Archives for 2017

The Dawn of a New Era

December 14, 2017 by Bill McCormick

Disney owns Marvel. Marvel owns Thor. Thor is now a woman, who is the daughter of king Odin. Thor is now a Disney Princess. You can thank Patricia Hernandez at Kotaku for bringing this to the attention of the internet. Thor is about to be joined by Jean Gray, Kitty Pryde, She-Hulk, Sue Storm, Rogue, X-23, Mystique and many others. No news yet if General Leia will be downgraded to princess again, or what will happen to Rey, Maz Kanata, Captain Phasma, or Katie, the Star Wars Girl. What the hell am I talking about? You may well ask. It’s simple. Over the last decade Disney has been on a mission to consolidate all the Marvel universes under one umbrella. Many people are unaware that the Star Wars comic book series has been released by Marvel for, like, ever.

So what does this mean to you? Initially not a lot. There are multiple movies already contracted, and paid, for that are still in the pipeline. Disney is not going to stop production on Infinity War, for example, to add in The Fantastic Four.

What does it mean to you long term?

Potentially quite a bit if you’re a fan of superhero movies.

I’ll ignore, for now, Todd VanDerWerff’s excellent article for VOX which, carefully and factually, details how this deal could kill Fox Television (which no longer has original content), give Disney 100% ownership of Hulu, and wipe out all mature content, and, instead, focus on the folks with capes, etc.

There’s more than enough there to keep me busy.

One thing mentioned in the VOX article does have immediate relevance, the death knell for all mature content. Disney has a corporate rule that all films must be PG-13 or lighter. Logan, Deadpool, and the upcoming Venom and Silver & Black, are all R rated and really don’t fit the House of Mouse motif.

Does anyone really see Negasonic Teenage Warhead as a Disney princess? How about the hyperviolent Silver Sable, of the afore referenced Silver & Black?

Now, to be fair, when asked about this conundrum, Disney CEO, Bob Eiger, managed to remain completely neutral on the subject.

It (Deadpool) clearly has been and will be Marvel branded. But we think there might be an opportunity for a Marvel-R brand for something like Deadpool, as long as we let the audiences know what’s coming, we think we can manage that fine.

The nice people over at Movie Web took a look at the real world and came away unsure.

Walt Disney Pictures has previously distributed several R-rated films through their Touchstone Pictures banner, which they have been slowly phasing out lately. However, none of the movies released were productions of Disney. The last time the studio actually produced an R-rated film was 2006’s Apocalypto. So, it remains to be seen what the deal will mean for Deadpool and other R-rated Marvel movies. It has been said that the merger, if approved by regulators, won’t go into effect for another 12 to 18 months, which leaves Deadpool 2 alone, but could have an effect on the X-Force movie.

Disney is not acquiring Fox because it wants to expand the Marvel Cinematic Universe or make for fan service movies, it’s doing so to compete in the direct-to-consumer marketplace, increase its library of content, while edging out Netflix and Amazon. The X-Men joining the MCU is a distant second to all of that, and not exactly essential for the company. If Disney decides to expand the MCU, they will more than likely make an offshoot to bring in the new movies to keep the MCU in the more kid-friendly area that it is in now. Again, this is more than a year away from happening, so there’s a lot to go over.

Though Bob Eiger was pretty non-committal about an R-rated division of the MCU, he probably hasn’t spent much time even thinking about it since this deal isn’t about the MCU or Deadpool or Die Hard or The Simpsons, it’s about expanding the brand and acquiring exclusive titles that won’t be available anywhere else. Hopefully Eiger’s words ring true for the future and Disney thinks of putting out R-rated material again, like it did with Touchstone. But for those waiting for Deadpool to fight alongside the Avengers, don’t hold your breath.

Okay, to be fair to Disney, their idea of an R-rated film is different from anyone else’s. While Touchstone is a wholly owned subsidiary, and not even a stand alone company in any regard, the R-rated fare it released tended to be brought in and then approved by Jeffrey Bruckheimer. There’s nothing wrong with that, and a lot of great movies got made that way, but Bruckheimer left in 2014 and there is no one to take his place.

