Nworbrew writes: Remember sousveillance? Well, here is the real thing . From now on, the NSA can be your personal butthole surfers.

(Then there is my favourite quatrain from Bob Conquest --

"For this old Fogey is a yogi
And has been known to pass whole
Years in pursuit of the Absolute
While gazing up his arsehole."

Heebie's take: Along with a few photos of the toilets, this is in the sidebar at the link:

which is technically a link to the Guardian's science page, but made me laugh. Stare into the darkness, into the unknown, and channel your inner Carl Sagan. Your very, very inner Carl Sagan.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while.

Episode 5.

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.