It Could Happen Here - The Balloon Wars and US China Relations

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Mia uses American balloon mania to talk about the material and political arc of US-China relationsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hot fucking Moses. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that is sometimes introduced by me, Robert Evans. The podcast that is sometimes introduced by me, Robert Evans. Other times it's introduced by James Stout or Mia Wong, who are both on the call today. How's everybody doing? Pretty good. We've declared victory over the balloon.

Yeah, finally, the F-22 gets its first air-to-air kill. I still can't believe it. Hundreds of billions of dollars later, we did it guys we did it worth every penny like the f-22 is like god's perfect killing machine yeah and it's thus it is like it is a 600 and what was like a 67 billion dollar aircraft that's completely useless it is a perfect air it is a perfect air superiority craft which in modern warfare makes it slightly less useful than an 850 dji drone with a hand grenade i mean to be fair to be fair express i cannot think of like a better metaphor to understand how the u.s army works than shooting a using using a 67 billion dollar aircraft to shoot a 361 000 missile

at a balloon but i mean just like listen as somebody who's shot several balloons in his life i'm really not this high up it is extremely entertaining and uh yeah i can't fault that pilot i am deeply disappointed in rural america that no crazy rich guy with a Cessna flew his friend with a 50 Cal up to like 40,000 feet. Did you just drop that thing? Why the 17 incinerator was invented for this specific instance. And yeah, we've been let down again. Anyway, what are we talking about today, Mia?

I mean, the balloon, obviously. We're talking about the balloon a little bit, and then we're going to talk about something more interesting, which is the sort of history of u.s china relations and how it's not what everyone thinks it is i've been led to believe by the media that there is nothing more interesting than the balloon and that we should be focusing all our coverage on the balloon that's true there have been other balloons there are now a fifth balloon has hit the towers okay so yeah let's uh let's go yeah so okay so i want to start off by like i want to talk a little bit about the balloon which is that okay so we have the american

arby's claim that this is a surveillance balloon there's a there's a chance it just was a random balloon like i don't know i don't i i don't want to completely discount the fact that it was a balloon i do want to talk a little bit about sort of balloon surveillance stuff though because i've seen a lot of people both on the left and also on the right who are just like, why would anyone ever have a spy balloon? It's like, OK, so it's like a little in order to do this, we need to talk a little bit about surveillance satellites, which I come from a family of astronomers. And one of the sort of dark secrets of astronomy is that the stuff you point up also be pointed back down again. And yeah And yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one of the other things about this is a lot of the companies that make telescopes and make the lenses for that are companies that work heavily with the NRO, which is the National Reconnaissance Office, which is a genuinely terrifying organization with an unfathomable black budget dedicated to just like spying on people from aircrafts and from space.

And more people should be like we have a lot of like people are scared of the NSA people are scared of the CIA but more people should be scared of the NRO because Jesus Christ that stuff is whoo but on the other hand okay so the NRO has a bunch of satellites right but the thing about satellites that they move okay you can't prove that I will I will prove I will I will I will do a war thunder I will post class if I don't give it up we live underneath a flat dome and satellites are stationary the dome rotates

in a clockwise direction around them and that's responsible for the illusion of motion in the heavens sure yes there's no competitive response today nothing no owned so okay all right so satellite satellites move they move in

stable and predictable orbits and this means a few things right one of the things that it means is that a satellite is only over the area you wanted to cover for a limited amount of time because it's you know satellites moving around the earth. And this means that, you know, you can you can calculate their orbits and you can calculate when they're going to be in range of whatever they want to look at. they passed this this is how the cia this is how the cia completely missed india's nuclear weapons program is that they knew when they knew when the flies the spy satellites were flying over they just hid all their weapons equipment and the cia never figured out they were building nukes

base well actually not based because nukes are bad but but yeah yeah it was very funny yeah yeah but what did they do did they just paint it like a hot dog or something and just be like no they literally just just put tarps over it whenever the satellite came around and then they built things underground. It was very funny. I'm patenting the world's biggest hot dog idea in case someone else does that.

