If you haven’t been living under a rock since the beginning of February you’ll be aware that a Chinese “surveillance” balloon has drifted over the continental USA and even hovered over some dustbowl in the centre where the USA keeps its missiles. This has led to that weird kind of 24 hour cable news coverage that gets Americans hysterical, in which they cover a perfectly normal event as if it were a catastrophe, and get terrified of shadows. In this case the media were tracking the balloon across its entire path, defense experts were being interviewed, and every armchair expert on twitter was weighing in with their opinion of the real significance of the thing. An entire country sent into a state of unhinged uncertainty by a balloon. Ultimately Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, canceled a visit to the USA which the Americans (but not the Chinese) claimed was going to lead to high-level meetings.
Of course this is transparent nonsense. Nobody can control the path of a balloon, though some people tried to speculate that some moderate degree of control could be achieved by changing heights, and the balloon covered a track across the USA that is already widely covered by military and commercial satellites. Why would the country that has its own fancy-shmancy space station, a cloud of satellites powering its own mapping service, the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and a lander on the dark side of the moon, need to use a balloon to spy on the continental USA? And why would it particularly want to hover over a missile site that has been so extensively mapped by the USA’s “adversaries” that all activity there has to be done underground? And why would they risk this provocation on the eve of a supposedly historic visit by a senior US diplomat?
The balloon took its strange path just after the USA experienced a huge cold snap across much of the contiguous states, and just as the north east of the USA and Canada were expecting a secondary cold snap. These cold snaps are caused by the jet stream slowing and weakening, so that its path sags southward and cold air from the pole is allowed to escape across the continental USA. These jet-streams flow from west to east, and are the reason for example that a Canadian weather balloon ended up over Russia in 1998. Indeed, after the Chinese government finally noticed US panic they issued a statement that it was a weather balloon gone wild, which is completely consistent with its strange looping pathway. It drifted north east until it hit the jet stream, diverted eastward, and then was dragged down over the continental USA by the sagging jet stream that was simultaneously producing the coldest ever recorded temperatures in New Hampshire.
None of this obvious counter-evidence led the US media or various twitter commentators to question the Pentagon’s claims, which is unsurprising but depressing, because these claims were being aired by not just the same institution that brought us the invasion of Iraq, but the very same people. The current Pentagon press spokesman, Brig Gen Pat Ryder, who gave press conferences about the balloon, has a storied history of propaganda for the US military, and in particular was in charge of “strategic communications” for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004. He was the chief of propaganda for the most corrupt military occupation in history, and in particular he was in charge of “strategic communications” when the Abu Ghraib scandal happened. He was also in charge of public affairs for an air force wing during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, when one US airplane (not from his wing) blew up the Chinese embassy – something that required a bit of spin at the time! The guy currently providing information about this balloon to the press never saw a truth he wasn’t willing to hood and electric-shock to death. If this guy said the sky was blue you would need stick your head out the window and check. If he asked for the salt at dinner you’d best pass him the pepper, and if he claimed he wasn’t the father you wouldn’t need to waste money on a paternity test – you could be sure it was him. This man is a liar, he is paid to lie for his government, and he has spent at least some of his life lying to cover up some of the most corrupt and incompetent mistakes and crimes of the US military.
Why would you believe this man when he tells you that a balloon is being used for spying?
It gets worse, of course. On February 4th the US department of defense released a statement about the shooting down of the balloon (which cost at least $1 million, but finally gave the F-22 jet a confirmed air-to-air kill). In the statement they noted that
Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times during the prior administration
and of course the media and various idiots in the commentariat went wild about how “spy balloons” had been regularly sent over the USA. Media reported this as spy balloons entering US airspace, dropping all ambiguity, as did the usual talking heads on the internet. But note that the DoD statement nowhere says that they’re spy balloons – it leaves that for the media to do. It also states they “briefly transited” the USA. It is not physically possible for a balloon to “briefly transit” the continental USA from China unless it passes over the tip of Alaska – standard behavior for a weather balloon launched from China and blown out to sea, on occasions when the jetstream is functioning properly. But all of this nuance and the obvious implications were left out by commentators, who went off the deep end at the suggestion that balloons might have been used for spying and Trump just let them.
