https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-halts-all-flights-texass...
The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region.
The restrictions have been lifted and normal flights are resuming."
I'm guessing DoD and the FAA were squabbling over a test the military wanted to run, and it didn't go up the chain fast enough to get resolved before testing was scheduled to begin.
Edit: Here's the actual notice from the FAA[1]. Note that it was issued at 0332 UTC, but the restrictions weren't scheduled to go into place until 0630 UTC. Either the FAA is clairvoyant, or Sean Duffy is lying.
We also don't know whether they expected this to take 1 day or more. Just because it worked out quickly doesn't mean that's the "worst case" operational timeline.
Indeterminate end dates are not a new problem.
For example, see the Disneyland TFR (FDC 4/3635): https://tfr.faa.gov/tfr3/?page=detail_4_3635
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/airspace-closure-followed-spat-...
> FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford on Tuesday night decided to close the airspace — without alerting White House, Pentagon or Homeland Security officials, sources said.
In the meantime, the politician responsible of course made up a quick lie and yall ran with it, fantasizing about cartel MANPADs:
> Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement, "The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion."
It sounds like the DOD was being unusually indifferent to the concerns, and after deadly prior mishaps, the FAA has to be particularly careful here.
This is the first explanation I've seen that fits the odd facts perfectly. This is the kind of thing that happens when two regional bureaucracies collide. The FAA has long-standing mechanisms for coordinating military use of airspace with commercial and civilian flight operations.
But instead of the usual DEA border interdiction, the administration is now tasking the military to drive this. Military commanders on a new high-priority mission to intercept drones which can attempt to cross the border anytime and anywhere realized coordinating with the FAA would require committing to active corridors and time windows in advance, limiting their mission success and resisted. The FAA realized that could lead to lots of last minute airspace restrictions, flight cancellations and increased risk of a mistake resulting in downing a civilian flight.
The regional FAA administrators responsible for flight safety around El Paso decided to escalate the dispute by simply shutting down all civilian flights, knowing that would get immediate national attention. It was an extreme action but one that's within their purview if they can't guarantee the safety of the airspace. I'm sure they expected it would put political pressure on the military to limit operations and it worked. In a sense, it also helps the military commanders because being ordered to accept FAA operational limitations gives them cover if it reduces their mission effectiveness below what they'd promised. That's probably why the military wouldn't agree on their own without it being ordered from above. They're the ones responsible for deploying expensive new anti-drone tech in field ops for the first time. Future budgets and careers are on the line.
> The Pentagon allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to use an anti-drone laser earlier this week, leading the Federal Aviation Administration to suddenly close the airspace over El Paso, Texas, on Wednesday, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.
https://www.newsweek.com/us-military-shot-down-party-balloon...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-military-shot-down-party...
US military shot down party balloon near El Paso after drone suspicion, official says
Would be funny if they used some new fancy laser weapon to, let's say, discombobulate this imminent threat, as indicated by other reports.
In the end, a cataclysmic war results from the otherwise harmless flight of balloons and causes devastation on all sides without a victor, as indicated in the denouement of the song: "99 Jahre Krieg ließen keinen Platz für Sieger," which means "99 years of war left no room for victors." The anti-war song finishes with the singer walking through the devastated ruins of the world and finding a single balloon. The description of what happens in the final line of the piece is the same in German and English: "'Denk' an dich und lass' ihn fliegen," or "Think of you and let it go."
I especially like the way she rhymes "Captain Kirk" with "Feuerwerk".
https://genius.com/Nena-99-luftballons-lyrics
In other news, Director Gabbard and Secretaries Noem, Hegseth, and Kennedy met with Secretary Leavitt for her big Gender Reveal Party in El Paso...
The real treat for German listeners is the first verse: ich, mich, dich, and neun-und-neunZIG (zig is pronounced like ich in the main German dialect).
With all of the 'neunundneunzig' (aka 99) repeated throughout the song, the ich/dich/mich/vielleicht rhymes is really a superior start over the English version.
It's a rhyming scheme that cannot be replicated in English at all.
(I can mostly understand spoken German. Have heard this song in German many times before. Never got the message. It's tricky!)
