Lockdowns Didn’t Work

I came across a Powerline post that confirmed what I expected to see in the media and scientific community, only several months too early.  I wasn’t expecting reconsiderations of our Corona-policies until after November 3^rd, but here you go anyway. The post, on a study in The Lancet ran the known data about government actions taken across the globe to fight COVID-19 and came to some interesting, and if you’re a journalist or on twitter, counter-intuitive conclusions.

But before I get to that, first a disclaimer about models. I’m a model skeptic as I’ve noted on more than one occasion.  So I’ve been happy to rip on them for their near constant failed predictions.  So, why I am more inclined to look at this one less skeptically?  This isn’t a model that is making predictions based on incomplete information, it’s a model looking back at what’s already happened, and trying to find correlations.

That’s useful.

But let’s get right to the meat.

“Increasing COVID-19 caseloads were associated with countries with higher obesity, median population age and longer time to border closures from the first reported case. Increased mortality per million was significantly associated with higher obesity prevalence and per capita gross domestic product (GDP). Reduced income dispersion reduced mortality and the number of critical cases. Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people. However, full lockdowns and reduced country vulnerability to biological threats (i.e. high scores on the global health security scale for risk environment) were significantly associated with increased patient recovery rates. “

Those are some interesting findings.  And by interesting I mean fairly obvious.  Old fat people were associated higher mortality, as well as longer times to closing national borders. Lockdowns on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any correlation to lower mortality.

Also…

“A potential protective effect of smoking was identified in a recent evaluation of 17 million adult patients within the National Health Service of the United Kingdom, with 5683 COVID related deaths. In their analysis, current smokers were associated with a reduced risk of COVID-19 related mortality.“

So instead of locking down and destroying our economy and ruining millions of lives, we should have just gotten skinny and started smoking.

I’ll have to remember this for the next Black Death.

A Sampling of Light Beers

Light beers are not part of my regular beer diet.  I consider kicking back and having a beer a treat, so I can’t be concerned overly much about how it affects the bottom line of my bathroom scale. Of course, beers are not for every day in my world.  I’m saving that sort of wacky lifestyle for retirement.  But I do come across a light beer now and again and have made a few snap judgments about some of them.

Warning: I must caveat that all light beers taste like water with a little bit of beer mixed in, so take that into consideration when considering the ratings.

 

Bud Light Orange

Carbs: 14.3    Calories: 142

Beers with flavors are somewhat of a crapshoot, and that goes double with light beers.  The Orange “taste” really does seem to imitate an orange artificial taste, if that’s what you are looking for.  It started out OK but by the end of the beer, I was really getting sick of that fake orange.

Rating:  Would not buy again

Yuengling Flight

Carbs: 2.6      Calories: 95

Although this beer shares the light beer problem of being watery, it’s actually not that watery.  In other words, it’s in the upper tier of light beers just on that alone.  However it’s still watery enough that it’s somewhat lacking in flavor. And although I felt the faint hint of an aftertaste, it never quite got there, which, in the light beer arena, is not bad.

Rating:  OK if that’s what is left

IC Light Mango Premium Light Beer

 

Carbs:            5.3      Calories:  126.50   (for a pint)

Small breweries and microbrews don’t usually dip into the Light Beer market since almost always their inspiration is creating flavorful, delicious beers, but Pittsburg Brewing dared dip its toes into it, and came up with a not bad beer. Again, it’s a light beer, but the flavor is there, if of course muted, and diluted.  However on a hot day, this seems like a good choice.

Rating: Pretty good for a Lite

Bud Light Platinum Lager

 

Carbs: 4.4      Calories: 137

This is described as “triple filtered” so that sounds important.  Plus it’s called Platinum, which sounds fancy.  As far as light beers go, I couldn’t find too much to complain about, but it’s another side reminder that no one is searching out light beers for their full, rich taste.

Rating: Could be a great mixer with a real beer.

