The Trump Show

Yay democracy!

Activists planning to fly the “Baby Trump” blimp during President Trump’s “Salute to America” event on July 4th were told by the National Park Service (NPS) that they could not fill the balloon with helium, essentially grounding the giant inflatable.

While the park service reportedly granted feminist anti-war group Code Pink a permit to have the balloon in Washington Thursday, the permit does not allow the group to fill the 20-foot representation of Trump with helium and float it off the ground.

“It is ironic that it is right here, in the ‘land of the free,’ the balloon is being grounded,” Code Pink cofounder Medea Benjamin said in a statement.

  The Hill

That was the old America.

NPS rules do not allow helium-filled blimps, and park service spokesman Mike Litterst told The Washington Post that the no-fly zone includes downtown Washington.

Additionally, the permit approved by the park service did not allow the group to fly the balloon in the requested location, meant to be within line of sight of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, where Trump will give a speech Thursday evening.

The only blimp in town will be Old Lardass himself.

Hey, Code Pink, you're activists. Civil disobedience is a tool in your arsenal. Fly that big baby.

Instead, the “Baby Trump” balloon will be stationed near the Washington Monument, where it will be allowed to stay for 15 hours throughout the day’s festivities.

Perhaps it can suddenly grow extra long cables at the time of the speech.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Blimp Spring

Another blimp of sorts broke loose this week.

Halloween came early for drivers and pedestrians as a giant, inflatable [25-foot-tall, 350-pound orange jack-o'-lantern] emerged from a group of trees before bouncing through a Peoria intersection and down the roadway in video captured on Thursday.

[...]

Big AZ Promotions, the owners of the pumpkin, didn't know what to expect when they got the call that their pumpkin was on the loose.

"We showed up and it wasn't there and we spent the last 40 minutes driving around looking for it," Sparkes said.

After the pumpkin got free from the streetlight pole it traveled about a quarter of a mile by bouncing over a wall, rolling through a business parking lot and eventually getting stuck in a neighborhood park.

[...]

"This is so heavy, and the straps, it just like ripped the rings out, went rolling down the streets," Shayne Smith with Big AZ Promotions said.

[...]

Luckily, nobody was injured in the great pumpkin escape, but it did damage street lights in the intersection of 83rd and Grand avenues, but those have now been repaired.

  12News

I know you want to see the video. It's a riot. The photographer loses his shit when the mammoth jack-o-lantern heads toward him. (I do hate those videos where they place an in-focus video inside a larger blurry video of the same thing. Not artsy, folks. Just incredibly distracting. So stop it.) Click the article link - video embedded.



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Accident with the US Blimp Over Kabul

On Oct. 11, a British military helicopter was coming in for a landing at NATO headquarters, where the blimp is moored. According to an eyewitness who spoke to the BBC, the helicopter hit the tether, which then wrapped itself around the rotors. The helicopter crashed, killing five people — two U.S. service members, two British service members, and a French contract civilian — and injuring five more.

[...]

“Official military sources say only that somehow or other, during the course of that incident, the cable of the balloon was severed,” he said.

The blimp deflated and eventually crashed to the ground nearby.

[...]

The helicopter was a Puma Mk2, carrying members of NATO involved in training and mentoring Afghanistan’s air force.

The two American casualties were both from the Air Force: Maj. Phyllis J. Pelky, 45, an aide-de-camp to the Air Force Academy superintendent; and Master Sgt. Gregory T. Kuhse, 38, who was assigned to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.

The British dead were identified as Flight Lieutenant Alan Scott and Flight Lieutenant Geraint “Roly” Roberts, both of the Royal Air Force.

[...]

Its deflation was captured on video. Afghan onlookers, used to seeing the blimp as impregnable and omniscient, cheered, and urged the person filming it to post the video on Facebook, which he did.

  The Inetrcept

What? They don't see it as a great sky guard for their protection?

The Oct. 11 accident was not the first time helicopters in Afghanistan have hit a blimp’s tether. Defense News reported in 2013 that at least three Army blimps in Afghanistan were lost due to a “helicopter tether strike” during the course of one year. That led the military to make the tethers more visible, placing “flags and visible light and infrared strobes at regular intervals on the tethers to help improve visibility.”

It took three time before they did something about it?

Defense News described an incident in 2011 where a blimp got loose, “speeding through the sky, out of control, carried by the furious wind. Suddenly, an F-16 fighter jet roared close and then opened fire, mangling the blimp-like dirigible, like blasting a football with a round of buckshot. Gradually, the aerostat slumped to the ground.”

And apparently, “that was just one of two aerostats lost to a storm that day,” Defense News reported.

Good lord! The people of Pennsylvania were very lucky. These things are a menace.

As for the runaway blimp that crashed in Pennsylvania, don’t expect to see it or its partner in the sky again anytime soon, if at all. They were the last remnants of a troubled $2.7 billion program called JLENS or “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System,” intended to spot aerial attacks that normal radar can’t see.

And good riddance. But I bet Kabul gets theirs back.

You can watch the haunting short documentary "The Above" about the blimp over Kabul embedded in the article cited, or directly at The Intercept's Field of Vision.

Keystone Kops in the Air

One of the two military surveillance blimps that has been watching the East Coast from Maryland has broken free of its mooring at Aberdeen Proving Ground and is now drifting over Pennsylvania, authorities said.

Two F-16 fighter jets from an Air National Guard base in Atlantic City, N.J., are monitoring the unmanned aircraft, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command is working with the Federal Aviation Administration "to ensure air traffic safety," a spokesman said. The blimp is drifting at an altitude of 16,000 feet.

[...]

"Anyone who sees the aerostat is advised to contact 911 immediately," spokeswoman Heather Roelker said. "People are warned to keep a safe distance from the airship and tether as contact with them may present significant danger."

  Baltimore Sun

If you missed it, watch this Field of Vision short documentary on the surveillance blimp the US military is flying over Kabul. Damned creepy.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:   https://twitter.com/FPCreasy/status/659435132605112321

Blimp backstory.

National Security

A pair of high-tech Army blimps is coming to the greater Washington, DC area, and soon they will be able to provide the military with surveillance powers that spans hundreds of millions of acres from North Carolina to Niagara Falls, Canada.

The airships are part of Raytheon’s Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, or JLENS, and when all is said and done they’ll offer the United States military what the defense contractor calls “an affordable elevated, persistent over-the-horizon sensor system” that relies on “a powerful integrated radar system to detect, track and target a variety of threats.”

  RT

When do we get to officially call this a police state?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.