Chinese Air Balloon Exposes America's Humiliation (VIDEO)

Background at WSJ, "U.S. Air Defenses Failed to Spot Earlier Chinese Balloon Intrusions, General Says."

And Tucker Carlson's opening earlier tonight:

Buzzfeed: FBI Informants Initiated the 'Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer'

At AoSHQ, "Buzzfeed: FBI Informants Initiated the "Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer." They Were So Central to the Plot It Raises the Question: Was This Always Just the FBI's Plot?"

Will Biden Take On Our Alarming China Problem?

Nah.

The Bidens are in bed with the C.C.P.

It's Glenn Reynolds, at the New York Post:

America has a China problem. And so do the Democrats and President-elect Joe Biden.

While everyone worried about the Kremlin the past several years, Beijing ran wild. And it still is. Will the Biden administration do anything about it? Or will it be OK with Chinese influence?

Back in 2015, China was behind a massive hack of records in the Office of Personnel Management, an attack so far-reaching and damaging, experts dubbed it a “Cyber Pearl Harbor.” In addition to federal personnel records — a gold mine for blackmailers and identity thieves — the hackers also stole even more valuable military and intelligence records.

The forms stolen were Standard Form 86, in which employees in sensitive positions list their weaknesses: past arrests, bankruptcies, drug and alcohol problems and the like. The 120-plus pages of questions also ­include civil lawsuits, divorce information, Social Security numbers and information on friends, roommates, spouses and relatives. Yet the Obama-Biden administration did little.

In 2018, Politico reported on extensive Chinese influence operations throughout the United States, and especially in California, where the Chinese Ministry of State ­Security has a special dedicated unit. When Free Tibet and Falun Gong protesters staged a march in San Francisco, the Beijing regime mobilized thousands of Chinese students in America — with threats of withdrawn grant funding if they didn’t cooperate — to stage a counterprotest. There were even box lunches provided.

And The Daily Beast reported about the same time on Chinese influence operations in America, quoting a former CIA official to the effect that Beijing’s goal was to “turn Americans against their own government’s interests and their society’s interest.”

Since then, we’ve seen one arrest after another involving US professors in the pay of the Chinese government. In 2020, 14 academics were arrested for alleged illegal Chinese ties — at places ranging from Harvard to UCLA to Emory to the University of Kansas...

Still more.

 

The Chinese Communist Party Fail

Following-up from previously, "How the U.S. Misread Xi Jinping."

See Cai Xia, at Foreign Affairs, "The Party That Failed: An Insider Breaks With Beijing":

When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, I was full of hope for China. As a professor at the prestigious school that educates top leaders in the Chinese Communist Party, I knew enough about history to conclude that it was past time for China to open up its political system. After a decade of stagnation, the CCP needed reform more than ever, and Xi, who had hinted at his proclivity for change, seemed like the man to lead it.

By then, I was midway through a decades-long process of grappling with China’s official ideology, even as I was responsible for indoctrinating officials in it. Once a fervent Marxist, I had parted ways with Marxism and increasingly looked to Western thought for answers to China’s problems. Once a proud defender of official policy, I had begun to make the case for liberalization. Once a loyal member of the CCP, I was secretly harboring doubts about the sincerity of its beliefs and its concern for the Chinese people.

So I should not have been surprised when it turned out that Xi was no reformer. Over the course of his tenure, the regime has degenerated further into a political oligarchy bent on holding on to power through brutality and ruthlessness. It has grown even more repressive and dictatorial. A personality cult now surrounds Xi, who has tightened the party’s grip on ideology and eliminated what little space there was for political speech and civil society. People who haven’t lived in mainland China for the past eight years can hardly understand how brutal the regime has become, how many quiet tragedies it has authored. After speaking out against the system, I learned it was no longer safe for me to live in China.

THE EDUCATION OF A COMMUNIST

I was born into a Communist military family. In 1928, at the beginning of the Chinese Civil War, my maternal grandfather joined a peasant uprising led by Mao Zedong. When the Communists and the Nationalists put hostilities on hold during World War II, my parents and much of my mother’s family fought against the Japanese invaders in armies led by the CCP.

After the Communists’ victory, in 1949, life was good for a revolutionary family such as ours. My father commanded a People’s Liberation Army unit near Nanjing, and my mother ran an office in that city’s government. My parents forbade my two sisters and me from taking advantage of the privileges of their offices, lest we become “spoiled bourgeois ladies.” We could not ride in our father’s official car, and his security guards never ran family errands. Still, I benefited from my parents’ status and never suffered the privations that so many Chinese did in the Mao years. I knew nothing of the tens of millions of people who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward.

