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On the Chinese balloon — 110 Comments

  1. “For some reason” you cannot stand this song? Perhaps it is because you have taste?

    This balloon thing is very odd. It just doesn’t add up. Why wouldn’t we want to get it out of the sky and take a look at the electronics onboard? Or, at the very least put it out of commission? It’s so odd to admit what it is and do nothing. There must be some 4-D chess thing I’m missing.

  2. Drop it in the North Atlantic, there are even less people living there than in Montana, Bunge.

  3. I think it’s a leftover from the Beijing Chinese New Year’s parade. They should scramble a fighter and take a picture of it. I bet there’s a cutesy drawing of a rabbit on the side.

  4. Om, it should have been brought down the instant it crossed into US airspace. A direct violation of our sovereignty that needed to be dealt with directly. Why you can’t see that, and put so much faith in the idiots running the government, I don’t understand.

  5. An open letter/message to President Biden:

    Dear President Biden,

    How did a “possible spy balloon”, from China, get over the United States?

    I thought that you, The U.S. President, and the head of The US military, had the job of [stopping] foreign aircraft, and stopping possibly…[dangerous] foreign…military objects, before these aircraft and devices can- enter our country, or get over our country’s air space?

    As I have seen- you, and your spokespeople, have said you would use:

    The US Military, The US Air Force, and The USA’s anti-missile defenses- to keep [foreign foes and foreign militaries] from threatening and attacking: The United States, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and a number of other countries.

    So, with one of the best militaries at your command- how did you and the US military [not] stop [this foreign aircraft], from flying over the United States?

    Our Military’s systems are designed to keep 1) [nuclear missiles] from flying into the USA’s airspace, and 2) they are designed to keep enemy, bomber-planes from flying over…and/or dropping [nuclear bombs] on, The United States.

    So, why didn’t our anti-nuclear-missiles systems detect, and stop, this foreign aircraft, from flying over The United States?

    As I understand it- The US Air Force’s, F-16 fighter planes have electronic countermeasures…devices/weapons, that- when fired: they fire a cloud of metal material, or electronic signals…at enemy fighter planes- to 1) jam the enemy planes’ radars/signal devices + recording devices, or to 2) jam the tracking signals of the enemy planes’ attack missiles.

    Why didn’t the USA’s military planes [fire or use] electronic-countermeasures weapons, on this flying, foreign aircraft?

    President Biden, your lack of stopping this foreign aircraft from getting over The US, and your lack of [destroying] this balloon…once this aircraft moved [over] the United States, will likely make: you, and The United States, [and maybe also the US Military]- a laughing stock to the world’s militaries, [and] a laughing stock to- the rest of the people of the world.

    Please explain why you could not stop this violation of the nation’s air space, and lands, by a foreign aircraft.

    Your actions in this event can give an undeserved, negative reputation to: The United States, The US people, and to The US Military.

    I am hoping, and many others are also hoping, that you’ll better protect The US nation, and the people of The United States, in the future days of The United States.

    Sincerely,

    TR

  6. rush had it as one of his bumper tracks, I forget for which subject,

    milley vannilli isn’t going to do it, the head of north american command doesn’t seem that interested either,

  7. physicsguy:

    F=ma IIRC.

    Why people fall into panic when the media pulls their chains is a question you might think about.

    Otay, physicsguy do you have a secret stash of data regarding the flight path or anything else? Or say how much it would cost to down the package or if it has any nasties on board, say hydrazine? What could possibly go wrong?

    Just maybe somebody weighed risks and benefits? Nope, “we knows!”

  8. Om,
    It should have been brought down the moment it violated US airspace. It is a direct attack on our sovereignty.

  9. Om, no, all I see is an unfounded faith in the idiots currently running the government and showing extreme weakness regarding our sovereignty.

    Did you read the article Neo linked? Pretty much says it all

  10. Too bad the military doesn’t have systems and instruments to track satellites, optical, radar etc., then they could observe and evaluate the instruments the balloon is carrying. Nope.

    To bad that all the capabilities of the DOD and other agencies are so well known. Because everyone in the DOD is totally focused on pronouns, DEI, CRT, XYZ&123. We knows.

