Time to stop messing around

Stop messing around.

If I had one message to send to all these supposed "experts" and policymakers concerning the Coronavirus 2019 Disease (COVID-19), it would be that.

I'd put it on a billboard and post it all over the world if I could.

No matter where we stand on the pandemic and the responses to it, I do believe if there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that.

Stop messing around.

Nothing else to say, really.

As much as I grant that there's still a lot of things about COVID-19 that are unknown- including how it spreads- that doesn't mean that policymakers should get a pass for not knowing how to handle it.

That's because there's only two ways to treat this pandemic:

1) This is a super dangerous disease upon which we must do everything we can to contain it, and not relent until it's gone

Or

2) This is a disease that, while still serious, is one that we, as a society, can live with and manage. Meaning we "go back to normal", with minimally intrusive adjustments needed to manage the disease.

That's it. There is no "middle ground". There's no "we have this deadly disease going around, but please go back to work and go back to going to the shops and visiting our hotels" that our policymakers seem to have going on.

Because, if it's deadly, then do all you can to get rid of it. Meaning a three-month or a four-month or however long of a lockdown (with the appropriate bailout to the population) is needed just to get the case count to "0" and keep it to a point where you can be confident it's not spreading in your area.

If it's not deadly, and we can live with the disease circulating- as seems to be the case in North America- then we need to find a way to make every business- and I mean every business, including the festivals, live sports, bars, nightclubs, places of worship, conventions, etc.- work and minimize the risk as much as possible while minimizing the disruption to their operation.

Because this can be done, since we've done it many times before with diseases far worse than this one.

I mean, during the height of the Spanish flu, someone snapped a picture of a packed football stadium where everyone was wearing a mask. Tell me why we can't do that today.

...and, before I close, let me state that we have to get COVID-19 under control soon, meaning a matter of months. Not years.

Not just because we, as the public, have lost just about all the patience that the policymakers keep telling us to have. Especially considering there are many of us who have also lost a lot of money due to the jobs policymakers- who are, in contrast, still in their jobs- prohibited them from doing.

Mainly, it's because it's time for policymakers to put up or shut up. Ever since the start of the pandemic, it's been a cavalcade of ever-shifting positions and ever-changing decisions, many of which were contradictory and illogical. As much as I respect that information about COVID-19 evolves and evolves rapidly, it's still no excuse for the constant flip-flopping and haphazard nonsense that has constituted "the pandemic response".

Pick a strategy and get on with it. No more "let's try this and hope it works". No more "tempering our expectations". No more hemming and hawing and throwing up their hands and saying "we don't know how this disease works", only being said in a pathetic attempt to deflect from their own mishandling.

Oh, and no more outrages over some random crowd at a beach or a park. It's clear why you're doing it, politicos- because it's easier to blame us, the public, than to admit to your own mistakes.

We're no longer fooled, policymakers.

So, pick a strategy, stick to it and get us out of this mess as soon as possible. Because if the policymakers want us to keep on paying them, they need to do the job that we pay them for.

-Daniel Arnold

Welcome to the DARC.

That's right. DG's Rants has a new name- the Daniel Arnold Reality Check. Or the DARC. It's the same great content- one that will make sense of the darkness in this world- but a new name.

Welcome to the DARCside, everyone.

Upgrading our health care systems should be the real goal to beat COVID-19

A few days ago, the Canadian province of British Columbia- which includes the City of Vancouver- announced a sweeping edict of business "reopenings" that would, essentially, get about 60-70% of their economy moving again. Although BC isn't the first Canadian province to reopen to such a degree, it is the most prominent, as their move allows one of Canada's economic engines to start up again.

BC was spurred to this move when their total number of COVID-19 cases dipped into the low double digits, with the province recording only 23 new cases on May 6, 2020. While the moves are optimistic for sure, the BC edicts include a lot of "tough talk" from the government to its people, telling them that "they have the responsibility to make sure the disease doesn't come back". BC also insisted that large gatherings- like Vancouver Canucks games- and nightclubs won't reopen without a vaccine, a therapeutic or herd immunity, since they believe that "contract tracing in those environments would be impossible".

It's par for the course for a lot of jurisdictions who have also decided to "open up", and, I'll grant that, while still knee-deep in the crisis, it's probably better to be cautious about the future than overestimate your optimism, even if, logically, there's every reason to believe in that optimism.

It's highly likely that by July or August this disease will be almost completely gone in North America and we'll never have to deal with it again, but that's not a call I'd make with 100% as of this writing. It'd be foolish to base policy behind it.

However, what is also foolish to base policy behind is counting on the public buy-in to disease countermeasures as well as independent scientists who- quite rightly- don't want the pressure to end the pandemic quickly. At some point, as a policymaker, you have to figure out ways to solve the issue on your own, because relying on others isn't well, reliable.

Yet nowhere in any of that strong talk from the BC health officials was any indication that they intended to acquire more hospital equipment and resources, like hospital beds, ventilators, doctors and nurses. Perhaps it's part of an announcement that I missed, but you'd think that, in the middle of a health emergency, the stockpile of your healthcare system would be one of the things health officials would want to talk about most since without resources there can be no hope of fighting a disease.

This is, ultimately, what really bothers me about governments and their responses to COVID-19. They've pretty much put the entire burden on stopping the disease on us and done very little on their end (except talk), with many times government inaction being what exacerbated the pandemic in the first place.

What's even more frustrating is that, no matter how you really look at this disease, it's not something that isn't manageable at all if we're smart about it. Back in March governments released rather grim projections that they used to justify placing their people in some form a lockdown, projections that have proven in May to be wildly off the mark- even in their so-called "best case scenarios".

That should mean that if a second wave of COVID-19 infections were to arrive- and that's a big if- we should be able to handle it without a lockdown, either with our current stockpile or with top-ups that should be well within our governments' budgets and production capabilities.

Especially if we start topping up now, with our current wave on the wane.

Look, policymakers have to get realistic at some point. While I am optimistic that scientists will sort out a medical solution to COVID-19 sooner rather than later, it's unfair for governments to place them on a timeline when science doesn't work well like that.

Furthermore, human nature means we're all going to go back to our habits, because "COVID-19 fatigue" will set in and I doubt many of us will want to physically distance forever. We'll also all want to work and play again, like we used to, because the lockdowns were supposed to be temporary.

Besides, there's only so long you can sell a public on fear. Eventually, we regain our senses, and if our senses tell us that our governments are placing an unfair burden on us, there will only be so much of it that we can take before we fight back. Public governance, after all, is a two-way street.

Governments have asked us to make immeasurable sacrifices during this crisis and we have- as a world- more than risen to that challenge. If they want to see this crisis through, it's time governments rise up to the challenge themselves.

-Daniel Arnold

Why the worst-case COVID-19 scenario really isn't that bad

OK. Let's imagine the post-lockdown world for a moment.

It's November 17, 2024. 12:27AM, to be exact. It had been a typical fall to that point, with the weather only now turning from the nippy, crisp autumn air to the searing, blistering cold that will define the winter.

However, none of that is really on your mind right now. You just got a new job so you're out with your buddies for a night on the town, with the downtown core more packed than it usually is. Everyone is out drinking and in close quarters, but no one is bothered- in fact, everyone is hugging and high-fiving and kissing everyone else (even random strangers) at rates that, five years ago, no one could have ever imagined.

Not a soul has their cell phone out, unless it's to take down the phone number of a new acquaintance. While social media isn't entirely a thing of the past, our usage has gone down considerably, as the public found they had a newfound appreciation for actual face-to-face, physical contact- and grew tired of the depressing negativity that is often found on social media message boards. Entertainment has a second boom period as a result of all this, but so too do retail and restaurants, as people have come to realize they prefer talking to a real live salesperson before buying something they need as opposed to ordering it online.

Speaking of ordering online, Amazon as a business is no more, ordered broken up by the Federal Trade Commission for their monopolistic practices. Jeff Bezos loses his fortune, but he's not left penniless, retiring to a villa complaining the FTC was really out just to steal his money.

In politics, conservatism and nationalism grow across the globe, as the 2020 crisis made people question globalization even more but, more importantly, it also made people want to limit or even eliminate their country's ability to impose the harsh lockdowns again. U.S. President Donald Trump easily wins another term paving the way for his Vice-President, Mike Pence, to replace him in 2024 (as Trump endorses him right away). The Chinese move further and further towards democracy as anger builds over their country's mishandling of the 2020 crisis and the hit the country took internationally, as fewer countries are willing to do business with them.

Only in Canada is a conservative revolution staved off, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada regain their majority government after giving their citizens a guaranteed basic income of $3,000 a month, meaning no Canadian ever worries about a lockdown ever again.

Wrestling comes back in front of fans, and the promotions finally decide to play fair, with Wrestlemania becoming a multi-company affair where the best wrestlers truly perform. This after Vince McMahon "mysteriously disappears" during a World Wrestling Entertainment taping during the 2020 lockdown. Even though McMahon is never seen again, the WWE insists all along "it's just a work and he's really fine".

As for sports, they all come back, but not like you've ever seen before. Gone are the long, winding marathon-like seasons of before, replaced with several "mini-tournaments" which offer prizes of their own and qualification for the "big championship" at the end. The sports leagues decide to operate this way after realizing their truncated mini-tournaments to end their 2019-20 seasons was more lucrative for them than their previous model, so they decided to move to it permanently.

