Go China

At least on car safety, where China has announced a ban on hidden car door handles.

This is not a surprise.

They make it difficult for first responders to make a rescue, and, in the case of Teslas at least, they do not function if electrical power is lost.

There is talk about similar regulations in the United States, but I'm not holding my breath, since they have allowed the pedestrian box grater known as the Cybertruck on the roads.

China will soon ban concealed door handles on electric vehicles (EVs), becoming the first country to do so after several deadly incidents triggered global scrutiny of the controversial design first popularised by Tesla.

According to regulations announced on Monday by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, cars sold in China will now be required to have a mechanical release on both the inside and outside of every door except the boot.

The new regulations will “improve the level of automotive safety design”, it said.

Due to take effect on 1 January next year, the regulations stipulate every car should provide hand-operable space measuring at least 6cm by 2cm by 2.5cm in order to manually release the door. Within the vehicle, there must also be signs showing occupants how to open the door.

The flush-mounted pop-out door handle was first popularised by Elon Musk’s Tesla Model S, released in 2012. The design integrates the handle into the door and uses electrical signals to activate the latch. Such door handles provide a slight boost to efficiency by reducing drag.

 

China Gets a Couple of Things Right

Th PRC has decided to ban algorithmic price discrimination.

Chinese regulators have issued new rules to curb e-commerce platforms’ use of consumer data to charge different prices for the same goods or services, targeting a long-criticized practice in which loyal or high-spending users were often quoted higher prices than others.

The measures, announced Jan. 7 by multiple government agencies, tighten oversight of algorithmic pricing and data profiling, marking the clearest move yet to draw a regulatory line between “big data” price discrimination and lawful promotions after years of consumer complaints and court cases.

Under the new rules, platforms are prohibited from using data profiling to offer different prices to different users, and barred from practices that restrict consumer rights or shift liability without notice.

For years, loyal or high-spending users of platforms ranging from travel apps to social media shops have complained that they are often quoted higher prices than others, prompting some to experiment with ways to “game” opaque pricing algorithms — from switching devices to masking browsing behavior.

This shit, which includes things like Uber's surge pricing, should be illegal everywhere.

Also, China is cracking down on high frequency trading.

Chinese stock markets have come under renewed pressure in recent days as Beijing intensifies its clampdown on high-frequency trading, a move that has rattled sentiment but reflects a deeper regulatory shift toward control and stability amid a US$1.2 trillion rally.

………

Commodities futures exchanges in Shanghai and Guangzhou have instructed brokers to relocate client servers away from exchange-operated data centers, a step that removes the ultra-low-latency access on which high-frequency trading strategies depend, Bloomberg reported.

While the changes apply to all market participants, high-frequency traders are expected to bear the brunt of the impact. The Shanghai Futures Exchange has set staggered deadlines for server relocation, requiring equipment used by high-speed trading clients to be removed by the end of February, with other clients given until April 30, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the matter.

In addition, some futures exchanges have drawn up preliminary plans to impose an extra two milliseconds of latency on connections routed through third-party data centers, the people said. Any such delay would be layered on top of the additional lag firms already face from relocating servers away from exchanges, further diluting the speed advantages enjoyed by high-frequency traders.

China is looking at making sure that businesses provide useful goods and services, and that investment is more important than various forms of exotic trading that turn markets into casinos.

Maybe we should address this shit in the USA as well? 

This is Literally Peak Cat

Domestic cats, the European Tour!

The Chinese TourThere is an article in Science where it is claimed that the genetic evidence shows that domestic cats did not make it to Europe until about 0 CE, about 7,000 years later previously believed.

There is archeological evidence that domestic cats, Felis catus, made it to Cyprus around 7000 BCE, but they never made the jump to Europe. 

While are references to cats in Greek and Roman documents before the common era, this now appears to be commensalism (basically hanging out) by local wild cat populations because of the large number of rodents and other prey animals near ancient granaries rather than domestication.

It appears that something very similar occurred in China, albeit at a later time. 

Around 730 CE, F. catus made it to China via the Silk Road. 

