rabas

You referenced the same article I posted so the conclusions must be the same! No one said fear was unfounded. I trust scientists more than Yahoo or BI. Such articles are also not new. From 2016, Scientific American: As Earth Warms, the Diseases That May Lie within Permafrost Become a Bigger Worry In 2014, Scientific American also asked: Could the Next Lab Accident Result in a Pandemic? Lots to worry about.

Both are full of click & scare. Here is a similar lay article from of a science website. Read it and see if you can see the difference. No scare, more facts. And pictures! Phys.org: Ancient dormant viruses found in permafrost Warning, disturbing images: Neolithic Mega-viruses eat lifeforms!

You don't seem to know how IC and high technology industries work and how interdependent the world has become. Destabilizing the world's IC industry would make covid's $6 trillion loss look like a picnic. However, China has one problem. Taiwan's vast IC industry depends far more on Western high technology than on China's. You might want to start here Reuters:special-report ... if Beijing invades, there is no guarantee it could seize the prized foundries intact. They could easily become a casualty of fighting, severing the supply of chips to China’s vast electronics industry. Even if the foundries survived a Chinese takeover, they would almost certainly be cut off from a global supply chain essential to their output.

Your article is unfortunately paywalled. Here is a March 8 Reuters article quoting German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius' comments on the Ukraine theory. "But I am warning against jumping to conclusions," Pistorius said on the sidelines of a summit in Stockholm. Pistorius said earlier the likelihood was "equally high" that it could have been a "false flag operation staged to blame Ukraine". Who would commit a false flag operation to blame Ukraine?

NB. Pressure in the NS-2 pipe-A dropped from 105 bar (~104 atmospheres) to 7 bar after the explosion [1 , 2]. (105 bar = 1523 psi) Otherwise yes, we are likely to never know. Seeing current very close NATO and US/EU relations, it is highly unlikely the US sabotaged the pipes to spite the EU as a few Putin cheerleaders claim.

Unfortunately the article is paywalled. So, I searched for other recent articles on Ukrainian secret weapons finding several that include: batteries, food, borsch, volunteers, ordinary people spying on Russian forces, and medics. So I screen capped the forbidden article to find the secret weapon, which is Morale. The authors deduce this from the recent video of the Ukrainian prisoner brutally executed while shouting "Slava Ukraini". That probably is the secret weapon that keeps Putin awake at night. The whole world is shouting it. Slava Ukraini!

"I don't see why if someone come and captured the territory ... " Despite your false equivalence whataboutism, it is good that most every Ukrainian now understands the horror of Putin's brutal, illegal invasion and destruction of their homeland and killing of innocent people. No, it was not OK for Adolf Hitler and it is not OK for madman Putin.

How can Putin's repeated brutal and illegal military expansions into democratic Europe and neighboring countries not threaten NATO and everyone? Not to mention threats to attack, destroy, and nuke NATO countries. Feb 24 they suggested moving back Poland's Border. You may be confusing NATO's collective defense Article 5 (attack one attack all) with external threats and security. You are surely confusing Putin's expansionist intentions with Ukraine. NATO, not me, already identified Russia as “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area” in their 2022 Strategic Concept paper. about NATO (bottom). To understand Putin, see Julia Loffe, a charming Russian/American journalist and Putin expert. She has many eye opening interviews, start here.

I don't care.

You naively assume events outside of the NATO block do not threaten NATO members' well being or security. All threats to NATO and in turn the world at large are external to NATO. Of course Russia's invasion is a major threat to NATO, Europe, and freedom everywhere.

For those who claim Western media bias and still believe any truth can come from Russia, listen to an independent audience in neural India react to Lavrov's "truth".

"Most chips are made on a substrate of polysilicon" Not IC chips, which I was discussing. Nearly all IC chips require single crystal silicon otherwise they won't work. They also require a massive Western based technology pyramid as I explained. Neither is true of solar cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon "A single continuous crystal is critical for electronics, since grain boundaries, impurities, and crystallographic defects can significantly impact the local electronic properties of the material, which in turn affects the functionality, performance, and reliability of semiconductor devices by interfering with their proper operation."

You bought an Apple computer designed in the US, made with US chips manufactured in the free world but chips themselves are the tip of a technology iceberg, little of which comes from China. So what companies dominate this iceberg? Do you see China in the list? I seriously doubt either country would dare start a technology war but if they did, China would be deader. Legitimate competition and trade are a benefit for everyone, which was understood in the 60s. The problem has been teaching the CCP the meaning of legitimate.