    Fry and blind Xi’s balloon of spies with microwaves or lasers?

    Maybe it is a test of US defensive capabilities? Nope, can’t be that?

    We knows, and we be panicked!

  11. physicsguy:

    You be you.

    If you haven’t noticed over the years, I loathe Xi and the CCP.

    Dig your bunker deep.

  12. At the link for this post, a US Air Force general points out that there is nothing this balloon can see, at 60,000 feet, that Chinese satellites cannot already see. He says they have taken some measures which they don’t want to talk about. Fair enough.

    But nobody has explained why on earth they didn’t eliminate the thing when it was over the water to the west of our coastline.

    We’ve issued strongly worded statements. I feel so much better.

  13. Is there a pattern here?
    Massive fail when withdrawing from Afghanistan.

    Failure to prevent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Pussy foot, gradual supplying of lethal weapons to Ukraine.

    Failure to do anything but hand-waving when the Chinese fly a spy balloon over our homeland.

    Nope. It’s all good. Nothing to see there. Move along.

  14. Biden made the decision not to take it down because he is bought and paid for by the CCP. Nuff said.

  16. It doesn’t exist. Its only to distract the Repubs into “calling for Biden to take acation on Chinese spy balloon” instead of doing anything real like cancelling foreign aid to Ukraine. Its a Ben Shapiro “own the libs” stunt; libs make up fake balloon, Benny owns the libs by pointing out how they won’t shoot it down, Benny becomes more popular, nothing happens because the balloon isn’t real anyway. Except its congress doing it now. Or its a CIA balloon to spy on conservatives. That only changes the lib strategy but not the Repub Shapirogy.

  19. Shoot it down. Examine the electronics and display everything else prominently in front of the Chinese Embassy in DC.

  21. Kate said:

    “A possible explanation.”

    Heh, heh!

    Yeah! XD

    …Or someone wrote, “ICE CREAM TRUCK”, on the side of the balloon!

    I kid! I kid!

  22. What decision has Sundowner made that didn’t favor the Chinese?
    I don’t know of 1 from his first day onward.

  25. I strongly suspect that the Xi balloon is flying considerablly higher than the maximum altitude than a F-35 can operate at. Unfortunately for Rick Moran’s opinion piece:

    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/02/03/for-gods-sake-just-shoot-the-damn-thing-down-already-n1667659

    So if you really want to shoot it down, not unnecessarily endanger the public, and want to recover anything usefull, you probably have to think a bit beyond just being angry. Or, we knows.

  26. The Eagle, the Black Widow, and the Raptor (US fighter aircraft) can all get to about 60,000 ft plus. Of course the U2 and the SR-71, long mothballed, could go to 85,000 ft as their ceiling. There’s a prototype unmanned drone that can supposedly get close to 65,000 ft, and I’m sure DARPA has toys it could bring to the sandbox. I heard a few months ago that the Air Force tried out a new high-powered laser weapon. Surely there is something kicking around that could go up there and poke a hole in a balloon. As for the general’s assumptions about satellites, his assumptions suck and so do his stars. He’s not being paid to assume, and if he’s going to sh*t-stir WWIII into life in the Ukraine, he ought to at least display some competence when the opportunity arises to do it legally for a change. Of course the ChiComs could also be goading us into showing capabilities, but if our focus was where it should be, the balloon would just have vanished without comment.

  27. I think the Chinese were hoping that the ballon would be shot down and release its cargo of photos of Joey and Hunter playing golf with the CCP head of the secret police and his buddy.

    As for the missile silos, we have nuclear submarines armed with nuclear warheads floating around under the Pacific that cannot be found. Nothing the Chinese can do would save them from retaliation.

  28. If we still had something like this:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

    You could burn holes in the balloon and it would loose buoyancy, resulting in a “relatively” soft landing and recovery of the payload. Unless the device had other controls/ideas.

    I’ve also not seen any discussion of how the payload of this balloon compares to other “weather” balloons. News reports are being far too coy about it.

  29. Aggie:

    The U2 is still in service. At least 20 years ago the USAF used a F-15 to launch an anti-satelite missile in a successful demonstration. It destroyed the satellite.

    I strongly suspect that the technical difficulty of bringing down Xi’s sensor payload is not the issue. Risk and benefits.