 

 

 

Blue Moon LightSky Citrus Wheat

 

I could keep going on this light beer list.  There are, after all, plenty of light beers to choose from, but after trying this, I decided to stop. I’ve drank enough light beers to know that the flavor runs from bad to OK.  None of them are great enough to enjoy for flavor on it’s own. But this one seems to hit the top levels of “OK.”  The promise of the name is actually met for this beer.  It has a faint hint of citrus and it’s somewhat wheaty.  Watery?  Sure, but not to the degree that the others are. That’s important.

Rating:  If you are going to get Light Beer, get this one.

This may sound like a very lackluster review of beers, but light beers fill a niche for people who want to continue to drink, but are wary of the sheer number of carbs and calories that go along with it.  If you are throwing a party or get-together, you need to have light beers available to accommodate the people who are on nutrition alert.  Not only that, it’s a good way to cut a beer that you’ve decided you don’t like that much.  It’s a useful household item, and I don’t mind having them around.

One Nation, Divisible

 

Just when you think the establishment GOP couldn’t sink any lower…

Republican senators Johnson, Lankford propose making Juneteenth a federal holiday and dropping Columbus Day

In response to bipartisan efforts to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, Republican Sens. Ron Johnson and James Lankford have proposed eliminating a different federal holiday “in exchange.”

The choice?

Columbus Day.

“We support celebrating emancipation with a federal holiday but believe we should eliminate a current holiday in exchange. We chose Columbus Day as a holiday that is lightly celebrated, and least disruptive to Americans’ schedules,” Johnson, of Wisconsin, said in a statement Wednesday.

Johnson and Lankford of Oklahoma will be seeking to amend a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday.

This is the “Republican” response? What happened to all of that standing athwart history stuff?  This isn’t standing athwart; it’s running over with a steamroller.  What could possibly be conservative about this?

Johnson said adding to the number of federal holidays would give federal workers an additional day of paid leave and increase the government’s costs. He called his amendment a “counter-proposal that does not put us further in debt.”

Oh this.  Gotcha.

The further we get from the civil war and slavery, the more enflamed we become by it.

In the continued undoing of e pluribus unum, The NFL makes its contribution.

NFL will play Black national anthem ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ before each Week 1 game

Starting with the nationally televised regular-season opener between the Houston Texans and Kansas City Chiefs on Sept. 10, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the Black national anthem, will be performed before every Week 1 kickoff, before “The Star-Spangled Banner,” according to a person familiar with ongoing discussions. The person spoke to USA TODAY Sports on condition of anonymity because plans have not yet been finalized and announced by NFL officials.

I’ll freely admit my ignorance that there even is a “Black National Anthem.”  I also don’t know the American Indian, Hispanic, or LGBTQWERTY national anthems either, but I’ve a feeling I’ll be educated on that soon enough.  And as for the “White National Anthem,” would that be The Star Spangled Banner?  Serious question I’m afraid.  I’ve no idea if we are still one country anymore, or if we’ve already spun off into our identity groups fighting over the spoils.

The George Floyd effect may turn out to be the most socially significant movement in American history, not the least because it seems to be effectively ending US history.  When everything that happened the day before yesterday becomes verboten, and we no longer even aspire to be one country, what holds us together?

Something to think about this July 4^th; when greater and greater numbers of the nationality formerly known as Americans look at the flag and think, “not my country,” and “not my independence day.”  Of course, this is a wave of hysteria and the tide could well break  and thing return to something close to normal, but the longer it goes on, the more we’re looking at a new normal, when everyone has their own independence day, holidays, and carefully nurtured grievances.

Happy Independence Day.  I hope the next one is better than this one, or that there simply is a next one.

 

Is there a limit to what we must give up?

On the radio last week (or the week before-time moves differently in 2020), I heard a talk show host make the argument that because of racism, white people are just going to have to give up some things.  He was referring specifically to Confederate flags at NASCAR, but it could include the myriad cancelling’s that the Twitter Red Guards have instituted in the past few weeks since George Floyd’s death.  There was some self-canceling as well. Tina Fey, creator of 30 Rock requested that three 30 Rock episodes be removed from streaming because of blackface episodes. The creator of Scrubs also requested that three of their episodes be removed due to blackface episodes.  This of course is as we’ve always suspected; blackface always comes in threes.