Oh, and the Buffalo Sabres and Buffalo Bills become dominant teams in their sports, which pleases the City of Buffalo and some weird guy in Toronto. Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers do win one Super Bowl, though, the Minnesota Twins dominate baseball and the Los Angeles Clippers dominate basketball, while Inter Milan and Manchester United alternate winning soccer's top club prize.

So, there you go...that's the world on November 17, 2024 at 27 minutes after midnight.

OK...you caught me...some of that stuff I did dream up and/or pull out of my derriere. I may have overestimated how well my favourite sports will do...but hey, it's my fantasy.

I might have also let my imagination run wild on the politics front...although I'm fairly certain Mr. Trudeau is going to come out with that UBI. The Liberals have always been sneaky that way.

...but, as far as the general premise goes, that the world of 2024 won't be unrecognizable to the world of 2019?

That you can take right to the bank. You can say that about 2023, 2022, 2021 or even the latter half of 2020.

I'm certain of that.

...and you may have noticed that- until now- I didn't even mention "COVID-19" at all in this article.

That's because "a return to normal" isn't contingent on the existence of COVID-19 or not. It might not even matter how well we deal with it, either.

You might be surprised to read that. Just about every treatise you read- from your Facebook friend Joe who got his epidemiology degree from a cereal box to the person your favourite news site is calling an epidemiologist this week- has said that "we can't return to normal until we eliminate COVID-19". The dire predictions involve a world where everyone wears a mask, everyone stays away from each other and there's nothing fun we can do, among many other "new normal" guidelines that will stay in place until COVID-19 is eliminated.

Now, there are definitely things the COVID-19 crisis showed us about our society that we need to address, like our penchant for crowds and businesses' apathy for cleaning, because we didn't like it before and we won't like them in the future. I also don't think we can expect things to go completely "back to normal" as we understood things until at least the fall of 2021, as the disruptions that COVID-19 caused to the sports and entertainment worlds mean that their seasonal content for 2020-21 will have to be adjusted.

I mean, if the NHL awards the 2020 Stanley Cup in September they're probably not going to start the 2020-21 season in October like they planned. It'll be a November or December start, at least, with an abbreviated season.

...but as far as COVID-19 implementing some of the more drastic and dramatic changes to our day-to-day life that some people are predicting, I can't imagine any of that happening, even if the disease manages (in a worst-case scenario) to stick around.

First, many of these dire predictions still involve people contemplating a disease that was once a mystery to us. It involved a disease that spread quickly but what was one that we knew little about, including, crucially, how we should handle it. One of the lines of thought behind implementing the lockdowns was that we needed to slow this spread of this mystery disease so we can "buy enough time" to know it a bit better so that we can adequately deal with it.

Half a year (or thereabouts) in the COVID-19 pandemic and, while we don't have a complete picture about the virus, we do know a lot more about it now than where we were in mid-March.

Besides, as more research pours in about the virus, the better we're going to understand how to deal with it. There are lots of diseases for which we don't have cures, but it's rare to have a disease that we don't know how to contend with it. For those diseases, their infections are rare and thus don't give us a lot of patients to study, unlike COVID-19, which has literally given us millions.

Secondly, it would be foolish for policymakers to think that the buy-in to "social distancing" will continue forever. People are already flouting it now when the disease is still relatively new and the shock is fresh in the public's mind- the further we get from March 2020 and the shock dissipates the more the very human instinct to "get back to normal" will kick back in.

More to the point, policymakers have done just about everything they can to convince people not to smoke, and they've been doing it for over half a century. Though smoking in Canada is actually going down- 15% prevalence in 2017 vs. 25% in 1999, according to the University of Waterloo- it's still a widespread practice.

Plus the dangers of smoking are very "real" to the public- things like terminal lung cancer, trouble breathing, heart problems and stroke, they resonate with people and those effects are consistent no matter who picks up smoking- some just might get the afflictions later than others do.

COVID-19? Even at its most mysterious, the public still knew that 80% of all cases were mild, meaning for most people, the chances of them getting really sick was very low. The odds have improved since then (especially considering there are increasing reports suggesting our confirmed case total is far lower than the actually infected total) and the odds will always be there, no matter how many sensationalist stories the media prints.

Eventually there's going to be this realization that the risks involved with COVID-19 aren't as dramatic as we thought they were and while the outliers may give some pause, as we get to know COVID-19 more, we'll understand the outliers even more- and lower the disease's danger more.

Lastly, despite what every forecaster had predicted in March about the scope of the pandemic, we've proven that we can handle the disease without bringing our healthcare system into collapse. Of course, the argument is going to be made that without a lockdown our healthcare system would have collapsed, but that's another debate.

What's more telling is that, in this initial wave where this unknown disease hit us and we don't know bad things were going to get and all we had to rely on was forecasts...around the world, the story is consistently the same. Even what forecasters had called the "best case scenarios" turned out to be far worse than the COVID-19 situation that we actually got.

This can only mean that, in the future, if there is a second wave of COVID-19, we at least now have a better idea of how it's going to hit us. Obviously, it's still not a "perfect" science, but at the very least we now have experience and actual data sets that tell us how this disease behaved before, so we can better act- and prepare- accordingly.

Besides, while in March we could talk about administrators being blindsided by COVID-19, now there is no such excuse. Administrators should be doing everything they can to stockpile and ensure they can deal with the surge of COVID-19 cases should it happen, especially considering that our current experience tells us that any future surge isn't out of our ability to handle it, if we plan for it properly.

At the end of the day, even if COVID-19 sticks around, it's not the kind of disease that isn't something that we can't handle, if we're smart about it. A lot of its danger was due to its mystery, now that the mystery surrounding it is almost gone, this should become a disease that should be much easier to handle and live with. We as a society have managed to find ways to mitigate the impact of many other diseases that are worse than COVID-19 without having to disrupt our daily lives too much, so there is no reason we cannot find a way to mitigate COVID-19 and regain our sense of normalcy.

Obviously, elimination- and a vaccine- would be the real endgame, and that endgame gets more realistic with each passing day. However, even if it wasn't, it's still not a reason for COVID-19 to be the end of our world.

-Daniel Arnold

Is it too early to reopen our businesses?

Short answer: they never should have been closed in the first place, because that decision was based entirely on panic and not an objective analysis of the situation at hand...

...but, we're long past that point. We've now committed to "locking down" society even though these lockdowns have been nothing but a joke at best and I don't know how effective they really are.

Anyway, for better or for worse, we have a strategy...or at least I thought we had a strategy.

On March 17, 2020, the Canadian Province of Ontario imposed its version of the lockdown, on a day when Ontario gained 12 new cases of COVID-19 to bring its cumulative total to 189. The previous two days had seen case counts grow by 31 and 41, and the day after the lockdowns started, the case count grew by 25. In the days ahead, case totals would grow by a magnitude of a hundred and then eventually by the hundreds, leading up to today where 521 new cases were added giving Ontario a cumulative total, as of May 1, 2020, of 16,608 confirmed COVID-19 cases.

So, in the course of about six weeks, Ontario's COVID-19 totals have increased practically tenfold, and the daily number of new cases has also increased by a factor of 43, and there doesn't seem to be any signs of these trends abating.

Now, we can finagle about the numbers, raise questions about testing, bring up the death total (which, at 1,121, is just as grim), complain about prevalence and where it's "truly" spreading...but the fact of the matter is, the confirmed COVID-19 case number is the one number the public most easily understands and most readily available, with the confirmed case number being the standard bearer for discussing the severity and impact of the disease worldwide.

Having said that...it would stand to reason that if Ontario ordered a lockdown when they only had 189 cases and a new case count of 30 or 40 per day, you'd think that there'd be no discussions- at all- about ending the lockdowns when we're still getting 521 new cases a day and our case total stands at 16,608. If the situation then merited a need for drastic measures, why would the situation right now be any different?

Yet there is Ontario Premier Doug Ford, announcing today that on May 4, certain businesses can reopen. They're most just small scale businesses that don't deal with a lot of people- home and garden centres with curbside pickup, auto dealerships by appointment only, marinas but only to prep for boating season and golf courses, but only for maintenance.

It's a very, very, very, very, very, very small relaxing of restrictions...but it's a relaxing of restrictions nonetheless, and Ford has promised to do more in the coming weeks.

Now, I will grant that- like many other jurisdictions around the world who are also beginning to open things back up- Ford is likely receiving growing pressure from businesses to relax restrictions and allow them to reopen.

I'll also concede that Ford has been more measured in his approach than that of other places, like everyone's favourite punching bag, the State of Florida, who began reopening their beaches on April 19, or the Province of Quebec, which plans to reopen just about everything in a matter of days (even bars) despite being much harder hit by COVID-19 than Ontario was.

Still, a reopening is a reopening and...you know that saying about floodgates. Once you open them, even a little, you can't stop the flood.

Before long, Ford's list of allowed reopenings will include just about everything, because everyone else will want in on the action too. Especially the hospitality industry and the entertainment industry, who need the summer tourist season as their moneymakers.

You may be wondering why I sound opposed to Ford's idea and that of so many other places reopening when I said I didn't support their closure in the first place. Aren't I getting what I want?

The problem is that I just don't see any real government strategy when it comes to dealing with COVID-19- it's just based on reactions and panic. Just how people panicking over whether they were going to get distressingly sick back in March forced the lockdowns, businesses panicking over their rent is what is driving governments to reopen in May.

...and, quite frankly, that shouldn't be happening. If certain conditions caused the government to respond in a certain way, then it stands to reason that the government should continue its response until it can demonstrate that its response needs to change.

