More and more Ride-share drivers are stopping their usual driving hours as the threat of the coronavirus increases. Drivers are reportedly wiping down their cars with disinfectant between riders and wearing masks and gloves during rides. More and more report that they aren’t taking rides from airports, and that they are considering stopping taking routes altogether. This is, of course, a decrease in income for them, which is concerning to some. Including Senator Warner (D-VA). Per Senator Warner, “[An] option would be to pay workers their regular average pay independent of whether they are able to meet their average hours worked during this time.”
You may have heard of singulair, also known as montelukast. It is one of the most common allergy medications given to children, but it can be used in adults as well. The FDA has just added a new black box label to the popular allergy drug for “mental health issues.” Per the official statement, “The incidence of neuro-psychiatric events associated with montelukast is unknown, but some reports are serious, and many patients and health care professionals are not fully aware of these risks.” There will be more studies done to determine the actual incidence, but for now, be aware of this new development.
Health officials in Victoria, Australia are attempting to contact about 70 patients in Melbourne. Their doctor flew from San Francisco to Australia with a runny nose and cold symptoms. He continued to treat patients throughout the week, but was diagnosed with the coronavirus the following weekend. There are concerns that he contracted the virus on the flight from the USA, and others on this flight are asked to come forward and be tested. All of the office staff and the patients who have been contacted have placed themselves in at home quarantine.
After the trial in New York City, Harvey Weinstein was set to go to jail immediately. This did not occur, as he was rushed to the hospital for heart palpitations and chest pain. He reportedly underwent heart surgery and stayed in the hospital for a week. He is now on his way to an infirmary unit in the notorious Rikers Island prison in New York City. Per a source at the prison, the infirmary is more like a regular prison unit than a hospital. Weinstein is set to be tried in Los Angeles later this year.
As the Milwaukee Brewers and star outfielder Christian Yelich are completing a long-term contract extension that will likely keep him with the club for at least the prime years of his career and a few years beyond that, the trade that brought him to Milwaukee in the first place is looking better and better.
Yelich’s former team, the Miami Marlins, were in the middle of their housecleaning under the new ownership of Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter when they traded him, Giancarlo Stanton, Dee Gordon and Marcell Ozuna, all for prospects.
At the time, there was a debate as to which of the two biggest stars – Yelich and Stanton – would yield more on the trade market. Both are tremendous talents. However, with the team-friendly contract he’d signed with the Marlins and his general durability, Yelich was clearly a superior option even if he was costlier in terms of prospects. With Stanton, the only thing a team needed to be willing to do was to take that $325 million pallet of anvils through 2027. Prior to the new contract with the Brewers, Yelich was guaranteed $49.57 million through 2021 with a $15 million club option and $1.25 million buyout for 2022.
With Yelich blossoming from an excellent player into an outright superstar with consecutive seasons in which he won the Most Valuable Player in 2018 and was the runner-up in 2019, the Brewers chose to lock him up.
The trade itself does not appear to be costly now given what Yelich has provided them, but the Brewers surrendered a chunk of their system to complete the deal. To Miami, they sent three top-100 prospects in Lewis Brinson, Isan Diaz and Monte Harrison along with an alluring arm in Jordan Yamamoto. Brinson is running out of chances to prove he can hit big league pitching, but Diaz looks like a future star. Harrison could end up replacing Brinson as the Marlins’ center fielder of the future.
Yelich boosted his production from an .800 OPS in five years in Miami to 1.046 and the previously mentioned hardware in his two years in Milwaukee. He has justified the cost and then some. Certainly, he was helped by moving from a home ballpark with friendlier dimensions in Miller Park vs. the cavernous Marlins Park.
The Philadelphia Phillies and Atlanta Braves were two known suitors for Yelich at the time he was traded to Milwaukee. There were others. The Yankees ended up with Stanton and undoubtedly regret it. They have no one to blame other than themselves. They had the prospects to get Yelich had they taken that route, but they allowed themselves to essentially be forced into taking Stanton because there was a marketing ploy to combine Stanton and Aaron Judge in the same lineup.
Yelich might not have had the glamour of Stanton, but he was and is a more useful player. Stanton steered the deal to pinstripes when he refused trades to both the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants, basically telling Jeter it was the Yankees or nothing. At the time, Jeter was mocked for supposedly helping the Yankees; that a diabolical plan to turn the Yankees back into a dynastic powerhouse including him taking over the Marlins and sending them Stanton for nothing. In retrospect, he got unintentional(?) vengeance against Brian Cashman for his contentious final free agent contract negotiation with the Yankees in which the GM told Jeter to leave if he didn’t like the offer.