"The version of TikTok raising all these concerns is not available in China itself. In an effort to protect Chinese students from the harmful effects of social media, the Chinese Communist Party has issued a rule that limits the time students can spend on TikTok to 40 minutes a day. And, they can view only videos with a patriotic theme or educational content such as science experiments and museum exhibits." Fortune: Is America overreacting to TikTok with all of its new bans at high schools and colleges? Probably not. The app was created by ByteDance, which is based in China and has ties to the Chinese government.

Some info on fingerprints and databases. Putting fingerprints into computers goes way back and is trivial. They manually mark each point where a raised ridge stops or bifurcates. That produces pairs of numbers like (88, 102) that are used to search. I would assume Thailand has had computerized fingerprints all along. The time to find a print with a computer depends on database size. If Thailand is only looking for people who have been banned in the past it would be instantaneous (on an old PC). The fastest current search methods using an Intel CPU exceeds 1 billion prints per second. I would not assume Thailand can't easily find prints from the 1990s especially for a small important group of people.

Washington Examiner Maybe that's why you are not hearing much, Chinese censors.

Possibly encouraged by the release of a top prize like Viktor Bout? Russia wanted Viktor Bout back, badly. The question is: Why? WaPost "There is little doubt that Bout is a top prize for Russian officials ..."

The Pentagon's recent interest and openness towards UFOs is likely due to rapid human technology advancement and increasingly aggressive adversaries, not aliens. They are hoping public awareness will lead to more citizen reporting. UFOs no longer in the Shadows What we should do is get the aliens to help us identify these adversarial flying objects, AFOs.

'War is a perfect timing for military and criminals to engage on armaments black market.' Viktor! I wonder how Viktor Bout is doing. Last I read, he pledged undying love for Mr. Putin, who now owns him, and rushed off to Ukraine saying he truly believed in what Putin was doing there. He didn't specifically mention utter human brutality and destruction. I assume he is on a special mission. But therein lies your difference. Putin employing the most corrupt people imaginable for his illegal war. Zelensky ridding his country of corruption.

"How russia can threaten Norway by blowing up their own pipeline?" From the start, the simple answer for those willing to see is that Putin blew them up to blame America and thus divide NATO, which was Putin's original purpose in building the pipelines. After his attempts to threaten Europe with energy starvation failed big time, the pipelines would never be used again as long as Putin remained in power. You can't move pipelines so their only remaining value to Putin was a false flag operation to finally split NATO. To Putin, everything is about NATO, even his Ukraine war. If he is willing to kill 100,000s of Russians in Ukraine, what's a couple of now useless pipes?

They came very close. Look at the video. Looks like they severed the array connection to the balloon and let the electronics mount free fall. Note: the camera view is from below. With all the flat panels, it probably fell fairly slowly. Real pros. Take that, Xi.

If it came down slowly it would have fallen outside of US territory. And it can be very slowly. The Canadians once shot 1000 rounds into a large errant weather balloon and it still made it across the Atlantic. Thwarted 3 nation's Air Forces. [ref]

WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) - A senior U.S. general responsible for bringing down a Chinese spy balloon said on Monday the military had not detected previous spy balloons before the one that appeared on Jan. 28 over the United States and called it an "awareness gap." reuters Air Force General Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command, said the latest balloon was 200 feet (60 meters) tall and the payload under it weighed a couple thousand pounds. VanHerck added that U.S. intelligence determined the previous flights after the fact based on "additional means of collection" of intelligence without offering further details on whether that might be cyber espionage, telephone intercepts or human sources. --- So they recently learned of the earlier 3 baloons by rummaging through data, as one forum member suggester earlier.

The term "at least" in "at least three times during the Trump administration" suggests some uncertainty so there could be more. Now it's being reported in the NYT and elsewhere: "The information on the three balloon transits in the Trump years was discovered after that administration had left, a senior Biden administration official said on Sunday night." NYT Sounds like they may be digging through old surveillance data.

Of course they shot it down. I'm sure the military and intel agencies want a look at it. Shooting it down over water may better preserve the spy equipment. On the detente front: It was shot down by a single A9X sidewinder air to air missile. The A9X shot down it's first target drone at China Lake, California in 1952. It's first combat roll was during the second Taiwan Straight Crisis against China successfully shooting down many MIGs. wiki