I think Jamie Loftus actually might have you beat to that. You'll have to duel to the death. Jamie's secret nuclear arsenal is something we're not supposed to talk about on the podcast. Well, look, it's like the Israeli secret arsenal secret arsenal it's an open secret not a closed secret so okay you you can solve this problem of of sort of telescope go move um either by having just a bunch of satellites going constantly or by having a geosynchronous satellite which is in which is in an orbit where it's like basically over the same spot of the earth at one time. The problem is that both of these are

unfathomably expensive. And that doesn't mean that governments don't do that. The US has a bunch of spy satellites. Lots of countries have spy satellites, but it's really, really expensive. And there's a few other reasons why you would use a balloon,

which are some of the reasons the US uses them in Afghanistan. One is that you have really limited space on a satellite which means that there's you know you can only fit certain kinds of equipment onto each satellite there's another issue which is that okay um if you're putting spy stuff on a satellite it has to work in space and it turns out that space sucks and wants to kill you. It's a mark of how bad people are at strategic thinking that they would ever ask, why would you put spy stuff on a balloon? Especially if, it's a little weirder to float it over the US

if that's what happened. But if you are the US or China or Russia engaging in most of the conflicts those countries engage in where they're not dealing with state level actors, a balloon provides perfect surveillance very cheaply. It doesn't require refueling like it's an incredibly reasonable platform to spy on people with. Yeah. And I think there's another thing which I think has been less talked about, which is that, OK, there's an equipment gap basically between when you design a camera for a satellite and when the satellite goes up and this means that whatever you whatever kind of cameras and technology you're putting in a satellite are going to be by definition a few years out of date because that's just how long it takes to design the equipment and putting it and put it into the

air but you know for a balloon you could you can you could use stuff that's more modern than what you would have on a spy satellite now you know and also like you can you can also just put other stuff on the balloon that's not just cameras like you can do sigint stuff you can use so okay the the the moral of this story is that like the the spy balloon is not like a completely implausible thing i if if if you like put a gun to my head and said mia what what happened here your my guess would be it was like this bible and went off course or some shit and they just lost control of it now yeah it probably was not meant for the continental united states because that's a weird move but it does keep happening so hi this is mia in post so but back when we recorded this episode in the heady days of early february there had been but two balloons.

There have now been so, so many more balloons. Oh, my God. The U.S. just has balloon mania. We now know a little bit more about the sort of suspected Chinese balloon. It does – that balloon seems to be an actual balloon. At the very least, the U.S. government claims that they've recovered an enormous amount of sort of technical and observational equipment from it. They said it was – what was their exact line? The size of three school buses, a bunch of signals intelligence stuff, which is something we didn't mention an enormous amount.

But yeah, like that's another thing you can use a balloon for is intercepting phone communications or radio communications etc etc okay so like it seems like they're like the first balloon may have been an actual balloon every subsequent balloon however we have learned more so at least one and my my assumption is this is every single subsequent balloon after the first balloon um we have confirmation that so one of the balloons is shot down over canada by an f-22 and this seems to be a Pico balloon from the Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade. Uh, these are just like, these are these just like tiny balloons that people send out so they can surf and navigate the globe. These people are just like balloon hobbyists. They just, they just like balloons.

And, you know, it's just honestly really sad. Like, these are just people who like, they just like putting balloons up and watching them go around the world. And they were met with the entire aerial bite of the world's greatest superpower, which spent literally more money than I've ever seen in my entire life to annihilate literally like about 100 or 200 dollars worth of essentially foil and some GPS equipment. These people apparently tried to contact the U.S. government and tell them what was going on, and the U.S. government was like, eh? So, yeah, congratulations to the U.S. government, which has

won an important geostrategic victory over the Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade. This has been breaking news from Mia in the balloon war. Yeah, enjoy the rest of the episode. But, you know, I wanted to use this to talk about something more interesting, which is, again, like the sort of arc of U.S.-China relations and what actually drives it. Because I think people have a really, really not very good understanding of how it works and why.

