Month: December 2020

Indonesian fishermen found an underwater drone on December 20th, local media reported. Analyzing photos of the drone, Naval News concludes that the drone is closely related to the Chinese Sea Wing family.

The drone was discovered near Selayar Island in the South Sulawes, far away from China’s adjacent waters. The location is close to two potential routes between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, according to Naval News. These routes, the Sunda Strait and Lombok Strait, “may be important in wartime” and “Intelligence gathered by the drone may be valuable to the Chinese Navy if their submarines intend to use these straits” according to the report.

The discovered object is a type of drone known as a glider. These are unpowered and use something called variable-buoyancy propulsion. This involves inflating and deflating a balloon-like device filled with pressurized oil. This causes them to sink before rising to the surface again. As they do so they travel along, aided by “wings”, gathering data on the ocean environment.

Indonesian based security & defense poster @Jatosint was quick to post the find on Twitter, and make the connection to the Chinese-made Sea Wing glider. Note that the device is upside down in the photos.

A fisherman in Selayar Island, South Sulawesi, has found a UUV:

Length: 225 cm
Tail: 18 cm
Wingspan: 50 cm
Trailing antenna: 93 cm

Very similar to China’s ‘Sea Wing’ UUV, which, if it’s true, raised many questions especially how it managed to be found deep inside our territory pic.twitter.com/RAiX8Xw2BK

— JATOSINT (@Jatosint) December 29, 2020

The drone collects such data as temperature, turbidity, salinity, chlorophyll and oxygen levels. While this data may sound innocuous and it is often used for scientific research, it can also be extremely valuable to naval planners. Especially supporting submarine operations. The better a navy knows the waters, the better it is able to hide its attack subs.

The US, France and other countries build and operate similar gliders. However, key characteristics of the Chinese type, which are not found on other similar underwater glides, are present. The nose cone has three circular sensor windows with the central one larger than the outer two. The wings have a folding mechanism and the antenna extends directly out of the center of the tail cone. The vertical stabilizer, like a tail fin, is seen underneath.

Sea Wing gliders are known to be launched by China’s specialist survey ships. In December 2019 the survey ship Xiangyanghong 06 launched around 12 of the drones into the Eastern Indian Ocean. The one found may be one of these, but it seems unlikely given the ocean currents.

Another Sea Wing glider was found by Indonesian fishermen in March 2019. This was in the Riau Islands, much closer to the South China Sea. The exact variant of Sea Wing was different, but the craft was very similar. However this is enough to suggest that they were deployed at different times and likely in different places. Additionally, camera-like sensors were apparently still operating when it was recovered. This suggests that it was deployed more decently.

Where the glider was originally deployed, and what it was doing, remains unclear. But these craft can provide valuable military intelligence.

China previously protested when it found a similar US Navy glider in international waters near its coast. On December 15, 2016 a Chinese ship plucked a US Navy LBS-G ( Littoral Battlespace Sensing-Glider) out of the South China Sea. The glider was in the process of being recovered by USNS Bowditch. The drone was only returned after the incident escalated.

This particular incident is unlikely to escalate in a similar fashion, but it does draw attention to China’s increasingly assertive maritime activities in the South China Sea and close to major naval lanes. These gliders may serve as evidence that China is analyzing  potential submarine routes into the Indian Ocean through Indonesian waters.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

With US-China relations at their lowest point in decades, one of Washington’s closest allies in the Pacific is gearing up for a potential war between the two superpowers. In an interview with Australia’s Seven News, Australian Senator Jim Molan said he expects a conflict to break out soon.

“We are likely in the next three to five years or in the next five to ten years to be involved in a war between China and the United States,” Molan said. The senator made the comments while discussing the budget and capabilities of Australia’s military. “The ADF (Australian Defense Forces) has never been better than it is now,” he said.

Molan voiced his concern over Washington’s current military capabilities, particularly the size of the US Navy. “In 1991, the US Navy was 600 warships strong. Now it’s less than 300,” he said. The politician who is a prominent voice in national political commentary is also a former major general in the Australian Army.

He said further:

“It is not inevitable and if we prepare, there is a chance it will not happen,” Mr Molan told Sunrise. The former Australian Army Major-General said China has been primed for war for a “long time” as well as the US.

“They [China] are picking fights with their neighbors around the world and they have extraordinary military capability, not just in rockets and aircraft but in overall capability to do things,” he said.