Before that, the Leopard Cat, Prionailurus bengalensis, hung out with the locals in the Far East as far back as 4000 BCE, as evidenced by archeological finds.

If you look closely, you will note that there is a 600 year gap, from about 150 CE to 730 CE where neither cat is present in the record:

………

Interestingly, the disappearance of leopard cats coincides with the turbulent era following the Han Dynasty’s collapse and preceding the Tang Dynasty’s rise. This period experienced colder, drier conditions, declining agricultural yields, social unrest, and a population contraction lasting 400 years. These factors likely disrupted the human niche that had supported leopard cats. A parallel can be seen in Europe, where black rat populations declined with the fall of the Roman Empire only to re-emerge with economic recovery. In both cases, the decline of major civilizations may have led to the disappearance of commensal animals dependent on human-driven ecosystems.

Six centuries after the disappearance of small felids, domestic cat remains began to appear in China and at another Silk Road trade hub in Central Asia.  The arrival of domestic cats may have hindered the re-establishment of leopard cats in human settlements, as both species occupy similar ecological niches. Additionally, the rise of poultry farming in ancient China after the Han Dynasty may have contributed to human-leopard cat conflict, given their tendency to prey on chickens, further preventing the return of leopard cats to anthropogenic environments.

The short version of this is:

• Human society develops agriculture in China.
• Large granaries lead to rodent heavy spaces, and P. bengalensis decides to hang out at the all you can eat rodent buffet.
• Social unrest in China leads to famine and population falling.
• Cats realize that the aforementioned buffet is over, and what's more the big dumb apes get upset when they eat the yummy birds.
• Cats decide, "Fuck this shit, I'm out of here."

That last bit is totally peak cat. 

Quote of the Day

[OpenAI Chief Sam] Altman is, in essence, the Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf [Baghdad Bob] of tech — the Saddam-era Iraqi Minister of Information who, as Abrams tanks entered Baghdad and gunfire could be heard in the background, proclaimed an entirely counterfactual world where the coalition forces weren’t merely losing, but American troops were “committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad.” It’s adorable, and yes, it’s also understandable, but nobody should — or could — believe that OpenAI hasn’t just suffered some form of existential wound.

—Edward Zitron, on the shock from DeepSeek's efficient and competitive AI model shows that, "The American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible.

I have always said that the enormous capital demanded by LLM artificial intelligence is a feature, not a bug.

Their goal was to use the enormous investment that they were demanding to create a moat around the field which they could then use to extort monopoly rents.

Not any more.

Parent Murderer Asks for Mercy as an Orphan

Oh I'm sorry, are you crying? Are you crying because your plagiarism machine that made stuff by copying everybody's stuff was used to train another machine that made stuff by copying stuff? Are you going to cry? Cowards, losers, pathetic pic.twitter.com/Xl4JwWXBaW

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) January 29, 2025

Ed Zitron owes me a screen wipe

OK, it's not an actual parent murderer, it's Sam Altman and OpenAI accusing DeepSeek of using its model to train their AI program.

I don't ascribe to the extreme view of IP that has people like Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, George R.R. Martin, and John Grisham that learning from copyrighted works is a violation of copyright, and I do not believe that LLM models are actually learning, (a pox on both their houses) but OpenAI is accusing DeepSeek of doing exactly what they have been doing since their founding.

Goose, gander, sauce:

OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property.

The San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the Financial Times it had seen some evidence of “distillation”, which it suspects to be from DeepSeek.

………

Distillation is a common practice in the industry but the concern was that DeepSeek may be doing it to build its own rival model, which is a breach of OpenAI’s terms of service.

Yeah, that is exactly what Altman/OpenAI has been accused of doing.

Go fuck yourself, SAM.

………

OpenAI declined to comment further or provide details of its evidence. Its terms of service state users cannot “copy” any of its services or “use output to develop models that compete with OpenAI”.

Yeah, well they aren't competing.  They are opensourcing their stuff.

