International Hot Air or Helium is Ballooning out of All Proportion
While the balloon may have been helium, the hot air is abundant everywhere.
It’s just an innocent weather balloon,” insisted the Chinese as American politicians fumed over the Chinese “spy balloon” flying over American farmlands, particularly over the top-secret, corn-mill site that has become such a controversy in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in the past year. Who would have thought Grand Forks, population barely above 2 during the snow-birding season when midwest farmers winter on South Padre Island, Texas, would have become a town milling with such international intrigue?
Apparently, the Chinese who barely even eat corn, were scouting for new sites they could flood in order to create rice paddies, and they thought somewhere around Wisconsin’s or Minnesota’s land o’ lakes might do nicely.
“It’s highly dangerous to US security,” claimed the Biden administration, regarding the great white ghost drifting lazily over America, as they refused to do anything about it for days until it had surveilled everything from one side of the nation to the other. Immediately, the US Secretary of State cancelled his vaunted trip to Beijing in protest over free-range ballooning.
“I am asking congress right now to approve a hundred-trillion dollars to develop our new Intraspace Force to cover there region between space and normal flight atmospheric levels with anti-balloon protection.”
“Why didn’t you just shoot it down?” howled Republicans, “before the Chinese learn about the nation’s top corn-hybridizing secrets, which until now have been securely guarded in Biden’s garage?
“Because, with Iowan cornfields each being only a hundred miles long and completely dead at this time of winter, it could have landed where it might have wounded a stray crow,” defended the administration, which could have shot the flimsy, high-tech rag out of the sky with a .410 shotgun or, in the very least, a decent midwestern goose gun. In fact, local legend “Gunny” Gunderson offered to do so from his pickup just the other day, but the administration seized his gun.
“Besides, We’ve surrounded it now with half the navy and coast guard to make sure the Chinese don’t salvage it before we can get to it and figure out what it actually was and how they make this technology work,” the administration added in self-defense. “We may want to backward engineer it in order to create airships capable of surveilling our own populace.”
It will now take about a week the administration has said for the navy or someone to figure out how to get a boat into the area capable of salvaging the pieces, though they already had a week to figure out where it was headed before they shot it down over the Atlantic. While local Boston resident, Joe O’Connell, has volunteered his lobster boat to go out and harvest what is left of the poorly identified aerial phenomenon this afternoon, the administration has said the mission is far too dangerous for a lobster boat because the balloon is suspected to have contained yellow-cake uranium that the Chinese might have intended to sprinkle over US cornfields.
So, the all-important inflation conflation has finally been deflated into surrender, and now the Chinese are fuming, “We reserve the right to respond to this outrageous military gunning down of our purely meteorological weather balloon that strayed over your airspace.”
Apparently, the targeting of weather cameras when in the wrong space, sometimes even over US military fortresses, is an international outrage because cameras and anemometers have become very expensive in this age of inflation, plus China is enraged that it cannot rush in to the salvage scene to recover its vital weather data … polar vortexes being all the rage for observance as they are these days.
What will the crazy Chinese try to do next? Survey Mount Washington for possible wintertime balloon docking sites? Meanwhile that other Washington, a little to the south of New Hampshire, has warned that North Korean fashion guru Kim Jung Un is preparing a balloon test launch of his own just to prove he can get away with intimidating America. Some say, however, it is a foreboding publicity stunt to launch the high-tech fabric he will be using in his summer clothing line, aimed at taking down the American fashion industry.
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