Balloon brouhaha

Many foreign policy experts foresee a looming nuclear war between the US and China. That is why Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s planned trip to China next week was so important. So little direct contact with China, coupled with so many provocations, mostly initiated by Uncle Sam, spells almost inevitable conflict.

But Blinken abruptly cancelled this important trip over….get this…a balloon. Citizens below and the US government spotted a balloon high up over Montana that admittedly came from China.

Must be a spy balloon gobbling up information on US nuclear installations below, war hawks crowed. Major war promoter stalwart Senator Marco Rubio went balloonistic: "It was a mistake to not shoot down that Chinese spy balloon when it was over a sparsely populated area. This is not some hot air balloon, it has a large payload of sensors roughly the size of two city buses & the ability to maneuver independently."

Wiser US heads prevailed for 2 reasons: First, they didn’t want to injure innocents on the ground from falling debris. Second, they knew the balloon, as a spy device, was a bust, saying: Our best assessment at the moment is that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC (People’s Republic of China) is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit,"

As with Russia over Ukraine, the US has pretty much shut down all talk with our imagined enemies in favor of more weapons, more overseas bases, more coordinated war games, more bluster.

I don’t worry about possible spy balloons flying overhead. I worry about real life mushroom clouds