These are mini-tragedies since none of these episodes were racist and actually handled the entire blackface issue in show (spoiler-it’s NOT OK!).  But what really got me in the gut was the removal of the “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” episode of Community.

The 21^st Century has not been kind to the venerable television format of the sitcom.  Partially, it’s because the format is just tired.  Since the 1950’s almost every possible permutation has been done; and then done again…and then again, and again, and again.  Also as a general rule, TV writers and creators have not gotten any smarter or more creative. So a show like Community, when it premiered in 2009, was quite a revelation.  Not in ratings of course, but in tight writing, quirky characters, and good laughs.  Think of it, a sitcom that was actually funny.  Believe it or not, that used to actually be a thing.

The actual episode wasn’t of course about race, Advanced Dungeon’s and Dragons, as Wikipedia described the episode, was about…

“The episode is introduced in flashback, narrated by a female narrator who explains the plight of Neil, a student at Greendale who had hoped that the stigma of teasing and name-calling from other schools would not carry over to Greendale. However, he soon became known as “Fat Neil”, causing him to become very depressed. Jeff observed his change and tried to cheer Neil up by feigning interest in Neil’s favorite pastime, Dungeons & Dragons. When Neil gave Jeff all his Dungeons & Dragons books, saying that he didn’t need them any more, Jeff worried that Neil had become suicidal. Jeff worked with the rest of the study group to invite Neil to play a game of Dungeons & Dragons with them to cheer his spirits. The group specifically did not invite “Pierce the Insensitive”, worried that Pierce would tease Neil.”

So it’s an episode about depression, told through the gameplay of Dungeon’s and Dragons, years before shows such as Critical Role began integrating a D & D game into episodic television, and it was done brilliantly, combining both the round-the-table gameplay with the actual story being told through the game.  It was easily in the top 10 Community episodes, and now it’s gone.

But wait you ask, what about the blackface?

Señor Chang (Ken Jeong) shows up dressed as a Drow, or Dark Elf.  Get ready, here it is!

 

So for that, we lose this episode to the memory hole.

So it’s not blackface at all, but a character cosplaying an imaginary species that doesn’t exist. But who has time to figure out what’s offensive and what isn’t?  Ban it all!

Since all of the episode-vanishing, statue vandalizing, history vanquishing, and imaginary noose hysteria has nothing to do racism or solving any racial issue, my prediction is that no racial issue gets solved no matter what you throw off the ship.  Even burning the entire Western canon isn’t going to satisfy a mob, either a real torch bearing one or a twitter one, because a mob can’t be satisfied, they’re a mob.

Public Health Strikes Again

The nation’s public health system keeps stepping on its own contact tracing.  It’s almost as if they are anxious to show the public how incompetent and unserious they are, and then daring us to do something about it.  The headline says it all:

NYC COVID-19 Contact Tracers Not Asking About George Floyd Protest Participation, Despite Fears of New Virus Wave

Over the two last weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio and others have voiced concerns that packed police brutality protests across the city could trigger a new wave of COVID-19 infections.

Whether or not that’s the case, however, remains unknown — and de Blasio’s team won’t be directly trying to find out.

The hundreds of contact tracing workers hired by the city under de Blasio’s new “test and trace” campaign have been instructed not to ask anyone who’s tested positive for COVID-19 whether they recently attended a demonstration, City Hall confirmed to THE CITY.

Of course according to SCIENCE, shoulder to shoulder protesting has no risk of exposure to COVID-19 as long as the protest is against racism and police brutality.  That’s why Bill de Blasio had no problem joining the marching with no ill effects whatsoever…

Hizzoner wasn’t feeling well on Monday and canceled all public events, a day after marching in the streets — but still refuses to get tested for coronavirus.