Okay, I think it's reasonable to ask you, why are you talking about the arc of U.S.-China relations? Aren't U.S.-China relations always bad? And the answer is no. In fact, U.S.-China relations are sometimes actually quite good. U.S.-China relations are driven by these two sort of interlocking forces, right? On the one hand, you have the internal domestic and also kind of global balance of class forces inside a country. And that plays a huge role in a lot of the things that are going to happen in US-China relations. And the other thing that happens is what you, I guess, would call geopolitics. And we're going to kind of start with the geopolitics side and then move back and forth between that and the sort of class angle on it.

So you can get a kind of understanding of how this stuff actually works and how to think about it in ways that aren't just sort of incredibly simplistic and useless so all right i'm not going to go all the way back to like the 1800s or whatever because there are u.s china relations like we actually invaded china at one point in like the 1800s for some fucking reason uh and we actually we did it again in the 1900s too. Yeah, but okay. So, but in terms of dealing with modern China, dealing with modern US-China relations is about the US's relationship with the CCP.

And weirdly, during World War II, the relations were actually really good. You know, because obviously China is the US's ally in World War II. There were also allies with China's Nationalist Party, good um you know because obviously china china is the u.s's ally in world war ii we're there we're also allies with china's nationalist party the kmt but you know what what's interesting about this is that there's a faction of the u.s army that is anti-kmt and pro-ccp and they're not pro-ccp because they're communists uh they're pro-ccp because a they're kind of racist and they really don't like the kmMT kind of out of racism.

And the, the second thing that that's going on is that the KMT, as we've talked about elsewhere, it's just like incredibly corrupt squad party. And that means that, you know, some of the people who have to like the people who have to work with them on the ground in world war two, or like, these are literally the worst people who ever lived. Why on earth are we doing this? These are literally the worst people who ever lived. Why on earth are we doing this? That means that when the Civil War starts, the US takes the nationalist side, but nowhere near as strongly as they could have.

And this creates this myth around the loss of China that becomes this massive thing in the US. This is one of the things that triggers self-McCarthyism, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone becomes convinced. It was like, oh my God, Truman, they lost China like we could have kept china for the communists but like they lost it and it's like wow okay but this has another massive impact which is that it creates this thing called the china lobby and the china lobby is this is this sort of bank of these like incredibly psychopathic right-wing like anti-communist ghouls and some also people who

had some also people who were like had been rich in china and then got owned by the ccp and they start pushing incredibly aggressively for like regime change in china for just the u.s and china not having diplomatic relations and this this starts to sort of like tank relations between the US and China. And then obviously like, so we fought a war with China and Korea, a thing that I feel like doesn't get talked about as much as you would think it would. Yeah, the Korean War is a memory hold war in the UK as well as America,

but it's a war that no one talks about. Yeah, I mean, the Forgotten War is literally like its most common nickname. There's a pretty good book by that title too. Yeah, I mean, the Forgotten War is literally, like, its most common nickname. There's a pretty good book by that title, too. Yeah. Yeah, but, you know, like, that war, like, there are U.S. and Chinese troops, like, shooting the shit out of each other, like...

Oh, yeah. Yeah, like, across the entire peninsula, like, there are Chinese troops doing bayonet charges through their own artillery, like, into the American lines. My, uh, my, the last, before I bought my place, my last landlord was a chinese citizen um living in the u.s on a green card and during a pandemic conversation over some wine we kind of figured out that both of our grandfathers wound up at the same battles um and may very well have

been shooting at each other yeah so that's the melting pot, buddy. She became a landlord. Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, she was renting a room. That's a dream. There is a reasonable argument that there and back again, a landlord story is the entire course of the sort of Chinese politics in the 20th century. Certainly with respect to the United States.