So just sing along. Every word, and understand as much as you can.
------
Once you know all the words, then the next step is to learn the grammar and learn how the words work together. If you give it a few months, full understanding will come!
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von 99 Luftballons
Auf ihrem Weg zum ... well, El Paso as it turns out.
the English rewrite of course starts:
You and I in a little toyshop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'til one by one, they were gone...
And rather than see the government have egg on face people (probably a majority here) will vote for politicians who promise all sorts of licenses and regulations on balloons because of it and then in 20yr when I complain and remind them that once upon a time every store used to sell balloons with no KYC BS they'll act like I'm some sort of barbarian, screech, wring their hands, clutch their pearls, etc.
How have we not blown ourselves up yet?
It's not that we haven't, it's just that we can only observe from those few realities where we didn't.
Most people aren't sadistically malicious, and most security is professional, so random little failures like metalled balloons or reflections off clouds (or the moon) scaring a security system will only blow up to something important (even on the scale of previous paragraph) every decade or so.
But what do we know, maybe it was an evil terrorist party balloon. You see, the wall just needs to be a little higher to protect that beautiful country from all southern evils.
Sounds like a great way for a drug-runner to proceed - release 1000 balloons across a very large area, and have only one of them carry their payload of drugs (or whatever).
That said, I doubt they even bother with such small-scale trade. The narco-submarines are much higher capacity and now apparently well-built enough to be trans-pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine
Which way are the prevailing winds at altitude over the Ukrainian-Russian border region, anyway?
Unbelievable. Next I'll read they shot down "balloon boy".
> UPDATE (CNN): Source briefed by FAA tells me that military activity behind the El Paso flight ban included unmanned aircraft operations and laser countermeasure testing in airspace directly adjacent to civilian routes into El Paso International. Airspace restriction just lifted.
I get the feeling this was a case of really wanting to test a new weapon combined with general organizational dysfunction for something unusual like this.
On CNN, they talked about how a shutdown like this would be the first time something like this has happened since 9/11. Is that really correct?
So with this lack of information: Why 10 days? Why not 3, or 12, or some other number instead?
Or: Why must there be a number?
Is the officious equivalent of "We've got some shit to deal with, so El Paso's airspace is closed for now" insufficient?
NOTAMs require a range of timestamps for which they're in effect.
https://lite.cnn.com/2026/02/11/us/faa-el-paso-texas-flight-...
The single drone was in fact a mylar party balloon.
That means a normal amusement park balloon can lift about 14 grams, assuming that the weight of the balloon itself and the string is negligible.
About 99 of them could probably do the job, though.
But then again this time seems different, laws aren’t followed or upheld. Human rights are a fleeting staple.
I suspect Mexicans would view it as another Pancho Villa Expedition, which was also event where neither side declared war.
Not in the metaphorical "war on poverty" sort of way.
FWIW, examples in addition to Maduro are Aguinaldo (Philippines), Noriega (Panama), Hussein (Iraq), and Aristide (Haiti).
(Technically speaking, the US didn't recognize Philippine independence so didn't consider Aguinaldo to be its president, but instead a rightful cession from the Kingdom of Spain due to the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish–American War, where the US had made a formal declaration of war.)
(Also, the US says Aristide's departure was voluntary.)
rather than arming the cartels to fight against the mexican government, thr US could just... not
In what world is public opinion not universally against the cartels? It's hard to take you seriously after that.
I think you’re getting tripped up by some specific wording and managing to miss the point the poster was making. The point should be taken seriously even if imprecisely articulated. While most folks are against the cartels, there’s a much wider range of belief on how much they warrant government or military intervention and to what degree we should be spending various resources on them. The historical state of play was(is?) that cartels are criminal organizations which are generally a policing matter that has escalated to specialized policing agencies and multinational networks of policing agencies. The marked escalation of the military into this is a more recent piece that is somewhat more controversial. One doesn’t have to be “in favor of the cartel” to ask questions about whether our military should be bombing boats or invading countries to ostensibly neutralize organizations that historically have been subject to policing operations.