“The mayor woke up under the weather. He’s taking the day to recuperate and we should be back to normal programming tomorrow,” his spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein said in a text message.

“We don’t believe it’s COVID-related,” she added, later stating he had a stomach bug.

Goldstein said Hizzoner wouldn’t seek a coronavirus test and confirmed he hasn’t gotten one since the start of the pandemic.

Sometimes, you just have to chuckle…

But ultimately, de Blasio is just a politician. What about the medical professionals, with years of experience?  That brings us to the most trusted man in America, Dr Fauci.  In speaking of the ever changing face mask recommendations:

He also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.

He explained that public health experts “were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”

So in other words, Fauci lied, and people died.

Now I’m perfectly OK with the government hoarding face masks and other PPE for medical personnel and first responders.  That makes perfect sense to me.  But to lie about it is really beyond the pale.  And that’s what they should have said in the first place; yes masks are effective but we don’t recommend them for the general public because the supply is limited and we need them for people who have a much higher chance of encountering the virus.  Now the entire public health community has blown its credibility.  Why should we listen to them now?  They’re self-admitted liars.

One lesson to take away from this is when the country faces a real infectious disease public health emergency, with Ebola like fatality rates, this country is screwed.

 

A Nation Divided between Normal and Woke

Last August, I commented on a New York Times article that opined that Trump’s chance to win re-election was slim, simply due to demographic changes that are leading to a larger and larger nonwhite electorate that has little connection to anything that the GOP has traditionally stood for.  Of course, demography isn’t the only factor in an election, but it’s a pretty big one, and for political scientists has been a reliable guide, at least for those who’ve dared pick up the 10 foot pole to poke at it.

But it’s not the only thing obviously, and 2020 has already revealed it to be such a dumpster fire that who knows what could happen?  Look how quickly the Coronavirus was forgotten to move on to the next hysteria, race.

The current, post George Floyd hysterical moment, like the post Dylann Roof era, which lead to the banning of The Dukes of Hazzard from the airwaves, has taken on a crazed life of its own, as multiple numbers of business people and celebrities found themselves cancelled, for issues having nothing to do with George Floyd. However let’s face it, Fawlty Towers was asking for it.

Simply, wokeism, is insanity.  Or more specifically, it’s like a cross between a mental illness and a religion.  The constant struggle sessions over being “more woke than thou” leading to upping the woke ante more and more is what accounts for George Floyd’s death leading to actor Hartley Sawyer’s firing from The Flash; it’s just a big ball of hysteria rolling downhill picking up more and more victims in it’s wake.

So now, George Floyd has led to “CHAZ” an Antifa secession of a few blocks of Seattle, whose leader may find that he’s been canceled over homophobic tweets…

It’s ridiculous, and getting more so.  I wrote about the Defund the Police movement last week, and despite several days of various liberal articles trying to smooth it over by saying, no, defunding the police really means police reform, no; the activists are still insisting that defund the police means….defund the police.

And that has what to do with the election?

Most people liberal or not, are just not cool with that. A recent ABC poll showed that 64% oppose defunding the police.  The idea that this is a winner with suburban moms, the group that Democrats thought they had grabbed back in 2018, is absurd.  To be fair, Biden has demurred on the “defund the police” idea for now, but how long can the handlers who operate the Biden puppet resist the pull of the activists?

But forget suburban moms for a moment.  Deep in the heart of woke country even some of our tech elites are getting sick of it.  LinkedIn recently had a Townhall on race which normally would have gone the way these things normally go when held in the open; Black Lives Matter, fight racism, ect…and so on.  But this time there was an option for anonymous comments.  As The Daily Beast reports:

“We’ll spend most of our time together in open discussion, so please consider bringing questions or experiences you’d like to share,” read the invitation email to staff.

LinkedIn employees followed those instructions precisely. The results were a disaster.

