Ryan Christenson and the Forearm Bump Gone Awry

 ...so the latest tempest in a teapot is about a bench coach for the Oakland Athletics, who stands accused of twice making a Nazi salute after his team beat the Texas Rangers, 6-4. No one making a fair assessment of the video can possibly believe that Ryan Christenson did any such thing.

He went for a "forearm bump," but held his arm up the wrong way. Then, someone, seeing how it looked, adjusted his arm for him. Then Christenson made the gesture again, as if to say, self-effacingly, "I was doing it THIS way, like a schmuck..."

Anyone who believes that he was doing a Nazi salute is a sturdy moron who should not be operating a motor vehicle.

Media Gaslighting, Early July 2020 Edition

-- President Trump visited Mount Rushmore for a speech; the media called Mount Rushmore a monument to white supremacy that honors two men who owned slaves, and say it was built on land stolen from Native Americans. You may be surprised to learn that this is not how the monument was described when it was visited by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders. Nothing about either Mount Rushmore or what we know about Mount Rushmore has changed in the past twelve years. So what has?

-- The president's speech was uplifting and unifying, and warned against the current trend of cancel culture and the push to destroy monuments. The media, perhaps listening to the wrong speech, described Trump's words as "dark" and "divisive," and pretended that cancel culture and the tearing down of monuments were figments of the president's orange imagination. Tammy Duckworth claimed, without any supporting evidence, that the president was defending "traitors" and "Confederates." I wish there were a follow-up question so we could find out, with the terms "traitors" and "Confederates," Duckworth was referring to Ella Fitzgerald, Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Louis Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, or the Tuskegee airmen, whom the president had praised.

-- While discussing COVID-19 policy with respect to the upcoming new school year, Kayleigh McEnany said the following: "The president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open. And I was just in the Oval talking to him about that. And when he says open, he means open and full, kids being able to attend each and every day at their school. The science should not stand in the way of this. And as Dr. Scott Atlas said, I thought this was a good quote. Of course, we can do it. Everyone else in the Western world, our peer nations are doing it. We are the outlier here. The science is very clear on this, that for instance, you look at the JAMA Pediatric study of 46 pediatric hospitals in North America that said the risk of critical illness from COVID is far less for children than that of seasonal flu. The science is on our side here, and we encourage for localities and states to just simply follow the science, open our schools. It’s very damaging to our children. There’s a lack of reporting of abuse, there’s mental depressions that are not addressed, suicidal ideations that are not addressed when students are not in school. Our schools are extremely important. They’re essential and they must reopen. Yes."

Several media outlets then proceeded to quote McEnany, but carefully snipped her words exactly at the words, "the science should not stand in the way of this." Just a few sentences later, of course, McEnany's context is clear -- that the science will not stand in the way of the administration's directives because the science does not contradict the directives. Science is on their side, McEnany said, but, rather than merely question that statement, which would have been in bounds, the media actually made believe that she was implying that the administration was acting in spite of science, which is an absurd and unfair allegation for the media to make, but also the type of attack that has become all too common.

-- The president was also recently asked about the incidences of African-Americans dying while in police custody, and responded by pointing out, accurately, that more Caucasians die in police custody. Media outlets rushed to "correct" his comment by stating that African-Americans die at a greater proportion than their percentage of the population would suggest, implying systemic racism as responsible for the disparity -- but virtually none of them mentioned proportionality to the rates of violent crimes committed, which account for the difference in outcome.

Here's the thing, Fourth Estate: if you are as tired as I am of hearing the phrase, "fake news," then perhaps one antidote would be to stop peddling it as often as you do.

Losing Your Job for Valuing Everyone's Life?

This week, Campus Reform reported that The University of Massachusetts-Lowell has recently terminated its dean of the Solomont School of Nursing, Leslie Neal-Boylan, reportedly in response to a letter she sent out to students and the school community.