This is particularly ridiculous posturing, because it is also attempting to rewrite history to suggest that Trump – who led a trade war against China and sparked a wave of both official and unofficial retaliation against Chinese living in the USA – was somehow soft on China during his time in office. And it is also trying to conjure up some grand conspiracy in which the country that controls satellites, a space station, and half the marketshare of the world’s cellphones, is sending balloons it can’t control across the Pacific in the hope that one day one of them will just randomly luck onto a top secret site that they couldn’t photograph better from orbit. This is thoroughgoing nonsense. But it has the entire press pack and liberal intelligentsia doing the Pentagon’s propaganda work for it, and baying for blood. These people aren’t even paid, and they’re taking subtly misleading information from the most dishonest organization on earth – straight from the mouth of the man who was in charge of “strategic communications” during the Abu Ghraib scandal – and adding the extra panic the Pentagon wants, without even being directed to.
This is how we got the invasion of Iraq, the murder of a million Iraqis, the displacement of four million more, and the creation of ISIS: because the Pentagon lied to journalists, and journalists just repeated everything they were told as if it were god’s own truth. Josh Marshall (whose tweet is pictured above) wrote lots of essays about the Iraq war that he has scrubbed from his blog, so I can’t tell if he supported it or not, but it is clear he wrote extensively about it at the time, so if he has any sense he would be aware that the Pentagon lied us all into that atrocity. Is he aware that the people he is quoting now were lying to him then? Do other journalists reporting on this ever stop to think that maybe they shouldn’t listen to people who lie to them consistently?
No, they don’t. Journalists are like a baby playing peekaboo, or like Bart Simpson in Lisa’s cupcake experiment – they just can’t think that the same thing would happen twice, because they cannot, under any circumstances, analyze the structural factors driving the news they report on. They just keep reporting the things they are told and even if they are being told the same lies with the country name changed, by the same people, working for the same institution, they are unable or unwilling to question whether there is any level of trust they should assign to that person. Even if they know that the last time around these were shown to be lies, and they know who spouted those lies.
They just don’t have object permanence. And these babies are going to help the Pentagon lie us into a war with China.
Compromise and Conceit 
February 6, 2023 at 12:40 pm
http://web.archive.org/web/20080809163643/http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008858.php
Send like he wasn’t in favor of the Iraq war, I checked a few comments from like 2002 until 2008 (not all, just skimmed). You can use the wayback machine to get stuff like this.
And don’t you remember that the US needed balloon pictures to find the WMDs in Iraq? Or in Cuba? Or anywhere else since the second works war? I think you’re just an opponent of big spot balloon…
February 6, 2023 at 1:35 pm
Apparently the USA is also currently using balloons to do mass surveillance of its own people: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stop-the-military-from-testing-creepy-spy-balloons-on-us/
From the wayback machine I can’t see if he supported or opposed the war but there is an interview with Kevin Pollack where he gives the impression that he was taking the US government’s case about WMDs seriously. I never made that mistake in 2002 – I could see that the govt was lying through its teeth. Everyone who took those transparently obviously bullshit lies seriously got egg on their face in the ensuing 5 years (the concept of the “Friedman unit” was developed to laugh at how dumb they all were), and yet here he is 20 years later, believing the same liars. Object impernanence is the easiest explanation for this stupidity.
February 6, 2023 at 1:44 pm
I totally forgot to also mention this.
And according to the blog excerpts that I read, he was somewhat skeptical of the government claims back then. But that would make it even worse, right? That would mean that he was skeptical back then but lost his critical thinking capabilities in the meantime. Or maybe he is lost in the groupthink that is American politics…
February 6, 2023 at 3:30 pm
From my jaded perspective as someone who saw through their bullshit from the get-go, it’s hard to make a judgement about what’s worse: being mildly skeptical of their story, having my skepticism confirmed, then lapping it all up 20 years later when they spin a silly tale about a fucking balloon; or swallowing their bullshit hook, line and sinker the first time, being humiliated by the discovery that they were completely lying about a war that ended up killing a million people and leading the utter humiliation of the US army, and then swallowing it all again 20 years later when they spin a silly tale about a fucking balloon.
February 21, 2023 at 9:42 am
Who was it that said that there needs to be a name for the epistemic vice of giving known liars the benefit of the doubt? Daniel Davies?
