Mossachter Charry writes: Following lurid :

I think I was envisioning a discussion about whether the balance of content -- more personal, more wonky, more geopolitical, more cock jokes -- could/should be tweaked at all, and whether some people were frustrated, many people were frustrated, only one person was frustrated, whatever.

For my two cents - more variety. All you assholes have your own niche interests and have worthwhile things to say about them: board games, national park management, church politics, water policy, Native affairs, policing, whatever.

Heebie's take: This is great! All you nerds can boil your weird pasttime interest into a short guest post. You must be so sick of my perspective by now. Yet I continue to have so much glorious power here.

As a shallow person, I do love the personal threads. I was vaguely wondering if the Affairs Post the other week would turn confessorial, the way they have in the past, but I guess those requests have to be made explicit, or maybe our judgement was just all worse a decade ago.

The other day, Trump took a question about blaming Asian Americans for COVID-19, and he responded by talking about the reverse allegation: that Americans brought the novel Coronavirus to China. Transcript:

Q: Mr. President, on Monday, did you speak with Chinese President Xi before you urged Americans to not blame Asian Americans for the coronavirus? We noticed that you've backed off of that language. I know you're speaking with him again tonight.

THE PRESIDENT: No, I didn't. I'm speaking to him tonight. It's scheduled to go tonight. I'll have a call with President Xi of China. I have a very good relationship.

No, I didn't like when they came up. And it -- it wasn't him. Somebody at a lower level -- mid-level -- we found out, pretty much. But they made a statement that our soldiers brought it into China. No, it came from China. [my emphasis]

After more rambling by DJT, the exchange continued:

Q Did President Xi -- Mr. President, did President Xi ask you to -- to calm that language down or to not use that language?

THE PRESIDENT: He never asked me to calm it down, no. Somebody might have spoken to somebody, but nobody spoke to me about it.

That bit about low-level/mid-level people caught my ear when I heard it, because it reveals how Trump (and many managers) view the workforce. For those who share Trump's perspective, the "high-level" people matter the most, know the most, and are generally the most valuable employees in any organization.

For those of us who have actually worked as "low-level" workers, there's an instinct in the opposite direction: the frontline workers know what's really going on; management often doesn't have a fucking clue.