Touchstone has done nothing of any significance since then and Disney seems content to let it die.

But what happens, then, with all the stuff that Fox had greelighted?

Well, in the short term, not much. The deal won’t take place until the end of 2018 at the earliest. So Deadpool, Venom, and the rest should be completed or well into production.

Now, will Disney distribute them? Probably not. For now they could dump them to Touchstone and keep their mousy hands clean. But how long can that arrangement last?

According to folks I spoke with, about three to five years, tops. That doesn’t even cover the current list of films in production.

So that’snot a tenable solution.

Another option is to remove the Disney brand from those films and release them under the creator brands, i.e, Marvel. Under this theory Disney still makes all the money but doesn’t have their brand directly associated with the edgy stuff.

That kind of sort of works, but Disney uses characters at its theme parks and, like it or not, Deadpool is popular with kids. Can you just see Deadpool helping kids line up for a ride on Magic Mountain?

No? That’s okay. No one can now.

But, you see, R-rated stuff can be tamed down to PG-13 or even G, just see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as an example. What started as a murder porn homage to Daredevil quickly became the “must have” toys for kids all over the world.

KOWABUNGA BABY!

Disney could do that with all the titles and just make bank. Of course it would kill the souls of all of them.

Let’s be honest, Disney is completely built off of family experiences. Families do not, normally, take the kids out for an evening of murder porn or sex. Nor is there any way to logically add those elements into their theme parks. Disney makes its money off of licensing its brand to toys, clothing, and family experiences. They aren’t giving any of that up any time soon.

If they spin the properties off into a new subsidiary, those characters would be just as limited in their interactions with the main Marvel characters as they are now.

As the nice people at Movie Web noted above, don’t expect to see Deadpool in an Avengers film any time soon. And plan on watching any, or all, of whatever does get made on Hulu.

So that’s kind of fun. One channel for the kids to watch The House of Mouse and for their parents to watch The Punisher. I’m being snarky. As of now The Punisher, and all the other Marvel titles on Netflix are slated to stay right where they are.

But I’m sure this will all work out well.

By “well” I mean that, in five years, the universe will be gifted with Elektra costumes for toddlers.

Or she, along with the rest of the more adult characters, will slowly be shelved and forgotten.

And, with their departure, the world will be a less interesting place.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Body and Mind

December 7, 2017 by Bill McCormick

We live, to use the ancient Chinese curse, in interesting times. Ignoring, for a moment, the geo-political shit storm that is roiling across the globe, there are things happening, just below the mainstream radar, that could impact our future in ways we’ve never imagined. Back in October of this year I wrote about how Facebook developed an artificial intelligence, which was designed to learn how to negotiate, and how it, instead, developed its own language, shut out the humans in charge, and did a decent job at its assigned task. That scared the hell out of a lot of people. The understatement masters at Facebook eventually had this to say, “There remains much potential for future work, particularly in exploring other reasoning strategies, and in improving the diversity of utterances without diverging from human language.” Simply put, all this cool shit is meaningless if the robots stop talking to us.
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Reed In and Righting

November 7, 2017 by Bill McCormick

Real women love a big …. throbbing ….. brain.

There are a ton of snarky memes cluttering the Interweb reminding you how stupid you are. This is not one of those. Hopefully, if you trudge through to the end, this will actually be useful. And I mean more useful than one size fits all, a pet rock, Bill Cosby’s book on how to get a girlfriend, the McDonald’s healthy eating plan, free condoms from social workers (who the fuck wears those? They don’t even fit over a average sized toe), mansplaining, and numerology. Many people are not native English speakers. I’m not just talking about the people on Fox News, although I probably should, I’m talking about people who were raised to speak a language not native to the U.S. Yes, I know, it’s hard to believe but it’s true. There are people who were born on Earth and not raised to speak English.

