Random Thoughts
17th December 2020
Severian does some oversharing.
Fantasies of Competence: I want to say it was reader WOPR (please correct me if I’m wrong) who noted a while back that most 1990s entertainment would be impossible to “reboot” now, simply because so much of it presumes a baseline level of social and especially governmental competence. Take The X- Files, for instance. The “hot take” on the show back then was that it reflected our widespread social unease with an all-powerful government. The truth is out there!
Thirty years on, we can only dream of a government competent enough to cover up contact with extraterrestrials. As someone remarked at Z Man’s the other day, our government is now so retarded, Eric Swalwell — a high-ranking member of the House intelligence committee and putative presidential candidate — couldn’t successfully bone a hooker. Sorry, gang, the aliens won’t be stopping by; they only want to make contact with intelligent life.
I remember watching tons of secret-agent movies in which the CIA had all sorts of cutting-edge tech gear and rolling my eyes because I knew from six years of military service that government gear is always about twenty years behind what you can buy on the open market.
December 18th, 2020 at 07:16
And yet they are on the verge of dumping Trump. They may not be sublte but it appears they are affective.