    Regarding WWIII and Ukraine, check with Bunge from his bunker.

  30. There were reports of an explosion and smoke plume over Billings when the balloon was there. Is it possible we did something to it?

  31. Oh, great. It will be over North Carolina tomorrow. Do we anticipate a big boom right after it goes out from Atlantic Beach?

  33. Kate:

    Billings isn’t NYC, only the largest city in Montana, Xi’s spy junk falling on it would not have been a good thing (I’ve lived there).

  34. “At least 20 years ago the USAF used a F-15 to launch an anti-satellite missile in a successful demonstration.”

    Closer to 40. Wife unit was a SW engineer on ASAT and supported that shootdown. We had not been married that long (a year or two) and our 40th is in a few months.

  35. Kate– FWIW, here are some videos etc. of the apparently demolished balloon, plus comments by the governor of Montana:

    “If it was up to Montanans,” Gianforte said, “this thing would have been taken out of the sky the moment it entered our sovereign airspace. It clearly had been there a while. It’s not moving that fast.”

    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2023/02/03/breaking-explosion-reported-in-skies-over-montana-video-n1667806

  37. I’m reminded of the little-known Japanese incendiary balloons in WW II:
    ___________________________

    Fu-Go … was an incendiary balloon weapon deployed by Japan against the United States during World War II. A hydrogen balloon measuring 10 metres (33 ft) in diameter, it carried a payload of two 11-pound (5.0 kg) incendiary devices plus one 33-pound (15 kg) anti-personnel bomb (or alternatively one 26-pound (12 kg) incendiary bomb), and was intended to start large forest fires in the Pacific Northwest.

    Between November 1944 and April 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army launched about 9,300 balloons from sites on Honshu, of which about 300 were found or observed in the U.S. and Canada, with some in Mexico.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
    ___________________________

    Six Americans in Oregon were killed by a Japanese balloon while on a Sunday School picnic.

  38. A song written by one of the all-time great songwriters, Jimmy Webb. And sung by the talented Fifth Dimension with one of the greatest voices ever, Marilyn McCoo.

  39. Last reports had the balloon over the mid-west and at a significantly lower altitude, around 45,000 ft and just above some civilian aircraft. Leaking? Lower because of night-time cooling? Also, reports of another balloon device currently soaring over Latin America somewhere.

  40. Chases Eagles:

    I knew it was more than 20 years, but as you reminded me, it was 1985. That was a year after I started working at the Hanford Site; N Reactor was still making plutonium (PU), the PUREX Plant was still extracting plutonium, and the Cold War was still full bore.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/first-space-ace-180968349/

    Reports of a balloon dropping near Billings may be bogus. Drifting along at 45,000 ft is well within routine SAM or jet/missile capabilities. IMO

  44. What, the Chinese don’t use direct deposit to a cutout to pay Biden off, they have to send a paper check?

    It’ll take half a century, but someday Slow Joe’s accounting records will become public. Of course, by then all of us who are paying attention will have shuffled off this mortal coil and the only people left will not be able to spell “Biden” much less know who he was.

  46. om, 10:20 p.m.: I didn’t advocate shooting it down over Billings; I am aware it’s a city of some size.

    I asked about the reports of an explosion and smoke plume over Billings. Two later commenters provided news links, and TR, at 1:12 a.m., answered my question with a link proposing a possibility that the US could blind the spy capability without shooting down the balloon. Local news stations here say tracking indicates it should be over the mountains in western NC about now, and will exit the country from either NC or SC.

    I hope they will shoot it down once it’s over the ocean, and I don’t understand why they didn’t do that before it reached our western coast.

  48. Kate:

    Bunge advocated shooting it down onto Montana because so few people live there, not you. I did not mean to imply that you advocated shooting it down over Billings.

    Why it wasn’t downed 199 or 11 miles offshore of WA is another question. I haven’t seen a plot of its route but it may have crossed first over British Columbia (Canadian airspace) not WA.

  49. I don’t think this is as big a deal as many of you think it is. First, there are much better ways to disable a spy satellite than shooting it down. Optics can be fried by low powered lasers, if it is an imaging device. Electronics can be fried by US electronic jamming equipment. Both would leave the balloon looking intact, and only the DoD and China would know what happened. If China complained, then they’d have to admit more than they want.