DeepSeek’s release of its R1 reasoning model has surprised markets, as well as investors and technology companies in Silicon Valley. Its built-on-a-shoestring models have attained high rankings and comparable results to leading US models.

………

The practice highlights the difficulty for companies keen to protect their technical edge. “We know [China]-based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distil the models of leading US AI companies,” OpenAI said in its latest statement.

By, "Protect their technical edge," OpenAI and its ilk mean, "Extract monopoly rents."

I'd love to see the big LLM companies go down in flames before the VC's have a chance to cash out and dump their stock on clueless low level investors.

That Sound You Hear is the Bubble Bursting

Most people probably don't realize how bad news China's Deepseek is for OpenAI.

They've come up with a model that matches and even exceeds OpenAI's latest model o1 on various benchmarks, and they're charging just 3% of the price.

It's essentially as if someone had released a… pic.twitter.com/aGSS5woawF

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) January 21, 2025

Roll Tape!

It turns out that the basic programming required to generated shitty overgrown Eliza programs is not a uniquely American skill.

Over in China, Deepseek has released an "AI" that is largely open source, and the paid part of it costs 3% of what OpenAI charges.

Look out below:

On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The company claims the model performs at levels comparable to OpenAI's o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model on several math and coding benchmarks.

Alongside the release of the main DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 models, DeepSeek published six smaller "DeepSeek-R1-Distill" versions ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters. These distilled models are based on existing open source architectures like Qwen and Llama, trained using data generated from the full R1 model. The smallest version can run on a laptop, while the full model requires far more substantial computing resources.

The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights models—which can often be run and fine-tuned on local hardware—have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI's o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. Having these capabilities available in an MIT-licensed model that anyone can study, modify, or use commercially potentially marks a shift in what's possible with publicly available AI models.

The US AI industry, and Sam Altman in particular, have been selling the idea that AI is hard and expensive.

That's why Altman has been saying that OpenAI needs a TRILLION dollars in capital.

It looks to me like the Chinese have come up with something better, faster, and cheaper.

It looks like the VCs won't have time to sell their stakes to the rubes before it all comes crashing down.

Heh.

 

Security Experts Have Been Warning About This Forever

It appears that the systems mandated by the US government to allow our state security apparatus to easily spy on people were hacked by the Chinese state security apparatus to spy on people.

Security experts have been saying that mandatory government back doors are a bad idea, because other people can use them as well.

QED

Chinese government hackers penetrated the networks of several large US-based Internet service providers and may have gained access to systems used for court-authorized wiretaps of communications networks, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. "People familiar with the matter" told the WSJ that hackers breached the networks of companies including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen (also known as CenturyLink).

"A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of US broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests," the WSJ wrote. "For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful US requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter."

These "attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic Internet traffic," according to the WSJ's sources. The attack is being attributed to a Chinese hacking group called Salt Typhoon.

The Washington Post reported on the hacking campaign yesterday, describing it as "an audacious espionage operation likely aimed in part at discovering the Chinese targets of American surveillance." The Post report attributed the information to US government officials and said an investigation by the FBI, other intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security "is in its early stages."

The Post report said there are indications that China's Ministry of State Security is involved in the attacks.

Considering the possibilities, from Daesh to the Sinaloa Cartel to whatever is left of al Qaeda, the Chinese are probably the least worrisome group to penetrate these systems. 

This is why mandatory back doors are a bad idea.

Because You Do Not Stop Your Enemy from Stepping on His Own Penis?

Over at the New York Times, Isaac Kardon and Jennifer Kavanagh, ostensibly experts in Chinese maritime power and foreign relations respectively, are wringing their hands because the People's Republic of China has not offered military aid to the US mission attempting to protect shipping in the Red Sea.

There has been plenty of hand-wringing in the West about the prospect of China displacing — or at least rivaling — the United States as the world’s leading superpower. But the evolving security crisis in the Red Sea makes clear that this remains a distant prospect.