All I could see was socialism’s bright future. My family’s bookshelves were stocked with Marxist titles such as The Selected Works of Stalin and Required Reading for Cadres. As a teenager, I turned to these books for extracurricular reading. Whenever I opened them, I was filled with reverence. Even though I could not grasp the complexity of their arguments, my mission was clear: I must love the motherland, inherit my parents’ revolutionary legacy, and build a communist society free of exploitation. I was a true believer.

I gained a more sophisticated understanding of communist thought after joining the People’s Liberation Army in 1969, at age 17. With the Cultural Revolution in full swing, Mao required everyone to read six works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, including The Communist Manifesto. One utopian passage from that book left a lasting impression on me: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Although I didn’t really understand the concept of freedom at that point, those words stuck in my head.

The People’s Liberation Army assigned me to a military medical school. My job was to manage its library, which happened to carry Chinese translations of “reactionary” works, mostly Western literature and political philosophy. Distinguished by their gray covers, these books were restricted to regime insiders for the purpose of familiarizing themselves with China’s ideological opponents, but in secret, I read them, too. I was most impressed by The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by the American journalist William Shirer, and a collection of Soviet fiction. There was a world of ideas outside of the Marxist classics, I realized. But I still believed that Marxism was the only truth.

I left the military in 1978 and got a job in the party-run trade union of a state-owned fertilizer factory on the outskirts of the city of Suzhou. By then, Mao was dead and the Cultural Revolution was over. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, was ushering in a period of reform and opening, and as part of this effort, he was recruiting a new generation of reform-minded cadres who could run the party in the future. Each local party organization had to choose a few members to serve in this group, and the Suzhou party organization picked me. I was sent to a two-year program at the Suzhou Municipal Party School, where my fellow students and I studied Marxist theory and the history of the CCP. We also received some training in the Chinese classics, a subject we had missed on account of the disruption of education during the Cultural Revolution.

I plowed through Das Kapital twice and learned the ins and outs of Marxist theory. What appealed to me most were Marx’s ideas about labor and value—namely, that capitalists accrue wealth by taking advantage of workers. I was also impressed by Marx’s philosophical approach, dialectical materialism, which allowed him to see capitalism’s political, legal, cultural, and moral systems as built on a foundation of economic exploitation...

Still more at that top link.

 

Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance

Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II. 

Hunter Biden Requested $10 Million From the C.C.P. to Help the 'Biden Family'

At AoSHQ, "Hunter Biden Requested $10 Million from the Communist China Party for 'the Benefit of the Entire Biden Family'; Requested that Keys to His China-Partnered Offices Be Made for Joe and 'Doctor Jill' Biden."

Wow. 

China 'Floods' U.S. With Spies

From Gordon Chang, at Gatestone, "Espionage Emergency: China 'Floods' America with Spies."

Sky News Australia had the bombshell breaking news the other day, "Leak reveals Chinese Communist Party members working in Aust, UK and US consulates."

And from Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "REPORT: Chinese Communists Have Infiltrated Top Companies, Governments In US, UK, Australia."

FLASHBACK: From 2017, "Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations."

PREVIOUSLY: "Chinese Communist Party Pushing Narrative of the Superiority of its Authoritarian Political Model."

Tucker Carlson Destroys Democrat Eric Swalwell: Congressman Pushed Beijing Talking Points as Member of House Intelligence Committee (VIDEO)

Huge, huge story that demands more scrutiny than any hoax the Dems have peddled. Sheesh.

At AoSHQ, "Tucker Carlson: We Reached Out to Eric Swalwell to Ask If, As Has Been Reported, He Had Sex with Confirmed Chinese Spy Fang Fang; Swalwell Told Us He Could Not Answer, Because the Answer Might be 'Classified'."

And at Fox News, "Swalwell scandal: Dems' hypocrisy 'breathtakingly remarkable,' White House says."

Video here, "Tucker Carlson: ‘Eric Swalwell … Used His Office To Promote Beijing’s Talking Points’ While Sitting On House Intelligence Committee."

And from yesterday, Axios broke it open, "Exclusive: Suspected Chinese spy targeted California politicians."

