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Notes -
Strange Rumblings in Columbia: Inauguration Day Weirdness
Some odd news and sights coming out of Washington in the last few days. First, the public Inauguration Day ceremony on the National Mall was cancelled. Ostensibly due to poor weather (the forecasted high temperature for Inauguration Day is 28F/-2C), although other Presidents have had public ceremonies in cooler temperatures. President Trump would be sworn in the Congressional chamber of the Capitol building in front of the full Congress, similar to a state of the Union address.
Then a day or two ago ago, that plan was cancelled, and the ceremony is being moved to the White House. It will be much smaller and most of Congress will not be there.
When Trump arrived in Virginia yesterday, all the cars in the motorcade had an odd feature. A three foot tall pole-like device attached to the roof, around 4 inches wide. It is apparently some kind of anti-drone countermeasure. There are rumors spreading that the first two ceremony types were canceled due to intelligence reports of a credible threat of drone attack.
Adding to the already odd protocol, it appears that Vice-President elect JD Vance will not even be present in Washington DC for the inauguration and will be sworn in at an undisclosed location somewhere else. This harks back to the years after 9/11 when Vice President Cheney would spend State of the Union addresses in an undisclosed bunker in case of a massive attack.
Meanwhile, there are still several thousand troops in Washington DC, who were brought in to safeguard the election certification process.
This all seems very odd. If this is in response to a foreign threat of some kind it seems like a very credible and serious one indeed. It is also of course sending bolts of static electricity through the creases of my tinfoil hat, but I have no idea how to interpret them. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts on this.
Possibly relevant concurrent events: DJI (the Chinese drone company) lifts geofencing restrictions in the US: https://viewpoints.dji.com/blog/geo-system-update
It lifted its own geofencing and is pulling in restriction data from a FAA API to populate US specific geofences. DJI used to just utilize NOTAM universal warning zones as first point of contact, but various ATCs around the world kept putting in requests for temporary geofences for special events that DJI just ended up witb different APIs to submit. Not sure what the latest firmware is like, but I hear its made things massively easier for a country to issue geofencing restrictions without any users, even DJI, knowing why.
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