China, with a trade-led economy dependent on the free flow of commerce through chokepoints like the Bab el-Mandeb strait off Yemen, relies on the United States to protect international sea lanes. The U.S.-led military response to the Houthi militia attacks on international shipping may not ultimately be the answer to the current crisis — the Houthis, so far, appear undeterred — but the United States has at least demonstrated a clear commitment to keeping open vital trade routes that connect China to the Middle East and Europe.

Rather than acting like the global leader it purports to be, China has made no appreciable move to shoulder the costs or risks of ensuring security in the Red Sea, despite having its sole declared overseas military base in Djibouti, adjacent to the strait. Nor has it publicly offered a viable alternative to America’s actions. Instead, it seems content to largely sit back and offer veiled criticism of the U.S. military response.

The idea that China should blithely support the United States when it is already in a major (thankfully non-military) conflict with the United States, is absurd.

The authors assert that China has an obligation to support the international community, (Defined as supporting the interests of the United States) the  global consensus, (Defined as supporting the interests of the United States) and the rules based order, (Defined as supporting the interests of the United States) and its own interest in being a global leader (Defined as supporting the interests of the United States).

To quote Emilio Estevez in Repo Man, "F%$# that."

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

It appears that the good folks at are distressed because China is trying to move up the production chain to more sophisticated, and more profitable, products.

I thought that the whole point of globalization was that it would allow less developed economies to work their way up the supply chain in order to improve the lives of their citizens.

It's far better to invest in this than to invest in yet another real estate bubble, as our leaders in Washington and Tokyo should, but don't understand:

As China’s property sector declines, President Xi Jinping needs to reshape the nation’s economic model to drive growth over the next decade. His government’s solution risks igniting a new wave of trade tensions across the globe.

China’s leaders are pouring money into manufacturing as property-related activity, which once spurred about a fifth of the economy’s expansion, turned into a drag on growth in 2022. Part of that focus is what they call the “new three” growth drivers of electric vehicles, batteries and renewable energy, aiding the world’s de-carbonization push and fueling demand for commodities such as copper and lithium.

So far, the strategy is helping China avoid the recessions that hit Japan in the 1990s and the US in 2008 when their housing markets melted down: The world’s second-biggest economy is now growing at about 5% a year. Yet it’s also fueling imbalances that are setting the stage for renewed global trade tensions between China and the developed world, as well as emerging economies that are pushing to reach the lower rungs of the industrialization ladder.

The panic is, "OMG!!!  The Chinese are moving from producing cheap shit that generates profits for foreigners to producing not-so-cheap shit that creates profits for themselves."

Merciful heavens, I believe that I do have the vapors over this.

Pass the Popcorn

Following changes in the US-China relationship, and changes in Beijing's approach to foreign investments, private equity firms find themselves with over a trillion dollars stuck in China, with any attempt to extricate these funds likely resulting in their getting pennies on the dollar.

It gives me warm fuzzies:

Private equity firms that amassed more than $1.5 trillion of assets in China in just two decades are now struggling to offload once-promising investments they were counting on for hefty returns.

With public markets in a slump and offering unattractive valuations, buyout firms are exploring private sales. But mounting concerns about the risks of investing in mainland China have left so-called secondary buyers demanding discounts of 30% to more than 60%, according to people familiar with the market. Haircuts in Europe and the US are closer to 15%.

Many firms are also looking at an alternative strategy, putting off sales by setting up so-called continuation funds to take over holdings for several more years, according to interviews with about a dozen of private equity investors and advisers. That’s also proving challenging.

Yeah, let's pretend that there are no losses in the hope that everything will eventually turn around.

To quote Herb Stein, ""If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

I just hope that the American taxpayers don't have to bail out these very special geniuses again.

Damn

I will miss the the pandas formerly residing at the National zoo.

They are on their way back to China:

Early this morning, the three pandas at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo were coaxed into large metal crates, then taken by forklift up the zoo’s main walkway toward three waiting FedEx trucks, past a gaggle of dozens of members of the media from around the world.

Giant pandas Mei Xiang, Tian Tian, and Xiao Qi Ji have begun their journey from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo to Chengdu, China.