Yeah, and also China, right? because landlords are back now it sucks oh yeah yeah land yet not all chinese people have become landlords but uh yeah many are subject to landlord shit yeah you know okay so like obviously it's really interesting too because when people like when people write about u.s china relations they normally like the thing that they think they pick from this period tends to be like the taiwanese straight crisis and it's like okay yeah there was a there was a straight crisis but again like the us and china were like shooting at each other like before this like why why is this that why is this the thing that you pick for the downer of us china relations like we were at war okay but baffling stuff right but you know and relations

are not good to like the 60s either. Like sort of based on very similar sort of lines that you'd seen in the 50s. Like this is a period where people sort of take communism, anti-communism seriously. That stops being true very quickly. On the other hand, these sort of geopolitics things have real material consequences, right? You can look at this in the American side where, for example, the industrial buildup of the Japanese and Korean economies and also the industrial buildup of California has to do with these sort of trade languages that are being set up in order for the U.S. to run the war in Korea and run the war in Vietnam. And China has its own sort of version of this where which which starts getting more and more apparent by it starts around the mid-60s they have this thing called the third front which is okay so having having now been through like I don't know how literally I don't even know how

many wars since the start of the century the CCP goes okay we need to shift our we need to shift our production away from sort of the coast and into the middle of the country so that they can't be attacked by the Soviets and they can't be attacked by the Americans. And this has a really major effect in terms of what sort of Chinese industrialization looks like over the course of the mid-20th century. You get this industrial belt that's built up, and that is going to be destroyed later on. later on and it's destroyed in part because of of what starts happening in the 70s which is the sort of warm-up between the u.s and china based on sort of nixon and kissinger's attempts to sort of peel the chinese away from the soviet union and you know like robert you've talked about this on bastards before um but you know part of part of what's going on here is that china like basically gets into a war with

the soviet union in 1969 it's not called that it's technically just called the border dispute but like like there are troops like shooting at each other yeah like all across the border people are beating each other to death with sticks like people are people are shooting borders at each other it's it's it's a real war and it's like in the grand british tradition of course calling like massive conflicts an emergency or the troubles yeah yeah it's like okay you know but this but this this this really sort of this this really sort of drives chinese sort of international like relations to the point where they're like okay so uh i know we're supposed to be communist but also like the other communist power next door might like march an army across the border at any

point so you know you get you you get the sort of trying to triangle diplomacy of of of cassenger trying to sort of bring china into the well at least away from the soviet sphere and then closer into the u.s sphere and you know this starts to work right and you can ask you know there's other there's other things going on here right it's china's not just playing pure geopolitics um there there's there's another factor involved which is that part of the sort of conditions for u.s and chinese sort of like i don't know what you call bilateral relations or whatever sort of geopolitical can't bullshit you want to say for getting along closer

is the US starts sending these technology transfers over to China. I mean, literally sometimes taking factories basically and taking them apart and then putting them in boxes and shipping them over to China. This is a huge deal for the ccp because

like the the chinese economy in this period has been really bad and part of this is just you know this is what happens when you bow but a a secondary part of this is that china's has like has had a real basically it's china's been dealing with this sort of economic crisis since, like, literally since they came out of World War II, which is that... Okay, so most of China's industrial capacity was completely destroyed during the war. The parts of it that weren't were, like,

there was this belt in Manchuria that had stuff, and the Soviets literally loaded the factories on trains and shipped them back east, or back west. by by the by the time that the ccp takes over like china has less industrial capacity than like russia did at the beginning of 1917 jesus so situation's really bleak right and the other the other thing that's bleak about it is that okay so in order to build an industrial base right we've talked about this a bit on the show in order to build industrial base you need food but in order to get like industrial base, right, we've talked about this a bit on the show, in order to build an industrial base, you need food. But in order to get, like, increase your agricultural productivity, you need, like, mechanical goods.

But you can't get those mechanical goods unless you can increase your industrial capacity. So you have this bottleneck. And this winds up being one of the solutions to the bottleneck, is getting technology transfers from the U.S. technology transfers from the u.s and you know the sort of product of this is that now uh all of our products and services which uh we are about to talk about which you should buy are made in china so yeah go go go go buy those things that are the product of all of this there's no problem yeah don't don't question it just purchase it go to alibaba and just find aliexpress get aliexpress and just wire them 700 within i'm gonna say two weeks to 17 months you'll get a package of something yeah get a drone buy a drone honestly if you order something from aliexpress there's no real

way to know what you will get that's the beauty of aliexpress look you on the other hand you there there was there was a non-zero chance you get a collection of really, really sick Chinese shirts that just have absolutely random bullshit on them. It's great. Sick Chinese shirts or like knockoff versions of military grade optics that work well enough for the Taliban to use. Yeah. Liberating people the world over, AliExpress objects. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows,

