the nearest town, Cape Canaveral, over ten miles away

The Falcon 9 that made an uncontrolled reentry in March of 2021 spread debris from Washington to Oregon.

Chinese Long March rocket failures have dropped parts into Indian states of Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Ten miles isn’t far for a vehicle moving 17,500 mph during the 12 minutes or so necessary to break Earth’s gravity well.

Cape Canaveral is directly east of Orlando, with a bunch of vacation resort spots hugging the shore. The Florida coastline isn’t exactly lightly developed.

Getting all my aerospace technology on Temu.

I’m not saying that the persecution against Falung Gong is fake, actually I believe is true, violence against minorities is another Wednesday for the CCP

The Falun Gong was originally an ally of the CCP as recently as 1993. They had a falling out when some of their chief leadership got caught in a string of financial scandals and abuse allegations. Attempts by the state to begin prosecuting church leaders triggered an outcry from the membership, which prompted more arrests and more efforts hide the organizations money, and finally a wholesale exodus from the country by its most devoted members.

Falun Gong leadership arrived in the US and immediately began churning out anti-China spin, with the help of the Epoch Times - an originally Chinese-only paper primarily distributed in Chinese ex-pat communities by church refugees. If you get into the history of the Epoch Times, you should very quickly discover that it is not a reliable source of information.

Which isn’t to say China’s been great wrt religious freedom or free association. But the modern incarnation of Falun Gong has more in common with Scientology than, say, Mormonism or Baháʼí. You’re going to fall down some really QAnon-themed rabbit holes if you take everything their community is saying at face value.

These projects tend to bring a bunch of economic development along with it. Would be like Floridians rejecting Cape Canaveral or Texans trying to shut down SpaceX. Locals might not be thrilled, but developers and business leaders are ready for the rest of you to take the risk.

Commencing the naval operation by tooting my Warp Whistle

Europe has an enormous surveillance state, increasingly modeled (and managed) by Israeli surveillance systems used in Palestine.

Germany, France, the UK, and Spain already have some of the most advanced facial recognition imagine in the world deployed in their surveillance networks.

And the EU just expanded their legal use

Maybe you’re safer from an American tech company. But not from the local police.

The worst that my country wants to do with my data is attempt to sell me shit I don’t want.

Facial recognition technology and the growing power of artificial intelligence

In some other countries, drawing parallels with certain emperors and certain A.A.Milne characters could cost me my freedom and possibly my life.

Of course. Always in other countries. Never in mine.

Wonder when they’ll apologize for spying on campaigners in the '00s, '10s, and '20s.

it’s a chain

There are more than a few spots in my home state of Texas that are functionally “Whites Only” already. Go in there as a poc and you won’t get served. You might not even be allowed through the front door. “Kung Fu Saloon” down in Houston (most diverse city in the country!) has had reputation for not letting brown people in for years.

The DEI shit is about inflaming the white nationalists who think even their little pockets of outright segregation aren’t enough. We’re approaching the idea that any place which isn’t “whites only” is somehow stealing something from a white person.

I’m convinced Americans have the same level of propagandist ignorance as North Koreans.

Given the budgets they have to work with, I imagine Americans have it much worse off. An hour on Facebook deluges you with more advertisement than any given NKer probably sees in a weak.

There’s always room for colored workers at the back of the bus or the front of the chain gang. Segregation has been a tool for dividing and conquering the working class, by shoving a minority of the population down and telling everyone else they’re next if they resist.

A handful of people with a whole lot of money are setting national policies. And those people no longer consider climate change a problem, so now you’re not allowed to consider it a problem either.

Can’t wait for this year’s hurricane season!

Nonsense. The only problem my country has is the problem created by the evil foreigners who threaten my liberty and security from the other side of the border. We need to be protected from those evil outsiders. Therefore, I will endorse and participate in an even more invasive degree of surveillance and a more draconian degree of policing.

That’s the only way to keep the foreign bodies from infecting me and taking over. And the idea of the foreigners having any amount of power over me is significantly more frightening than the prospect of a domestic administration having unlimited authority to protect me.

Do you realize we are allowed to discuss and criticize things around the world whether or not America is guilty of something similar right?

It becomes tiresome to read “Foreign Country is doing the EVIL THING! Rally around the burn pit and lets talk about how intrinsically bad their are!” when they learned this shit by watching every other western country do it first. Just feels like another edition of American Exceptionalism and hysterical far-right xenophobia.

The CCP are actively engaging in genocide

It always gets me to see how Americans treated Afghanistan for 23 years, only to find religion when they see China doing the same Radical Islamic Extremism crack downs the Ted Cruz masterbates to in the middle of the night.

Literally right on the other side of the border! Practically the same dudes. And we outright applauded China for helping us with the genocide under Bush, when we were applauding Russia for the same shit in Chechnya no less.

But now we’re out of there, and in between kicking off massive famines and looting their Treasury, we’ve decided to care about Uyghurs now.

But it is still night and day in terms of horror.

More black and white.

It’s not called The China Man’s Burden, ffs. Who do they even think they are?

Anyway, back to explaining to Houthis why we don’t have health care by blowing up another elementary school in Yemen.

At some point, its just tiring to see folks slam their fists in their palms and declare whole-heartedly “I will NEVER visit China for ANY REASON!” when half our country is broke as shit and our planes occasionally just have the doors fall off mid-flight.

As if you were booking a vacation to Macau ten minutes ago, but now you’ve suddenly changed your mind. Come the fuck on, dude.

It doesn’t matter if it is the UK asking if we want the left or right hand this time or the CCP

Unfortunately, there’s this baseline understanding of liberal western democracies providing security while eastern fascist dictatorships of the proletariat are looking for people to punish arbitrarily. The tolerance for British mass surveillance (some of the worst in the world) is sky high, simply because they’re doing it the white way.

Love to live in a country where my data is always secure and my government would never try to harvest my data in bulk. Liberty! Whiskey! Sexy! USA! USA!

dude federal authorities should totally investigate this fucker’s laptop.

Its frustrating, because a Bush USA would have been so far up Ron’s ass he wouldn’t need those lifts in his shoes. But Obama and Biden just kinda shrug at this and let it slide.