International Hot Air is Ballooning out of All Proportion
The balloon may have been helium, but the hot air is everywhere.
“It’s just an innocent weather balloon,” insisted the Chinese as American politicians on both sides of the aisle 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 out new sites they could flood in order to create rice paddies, and they thought somewhere around Wisconsin’s or Minnesota’s land o’ lakes region might do nicely.
“It’s highly dangerous to US security,” claimed the Biden administration, regarding the great white ghost drifting lazily over America, as it continued to surveil everything from one side of the nation to the other for days. Immediately, the US Secretary of State cancelled his trip to Beijing in protest over free-range ballooning.
“Why didn’t you shoot it down?” howled Republicans, “before the Chinese learn about the nation’s top corn-hybridizing secrets, which have, until now, been carefully guarded in President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago closet?
“Because, with Iowan cornfields each being only a hundred miles long and completely dead at this time of winter, the balloon 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.
“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 need to get it now,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, “in order to backward engineer it and figure out how the Chinese have developed this stealth, soft-fabric aerial technology that defies radar.”
In spite of McConnell’s demands, it will take about a week for the US military to figure out how to get a boat into the area capable of salvaging the pieces because they had a week already 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 Biden administration has said the mission is far too dangerous for a lobster boat
New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, says he agrees “because we suspect the balloon contained yellow-cake uranium that the Chinese might have intended to sprinkle over US cornfields. We urge an extra hundred-trillion dollars in funding for the US military in order to counter this new threat from Chinese weapons of mass destruction.”
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 are expensive due to inflation. China is also angry 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 Chinese try to do next? Survey Mount Washington for possible wintertime balloon docking sites? Meanwhile that other Washington, a lot hotter right now and 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 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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