The Marlins did quite well in both trades. For Stanton, they received two good prospects in Jorge Guzman and Jose Devers, some veteran production in Starlin Castro, and cleared that horrendous contract.
The Yankees did not need Stanton. Yelich has been ahead of Stanton in every conceivable context. This is not hindsight given the comparisons of the players’ two seasons after leaving Miami. It was known at the time that Yelich was the true prize and that has proven to be so. Even as he signs a long-term contract extension for $215 million, it’s $110 million less than the full freight of Stanton’s deal.
The argument could be made that the Brewers were under no pressure to give him a contract extension now. Still, owner Mark Attanasio is generous with his players, treats them well and wants to win despite mid-market constraints. The uncertainty of the upcoming collective bargaining agreement negotiations and how it will impact just about everything involved with the game is not a small concern. An understated factor could be that the Brewers would prefer to add Yelich to their organization’s Mount Rushmore with Robin Yount and Paul Molitor instead of current team home run leader Ryan Braun, whose reputation is still suffering from his PED suspension and his series of lies about it. Braun’s contract is up at the end of 2020 with a mutual option for 2021. Though Braun is still a Brewer, it’s Yelich’s team now.
The Brewers made certain Yelich is theirs basically for the rest of his career by going beyond the team-friendly contract and tearing up the club option for 2022. It all started with that trade. It was expensive, but it was worth it.
Per an internal email, and now a public statement, the Los Angeles Airport has disclosed that one of their contracted medical screeners has tested positive for the coronavirus. He last worked on February 21st, and is currently under self-imposed home quarantine. His immediate family is under observation as well. He has mild symptoms and has not needed any external medical care. He became symptomatic one week after the day he last worked and was diagnosed the following weekend.
The first leaked photos of Robert Pattinson in full Batman regalia for his role as the title character in Matt Reeves’ The Batmansparked the inevitable geekdom dissection and debate as to the potential for the film. Since Pattinson is set to play the youngest Bruce Wayne/Batman in one of his earliest cases ever portrayed on film, excitement at the relatively “new” take on Batman is combining with reticence at the possibility that the film will be another DC Comics film screw-up like Suicide Squad, Justice League and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
The films have been hit and mostly miss. For every Wonder Woman – a film that had the combination of a workable story and the charm of Gal Gadot – there are five films that simply did not work.
DC has partially shunned the idea of copying Marvel and having the stories interwoven and interlinked. Marvel’s successful strategy in creating the Marvel Universe leads to people who would ordinarily not go see every one of the films to go see them because they do not want to miss the nuggets that will be hidden in the background and in the post-credits scenes.
DC has failed miserably since the stories were not sufficiently engaging for people to care. It was delving into Zack Snyder’s ego and what he wanted to see rather than pleasing the customer. There is room for both.
DC’s mistakes are many in their attempts to tell these rich tales. Trusting Snyder, whose real skill is in cinematography, to oversee the entire franchise was a massive blunder that has made the DC Universe essentially unfixable, hence the critical smash and monster hit Joker. Separate from the DC Universe and ushering in a different and darker vision that resonated with audiences better than the obscure symbolism, smugness and rushed product that the Snyder films were, Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix were freed from the shackles of Snyder and the producers who clearly wanted a sellable product rather than letting the tale tell itself organically and reaching a climax as Marvel did with Avengers Endgame. For Marvel, getting there took more than a decade and even casual comic book aficionados would say it was worth it.
Any superhero film lives on the border of “this is ridiculous” and losing the audience.
The success of Joker will inevitably tilt the direction of subsequent DC films toward an even darker direction of searing intensity. Reeves’ The Batman does not necessarily need to be that dark, but it can take certain aspects of what worked in Joker and use it to the film’s advantage.
The symbols present in Joker – Bernie Goetz, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, Pagliacci – were not so offensively obvious that one would think Phillips was treating the audience like it needed the explanation spoon fed to it, but they were not in need of a set of CliffsNotes when walking out of the theater as they did with Snyder’s work.
Adam West’s campy, family-friendly portrayal worked for what it was because no one was expecting him to save Gotham City from a madman looking to set the entire place on fire for the fire itself.
The Michael Keaton Batman worked despite initial vitriol at the casting choice because the character most remembered was West and no one had seen the dark, brooding hero, the dismal Gotham, or a bad guy so charismatic as was Jack Nicholson’s Joker.
Batman and Robin was pure idiocy. Had Joel Schumacher been trying to make a movie that terrible, he couldn’t have done it. It’s not just the worst superhero movie ever made, but it’s in competition for the worst films ever made, period.