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All right, and we're back. So, okay, the Chinese swing into sort of like alignment with the u.s they start doing things that are like even a lot of the u.s's right-wing allies won't do like for example china china is one of the first countries to like to diplomatically recognize uh chile and they like send him a shit ton of money they send him loans they send them they send him direct cash transfers and like this is a point where even France and the UK are like, ooh, we're not going to acknowledge this military dictatorship.

China's like, yeah, this rules. Hell yeah, pitochet. And they do other stuff that's very sort of pro-US, right? They invade Vietnam in 1979 in the war that, you know, the only war that's more forgotten than the Korean war yeah that's true it's the Sino-Vietnamese war um yeah there was some really good twitter threads that taught me a lot about China's non-aggression towards other

countries last week yeah it's it's a good time I I can we we could also talk about like the Sino-Indian war in the middle of this, where they just invade India. No aggression. Which is great. But, you know, okay. But, like, what this sort of comes up to is, like, you get a point where the U.S. and China, by the end of the 70s and going into the 80s, are very much on the same side. Like, for example, when Deng Xiaoping came to visit the U.S., he takes like an hour out of his schedule to make a secret visit to the CIA

so that he can set up a joint USCIA listening post in China to monitor the Soviets. We talk about this a lot in the Kissinger episodes from last year, but folks should generally be aware that, like, Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon legitimately got along, like, enjoyed one another's company, as did Nixon and Ceausescu.

Like they were, they were all good friends. Yeah. Which is something, something, one ruling class, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. There's almost a class analysis you could make there. Yeah. But you know, okay, we're going to do it. We're going to do a slightly different class analysis, which is that like,

okay, so US China relations are very good literally like basically until tiananmen and then everything gets kind of messed up because tiananmen tiananmen it's a very it has a set of like very weird and contradictory effects right you know we talked about some of this entertainment episodes but it does two things right on the one hand like in the u.s people are horrified right the you know the the entire media class just like watches this happen other outside their windows there's just like it is an incredible uproar it becomes one of the sort of like central like i don't know like i sort of i like it becomes it becomes a thing that's like incredibly central to just like the memory of what it is to be an Asian American, is to sort of remember quote-unquote Tiananmen.

But on the other hand – so okay, what you would expect from there is the US and China break off diplomatic relations, and the Cold War II starts again immediately with the US and China. And it doesn't happen like that. And it doesn't happen like that because the second thing that Tianan tiananmen does is it finally crushes the chinese working class and you know once once once that once the old once the last deal chinese working class is just gone right and all that's left is an incredibly disorganized and incredibly desperate sort of migrant working class suddenly hey look we have a very highly educated very poor uh population that you can that you can that you can just ship labor to. And this is what actually happens in terms of the US and Chinese relationship over the 90s,

which is that you have this double deindustrialization going on. You have a deindustrialization in the US where the last of the old Rust Belt falls apart. The sort of like minor industrial boom that had happened under Reaganagan just implodes and you know some of this is some of this is decentralization some of this is these jobs go to like the suburbs and shit or like places like decalb that are just incredibly accursed but real call out there mia i look i i i'm sorry to anyone who lives in decalb i i wish you best luck fleeing that goes out to carb tourist board sponsorship that we've been looking for. Yeah, but, you know, but simultaneously, there's another wave of deindustrialization happening in China, too, which is that that old third wave industrial belt that I was talking about, right? Those people had worked in, like, basically the equivalent of, like, the Chinese equivalent of sort of, like, good union jobs, right?

