Making anglo North Americans even more paranoid and racist, getting them hyped for a war with China? Distract people from actually terrible things like the poisoned town in Ohio, increasing effects of climate change, our bleak present and even bleaker future? Is China just trolling the US and Canada? Aliens? What is going on lol
Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, is the populace as insane and propagandised to as the US. I can’t emphasise this enough. It is absolutely mind boggling the daily insanity that comes from the US that would never happen elsewhere.
My hunch is, everyone knows these are weather balloons. In the past these governments never thought to make a big deal out of it because why the hell would you in the first place. There's probably a whole bunch of science balloons up in the sky at any given moment. Then last week when this balloon showed up in Montana, they decided to make hay from this particular event, without much thinking about the future. But after it became such a massive news story that I think the Biden admin thinks made them look bad, the new unannounced policy among the Defense Dept is to just shoot down anything in the sky they don't know about, even if it's certainly just a weather balloon.
they decided to make hay from this particular event
To provide cover for the train derailment and toxic cloud that formed from it.
I'm sure their science advisors told them. This arctic blast event is a once-in-a-generation event so a lot of scientists are throwing up balloons to get direct observations. They also know this arctic blast event started in China so having a balloon come through is not unexpected at all.
It's an overreaction after the Chinese "spy balloon" fiasco. Weather balloons snap their moorings fairly frequently or are free floating, and smaller balloons with radar mirrors are used by any number of nations and groups for all sorts of purposes, from meteorology to weapons testing. They float well above the ceiling of even military aircraft so they aren't a danger to planes. They are slow moving and tend not to be captured on early warning radar, and even if they are were usually ignored by ground crews who could see its clearly not a plane or missile.
But after the "spy balloon" and the US military and the White House making such a big deal out of it, and getting criticism for not shooting it down earlier. They probably have ordered the Airforce to start shooting these things down whenever it pops up on radar. The fact that they don't even know what they are shooting down is telling since they are probably only seeing radar blips. The original Chinese balloon was huge, and could be observed from the ground, simple weather balloons and radar reflectors are much smaller; the pilots themselves almost certainly can't visually see them before they fire their missile.
This is obviously worrying, becuase this kind of hightened alert is how you end up shooting down an airliner.
With the caveat that I don't want it to actually happen, watching a US F-22 take out a Spirit Airlines flight that just left Tahoe because of this bullshit would lead t the best performance of Kafka media bullshit yet. "Unidentified cylindrical object violated US airspacea nd emerged on radar unexpectedly. Wait i'm getting reports that the object has been I'd... as a Chinese communist terror missile disguised as 200 American civilians flying to Seattle. Our brave airforce has once again saved us from a sinister Chinese plot".
This is totally unexpected. The only thing that could explain this is an arctic blast event pushing cold air from asia over the north pole into canada, which then pushes south and east into the lower United States. There's exactly that going on right now? We're having record-breaking wind chill on Mount Washington in the same news cycle too? Huh, must be the Chinese military up to no good.
They've had a weather machine for centuries so what seems like perfectly normal airflow is a Chinese long game strategy.
I could totally see a very near future as weather gets more extreme people blaming other parts of the world for the formation of weather phenomena.
Getting mad at south America for El nino/La Nina, Africa for hurricanes etc
I think it’s pretty interesting timing that the most egregious pig brutality since George Floyd was popping off and then all of a sudden we start seeing weather balloons 24-7 on the news
yeah every time someone suggests that some stupid story is a distraction for some important story, i feel like the reality is that the news-entertainment industrial complex is just structurally predisposed to stupidity and uninterested in anything important.
I think this balloon thing is more of a retaliation by the US for China meeting with Russia and snubbing Blinken (after being snubbed by Blinken first).
This is the US showing that they can manufacture Cassius Belli from thin air to attack China, but I don't think China's budging. They ignored the phone calls and are calling the bluff.
I am honestly completely with you on this.
I think after George Floyd they had planning events where they sought to figure out how to intercept that kind of uprising before it happens. Interfering with the media in an utterly sensationalist way has been the methodology decided upon.
This seems like the kind of tactic you'd come up with in a war room brainstorming session. We know for a fact that they had planning sessions to stop a "gen z revolution" in the future. I absolutely believe that they saw the pig violence and deployed new tactics to prevent an uprising.
Just another nucleation point for preexisting madness to fasten onto
Oh woops sorry I guess Ohio was just destroyed nevermind that would be the problem
fuck it, I'm gonna go with aliens. They are sick of the US' shit and are invading them through the least populated states for some reason.
we pissed our pants over a weather balloon so now nothing in the sky is safe lmao
either we all stop hearing about this and forget about it before the end of the month or we get invaded by aliens idk
Definitely reschedule any hot air balloon tours. I don’t think even those are safe.
I do remember Summer of the Shark but I haven't met anyone my age who does lol. But that does make some sense, it's a repeated thing that gets people worked up while media companies just kicks back and gets the views. Except this time there's now 2 governments who are also fanning this and making big announcements about shooting down balloons and shit, I don't remember governors announcing everytime they killed a shark or shot a large underwater organic device or whatever
I swear, if the yanquis aren't over their balloonphobia by November, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is gonna be fucking wild with the F-22s strafing everybody.
If he's in his WWI ace getup and piloting the doghouse, he might have a fighting chance. Just have to outmaneuver them for long enough that the pilots die of Raptor Cough because of all the asbestos composite dust being pumped into their oxygen masks.
They didn't even bother to find out what it was... Insane. If it was a nuke, we couldn't shoot it down. If it isn't a nuke, you can wait until you at least identify the thing. FFS. I guess we have to distract from the toxic train in Ohio?
I take this as evidence that they never doubted it was a stray weather balloon. Otherwise they definitely would've wanted to examine it.
Oh yeah shooting down an unidentified target is completely, utterly deranged behavior, especially when it's at an altitude where they could just fly over and look at it.
Nah you can shoot down a nuke. For a nuclear detonation to occur the fissile material has to be pushed together in just the right way with microsecond precision. If you shoot at it or blow it up with a bomb or something all you're going to get is a squirt of hot plutonium and a fizzle. It's still an environmental mess wherever the plutonium lands, but it's not going to be a nuclear detonation. and even if it was it's at 40,000 feet over Yukon. It'd be a pretty fireball but it wouldn't do any damage. Might not even knock over trees on the surface.
What if the wildcard is that it is aliens and they're not peaceful.
or maybe they tried to be peaceful but now they're pissed after their diplomatic envoy got shot down
"Your galactic honor, we had to shoot down your diplomatic spaceship because we believed that it was a harmless balloon. There was simply no other option"
What if it's aliens and they were peaceful.
They sent a probe out to prove the Black Forest hypothesis wrong, but now they think it's correct.
Please save us aliens, no joke, sincerely please destroy capitalism.
