Skip to main content

Chinese "weather" ballon

 For some reason, the Chinese military launched a spy balloon as Blinken was about the leave for discussions with Xi.

It should be noted that this is not the first time a Chinese "weather" balloon has overflown the US territory, it seems that it happened a few times during the time of Trump, and at that time the US government decided to do nothing.  The ballon was very large, around 100 meters in diameter and the payload was the size of a school bus, with lots of antennae and solar panels it could also be guided since it had some propellers to direct it (to some extent).

The story that is being repeated is that not unlike many governments the right hand and the left hand are not talking to each other, so the military decided, probably because of certain airflows at altitude at this time of the year that February would be a good time to deploy a sophisticated surveillance platform.  Now, where things get bad is that once the US government started to want to talk to the Chinese government no one was willing to have a discussion with the Americans.  Strange 

The Chinese are in a strange place right now, with probably the strongest cult of personality under Xi that has ever existed, the removal of Hu Jintao, the former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, now an elder statsman during the plenary session was unheard of, ever, it was a symbol of the power of Xi.  If the stories are true, and it's hard to be sure with all the disinformation that occurs in these exalted circles, is that Xi doesn't like bad news, and has removed several bearers of bad news -- even if they had nothing to do with the negative information.  So, as the story goes, Xi doesn't hear bad information.

I guess this was done for domestic consumption, but the Chinese insisted that it was a weather balloon and that it wandered over many of the US strategic assets was just a "coincidence".  The Politbureau spokesperson used a variety of reasons for the balloon, eventually saying that the US was also using balloons to spy of China.  Although first denying that it was a spy-balloonThe high-altitude images showed that this was nothing like a weather balloon.  It made the Chinese media look foolish.  Also, I would like to think that if the Americans were using spy-balloon they would not use a white balloon to make it a little less obvious.  Still not a win for the Chinese

The Americans waited for the ballon to leave its land mass before destroying it, and that's because taking down such a large instrument (the size of a bus) could lead to death and destruction on the ground, furthermore that the balloon fell into the ocean allowed the US to recover the device in shallow waters, it will give the US government a good understanding of US made equipment that is now being deployed for military use.

Overall, the Chinese got, probably little information since the US could see the balloon come miles away, US-China relations are now near frozen, and the US now knows which US company has been selling equipment that is being used in Chinese military hardware.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

what people get wrong about tariffs

 The issue is simple. What percentage of the economy is dependent on tariff goods? The truth, is that the US economy is far more closed than people understand. People genuinely believe that all manufacturing has ceased to exist in the United States all given to China on the altar of woke policy the truth can be further from That statement. Only about 15% of US GDP is related to foreign trade. Of that amount, slightly more than half is from Canada in Mexico. And half of that is energy. What that means, is that about 7% of US GDP is tariff dependent. The proof in the pudding, is how little money tariff generates. People think that 30 or 50 billion is a lot it’s not in an economy that has $3 trillion. The impact on the US economy will be less visible but not absent. Inflation hasn’t occurred yet first because tests have hardly started to bite, but more importantly it’s such a small percent of the economy. Now certain things are critical. The rare earth metals from China were critical....
Post a Comment
Read more

The end of Tesla?

 it takes a special kind of idiot, to think that he can antagonize his entire customer base, and think that it will not impact his business. When Elon Musk went to work for Donald Trump, and created the doge department, he antagonized every liberal, and these people represent 90% of his client base.That’s not a brilliant move. Now Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollar, so he shouldn’t care a great deal, however, he needs to care because of several other issues. The cyber truck has been a disaster, most have had to be recalled because of defective glue, it’s not a truck, it’s not a car, it’s noisy, relatively uncomfortable, but great as a development platform. What Tesla has learned in making car manufacturing more seamless is truly amazing. The problem was that Elon Musk was so pissed with the Democrats, and with Joe Biden, in particular because of some slight, which were just plain stupid too. By the way, that he decided to support with hundreds of millions of dollar, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Demographics

 I am preparing a kind of family tree for our children so that they know where they came from.  In my family I am the only survivor, although my brother and sister died recently they were both in their seventies (a story I told already).    It was a fun process, but it provided more than that.  First, I married relatively young I was 26 when I married and nearly 30 when our first child was born.   I was looking at my ancestors.  On my mother's side, she had 6 siblings, Four died before the age of 30, two in war, and two from illnesses.  Only she and a single sister survived.   The two boys had a child each but they died in WWII, and the other sister died as an infant.   what is interesting is that every one of my mother's siblings had children in their early 20s.   I know that my mom was hardly 20 when my brother was born.    What is remarkable is that among our friends, we are the only ones to have fou...
Post a Comment
Read more