The animals are among the District’s cutest, furriest, and most famous residents.

It's kind of a bummer, but China is doing good work on recovering and rewilding pandas, so there is that.

 

Everyone Wants to Tell Rahm Emanuel to Shut the F%$# Up

Including, it appears, the Biden administration.

I was among the legion of people who thought that appointing Rahm as an ambassador was a stupid idea, particularly as ambassador to Japan.

It turns out that Rahm's recent behavior on social media is perceived as disruptive:

Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel is reportedly in hot water with Biden administration aides for recent social media posts.

The social media posts include Emanuel questioning the recent whereabouts of Chinese government officials and accusing Chinese President Xi Jinping of disinformation.

“President Xi’s cabinet lineup is now resembling Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None,” reads one of Emanuel’s posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “First, Foreign Minister Qin Gang goes missing, then the Rocket Force commanders go missing, and now Defense Minister Li Shangfu hasn’t been seen in public for two weeks. Who’s going to win this unemployment race? China’s youth or Xi’s cabinet? #MysteryInBeijingBuilding”

According to NBC News, National Security Council officials warned the staff of the ambassador to Japan about the risks of his comments. They said it could jeopardize attempts by the Biden administration to repair rocky relations with China.

A White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to NBC News said the ambassador’s posts are “not in keeping with the message coming out of this building.”

Rahm Emanuel has always been an incompetent grandstanding sh%$-show.

I don't blame him, I blame Biden and his minions for assuming that it would be any different.

Yeah, About Those Sanctions

So, Huawei just rolled out a new phone using a Chinese made processor using 7nm technology.

This was supposed to be beyond the Chinese, they were assumed to be at the 14nm feature size, but apparently in response to US sanctions, Huawei and SMIC have rolled out chips very close to the current commercial standard. 

This is not a surprise.  The basic technology and basic physics are known, it is called Extreme UV Lithography, and they know that the technology can be implemented at a commercial scale.

So implementing the process so it's just a matter ironing out the kinks and making the (rather significant) capital investment.

Given the interest of Huawei, and SMIC, and and the Chinese government in technical development and their interest in minimizing the effects of US sanctions, this is not a surprise:

Huawei Technologies and China's top chipmaker SMIC (0981.HK) have built an advanced 7-nanometer processor to power its latest smartphone, according to a teardown report by analysis firm TechInsights.

Huawei's Mate 60 Pro is powered by a new Kirin 9000s chip that was made in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), TechInsights said in the report shared with Reuters on Monday.

Huawei started selling its Mate 60 Pro phone last week. The specifications provided advertised its ability to make satellite calls, but offered no information on the power of the chipset inside.

The processor is the first to utilize SMIC's most advanced 7nm technology and suggests the Chinese government is making some headway in attempts to build a domestic chip ecosystem, the research firm said.

………

Buyers of the phone in China have been posting tear-down videos and sharing speed tests on social media that suggest the Mate 60 Pro is capable of download speeds exceeding those of top line 5G phones.

This is not a surprise.  The current state of the art is 4nm, so 7nm is not a surprise.

This was a foreseeable response to aggressive sanctions by the US.

The US foreign policy Blob chalks up another one in the "L" column.

Their record is worse than the Washington Generals.

Interesting, Not in a Good Way

All I've found is a twitter thread, anarticle on on an obscure chinese news site, but it appears that, apparently in response to overtures by the US and Japan toward the government of Taiwan, the Chinese ambassador Wu Jianghao, has held talks with the deputy governor of Okinawa, Yoshimi Teruya, and held a lengthy meeting.

Following the meeting, the Chinese diplomat stated that, "China would now be officially calling Okinawa prefecture by its old name "琉球", i.e. Ryukyu," the name of the old kingdom that was occupied by Japan in 1879.

Given the existing tensions between Okinawa Prefecture and the central Japanese government, many Okinawans feel that they are 2nd class citizens, and they are the location the bulk of the US military presence in Japan, so it is fertile ground for secessionist sympathies.

It seems to me that the Chinese are sending a message on Taiwan.

