we don't need no stinking compliance

The Six O'Clock News was a Simon and Garfunkel song.  It had two tracks, one was the six o'clock news itself, bad news from the Vietnam era, and the other track was Silent Night.  I guess the contrast between between the troubled earthly news and the hymn to the savior in the spiritual world was the point of the thing.

In the seventies a crowd of us would gather in front of the tv in the bar for the five o'clock news (time zone thing).  We all hated Nixon and the war, and we would hoot and holler as it looked like Nixon was going down the tubes and the war with him.  When Walter Cronkite (it was always CBS) proclaimed that it was time to withdraw from the war there were cheers and the clanging of beer bottles. 

In those days there were only the three networks. and the fairness doctrine was still in force, and all three networks were pretty much the same and pretty much unbiased since they all sought to appeal to everybody and offend nobody.  Of course we of the left thought they were too conservative and our brethren on the right thought they were too liberal, but all of us would have been shocked indeed to hear any of the networks blandly tell an outright lie.

I've watched the five o'clock news pretty regularly since then.  I tend to skip between them when the one I am watching is covering something I am bored with, but that's okay because I still think they are relatively the same and unbiased,

Trump's briefings used to be in the early afternoon, but then they drifted into the five o'clock slot.  At first the networks thought this would be important news about corona and preempted their programming (in this case the news) to air it, but as it quickly became apparent that it was mainly Trump insulting reporters they began to maybe skim it at the beginning to see if there is anything there and then leave it when it was apparent there wasn't,  Anymore they often don't put it on at all.

This Swedish thing has been in the forefront of the news lately.  It's kind of odd because although they were once vikings they are now viewed as very moral and reasonable, so this is not what we would expect of them.  There is a certain logic to it, bite the bullet and move on, but an awful lot of Swedes are dying. 

I wonder what government numbers Beagles is referring to that Americans don't have confidence in and therefore they aren't complying voluntarily.  And you know Americans are the assholes of the western world, we are generally not voluntarily compliant about anything.  Well actually it seems to me that most of us are at this point (two thirds in polls want to keep the lockdown), but if ten percent don't comply that negates the efforts of the ninety percent who do.

90 dead in Illinois yesterday, not good.  You know what else is not good, so far I in my tower and Beagles in his swamp are coasting pretty easily through this thing, but now it looks like there may soon be a shortage of food, and even beer..