They're working for state-owned enterprisesowned enterprises so they have housing they have health care they have pensions and all of that is just destroyed like all these people lose their pensions they fucking lose everything there are like millions of people who are pushed out of their jobs and you know when both of both of these things happen at the same time and a lot of companies who are watching the sort of east Asian companies, like economies collapse, who are watching the Vietnamese, I'm sorry, who are watching the South Korean economy collapse or watching the Japanese economy collapse, suddenly start looking at China. And throughout the course of the 90s, sort of more and more American capital, I mean, there's already been capital from East Asia sort of flowing into China,

more and more American capital starts flowing in and what you get here is you get this battle between geopolitics and economics right the sort of geopolitics side and the sort of like you know the this this side that like the media is on and the side is at this sort of like this sort of intellectual etc etc like anti-china class is on is you know they don't they don't want to let china into the world Trade Organization. But it doesn't work, right? Those guys just get destroyed. China gets admitted into the World Trade Organization. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush support China entering the WTO.

And they do it because they can see what I'm partially – a little bit of it is because they, for some, they've been drinking the Kool-Aid, and they believe that if you have capitalism, then democracy will follow which i yeah empirical data suggests yeah okay sure sure neocons like whatever but you know but it's also it's also because these these these people have financial backers and their financial backers are telling them like hey look we can you know if if we if if like if all of the sort of weird sanction

regime shit is worked out and and if China's fully integrated into the capitalist system, we can make a lot of money. And they do. This is what the 2000s is, right? Walmart and Walgreens and shit directly integrate all of their supply lines into Chinese supply lines. They make deals with the Chinese government in order to do this. And suddenly, in 2001, China's, I think, the fourth exporter of goods in the world. By 2009, they are number one by an order of magnitude, but they're very, very much the world's dominant export economy. And this is a problem, right? Because on the one hand, American-Chinese relations get – they're actually really good. Around 9-11, they're actually really good, right?

they're actually really good around 9-11 they're actually really good right like the the u.s like there were there were guys from xinjiang who like china sends to guantanamo it's like here take these people in the u.s torches them for china like you know yeah like relations are like relations are good right it's like well okay hey we both have like this like quote muslim extremist threat that we're like dealing with you know and they try to get in the war on terror but eventually relations kind of degrade like you have have the whole Olympics thing you have. There's like in like the 2010s, there's this whole fight over these islands that the Philippines claim. But, you know, but the problem with this is like, OK, so you get on the one hand a faction of the American right that is really and also and also a faction of the American right that's really really hardline anti-Chinese based on sort of racism

there's American liberalism which has this thing about the rules-based international order that China's violating, they're also racist and then there's progressives like Elizabeth Warren who are also racist and also but you know, whose thing is like

workers' rights in China are really bad so so we need to do competition with them. It's like, okay. That's how you fix it with more capitalism. Yeah, right. But they have a political issue, which is that there's another massive section of American capital that has enormous investments both sort of financially and in terms of where their factories are, where the logistics are, where the supply lines are, that make them incredibly supportive of sort of closer US-China relations, or at the very least makes them oppose any kind of sort of like real, like anything that goes beyond kind of geopolitical posturing that makes it harder to do business for them. And this is something I think people have a tendency to forget when they try to think

about US-China relations in terms of economics is that like, okay, so the US has a military industrial complex, but that's not the entire U.S. economy. Like there are other people in the U.S. who have lots of money. There is an entire financial sector. There is an entire tech sector. And those people also have a shit ton of money. And even sort of tech companies, right, who have a foot in sort of the American contracting business also often have a bunch of their, you know, a bunch of the places where the technology is built is in China, right? So, you know, even people who could theoretically be brought into a sort of like a military industrial complex political coalition against China, like have reasons not to do it. And, you know, and this works down the board,

right? If you look at when Trump did the trade war, he, you know, initially there was a lot of popular support among sort of like American, like mid-sized businesses who were like, oh, we can bring industrial capacity back to the US. And then all of them discovered that I, they, they had to pay, like all of them discovered that like they had to pay more for their Chinese goods. And we're like, wait, hold on. We fucked up. We've made a mistake. He's actually screwed us. And like, you know, there's, there's another kind of guy, right, who there's a lot of people who you would expect to be really anti-CCP who aren't, right?