Throughout the meeting, which was conducted by videochat and featured a sidebar where employees could leave comments, several anonymous staffers shared opinions echoing the detractors and skeptics of the Black Lives Matter movement. Several of these commenters criticized LinkedIn’s position on diversity hiring, equating such practices with racism against white people.

“As a non-minority, all this talk makes me feel like I am supposed to feel guilty of my skin color. I feel like I should let someone less qualified fill my position. Is that ok? It appears that I am a prisoner of my birth,” one commenter wrote. “This is not what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted for anyone.”

“I believe giving any racial group privilege over others in a zero sum game would not get any support by others. Any thoughts on hurting others while giving privileges with the rosy name called diversity?” read another employee comment.

“George’s killers need to be tried according to law. But how can hiring more minorities into manager roles and C-suite positions address cop racism? I thought hiring at LinkedIn is based on merit alone.”

That’s not what we usually hear from Silicon Valley, but on the other hand, we don’t usually get to hear anonymous comments either.

I’ve wondered for years when we would finally hit Peak Woke, the point when wokism is so ridiculous it collapses in on itself and is devoured by common sense forces.  It hasn’t happened yet, but there hasn’t been a real pushback to it either. But if even Silicon Valley is starting to show dissent…

I’m not predicting a public push back to this.  The risk is too great.  People can lose their jobs or even face death threats.  But once in the voting booth, it may be a different story.  It’s possible that the political re-alignment the country has been going through that began with Trump could veer off in unexpected ways.  We’ve mostly been looking at the 2020 election as elite vs deplorable,  managerial class vs blue collar workers, nationalists vs globalists, even the comments page vs the editorial board.  But this year it could spin around to normal people vs the Woke.

This of course could benefit Trump, but he has some issues of his own.  He’s not exactly been the avatar of normalcy as President.  If Trump, simply by manner, could look and act normal for a few months, while those on the Democratic side slide further and further off to crazy land, he could persuade a lot of normally Democratic voters who aren’t crazy to side, however unwillingly, with Trump.  That’s a big ask, but on the other hand, I’m sure Trump wants to win.

And when Trump is asked what he thinks about Black Lives Matter, he better have an answer.

It was never about “Science”

The post, signed by 1,200 public health specialists, advocating for public demonstrations in spite of the threat of COVID-19, has effectively put the stake in the heart of the idea that the lockdowns were about public health.  Strolling through the credentials, there are plenty of Professors, Epidemiologists, and other medical doctors who’ve suddenly discovered that the threat of white supremacy outweighs the threat of the virus.

This of course, is pretty much a confirmation of what I and many others suspected, that it was never about science.  So if you’ve been yapping about “science” being the reason for the lockdowns for the past few months, give it a rest, you’ve been found out.

So no to church, yes to rioting, because science.

Consider some of the credentialed scientists who are extolling their newfound woke science.

And who is Dr Nuzzo?  According to her Wikipedia bio:

“Jennifer Nuzzo (born August 27, 1977) is an American epidemiologist, an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering and the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Nuzzo co-lead the development of the Global Health Security Index, an assessment of global health security capabilities in 195 countries, performed by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security together with The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). She is the director and principal investigator of the Outbreak Observatory, a research project working to document infectious disease outbreaks and how governments respond to them. Nuzzo serves as an associate editor of the Health Security journal.

Nuzzo has often appeared in the media discussing how health systems to respond to outbreaks. She has helped bring attention to dangers of delaying vaccination,the spread of the ebola virus, and the 2019–2020 coronavirus pandemic.”

Frankly, she sounds like she is qualified and credentialed out the ass, and is still an idiot. After this, why should I ever listen to her?  Woke Science isn’t science; it’s just wokeness with credentials.

Of course, I can scarcely imagine the anger of someone who was denied the right to attend a loved one’s funeral, or spend their last moments with them as they lay dying.  Would any of those people ever trust public health officials again?

Next up of course, are the evil twins to the two faced public health officials,  the two faced politician.  New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy gives a great twitter example of this kind of hypocrisy (thanks to lefty journalist Glenn Greenwald for pointing these out).

