(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Spy Balloon, Much Ado About Nothing [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-13 I’m not at privilege to disclose how I know about top secret information gleaned from the Chinese Spy Balloon that recently traversed the skies across the country. Turns out the balloon was sending us a signal all along and we either didn’t get it or, most likely answer, we were ignoring it. The message from the Chinese Spy Balloon was this: “Surrender, we have your mother.” Naturally, since we assumed the Chinese had no sese of humor and were as one-dimensionally and thick-headedly literal as we are we took the message seriously. And of course, the right-wing conspiracy mongerists exploded with doomsday scenarios. Consequently, chaos reigned. The first question from the folks who took themselves too seriously was; “Whose mother? Certainly not Joe Bidens Mother. She would be over 100 years old.” A prominent republican is reported to be overheard saying, “Well if they’ve got Joe Biden’s mother, then let’s message them, through our secret line to Beijing, to keep her till the next election.” And when told that Biden’s mother had died in 1910 he said, “Then by all means keep her.” Thus enacting what the media later termed, “Corpse Diplomacy.” However, political wits on either side of the aisle recognized metaphor when the saw it and determined the “MOTHER” of which they spoke was about the whole USA. Once it was accepted by most of the media that somehow the kidnapping Chinese had captured the ‘spirit’ of the whole USA in a spy balloon, the country went to red alert. What else could a fearful country do? Naturally after 100 of hours of study experts agreed that it was impossible to contain a whole country in a balloon, even though it was the size of 3 school busses, they decided, because of public pressure, to shoot it down when it got over the ocean. After retrieving what resembled nothing so much as a giant spent prophylactic (the rescuers seemed to be swimming in galactic spooge), they discovered the real reason behind the “Sabre-rattling message of “Surrender, we have your mother.” It was from a lowly First-Lieutenant in the Chinese military and he thought, since China, Russia and the US have been doing spy balloons, ships and vehicle forever, it would be a nice gesture to break the excruciating boredom and show that they had a sense of humor and therefore, open-up a whole new, less-militaristic aisle of diplomacy. Alas, if anything, the countries became more militaristic, withdrew their diplomats, closed all meeting between the two parties and were on the brink of war for several weeks over the innocence declaration. Amongst the chaos, there was one lonely voice of a crusty old Navy enlisted man who claimed he witnessed something very similar back in the mid-sixties with a Russian ‘Spy’ Trawler in the North Atlantic. “We always had a Russin “Fishing’ Trawler tailing us which we knew was a spy ship and they knew we knew they were a spy ship (we, us and them and including all leading countries, have been doing this sort of ‘spy balloon’ diplomacy forever). We, the enlisted men, were told that the spy ship posed as a menace and a threat to democracy. One very dark, very choppy and very cold night in the north Atlantic, three of us were in the Signalman’s hutch, huddled together for warmth when we saw a light on the horizon where the Russian Trawler had been before dark, and it was signaling in morse code to us. Which was very perplexing since, if they wanted to message us there were many electronic media avenues to use. We thought it was an SOS at first and told the bridge. However, we were informed that the ‘Bridge’ officer was asleep and was a bear when awakened so handle it ourselves. So, we did. The Morse code from the dangerous, threatening Trawler read, “Surrender, we have your mother.” It took we three unsophisticated enlisted men ten seconds to figure out it was a joke Ivan was playing on us. We signaled back. “How is she? She hasn’t been the same since the kids left the gate open and the hogs got in and ate the baby.” The crusty old sailor confessed he had been reading Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” at the time. A few minutes later the message came back, “So sorry inferior westerner, Russian hogs would have fed and bathed the baby.” And so it went back and forth for about an hour of good-natured one-up-man-ship faux bragging, when we got the word that the Officer on the bridge was waking up. We gave one last signal, “Nice chat Ivan, we’ll have to do it again some time.” And, they did, sixty years later, this time, causing an international crisis. Folks, the upshot is, we spent millions, perhaps billions of dollars and man hours on much ado about nothing. Sometimes, we are truly, as no less an authority as Dr. Who calls the human race, stupid little monkeys. 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