    As long as it is above commercial airspace (FL550 is sufficient) then it isn’t a threat. If Aggie is right and it has descended (as it will eventually do), then it can be a threat to commercial airspace, but even then it can be avoided. If it slowly descends intact, then it can be examined and we can know exactly what it was doing.

    Meanwhile, we don’t set a precedent of just shooting things down. This is a bad philosophy that leads to not only escalation but a greater chance of civilian casualties. I do agree, had it been shot down immediately entering Alaska, that might not have been a bad idea, just under the grounds we don’t want uncontrolled objects in our airspace (and if China wanted to admit to control, then they would need to explain their theory of controlling aircraft into US airspace). That didn’t happen, and doing it now no longer makes any policy sense.

  50. Leland:

    Glad to hear that someone else is thinking things through, and clearly stating the thoughts.

    Media drives stories by pushing panic buttons although you don’t spin up a balloon you just release the tether?

  51. BBCNews says-
    a second, [possible, Chinese, spy balloon], is now floating over South America, near Costa Rica.

  52. Costa Rica is in Central America, but that is south of the USA.

    Spying on bananas no doubt, or Costa Rica’s fabulous parks and nature preserves.

    Missed it (the USA) by that much. Wong Way

  54. I saw reports that the balloon had come in over the Aleutians, then Alaska and British Columbia before sliding down over Montana. So we could have shot it down over the sea near Alaska, it seems to me.

    I hope Leland is correct that we have fried or jammed its electronics, so it is now merely a large object to be avoided by commercial aircraft (assuming it’s that low now). That would be consistent with what the USAF Brig. General said in the link in Neo’s post, that we had taken steps that he declined to specify.

  56. Kate:

    om on February 3, 2023 at 6:48 pm said:

    Too bad the military doesn’t have systems and instruments to track satellites, optical, radar etc., then they could observe and evaluate the instruments the balloon is carrying. Nope.
    ….

    Fry and blind Xi’s balloon of spies with microwaves or lasers? …..

  59. “Om, no, all I see is an unfounded faith in the idiots currently running the government and showing extreme weakness regarding our sovereignty.”

    Dude, om is not complicated. I’ve repeatedly spanked him for not being anywhere near as smart as he thinks he is, so he now must compulsively try and return the favor. His problem is that I don’t routinely show off my own intellectual limitations, so he just reflexively jumps in ANY time he (usually mistakenly) thinks he can catch me in a “gotcha!”

    The suggestion the U.S. military cannot shoot down a spy balloon when it’s over Montana without real risk to the public is profoundly dumb, but that is the hill om has, yet again, stupidly chosen to die on. Don’t try and figure it out. It’s clearly a pathology deeply embedded in om’s character. Maybe he wasn’t properly toilet trained or something, but I think we’d need a team of mental health professionals to figure out why om is so combatively ridiculous.

    Mike

  60. “U.S. officials say a massive surveillance balloon believed to be from China and first seen above Montana is being tracked as it flies over the continental United States.”

    “The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is flying over the continental United States right now,” Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement on Thursday. “NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] continues to track and monitor it closely.”

    “China’s foreign ministry has claimed it is a civilian balloon used for meteorological purposes, but U.S. politicians, many on the right, are already demanding President Joe Biden shoot it down.”” — ABC News report

    I’ve been trying to remember what this reminds me of, and it dawned on me, it is eerily similar to NORAD tracking Santa Clause– except for the calls to shoot him down, of course.

  61. Bunge keeps digging his hole. Doesn’t understand that dropping a payload the size of two school busses on someone other than Bunge is not a good idea. And Bunge’s fixation with spanking and elimination is clearly TMI. Projection sonny?

    Don’t be a Bunge.

  62. Bunge doesn’t “routinely show off his intellectual limitations.” Well that is certainly good to know (LOL). Okay, Bunge, whatever you say. (LOL)

    Don’t be a Bunge.

  64. I haven’t heard this song in years; tried to listen, but decided my background YouTube mix (with Santana right now) is much better in less than a minute. Will never sing this one in karaoke or anywhere else.