And Elon Musk is the best example of this. Like, he is a guy. I think we'd expect Elon Musk to fully support anyone who can fully stamp on the face of their working class because he is about that if nothing else. He's the kind of person who you would expect by pure racism to be like a really hardline anti-ccp guy and he's not because like he has there's a class consciousness i think which overrides even apartheid boys racism well and and like he has

there's a tesla has this like oh god it's called the gigafactory which is a name that makes me want to die. But the Giga Factory is in Shanghai, right? And like he has even during when like the media was like pretending to care about the Uyghur genocide, like he opened a showroom in Xinjiang like during that period.

So, you know, and there's also people like Michael Bloomberg who are very like, you know, if you read Michael Bloomberg talking about China, like in the media he was talking about like how great of a leader xi jinping is and it's you know it's because these people have financial interest there and you know and this this means that like it you know even even the sort of media coverage of this balloon bullshit right and like china has been like threatening revenge or whatever for the shooting down of the balloon but like this isn't going to turn into anything right it's it's the same in the same way that like the last time watched

like straight stuff like didn't turn into anything in the same way that like the last 17 goddamn of these scandals isn't going to go anywhere and it's not going to go anywhere because there's a there's an enormous like faction of american capital who relies on this stuff i think it serves like the the military industrial complex and military specifically to have china be like schrodinger's next world war right like that they're always a threat but like they're not a threat you know like we can justify so much spending and allocation of resources if we can always like wave this stick of potential conflict with china yeah and i think this is something that's kind of like this important to understand is that like both the

china hawks and the china doves are enemies of both the american chinese working classes like the china hawks thing is they want to like you know they want to pit the chinese and american working classes against each other and it's like nationalist fervor in order to get everyone to ignore the fact that like both the societies are collapsing around them. And by the way, did we, we have not, no, I don't think this has really made the news yet, but Norfolk Southern fucking basically set off a chemical weapon in Iowa by crashing one, by crashing a train full of toxic chemicals. Yeah.

And it's, it's literally exploding, like, right now as, as we're fucking recording this episode, it's on fire. Ah, good. You know, I love how when you deregulate train industry so that you can have

just like one guy working a massive train hauling huge amounts of toxic chemicals, it works out great. Yeah, nothing bad happens. It's called efficiency, Robert. Yeah, look,

a train crash like this would have normally taken dozens of people to engineer. So we have improved our efficiency markedly well and also in terms of efficiency robert like think of how bad it could have been if we hadn't crossed the rail strikes yeah see yeah could have been disaster yeah terrible there might not be there might not be a giant poison gas cloud and what is it ohio we can't have that yeah it's in east palestine ohio that's it no it's it's palestine they don't say no yeah you can't call it palestine can't have american things you know what's that

solidarity with the chemicals oh no free free palestine that's what i'm saying that's been done already the first part the first palestinian this will this will seem like it's in bad taste if a lot of people wind up dying but yes i mean i i also want to mention here that i i'm going to take this opportunity to mention that china is the second largest israel's second largest trading partner and they do like yeah and like they they they do like security exchanges with each other where people trade each other's militaries. It's great. It's great.

Yeah, but you know... You can rely. If someone is oppressing working people, they've done a security exchange with Israel. That is like the golden law of a cop beating you in the head with a stick. It's never more than two degrees removed from the idf welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iheart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror

stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart Podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.

This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. every Thursday. it's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Okay. There's one last thing I want to talk about really briefly, which is, okay. So one of the things you will see people talk about who are like pundits or like people on the news talk about this thing called decoupling.

And the thing you need to understand immediately is at the moment someone says the word decoupling, you can stop listening to everything they're about to say because they are lying to you. Like it is bullshit. So in theory, decoupling is this thing where like supposedly like the U.S. and Chinese economies are going to decouple. Right. In theory, decoupling is this thing where supposedly the US and Chinese economies are going to decouple, right? And all of the American firms in China are going to pull out, and they're going to pull out their supply chains, and they're going to relocate them to somewhere else in the world. And the US and Chinese economies suddenly will not be coupled to each other. It's like, no, they're not. This has never happened. If it was going to happen, it would have happened in 2017 or 2018 when Trump was doing the trade war.