In other words, if all it takes is Ontario to have 189 cases of COVID-19 and 30-40 new cases a day to impose a lockdown so "the healthcare system is not overwhelmed", then it should stand to reason that, until we get back to only having 30-40 new cases a day and 189 active cases (or thereabouts) then there shouldn't be any discussion about ending the lockdown.

Unless Ontario says that now they can handle this caseload, which raises questions about why they put in the lockdowns in the first place.

Ultimately this all goes back to the lack of transparency and foresight that has blighted the COVID-19 crisis. Not just have years of healthcare cuts hampered our ability to deal with the crisis now, the inability of the government to put in meaningful measures to mitigate a situation they created means they don't have any hope to get the public to all buy in to their strategy.

Because if governments really did care about public health, they'd develop a strategy and stick to it, and do everything they can to make sure that strategy is successful. No one should have to worry about making their rent or their bills in a time of crisis and it's utterly ridiculous that governments have failed to take that into account.

Because if the government isn't going to take this seriously, then why should I?

-Daniel Arnold

Helplessness and irrationality the real "covidiocy"

I have a lot of issues, questions and concerns when it comes to COVID-19. I'm sure I'm not the only one but, sadly, the ones who I'm looking for answers from don't seem to have those either.

I could devolve into the usual talking points- are we overestimating this disease or underestimating it? Are our responses appropriate or could we have done it another way? Can we afford to "tough it out" or will the cure be worse than the disease?

All those things are fair questions, and I've got an opinion on all of them. However, so do many other people and they're just as "informed" about COVID-19 as I am, so I'm not going to waste your time talking about them since I doubt I'll get anywhere.

What I will say, having been subjected to hearing about and thinking about this virus nonstop for the past two months or so, is that there's a few things that I am certain of:

• A lot of people know how to use Google, but very few of them have any clue on how to think critically of what they're reading. Just like any other issue in the Web 2.0 days, people only use Google to reinforce what they already believe about COVID-19.
• Fear and panic have been all that's reigned during the pandemic, perpetuated by irresponsible media companies who should know better. I can't believe how quickly and easily the most negative news items surrounding COVID-19 spread, even though much of it is clearly extreme and is just pure speculation anyway.
• Worse, it's troubling how much policy is being dictated by fear and panic when you'd think politicians should know better.
• It's amazing- and saddening- at how easily we believe the words of someone who "appears" qualified to talk about COVID-19, even if what they say doesn't stand to scrutiny.
• It's also amazing- and saddening- at how easily we'll take whatever the government tells us about the pandemic and how easily we'll acquiesce our own power and rights to them without even a hint of scrutiny.

It's that last part that I really want to dive into, because- no matter all the torrent of other emotions that I may feel about this- I believe the sense of powerlessness and helplessness in this pandemic doesn't really get discussed, especially in those media missives about "mental health" that basically just tells people depressed about this thing to "get over it".

To illustrate, let's go back two months, when COVID-19 first hit the Canadian province of Ontario (where I live). Even though a virus knows no political affiliation and doesn't care about ethnicity, there wasn't widespread worry about COVID-19 because it had only ravaged China and Iran.

Nobody seemed to worry- or care- about what might happen if COVID-19 took hold in our territory because, apparently we were "not China or Iran".

The worry seemed to only ramp up after Italy got hit pretty hard with COVID-19 and had to impose lockdowns akin to what the Chinese and Iranians had done. Even though Italy has its own host of problems (since 1953, only one Italian Prime Minister- Silvio Berlusconi, who had a few of them- had a term of at least four years), Italy was a "first world country that shouldn't have been hit by the virus"...but it was.

That spooked a lot of people and spurred the cancellation of events that, right now, seem to be the only news items we get these days.

However, despite all that, the response was tepid. For weeks, our government officials kept stressing "the risk of getting COVID-19 is low" and kept beating that line as the case count kept rising.

Then there was a report out of Toronto of someone who had COVID-19 who rode a few city transit buses, and did so during the packed morning rush hour.

"Someone was with an infectious disease in tight quarters able to spread that disease to so many other people"...but, again, the response from the government was "your risk of getting it is low".

Ah, OK. It also didn't help that many reports of COVID-19 state that the disease was pretty mild in the vast majority of cases, which only prompted more questions about its seriousness.

I mean, if we had a disease that spread easily but also killed the majority of those that it infected, I doubt anyone would question its severity.

So that's where we were in mid-March, constantly told that despite the fact this disease spreads easily, it was mostly mild and, more importantly, "my risk of catching COVID-19 was low".

I remember thinking at the time that COVID-19 was just going to be like swine flu- lots of PSAs about "keeping clean" and "keeping things clean" but, otherwise it would be "life as usual".

Then, on March 16, 2020- the day Ontario imposed its version of the COVID-19 lockdown- everything changed.

First, in a blink of an eye, my entire life was turned upside down, with Ontario imposing restrictions on my day-to-day life and personal autonomy. Doing that is bad enough, but doing it without warning and without having to justify it?

That's even scarier.

Then the messaging became more sobering and more sombre, treating COVID-19 like it was the second coming of the Black Death. We had to "prepare for the new normal", we're told, and we had to look at every stranger as if the mere sight of them would infect us with the plague.

To say that this was all confusing was an understatement- I'm not sure I have a word to describe the state of shock I was in.

I had so many questions, the very least of which was, "just 24 hours ago you kept saying you had this thing under control and kept telling us not to worry and now we have to worry? What gives?"

 If Ontario had come out and said, "be prepared for a lockdown, which we will impose when X happens", I would have been able to accept it. I would have been able to further accept it if Ontario had come out and also said "when conditions are X, we can lift the lockdown".

None of those things happened, which gives me the impression that Ontario can impose a "state of emergency" whenever it wants and doesn't have to justify it. That should scare anyone, because there's no guarantee a future Premier won't abuse that privilege.

(An odd thing that, considering Ontario Premier Doug Ford almost went on a powertrip himself when he threatened to override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in order to win his petty dispute with the City of Toronto, but I digress)

Then as the days progressed and the lockdown became more of a reality, the situation just got worse. Ezekiel Emmanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, caused quite the stir when he said he thinks the lockdowns should last for 12-18 months, the timeframe the media keeps touting as a timeline for a therapeutic for COVID-19. He was particularly pointed about large gatherings, insisting that should be the last to reopnen.

Under normal conditions, I'm sure that news item would get the traction it got but under these conditions Emmanuel's claim didn't just gain traction- it influenced policy.

Which only really amps up my frustration and feelings of powerlessness because I know policymakers influenced by those items clearly weren't thinking.

First of all, Emmanuel- who was once an advisor to Barack Obama- does have the education background to have a bit more of an informed opinion than your usual Googler. However, he's not an epidemiologist, he doesn't work in COVID-19 research, he's not on the front lines in a hospital trying to treat patients infected with this thing...as my brother put it, he's like Wayne Gretzky giving his opinion on baseball. He might know a few things, but he shouldn't be your "go-to guy".

Besides, Emmanuel has a history of rabble rousing- in 1997, he opposed euthanasia before backtracking in 2016 and, in 2014, Emmanuel argued that living life after 75 was pointless (for the record, Emmanuel will be 63 in September 2020).

I really don't know why we would want to give this guy a huge platform. He sure doesn't sound like someone who I would trust to give me solutions in a time of a crisis.

I also wonder why Emmanuel gets a platform but Doctor Neil Rau, who vehemently opposed imposing a lockdown at all, gets no attention. I mean, not only is Rau a microbologist but, more importantly, he's a practicing doctor, meaning he's far more qualified to talk about COVID-19 considering he's at the front lines.

I guess he's "too positive". *shrugs*

Which is really the heart of the matter. Because of Emmanuel, you have Quebec insisting they can't have festivals until after August 31, and New Brunswick believing it needs to hold off on not just festivals but also bars and clubs until the rest of the year...even though New Brunswick hasn't had a COVID-19 case in a week.

So many different things about this virus changes from week to week, and just about everyone has gotten so many things horribly wrong about the virus every step of the way...frankly, it's reckless and irresponsible of policymakers to make such sweeping choices definitively so far into the future when the situation could be drastically different by that point.

Seriously, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs...if, say, in July COVID-19 is gone from your province, is practically gone from Canada and it's contained in the United States...are you going to tell me it's still not "safe" for a bar to be open?

Speaking of deranged government policies- the lockdowns. Let me start by saying they're not even real lockdowns- they're these haphazard things with so many loopholes and vague generalities that, apart from anything "fun", there's nothing that's really "banned". How many people are truly locked down and, worse, who's really being protected?

I don't have any hard numbers, but I suspect most of the workers who are deemed "essential" are minimum wage earners who already had 50 reasons to hate their job and now have 50 more. I also wonder, how many of them really have to be open? Does getting a Tim Horton's coffee or a Big Mac really mean anything in a pandemic? Or any restaurant, for that matter? Why can't grocery stores be restricted to curbside pickup?

That's just the tip of the iceberg. What really bothers me is that policymakers in this crisis think more about crowds as opposed to crowding. The Scotiabank Arena, Rogers Centre, Downsview Park, etc. are more than large enough to host crowds of thousands and accommodate physical distancing, but gatherings there are "too risky" yet a grocery store, with its aisles barely big enough for one person, attended to by hundreds, if not thousands of people per day, all of whom touching and handling surfaces and products that- who knows who- has touched or sneezed on them...that's perfectly acceptable.

