The Fifth Dimension’s1967 hit “Up, Up and Away” was vot­ed one of the top 100 songs of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. The Chi­nese have made its catch line, “Would you like to ride in my beau­ti­ful bal­loon?”, the theme song for 21^st cen­tu­ry pro­duc­ers of a what you need to take that ride.

The “spy “ — or as Bei­jing insist­ed “errant weath­er” — bal­loon may not have gath­ered much use­ful mil­i­tary intel­li­gence, but it did give any­one who was pay­ing atten­tion an insight into how lit­tle it takes to gen­er­ate enough hot air to fly one halfway around the world.
Asked about how the bal­loon man­aged to float past his purview, Gen. Glen D. Van­Her­ck, who over­sees the North Amer­i­can Aero­space Defense Com­mand, said: it was “a domain aware­ness gap”. How’s that for hot air?
Let’s hope that gap is eas­i­er to fill than those in the intel­li­gence of the politi­cians and oth­ers who sur­vive and thrive by expelling enough hot air to keep a flotil­la of Chi­nese bal­loons aloft in perpetuity.
 “The pres­i­dent failed on this one,” New Hamp­shire Gov. Chris Sununu ® huffed. 
Talk-show host Mark Levin puffed that Pres­i­dent Biden was “Bought and paid for by the Com­mu­nist Chi­nese government.”
Per­pet­u­al­ly and earnest­ly irate FOX News host Maria Bar­tiro­mo demand­ed to know: “Did it drop and dis­perse sur­veil­lance prod­ucts pow­ered by solar ener­gy to allow unlim­it­ed surveillance?”
Why both­er? Amer­i­cans and pret­ty much every­one else in the world will­ing­ly pay the Chi­nese to poten­tial­ly spy on us. Think any elec­tron­ic device that’s labelled a ver­sion of “smart”.
The white coat Mar­jorie Tay­lor-Greene (she of “Jew­ish space laser” fame) sport­ed at Biden’s State of the Union address, was appar­ent­ly intend­ed to under­score her crass heck­le of “China’s spy­ing on us”.
Real­ly? Like Cap­tain Renault, the cor­rupt police­man in Casablan­ca, “I’m shocked. Shocked…”
What isn’t shock­ing is that Tay­lor-Greene was among sev­er­al Repub­li­can par­ty hot air spe­cial­ists who posed on social media with AR15s and the like. They appar­ent­ly expect us to believe they could “stand their ground” against some­thing drift­ing at 60,000 feet, a clue as to why they think guns are so great. 
It also explains why they don’t under­stand that gun­fire, and shoot­ing down large objects over land, caus­es “col­lat­er­al dam­age”, mil­i­tary speak for inno­cent dead peo­ple.
Their mind­set remind­ed me of a report­ed  UFO sight­ing when I lived in South Africa in the 1970s.
Two white police­men sent to inves­ti­gate brave­ly blazed away at what­ev­er it was – or wasn’t — with shot­guns. The same kind of weapon that couldn’t stop Black kids tak­ing on armoured police vehi­cles with stones was appar­ent­ly the best one to use against what was pre­sumed to be a race with the tech­nol­o­gy to trav­el bil­lions of miles. Why any­one (White cops and their ilk apart) would think such aliens might con­sid­er apartheid-era South Africa a place where “Take us to your leader” would get a friend­ly response, is as big a mys­tery as UFOs.

                  TOO MUCH IS NEVER ENOUGH                         

Thank­ful­ly for the hys­ter­i­cal right, the U.S. mil­i­tary knew that more than the NRA’s pet weapon, or a shot­gun would be need­ed to take on the Chi­nese float­ing “threat to nation­al secu­ri­ty”. The North­ern Com­mand and North Amer­i­can Aero­space Defense Com­mand scram­bled F‑22 Rap­tors,  F‑15s and sev­er­al air-to-air refu­elling tankers as back up for what its mak­ers describe as “the best air dom­i­nance fight­er in the world” to fire one mis­sile at a drift­ing and almost cer­tain­ly unarmed…balloon.
That’s called being “mob-hand­ed”, a good descrip­tion of  any so-called “media brief­ing” by politi­cians and oth­er pub­lic offi­cials. They gen­er­al­ly pro­vide lit­tle more than a ker­nel or two of use­ful infor­ma­tion enveloped in a cloud of hot air, but require sup­port from half a dozen and more acolytes, grouped in a semi­cir­cle around the star per­former, try­ing to look somber and important.
Grant­ed, the very fact that offi­cials make pub­lic state­ments on cam­era is a step up from the Chi­nese way of sim­ply deny­ing every­thing and nev­er answer­ing questions.
Maybe one of the things the Chi­nese learned from their “weath­er bal­loon” is that all they have to do to pro­voke point­less pos­tur­ing and more hot air than sub­stance, is go “up, up and away”.
The rest of us need only look to Dr Seuss:
As you par­take of the world’s bill of fare,
that’s darned good advice to follow,
Do a lot of time spit­ting out the hot air,
And be care­ful what you swallow.”

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