Up, Up and Away

Those dirty Commie bastards. They finally did it. They showed their true colors by launching an outrageous spy operation, violating our sacred space. What was surprising is how old school the operation was. Or maybe not. After all, Chairman Mao did say in his Little Red Book, Chapter 8, Quotation 6, “There’s no school like old school” (admittedly a loose translation).

The first Chinese spy balloon was first cited floating over Montana. Who knows what information it had gathered by the time it was spotted. The pinkos probably know the status of the new strip mall going up in Bozeman at West Oak Street and N. 7th Avenue, near the Walmart Supercenter. They certainly would have seen the new well being dug at the Tail Waggin’ Ranch, just north of Holland. I wouldn’t even put it past them to have jettisoned something to poison that well (bye, bye Toto).

The sad thing is that this is certainly just the tip of the iceberg, not that we’ll hear anything about it from the lamestream media. For example, you probably did not know that the Three Percenters militia (named for the portion of their brains they use) captured banditos crossing the Mexican border while carting ten crates of Junior Birdmen decoder rings. The border guard dismissed it as a harmless prank, but we know better.

And then there was the shipment of disappearing ink that showed up at the Leon Trotsky Elementary School in Pocahontas, Arkansas. The ink was cleverly used to mask the 4th grade writing assignment on the efficacy of critical race theory, wiping out all trace of this attack on American goodness before it could be revealed. Luckily, Governor Huckabee is on the case. You go girl!!!

It’s not just technology that has infiltrated our borders. Because what would technology be without the humans to operate it? Here too we have inconvertible proof. Strange characters have been seen in multiple locales (Zolfo Springs, Florida and Sulphur, Oklahoma, just to name a few) employing highly sophisticated communication devices. Deny these pictures, if you can.

OK, maybe I am dismissing this all too lightly. As of now, four floating aircraft have been shot down. I like to think that there is a real reason for this, and we are not just overreacting because we don’t want to seem weak (as if deflating a balloon with an F-22 jet is somehow a show of strength). It is just hard to imagine what vital information can be gathered in this quaint fashion.

Even if I could get over the innate silliness of this whole affair, it would strike me that, once again, we are focusing on the wrong things. On February 6, the FBI arrested two white supremacists, one of whom had started the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen, and accused them of plotting to attack multiple energy substations. According to the news reports, their goal was to inflict “maximum harm” on the power grid, so as to “completely destroy” Baltimore. That arrest barely caused a blip. Maybe if they had planned to attack with a catapult, we would have paid attention.  

Attacks on vulnerable power sources has apparently become a strategy adopted by radical groups in the United States. In December, shots fired at a substation caused 45,000 North Carolinians to lose power for several days. Power grids were also targeted in Oregon and Washington. These attacks go far beyond information gathering to very real attempts to inflict significant harm to people and property.

The threat of cyber-attacks is even more troubling. Unfortunately, the political wrangling over the 2016 election seems to have prevented any real response to the Russian cyber terrorists who hacked into Democratic National Committee systems, accessing e-mails and other private data. So, it wasn’t surprising that in 2020 the State Department, Treasury, Department of Homeland Security, and Pentagon were among the governmental entities breached. Per usual, we were so focused on laying, or avoiding, blame that there was little public furor, or clear organized effort to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Maybe it’s a function of the social media driven world we live in. These serious threats just don’t have visual allure of balloons. Try creating a funny meme out of an attack on a sub-station, or the theft of data. It can’t be done. Yet, the consequences of these attacks are potentially so much more profound. 

Of course, I am as guilty as anyone. You didn’t see a blog post on the substation arrests, or the cyber-attacks, did you? I waited until the balloon presented me with the chance to crack some goofy jokes and reference one of my all-time favorite TV shows, before I gave any real thought to the nature of the threats that exist.

You hope that those in the government agencies responsible for homeland security are looking at a broader picture. I like to think that there are directives flowing out of the oval office to employ any 16-year-old computer whiz kid able to hack Target to develop systems countering cyber-attacks. I like to think that there are plans being hurriedly drafted to protect our power supply. Sorry to say, I just don’t have the confidence that’s happening to the extent it should. It’s just not as cool as sending out jets to decimate the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. After all, that would be a great meme!!!

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