Burning Incompetent Aliens

The Press Needs A Restart

This isn't a surprise at all and that tells you everything you need to know.

I did a screen cap of the tweet in case it gets taken down by the WaPo in a belated spasm of business competence. Like that's going to matter.

A WaPo writer saw a tweet so he called the dude's mommy. The news media's brand is now so utterly smashed that all this did was make the rubble bounce.

Back when we Catholics began to see stories of pedo priests start to leak, a lot of us wanted to hear that the Church had thrown them all out. We would have accepted parish closures in exchange for getting rid of abusers. The Church didn't do that and by hiding the creeps, they burned our brand to the ground. The news media has done that to themselves as well.

The Church can't start fresh because we represent a 2000-year continuum, but the press can. The only way to recover their utterly incinerated reputation is to form a new press organization that scrupulously polices its members, devotes itself to serving the average person and commits to total ideological equality. There is simply no way to recover from where they are right now without burning the entire institution to the ground and restarting from scratch.

It's not even worth replying to things like that tweet. At this point, what new snarks can you add?

Biden's Campaign Team Is Incompetent

Yes, the guy is going senile. Yes, he's a leaden speaker. That doesn't explain why, in the year 2020, his team can't pull off simple things like feeding him from a teleprompter and setting up a digital town hall. Here's just one example out of dozens.

What is going on here? When this is over, there are going to be some fascinating tell-all books from his campaign. Is Biden himself micromanaging things from a position of ignorance? Have all the digital professionals on the left abandoned him? Even if they have to wipe the drool off his face right before he goes on screen, there's no excuse for the failure to execute simple tasks like these.

Horrible.

Preparing For Alien Invasion

THE US WASN'T PREPARED FOR A PANDEMIC AND IT'S ALL TRUMP'S FAULT!

Err, no. Maybe we weren't prepared for this kind of pandemic, but we're not prepared for an alien invasion, either, and I don't see anyone howling to have their taxes doubled so we can establish massive underground bunkers defended by ion cannons.

Yep, we need about four times as many respirators and ICU beds as we've got. That's what you need when a crippling pneumonia sweeps through the population. If it had been a cholera clone, we'd have needed something different. If it were an arthritis epidemic, we'd need different things still.

We complain about the cost of health care and then we scream that we don't have a massive design margin built in to anticipate every possible pandemic. Maybe we need to stop screaming and accept that life can get messy sometimes.

I will say that where we are today seemed obvious to me as soon as things got out of control in Wuhan. Credit to Trump for trying to close down traffic from China and other hotspots, but I never thought that was going to do anything other than delay it.

Gratuitously returning to the press, it was no surprise that they ran with RACISM! at the start instead of suggesting we might all want to calmly prepare for what was clearly coming. They're like automatons with a limited number of procedures to execute. They have RACISM, SEXISM, RUSSIA and the other assorted ORANGE MAN BAD subroutines and that's all they can do. They're worse than useless in the best of times and this isn't the best of times.

Oh Well

Meanwhile, the weather is starting to clear here, so it's time to build my MGB's new center console from fiberglass. Pictures to follow in the coming days.

Take care, everyone.