Thanksgiving Pardon for Retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn

Leftists destroyed this man's life as a political vendetta. He was convicted on a "process" crime with no substantial underlying linkage to the allegations of electoral collusion with the Russians. 

Now he's received a presidential pardon, but how does someone rebuild one's life --- a life of patriotism and exemplary national service --- after a diabolical ideological smear campaign like this?

Thank goodness for President Trump. 

Background at NPR, "Trump Pardons Michael Flynn, Who Pleaded Guilty to Lying About Russia Contact, and at NYT (with fear and trepidation, lol), "Trump’s Pardon of Flynn Signals Prospect of a Wave in His Final Weeks in Office." 

And for the analysis, see Grim's Hall, "Michael Flynn Pardoned":

It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon. Congratulations to @GenFlynn and his wonderful family, I know you will now have a truly fantastic Thanksgiving!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2020

In a particularly grueling miscarriage of justice, retired general Michael Flynn had to be pardoned for a crime of which he was innocent. Investigated by the FBI at the behest of President Obama, who decided for some reason that Flynn was a Russian spy, Flynn was cleared of all charges as a result of the investigation. The FBI closed the case. 

He was prosecuted anyway by a politicized Department of Justice, which nevertheless failed to produce the only piece of evidence it allegedly had against him. That evidence would have been the original "302" form showing that the FBI agents who interviewed him thought that he'd lied to them -- about a case in which the FBI had already cleared him. No such 302 was ever produced, allegedly being lost, but we do have one that we happen to know was edited long after the fact by disgraced liar and political agent Peter Strzok. We know this because he discussed it in unencrypted text messages with his lover, also-married disgraced former prosecutor Lisa Page. 

After a financially ruinous prosecution in which the FBI/DOJ produced almost none of the exculpatory evidence that the law requires them to produce -- including the record of the investigation that completely cleared him on all charges -- Flynn's sorry lawyers convinced him to plead guilty. This was done in such a way that the DOJ and his sorry lawyers (perhaps motivated by one of their partners, a former Obama attorney general) made an illegal deal to hide the agreement not to prosecute Flynn's son from the judge! Not only did the judge lack the information he needed to discern whether the guilty plea was coerced, anyone against whom Flynn later might have testified as a result of the deal would have been denied their constitutional right to know of the deal so they could raise it as a defense against the value of his testimony. 

That judge -- a personal friend of Obama's, it turns out -- wasn't upset about the fact that the law firm and the DOJ conspired to hide these facts from him in violation of the law. His ire was for Flynn, whom he accused of selling out his country even though the DOJ had never even attempted to charge Flynn with that. What they charged him with was perjury for "lying" to the FBI (in the vanished 302), and a paperwork violation for which the FBI investigation had already cleared him. 

(They cleared him of the FARA violation because he had in fact filed paperwork with the government under another act, on the advice of lawyers he hired specifically to help him meet the legal reporting requirements -- thus, he had not tried to hide his lobbying work for a NATO ally, and clearly they could not s how criminal intent. DOJ knew all of that and made him plead guilty to it anyway, if he wanted them not to send his son to prison on trumped-up charges too.) 

Then we spent a year while Flynn's new lawyer, Sidney Powell, managed to get all the exculpatory information illegally hidden from him in the first place. None of it convinced the judge one bit to let Flynn withdraw the coerced guilty plea, nor to accept the DOJ's determination that it should probably actually drop those baseless charges after all. Ordered to drop the charges by the DC Court of Appeals in a three-judge ruling, the judge instead sought en banc approval to continue the case. He was granted it, provided he would dispose of the matter with "dispatch." That was now several months ago, and instead of disposing of the case he has been dragging it out towards an obvious intent to sentence Flynn in spite of his innocence. 

What this case shows is how completely distorted our system has become...

Still more.

You Don't Say? Rachel Maddow Rooted for the Steele Dossier to Be True

At the Other McCain, "The 2019 Media Credibility Bonfire."

BONUS: At AoSHQ, "Washington Post Columnist Rips Rachel Maddow for Promoting Steele Dossier Conspiracy Theories for Three Years."

More, at Legal Insurrection, "Again We Ask: Why Isn’t Rachel Maddow Treated Like Other Crazy Conspiracy Theorists?"

How Russian Agents Hunt Down Kremlin Opponents

Very dramatic.