Christopher Nolan’s version of the character was not a good vs. evil morality play. It showed the perspective of the opposing characters and the consequences of their actions. Heath Ledger’s Joker did not want money. He was trying to prove a point. Aaron Eckhardt’s Harvey Dent sought to be the white knight who worked within the confines of the law with the help of Batman, who worked outside those confines with the tacit participation of the Gotham City Police Department, its commissioner, and the DA’s office.
Affleck’s Batman was unfairly criticized because of the scripts, yet Affleck was effective in the role as a world weary and older Wayne/Batman who wondered if he had any impact at all and if that impact was a net positive. He just kept doing it because he didn’t know what else to do with himself, eventually confronting an existential threat in Superman that he feared could destroy the planet. By then, the stories were so far gone that there was no bringing them back to something intelligible. Batman v Superman was a mishmash of stuff thrown in, seemingly at the last moment or at the behest of some producer who had no innate knowledge nor concern about the characters.
After Joker, the easy response is to go heavy on the brooding symbolism, but Pattinson’s Batman needs more nuance. Whereas Affleck’s Batman had been at it for two decades and realized what he was doing was not only fruitless but might have been making things worse, if Reeves is adhering to the conventional Batman wisdom, Pattinson’s Batman is seeking to right wrongs and prevent others by enduring what he, despite his life of wealth and privilege, has faced as the son of two murdered parents, shot in a robbery before his very eyes.
The moral ambiguity in any Batman film is self-evident, but worsens as he ages. Initially, right and wrong is relatively clear. It takes time before Batman can be cast as something other than a do-gooder, but as what he is: a legitimately deranged psychopath who just happens to be confronting so-called evil with a code never to kill. This is not something that can be accomplished when he has just begun his journey. His association with the GCPD and especially Commissioner Jim Gordon and Dent is one of expediency to achieve their ends.
Pattinson is far enough removed from his days as a ludicrous and reluctant teen heartthrob from the Twilight series and its intrinsically mockable vampire character that he can pull off the Batman role. Few ridiculed it better than the brief and still-missed Beavis and Butt-head reboot.
Still, the costumes do look to be tilting in the direction of a Joker-style concept rather than other interpretations.
A key problem that The Batman faces is straddling the line of credulity that every superhero film must navigate. If, as the rumors and casting suggests, the storyline is taking massive chunks from the 1996-97 comic miniseries The Long Halloween, Reeves has an even thinner line to tread than the usual neo-realism with a heavy dose of disbelief suspension.
Complete with some tired and lazy storytelling techniques like faked deaths, inexplicable disguises, multiple perpetrators in the puzzling denouement, the style was superior to the substance in a basically enjoyable storyline. Presumably, Reeves wants to do better than that and will use portions of the comic series while discarding others to suit the narrative.
The characterizations and how the actors perform in the roles is and will always be secondary to the story. If the script is convoluted and nonsensical as was Batman v Superman or is worse than a Saturday morning cartoon like Batman and Robin, then it’s not going to work.
If they’re heading in the direction of having Batman’s career as a crime fighting zealot with deep psychosis as he traverses a complex case early in his career while he still believes he is a force for good, then they’re on the right track. Trying to cram everything into one film with no reason for doing so will be a repeat of the disastrous versions which spawned the spin to Joker to begin with. The reinvigorated interest will be extinguished immediately by making the same mistakes other filmmakers made in the past.
This week, the Black Lives Matter movement staged a protest outside of Jackie Lacey’s house. Lacey is the District Attorney of Los Angeles, California, and has not agreed to any community meetings since 2016.
The protesters brought their group up to the front porch, which Lacey’s husband did not appreciate. He opened the front door holding a handgun and stated, “I will shoot you. Get off of my porch. I don’t care who you are, get off of my porch right now.”
DA Lacey addressed this the next day in a press conference explaining that she apologizes for her husband’s actions, but does not think it is appropriate that they came so far onto their property.
The police in Santa Ana, California were called and alerted that a man inside Immaculate Heart of Mary Church held a gun. The police entered the church, found the man and the shooting occurred shortly after. The man ran outside of the church with gun wounds and fell on the street outside. He was pronounced dead at the scene by EMS responders. It is unclear why the individual had a gun inside the church, but it has been stated that this was not a mass shooting threat. The man seemed to be suicidal over a broken relationship, but police are still investigating.
It may come as a surprise to many, but the nation of China is not as homogeneous as commonly thought. There are exactly 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities that make up the country, along with the one group laymen ascribe as the de facto representatives of China: the Han (due to the Han being the overwhelming majority.) As with any nation-state, there are challenges that come with inhabiting a space filled by various cultures and their respective systems of belief and practices. The Middle Kingdom is no exception.
