Quote (kusotarre1 @ Feb 19 2023 12:34pm)
So we now know that America was tracking that balloon from the moment it was launched in Hainan, and we know that an unexpected cold front pushed the balloon off course. It was tracked over the Aleutian Islands, through Alaska and Canada. They knew were it was the entire time, and they knew it was a weather balloon the entire time.
The important thing about this is to understand why America waited until it entered the lower 48 and then generated a massive China Threat media campaign. It seems done to derail Blinken's trip to China, which had just been upgraded to a meeting with Xi, which then forces the question of who started the media campaign? Did Blinken want the meeting cancelled, or was it cancelled for him?
What I can't make sense of is why they then proceeded to humiliate themselves by shooting down a NWS balloon and several hobby balloons. Was it an attempt to make themselves look less ridiculous for freaking out over a weather balloon? Has it actually been effective in more 'normie' TV-news-watchers?
To my reading, it seems that outside the Anglosphere this whole situation is being universally mocked as some sort of American mental distress episode. It is quite funny that after shooting it down, Lloyd Austin tried to use the secure emergency line to call his counterpart Wei Fenghe and was just ignored. I think the Chinese govt looks at this and correctly surmises that America is a deeply unstable, uncertain power obsessed with optics.
its called TDS all the lefties went criminally insane in 2016