This is before getting to the fact that a lot of "essential business" declarations make a mockery of the lockdowns in general. A lot of attention has been paid to Florida in this regard, because Governor Ron DeSantis after being influenced by Vince McMahon and Tony Khan decided that because wrestling is in the business of "providing entertainment", they're "essential" businesses. DeSantis also decreed that golf, too, is an essential business.

If you're not as lost about those decisions as I am...I have no words.

Canada too, doesn't get a pass, as Ontario and Alberta deemed their manufacturing and oil sectors as "essential" businesses before backtracking.

With so much confusion over what is essential and what isn't and the fact that governors' buddies seem to influence their list, it's small wonder why there are people who aren't taking the lockdowns seriously.

Why should they when the governments themselves don't do it?

The real sore spot, even amidst all that goes way beyond any debate over what measures we should or shouldn't take, what should be open and what shouldn't and whom we should or shouldn't listen to.

Because let me say this as loud and clear as I can:

The lack of foresight is the real crisis.

Let's be honest with ourselves- there wouldn't be this much worry and anxiety over the effects of the lockdowns if the people affected by them learned they'd be mitigated in a meaningful way.

I mean, if the government was going to pay me to stay home and make sure my bills are all paid, I'd do it forever, if they need me to do that.

(Well, maybe not forever...but you know what I mean)

That's really what all this anger is about. That's really what most people who downplay the virus or protest the lockdown restrictions are really angry about- the fact that the government can take away their livelihoods in the blink of an eye and then turn around and tell us to "deal with it", without giving us any way to actually deal with it.

Maybe instead of spending millions on condescending ads telling us how "heroic" we are, we should spend it on things like wiping out our utility bills, paying our medical costs and canceling our rents and mortgages.

You know, the stuff we go to work for only when the government doesn't stop our ability to go to work.

Further, why it took so long to start buying beds, ventilators and other hospital equipment is beyond me. Yeah, we can- and I do- fault the World Health Organization for its erratic messaging at the beginning of the outbreak and Chinese officials downplaying the virus, but this goes beyond that.

Our healthcare systems- worldwide- have been chronically mismanaged and woefully underfunded, meaning they're barely operational at the best of times so we had no hope in dealing with a pandemic.

While I grant it's no sure thing that if we had a better prepared health care system that we could have avoided the lockdowns, it's sure a tough pill to swallow knowing that at least part of the reason why I'm suffering through it is because governments failed to do all they could to prevent it.

Ford likes to call our healthcare providers "heroes" for all the work they're putting in...and I grant, that work is heroic. Just don't tell any of them that the reason why they're being asked to be heroes is because Ford slashed healthcare funding so much that the Ontario government wasn't at all prepared for the pandemic.

Yet I don't believe I've ever heard Ford even once apologize or acknowledge that his government's actions or inaction may have some blame in this. Even though the reality of the situation- in all likelihood- was far beyond his control, a little humility might at least show that he at least has some understanding of how we're truly feeling.

Because if there's one thing that will never be acceptable- before or after this virus- it's knowing you're suffering because of someone else's hubris.

Don't ask me to keep my head up if you're the one that knocked me down in the first place.
-Daniel Arnold

Six Years That Defined Kobe Bryant

“We are all human...we are good and we are bad. We are angels and we are devils.”- Ramona Shelburne quoting Kobe Bryant on “Around The Horn”, original airdate January 27, 2020

I lead off with that quote, but there's another quote from another TV show I love that could also fit my thoughts about the life that has just passed of Kobe Bryant, someone who is arguably without peer not just on a basketball court where he made his money but in the wider pop culture universe where he truly made his name:

“Sometimes there are no words, no clever quotes to neatly sum up what's happened that day. Sometimes the day just...ends.”- Aaron Hotchner in the Criminal Minds episode “...And Back”, Season Four, Episode 26, original airdate May 20, 2009

Like a lot of people today, as I write this a mere 24 hours after Bryant's helicopter crashed on a foggy day in the mountains of Calabasas, California, just a stone's throw from Los Angeles, there's a lot to process about the death of Bryant and a lot that still needs to be processed. There is, of course, also the deaths of eight other people from that same crash- Bryant's daughter, Gianna, her basketball academy teammates Alyssa Altobeli and Payton Chester, Alyssa's parents Keri and John Altobeli (himself a coaching legend at Orange Coast College), Payton's mother Sarah Chester, Christina Mauser, a basketball assistant coach and the pilot, Ara Zobayan- that seem to get glossed over in the reporting of Bryant's death, even though their deaths will leave just as much an impact to their friends and families that Bryant's death left to the wider world, where, in some twisted way, we all felt we knew Kobe Bryant personally even though we really didn't.

A death like this, especially one so sudden and undeniably too soon, is hard to wrap your head around. Our gut check reaction when we first heard the news- as was the case for me- was to double check and then triple check, because our mind doesn't want to believe the story to be true. Kobe Bryant may have ended his National Basketball Association career just three years ago but, at 41 years old, he still had the rest of his life ahead of him- there was no way it could have ended so quickly.

...but it did, and the next step, as it always is when it comes to death, is to reflect on the life of the one whose just ended. As I sit here today, myself very close to Bryant's age meaning I have experienced most of his life in real time, I too have reflected on Bryant's life but I keep coming back to the same conclusion- it's complicated.

For most- as seemed to be the case on ESPN's cadre of loudmouth “talking heads” shows- that story begins and ends with Bryant's career on the basketball court. For some, like the woman who accused Bryant of sexual assault after a 2003 encounter at a Colorado spa- the story begins and ends quite differently. There were a few brave souls, like Dan LeBatard and Ramona Shelburne, who acknowledged this other side to Bryant's story, as well as acknowledging Bryant's many other shortcomings- including his arrogance, his feud with longtime teammate Shaquille O'Neal and the assertion of his coach, the legendary Phil Jackson, that Bryant was “uncoachable”.

It's that other side of Bryant's story that informs my opinion of his ultimate legacy. Sure, everyone has their flaws, and everyone has skeletons in their closet, and I'm sure everyone that looks back on their lives would say that their own life story isn't all rosy or all gloomy. However, when it comes to the world of celebrity, more often than not it is either their triumphs or their infamy that defines their fame- very rarely does a celebrity become known for the good and the bad in their lives.

For some, like Michael Jackson and Chris Benoit, the bad eventually came to overtake the good in their lives, leaving a figure whose tragic ending began before their tragic demise.

For Bryant, he got a chance at redemption in his story, a chance to rise back again like few do after their lives seemingly fell apart. His life pretty much literally went like a typical Hollywood script- a character would make a name for themselves at the start of the movie, they'd face a challenge that threatens to tarnish their legacy by the end of the first act, with the rest of the movie spent repairing their legacy where they ride off into the sunset in triumph with an even greater name than when they started.

Let me take this concept even further for the prospective script writers who now so eagerly want to tell Bryant's tale- you don't even need to focus on all of Bryant's 41 years to tell the gist of Bryant's tale. Because six years are all that are critical to tell Bryant's tale, and it begins in the summer of 2003.

On June 30, 2003, Bryant checked into a hotel in Edwards, Colorado, home of a U.S. Air Force base and a little over 100 miles east of Denver. Bryant was there to get surgery on his knee, which was scheduled for July 2. While he was there, Bryant, then 27, met a 19-year-old woman who worked at the hotel and the two of them had an encounter the night before his surgery.

What happened that night is not in dispute- Bryant and the woman had sex, and it was rough. Bryant believed the sex was consensual, but the woman did not, as she filed a police complaint over the issue. The resulting investigation by police yielded enough for them to issue an arrest warrant, which occurred on July 4. Twelve days later, Bryant was formally charged, with Bryant holding a press conference right afterward.

At that press conference, Bryant- who had been married to his wife Vanessa for seven and a half years- admitted to adultery but insisted that the sexual encounter that he had was consensual. Vanessa publicly stayed by Kobe's side and claimed to have forgiven him, though it was revealed that Kobe bought her a $4 million ring and, behind the scenes, the relationship was damaged (Kobe and Vanessa Bryant would file for divorce in 2011). On the basketball court, Kobe Bryant avoided punishment by the NBA, though he'd still miss some games in order to attend court in order to answer to the charges. In September 2004, the prosecution announced they were dropping the charges against Bryant because his accuser withdrew her co-operation. Bryant and his accuser later settled a civil case outside of court, with Bryant issuing a statement saying he apologized to the accuser and understood that she didn't feel about the incident the same way he did.

Before I continue, I think it's important to understand the many dynamics that go into a sexual assault case. I could go on a rant about the many issues of the criminal justice system as a whole and how activists make a mockery of the truth about it, but that's another article altogether.

What's important to understand about criminal proceedings is twofold. One, there's tons of emotions going through the minds of both parties, and the slow pace of the criminal trial exacerbates those emotions. Two, the standard for conviction at a criminal trial is essentially proving that the crime 100% happened and since a conviction of sexual assault relies on consent, the case often breaks down into “he said/she said” because (as is the case with Bryant's situation) there are no witnesses. This makes sexual assault difficult to prove, especially when the accuser stops co-operating.

So understand all that when thinking about Bryant's trial. I'm not going to get into the specifics of the trial nor am I going to weigh in on whether justice was served- you can read that on many different places on the Internet. What I can offer only is speculation, and I think the woman at the centre of the scandal preferred closure and not having to relive that night instead of pursuing a conviction that may not have happened, while Bryant likely went the rest of his life with the deepest of regrets about the entire incident.