To go back to the parallel… the public wasn’t in favor of Al Qaeda before 9/11 either, but there was a huge difference in the level of response the public was in favor of after. It turned from an intelligence monitoring level of response into an active military invasion of multiple countries.
If they were all drug runners, why weren't they put on trial? Why was so much effort made to sink all the evidence? Why did an admiral resign, when told to do this?
Everybody involved, starting from the people pulling the trigger, to the people giving the orders should be getting a fair trial and a swift punishment for that little stint of piracy and murder.
But these people all act like there is no such thing as consequences.
Are there?
In that case, the justification was a prerequisite to Congress authorizing a war without losing elections, and then selling it to the US's allies so we wouldn't have to send quite as many troops and thus lose elections. This administration demonstrably doesn't care about justification, authorization, alliances, or elections. So why bother? If they're going to stage an arbitrary Venezuela-like military operation in Mexico because of "cartels", they wouldn't wait for a civilian mass-death event, or for Congress, or regional allies, or public opinion. They didn't wait for any of that in Venezuela.
TBQH this just felt like a cheap and easy way for them to perpetuate the idea that we're always at war with terrorists. Now they're "narcoterrorists", but they're still "terrorists". And this administration might not like obstacles like authorization and due process, but it loves cheap, easy terrorists.
They definitely care about not ratting the cage with the US - they don't harm US federal agents, or take US hostages, and the last incident of Americans being killed in Mexico by cartel-affiliated gunmen in a case of mistaken identity - it was the cartel who handed the perps over and apologised[0]
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/09/us/mexico-matamoros-ameri...
Russia and Ukraine can't stop drones. Does the US have a secret weapon?
It sounds like that's what was being tested requiring the NOTAM. We just don't know if it did or didn't work. It could have failed so badly they decided to just shut it down, or it could have worked so successfully they decided no more testing was needed.
That does actually seem to be what they are saying now, yes.
All of that coming together, I see this action coming out of meeting where
- one party was convinced that this would solve the fentanyl epidemic
- one party was hoping this would escalate military action in Mexico
- one party was convinced that America had lost its masculine bravado and taking swift and unprecedented action like this would make their wife respect them again
- one party was busy making “bets” on Kalshithey want to overthrow the Jacobites
> accelerationists
how's that going to work ?
The Republicans may wave the "Conservative" flag, but they're the only ones I see going full-hog on pretty much anything.
That said, pre-Trump Republicans were milquetoast in comparison to what has happened over the last 13 months. Assuming US democracy doesn't collapse before the next transition of power, I wouldn't want to guess if the next Democrat government will continue this trend or be as full-hog in disregarding all checks-and-balances constraints on executive power to get stuff done.
"yeah but I agreed with those"
No, because so far as I know the Democrat Party didn't arrest him.
The State of Georgia arrested him, after a grand jury indicted him on charges of election racketeering, if that's what you have in mind?
> Do you remember when they put J6 people in prison in solitary confinement for a year?
Nope. Tried looking, I find stories about 4 months?
But sure, let's say that's a distinction without a difference. How is this "go full hog"? It's not like solitary confinement is all that rare in the US prison system.
If you want to treat solitary confinement as a wild and unacceptable punishment, please do campaign against it entirely, I'd like to see that change in your system. But it would be a change, which is kinda the point I'm making here: the Democrats *don't do change*. Not fast.
> Do you remember when they locked you in your house for a year?
Three problems with that:
1) Look at my profile to see why that's a dumb question in the first place
2) These clearly show state-level responses, not federal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_local_governmen...
3) Look at the dates on the previous link, which are both significantly shorter than a year, and also (except for CA) entirely contained within Trump's own first term.
So, if you did want to blame just one single party executive, which would be weird, you'd have to blame the Republicans.
> Do you remember when they fired people from the military for not having forced medical procedures?
You know how the military are supposed to follow any lawful orders even when those orders will definitely result in their own deaths?
Of all the pearls people clutch over the pandemic, the two which most confuse me are this particular one about the military, and which specific political tribe ended up being the one affiliated with hating masks. Slap some fake cameo pattern on it, call it "tactical", perhaps brand it "lung armour". Still, was obvious that eventually most people would hate them and it was just a matter of which party picked up the loudest mask haters, as per what happened in the Spanish Flu pandemic.
