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+--- Thread: Balloon madness (/showthread.php?tid=7434)
Balloon madness - Dark Jaguar - 13th February 2023
Everyone's losing their minds over spy balloons.
Also, the UFOs being spotted and shot down. Those UFOs are probably more balloons that the Canadian and U.S. militaries are refusing to identify so they don't reveal their own capabilities. In fact, generally the policy for such spy craft like planes, satellites, and so on has been "pretend we don't know it's there, and stage false intel for them to take pictures of". Political pressure seems to have changed that policy. Goody...
In any case, it's not aliens, and it's not anything to really worry about. We're in the second cold war now. Carry on.
But if you do want to know if there's something to worry about:
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
This will tell you what to actually worry about.
RE: Balloon madness - Weltall - 20th February 2023
I know it only takes one nuke to fuck everything up for everyone, but the general state of Russian equipment and logistics makes me skeptical that their nukes even work anymore. For certain, they are not a serious conventional military power anymore, outside of their own region.
I guess the one good thing about throwing a trillion bux at the MIC every year is that absolutely nobody can step to our military at this point. It's not just the best funded military on earth, it is also battle-tested and experienced. We've been fighting, almost non-stop, the entire century so far. The PRC has never fought a serious war against anyone. They can't project power beyond their region. US v China is a serious mismatch, militarily, and they know it. Watching NATO perform against what everyone assumed was the second-best military on earth, without doing anything except giving obsolete equipment to Ukraine and training them in its use, is sure to be a sobering experience for the top brass in China.
RE: Balloon madness - Dark Jaguar - 22nd February 2023
On the other hand, China are champions at "soft power" which the U.S. could learn a thing or two about. They're already working their way into African nations, rebuilding roads, hospitals, schools and the like to gain influence.
RE: Balloon madness - Weltall - 22nd February 2023
No sir, the United States wrote the book about soft power. China is no slouch, but we are the undisputed masters. A great example is the Marshall Plan, and more in general, the post-war rebuilding of Western Europe and Japan serve as extremely successful applications of soft power, the effects of which have provided incredible economic and geopolitical advantages for going on a century. Soft power played a huge role in making the US and China major trading partners in the first place, and for sure why we have rock solid defensive alliances with most other democratic nations. American soft power has largely cut Russia off from the global economy, and that alone is a huge advantage for Ukraine. But that's just the obvious stuff. Our culture permeates the entire world, and influences everyone and everything (except the Sentinelese, I guess). People all over the world watch our movies, listen to our music, wear our clothes, read our books, eat our food, and benefit (or sometimes, not) from our technology and science. A lot of that is cultural osmosis, but a lot of it is deliberate, too. It is in our national interest to be a cultural powerhouse. It affects our perception around the world in all kinds of ways, and it means that people who've never even been to America are likely to know it as well as some people who live here. China is investing in Africa, largely because it's a market the US just hasn't ever been very interested in. Well, at least not in a couple of hundred years, anyway.
For that matter, look at the Louisiana Purchase and Alaskan Purchase. By land area, two of the most significant instantaneous acquisitions of territory ever, and all we had to do was buy them. For pennies on the dollar!
RE: Balloon madness - Dark Jaguar - 24th February 2023
I'll grant you all that. It's very interesting then that the U.S. seems to have forgotten all of that in the past 50 years of neoliberalism. We're definitely failing at the soft power game in the middle east, for example. Just handing lump sums of cash straight to their governments has rather literally blown up on us.