It didn't affect Bryant's play on the court, at least at first. In the 1999-2000 season, Bryant emerged as a superstar for the first time, forming a partnership with veteran superstar Shaquille O'Neal that led the Los Angeles Lakers to three straight NBA championships. The 2002-03 season saw the Lakers lose to the eventual champion San Antonio Spurs, but in 2003-04, the Lakers got back to the NBA Finals where they won Game 1 against the Detroit Pistons, seemingly setting them up for a fourth title in five years.

Instead, the Pistons won the next four games, which earned them the NBA title. The Pistons' victory was seen at the time as the triumph of the team over the individual, as the Pistons had no superstars but had more overall quality and chemistry than the Lakers did. In the summer of 2004, the Lakers decided on an overhaul, letting Phil Jackson go as their coach and trading O'Neal- whom the Lakers felt was “too old”- for depth players. They hoped that with Bryant as the centrepiece of a deeper squad- essentially copying the Pistons' method of success- it would lead the Lakers back to glory.

The next season, by all accounts, was a disaster. Bryant was his usual dominant self, but the players tasked with providing him support proved incapable of doing so, and Jackson's replacement- Rudy Tomjonavich- resigned in mid-season citing exhaustion. Earlier in the season, Jackson published a book where he described Bryant as “uncoachable”, apparently going so far as telling Lakers management that he would not come back to Los Angeles if it meant coaching Bryant. Worse, with O'Neal no longer his teammate, it came to light that during the 2003-04 season Bryant, with his overconfident attitude, rubbed his veteran teammates the wrong way, especially O'Neal. Throughout the 2004-05 season and the rest of the 2005 calendar year, O'Neal and Bryant would occasionally trade public barbs at each other as their animosity boiled over.

With the season a mess, it was hardly a surprise that the 2004-05 Lakers missed the playoffs. In the summer of 2005, Jackson agreed to return to the team, which Bryant publicly praised. The following season, Bryant set Laker scoring records, getting 81 points against the Toronto Raptors- the second highest personal point total in NBA history- as well as having a night where he outscored the Dallas Mavericks 62-61 over three quarters. He and Shaq seemed to “bury the hatchet” with a handshake and a hug before a Christmas Day game where the Lakers played Shaq's new team, the Miami Heat. At season's end, Bryant finished fourth in voting for the Most Valuable Player in the NBA, and the Lakers got back into the playoffs.

Then the wheels fell off. After winning three of their first four games of their first round series against the Phoenix Suns- leaving them one win away from advancing- the Lakers crashed out of the playoffs by proceeding to drop the next three games, despite dominant performances from Bryant. A season later, Bryant would get suspended by the league for the first time, being forced to sit out one game after elbowing the Spurs' Manu Ginobli. Bryant still had dominant scoring performances- including a stretch of four straight games with 50 or more points, the second NBA player to do so- and the Lakers made the playoffs again, but, again, they were eliminated by the Suns in the first round, this time in five games.

As the 2007-08 season began, questions began to surface about Bryant's ability to lead the Lakers, buoyed by preseason demands by Bryant to be traded after reports surfaced that Bryant was trying to manipulate Lakers management. Jackson eventually talked Bryant out of his trade demand, with cooler heads prevailing as the season began.

During the season, Bryant hurt his shooting hand but opted against surgery, allowing him to play in all 82 games. He also finally got a teammate that could adequately support him, as the Lakers traded for Pau Gasol. Riding a Western Conference leading 57-25 record, the reinforced Lakers tore through the Western playoffs, including a five-game series victory over their long time rivals, the Spurs, in the Western Finals.

However, Bryant and the Lakers had their difficulties in the 2008 NBA Finals, where they fell in six games to the Boston Celtics. The series' margin ultimately wound up being kind to the Lakers, as the Celtics built a 3-1 series lead only for the Lakers to survive with a Game 5 win, with Boston winning the title in Game 6 with a 39-point victory, the largest margin of victory in a NBA title clinching game. Though Bryant won his first MVP award in the 2007-08 season, his failure to lead the Lakers to the championship made some wonder if he ever could.

None echoed that sentiment louder than Bryant's erstwhile teammate, O'Neal. At a New York nightclub in the summer of 2008, O'Neal took the stage and laid down a freestyle rap, where he notably referred to Bryant's struggles against Boston by saying, “Kobe couldn't do it without me.” O'Neal's performance seemed to suggest that their feud was still simmering, even though publicly O'Neal and Bryant both laughed it off.

It did seem to be motivation for Bryant. In 2008-09, Bryant again had a dominant season, finishing second in MVP voting to LeBron James, the player who would pass Bryant in the all-time scoring list a day before Bryant's death. The Lakers steamrolled their way through the NBA season, improving their record by eight wins to 65-17 and barely breaking a sweat through the playoffs, their only challenge being the Houston Rockets who took the Lakers to seven games in the second round. In the NBA Finals, the Lakers easily handled the upstart Orlando Magic, winning four games to one.

In the process, Bryant won his first NBA Finals MVP, but, more importantly, he won his first title without the help of O'Neal. Some might argue that Bryant truly didn't reach the summit of his career until winning the Finals rematch with the Celtics a year later- where he again won the Finals MVP and surpassed O'Neal for the amount of titles he won (five to O'Neal's four)- but arguably the Bryant of 2009 had a lot more to prove. Winning the 2009 NBA title finally showed that Bryant could be the undisputed leader of the team and lead them to victory, which is what he ultimately needed to prove in order to really join the game's greats, like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.

The rest of Bryant's career would eventually get overshadowed by James, who would establish himself among the all-time greats when he led the Cleveland Cavaliers to the 2016 NBA Championship, the year that was, ironically, Bryant's last. Bryant was still a dominant player almost right up to the end of his career, which he capped off by scoring 60 points on the Utah Jazz where he outscored them 23-21 in the fourth quarter.

More importantly, though, after winning in 2009, Bryant finally seemed to have his life back in order. The feud with O'Neal dissipated, with both becoming good friends toward the end of Bryant's life. He reconciled with his wife and they grew their family. Bryant also buried his arrogance, becoming a much friendlier guy and a mentor to the younger players, as he now no longer had to stress about getting on top. Having essentially “achieved it all”, Bryant could finally bury the demons of his past and really become the beloved player he was in his later years.

It was those six years of hardship that set it all up, as Bryant learned that nothing was going to be easy and he had to earn it. Earn it he did, and seeing him do it was one of the more captivating journeys I have ever seen.

...and now that journey is finished, and what a story it told. Has Kobe Bryant really redeemed himself from the ghosts of his past, one marked by stretches of infidelity, sexual misconduct, arrogance and being a difficult teammate? I'll let you decide that, but there's no denying that the six year period from 2003-09 is the crucial part of his life in making that determination.

R.I.P. Kobe Bean Bryant. There truly will never be another one like you.

-DG

All Embarrassing Wrestling

I'll admit, I was late getting onto the wrestling bandwagon. Heck, some would say I've boarded the train just when many were getting off.

It was the summer of 2018. I'm the artist type- I have a fictional world that I write about, so I have a natural tendency to want to "create".

Anyway, in June 2018, my brother noted to me that in the video game WWE 2K18 you could create wrestlers, with a pretty expansive creation suite. That was enough to hook me on to the game, and, lo and behold, I did wind up spending countless hours creating wrestlers, arenas and wrestling shows.

Then it came to us that since we enjoyed the game so much that maybe we should give this wrestling thing a watch. We had tried before- because we have friends who are big wrestling fans- but every time we'd try to watch World Wrestling Entertainment we kept seeing a show that was sophomoric and stupid ("sophomoronic" is the word I like to use), plus the whole "it's a fake sport" was a major turn-off.

...but, this time, my brother and I said, "we enjoyed the game so much that maybe we should give it another chance". So we did.

After giving in- the first day was June 18, 2018, the day after that year's Money In The Bank- we were hooked, because we realized that, despite the flaws WWE had, they really knew how to put on a good show.

Since that year and change, my brother and I have been "students of the game", trying to soak up as much as we could about the industry and its history that we hadn't been exposed to. We soon came to realize that we'd been too dismissive of the industry and that when wrestling is at its best, it can be an entertaining and creatively fulfilling adventure.

Why do I mention all that?

Because I feel I need to provide some context before I write about what was supposed to be "wrestling's next chapter" and that is the debut of All Elite Wrestling's weekly show, AEW: Dynamite.

I don't think there's been a more anticipated debut than that of Dynamite, as the talk surrounding AEW is that it was seen as the first "real" competitor that WWE had since World Championship Wrestling in the late 1990s. The talk was more than just hyperbole- just like WCW had the likes of Sting and Ric Flair and loads of other high profile acts that cemented its legitimacy, AEW was led by Kenny Omega, Cody Rhodes and the Young Bucks, who were seen as the darlings of the non-WWE wrestling universe, with Omega often hailed as the best wrestler outside of WWE (if not the best wrestler, period).

Personally, I was ambivalent towards the company. Sure, I too began to think the WWE could benefit a "real" competitor- its TV ratings were stagnant and, once the novelty wore off, I too began seeing how "stale" WWE programming had become- but I also didn't think another "major" wrestling promotion was necessary. After all, I felt the WWE already had other competition in the form of other forms of entertainment, and while there may not have been another "major" promotion, with the Internet, it wouldn't have been hard for wrestling fans to find something else- at least not as hard as it would be in the 1990s.

...but, hey, competition is good, right?