At Der Spiegel, "Putin's Killers in Europe":

Putin's Killers in Europe: How Russian Agents Hunt Down Kremlin Opponents https://t.co/hERYQFCzUu pic.twitter.com/5PFZg8GTaH

— SPIEGEL ONLINE English (@SPIEGEL_English) December 9, 2019

In the summer of 2013, a killer in Moscow rode a bicycle toward his victim. The Russian businessman Albert Nazranov saw him, and a short brawl ensued. The killer shot the man in the head and upper body at close range. Then he rode away. All of that can be seen in surveillance footage of the crime.

In the summer of 2019, a killer also rode a bicycle toward his victim, only this time in Berlin. He shot Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, of Georgia, in the head and upper body at close range, before riding away. That's how witnesses described the scene.

Reporting by DER SPIEGEL, Bellingcat, The Insider and The Dossier Center now reveals that not only were both murders very similar -- they were also likely carried out by the same person. A forensic comparison of both perpetrator photos reveals clear similarities. The man who carried a passport bearing the name Vadim Sokolov in Berlin was the Russian Vadim Krasikov, the killer who is thought to have also struck in Moscow.

German General Federal Prosecutor Peter Frank has now assumed responsibility for the investigation into the Berlin murder case at the federal level because, he says, they are of "special importance." Germany's chief prosecutor believes that Russian government authorities deliberately issued Krasikov's new identity, an assumption based on the fact that Moscow took the surprising step in 2015 of revoking an international search warrant for Krasikov and issuing a new identity card to him with the name "Vadim Sokolov" a short time later. It's not likely to have been a coincidence.

The Chief Federal Prosecutor's Office is accusing the Russian government or one of its henchmen of having murdered Khangoshvili in broad daylight at the end of August, a hitjob on German soil against a man who had come to the country as an asylum-seeker,

A similar crime committed in the United Kingdom last year sparked an international crisis when suspected agents with the Russian military intelligence agency GRU conducted an attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter using the Russian neurotoxin Novichok. Twenty-nine countries expelled 146 Russian diplomats in response to the crime. Berlin also forced four representatives of Russia to leave the country.

A Slow Political Response

Despite the similarities, officials in Berlin seemed to be struggling in coming up with a political response to the Khangoshvili murder. For some time, officials said evidence in the case was too unclear. They argued that a fake ID in Russia could also be obtained through bribery and that it couldn't automatically be assumed that the Russian government had been involved.

But last Wednesday, just as the German federal prosecutor took over the case, the government in Berlin also adopted a tougher line. They ordered the chargé d'affaires at the Russian Embassy to the Foreign Ministry, where officials informed him that two staffers in the defense affairs division of the embassy, both of whom are believed by German security authorities to be members GRU intelligence service, would be expelled from Germany.

The Foreign Ministry justified the decision by saying that the cooperation by the Russian authorities has been "insufficient." "We view the expulsions as a very strong message to the Russian side to provide us with immediate and comprehensive support in clarifying the identity and background of the alleged perpetrator," said Helge Braun, chief of staff at Angela Merkel's Chancellery. "Given that there has been a lack of support for months, I have absolutely no comprehension of how Russia could be outraged or even be thinking about countermeasures."

Addressing a question about the case at last week's NATO summit in London, Chancellor Merkel stated: "We took this action because we have not seen Russian support in helping us solve this murder." Merkel has left open whether she will take up the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Ukraine summit in Paris on Monday. But it's difficult to imagine that she wouldn't.

The government in Berlin wants to wait until the investigationsproceeds further before considering whether to take further punitive action against Moscow. Officials in the Chancellery are still wary about comparing the foreign policy fallout of the Khangoshvili killing with the Skripal case. But the circumstantial evidence is strong and there is much to suggest that Georgian national Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was killed for political reasons, even if Russia, as so often in the past, has denied all accusations...

More.

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

*BUMPED.*I

'm just seeing that this book is something of a collector's item.

An older used Bantam paperback is going for more than a brand new Penguin classics edition.

At Amazon, the Bantam paperback, Graham Greene, The Quiet American.

And the Penguin classic is here.

Graham Greene, The Human Factor

At Amazon, Graham Greene, The Human Factor (Penguin Classics).

British Panic After Russian Spy Poisoning

Here's the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Russian Spy Poisoning, Britain Tells Public to Wash Clothes and Use Baby Wipes."

