They were sooooooooo close to not sending a living person to the funeral home in a body bag. So close!
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What’s Rod Dreher up to? Let’s find out!
Cliffs: Dreher, who moved to Hungary because he’s a shell of a man whose family hates him or something, is now part of Orban’s inner circle of friendly “journalists” who he’ll shoot the shit with. Dreher made a major faux pas by going home and actually writing down stuff Orban said, which turned out to be a bit embarrassing as Orban said some anti-Ukraine and anti-EU stuff that’s a bit more extreme than what he’d want reported in public.
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RIP balloon, whatever this actually was
I still have so many questions:
- WHY? WHY A BALLOON?
- Is this some massive psyop?
- Does the pilot who shot this down get an air to air kill? @skydiver8?
- Do we really know this was china?
Would it be a pilot? I saw a random tweet saying the balloon is at ~100k feet and a F-16 can only fly at ~50k.
As for “why a balloon”, I can only imagine it’s because it’s extremely funny. Like, look at everyone (mostly Republicans) freaking out about a balloon, just an incredible ROI for China.
They just shot it down with something. I just want to see some sort of aircraft with a balloon painted on the side.
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Apparently people were going outside with their guns and shooting at it… 19 miles up.
hopefully there was no boy inside the balloon
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Sleepy Joe not going to allow any malarkey
——
On Wednesday when I was briefed on the balloon, I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down — on Wednesday — as soon as possible," the president told reporters in Hagerstown, Maryland.
“They decided, without doing damage to anyone on the ground, they decided that the best time to do that was as it got over water … within a 12-mile limit. They successfully took it down and I want to compliment our aviators who did it,” the president added.
Twitter aviation nerds telling me that an F-22 shot this thing down… and that it’s the first air to air kill in us continental airspace ever.
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Ok seeing other nerds say other balloons have been shot down in the past. German maybe? Or maybe that was in France? Maybe I should figure this out before posting? Idk
Thread with actual info
Cliffs: shot down with a missile at approx 60k ft trying to splash down in water with 47ft of depth
I’m not saying I know who shot the balloon down, but
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China has admitted it was theirs so I think #4 can be safely assumed.
Nah, CNN and others reporting the balloon was below 60k feet and well within the range that jets could get it at. I mean, you could see it from the ground with the naked eye, and the shootdown was caught by a bunch of cell phone cameras.
There were a bunch of incendiary balloons launched over the US during WW2 I think by Japan. It was really fucking stupid because apparently Japan just didn’t understand how gigantic the US was and how ineffective the balloons would be?
Edit: Yeah, I found it, lol they launched like 9,000, only one ever caused any actual damage and 1 death: Fu-Go balloon bomb - Wikipedia. The civilian who was killed was killed because he found a balloon on the ground and was messing around with it when it blew up.