Unfortunately for AEW, as soon as they began promoting themselves, I began to sour on them. Right from the outset, the AEW guys mastered the PR art of talking big without providing any substance. They'd always talk about how they'd have "this next big signing" or that they have this "really great deal lined up" without ever once mentioning specifics. The rumour-loving wrestling media ate it up, but I wasn't fooled.

Still, I said that the company still deserved a chance because even if the people who ran the company were a bunch of blowhards, if they put on a good show then all that won't matter.

Besides...Omega is very talented wrestler, and AEW did manage to snare the erstwhile Dean Ambrose (now known as Jon Moxley).

What could go wrong?

Turns out, on opening night, all of it.

Right from the get-go you had a presentation that screamed "we're too full of ourselves", with an ostentatious but clearly cheaply made stage and an even worse designed ring.

I mean, AEW didn't even try to mask the fact that the ropes were actually bungee cords. At least in a WWE ring they look like actual ropes.

So, OK...stage looks pretty bad. What about the announcers?

Well, if your idea of a quality commentary team is an ancient has-been in Jim Ross, a shameless company man in Tony Schiavone and a luchador who's only there so AEW can say they have a "diverse" team, then the AEW commentary group is for you.

If you were looking for actual broadcasters who knew how to be professional and give you insightful commentary on what's happening in the ring, look elsewhere.

All right...but that's just semantics, right? What about the storylines and the booking? The buns on the AEW sandwich?

Apart from an engaged and impassioned delivery from the still very young Maxwell Jacob Friedman (MJF) during his promo, the "story" you got from AEW offered very little of anything.

The show started with a rudimentary promo featuring the two combatants of the opening match- Sammy Guevara and Cody (no last name now). Sammy was seen working out and delivering some tired lines about how he'll win, and Cody was in a mock interview where he claimed he wasn't looking past Sammy towards his scheduled title fight against Chris Jericho next month (as Cody would lose that opportunity if he lost to Sammy).

Basic stuff...even for WWE writing.

The rest of the promos weren't any better. They were your standard heel fare, the tired trope of "you fans suck/your city sucks", and all it were versions you've heard much better before. They also were painfully overacted and stilted, as it was clear none of the performers had ever learned that a "natural" performance is the only one that actually feels real.

OK...all except MJF. He had his delivery down to a tee, reacting well not just with the crowd but to them as well, plus he was very good at ad-libbing. He sounded very much like a seasoned actor, commanding his presence like the best performers, and I don't just mean those in AEW or even WWE. If wrestling doesn't work out for MJF- and I believe it will, because I'm sure the WWE will nab him- he's got a few Oscars with his name on it.

Hey, the man's this good at just 23. Think of the potential.

Having said that...seeing how good MJF is makes me wonder how much he should put up with the clowns of AEW. Like Omega, he's clearly wasting his talent in AEW and you'd think at some point he'll actually want to be a big fish in a big pond.

So, the promos were bad...but, what about the booking?

I think all you really need to know about the booking here is the Sammy-Cody match. Here was an opportunity for Cody to really put over a young up-and-comer (Guevara is only 26) and prove that, even though it's Cody's company, that no one is "bigger" than the company.

Fine...I get that Cody needs to win the match so that he can keep his match-up with Jericho...but at least Cody could have done it in a way that makes Sammy look good.

Instead, we got a spot during their match where Sammy is outside of the ring and Cody attempts a suicide dive onto Sammy. During that spot, Sammy sees Cody's attempt (too soon by my estimation) and steps aside, pulling Cody's wife, Brandi, into Cody's path so that Cody hits her instead of Sammy.

Well you can guess what happens next- the chorus of boos. Sammy was buried, because at that point there was no way the crowd was going to get behind him and not cheer on Cody. It also meant that Sammy's loss in the match was inevitable, and, given that he's a heel now, he's probably doomed to being a midcard jobber because the audience didn't get behind him nor sees him as a threat.

Granted, such booking isn't bad per se- but Sammy's opponent was no regular opponent. It was Cody freaking Rhodes, one of AEW's corporate executives and arguably already one of the promotion's biggest stars. Cody didn't need any boost in the crowd's eyes- he's already near the top in their eyes- so why Cody decided to book the match where only Sammy could look bad is beyond me. I guess there's the whole "underdog" thing, but it's hard to label a top star as an underdog.

This was Cody's ego taking control of the promotion, and it's not a good sign.

As for the rest of the booking...well, we had multiple brawls and assaults, including Jericho assaulting Cody after the latter's match. None of them were particularly exciting or engaging, as they didn't do anything except the fake fisticuffs you see too much in wrestling anyway. Maybe some fans like this kind of stuff, but I find it boring. Wrestling is fake fighting, and fake fisticuffs never look right. Bottom line, if you're going to book a brawl, throw in some moves or something to at least make it somewhat watchable.

The only brawl that had a noteworthy moment featured two performers who know a thing or two about how to sell a wrestling match in general- Omega and Moxley, two veterans of the business. That one featured an amusing spot where Omega whacked Moxley with a mop (I guess Omega is "mopping the floor" with Moxley?) and another spot where Moxley threw Omega into a "glass" table. They still did it at half-speed and looked kind of botched, but at least it broke the monotony of the other "fake fights" that looked so bad, no action film would ever use them.

All right...so the booking and storytelling is bad. So what? It's the matches themselves that count, right?

Except...what were the matches we got from Dynamite?

I should mention before I get into the actual specifics that AEW has long presented themselves as wanting to have more of a "sports" feel than WWE. It's akin to the winning strategy of WCW, which pioneered the cruiserweight division as well as more athletic, high-flying acts that the WWE had ignored before WCW came around. Of course, helping WCW in that regard is that they had a very young Rey Mysterio, Jr. plying his trade for the company, a man who'd go on to revolutionize wrestling as a whole.

Unfortunately for AEW, they have no Mysterios in their midst. They don't even have anyone close...or anyone revolutionary, for that matter.

Let's start with the "sports feel" thing- in actual sports, there are actual rules and regulations that state that when a performer does a certain thing, it has a certain consequence. Like how in basketball if a player throws the ball out of play it goes to the other team- no exceptions.

Now, I grant that wrestling, being scripted, can ignore or follow the rules as they need to. The WWE has "rules" for their matches, but they're not always uniform, depending on the story. That said, the WWE still tries to maintain some semblance of continuity with its rules, being pretty consistent with things like outside interference or introducing weapons into a "regular" match leads to disqualification. The rule that says performers can only spend 10 seconds outside of the ring gets haphazardly applied and tag matches can become circuses as who's "legal" becomes unknown, but, for the most part, you can follow along with a WWE match and know how it's supposed to work.

AEW? Omega's tag match with his team and Jericho's team was interrupted by Moxley, who pulled Omega out of the ring so they could "brawl", which would normally lead to a disqualification but the referee paid no heed to it. Nyla Rose could bring out scores and scores of chairs out on to the floor during her match- and even intend to throw her opponent, Riho, on to them- but the referee was indifferent, only casually telling Rose she can't do that.

Stuff like that makes me wonder if there are rules in AEW...and if they're going to be this haphazardly applied, that certainly doesn't make them very "sporty" does it?

Of course, if the in-ring action was great, it can make up for all the spotty refereeing we saw...and we didn't even get that.

Not once did a moment in a match take me out of my seat or even make me pause to take notice...everybody was slow, contrived and lacked any kind of cohesiveness. Yes, there probably were nerves about putting on a good show but if they're professional athletes, they should be able to handle that pressure and do it anyway. Not only did none of the AEW guys manage to handle the pressure, few of them looked like they belonged in a wrestling ring, let alone show they had some kind of actual wrestling talent.

I'll give Omega and the Young Bucks here a pass because their match was cut too short, but that's it- the moves you watched in a AEW match paled in comparison to the free-flowing, eye popping gracefulness that you'd see when wrestling is actually at its best.

Nowhere was AEW's lack of talent more apparent than in the Rose-Riho match. I've gotten this far without mentioning that Rose is the first openly transgender wrestler in known history, and I did that because I don't think her being transgender really matters. This isn't actual competitive sports where issues like biology could actually matter- it's a scripted fight, after all.

It also shouldn't make her more "special" than other wrestlers, as AEW's promotion seemed to suggest. She's just a human being, and I bet she wishes the "transgender" stuff would just go away so that people could see her as a wrestler, period.

Even then...well, she may have made history but watching Rose shows me she's not much of a wrestler either. No, diving off the top rope and landing on top of your opponent on your belly is not an athletic move.

Not when you see the likes of Samoa Joe doing a roundhouse kick or Keith Lee- all 320 pounds of him- doing a backflip over the top rope.

Criticize the WWE all you want about how they rely on "big guys" too much...but once you see what those "big guys" can really do, you realize how special an athlete those guys truly are.

There is, frankly, nothing at all athletic about Rose, who did nothing except be an obstacle for Riho. So much so that it sure felt that Riho was wrestling an actual wall.

I'm not going to take Riho off the hook either. She moved...she was fast. Agile. Was very acrobatic. She probably does have some athletic ability in her, but as far as wrestling training goes, she's got a long way to go. None of her moves really made her stand apart, and her style made me think she's very much a "second-rate Kairi Sane". Not a "poor woman's Kairi Sane"...a talent that says "we couldn't get someone of Kairi's calibre, so we got her".

If she's AEW's women's champion- and Rose deemed her best challenger- what does that say about how good the rest of the division is?

