In a comment on last week’s post about the Great Chinese Balloon Caper, I wrote:
My fear now is that Biden or his babysitters will do something stupid to prove how tough and resolute they are…
I’m gonna go ahead and give myself a bingo on that.
Here’s the article Danmarks Radio (DR) published this morning:
First it was a spy balloon and now a UFO: ‘Very, very unusual with two shootings in a few days’
The questions pile up after the USA shot down a UFO yesterday.
Mathilde Bugge, DR.dk, February 11
For the second time in a week, the US Department of Defense has shot down a high-flying object.
First it was a Chinese spy balloon, and six days later an unidentified flying object—a so-called UFO—near the state of Alaska.
That’s so American, isn’t it? After decades of denying UFOs even exist, our government finally acknowledges they’re real—and within a year it’s blowing them out of the skies.
DR’s (ace!) American correspondent Steffen Kretz calls it too unusual to have two shootings within such a short period of time.
“It is totally, totally unusual for the US Air Force to shoot down two unidentified objects within just a few days,” he says.
Yesterday’s shooting is still shrouded in mystery and leaves the correspondent with “more unanswered questions than there are good answers now.”
The first object wasn’t unidentified, and the only unanswered question about whatever piece of hardware got shot down yesterday is why it took five days for the Air Force to stage a shooting for us.
Right now rescuers from the American military are on their way out to see if they can locate and identify what was on board the UFO, says Steffen Kretz.
According to a briefing from the US Department of Defense, the UFO was shot down near the state of Alaska when it was on its way out to sea within US territorial waters .
The American president, Joe Biden, gave the order to shoot it down when he was informed about it – among other things, out of a security concern, explains Steffen Kretz.
Naturally DR’s ace correspondent is indisposed to point out the obvious: that President Joe Biden received a lot of criticism for waiting until the Chinese spy balloon had completed its circuit of the continental United States before shooting it down and therefore had every political incentive to flex some military muscle—precisely as your own moronic American correspondent suggested he would.
Under other circumstances, the news about the downed UFO would probably not reach Denmark at all, believes Steffen Kretz.
Correct, because the administration wouldn’t have been jumping up and down and shouting “we shot something out of the sky over Alaska because we’re tough serious people! So tough! So serious! Yippee-ki-yay, you dog-faced pony soldiers!”
But because it happened six days after the Chinese balloon was shot down, it has a greater interest.
Indeed. Or, as Cicero would have said, duh.
“It caused a great stir that a Chinese balloon moved over the American continent and over military installations critical to American defense, including nuclear missile silos,” says DR’s (ace!) American correspondent.
Not entirely accurate: what caused a stir was that it was allowed to…. by Joe Biden. Who therefore looked weak, irresolute, and feckless.
In a single 24-hour period, we learned that Joe Biden perpetrated an act of war against Russia and have seen him commit an act of war against the UFOs. Who do you think will strike back first, Russia or Betelgeuse?
Danish readers of DR won’t know about the act of war against Russia, of course, because DR has certain journalistic standards that Seymour Hersch’s blockbuster piece clearly did not meet.
I’ll translate for you:
LATEST NEWS 8 FEB AT 22:04
There was previously an article earlier about Russia’s reaction to undocumented information about Nord Stream here
by Lotte StensgaardDR News wrote a news item on February 8 that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had called on the United States to respond to accusations made by the American journalist Seymour Hersh, who claims in his blog that the United States was involved in the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
But Seymour Hersh’s post is based on an anonymous source, and no kind of documentation has been presented for the claim of American involvement in the explosions on Nord Stream 1 and 2, nor has it been possible to verify the information.
Therefore, the item does not meet DR ‘s ethical guidelines and it has therefore been removed.
I’ll cut myself off now so you can carry that laugh into your weekend.
I would not put much faith in Hersh’s article. I think he got taken for a ride by his source (assuming there is one, that is).
None of which absolves DR of its wildly partisan application of standards.
Just to elaborate a little, the whole Norwegian angle seems preposterous on the face of it, especially given the supposedly focus on avoiding any potential leaks or disclosures.
And one aspect of the operation hinges on a Norwegian P-8 flying a routine mission near Bornholm in September. Given that the P-8 appears not yet to be operational with the Norwegian air force (the first planes appear to have been delivered to the Norwegians in Spring 2022 – 2 to the Air base in Lofoten in Northern Norway and 3 to Jacksonville, FL, where the Norwegian pilots are doing their training – and the plan is for the first P-8 to commence operations sometime in late 2023), it would be far from routine to see one near Bornholm.
There is a bit around sonic activation and risk of accidental detonation from background ocean noises that made me laugh out loud. I have no idea who was behind the sabotage and am entirely persuadable that the US Navy was somehow involved, but I am quite sure it was not done the way Hersh’s source alleges. And he needs to explain why one of the four pipes were left intact, and why there was a 17 hour delay between the explosions. Especially if this was all done using remote controlled detonations. Did they accidentally put the AA batteries in the wrong way and only find out a day later?
Hersch could be entirely wrong, and from what you say it sounds as though he’s certainly been pretty significantly misinformed, but the idea that any Danish news outlet is refusing to carry an American story because it was anonymously sourced or couldn’t be verified just made my day… But I guess I sympathize with their discomfort: without a gaggle of “intelligence” officials tell us all what to believe, how can anyone know which way is up?
All very true and on point, of course.
Actually, if you want to get conspiratorial, you could argue that if the US was indeed behind it, leaking a story with some clear errors to someone like Seymour Hersch, a man whose best days are clearly behind him (and who has tried to live up to his My Lai scoop ever since he made it, and who in recent decades have shown an increasing degree of gullibility whenever someone pointed him in the direction of yet another example of nefarious US government activity), might actually be a rather clever way of obfuscating the issue. The trouble is that the US angle requires both a very delicate balancing of great cleverness and great stupidity to be present in the exact right amount at the right places. I could be persuaded that parts of the current US leadership can easily meet the stupidity requirements, but it is less clear that they are clever enough.
But, yes, the sudden attack of scruples at stories relying on single anonymous sources is preposterous. Hello, every bad Donald Trump story, starting with Russia Gate called. They want their hypocrisy back.