    It’s supposed to be a happy song, uplifting. But it’s unbearably pretentious.
    Kids today, like my youngest teen (17), would call it cringe.
    And be right.

    Disney’s “It’s a Small World” remains worse.

    I was looking for Sting’s great version of Mac the Knife, in karaoke (with lyrics), but didn’t see it. So it’ll be Talking Heads (old) “Don’t Worry About the Government” — had to practice last night. Singing some 4-8 songs among other poor, ok, or sometimes good singers remains fun.

    Read this morning a headline that the CCP spy balloon was shot down – good. Surprised they don’t have a way to “capture” it, and examine the electronics better.

  70. More info on Kate’s comment: https://nasstatus.faa.gov/

    What is interesting is that site, which is the authority site concurs with what Kate wrote, but if you click details, the NOTAM lists US and Canadian facilities on the west coast.

  74. Now I suppose we won’t be told much about what was on the balloon, assuming they recover the works, which they are trying to do.

  75. This blind squirrel (om) couldn’t even guess that it would be dropped (shot down) in the Atlantic offshore of North Carolina, not the North Atlantic offshore of Maine, what a looser:

    om on February 3, 2023 at 5:46 pm said:
    Drop it in the North Atlantic, there are even less people living there than in Montana, Bunge.

    Well, back to work. As oft repeated in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

    Don’t Panic!

  76. I said, last night, that it would go down somewhere between Atlantic Beach and Myrtle Beach, and it looks like I got it right.

  77. Still not sure what we got by shooting it down, but maybe we will find something interesting if recovered. I do think there needs to be pressure on China to explain why they think they can just fly uncontrolled (in this case, I mean not responding to ground based controllers for the airspace they are in) aircraft in the US or over any country.

    The US routinely practices freedom of navigation exercises at sea and in the air to make sure everyone is clear it is ok to operate in international observed seaways and airspace. Over the US, within civilian and military airspace is not international. I’m fairly certain the balloon did not respond to ground controllers. Doing this in airspace over multiple countries is just dumb for China. In that sense, taking it down is fair game.

  78. Recovery crews are in the water, and they hope to get the payload. We’ll see.

    In my opinion, we had the right to shoot this down over Alaska waters, and should have done so. I hope the outcome here will be standing orders to take down anything out there which is unidentified and does not respond to air control.

  79. Yeah…mentioning me over and over and over in the most pathetically childish way TOTALLY disproves that you are obsessed with me.

    Again, om’s position is that the United States military is incapable of safely downing a foreign intelligence gathering BALLOON when it is over a mostly empty state like Montana. I’m sure Taiwan and Ukraine are tremendously reassured by the events of the last few days.

    Mike

  80. MBunge:

    You have done your part here to be “pathetically childish” and confrontational. There’s plenty of that to go around.

  81. Foreign nations and foreign people ignore our borders with impunity. This will lead to no good end.

  82. Kate:

    Possibly, conceivably the recovery of the remains of the instrument payload may be easier in the shallow nearshore Atlantic (?) versus the mountains of Alaska, British Columbia, or Montana. Now if you want to drop from 60,000 ft (?) three school busses of stuff (how’s that for a unit of measurement?) onto the totally empty (some exaggeration) state of Montana that’s not a problem worth considering to some.

    Back to work.

  83. Kate, I don’t disagree about the right, but we have various rights that don’t need enforcement all the time. I know the US media has made this a domestic political issue, but internationally, this is a huge mistake by China. Letting the balloon drift into the CONUS where it clearly should not have been is not something the Chinese can brush off as a “weather balloon”. Nobody wants another nation’s uncontrolled weather balloon transiting their commercial airspace. If it was shot down in Alaska, it may never had made the news, and if it did, it would be painted as trigger happy Americans. Shooting it down after it crossed the US makes it look like we gave the Chinese every chance to explain themselves honestly, and they did not. On this, I think the US military did the right thing.
    Speaking of the US military, I don’t like the notion (as I read at Citizen Free Press) that the military told the President “no” to an order. If that really happened, someone in the military needs to go to jail. But I don’t think that’s the way it happened. I suspect the military explained their plan to Biden and his cabinet advisors, and what ended up happening was the plan. Assuming I’m right and Biden took the military’s advice, then I think both did the right thing. Although I don’t blame others making domestic political hay about it.
    The US still has the right to shoot down any more balloons that China tries to send over. And now, when the US does so, it will appear that China is behaving dangerously by constantly sending uncontrolled objects into controlled airspace. All nations would hate this. The US from here on is simply protecting civilian air traffic from China’s reckless behavior. China has access to NOAA.gov and can get all the weather information from a free and open society they can consume without endangering air traffic.