Did Neal-Boylan make an insensitive comment about George Floyd? Advocate for renaming a library after David Duke? No. Here are the shocking, offending words:

"I am writing to express my concern and condemnation of the recent (and past) acts of violence against people of color. Recent events recall a tragic history of racism and bias that continue to thrive in this country. I despair for our future as a nation if we do not stand up against violence against anyone. BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE'S LIFE MATTERS...No one should have to live in fear that they will be targeted for how they look or what they believe."

Terrible, right?

...wait.

Yes, most level-headed people will find nothing fireable in that excerpt -- and, at the same time, sadly recognize what part somebody else considered to be fireable. After someone contacted the university, via social media (of course), that Neal-Boylan included the phrase "EVERYONE'S LIFE MATTERS," Neal-Boylan was gone within days. The only encouraging part of this story is that she is vigorously advocating for herself, and, on social media (of course), many others are advocating for them, as well. Two candidates who were considering joining that faculty -- due to their admiration of Neal-Boylan -- are now apparently reconsidering.

In an unrelated/related story, Grant Napear is out as the play-by-play announcer after a tweet. Former King DeMarcus Cousins asked Napear for his take on Black Lives Matter. Napear's response:

"Hey!!!! How are you? Thought you forgot about me. Haven't heard from you in years. ALL LIVES MATTER...EVERY SINGLE ONE!!!"

Welp! That's it. He's gone. Napear apologized on his way out the door for his, uh, hateful words, saying that he didn't realize that the phrase "All Lives Matter" is "counter to what BLM was trying to get across."

If anyone thinks that saying that "all lives matter" is somehow hostile to any one group, then obviously there's some sort of failure to communicate.

As I blogged in January 2017, in "Of Lives and Mattering,"

I do understand that most who say "black lives matter" do believe that other lives matter, as well, but they also believe that African-Americans are being disproportionately targeted by police. One may agree with that assertion. One may disagree. But at least the conversation can begin from there.

But if "BLM" deserves the benefit of the doubt, then the same is true for "ALM." If people should not mentally add "only" to someone else's "Black Lives Matter," then others should not mentally add "Except Black Lives" to someone else's "All Lives Matter."

Then there are the shoddy Internet comparisons. One argues that saying "all lives matter" is like a fire department hosing down all the houses on the street, not just the one burning, because "all houses matter." Or a surgeon operating on every bone in your body, not just the one that is broken, because "all bones matter." But I look at the lives being lost on the news. Folks, it's not just one house on fire. I see many broken bones, and they're not all one color.

Do I understand why people choose to say something as specific as "Black Lives Matter"? Of course. The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd are three worthy examples. I won't throw shade on someone who takes the time to focus on their needless, unjustified deaths. Conversely, though, people who choose to include other people's lives, rather than to focus only upon one race, are not white supremacists for doing so. Actual white supremacists -- actual ones, not just anyone who disagrees with a leftist -- probably wouldn't be caught dead saying something as unifying and anodyne as "all lives matter."

Arbery, Taylor, and Floyd should be alive today. Forcing Leslie Neal-Boylan and Grant Napear out of their jobs will do N-O-T-H-I-N-G to advance anyone's cause. It will only alienate many people who want to be allies, because they used the "wrong three words" to express their support.

Say what you want to say. But no one should lose a job for saying that every single life has value.

Don't Surrender Your Cities to Mobs

...so now the South Philadelphia statue of Christopher Columbus is being removed, due to several days of fighting between those who want to tear it down and those who want to leave it up.

Many people recognize that Columbus has a checkered history, but tearing down monuments does nothing to help people learn about the nuances of one's achievements and sins. 

It's not only Christopher Columbus and Confederate generals. Recently defaced was a statue of Matthias Baldwin, a 19th-century abolitionist. Elsewhere, "activists" are stating aloud their plans to tear down Emancipation Memorial, a Washington, D.C. statue funded by former slaves, depicting President Lincoln helping a newly liberated slave to rise off his knees.