Like Washington, Canberra has taken an increasingly hostile stance against Beijing in recent years, and China-Australia relations have been rapidly deteriorating. Both the US and Australia have taken steps to boost military partnerships in the Indo-Pacific with the aim of countering Beijing.

The US, Australia, Japan, and India make up the informal alliance known as the Quad. In November, Australia joined the other quad countries in the annual Indian-led military exercises known as the Malabar.

It was the first time since in over a decade that the Quad countries held military drills together.

Australia and Japan recently reached an agreement on a new military pact that will allow their militaries to operate on each other’s soil. Once the pact is implemented, it will mark the first time in 60 years that Japan allows another foreign military besides the US on its soil. 

Russia’s Defense Ministry has published two calendars for the year 2021, showing the Orion long-range drone, in two forms: strike and reconnaissance versions, according to Russian state news agency TASS. 

“The Defense Ministry of Russia shows the ‘Inokhodets’ reconnaissance and strike unmanned aerial vehicle,” the ministry said in a statement.

The Orion drone (the ‘Inokhodets’ experimental design work) is a medium-altitude, long-range unmanned aerial system. 

TASS noted that the calendar release is the world’s first view of the drone with beam holders under the wings for attaching missiles. 

With a maximum take-off weight of 2,000 pounds, the drone has a maximum payload weight of 440 pounds. 

The calendar also shows the Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter, the BMPT-72 Terminator tank, the T-14 Armata main battle tank, and other military hardware. 

SU-57

BMPT Terminator

Russia’s new weapons are part of Moscow’s rapid modernization effort to improve armed forces’ combat readiness. 

Besides new drones, fifth-generation fighter jets, and new tanks, Bank of America’s aerospace and defense analyst Ronald J. Epstein outlined in a new report on Monday that a great power competition is underway between the US, Russia, and China. 

On the subject of hypersonic weapon development, Epstein wrote the US is following behind the technological curve. 

“The US typically exerts weapons superiority over its adversaries. There is a perception in the defense community that the US has lost some advantage over its near-peers (China and Russia) in hypersonic weapon development,” he said. 

Despite the trillions of dollars in taxpayers’ monies, President Trump has plowed into the military, Russia and China, at a fraction of the US military budget, are advancing their respective militaries at a much quicker pace. 

The question we ask: Is American exceptionalism in decline? 

Via 21stCenturyWire.com,

One of the most bizarre features of the alleged COVID-19 ‘global pandemic’ has been the mysterious disappearance of the seasonal flu in medical and public health record keeping. It’s as if the Flu just vanished into thin air after being the most common perennial seasonal respiratory virus.

As it turns out, recorded seasonal influenza cases have literally nosedived by 98% across the globe.

This improbable phenomenon has led a number of experts to ask, “Has Covid killed off the flu?”

“The disappearing act began as Covid-19 rolled in towards the end of our flu season in March. And just how swiftly rates have plummeted can be observed in ‘surveillance’ data collected by the World Health Organisation (WHO),” reported the UK’s Daily Mail.

WHO spokesperson, Dr Sylvie Briand, recently claimed during a press briefing that “literally there was nearly no flu in the Southern hemisphere” of the planet Earth in 2020, but gave no real explanation as to why. She then went on to extend this magical thinking saying that, “We hope that the situation will be the same in the Northern Hemisphere.”

Truly extraordinary science by the health experts at the WHO.

Earlier in December, Southern California news outlet KUSI raised the alarm which prompted an audit of COVID statistics in their region…

SAN DIEGO (KUSI) – COVID-19 cases continue to increase across California, and here in San Diego County, but flu cases remain extremely low in comparison to this time in previous years.

We are well into flu season, but San Diego County’s data for flu infections only shows 36 reported cases so far this year. Carl DeMaio tweeted out this shocking revelation, comparing it to this time in other years saying, “In a typical year we get over 17,073 on average!”

DeMaio explained, “if you are going to use a set of numbers like COVID stats to shut down the economy, to take people’s livelihoods away, then we have to really look closely at what those numbers really mean, and whether those numbers are giving us the right picture.”

Continuing, “my concern has been from the get go, that we are relying on numbers from government agencies, that may have a different agenda at stake. We would benefit from having a different set of eyes looking at them, such as an auditor or a citizens review committee. Because again, the decisions being made on these data sets are sweeping, the lockdowns are far reaching in terms of their impact.”