In order to accurately and objectively view the current situation and conditions in China, some facts and figures must be presented first. As of 2020, the total population of China numbers around 1.4 billion (making it the most populous nation on Earth) and the country covers an area of 9.6 million km2. About 8.49% of the population are members of minority groups. Without going into significant and lengthy analysis of minority history, it wasn’t until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 (a conflict that saw an estimated 10,000,000 civilian and military casualties) that these groups were given special recognition by the state. Applications to be designated a minority group were accepted by the state until 1979. In addition to these rights, those recognized were given designated autonomous regions where preferential policies are applied to this day.
One of two autonomous areas belonging to the People’s Republic, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), better known as Xinjiang, has received extraordinary media and political attention in both the United States and Europe in recent decades. This area accounts for 1/6 of total Chinese territory and is bordered by no less than 8 sovereign nations. Home to the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, the 11.2 million inhabitants largely follow Islam. Inter-ethnic tensions have flared and resulted in acts of violence such as rioting, stabbings, and outright terror attacks.
This is in no small way due to the East Turkestan independence which has as its goal the separation of Xinjiang from the People’s Republic. A militant Islamist group known as the Turkistan Islamic Party is an outspoken supporter of the movement. The United Nations and several nations have designated this group a terrorist organization. Another major instigator of Uyghur grievances is the World Uyghur Congress. Though not condemned in the same manner by the global community as the Turkistan Islamic Party, this group has repeatedly instigated unrest in the region and lobbies actively in the United States.
While only over 1,000 Uyghurs live in the United States, the World Uyghur Congress is funded in part by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED.) Being both non-governmental and non-profit, the NED’s goal is to promote democracy abroad. Xinjiang is thus considered ripe for democracy.
Separatist language and initiatives lead to widespread unrest and a restriction of normally guaranteed freedoms in Xinjiang. As with any authoritarian state, the image of the leader is intertwined with the country and its government. Being the paramount leader, Xi Jinping is in full view and as such, has been branded an authoritarian. Adding to this image, especially in Xinjiang, is his 2014 declaration of a “people’s war against terror” that has seen an increase in surveillance of Uyghurs. This tough stance on domestic terrorism and promotion of national security bolsters General Secretary Xi’s popularity with the Chinese people.
2009 saw days of riots and attacks against Han Chinese coinciding with the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi that resulted in the deaths of almost 200 people, mainly Han. Government crackdowns can sometimes be overzealous, but in light of the situation, can be understood.
One policy that has become a recent bone of contention with separatists and the government is the forcible relocation and internment of suspected anti-government agents and those considered zealous in their interpretation of religious doctrine. It has been reported that possibly 1 million Uyghurs (1 in 10 citizens) are being held. The attempts to paint these centers as concentration camps or reeducation camps is irresponsible, inaccurate, and grossly exaggerates what is taking place on the inside. There is no brainwashing or destruction of a culture going on within the walls. Detainees are taught secular values and given language instruction in Mandarin.
Critics shout at the top of their lungs about religious intolerance and suppression in Xinjiang. The restrictions in place and laws on the books are in fact, quite reasonable: Children and government/state workers are banned from participating in public religious activities, fasting and praying on the job is prohibited, and the wearing of headscarves, long beards, and veils in school is not allowed.
Special interests groups, lobbyists, separatists, and anti-China elements will only give you one side of this story. None of them will willingly give speeches on the state subsidies allotted Xinjiang (for example a large portion of the oil revenue generated there is funneled right back into the local economy), nor will they be quick to point out that in 2004, the central government in Beijing provided 53% of the autonomous region’s budget.
Even more outrageous a claim is that minority rights are some sort of sham. That while existing on paper, there is no realistic outlet to promote their cultures or power given to govern. Members of the Uyghur ethnic group maintain the highest number of government positions in the jurisdiction of the XUAR. Furthermore, they are over-represented in the Central Committee of the Communist Party (a powerful state organ.) Low coast loans are available to them, school admission thresholds are lowered in order to admit more Uyghurs, and the filling of cadre positions in the Communist Party are liberally preserved for them. Affirmative action policies are many.
Naturally, the question of minority rights in China is far from perfect, but when compared to its neighbors, such as India, the situation should be lauded for its stability and opportunities. At this very moment, protests are rippling throughout Indian society as a result of the government’s attempt to strip certain (mainly Muslim) citizens of their status. The United States treatment of its indigenous populations is abysmal. Alcoholism and unemployment are rampant.
Legitimate grievances should be filed and aired, but not blown out of proportion and used as a weapon against a sovereign nation, especially one that does a great job of promoting minority rights.