  85. Well, of course it would have been hard to find the debris in Alaska, but the opportunity to shoot it down existed while it was over our territorial waters north of the Aleutian island chain before it entered the continental land mass. On the other hand, that’s probably pretty rough water out there. The AP is reporting that the debris off Myrtle Beach landed in 47 feet of water, six nautical miles off the coast, so they may very well be able to get some useful information from retrieving it.

    I agree this all makes China look bad, if it cares, but allowing a spy vehicle to float all the way across our county, including over numerous important military sites, is also a bad look.

  87. om, on that chart, when the balloon was making its way NE along the Aleutians, it was well within our territorial waters.

  88. Kate:

    Ok, now do you have the resources to shoot it down, (probably, from Air Force bases in the Fairbanks area?), and recover anything useful (maybe). There are some Coast Guard facilities up there, but it is a rather large area to cover. Note that deep blue feature shown by the bathymetry (Aleutian Island trench) and the deep water appears to be typically within 24 nautical miles of the islands. The waters near the Aleutian Islands are rough and the weather is notoriously foul IIRC.

  89. Kate:

    Here’s some info on the 17th District of the US Coast Guard that covers the Aleutian Islands (the Western Alaska area of operations).

    https://www.pacificarea.uscg.mil/Our-Organization/District-17/

    Air Station Kodiak – part of the Aleutian Islands (?)
    Air Station Sitka – closer to Juneau not the Aleutian Islands (?)
    and 3 Coast Guard Cutters for all of Alaska.

    It seems to be a huge area to cover. Not arguing, just sharing information.

  90. Yes, om, I can see the complexities, and this may mean that the US needs to beef up defense capabilities in that region rather urgently. Perhaps, after having allowed, for whatever reasons, a Chinese spy vessel to transverse the entire USA, we may do that. If we didn’t have the capability to shoot it down over the Western Alaska region, then China learned something very useful with this caper, didn’t it?

  91. Kate:

    Xi learned quite a bit I would agree,

    Did Brandon junta learn anything?

    We wont know what we (DOD and other agencies) learned from the recovered instrument payload of the balloon. Were they using any Apple or Android aps onboard? ( 🙂 )

  92. Kate:

    IIRC some F-22s are based in Alaska so I assume they could drop any balloons coming from Xi. Recovery of the downed parts and pieces may be the problem,

    With the Brandon junta who really knows.

    Having access to what’s left of this balloon’s instrument package may enable the engineers (boffins) to find ways to blind or disable the next one before it too is shot down.

  93. Maybe the military really wanted to know what was on this thing and so decided to take it down in waters where they could recover it. If so, this could be a good decision; but it’s a public relations disaster for the Biden gang.

    The Biden junta is not known for its learning abilities.

  94. Kate:

    Old news (2/3/2023) by now, but one meteorologists used NOAA modeling to plot the balloon’s path and thus indicated that the flight path in Alaska was mostly over land, not over the northwest Pacific ocean once it crossed the tip of the Aleutian Islands. So recovery after an Alaskan shoot down would have been over Alaska (big and remote) or Yukon/British Columbia (big and remote and Canadian, eh)?

    https://twitter.com/wildweatherdan/status/1621293636943052801

    He made later plots of the balloons path too.

  95. “I’m fairly certain the balloon did not respond to ground controllers.”

    Hey, you wouldn’t want to go out on a limb, would you?

  96. “If it was shot down in Alaska, it may never had made the news, and if it did, it would be painted as trigger happy Americans.”

    Didn’t Alaska become US territory some time ago?

  97. Considering the arguments for and against, I guess I’m content with the way our military proceeded with this event. I think Leland made a good case. (It doesn’t hurt that I had a friend in grade school named Leland.)