DeMaio then said San Diego County has refused to have any look over or vet our local COVID-19 numbers.

Chairman of Reform California, Carl DeMaio, joined KUSI’s Jason Austell on Good Morning San Diego to explain why he is calling for a “full audit of the COVID-19 data we are seeing reported from our public health system.”

As different pressure groups and journalists begin to demand answers from the various health authorities, it’s becoming clear now that there has likely been some degree of widespread, systemic administrative fraud designed to over-inflate COVID-19 numbers to the detriment of every other normal seasonal illness or disease.

Paul Craig Roberts from the IPE expanded on all of this in a recent piece:

Is there no flu this year or is flu “the second wave of Covid?” Don’t expect any honest answer from health authorities. They have the fear running strong, so strong that people are submitting to needless lockdowns that are causing economic havoc to their lives and to mask mandates that do more harm than good.

What is it all about?

Is it simply about vaccine profits for Big Pharma?

Or is it about getting people accustomed to arbitrary orders unsupported by legislation? Isn’t what we are experiencing a takeover of our lives by the executive part of government?

So much for those warnings of a “twindemic”…

According to recent media reports, the Republic of Palau has invited the US to build joint use facilities (ie. bases, ports, and airfields) on its island located strategically in close proximity to the Philppines, Indonesia, Malaysia and, of course, China. This, as Bank of America rhetorically points out, “would improve US access in the Pacific.”

The offer was reportedly made during Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s trip to the island nation in early September. The Republic of Palau is made up of 340 islands (180 sq mi) and located in the western Pacific Ocean.

Whether the US takes up Palau on its offer remains to be seen, but in the meantime, here courtesy of BofA is a map of US military bases and presence in the Pacific Ocean and, specifically, in proximity to China. One wonders how US citizens would feel if China had over a dozen military touch points in close proximity to the continental US.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

So party on, because “the worst year ever” is ending and the rebound of financial markets, already the greatest in recorded history, will only become more fabulous.

 

Of the lavish banquet of absurdities laid out in 2020, one of the most delectable is Time magazine’s December 14 cover declaring that 2020 was the “worst year ever.” You’re joking, right? In history’s immense tapestry of human misery, it’s not even in the top 100 worst years.

Consider 1177 B.C., when many of the great civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea and Mideast collapsed, and the survivors struggled through a pre-modern Dark Ages. This book assembles what is known about this catastrophic era: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

Then there’s 1644 A.D., when the Ming Dynasty was overthrown by the Manchu invasion, a series of self-reinforcing misfortunes stemming from extremes of climate (a.k.a. The Little Ice Age) that left millions hungry and vulnerable to disease and the predation of roving bandit armies.

The Little Ice Age and the famine, conflicts, civil wars, coups, revolts and rebellions it launched killed between a quarter and a third of Eurasia’s population. Entire villages melted away as starvation drove the survivors to desperation. The misery stretched from western Europe to China, and lasted for decades.

This fascinating history lays it all out: Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.

Though it is now relegated to a footnote in history, the Antonine Plague of 165 – 180 A.D. decimated the Mediterranean, Mideast, North African and Eurasian regions, toppling regimes that had endured for ages and very nearly brought the Roman Empire to an inglorious end. Roughly one-fourth of the population died as the novel disease was distributed along Rome’s numerous trade routes, which stretched from Northern Europe to Africa and India.

Western Rome’s eventual decline and fall was also the result of pandemics and climate change as well as the usual suspects of war, political in-fighting, overtaxation and the stranglehold of self-serving elites: The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire.

Europe’s inhabitants circa 1350 A.D. would have chosen the years 1347 – 1351 as “the worst ever” as the Black Plague took the lives of a third of the population: The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe.

The inhabitants of North and South America would have selected the years following 1492 and the arrival of Europeans carrying novel diseases as the worst years ever as the diseases carried away between 50% and 90% of the people who were alive in 1491: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

Declaring 2020 “the worst year ever” reveals much about the psychology of our delusional state of affairs. It reflects an absolutely abysmal grasp of human history and a self-absorbed desire to exaggerate the calamity so the rebound will be gloriously triumphant.

It also embodies our delusional addiction to measuring the well-being of the human populace with financial markets: as long as stocks are hitting new highs, we’re all doing wonderfully.

So party on, because “the worst year ever” is ending and the rebound of financial markets, already the greatest in recorded history, will only become more fabulous.

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Are relations between China and Japan about to enter another deep freeze?

