I don’t think balloon boy and his saga is at all inconsistent with what’s going on macropolitically.
It’s all part of the same scam, small and large, and it’s all coming to us courtesy of the MEDIA, mainstream or not.
The balloon scam started as a human interest/potential disaster story, which the media, including FOX, followed slavishly , because they wanted ratings and wanted to cash in on the glory of finding the boy alive or the tragedy of finding him dead. All this stuff is cut from the same cultural cloth: I don’t think it’s a matter of “we should be following the important news and not this trivial stuff”.
So you suspect that people in the news business might be doing it to make a living? Remarkable.