Friday, the President of the United States had an hour long press conference to reassure the American population about his government's response to the Coronavirus outbreak. He told us Google was helping the administration develop a screening website to advise users on their symptoms. He said Google had 1700 engineers working on the site, and it would be done quickly, unlike the troubled roll-out of Heathcare.gov. He had his Coronavirus Response Coordinator show a chart detailing the process the website would use.

One day later it has been revealed that there is no website.

Yeah, my confidence is restored.

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Says the President of the United States in a live address to the American people at 9PM EDT:

We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days. The new rules will go into effect Friday at midnight. These restrictions will be adjusted subject to conditions on the ground. There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings, and these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval.

Says the President of the United States in a tweet to the American people at 10:15PM EDT:

Hoping to get the payroll tax cut approved by both Republicans and Democrats, and please remember, very important for all countries & businesses to know that trade will in no way be affected by the 30-day restriction on travel from Europe. The restriction stops people not goods.

The takeaway: The President of the United States revealed on television that we trade people.

While I'm glad that he's finally taking a global pandemic seriously, I wish it wasn't the Cholera pandemic of 1849.

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When I was a kid, we used to laugh about how old and out of touch Ronald Reagan was. Hard to believe that he was only in his 60s when he became president.

In its nearly quarter-millennium history, the United States has had exactly one president who was older than 70 when he took office. He's still our current president.

Considering who is still in the running for the next term, the next president is guaranteed to be older than 70 when he takes office.

I'm sure that having back-to-back septuagenarian presidents for the first time in American history must say something about something, but I'll be damned if I know what it is.

Maybe I'll figure it out in thirty more years.

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A birthday card for friend Brian, whose birthday was yesterday.

It's you who is the shit, Brian.

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There are probably more important stories in the news, but none as entertaining as this: in his quest to prove the Earth is flat, self-proclaimed daredevil "Mad" Mike Hughes blew himself up this weekend in the California desert.

"Blew himself up" isn't really the correct phrase. His homemade steam-powered rocket, launched from the back of a tractor-trailer as part of a reality television project for the Science Channel, took off in one piece. If this had been a launch for NASA TV, the post-mortem anomaly report might have sounded something like "though the mission succeeded in achieving its primary goal of powered flight, a subsequent abrupt failure of all descent parachutes resulted in the loss of the craft." (It may or may not be a coincidence that NASA doesn't use hot water to launch rockets.)

There is no small irony in a flat-earth theorist being done in by gravity, which Einstein's general relativity theory defines not as a force but as the distortion matter creates in the curvature of spacetime. In other words, Hughes was literally flattened by a round Earth.

In the aftermath of the — what shall we call this? An accident? An incident? A punchline? — a public relations representative told the press that Hughes' oft-repeated disbelief in a round Earth was in reality nothing more than a PR stunt. That would also explain why Hughes told Space.com that his motivation for this launch was "his love for Trump and his desire to make America great again." Nobody could say such things with a straight face and mean them. At least nobody sane.

While we may never understand what would drive someone to climb into a steam-powered roman candle for the benefit of a television camera, the one thing we can say for sure is that "Mad" Mike died doing what he loved: denying science.

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If Friday's post let you feeling a little dirty, I also got you some soap!

Spotted on Twitter.com, where someone posted a response image of shit-shaped car air fresheners.

(Seriously, the frequent association between the poo emoji and chocolate just because both of them are brown probably says everything you need to know about the modern American consumer.)

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Happy Valentine's Day! I got you some candy.

Love, American style.

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Georgia junior senator Kelly Loeffler to Congress, February 3, 2020:

"As my notebooks filled up, I thought to myself, how did this case even make it to the Senate?"

Georgia senior senator David Purdue to Congress, February 4, 2020:

"It is clear now, after hearing all the testimony, that the primary motivation to ask Zelensky to look into the Biden-Burisma corruption issue was to root out corruption in the Ukraine."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to Congress, February 5, 2020:

"We will reject this incoherent case that comes nowhere near, *nowhere near* justifying the first presidential removal in history. This partisan impeachment will end today."

...

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Rush Limbaugh announced earlier this week he has "advanced" lung cancer. I'm not sure how advanced. Maybe his doctors don't know. So far as I can tell, he's been a talking tumor for years.

True story: in the 1990s, I considered myself a pretty hard-core conservative. My father had always resented authority of any sort, and I had accepted his libertarian philosophy. In a nutshell, I figured that anything that infringed on the rights of anyone was bad. It was Rush Limbaugh who changed my mind.

I don't remember the exact moment or quote, but it was sometime after the Clinton impeachment, probably the early days of Bush Jr's first term, definitely before Limbaugh outed himself as a racist on ESPN. Day after day, Limbaugh was on the air, drunk on the sound of his own voice. Though he claimed to be a great champion for reason, he constantly vilified and dehumanized the people he didn't agree with using insulting terms like "moron" and "libtard."

It was while listening to caller after caller parrot Rush's demeaning talking points railing against political correctness and anything else that he disagreed with ("mega dittos, Rush!"), I realized that I didn't enjoy listening to them. To any of them. These were, theoretically, the people who I shared ideology with. Did everyone who believed these things act this way? Was this how I wanted my friends to act? Was it how I wanted to act? The obvious answer was no.

In the years since, I've tried to be a better person and not condemn everyone who disagrees with me. (I know, I know. I said I've tried, not that I had succeeded.) I now believe that an unwavering obsession with political ideology is never as important as the people that ideology is supposed to serve. I believe in the facts, even when they are inconvenient. And unlike the President of the United States who used last night's Constitutionally-mandated State of the Union address to award Rush the Presidential Medal of Freedom for constantly blowing smoke up his ass, I've decided that the world would be a better place without anyone who abuses others the way that Rush Limbaugh does from his radio pulpit.

So thanks for helping on the road to self-improvement, Rush. Smoke one more cigar for me!

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The Hollywood Reporter reports the totally inevitable news that Disney is remaking Bambi as a "live-action feature" as a "companion piece to its remakes The Jungle Book and The Lion King." I can't tell you how much it bothers me that Disney insists on calling its computer-generated eye-candy "live-action." I also can't tell you exactly why.

A large part of it must be related to my distaste for Disney itself. I once had a great deal of respect for the company that Walt built on the back of an animated mouse. Mr. Disney was an imperfect man, but he really did believe in making disposable entertainment into art. His successors less so. These days, the powers-that-be at Disney are obsessed solely in their quest to be the only entertainment company on earth. They'll do anything that gets them an extra almighty dollar, mostly including exploiting pre-packaged nostalgia for Walt's corpse.

However, a bigger problem is the lie itself. Computers are powerful, but outside of Weird Science, they remain incapable of breathing life into binary code. Nothing about The Lion King was live action, but Disney has been very careful to avoid saying so. (For example, they refused to submit the movie for consideration for Best Animated Feature Film Oscar.) I don't know why. Movies aren't real to begin with, so why mislead people about how they are made?

It increasingly looks like we're living in a post-truth society. The man in the White House can't say two sentences without a lie. Facebook will not restrict political campaigns from spreading intentional, demonstrable mistruths in paid advertising. Enemy states are using face-switching technology to promote propaganda on social media. With politicians already doing such a great job at it, why should we let corporations continue to degrade America's tenuous grasp on "reality" any further?

Sigh. I know I'm over-reacting. It's just promotional press for a movie that I won't watch. (Unless they shoot Bambi this time.) I know I'm just getting old and weary. But these uncontested, re-reported lies are really starting to get to me. It feels like 1984 is getting closer ever day, and now it's coming soon to a theater near you.

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