But guided by data, not emotion is so last month.  Now mass gatherings are great!

…and at the same time, we continue the Potemkin village of public health.

This of course blends right into the Face Mask madness I wrote about a few weeks ago.  From the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine:

As the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic continues to explode, hospital systems are scrambling to intensify their measures for protecting patients and health care workers from the virus. An increasing number of frontline providers are wondering whether this effort should include universal use of masks by all health care workers. Universal masking is already standard practice in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other parts of Asia and has recently been adopted by a handful of U.S. hospitals.

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

Aww, so it was just to make us feel better!

Is there anything we’ve been told that’s true?

In a way, this is a return to what we went through in 1968-1969 with the Hong Kong Flu.  As I wrote about last month, we went through a pandemic during the same time period that we went through “the Prague Spring, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the White Album was released, and of course, man landing on the moon and Woodstock.”

And Vietnam of course.

I suppose Pandemic hysteria is what you freak out about when nothing else is going on.  Well now there is a lot more going on.

“Defund the Police!”

Trying to parse the policy preferences of a mob is difficult at best. “End Racism,” or “Equality Now” tell me nothing about how to achieve that.  During the civil rights era, there were marches to end specific practices or support specific legislation.  This?  Who knows…

Well wait, there actually is one policy suggestion I’ve seen in the many images and videos of these protest/riots:

I think it goes without saying that defunding the police is, in a wheelbarrow of stupid ideas, one of the stupidest.  Even during the Obama era, during the Ferguson and Baltimore riots, there were no calls to do that.  But luckily, Democrat and leftist politicians are too canny to do anything so dumb…

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, City Officials Cutting $100 Million-$150 Million From LAPD Budget, Funds To Be Reinvested In Communities Of Color

“We will not be increasing out police budget,” said the mayor. That allocation is pegged at $1.8 billion in the mayor’s previously proposed budget.

Garcetti spoke of “reinvesting in black communities and communities of color.”

The mayor proceeded to announce $250 million in cuts to the proposed budget and to reallocate those dollars to communities of color, “so we can invest in jobs, in education and healing.” L.A. Police Commission President Eileen Decker then announced that $100 million-$150 million of those cuts would come from the police department budget.

L.A. City Council President Nury Martinez made it official Wednesday by introducing a motion to cut LAPD funding, “as we reset our priorities in the wake of the murder of #GeorgeFloyd. This is just one small step. We cannot talk about change, we have to be about change,” Martinez tweeted.

Well that will certainly be some change.

Of course that isn’t nearly good enough.

The amount of police spending in L.A. has long been a source of frustration for activists. This year, Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles teamed up with other grassroots organizations to survey Angelenos about their budget priorities and draft their People’s Budget.

Under their alternative spending plan for the coming year, police would receive only 5.7% of the city’s general fund — a reduction of nearly 90% compared with the mayor’s budget.

Well that sounds interesting.

Naturally this lead to some interesting twitter commentary.

Of course this led to some amusing comments from the right.

And an actual suggestion.

Frankly I’m with Byron York on this one.  I would love to see how this experiment plays out in some big blue cities.

And if they don’t defund their police, they’re racist.

Rush’s Conversation with The Breakfast Club was a Waste of Time

In what I would call a surprise move, Rush Limbaugh informed his audience today that he had pretaped a conversation with the popular Radio Show, The Breakfast Club. Of course the killing of George Floyd in the annals of popular outrage over police killings of unarmed Black men is an unusual one in that unlike most others, there is only one side.  This isn’t a Michael Brown situation, in which the details of the killing were disagreed with.  With Floyd, everyone knows what happened, no one is arguing about the details, no one is arguing that Floyd asked for it, and everyone agrees that it was horrible and deserves justice.

So naturally the country had the worst rioting in years.

