(CNN) A trio of new intrusions leaves America’s leaders grasping for explanations. Quoting,
A deepening national security mystery is threatening a political storm after US fighter jets scrambled three days in a row to shoot down a trio of unidentified aerial objects high over the North American continent.
To all, patience. The answer will come. This is science. When it comes, it will be technical, not political.
The only political aspect is, how much do you want to spend?
(CNN) Analyst thinks this is why more unidentified objects are being spotted.
CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem wants to know the constitution of the “bigger aperture.” I’ll explain the part that any electro-physicist or radar engineer knows.
Decluttering algorithms are essential to radar function. These algorithms are characterized by scales of time, known as time constants. Normally kept fixed, these numbers are now being varied — “swept.” For a balloon, you want a larger number than for an airplane, because in most circumstances, balloons move slower.
The “aperture” has another part. Out of respect for secrecy, I will not discuss what I think it is.
(CNN) US military shoots down high-altitude object over Lake Huron on Sunday. Quoting,
The object was shaped like an octagon with strings hanging off it and did not appear to be carrying anything.
The octagonal shape renews interest in a balloon structure that may contain integral antennas:
A suspended capsule containing active electronics may have been deliberately dropped.
(CNN) US jet shoots down ‘unidentified object’ over northern Canada, Trudeau says.
After Deadhorse Alaska, this is the second balloon discovered within the polar vortex, in the vicinity of the North Warning System.
The AN/FPS-117 radar component of the North Warning System uses pulse compression to defeat jamming. To jam this radar requires detailed knowledge of its emissions. To avoid the distortion of atmospheric dispersion, the radar pulse must be sampled close to the source.
Reliable insertion into the polar vortex requires launch from Russian territory, a courtesy that may have been provided to China.
(CNN) Exclusive: US developed method to track China’s spy balloon fleet within last year, sources say. Quoting,
But the new method is important because the balloons are extremely difficult to track without it – they are slow-moving and can fly extremely high, in some cases as high as much as 60 miles up,
This error appears to be propagation of a typo in a government report.
For theoretical and practical reasons, the limit is close to 170,000 feet, 32 miles.
The world record is held by NASA “Big 60”.
(CNN) Biden ordered US military to ‘down’ a ‘high-altitude object’ over Alaska, White House says
The ambiguous shape description suggests it may be a balloon made of multiple non-spherical gas cells, like an inflatable mattress.
This would allow the attachment of inconspicuous conformal antennas. See patch antenna.
So it may be a miniature, low capability spy balloon.
(Aljazeera) US has questions to answer over Nord Stream blasts, Russia says. Quoting,
Comments by Russia’s foreign ministry come after a piece by American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleging the US military was behind the Nord Steam attacks.
Hersch is wrong. He swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
See Who Sabotaged Nordstream Pipelines? and (Wapo) No conclusive evidence Russia is behind Nord Stream attack.
Hint: amber.
Last week, major news outlets reported that the inner core of Earth was about to stop turning. Now a prominent columnist has declared that the Chinese balloon weighed as much as three buses, which is about 105,000 lbs. This is baloney. So I did a calculation.
We need the diameter of the balloon. Based on a photo, and the length of the truss, stated by U.S. authorities as three coach bus lengths (12 meters/bus X 3), the diameter is estimated as 50 meters.. We use:
This determines a total weight in the vicinity of 11,000 pounds. The payload may be a third of that.
(CNN) What is a suspected Chinese spy balloon doing above the US?
Refer to CNN Exclusive: FBI investigation determined Chinese-made Huawei equipment could disrupt US nuclear arsenal communications. A possible explanation:
The National Reconnaissance Office has space-based ability to do this; the sigint satellites cost $1BN apiece. This is currently beyond the capabilities of China.
From Police Brutality, Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, Rousseau’s Social Contract Part 2,
CNN) National security adviser: ‘I don’t think there’s systemic racism’ in US police forces. Quoting Robert O’Brien,
“No, I don’t think there’s systemic racism. I think 99.9% of our law enforcement officers are great Americans. Many of them are African American, Hispanic, Asian, they’re working the toughest neighborhood, they’ve got the hardest jobs to do in this country and I think they’re amazing, great Americans.”
This is easily contradicted:
The participants in the fatal attacks on George Floyd and Tyre Nichols did not initiate simultaneously. In each case, one individual initiated. In the case of Floyd, the rest remained passively complicit. Statistics imply, without proof, that Derek Chauvin and at least some of the “Memphis Scorpion Five” are workplace psychopaths.
In (CNN) Opinion: The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism, Van Jones suggests that racism may have a part. Though self-loathing occurs in minorities, it can be only a part of what causes a police officer to slip the bonds of civil behavior. The huge occupational hazard, per Friedrich Nietzsche:
The Stanford prison study conducted by Philip Zimbardo offers a horrific alternative to the notion that brutality is the domain of the psychopath: In conditions fairly easy to obtain, ordinary people can be induced to behave like workplace psychopaths. Quoting Zimbardo about the Lucifer Effect,
“I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects,”
and
Police Brutality, Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, Rousseau’s Social Contract Part 2 proposes an approach with three forks:
The Memphis Scorpion Five, which forced a look at the Stanford prison study, suggest this is inadequate.
What else is there? Hint: It’s in the title.