I could go on...there were plenty other things that were wrong with Dynamite that I didn't get to, but this post is long enough and my point has been made. Through watching the program, I honestly felt I was watching the worst of the WWE when I tried to avoid it- minus the tawdriness. The AEW people had no charisma, no spectacle, were poor storytellers and had no idea how to run a match.

This was a trainwreck through and through.

Sure, it's just the first episode and things could get better...but given how much AEW's executives were pompous jerks who believed they've already won the war with WWE, I don't hold out much hope that it will get any better because I doubt they truly see what's wrong with their product.

...and that just might be the real shame tonight.

-DG

How Over-sensitivity Is Undermining Rape Advocacy

Let me preface this by saying I have the utmost respect and sympathy for rape survivors and other victims of sexual assault. I think we as a society do need to do a lot more to ensure justice for sexual assault victims, because way too many victims get their cases unheard.

However, stuff like this won't help. In fact, as Elizabeth Nolan Brown herself notes in a response piece for the Reason Foundation, it hurts.

On April 30, 2015, The Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper for Columbia University, an Ivy League school in New York City, ran an op-ed piece that detailed an account of a student who felt that passages in a poem- "Metamorphoses", by the Roman poet Ovid- "triggered" dangerous memories of an assault she suffered, and felt unsafe during the ensuing discussion of that poem. For the uninitiated, "Metamorphoses" recounts the kidnapping and rapes of Daphne and Persephone by the hands of Apollo and Hades, respectively (the latter being used as an explanation for spring and winter, since Persephone's mother, Demeter, the goddess of fertility, would agree to allow Hades to spend several months each year with Persephone, with Demeter's sadness during these passages causing her to stop plants from growing and the weather to get colder). According to The Spectator, the student felt "disengaged" from the discussion because, despite the fact that the passages caused her to relive her horrors, the professor decided to focus on the artistry behind the text, instead of focusing on the actual text itself. The student, according to The Spectator, didn't feel "safe" in the class and raised the issue with the professor afterwards, but was "dismissed" with her feelings "ignored" by the professor.

Now, I will grant I was not at the class, so I cannot verify what was said and whether or not the professor actually was dismissive of the student's concerns, and I will grant that the op-ed piece did raise some good points that some professors- many of whom are not actually educated in, well, "educating"- may need training in sensitivity. However, regardless of the context, it is apparent to me that the whole concept of "triggering" hasn't just gotten out of hand or has become counter-productive, it has become destructive to the very cause it seeks to solve- figuring out an end the rape problem.

First of all, it's very troubling that people can play the "victim card", silence their critics and essentially engage in censorship (as is what's happening here and what has happened to me in the past), stifling discussion that could be important in solving the problem. Because, let's face it- if we can't talk about sexual assault openly, how can we even begin to figure out how to solve the problem?

Moreover, where's the line where something is just "normal discourse" and where it becomes "triggering"? Rape can be committed by just about any instrument imaginable, so, in theory, just about *anything* can be a "trigger". For example, someone could be raped by something as innocuous as a pop can- do we get rid of all the Coke and Pepsi machines because they dispense items that are "triggering"?

More importantly, I can't understand how constant coddling and, frankly, "babying" victims of sexual assault helps in any way. By avoiding the problem- and not seeking a way to get past it- the victim is doing what the rapist intended, and that's get inside their head. I understand that a rape stays with someone for the rest of their lives- how can one get rid of that thought- but it's one thing to have it stuck in the corner of your brain and another to have it affect you in your daily life. The former is just a "bad memory", the latter tells the rapist they have won.

That is the heart of the matter. At the end of the day, advocacy groups seem to forget that rape is about power, not sex, and there's nothing more powerful than ensuring that the rapist has permanently entrenched themselves into a victim's cranium. Sure, the rapist might end up in jail, but they don't care- they're interested in the "hunt", and ensuring that they've devoured whatever life the victim had before. If something like that isn't enough to scare some sensibility into this nonsense, I don't know what is.

-DG

The Blacklist Episode 1.12 “The Alchemist” Review

So what would you do if you’re on the run from the authorities? What would you do to disappear?

Well, tonight on The Blacklist, you’ve got your answer- how about a man that can take your DNA and transplant it into someone else’s DNA, with the other person getting killed? Since the other person has your DNA, the authorities will be fooled into thinking it’s really you that had been offed, when in reality you’ll be watching the news laughing at those incompetent fools before crying all the way to bank once you realize how much you paid for this endeavour.

…but hey…what’s the price of freedom?

The episode begins with The Alchemist doing his work. He’s got some busty blonde in his sights, and it looks like they’re going to have a fun time…but what’s this? She’s going to pass out? Dude…she’s totally into you, taking advantage of her when she’s unconscious just isn’t cool. Of course, sex isn’t The Alchemist’s goal- he needs a body where he can transplant DNA to, and this bodacious blonde seems just the right fit.

After the blonde passes out, we cut to a scene where she’s wearing some hideous Dalmatian-inspired dress (that’s the best way I could describe it), complete with really pale skin, some thick lips and jet black hair. Oh, and she just happens to be on a jetliner, with some dude she’s never met before. Understandably, she’s delighted at this occurrence (before anyone raises a quibble, yes that is sarcasm). This man, too, is wondering what the heck is going on, since he’s been transformed into some guy with tattoos (didn’t know The Alchemist was a tattoo artist too) and much tanner skin than he’s accustomed to. However, before the two erstwhile lovebirds can realize what’s going on, they meet The Alchemist, who’s taken- presumably- the aircraft’s only parachute and launched himself out of the plane. We then pan to the lady screaming, the man being dragged out of the plane by the wind created by the door being open aloft and the pilots hunched over their chairs, presumably dead. We then see the cockpit window showing the ground getting ever so closer, leaving little to the imagination about what’s going to happen to that poor couple.

Of course, the savvy viewer will wonder why neither of the two doomed passengers ever thinks to try to grab control of the plane or why the aircraft seems to have just one parachute (how did that pass Federal Aviation Association standards?)…but then we’re reminded that this is a television show and any pretense of realism was shown the minute we turned it on.

Anyway, we then cut to the scene where the Federal Bureau of Incompetents (because the FBI on this show display the average intelligence and awareness of your local village idiot) brief each other over coffee and copious amounts of donuts (okay, I’m exaggerating…there are no donuts) about the plane crash, revealing that the pair that died were really mobsters that have been FBI fugitives for years! The viewer knows better (and, presumably, the viewer also knows that hiring someone like The Alchemist seems useless since there’s no way the FBI in this universe could catch anything other than a cold), so who’s going to be the one to show the FBI what’s really going on?

Oh…it’s you, Raymond “Red” Reddington. The only person on this show that seems to have any kind of clue about what’s going on, and maybe the only character that makes this show worthwhile…but, I digress.

We first see Red meeting with his “people” still trying to find the mole that led Anslo Garrick to the FBI headquarters back in November, with Red pulling up garbage bags upon garbage bags of shredded FBI documents, and, in a classic Red move, he gets his cronies to open each of those bags and piece every last one of those documents together. Red’s minions are understandably overjoyed at this task, but Red isn’t too concerned about their feelings toward the project- he, too, is worried about The Alchemist.

So he meets with Elizabeth Keen inside of a Church and…wait, is he wearing a kippah? So does that mean that Red is a religious man? Or does his arrogance know no bounds in that he believes he’s some kind of “servant” to the LORD in that by targeting all these criminals on “The Blacklist” he’s doing God’s work? Time will tell us…or, as I predict, this whole sequence will be forgotten and four years down the road it will all be contradicted. I don’t trust the writers of this show to be good enough to remember such details down the road when inside their own episodes they miss a lot of details…but hopefully I’m wrong.

Anyhow, Red meets with Keen and explains to her that The Alchemist has ways of manipulating DNA and the teeth of his murder victims so that they can appear to be the fugitives he’s trying to hide. Red doesn’t delve into the process much, only describing some kind of process where one’s blood is substituted for another person’s blood, which seems a bit iffy a proposition if you ask me, but for the sake of entertainment, I let it go.

This leads to the FBI to realize their mobsters are really still alive, so they fly out to Hungary (where the mobster lives) in an effort to catch him. They do that, but for some mysterious reason, decide that locating his wife isn’t important (despite her being a wanted woman too). We see the wife- in what must be the worst Hungarian accent I’ve ever heard (note to the director: the Hungarians have absolutely no relation to the Slavs (e.g. Russians, Poles, etc.)- they’re more closely related to the Turks, so a Turkish accent would have been much better)- confronting The Alchemist, understandably asking him how, despite his work, the FBI found her husband. The Alchemist decides he doesn’t have time for the wife’s questions and shoots her dead, which makes him look to be rather rash in his judgements making one wonder how he had the patience to transform all of his victims…but, again, I digress.

We then see the husband in FBI custody, talking with Donald Ressler. Ressler, as is par for the course in the FBI, is getting nowhere with the husband, who promptly asks to speak to his wife and his lawyer. A frustrated Ressler relents, giving way to the husband’s lawy…wait, what’s this? Is The Alchemist pretending to be the husband’s lawyer? The husband isn’t fooled, but The Alchemist doesn’t flinch- the husband, in a panic, asks for one of The Alchemist’s nicotine gums, which The Alchemist is only too happy to give him. It’s revealed that this gum was really a poison (which raises the question about how The Alchemist can manufacture twelve identical gum pieces and the gum package in time to meet with the mobster husband), and the husband falls dead. It’s here that The Alchemist beats an escape somehow.