If any changes are to be made to our landscapes with respect to murals, statues, and other monuments, they should come after long, careful, well-reasoned discussion, and not in reaction to vandalism and mob violence. Thoughtful conversation is how a civilized society should be operated; one should never reward criminal behavior with positive reinforcement or capitulation. Unfortunately, the precedent has now been set.

Protesters or Criminals? Not That Hard to Tell the Difference

The grotesque killing of George Floyd at the hands knee of (now former) Officer Derek Chauvin seemed to unite Americans -- if for only about 24 hours -- in condemnation against this callous, horrific act. I've yet to find anyone of any race or political affiliation who has attempted to justify Chauvin's decision to have his knee upon Floyd's neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds.

That unity has seemed to disintegrate in the week or so since then, as peaceful protests are being overshadowed by the blatant, criminal actions of rioters and looters, which have led to the deaths of even more people, destroyed businesses, and have created images of America that most of us can't recognize.

Sarah Silverman denounced critics of the rioters for, well, referring them as "rioters" in the first place, arguing instead that they're mere "protesters." In doing so, she pretty much announced that she can't tell the difference, herself.

I remember during the 2016 DNC debates, candidates condemned Republicans for criticizing "radical Islam," saying that a religion is the enemy. When the moderator, to his credit, pointed out that Republican candidates explicitly said "radical Islam," not all of Islam, Democrats such as Hillary Clinton merely repeated the assertion that it was an attack on a religion.

Here's the deal: if you refuse to condemn those who blow up buses in Tel Aviv or murder their own teenage daughters in "honor" killings because that amounts, in your mind, as an attack on ALL of Islam, then you are the one who is lumping all Muslims together, not your political adversaries.

Likewise, Sarah, if you see Antifa goons throwing bricks at the Secret Service, and looters wrecking a Rite Aid pharmacy, and you describe that as political speech protected by the First Amendment, then you are the one who can't distinguish protesters from criminals.

See the people assembling with locked arms, or holding signs, singing "We Shall Overcome," and NOT breaking the law? Those are protesters.

See the people climbing out of a broken glass door at Target, with a flat-screen TV and five pairs of sneakers they didn't pay for? Those are criminals.

The former group is marching for a cause. The latter group doesn't give a damn about George Floyd, and merely sees an opportunity to act lawlessly.

-- and, while it's heartening to see how many people are in the first group, it's equally dispiriting to see just how many are gleefully willing to be part of the second.

ADULT (i.e. Non-Embryonic) Stem Cells May Be Used to Treat COVID-19

(One hundred posts! Including referrals to previous posts! And it only took a little over eleven years! Woo hoo!)

Reports are coming out that one of the several proposed treatments for COVID-19 will be a "Multistem" stem-cell therapy from Athersys, a company that works with adult stem cells. According to its site,

"We are developing MultiStem^®, a patented, adult-derived 'off-the-shelf' stem cell therapy platform, for disease indications in areas of neurological, inflammatory & immune, and cardiovascular disease areas, as well as other critical care indications where there is substantial unmet medical need due to the limitations in standard of care."

Adult stem cells, a topic of many posts (of the one hundred) in the history of Benevolent Grammarian, are derived from actual adults, born children, or umbilical-cord blood. For many years, while embryo-destructive stem-cell research was being hyped by the media, adult stem cells -- which have already been used successfully to treat patients in the fight against 73 different diseases and ailments -- were often given short shrift or ignored outright. As with other potential remedies for COVID-19, we'll keep our eyes on this one...

Samantha Bee -- SO Heroic for Going after a Man Who's Trying to Save Lives

As with every crisis, we see both the good and the bad in humanity. Recall the words Fred Rogers reportedly said about his mother comforting him by telling him to "look for the helpers." There have been plenty of helpers, worldwide, since COVID-19 was unleashed, greatly abetted by a tyrannical communist government in China that lied about how communicable the disease is, and punished those who tried to publish the truth.

