I guess maybe they had lasers/LEDs pointing up at the cameras? Still, that's some precision positioning

>Zeihan says the US had a helicopter hovering below the balloon

Assuming that even the spinning blades can obscure cameras and it can't be compensated for, AND it was some special high altitude helicopter that can go maybe half as high as a fixed wing interceptor, this would still be a 30ft circle thousands of feet away from the camera aperture. It would be like someone holding the head of a pin a few feet in front of you trying to block your view.

It's strange that we're willing to call out other things -- Uyghurs, incursions around Taiwan, TikTok, tech espionage, etc., but if we were to challenge the claim that it was an accident, suddenly it becomes an obstacle to diplomacy.

The incident happened this year, so it's reassuring that they were able to comb through 7 years of archived daily radar data from stations all across the western seaboard to find and confirm precisely three matches in a matter of days. Maybe they have an exceptionally powerful pattern matching AI trained for this already? Or maybe my layman's idea of radar data is wrong and there's no fuzziness or interpretation involved so they could just do a Ctrl+F? Of course that raises other questions, like why are radar data archives so much more diligently retained than, say, communications between officials?

Linked article doesn't answer the question. Can you find a quote from any article anywhere that clarifies who knew, and when they found out?

1. It was purely accidental, but it happened three times before?
2. The other times were completely undetected, but they knew about it?

Never in history have those in power willingly offered greater transparency. This sudden coordinated effort from the places of power to ostensibly *find out the truth for the American public* is deeply suspect. Is there a similar effort to unredact those last few pages in the 9/11 report? How about showing us the physical evidence that ties Ukrainians to the Nord Stream pipeline explosion? No? Then, I can't trust that this thrust towards transparency is genuine. Something else is afoot.

GTA 5 released around the same time as George Zimmerman's acquittal. If first person rampage games were the reason, you would have seen the effect decades earlier.

I'm sorry but the WHO is fighting cancer at the Speed of Science. Try to keep up. FDA questioning science is a bad look. oof yikes.

I hope I don't need to explain the difference between losing a month's paycheck and losing access to all the money you have.

>"You should tell kids to drink milk for strong bones" would also be coercion.

Bad analogy. The point isn't coercion per se, but coercion in service of censorship. A more accurate analogy would be government asking a newspaper to not print an opinion column that claims milk is bad for kids.

Imagine claiming to be against disinformation and then posting this. lmao

Have you ever seen an email from Hillary's server? See, that's why it's so secure.

True, building the infrastructure that can be easily used for oppression is not proof of oppression. But do you want to wait to find out?

"It's only an enclosure, see it has windows"
"It's only bars on the windows, see it has a door"
"It's only a door that opens from the outside, see I'm on the outside" ...
"Get in, there's a monster outside!"
*clank*

The second link shows the proposed tolling infrastructure, which uses mast arms full of cameras that track vehicle license plates. It says those without the toll pass will be sent a bill (I assume with an additional fine) to the address registered to their vehicle, so the first question is how would this work with out-of-state cars? Second, this reminds me of the tracking infrastructure in China, with licence plate cameras on masts dotted every kilometer or so tracking the movement of every car across the country (ostensibly to catch violators). Scaling this out would give the US government the same kind of citizen tracking ability as China.