Just shoot that dam BALLOON down.

拜登是个老白痴

No, because I’m not unhinged with China anxiety

Coco, you don't need to ID the F-22 to see it do a half-Immelmann barrel roll. Are you really this clueless?

WTF is an agip? Go agip yourself, rice bowl.

然后，一个白痴刚刚击落了你的间谍气球。

M’aga was fine with Chinese spy balloons when Donald Trump was president. But Fox News told m’aga to freak out this time…and so m’aga freaked.

forbes , Bloomberg, AP:

The balloon spotted this week over Montana was not the first time the U.S. has detected Chinese balloons over their territory—with previous incursions occurring during the Trump Administration,” Bloomberg reported.
But an unnamed source from the Trump administration insisted to Bloomberg in that same article that it wasn’t a big deal.
“One top national security official from the administration of former President Donald Trump said none of the Chinese spy balloons were near sensitive sites or had payloads as large as this one appears to carry,” Bloomberg continued.

你妈妈太大了，他们无法用导弹击落她

Translation: Your mama is too big, they could not take her down with missiles

This thread as usual has gone to the dogs.

From @Wexboy_Value

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For the record, I'm posting this from a Lenovo computer.

Also, old enough to remember this.

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Video of Chinese balloon attack

Official Dept of Defense confirmation that Trump let Chinese spy balloons cross the USA several times and did not act.

Now does right wing media apologize and slink back under its rock? O hells to the no.

The balloon did not pose a military or physical threat. Still its intrusion into American airspace over several days was an unacceptable violation of U.S. sovereignty. The official said Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times during the prior administration.

defense.gov

F-22 Safely Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon Off South Carolina Coast

@DeptofDefense

A U.S. Air Force fighter safely shot down a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a written statement.

Open link

THIS

If you use tiktok, zoom, etc - China has all your data! And you complain about a balloon bobbing up and down in the sky!

You are a moron.

Satellites are at least 10x higher and have to travel fast to orbit the earth every 90 minutes (unless they're in geosynchronous orbit in which case there 300x higher) so it's not unthinkable they would gain something from a balloon that they couldn't get via satellites. I mean do you think it was actually just a weather balloon?

You can see really high detail on even Google Earth Pro or other mapping programs using publicly available data, up to about 15cm resolution, without leaving your mom's basement. There's public lidar in many places down to 5cm. Just looking at a local military base, a former DEW line site, and a former Nike missile site on Earth Pro, I see tons of detail at a very high resolution. The military doesn't seem to find it necessary to even ask those areas to be blurred out from public maps.

Do you really think that there are top secret things that are left exposed to the sky where it makes a difference that you have 15cm resolution vs. say 2cm resolution from a plane flying much lower than 60,000 ft? Other than keeping things hidden/not performing maneuvers when the balloon (or spy satellites) was overhead, I don't think the US military was really worried at all.

What equipment would it have besides lidar and cameras if it were spying? It's not like it could do ground penetrating radar or surveillance microphones from that height.

A quick google search comparing the size of this balloon to regular weather balloon and a little math found that it could probably carry a payload of about 1,000 pounds. That's enough to carry a hydrogen bomb or an H-bomb to produce an EMP pulse.

China has learned that the US government will allow China to overfly the US with a balloon capable of carrying a weapon of mass destruction.

An atomic ballomb?

This is just crazy... if the US actually suspected an H-bomb they would've acted much differently. You really think they wouldn't be able to tell?