According to Japan Times, which quoted “a person close to Japan-U.S. relations” Japan provided intelligence to the United States and Britain last year showing evidence of China’s forceful detainment of the Muslim Uighur minority on condition of keeping the source confidential. Using on that information, the United States stepped up criticism against China’s alleged crackdown on Uighurs in the Xinjiang autonomous region, the source said.

The move shows Japan has already been sharing key intelligence with partners behind the scenes amid calls within the government to join the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance to better respond to increasing threats by North Korea and China. The intelligence-sharing network involves Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

Britain joined the United States in pressing Beijing over its crackdown on Uighurs, but Japan has only said it “is closely watching the situation with concern.”

Japan seeks to maintain friendly ties with China – its largest trading partner – without hurting relations with its top security ally, the United States. In retrospect, that may prove extremely impossible now that Japan’s backroom backstabbing of Beijing has leaked.

Given that Tokyo’s relations with Beijing had been improving, it was preparing for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first visit as a state guest in spring 2020, although the planned visit was later postponed after the outbreak of the global coronavirus pandemic.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has put in place a series of sanctions on Beijing for alleged human rights abuses against Uighurs, such as visa restrictions on Chinese officials, increasing bilateral tensions.

Vice President Mike Pence severely criticized China in a July 2019 speech in Washington, claiming that the “Communist Party imprisoned more than a million Chinese Muslims, including Uighurs, in internment camps where they endure around-the-clock brainwashing.”

China has, naturally, responded with anger and urged Western counties to mind their own problems, slamming  criticisms as interference in its internal affairs.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Social engineers are pushing tiny 200-sq-ft Ikea houses as the solution to climate change in another example of how our living standards are set to be lowered.

In an article entitled ‘Ikea tiny homes can help fight climate change by giving small footprints a big toehold’, Carl Pope, former head of the Sierra Club, gushes over the micro-homes (basically trailers) that sell for $47,550.

“Housing is an important source of climate pollution — directly responsible for about 5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States plus their electricity. Given Ikea’s emphasis on recycled and reusable materials, the company seems likely to accelerate some important shifts in the housing market. Ikea will also almost certainly take advantage of what it learns in the “tiny” segment of the building market to establish a foothold in the broader, potentially highly green, manufactured building space,” writes Pope.

While solar panels would struggle to heat larger homes, this isn’t an issue for the tiny homes, so long as you’re content living in a box.

“The use of rooftop solar panels to generate power and the replacement of propane heating with a heat pump run by those solar panels is likely to become the standard in many states for manufactured homes,” he adds. “They will gravitate toward all-electric mobile homes because propane is a significant factor in the threat of fires to mobile home parks.”

“When utopia is achieved, we will be forced to live in tiny playhouses — for our own good, because living in a rabbit hutch will improve the weather,” writes Dave Blount.

“Winter could mean praying for sunny weather so that the heat comes on. That way we will be cozy and snug when we are placed under house arrest the next time a virus comes around.”

As we previously highlighted, last year CNN promoted the idea of young people living in ‘pods’ in the center of huge cities where they have no privacy.

Houses are now becoming so unaffordable for debt-stricken millennials that young people are also now literally living in decorated sewer pipes.

They’re called OPod Tube Houses and literally consist of reclaimed bits of industrial piping renovated inside with other left over pieces from building sites to make them into micro apartments.

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Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

Back in the day, when I was managing editor at the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., I enjoyed the end-of-year ritual of voting in the Associated Press’s poll of the Top 10 news stories.

When I started participating in the year 2000, my list would include many of the same stories that made the final AP list, although often with differences in ranking. But by the time I retired in 2018, my view of the news had sharply diverged from the AP’s consensus view. I’d become something of a gadfly by then, questioning what seemed to be an ever more transparent left-leaning bias in mainstream reporting.

That divergence was probably magnified by the 2016 candidacy of Donald Trump and the bright light he had shined on Fake News, but my disenchantment with my profession had been growing for years, as chronicled in my book “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?”

Still, there is no way that even as recently as four years ago I would have predicted just how abysmally irresponsible the media would become by 2020. Major newspapers are winning Pulitzer Prizes for blatantly false reporting on topics such as “Russian collusion.” Meanwhile, Silicon Valley oligarchs have appointed themselves censors — warning the American people not to read or watch anything that hasn’t been “fact-checked” by their hand-picked thought police.

