The stupidity involved here is pretty fucking amazing:
The sudden closure of El Paso's airspace Wednesday came sometime after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials used an anti-drone laser that was provided by the military to shoot down objects that were later identified as party balloons, four people familiar with the matter said.
The technology was used without coordinating with officials from the Federal Aviation Administration, the people said.
The testing of U.S. military-owned laser technology was taking place in the proximity of the airport. The FAA responded by issuing a “temporary flight restriction notice,” which was to shut down the airspace for 10 days. It prevented flights, including helicopters used for medical transport, below 18,000 feet. The airport is a major hub for the region, with more than 50 flights scheduled every day.
Medevac flights had to be diverted to Las Cruces, 45 minutes away by ground ambulance.
Anyway, I was wrong on Wednesday when I thought that this was a prelude to droning Mexico, and I’m glad to be wrong, but my God CBP and ICE are so god damned incompetent. You can’t just go around shooting off lasers at a military base (Fort Bliss) that is right next to an airport.
I listened to almost all of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Wednesday mañanera (daily press conference) so I could see how she reacted to this news, but by the time that someone asked her about it, the airspace had been reopened. She of course didn’t say much, other than she’d look into it.
That press conference was almost completely devoted to talking about measles in Mexico, which I wrote about the other day. The reason is that right wing media have decided to tell lies about the vaccine supply in Mexico. Even though the government has procured 28 million doses, the right wing had tried to push lies stating that there was a shortage. Claudia and Health Minister Dr. David Kershenobich were tag teaming for almost two hours pounding home the message that there’s plenty of vaccine, that it is going to be prioritized to children but adults in areas with outbreaks would be getting it, too, so the outbreak can be halted.
Some screenshots and commentary because I think it’s an interesting piece of political communication:
National Strategy for Measles Care - How was the outbreak in Chihuahua controlled? VACCINATION!
Chihuahua is the biggest, by area, state in Mexico, with ~3.8 million residents. Over 1/3 were vaccinated to control the outbreak. That gives us an idea of what it will take to control the outbreaks in the US.
This graph shows the measles antibody levels in the blood samples taken by a yearly health survey. “Edad” is age range — as you can see, the older folks have less immunity (red means no antibodies). This is due to a number of factors: one was that the second dose of vaccine was normally given at age 6. Now they give it at 18 months.
David Kershenobich, MD PhD, Minister of Health.
Kershenobich was called to the podium repeatedly by Claudia and reporters — he related one new-to-me fact that the first case in Chihuahua came from a visitor to a Mennonite colony in Texas, but the disease in Texas came from a colony in Alberta. The two worst places in North American (Alberta and Texas) did their job of sucking really well here.
Claudia was asked what could be done about the lies, and her response was “inform, inform, inform.” At the end, she introduced the regular Wednesday episode of “Lie Detector”, which is a packaged-for-social short video debunking lies. The vaccine lie was one of them.
We regularly decry the lack of left wing media in the US, but one thing that Claudia and her predecessor AMLO have done is have a two-hour morning press conference. This is a smart use of free media, plus:
Lies are called lies.
She’s not afraid of publicizing lies to “put them in the mainstream” because she and the rest of her government are aware that the lies are already out there.
She and her team say it, over and over again. The same facts were repeated, patiently, by her and her super-credible Minister of Health.
The horrible irony here is that Claudia, Dr. Kershenobich and the rest were working their asses off to show that they were going to get enough shots in arms to stop a measles outbreak. Here in the rich “superpower”, only a few are working their asses off to convince people to get vaccinated.
