So there was an incident in which some elite apples stopped a car, pulled the driver out, and beat him to death... or how it's better known in the US, policing. Luckily, Fox News is there to help us make sense of such things, courtesy of The Daily Show...

Between this tax collecting business, unions preventing them from getting fired, qualified immunity protecting them from lawsuits, and all the murders, they really seem to be making the most of this monopoly of violence thing.

Expert weighs in on seriousness of Chinese ‘spy balloon'

The suspected Chinese spy balloon may be guided by advanced artificial intelligence technology, a US expert said Friday.

William Kim, a specialist in surveillance balloons at the Marathon Initiative think tank in Washington, told AFP that balloons are a valuable means of observation that are difficult to shoot down.

Guided by AI?

Mr Kim said the first Chinese balloon looked like a normal weather balloon but with distinct characteristics.

It has a quite large, visible “payload” — the electronics for guidance and collecting information, powered by large solar panels.

And it appears to have advanced steering technologies that the US military hasn't yet put in the air.

Artificial intelligence has made it possible for a balloon, just by reading the changes in the air around it, to adjust its altitude to guide it where it wants to go, Mr Kim said.

“Before you either had to have a tether ... or you just send it up and it just goes wherever the wind takes it,” he said.

“What's happened very recently with advances in AI is that you can have a balloon that ... doesn't need its own motion system. Merely by adjusting the altitude it can control its direction.”

Pundits with undisclosed funding from arms manufacturers urge ‘stronger force posture' to counter China

The Trump administration's efforts to blame China for COVID-19's rising death toll in the U.S. have not been backed up by intelligence assessments, but it has not stopped Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from making the baseless assertion of the virus originating from a Chinese lab or the Trump campaign from attacking the presumptive Democratic nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, as going too weak on China. But there may be more than political opportunism at play. Weapons manufacturers stand to reap huge profits if they can stoke a new cold war between the U.S. and China.

Those overlapping interests were on display last week when The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by two former Trump administration officials claiming, “The Covid-19 pandemic has convinced many that the U.S. must fundamentally change its policy toward China. Shifting course is necessary, but it won't be achieved with a few policy tweaks.”

“That's because,” they added, “the pandemic's political and economic effects are bringing about a more assertive Chinese grand strategy.”

There are at least two big problems with this op-ed.

First, there's no actual evidence or explanation provided about COVID-19 “bringing about a more assertive Chinese grand strategy” but the authors plow forward with their theory that “Beijing was cruising to global domination” unchallenged.

Second, both of the op-ed's authors have undisclosed conflicts of interest that might motivate their prescription for a new U.S. grand strategy centered on, among other things, “maritime and aerospace power.”

The authors, Elbridge Colby (who served as assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017-2018) and A. Wess Mitchell (who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs from 2017-2019), are both employed by institutions that receive considerable funding from weapons manufacturers.

The Wall Street Journal describes Colby and Mitchell as “principals of the Marathon Initiative,” an entity that has no website* and about which there is little public information other than that it was formed on May 7, 2020 according to the Washington, DC Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.

The Marathon Initiative shares an address with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) where Mitchell serves as vice chairman and received $227,500 in compensation in 2017. Donors to CEPA include a defense industry who's who: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, and BAE Systems.

Mitchell's co-author, Colby, also appears to have benefited financially from funding originating from arms manufacturers.”