THE NEWS BALLOON

Somebody's got to explain to me why the USA had a 24-hour panic attack when a balloon from China made its way here across the Pacific. True, it wasn't just any made-in-China balloon you can pick up at Woolworth's for your child's birthday party. 

Uh oh! China really has our number now.

This one had spying capabilities similar to those found on, um, high-tech Chinese satellites that fly over us every day, snapping pictures like they were -- well, what's Chinese for "paparazzi"? 

The photo on the right is just one example, taken in 2021, when a satellite took almost 2,000 images of the San Francisco Bay area.

If the satellite was like any other, it flew at an altitude of 600 to 1,200 miles. The balloon flew only 11 miles up. That's much closer, but today's technology would probably make any detail visible on that real satellite photo. Any detail, that is, other than why Xi Jinping is so interested in football fields.

If they need to build a life-sized copy of a ship
to practice on, it doesn't seem like China's
military has very accurate bombers.

American lawmakers objecting to adversarial satellites overhead have no problems with our satellites spying on China. The photo on the left, courtesy of Maxar Technologies, captures a mock-up of a US warship in the middle of a Chinese desert. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking we accidentally caught this image while looking for a good Kung Pao Chicken restaurant.

"Surveil" sounds more Times than "spy."

The headline of the Sunday New York Times -- US SHOOTS DOWN A BALLOON CHINA SENT TO SURVEIL -- sounds like something from a 1950s Commie-scare propaganda movie. It's as if the copy editor was trying really hard to make the incident sound like the beginning of World War III, only to start giggling by the time he finished writing it. 

Remember, news folks want to scare you. And when there's nothing handy, they'll try to shock you with stories that have nothing that affects your daily routine. And they'll keep doing it after you've forgotten about it.

Allow me to offer an example. Every morning, I scroll through the pieces on this blog that have been read in the previous 24 hours. This weekend, one of the hits was for a piece I'd written in 2016 concerning Kim West, 51, and her 32 year-old son Ben. 

The scene of the crime.

Kim put Ben up for adoption at his birth. Like many adult children in that situation, he just wanted to make a connection. Unlike most, the connection wound up becoming far more intimate than just a hug and a kiss on the cheek. 

Seeing that someone out there read it over the weekend, I wondered, What's happened to these two lovebirds since they shared their nauseating story with the world?  Googling their names, I discovered something that nauseated me even more.

Last spring, news sites around the world suddenly regurgitated the original story, which, I remind you, was first printed seven years ago. Most of them didn't even change the couple's ages to reflect the passage of time. The Irish Mirror printed it twice, six years apart, almost to the date. No wonder the newspaper is called the Mirror. It just reflects what it's already published. Is there nothing of importance to cover that sites have to reprint real-life incest porn?

That the New York Post is the only American newspaper to pick up on the saga of Kim & Ben twice as if it were news -- as in new -- doesn't mean respected information outlets aren't engaging in their own tricks to keep their readers and viewers coming back for their daily fix, no matter how silly the stories sound. Remember what the New York Times wrote: US Shoots Down a Balloon. A balloon that was already doing what satellites do every day without us noticing them. Get scared, America!

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