I'm worried that this is going to escalate.

Today in Reporters Not Doing Their Homework

OK, so, I'm reading an article on the Chinese balloon(s) that got shot down, and I'm not expecting much, but the person writing the story neglects to understand the most basic aspects of the technology in question.

Here is the bit:

………

The spy balloon that overflew the continental U.S. in February had sophisticated reconnaissance capabilities, possibly including "synthetic aperture radar," which can see at night and penetrate clouds, topsoil, and thin materials.

First, all radars of certain frequencies can penetrate clouds, topsoil, and thin materials.

That's why you have thing like "Ground penetrating radar."

What "synthetic aperture radar" (SAR) does is create higher resolution images.

Radar resolution is a function of two things, the frequency of the radar, and the size of the antenna.

What SAR does is that it takes multiple images from a moving platform, and then uses the radar returns from different locations and processes them to create an return that has the higher resolution of a larger antenna.

It simulates having a larger aperture (antenna), hence the name.

It's just radar, and apart from the increased resolution, it does not do anything different from any other radar.

For f%$#'s sake, SAR has its own Wiki Page!

It would have taken 15 minutes to understand the basics of what the technology does, and does NOT do:

Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) is a form of radar that is used to create two-dimensional images or three-dimensional reconstructions of objects, such as landscapes.^[1] SAR uses the motion of the radar antenna over a target region to provide finer spatial resolution than conventional stationary beam-scanning radars. SAR is typically mounted on a moving platform, such as an aircraft or spacecraft, and has its origins in an advanced form of side looking airborne radar (SLAR). The distance the SAR device travels over a target during the period when the target scene is illuminated creates the large synthetic antenna aperture (the size of the antenna). Typically, the larger the aperture, the higher the image resolution will be, regardless of whether the aperture is physical (a large antenna) or synthetic (a moving antenna) – this allows SAR to create high-resolution images with comparatively small physical antennas. For a fixed antenna size and orientation, objects which are further away remain illuminated longer - therefore SAR has the property of creating larger synthetic apertures for more distant objects, which results in a consistent spatial resolution over a range of viewing distances.

To create a SAR image, successive pulses of radio waves are transmitted to "illuminate" a target scene, and the echo of each pulse is received and recorded. The pulses are transmitted and the echoes received using a single beam-forming antenna, with wavelengths of a meter down to several millimeters. As the SAR device on board the aircraft or spacecraft moves, the antenna location relative to the target changes with time. Signal processing of the successive recorded radar echoes allows the combining of the recordings from these multiple antenna positions. This process forms the synthetic antenna aperture and allows the creation of higher-resolution images than would otherwise be possible with a given physical antenna.^[2]

This sh%$ ain't rocket science, just stop phoning it in.

The Final Word on that F%$#ing Chinese Spy Balloon

the spy balloon shows how far we’ve fallen behind china in steampunk technology

— Emo Philips (@EmoPhilips) February 4, 2023

Yeah, this is pretty much the deepest analysis on the whole l'affaire ballon Chinois.

You Blew It Up! Ah, Damn You! God Damn You All to Hell!

Alright,


I’m ready for my close up Mr. DeMille.

We just shot down the Chinese balloon.

Reports are that it was done by an F-22 with an AIM-9X Sidewinder, which was about $300,000 more than than using the cannon, for reasons that are unclear to me.

A U.S. Air Force F-22 fired a single AIM-9X missile at 58,000 ft., downing a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4 that ended a three-day-long international saga.

The F-22 from the 1st Fighter Wing at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, hit the balloon, which was flying between 60,000 and 65,000 ft. when it crossed over open water at 2:39 p.m. local time near Myrtle Beach.

………

The Chinese Foreign Ministry in a Feb. 2 statement said the balloon was used for meteorological research, and it had drifted off course, a claim the Pentagon says is obviously false. As the balloon drifted over the U.S., the Pentagon drafted plans to shoot it down while also closely monitoring where the balloon drifted and trying to determine what comprised its payload.