The situation has gotten so bad that it’s no longer worth ranking the top news stories of the year because so little that is covered is news and so much that is news is written off as a “conspiracy theory.” That’s why I’m introducing Heartland Diary USA’s first annual presentation of “Last Chance to Wake Up and Smell the News They Tried to Kill.”

So here are five of the biggest suppressed stories of 2020. Pardon me if I don’t go into great detail on them, but the closer I get to the truth, the more likely that Google, Twitter and Facebook will bury my story, too.

5) Mysterious mutating lockdown:

Has anyone ever figured out why it is OK for grocery store workers to remain on the job during an international pandemic while serving the needs of the entire population with no restrictions other than wearing a mask, but it is considered dangerous for gyms to open or, most ludicrously, for anyone other than spouses of governors to take their boat for a quick spin around the lake? It seems like the lockdown can turn into whatever is convenient for politicians. The uneven effects of the lockdown on different states and different sectors have resulted in the shift of trillions of dollars of capital in ways that will reshape the economy for generations to come, yet we are not supposed to talk about it.

4) Hydroxychloroquine:

If you know anything about this drug, it is probably just that some guy in Arizona died after drinking it, and that maybe President Trump was somehow responsible. Well, as they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The guy in Arizona didn’t take hydroxychloroquine; he took a fish tank cleaner called chloroquine phosphate. And Trump never told anyone to take either the drug or the fish-tank cleaner. He just said hydroxychloroquine was a promising treatment against COVID-19. Of course, as soon as he said it, the radical academic leftists who control medical journals and associations warned that hydroxychloroquine had no benefit as a treatment and was potentially dangerous even though it had been safely used against malaria and various immune deficiency syndromes for decades. Fortunately, many doctors who were familiar with the drug continued to use it as a therapy in the early stages of COVID infections, and many patients around the world have been spared the most dire effects of the virus as a result. Just don’t expect to read about it in the New York Times.

3) Trump’s vaccine victory:

While the president has been painted as anti-science, it was his administration’s support that led to the fastest turnaround ever from viral discovery to viral vaccine — essentially less than a year. Even as House Democrats are poised to launch investigations into Trump’s supposed crimes against humanity for being president during the COVID crisis, lives are being saved as a result of his policies. Just don’t expect to read about it in the mainstream media, which spent much of 2020 ridiculing Trump for his prescient predictions that a vaccine would be developed by the end of the year.

2) Hunter Biden’s laptop:

The ability to bury the Hunter Biden story throughout the 2020 presidential campaign ranks as one of the greatest victories in the history of propaganda. Hunter is the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, and his acknowledged history as a drug addict is now considered his strong suit. The Senate Homeland Security Committee found extensive evidence that Hunter has made hundreds of millions of dollars for the Biden family by selling access to his father, so when Hunter’s laptop turned up with first-person incriminating evidence, it was pretty obvious that Joe Biden had a lot of answer for. Except that the media never made him answer for anything. It preferred to rest on the bizarre assertion from 50 former U.S. intelligence officials that clear evidence of foreign collusion on Hunter’s laptop had all the earmarks of a “Russian disinformation” campaign. This was errant nonsense. Reporters, read the emails!

1) Election fraud:

It turned out that everything that happened in 2020 before Nov. 3 was just prologue for the greatest deception in American history — namely the hijacking of a presidential election through means both legal and illegal. Most importantly, every state that changed its election procedures without the consent of its legislature violated the U.S. Constitution. That’s why Republicans plan to challenge the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6. Whether you like Donald Trump or not should be irrelevant. You either follow the Constitution or you don’t. The fact that Trump increased his support in almost every demographic since 2016 and yet lost the election will apparently remain a mystery because the Democratic Party, with an assist from weak Republicans, is intent on continuing the charade that Joe Biden is a beloved elder statesman even more popular than Barack Obama.

I should add a disclaimer here. My list will not be your list. This is 2020, and there is plenty of suppression to go around.

You are hereby invited to submit your own contributions in the comments section below. In the meantime, rounding out my Top 10, here are some of the other major stories suppressed in 2020:

• The communist links to antifa and Black Lives Matter;

• how the Russian hoax was exposed but left unpunished;

• how the policies of a certain governor in New York state led to thousands of COVID deaths in nursing homes;

• the successful campaign of billionaire George Soros to subvert American jurisprudence by electing pro-criminal district attorneys;

• and of course the suppression of news itself.

Big Tech, take a bow!