What to make of a situation in which the country is united, yet also tearing itself apart?  Given the odd unity of the country on George Floyd, and Rush’s own disgust with the crime as expressed on his show last week, he took the initiative to reach out to the show with the largest Black radio audience to…what?  Seek common ground?  Honestly I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish but it did make for fascinating radio.  The full transcript is here, but I do have a few comments on some of the points that were gone over.

First a general observation; The Breakfast Club maintained a low level of hostility towards Rush throughout the interview while Rush clearly was trying to reach out with a “come let us reason together” type of attitude.  However there seemed to be no reciprocation of that.  Just a hat tip for negotiators, the person who reaches out puts themselves in a position of weakness.  Here is a good example:

DJ ENVY: You talk about peacefully protest, right? And you were very opinionated about Colin Kaepernick when he was peacefully protesting, right? And now people are saying, “Oh, they’re not peacefully protesting.” This is the same thing Colin Kaepernick was kneeling for that the world was so upset about and the world said he’s taking it too far and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is exactly the reason why he was kneeling and protesting…

RUSH: Look, I – (crosstalk)

DJ ENVY: And looked at us like, yeah, I’m doing it and what?

RUSH: Guys, I’m trying to tell you, I’m all with you, I’m a thousand percent with you on this. This is why I wanted to talk to you because I know that there are — you know, we all have preconceptions that we live under and biases that we live under, and I wanted to reach out to you guys specifically, you were the ones that I was told to speak to, that this is intolerable. Now — but — (crosstalk)

I have to admit, Rush didn’t come out looking good in this exchange, particularly with the easy bait of Kaepernick dangling before him.  Anyone who had actually listened to Kaepernick knew that his “taking a knee” was about rejection of the country, not any particular list of social justice grievances.  He said it himself, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color…”  For Kaepernick, it was always about America (or Amerikkka as he might spell it).

The other, and in my opinion more troubling issue was the total lack of similar vocabulary.

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: I have a question for you. I want to know. How are you gonna use your privilege as a white male to combat this prejudice. You got a direct line to Donald Trump. (crosstalk)

RUSH: No, wait a minute, I don’t buy into the notion of white privilege. See, I think that’s a liberal —

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: You’re being —

RUSH: That’s a liberal — (crosstalk)

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: You’re being delusional.

RUSH: — political construct right along the lines of political correctness. It’s designed to intimidate and get people to shut up and admit they’re guilty of doing things they haven’t done. I don’t have any white privilege — (crosstalk)

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Do you know what white privilege is? White privilege is that what happened to George Floyd would not have happened to a white man.

RUSH: If what happened to George Floyd had happened to a white man we probably wouldn’t have even heard about it.

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Huh?

DJ ENVY: We definitely would have heard about it. You definitely —

RUSH: You think so? If George Floyd — if George — if George — (crosstalk)

DJ ENVY: — be killed by –(crosstalk)

ANGELA YEE: Yeah, I would like to — (crosstalk)

RUSH: I don’t think — if George Floyd — (crosstalk)

ANGELA YEE: Rush, there’s a lot of instances where this does happen and we don’t hear about it. There’s a lot of times that there’s no video that exists and then people are — police officers lie and they say this is what happened, just like we’ve seen it happen so many different times where fortunately there was video. There’s a lot of cases that won’t make it.

RUSH: I think – (crosstalk)

ANGELA YEE: That don’t go viral. (crosstalk)

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Never hear about it, that never make it to TV, that never make it to social media because there is no phones, there is — (crosstalk)

RUSH: I think you misunderstood what I said, guys. I said if George Floyd were white, we wouldn’t have heard of this. And if the same thing had happened to him, we wouldn’t have heard about it, it wouldn’t be — you know, we — (crosstalk)

It’s clear The Breakfast Club cannot conceive of a situation in which an unarmed white person is killed by the police and it go unremarked, “White privilege is that what happened to George Floyd would not have happened to a white man.” 

But what does actual data reveal?

The Washington Post has a database of police shootings and it reveals data that goes against the narrative.  For example:

In 2019, 9 unarmed black people were killed by the police.

