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We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant too boot.
They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.
It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces. Here’s the typical resume of one of these hacks:
- Went to high school, and never went to parties
- Went to college, majored in journalism, and never went to parties
- Went to journalism grad school, and never went to parties
- Works in the media, and goes to Manhattan/Georgetown cocktail parties
This apparently qualifies them to explain to people like us who have actually done something in our lives how stuff is supposed to work.
Each of them is an Official Junior Epidemiologist now, weighing-in on curve flattening and RO rates like they have any idea what any of it means. What’s really funny is how they now want to decide what we should hear by censoring the president and his team’s press conferences and then reporting to us only what they consider to be things we should know. Yes, the media presumes to decide what we need to know, not Dr. Fauci, not Dr. Brix, no, the media. Because the media is full of smart people who know stuff or something.
Well, its record is poor. The media largely fell for the Imperial College Apocalypse Flu scenario, but then they wanted to. It’s more fun to be chronicling the Fall of Rome than Just Another Day in the Third Century A.D. under Emperor Elagabalus. The doomsayers ended up walking back their zillion dead to a few thousand dead, and the media just sort of ignored it because “Phew! Dodged a bullet!” doesn’t have the same resonance as “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE (and it’s Trump’s fault, not our ChiCom friends’ fault).”
Another hitherto unknown skill that the media believes it possesses is logistics. “Why hasn’t Trump commanded a million ventilators to appear?!” the reporters demand. It’s pretty easy to see where they might have gotten the idea that the moment one articulates a desire to possess something that it magically appears. Capitalism has pretty much made that a reality. If you want something, you can go to a store and get it 24/7, or you can go on Amazon and it’ll be at your Manhattan apartment in 48 hours. Since they have never built anything or transported anything or distributed anything, only benefited from the labor of the unhip people who do those things, it’s only natural that the delayed adolescents who make up our media class imagine that material goods can be simply wished into being. After all, for all practical purposes during normal times, because of the efforts of Americans they look down upon, material goods pretty much can be simply wished into being. But prosperity takes work, not that the media would know.
Rhodes scholar Racheal Maddow mocked our Navy over the idea it could sail a floating hospital up to New York, leveraging her nautical knowledge to insist it was weeks away. It took all those water army people a week. Oh, and the ground army simultaneously built a full hospital in a few days. And, amazingly, almost none of the folks doing it attended Haaaaaarvard. But hey, our media elite has contributed – it’s accomplished…uh…um…shut up, racists!
The same people who are always telling us how smart they are and how they are morally entitled to instruct us peasants have never designed anything, engineered anything, built anything, trucked anything or assembled anything, except maybe some crappy Ikea bookcase. But they are qualified to insist that – POOF! – a bunch of N95 masks should magically appear overnight. I guess everything is easy if you don’t have to do it yourself.
What’s even more amusing is their solution to the “problem” of stuff not magically appearing, which is socialist central planning. They lambasted Trump for not using the Defense Production Act to command companies to build stuff the government wanted. Yeah, nothing like commanding civilians to do things to make them do it at a faster rate than under the snail-like, plodding pace of modern business. Of course, Trump did use the DPA once when GM started dithering – and immediately got criticized for it. Remember, when journalisming, you start from the conclusion that “TRUMP IS TERRIBLE” and work backwards.
The media types were delighted to find empty shelves in our supermarkets in the early part of the crisis, which many turned into an occasion for owning the cons over complaints about the scarcity of goods in socialist countries. Here’s the thing they missed, because they are stupid and unserious people: Those goods that are no longer on the Safeway shelves are on American families’ shelves at home. In socialist countries, there was never anything on the store shelves.
Apparently, the media class thinks there are giant warehouses with an endless supply of goods just sitting there, somewhere, waiting. They have no idea about how logistics work, how goods flow quickly from producer to market and how expected resupply levels need a few days to adjust from a 10 percent daily turnover to a 30 percent daily turnover. They have zero appreciation for inventory management because no one they know does unglamorous stuff like that.
It’s all much easier in a socialist command economy. You get nothing and like it. Or don’t like it. Whatever. Here’s your weekly bean allowance. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but access to toothpaste and toilet paper.
The best part is when the media – the same media that was collectively soiling its Dockers because that mean old Trump was barring direct flights from China because of racism and stuff – demands to know why, back in December, Trump was not commanding a zillion Wuhan Flu tests, a zillion masks, and a zillion ventilators be created, while locking down all of America. Leaving aside the whole lack of an enumerated power to do that thing, in what world would have Trump have convinced anyone – least of all the media that was slobbering over his bogus impeachment at the time – that some bat soup-derived pathogen in BumFoo, China, was going to black swan all over America’s economy? The lack of seriousness by the people who presume to be reporting the news to us is more breathtaking than the damn ChiCom grippe.
Our media is garbage, full of clowns and dilettantes with no experience and less common sense. The media is now complaining that the pandemic is hurting its industry badly and that some of the media may go under because of the Woking Pneumonia. Well, I guess you can’t paint anything all black.
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