  98. “You have done your part here to be “pathetically childish” and confrontational. “

    Neo, I would never deny my own dickishness. But read my posts and om’s posts in this thread (or any of the other times he plays this silly “gotcha” game after I make a comment) and tell me you can’t see a difference.

    I mean, om didn’t chime in with “Sure, the military could probably safely down a spy balloon in a state with as much empty space as Montana,, but they may have decided not to for reasons X, Y, and Z.” Nope. om wanted to argue that expecting the U.S. military to be able to do something like that was THE STUPIDEST SUGGESTION IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

    I would also add that I’ve gotten into it pretty good with Art Deco in the past and he doesn’t behave like a child throwing a tantrum whenever I post something.

    Mike

  101. So, this morning (2/5) the headlines say China is complaining about our shooting the balloon down. Don’t want it destroyed? Don’t send it here.

  102. They probably got totally confused WRT “Biden” ‘s “Secure Borders” messaging.
    Can’t blame ’em, really….
    It’s as though “he” ‘s talking out of both sides of “his” mouth.
    Imagine that!
    – – – – – – – – – –
    In related news, we have a real Shocka on our hands…as it appears that KJP is actually speaking truth!!….
    “White House press secretary defends…statements at the podium: ‘I have been consistent’ “—
    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/white-house-press-secretary-defends-false-statements-podium-i-have-been-consistent?dicbo=v2-zjyqkyq

  103. The DoD confirmed what I thought on how the balloon was destroyed. They used an IR tracking missile (AIM-9X). I guess that makes sense, as that missile is designed to work with the F-22, which can operate well at 60,000 ft. You can tell from the video because the missile hits nearly level with the balloon payload (debris cloud is in the same axis as the payload) and it hit the payload (smaller object that is likely hotter) and not the balloon (bigger object that may or may not be a better radar return as the payload metal reflects better than the balloon material). I was hoping for a strafing run of the balloon for a less dramatic deflation and more intact payload to exploit. Also bullets are a lot cheaper than that missile. But safety says the F-22/AIM-9X was the better choice.

  104. And—of course—“Biden” simply DOES NOT skip a beat!
    “…Biden officials claim Chinese spy balloons briefly transited the continental United States under the Trump admin”—
    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-top-national-security-officials-refute-claim-chinese-spy-balloons-transited-us-under-last-admin

    Denied and refuted by Trump and “top national security officials”…
    …but hey, NICE TRY President Fentanyl!!
    (No doubt we’ll soon be hearing about the Chinese SPY Balloon the FBI “found” in Mar-a-Lago, hidden under Melania’s Made-In-China(!) Underwear, which scandal couldn’t be revealed previously because of its sensitive nature and because of Top Secret Security Concerns….)

  105. Debris field reported to be 7 miles long. Termination of balloon’s flight and impact of debris was mostly peaceful.

  106. I think this is a definite win-win.
    China gets what it wants—whatever that might be (information, test run…on a number of levels).
    “Biden” crows that the balloon was shot down (neglecting, of course, to mention that this happened AFTER the balloon’s mission was complete).
    China pretends to be outraged.
    “Biden” (using the avatar of Honest A. Blinken) also pretends to be outraged.
    Yep, WIN-WIN!

  107. Barry Meislin:

    Did you notice that it was a “white” balloon? Root causes will emerge. No one speaks of the elephant in the balloon. 🙂

  108. True, but I think that everyone’s been totally traumatized by what happened in Memphis last week…so maybe that’s less of a factor than it ought to be.
    Actually, maybe that should be, “truly inspired” by what happened in Memphis last week…
    “Just a reminder that this is the author who replaced images of the black kid with a “Getty stock image” of a random white kid
    [w]hen describing the attack on the 9 year old girl in a school bus “—
    https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1622043940747870209

    In fact (wouldn’t you know…):
    https://www.foxnews.com/us/students-mercilessly-assault-girl-school-bus-parents-pressing-charges-video

  110. People on the Carolina beaches are being warned not to touch or retrieve any balloon debris which may wash up. There’s no information on whether the debris is inherently dangerous; I’m guessing, rather, that authorities want to have as many pieces of this thing as they can find.

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