In 2019, 19 unarmed white people were killed by the police

Does anyone know any of their names?  Yet I’m sure if you presented those figures to Charlemagne Tha God, he simply wouldn’t believe you, so his entire definition of White Privilege, based on this radio interview, is false.

Even if Rush had confronted The Breakfast Club on the actual data, I don’t think it would matter.  In fact, I can’t remember the last time real data or facts have mattered, but it definitely doesn’t matter if you don’t even bother to bring it up.   Rush needn’t have bothered.  There was never going to be any dialogue.  The Breakfast Club would have been happy to accept Rush’s surrender, but they weren’t interested in having a conversation.

 

Batwoman Crashes and Burns

I didn’t know who Ruby Rose was when she was cast as the main lead in Batwoman. She didn’t seem to have the physicality for the role (too thin) and was covered with weird, grotesque tattoos, but I thought, “Eh, I’ve been wrong before in casting choices,” so I was content to see how it played out.

Not that great in my opinion.  I realize official fan reaction was enthusiastic; with “official fan” being defined as the editorial guidance of nerd fan sites.  Greg Berlanti, the father of the CW Arrowverse and gay himself, specifically was looking for an LGBT actress to play the role.  Unfortunately that narrows down the choices available, so I imagine that’s how he ended up with Ruby Rose.

The show itself was so gay that Will & Grace looked straight by comparison.  Almost every subplot was gay related. Kate Kane gets kicked out of military school after being caught in flagrante delicto with her girlfriend, comes back to Gotham years later after training herself up to Bat-standards, runs into her old girlfriend who’s now married to a guy, and proceeds to try to break up her marriage and get her back.  She successfully breaks up her girlfriend’s marriage (but doesn’t get her back), starts a gay bar, romances several other girls, listens to Rachel Maddow… it’s just one rainbow flag after another.

Oh and also fights crime.

Now imagine if there was a show about a Bat crime fighter, only instead of a proud and out lesbian, it’s a straight man (I know, crazy right?  But just pretend for a minute).  This “Bat-Man” tracks down an old flame, tries to break up her marriage, and continually stalks her throughout the season, all the while developing a side business of a hook up bar and listening to Manosphere podcasts.

He would be a Bat-creep right?  But it’s different when she does it…

So with the conclusion of Season 1, Ruby Rose abruptly quits the show for reasons, and Warner Brothers thanks her for service and immediately vow to recast the character:

“…look forward to sharing its new direction, including the casting of a new lead actress and member of the LGBTQ community, in the coming months.”

So they are vowing to repeat their dumb mistake, and limit their choices once again.  Although… I admit I might really look forward to Ellen Degeneres as Batwoman, but it doesn’t seem like the producers would find that as funny as I would.  Hopefully Rue Paul is still in the running…  I don’t think the record on recasting the lead character on television shows is a particularly good one, but this seems to be an ideological imperative.

So I’m very much in the minority on this, but I regard Batwoman Season 1 as a failed experiment.  I wouldn’t recommend recasting your lead and doubling down on the same mistake.  If it were me, I would:

1. Have another character take on the Batwoman mantle.
2. Turn the show into a more ensemble show of a team of many Bat-related characters.

Obviously the producers are not going to do that since it would be an admission that season one was in fact a failed experiment, but in both scenarios, there is a rather large Bat-family of characters to draw on, including one already on the show, Camrus Johnson plays Batwoman’s man Friday Luke Fox, who in the comics becomes Batwing.  Both options allow for a long term “whatever happened to Kate Kane?” storyline.  And of course, the show should keep the villain ‘Alice’, played by Rachel Skarsten.  Skarsten’s performance as the crazed Alice was one of the few highlights of the season.

Whatever they decide, we won’t see the finished product until 2021, so they have plenty of time to tweak the concept (which they won’t).  It seems like a lot of trouble to save a show that last saw over a million viewers during the Crisis crossover. But I suppose sometimes it’s about making a statement, even if the statement is a dumb one.