Normally, I’d say this is another case of FBI tomfoolery but in this instance it is justified- The Alchemist likely has forged documents allowing him to fake being a lawyer and since the situation really doesn’t call for a thorough background check, The Alchemist can slip by undetected. Still doesn’t excuse the other errors the FBI seems to make on a routine basis on this show, but at least for once one of their mistakes is an understandable one.

Meanwhile, back at the FBI headquarters, the investigation on who the murdered victims really are reveals that the blonde (identified through bone marrow records, which casts further doubt that this “blood exchange” method of The Alchemist could really work) met The Alchemist through a dating website. The FBI’s resident technical analyst, Aram Mojtabi, explains that although the dating profile doesn’t reveal his actual name, it reveals his actual face, which is forwarded to the agents in Hungary.

Ressler sees that the “lawyer” he let in was really The Alchemist, but it’s too late- the deed is already done. The team then digs a little bit more into The Alchemist’s online alias, revealing that he’s really an estranged father to a daughter and a wife that seems awfully terrified of him. The kicker? The daughter, a young girl, just recently got diagnosed with diabetes, which you can bet will come back up once the show is finished.

Despite this nugget of info, Keen and Ressler don’t find much, digging through The Alchemist’s lab but finding nothing but a sheet of plastic paper with some random numbers on it. That’s either crafty of our criminal, or sloppy. I go with the latter- clearly this guy isn’t meticulousness enough to bother cleaning his lab out thoroughly, since you’d think a serial number (as that’s what the sheet of paper clearly is) would be something important to keep hidden.

Then again, maybe our Alchemist is savvy, since our hapless agents run around in circles in their minds trying to figure out what the numbers mean- we hear Ressler posit that these could be part of a bank account serial number. Seriously Ressler? How’d you get your badge? Since when is a bank account serial number printed on a white, plastic-coated, strip of paper in thick black font?

It takes Red- who seems to know crime fighting a lot better than the people actually tasked with crime fighting- reminding Keen about her job as a profiler (which she should have some mastery over after five months on the job) to figure out what the audience already knows. Since The Alchemist is a “lab rat” according to Keen, that serial number is part of a serial number for a microscope The Alchemist bought, which is evidence enough to get an arrest warrant out for him.

The Alchemist is already planning his next move, having invited a young blonde woman out for a “casting call” that we all know is fake. This woman, showing her superior intellect, thinks it’s a wonderful idea to take a ride from a man who only informs her that the call has been relocated- she does nothing to verify that this man actually works for the studio that she’s supposed to be auditioning for.

(Which raises another question- did the actress not drive to the event? Why couldn’t she use her own car to get to the new location?)

Predictably, the woman is on the gurney, affixed with black hair, pale skin and drugged beyond recognition. We then cut to a scene where the aspiring actress is found dead next to a body of a young girl, both shot. This time, Ressler and Keen know right away exactly what’s going on- The Alchemist has kidnapped his family and is on the run- so they try desperately to find him before it’s too late.

How do they find him? Remember when I said the diabetes diagnosis would come in handy later? Well, Aram, ever the intrepid one, informs us that the daughter’s insulin pump has a radio transmitter on it, useful for if it ever gets lost. They use it to locate the family, who stopped at a gas station just outside of town. The result is a standoff with the SWAT team and the now cornered Alchemist, and despite Keen trying to intervene and negotiate the peaceful surrender of The Alchemist, the SWAT team still manages to shoot the criminal in the back. It’s still possible that The Alchemist could live through the bullet wound, though, so perhaps not everything is lost for Keen.

Keen manages to get a list of all the criminals The Alchemist made “disappear”, which she passes on to Red. Red, without looking at the list, puts it into his pocket, which surprises Keen. Red informs her that he’ll have a look at it later, but right now he has “some business to take care of”.

It’s here where we see Meera Malik, alone in a room with Red. Red’s men had figured her out to be the mole based on piecing together the documents the FBI discarded, and Malik believes that Red is meeting her to kill her. The episode ends before we find out her fate.

Another side story in this episode sees Keen’s husband- Tom- get frustrated with Liz’s lack of commitment to the marriage, starting to take things into his own hands. During a baby shower where Liz reveals that she won’t take maternity leave- which, despite agreeing to it, is a sign for Tom that Liz isn’t interested in the marriage, a notion that gets Liz understandably upset- Tom meets “Jolene” (an alias for a person we saw earlier was someone Red was keeping tabs on), who tells him that the two of them need some “spice” in the marriage. She tells him about a photography exhibit where an artist takes pictures of married men while she has sex with them, which Tom founds outrageous. Tom is intrigued by this woman, so, despite his insistence that a photography exhibit isn’t a thing the Keens would go out for, he tries to make Liz go to this exhibit anyway. Liz promises another idea for a date, but, after several failed attempts to have that date- because of her work- Tom decides to go to the exhibit alone, and the storyline ends with Liz bringing home Chinese takeout to an empty house.

Part of this side story has Ressler reconnecting with his estranged fiancé, with his coming to terms with her impending marriage to another man. He can’t stand the thought of them together but he doesn’t want to be selfish, so he tells her that he’s happy for her. However, in a twist that gives Ressler a happy ending, his estranged fiancé tells him that ever since she saw him in the hospital she couldn’t stop thinking about him, so she ended the engagement with the other man. Ressler is flummoxed but delighted, and the two of them proceed to have a happy dinner.

The Good:

-Despite having very weak material to work with, Diego Klattenoff did very well as Agent Ressler. He’s come a long way since the pilot where he was wooden and stiff, as tonight he brought out the emotional nuances that brought his character to life. If only he could get some decent writing.

-Amir Arison was again his quirky self as Aram Mojtabi, proof that he should promoted to series regular soon.

-James Spader, again, was excellent, as his ability to humanize what must be the world’s most vile criminal amazes me. What really shone for me tonight was the kippah, and here’s hoping the show doesn’t shy away from the religious reference- there’s so much narrative potential in having Red be a devout religious follower because it opens so many new perspectives onto the character

-Ryan O’Nan did a good job as The Alchemist, making him smarmy but purposeful as well. You could tell that, despite his questionable morals, The Alchemist still had human motivations, and that was to eventually rebuild his life and rebuild his family

-I did like, despite the fact that “Elizabeth Keen places work over her family” is a clichéd storyline (but, unfortunately, way too common in real life), at least we’ve got an interesting variation on it. Tom is obviously going to stray from Liz, but this won’t be some random affair- Jolene wants something from him, if not from Liz as well, and I’m curious to find out what that is.

-Also, given the above, it’s great to see a law enforcement worker- Ressler- reconnect with his significant other, instead of losing it as so often happens in shows like this. At least The Blacklist shows that it wants to give its characters happiness, even if it is just fleeting.

The Bad:

-Spader, for all his good works, wasn’t featured that much in this episode, which is a shame. Red is really the only reason this show is a hit, and while I like that Keen and Ressler got more of a spotlight tonight, the show cannot forget what drives it.

-Usually, I like Elizabeth Keen because Megan Boone brings out the nuances in her character and makes her a lot more rounded than the writing makes her out to be. However, tonight Boone was flat and it showed. Since Boone and Klattenoff were expected to carry the load tonight, Boone’s average performance was noticeable, derailing the episode a bit. The frustrating part is that both actors have shown that they can rise to the occasion if need be, so hopefully the next time Red gets a reduced role in the episode (which hopefully won’t be for a while) they’ll be up to the task

-I wonder about the mechanics of the crime on tonight’s show. While I do know that DNA can be manufactured and altered, I’m not sure the way The Alchemist does it would work in real life. While I get that he doesn’t likely care about the survival of the substitute, simply substituting someone’s blood for someone else’s blood would cause noticeable complications in the skin (if they have the wrong blood type) and would likely be counteracted by the new blood created by the bone marrow, creating more complications physically. While I appreciate the fact the show at least tried to explain the crime, this may have been a case where “less is more”, with the explanation for how it works being some kind of “novel” project only The Alchemist knows how it works, especially considering that, story-wise, The Alchemist’s motivations were far more interesting

-The bumbling FBI…yeah, this criticism is getting old, but how many times must I suspend my disbelief watching people who are supposedly educated make the dumbest of mistakes? The FBI doesn’t have to be the one solving the crimes, but it would be nice to know that, every now and then, they display the competency that is expected with a job like theirs

The Questions:

-Still not sold on Ryan Eggold’s participation. Tom Keen always seemed to be nothing more than a peripheral character on the show, and, up until now, his presence really didn’t add much to the episodes. Having said that, now that he’s got a meaty storyline to follow, I’m willing to give him a chance to see what he can do on the screen.

-Meera Malik: I don’t like the thought that she’ll be offed, so I’m hoping she gets the Aram treatment and we find out that she’s been framed too, since she’s too good a character (and Parminder Nagra too good an actress) to discontinue. However, if the show does go that route, I hope Malik leads to the real mole, because I’m not sure how much more misdirection I can take.

The Verdict: B-

It was a good episode, all things considered. A lot of kinks still need to get worked out, as the writing is still subpar but, at least, the staff have still shown to be competent enough to have a “sum of its parts” be entertaining despite its flaws. I do also like the narrative potential of Tom-Jolene and it’s great that, for once, someone in law enforcement is reconnecting with their significant other instead of losing them, and, with Malik being involved, the Red vs. the U.S. government arc seems to be in full swing, so there’s lots to look forward to on the second half of the season.

-DG