And yes, the USA and China have lots of spy satellites, spy aircraft, spy stations … why on earth get excited about a balloon?
For many people, TV news or corporate social media are like a soap opera, providing an endless flow of things to be angry about and interpersonal drama and suspense. Americans who think they are lefties or centrists talk about the “Marvel Extended Universe” but the tweet being shocked, shocked that the US government might lie to its citizens is similar.
February 21, 2023 at 10:04 am
That should be “Fox News Extended Universe” sorry.
February 23, 2023 at 10:51 am
Yes, I remember Dan Davies even wrote some kind of book about not trusting people who lied to you in the past. But now a lot of bloggers who acted like that was the smartest blogpost in history are now reciting “evidence” provided to them by the Iraq war’s lying instigators as if it were fact. A complete loss of sensibility, imo!
February 23, 2023 at 2:07 pm
I think some people did successfully update their priors about the credibility of US government statements after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (ie. “ok, Russia really is aggressive and dreaming of hegemony over Europe!”). But many of those people have gone too far in that direction.
No idea about which Americans are getting too excited about a lost, possibly spy, balloon. There are way more useful things for me to pay attention to!
February 23, 2023 at 2:37 pm
The response to the Russian invasion is a similar example, to me. The media spent the past five years talking about Ukraine’s corruption, so many articles about its “Nazi problem”, and then the moment Putin cites denazification as a reason for the invasion we’re told the idea Ukraine has a nazi problem is preposterous, the Azov battalion (who inspired the Christchurch mass shooter!) are nothing to worry about, and we should be sending huge amounts of money and weapons to the country we had just a year earlier been told was the most corrupt country in Europe. I could accept this kind of memory-holing if it came with some kind of sense (e.g. “we did say that it’s the most corrupt country in Europe, but what can you do? Maybe we were wrong, there’s a war, etc.”) but it just gets ignored. It’s like these journalists haven’t even read their own articles that they wrote a year ago. The same with the ridiculous idea that Russia bombed Nordstream 2, something we’ve been assured by the same fraudsters who gave us the “Saddam’s 45 minute threat” claim. Why does nobody in the media even try, at even the most superficial level, to question the credibility of the people telling us this bunk? They’re propagandists, not journalists.
February 23, 2023 at 3:09 pm
It seems to be a tribal custom. I remember one journalist who switched from arguing that Russia probably would not invade because they did not have enough troops in one week, to arguing that Russia would quickly overrun the country the next week. AFAIK the journalist has never explained why they changed their mind or on what evidence or why someone should trust their new position. Its like how “Economist” articles are written with the voice of authority even though the authors are often monolingual 24 year olds on their first job after uni.
Contacts in Ukraine tell me that Azov is kind of a smokescreen (there were Neo-Nazis on both sides of the 2014 Donbas War, Russian propagandists talk a lot about one group of them based in Ukraine and now how the Ukrainians threw some of the worst ones out of the battalion or in to jail).
February 23, 2023 at 3:37 pm
Some people are going to have strong opinions about things on the basis of reading a few tweets or turning on the TV, I would not worry too much, its just talk to them. Who gassed Ghouta or blew up Nordstrom II is important to a lot of people, but the average person does not have a reliable way to know the answer.
February 26, 2023 at 1:29 pm
I don’t have any contacts in Ukraine. I’ve read things about Nazis active in Ukraine, I’ve read things about the Ukrainian government purging Nazis from the Azov Battalion, and I’ve concluded that there’s probably elements of truth in many of the stories I’ve read but the chances of my pinning down which details are true and which false are slim and if I’m going to evaluate the situation I’m going to have to do it more generally, as follows: whatever was going on in Ukraine before Vladimir Putin’s decision to send the Russian army in, it is clear that decision has made the situation much worse and it would have been easy to predict that in advance. That decision has been and will continue to be the cause of death, destruction, and loss on a large scale, and there was never any justification for it. He talks about Nazis in Ukraine. How does that justify his decision? He hasn’t made things better.
March 24, 2023 at 7:21 am
Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble” (2010) talks about the code of since among commentators about each other’s failed predictions (criticizing them would endanger everyone’s racket in the predict-the-future game, because no confident talkers are very good at predicting the future)