The helpers come in the form of the many health-care workers at high risk of contracting contagion by going to work and staying for overtime every day, grocery clerks who remain stationary while hoping the wrong person doesn't sneeze on them, good folks checking in on their neighbors to make sure they have everything they need, and even those who've just agreed to stay inside and to go for walks alone until this slow-motion catastrophe eventually blows over.

The helpers also come in the form of business and those "evil" corporations, who have changed the structure of their processing plants practically overnight, to make ventilators and hospital beds, or have donated hydroxychloroquine to the front. One of these businesses is MyPillow, chief executive officer, Mike Lindell, has overseen the temporary transformation of production, so that 75% of operations goes to making surgical masks to help health-care workers.

Ah, but Mike Lindell, in addition to being a philanthropist, is [gasp!] a Trump supporter and (EGADS!) an Evangelical Christian, a point that was made more obvious when Lindell took the podium at a recent coronavirus task-force press conference. At one point, Lindell thanked God for Trump's presidency -- and that was enough to earn the snark from Full Frontal's Samantha Bee, who tweeted, "My Pillow is now making highly absorbent pillows so you can cry yourself to sleep after watching this press conference."

Bee did not seem to go into detail at what about the press conference made her want to weep. Sane people would probably weep, if anything, at the outpouring of help from so many people to so many other people. I know that empathy is something that moves me, personally.

Bee, however, would rather tee off on Lindell, because, do-gooding be damned, the man is religious and a supporter of the president, and thus must be destroyed. Bee's the real hero in this, after all. Lindell might be making 50,000 face masks, which can save who-knows-how-many lives, but Bee is Keeping America Sane! Or Speaking Truth to Power! Or Resisting or Persisting or whatever it is she proudly tells herself after a taping. As with most rant comics, her rants are not comic.

FDA Authorizes Use of Chloroquine to Fight COVID-19

France has just the use of chloroquine to treat COVID-19, this after trials yielded favorable outcomes in 78 of 80 patients treated in trials.

Now, the Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency authorization for this anti-malaria drug, and private firms have been donating millions of doses of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to the fight.

Others have cautioned that a long period of human trials should take place first, but these drugs have been around for decades, treating patients, and I think the determination has been made that the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks.

Fingers crossed.

Happy Leap Day 2020!

(a repeat from 2012, because, y'know, it's still true)

The adjustment known as leap year goes even further than some people know. To be even more precise and keep the earth from gaining or losing too much time, every year that is a multiple of 100 but not a multiple of 400 will not be a leap year. For example, 2100, 2200, and 2300 will not have 366 days, but 2400 will.

Hope everybody made the most of today.

Protect Andy Ngo...Now

By now, you may have seen -- or heard about, if you heeded the warnings of how brutal the footage is -- Antifa's attack on Andy Ngo in Portland, Oregon. The video-journalist for the website Quillette has extensively covered the anarchist group's actions, has been targeted and doxxed by Antifa in the past, and was covering them last weekend when he was outnumbered and assaulted by the group's masked members, being punched, kicked, and (evidently) struck with cupfuls of quick-dry cement. In the hospital, he was diagnosed as having a brain bleed among his injuries. This happened at an event in which awareness was being raised for male victims of sexual abuse. Antifa was there to protest against that. Figure that one out.)

First off, I know others have made this point, but, before I get to talking about innocent people such as Andy Ngo, who has no apparent odious philosophy, let's get this out of the way first:

No, unless they're acting out first, it isn't okay to "punch Nazis." I'm not sure what happened. Just a few years ago, we were all quoting Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it." This may be getting replaced by "I disapprove of what you say, so I'm going to crack you across the skull with a bike lock."

A hateful ideology, in and of itself, is just hateful. A person has the right to hold views that I may personally find objectionable, or even horrid, without my being able to attack that person physically. If (s)he acts upon that hateful ideology by attacking someone else, or clearly planning to do so, then I may intercede. But if that doesn't happen, then I may not. A proper response to ten marching, Klan jerk-asses is to shun them, or to ignore them, or to ridicule them. But if all they're doing is marching, and you begin throwing rocks, then you're the aggressor, no matter how loathsome they may be. It's the only way. If we begin allowing violence based on what a person thinks, the result will be very bad.