It didn't happen then. 2017 and like 2018 when trump was trump was doing the trade war it didn't happen then the only time it's ever happened or the only time american companies ever sort of pulled out of china like en masse or tried to was ironically in june 2011 but in 2011 they were trying to pull out because uh of the wukong riots and this like massive surge of strikes in china and suddenly all these companies were like oh my god china might not be able to keep our i might be not be able to suppress the working class hard enough. And then they got horribly crushed. And the other thing that happened was companies tried to go elsewhere and they couldn't do it. Because no other countries had the combination of things like a stable electrical grid and working roads, an actually highly educated population.

So they didn't have all of these things at once so they all came back and you know that that was that was closest ever came to happening everyone talks about this all the time they're lying to you ignore them yeah it's it's not it's not going to happen the u.s and chinese economies are inexorably bound to each other and they're going to continue to be. Yeah, I mean, we can't run... Our economy, to a large extent, or not our economy, but our society runs on providing treats to the working class just enough to prevent them from rebelling

or from trying to actually change anything. We can't keep the constant stream of treats running if we decouple from China of of like cheap consumer goods and also like the chinese economy relies on like is an expert economy right like they've they've been trying to turn to an internal consumption economy for a decade it's like not really working because hilariously it's not working because they don't pay people enough to buy shit and surely no one will ever do that because yeah then that fucks the economy yeah so you know but yeah it's great but you know okay i i guess like the the the gist of what i wanted to say here is that like like u.s china

relations are driven by forces that are more complicated than man on tv yell at balloon and as as powerful as man on tv yell at balloon seems like in the moment it's not actually the thing underlying what's going on here and you need to be able to look past man yell at balloon seems like in the moment. It's not actually the thing underlying what's going on here. And you need to be able to look past man, yell at balloon on TV in order to look at sort of the broader political and social forces that are going on here. And I think beyond that, what we need to do is recognize that there's a deep emptiness at the center of American society that should have, in this case, been filled by rich people in Cessnas

and their friends with high caliber precision rifles flying into the sky in a noble Cahoteus quest to shoot that fucking balloon down. Just having Sancho Panza crank the- I have never been so disappointed in this country. I expected 40 or 50 people to die, but that balloon to be taken down.

There was a time when we had a country. Yeah. Our founding fathers would have dropped that son of a bitch. Yeah. Joe Brandon has forced them all into retirement. Yeah. And China has revealed its gender to the world. Anyway, I hope china sends another balloon yeah what else we're gonna do yeah hopefully it'll be like a mickey mouse a fucking

frozen balloon you know if they do like the uh the girl from frozen sure that would be cool i'd like to see that they should start pranking us with character balloons i'd fucking love that oh god but but then the u.s would start sending like winnie the pooh balloons over the china elizabeth warren would commission a moana balloon if it was legal for anything fun to happen we would have like a balloon-based cold war where the united states starts shooting over balloons across china and the Russians start floating and it's just we gotta close the balloon gap Albuquerque becomes the number one

world power green chilly jackboots stamping over the face of humanity a strong wind decimates our military capacity the developers of balloons tower defense get hauled before a senate committee for supposedly knowing the future god yeah yeah we've got a nationalized mylar production

in order to monopolize it all right well the balloon pause yeah i think that's our episode yep all right until next time everybody go forth and balloon. Yeah, yeah. Float a balloon into the airspace of a sovereign nation. Just to fuck with them a little bit. Buy a camera on AliExpress, put it on a balloon, send it somewhere, put a flag on it. Be the CIA you want to see in the skies over a sovereign country. Just write CIA on the balloon. Yeah, spray paint it on the side.

Why not? Why not? Why not? What's the harm? What could possibly go wrong? Let's send a flotilla of balloons. Now I'm going to listen. On an unrelated note, I'm finally going to listen to the song 99 Red Balloons for the very first time. So I'll report back to see if this changes my opinion on what people should do with balloons.

All right, everyone. Out. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. Danny Trejo and Step Into the Flames of Right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.