Up, Up and Away!

From the folks who gave you the Cultural Revolution, cheap underwear, oppression of Uighurs and Tibetans, and a major pandemic, we had a big balloon in our air space!  That's right, the Chinese sent over a spy balloon and claimed it was a weather balloon.

So why do the Chinese need to know how cold it is in Montana?

They didn't.  They were looking to peek at our silos.  I don't mean grain storage buildings on Jon Tester's farm. 

Anyway, the balloon "drifted" across the country on a southeasterly trajectory over to South Carolina, and then over the Atlantic, where it was shot down on President Biden's orders, which he'd given three days earlier on the grounds that it be done as soon as it posed no threat to people below.  Because there was no place on land that it could be shot down without threatening people - even in southern central Montana (actual bird's eye view below) . . . 

. . . it wasn't until yesterday that it was shot down over the ocean.

The government is hoping to retrieve the payload from the balloon - about the size of three city buses - to fin out what the Chinese were looking for with the balloon, but it's likely that the Chinese already found it. 

It's time we stopped dealing with the Chinese like we're walking on eggshells.  They infected Canada with SARS, they infected the entire planet with COVID, and they're melting our children's brains with Tik Tok (a video-based social media platform I don't use, and never will).  The China that can say "Fuck you!" is more dangerous than the Japan that can say no.  Anyone who believes otherwise is full of hot air.