And at Telegraph U.K., "Salisbury spy poisoning: public warned to wash possessions to avoid possible nerve agent contamination":

Salisbury public warned to wash clothes after nerve agent attackhttps://t.co/4nX5Fwo1NP

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 11, 2018

Anyone who visited the pub and restaurant in Salisbury where the poisoned Russian spy and his daughter went before they fell, are being advised to wash their clothes and other possessions to avoid possible contamination.

Hundreds of people are thought to have gone to The Mill Pub and Zizzi's restaurant in Salisbury between Sunday lunchtime and Monday evening, when both were closed by officials.

Sergei Skirpal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, were taken ill shortly after visiting both venues.

A spokesman for PHE said: "Based on current evidence, the risk to the general public from this substance has not changed and remains low.

"While there is no immediate health risk to anyone who may have been in either of these locations, it is possible, but unlikely, that any of the substance which has come into contact with clothing or belongings could still be present in minute amounts and therefore contaminate your skin.

"Over time, repeated skin contact with contaminated items may pose a small risk to health."

Anyone who visited either location on Sunday afternoon is being advised to:

* Wash the clothing that you were wearing in an ordinary washing machine using your regular detergent at the temperature recommended for the clothing.
* Any items which cannot be washed, and which would normally be dry cleaned, should be put in two plastic bags tied at the top and stored safely in your own home. We are currently reviewing the best way of cleaning these clothes and will provide further advice on our website.
* Wipe personal items such as phones, handbags and other electronic items with cleansing or baby wipes and dispose of the wipes in the bin (ordinary domestic waste disposal).
* Other items such as jewellery and spectacles which cannot go in the washing machine or be cleaned with cleansing or baby wipes, should be hand washed with warm water and detergent and then rinsed with clean cold water. Please thoroughly wash your hands with soap and water after cleaning any items.

Julian Assange's Nihilism (VIDEO)

From Sue Halpern, at the New York Review, "The Nihilism of Julian Assange":

Sue Halpern reviews ‘Risk,’ Laura Poitras’s documentary portrait of Julian Assange https://t.co/tgEwRkGF1q

— NY Review of Books (@nybooks) June 20, 2017

About forty minutes into Risk, Laura Poitras’s messy documentary portrait of Julian Assange, the filmmaker addresses the viewer from off-camera. “This is not the film I thought I was making,” she says. “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.”

By the time she makes this confession, Poitras has been filming Assange, on and off, for six years. He has gone from a bit player on the international stage to one of its dramatic leads. His gleeful interference in the 2016 American presidential election—first with the release of e-mails poached from the Democratic National Committee, timed to coincide with, undermine, and possibly derail Hillary Clinton’s nomination at the Democratic Convention, and then with the publication of the private e-mail correspondence of Clinton’s adviser John Podesta, which was leaked, drip by drip, in the days leading up to the election to maximize the damage it might inflict on Clinton—elevated Assange’s profile and his influence.

And then this spring, it emerged that Nigel Farage, the Trump adviser and former head of the nationalist and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) who is now a person of interest in the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, was meeting with Assange. To those who once saw him as a crusader for truth and accountability, Assange suddenly looked more like a Svengali and a willing tool of Vladimir Putin, and certainly a man with no particular affection for liberal democracy. Yet those tendencies were present all along.

n 2010, when Poitras began work on her film, Assange’s four-year-old website, WikiLeaks, had just become the conduit for hundreds of thousands of classified American documents revealing how we prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis, as well as for some 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. All had been uploaded to the WikiLeaks site by an army private named Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning.

The genius of the WikiLeaks platform was that documents could be leaked anonymously, with all identifiers removed; WikiLeaks itself didn’t know who its sources were unless leakers chose to reveal themselves. This would prevent anyone at WikiLeaks from inadvertently, or under pressure, disclosing a source’s identity. Assange’s goal was to hold power—state power, corporate power, and powerful individuals—accountable by offering a secure and easy way to expose their secrets. He called this “radical transparency.” Manning’s bad luck was to tell a friend about the hack, and the friend then went to the FBI. For a long time, though, Assange pretended not to know who provided the documents, even when there was evidence that he and Manning had been e-mailing before the leaks.

Though the contradictions were not immediately obvious to Poitras as she trained her lens on Assange, they were becoming so to others in his orbit. WikiLeaks’s young spokesperson in those early days, James Ball, has recounted how Assange tried to force him to sign a nondisclosure statement that would result in a £12 million penalty if it were breached. “[I was] woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign,” Ball wrote. Assange continued to pester him like this for two hours. Assange’s “impulse towards free speech,” according to Andrew O’Hagan, the erstwhile ghostwriter of Assange’s failed autobiography, “is only permissible if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.”