………

The balloon’s payload was not particularly sophisticated, and it did not provide additional value compared to existing satellite capabilities, the official says. The Pentagon was able to mitigate its collection by protecting valuable locations as it crossed over, the official argues.

The downing is the first air-to-air kill for the Lockheed Martin F-22. Livestreams showed a missile trail heading to the balloon and a brief explosion, before it quickly began to fall.

OK, now I get it.  First air to air kill by an F-22. 

I'd still like to know what the payload for the balloon was, and why the Pentagon decided to make a tempest in a teapot.

What the F%$#ing F%$#?

So, we are having wall to wall coverage of a f%$#ing gasbag, but it's not Donald Trump, or Ron Desnatis, or Mitch McConnell, or Sean Hannity, or Tucker Carlson, it's that damn Chinese balloon.

At lunch today, they had CNN on, and they were covering that damn balloon like it was Payne Stewart's private jet. 

Even if this is a Chinese spy balloon, the record of such endeavors, the US tried something like this with Project Mogul, which generated little more than UFO reports around Roswell New Mexico:

The discovery of a Chinese satellite floating over Montana has created lots more heat than light. Hourly news reports make it sound like a replay of Pearl Harbor.

Fact is, the satellite itself presents zero danger, weapons-wise, and if it were on a serious spying mission, it could be easily neutralized.

“Really, it’s not a big deal,” former Air Force general and CIA director Michael Hayden tells SpyTalk.

“We can neutralize so I don’t think it’s a danger either.”

The Pentagon has said as much, too, but its calming message has been pretty much overlooked in the hysterical coverage afforded news the satellite’s discovery a few days ago.

………

Bottom line: Everybody needs to calm down.

I thought about putting the balloon on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, but that would really silly, and I'm not feeling silly today.

Today in Extremely Dishonest Graphs

An analysis looks at how defense spending among the nations with the highest expenditures has changed since 1992 and what may have driven the changes https://t.co/3ln08vOKAo pic.twitter.com/yqK6MqwQUm

— St. Louis Fed (@stlouisfed) January 22, 2023

The real picture

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis responded further down that they were just trying to make the data easier to view.

This is, of course, complete bullshit.  This was deliberately deceptive.

I have attached a picture, showing everything on the same (i.e. not deceptive) scale.

The basic point here is that the ST. Louis Fed's graph was not an error, it was deliberately deceptive.

The US spends more on defense than the next 9 countries combined.

Now, it could, and IMHO should, be argued that the US is not getting the results that it should from this, Russia is not running out of artillery shells, and NATO is, for example, but that has nothing to do with the deceptive content of the graph and the post.

Seriously, if these guys ever took a statistics class in college, they must have gotten an "F".

Something is Going Down

I do not know what is going on, but the Chinese Foreign Ministry is urging Chinese nationals to evacuate the Ukraine immediately.  A natural conclusion is that some sort of balloon is about to go up in the war there:

Some Chinese nationals still in Ukraine have signed up for evacuation from the country, with most registering for organized evacuations, while others are preparing to leave Ukraine on their own, the Global Times learned on Sunday, after the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Chinese citizens to leave Ukraine, citing the grave security situation.

The move, following the large-scale evacuation in March that safely returned some 6,000 Chinese nationals in Ukraine back to their motherland, represents the Chinese government's greatest efforts to protect its citizens, as the Russia-Ukraine conflict further escalated, experts noted. 

………

In a notice issued on Saturday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that given the grave security situation in Ukraine, it calls upon Chinese nationals still in the country to strengthen security precautions and evacuate the country. The Chinese embassy will assist the organization of evacuation for those in need, the notice said, while urging them to register their personal information to the embassy as soon as possible.

Later on Saturday, the Chinese Embassy in Ukraine said via its WeChat account that it will offer assistance and help coordinate relevant evacuation matters such as emergency document processing.

The bureaucrats are expediting things, and this is never a sign of a stable situation.

My guess is that Moscow communicated with Beijing and suggested that now is a good time to leave.

What this means specifically, I have no clue about.