Having said that, let's get to the obvious. Antifa is an organization that believes 1.) it does have the right to punch Nazis and white supremacists, and that, 2.) equally importantly, everyone who disagrees with it as a group is a Nazi and/or a white supremacist. It's a pretty good gig, actually: shouting "Take that, fascist!" while you hit the school crossing guard with a brick because you don't like the colors of his uniform, and it's a get-out-of-jail-free card. Or, at least it has been at least a few times, because people like Portland mayor Ted Wheeler have, in the past, given his police forces (he is also the Police Bureau's commissioner) orders to "stand down" when Antifa is embroiled in a conflict. CNN's Chris Cuomo has defended Antifa's tactics in the past, saying last year that "all punches are not equal morally," again suggesting that (non-self-defense) violence is justified depending on who the target is, and, again, intimating that all of the people Antifa attacks really are the fascist bigots Antifa claims they are. Cuomo's crossover buddy, Don Lemon, expand condescendingly, "It says it right in the name: Antifa. Anti-fascism...". Presumably, if a band of thugs called themselves the Angels of Nice and then put on masks and hoods and beat up random people in the streets, Lemon would be chiding those of us who opposed them, arguing that we must be against nice people. (Twitter is loaded up with such arguments in defense of Antifa.)

Hopefully, this incident will be a turning point in how Antifa is covered by the national media, and how it is dealt with by law-enforcement authorities, but we've had similar hopes fall through before. As for Ngo, you are invited to his gofundme page, the the Protect Andy Ngo Fund, initiated by Michelle Malkin for his medical expenses and future protection while he bravely does his job.

A O-C and the SBD

"We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of f-rting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero." -- direct quotation (except for my striking out of one letter) from the Green New Deal, authored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (both of the Empire State). 

I used to refer to myself as the "world's youngest curmudgeon." Okay, maybe I wrote that once. I wish I wasn't constantly thinking about age, but I will say that I am old enough when you were not even permitted to say the word "f-rt" on television.

"Fort?"

"No."

"Fyrt?"

"That's not a word."

"It is in Norwegian!"

"Okay."

I don't use much in the way of foul language on this blog, and I usually blot out a letter if I do. I don't think I'll get in trouble or anything; I doubt Blogger is all that strict. This is just my little revolution against the ubiquity of such words, even the relatively tame ones that can now be heard on Nickelodeon. But I'm pretty sure I remember "f-rt" not being said aloud on television. Words like that became their own joke, as shows would try to see how close they could come to saying them or displaying them without getting hammered by the network. "-ss" is another such word. Johnny Carson once appeared as the surprise guest on Dean Martin's show, did a little bit, and then, apropos of nothing, said, "You bet your sweet -ss!" and brought the house down. Martin collapsed on the stage in laughter and disbelief. They cuckooed the word out on TV, and it was remarkable enough that the clip made it on the infomercial for the DVD (which is how I saw it -- I'm not that old). One quick "-ss" and people would be talking about it the next day. Think anyone would even blink today?

This part week, however, may be the first time that the word "f-rting" (present participle or otherwise) has made its way into an official congressional resolution. We'll leave aside, for the moment, the pledge to guarantee an income for people "unable or unwilling to work." I'm just marveling at the bit about the bovines gassy from too much grassy (or, more likely, whatever they're overfed with). This could pave the way for new language in government proposals.

"If Congress does not pledge to limit carbon outputs within the next term, we predict that the sh-t will hit the fan by approximately 2037."

"My esteemed colleague believes that raising marginal tax rates will be able to fund his ambitious health-care proposal, when, in fact, an O.P.B. study indicates that it will prove to be a clusterf-ck for the middle class."