Meanwhile, some of the company he was keeping while Poitras was filming also might have given her pause. His association with Farage had already begun in 2011 when Farage was head of UKIP. Assange’s own WikiLeaks Party of Australia was aligned with the white nationalist Australia First Party, itself headed by an avowed neo-Nazi, until political pressure forced it to claim that association to be an “administrative error.”

Most egregious, perhaps, was Assange’s collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally to whom Assange handed over all State Department diplomatic cables from the Manning leak relating to Belarus (as well as to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel). Shamir then shared these documents with members of the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who appeared to use them to imprison and torture members of the opposition. This prompted the human rights group Index on Censorship to ask WikiLeaks to explain its relationship to Shamir, and to look into reports that Shamir’s “access to the WikiLeaks’ US diplomatic cables [aided in] the prosecution of civil society activists within Belarus.” WikiLeaks called these claims rumors and responded that it would not be investigating them. “Most people with principled stances don’t survive for long,” Assange tells Poitras at the beginning of the film. It’s not clear if he’s talking about himself or others...

I've never liked nor respected Assange, who I consider an enemy.

But note how Halpern gets the basic background wrong: That "graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis" was actually a video of anti-American journalists embedded with Iraqi insurgents armed with RPGs. The Apache took them out in self-defense, following strict rules of engagement. That story's been totally debunked. But as with most other things in the news, the initial lie becomes the official truth for the radical left. That's why you can never let your guard down.

Keep reading, FWIW.

Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations

This is really shocking piece, considering how nonchalant everybody is about spying and intelligence these days. All this hacking and leaking and political payback can get you killed. A lot of people are getting killed.

At NYT, with the response at Zero Hedge:

Killing @CIA Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations, rivaling if not worse than Ames/Hanssen betrayals https://t.co/U22mdiTTvt

— Adam Goldman (@adamgoldmanNYT) May 20, 2017

CIA Incompetence Allowed China To Murder A Dozen CIA Assets: NYT https://t.co/tYmMeSI5NS

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 20, 2017

Julian Assange Rape Investigation Is Dropped in Sweden

He's gonna be extradited to the U.S., one way or another.

British authorities said they'd arrest him if he leaves the Ecuadoran embassy.

At Memeorandum and Twitter:

⚡️ “Sweden drops rape investigation against #JulianAssange”https://t.co/etdgpxGNbe

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 19, 2017

Shop Deals at Amazon

I appreciate all the reader support. I mostly love Amazon for the books. I love posting and learning about all these books. And I use the commissions to buy books, heh. I've never really blogged for the money. When Amazon cut off California from the marketplace in the sales tax standoff, I just kept blogging as always.

In any case, I do thank all of you for your support. It's very nice of you. I'm a humble community college professor. American Power isn't as popular as it used to be, although I like to think I can still fill niche here, especially with unabashedly pro-American and politically incorrect blogging. That's never going to change.

In any case, at Amazon, Today's Deals.

Also, Audio Technica AT-LP120BK-USB Direct-Drive Professional Turntable (USB & Analog), Black.

Here, AmazonBasics Apple Certified Lightning to USB Cable - 6 Feet (1.8 Meters) - White.

And, Millennium Assorted Energy Bars (6 Count) - Long Shelf Life Fruit flavored Bar Bundle - Survival Pack for Calamity, Disaster, Hiking and Meal replacement - with Emergency Guide.

More, Mountain House Just In Case...Breakfast Bucket.

Plus, Koffee Kult - Medium Roast Coffee Beans (2 lb Whole Bean) Highest Quality Delicious Coffee - Fresh Gourmet Aromatic Artisan Blend - Packaging May Vary.

BONUS: Harvey Klehr, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, and The Soviet World of American Communism.

Trump Administration Said to Apologize to U.K. Over Spying Claims

At the Los Angeles Times, "Trump's unsubstantiated claim that Obama spied on him has now entangled — and upset — Great Britain."

This was the big thing on CNN this morning, which I had on for a while while grading essays:



Still more, at Memeorandum, "White House apologizes to British government over spying claims."

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."



Also at Theo's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

Cartoon Credit: A.F. Branco, "The Shadow Knows."