Investments on Kalshi!
This would arguably be much more severe -- and quite likely already happening -- than the whole "congress trading stocks" thing because most of those (besides the sports ones) tie very directly to government actions in a way that the economy or a large company in generally doesn't as predictably.
For a silly example, I would imagine the streaker from this year’s Super Bowl is either (a) a complete idiot, or (b) put a significant amount of money on a “prediction market” of there being a streaker at the Super Bowl - more than enough to cover his ticket, legal, and medical costs.
Even if you have perfect clairvoyance, you still need someone to take the other side of the bet.
https://www.dechra-us.com/our-products/us/equine/horse/presc...
For the most part, no customer wants fentanyl. The dealers like it because it's a cheap booster for cutting the drugs that their customers actually do want to buy. It just has this unfortunate side effect of making small overdoses lethal.
That's why "ending the fentanyl crisis" is a curious goal. We had a perfectly good War on Drugs going on, but fentanyl is making the illicit drug industry too dangerous. You'd think that if we wanted to stop drugs, and we knew how to do that, we'd stop drugs. Instead we're stopping fentanyl, so we can get back to the regularly scheduled version of the War on Drugs that was always intended to last forever.
I'm not sure I believe that making heroin legal and available for "recreational" use would solve the problem. People who propose it usually say that it's working in another country (such as Portugal), but then you look at that country and it's not really legal or available, it's just that they do not jail people for personal use anymore. I can agree with that, but it doesn't solve the trafficking problem. The only way to get rid of trafficking is to either allow people to easily buy it legally without onerous taxation, or to reduce demand to zero. If you do the former, you will still be stuck with lots of addicts, the associated crime and suffering, and probably many overdoses. Most likely, the number of addicts will increase, as they did with OxyContin, Actiq, etc. Worth mentioning that Actiq is fentanyl and it was in demand.
Reducing demand is a multifaceted problem with complicated solutions, many of which are politically unpopular.
Interestingly, some drugs can simply be taken off the market and the demand plummets. Quaalude is one example. Nobody stepped in to make an illicit version and the users probably just stopped using or switched to benzodiazepines and then hopefully stopped those. Unfortunately, it seems like we have a persistent demand for opioids.
https://www.afr.com/world/asia/singapore-executions-touch-22...
This article cites Singapore saying the existing laws mostly get low-level users and not kingpins because kingpins operate outside of the country.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/singapore-drug-executions/
Decriminalization of drug use doesn't have to mean decriminalization of anything else. Thieves and murderers should be prosecuted regardless of any state induced by the voluntary ingestion chemicals.
Ideally we would pick one or the other on a drug by drug basis. Executing people for selling weed isn't something I actually want, but neither do I want them simply imprisoned or fined either. But with shit like fent? Trying to find a single policy to fit both drugs is inane.
Anyway: Capital punishment is an elegant solution.
Might as well talk about drug policy in South Sudan to be honest.
Edit: I will say I do have one Singaporean expat friend who finds capital punishment for drug possession vile, and cites it as one of the reasons she no longer lives there. Along with the crushing wealth disparity between the servant class and the working class. Not that it adds much to the conversation except personal flavor.
Do you mean that drug dependence has become more visible? That petty crime has increased?
One fun thing about harm reduction policies is that, as a result of fewer people dying, more people are on the street. So while you don’t see people in the morgue on your daily commute, you do see them down the alleyway. This side effect may be more unpleasant for you, but that’s only because you’re not personally inconvenienced by the corpse sitting in the freezer at the coroner.
There are still legal ways to have a gun in Australia and many other countries that “ban guns”. They don’t have total bans, they just have more restrictive regulations than the United States.
Consider how we regulate alcohol or marijuana as examples of how legalization of drugs works.
So if the goal is to put cartels out of business then yea, full legalization would help. If the goal is to stop overdoses and addiction then absolutely not.
But we still have a depressingly large number of alcoholics. The campaign against drunk driving has helped reduce one set of negative side effects, but not others.
Maybe an unintended positive externality of marijuana legalization?
don't attribute to security concerns...what can be explained by incompetence...