>"The US state apparatus did not make a big deal of this."

Cancelling / postponing (whatever it will be) Blinken's visit to China does seem like a big deal.

Via NPR transcript of a segment today: [1]

> SIMON: This trip was supposed to happen this weekend, right?

> KELEMEN: Yeah. I mean, we were planning to fly out last night. We had our visas in hand and our bags sort of packed. So this was very last minute. Though Blinken had been raising concerns with the Chinese about this balloon since Wednesday, when pictures started appearing on social media of this thing way far up in the sky over Montana.

My interpretation is that this move was likely forced by the public furor.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/04/1154473950/u-s-cancels-blinke...

That's the way it seems to me as well. The earlier excuse about not shooting it down over Montana because of falling debris didn't make a ton of sense. I think they didn't want to shoot it down because the threat was long ago characterized and the standard operating procedure is to ignore these balloons. But once the public started making a big deal about it, politicians respond to that.

And I agree this has been largely because of public furor. Now, something that's interesting is 'ufo' videos have been trending on tiktok for some time with lulls and resurgences in their postings. When this large object showed up and people started capturing pictures it is no surprise to me it took off on social media.

> Cancelling / postponing (whatever it will be) Blinken's visit to China does seem like a big deal.

It's all political posturing. Look into the history of if you are allowed to take a photo with a handshake or not in political photographs. It's just part of the game to ensure you still have power or relevance,

I'm not saying it happened here, but the US media has a very, very long history of being happy to take a ball from the white house, military, or cabinet - and run with it.

Fair dinkum! We probably won't know for sure what maybe happened until someone involved maybe writes a book in 5-50 years.

> The US state apparatus did not make a big deal of this.

The majority leadershio of the House are not “state apparatus”? Because they were the main source fanning a big deal out of it.

I mean, no political commentary intended, but I don't really see the present house as like, well represented at the helm of the government? It seems like the state apparatus is keeping them at arms length from power, yes, due to the internal turmoil that has been ongoing for some time. Thus I basically mentally lump them in with "media and public."

They're anti-state apparatus -- remember, they're the ones who attempted a coup.

The media is the US state apparatus.

> The media and the public did, and the US state apparatus answered to the media and the public, as is their duty.

Their job isn't to respond to every current outrage in the media cycle. That's why we have a representative democracy and not a full direct democracy. They're to be held accountable for their overall performance every few years, and in the interim are supposed to be resilient to the short term ebbs and flows of public sentiment (which are fickle and can be manipulated) and do what's actually good for the people in the long run.

> the US state apparatus answered to the media and the public, as is their duty.

No, the state feeds the media what it wants to see reported. They can share what they want and they can hide what they want from the media.