 What we know about the U.S. Air Force's balloon party so far. You know, everyone's always talking about how the U.S. military is only ever used to kill foreigners for resource control and generate profits for the military industrial complex, but that's not entirely true. Turns out the U.S. military is also used for shooting down party balloons. In an article titled, Object downed by U.S. missile may have been amateur hobbyist's $12 balloon, the Guardian's Richard Loscombe reports the following quote. The Northern Illinois Bottlecat Balloon Brigade says one of its hobby craft went missing in action over Alaska on the 11th of February. The same day a U.S. F-22 jet downed an unidentified airborne entity not far away from Canada's Yukon Territory. In a blog post, the group did not link the two events, but the trajectory of the Pico balloon before it last recorded electronic check-in at 12.48 a.m. that day suggests a connection, as well as a fiery demise at the hands of a sidewinder missile on the 124th day of its journey, three days before it was set to complete its 7th circumnavigation. If that is what happened, it would mean the U.S. military expended a missile costing $439,000 to fell an innocuous hobby balloon worth about $12, end quote. The descriptions of all three identified objects shot down February 10th through 12th matched the shapes, altitudes, and payloads of the small Pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12 to $180 each, depending on the type, writes Steve Trimble for Aviation Week, who first broke the Bottlecat Balloon Brigade story. This information would put a bit of a wobble on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's comments to ABC's This Week on Sunday that all three of the balloons shot down through the weekend were Chinese surveillance devices, saying the Chinese were humiliated by the U.S. catching them in their sinister espionage plot. If the U.S. Air Force did, in fact, just spend millions of dollars shooting down American party balloons, it wouldn't be the Chinese who are humiliated. And it looks like that is indeed what happened. On Tuesday, the National Security Council's John Kirby said the leading explanation for the three unidentified flying objects that were shot down as that they were balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose. On Thursday, President Biden told the press that the intelligence community's current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research. And this all comes out after U.S. officials told the Washington Post that the Chinese spy balloon, which started this historically unprecedented multi-day frenzy of aerial kinetic warfare over North America, was probably never intended for surveillance of the United States at all. Experts assessed that the balloon was blown over the continent entirely by accident, trying to reconcile that narrative with the contradictory U.S. government claims of intentional Chinese espionage by suggesting that perhaps the Chinese had intended for the balloon to be used for spying on U.S. military forces in the Pacific or something. So to recap, the U.S. Air Force shot down a Chinese balloon, which U.S. officials have subsequently admitted was only blown over the U.S. by accident, then went on a spree of shooting things out of the sky, which it turns out were probably civilian party balloons. The entire American political media class has been spending the month of February furiously demanding more militarism and more Cold War escalations over what is in all probability for harmless balloons. And what's crazy is that they'll probably get those increases in militarism and Cold War escalations they've been calling for, despite the entire ordeal originating primarily in the overactive imaginations of the drivers of the U.S. Empire. The shrieking hysterical panic about Chinese spy balloons has dwarfed the coverage of the revelations contradicting that narrative, and China hawks have been using the occasion to argue for increases in military spending. The Atlantic's Richard Fontaine got all excited and wrote a whole article about how the threat of Chinese spy balloons can be used to rally public concern and build international solidarity against China. These are the people who rule our world. They are not wise. They are not insightful. They are not even particularly intelligent. The U.S. Empire is a Yosemite Sam cartoon character who at any time can just flip out and start firing sidewinder missiles at random pieces of junk in the sky, screaming, I'll blast your head off, you varmin! If the U.S. war machine was a civilian human, their family would be quietly talking amongst themselves about the possibility of conservatorship. These are the last people in the world who should be running things, and they are the last people in the world who should be armed with nuclear weapons. But that's exactly where we find ourselves in this bizarre slice of space-time. God help us all.