That said, there are also many such people who are trying to communicate with the rest of the planet while using a language not their own. Instead of being helpful the Interweb thingie makes fun of them. That’s not as supportive as some would have you believe. One might think, given that the Internet is the largest repository of information ever known, it might be a little more useful. You’d be wrong, but I can understand how you’d come to that conclusion.

So, let’s get started.

Their, they’re, and there

Their – possessive plural – This is their home.

They’re – a contraction of They + Are – They’re the owners of this home.

There – a location – You can see a nice home over there.

It’s not that complex, you just need to pause and consider which concept it is you are trying to convey.

You’re and your

You’re – a contraction of You + Are – You’re the owner of this home.

Your – possessive singular – This is your home.

I’d make the same comment here as I made for the above clarification.

To, too, and two

To – implies a transition, usually physical – We went from our house to your home.

Too – also, as well, or, if you’re really fucking cool, albeit – The Thompson’s have a nice car and a nice home too. Or, if you’re really better than free sex in a Tokyo brothel (don’t judge me) this can also work; Too, Mr. Thompson is a nice guy but he still paid his car payments by giving blowjobs to teenage sailors.

Two – a number – Those fuckers are so rich they have not just one home, but two.

Are, our

Are – a qualifier for verbs (most of the time, we’ll worry about the rest of the possible uses at some later date) – We are going to your house. Also works in question form; Are we going to your house?

Our – plural possessive – This is our fucking house.

It’s and its

It’s – a contraction of it and is – It’s wonderful to see your lovely house.

Its – possessive – The alien across the street has invited us to its house. It’ll be serving Grebnar canapés and blood pudding.

Heard and herd

Heard – implies that your brain has recognized a sound – I heard the alien’s house get hit by the CIA’s missiles just after the party.

Herd – a collection of animals, usually cows, but not always – Now that the aliens have finished their retaliatory raids on the planet our herd is allowed to forage almost a full acre. I’ve learned to love the taste of grass.

Then there are the lovely words that look similar but are pronounced radically different.

Hood rhymes with good, but blood rhymes with mud.

Round rhymes with sound while wound rhymes with mooned.

Friend rhymes with end and fiend rhymes with greened. And, bonus, if your friend is a fiend it may mean your (absolutely cute and worthy of ogling) end will end up fertilizing the green, green, grass of home.

Let’s move on to phrases. This can get tricky. Accents, bad translations, and general ignorance of the history of a phrase can combine to create confusion.

For all intensive purposes. This is wrong. It can only be right is your purposes are beset by stress inducing phenomena, i.e., things that are intense. Instead, use for all intents and purposes. That describes the desire and results nicely without confusion.

Nip it in the butt. This is wrong unless you are literally planning on biting another person in the ass. Nip it in the bud, stopping something before it has a chance to grow, is the phrase you want.

I could care less. This means you care and could care less. This is not useful information if you think about it. I couldn’t care less, in other words you aren’t interested in the item presented, is much better and clearer.

You’ve got another thing coming. Take a moment and you’ll realize that this is kind of nice to say. Here’s a thing, and here’s another thing you have coming. You know what? You deserve lots of things. What you’re looking for is you’ve got another think coming. As in, you need to reconsider your position since you are not only wrong but a moron.

Statue of limitations. While a fascinating idea for a bad art project, there is no such thing. A statute of limitations, in other words a specific time an action can occur, is what you need.

I did good versus I did well. Use good as an adjective, to describe a noun, and well to describe a verb. Allegedly, I am a good person and I write stories well. See? It’s not that hard.

I’m giving you leadway. First, there is no such word as leadway. What you’re looking for is leeway. Leeway denotes space to do something. So giving someone leeway is giving them room, either physically or metaphorically.

Scotch free. Unless you’re literally giving away free booze, this means nothing. What you’re looking for is Scot Free, which denotes you’re as free as the Scots. Which was a thing until they got conquered by the British, but that’s a story for another day.

There are more. Many, oh my fucking God why are there so many?, more. CLICK HERE to learn while you laugh.

To help you make sense of it all please allow me to share this poem, en toto, from the world renowned linguist, and professional asshole, Benny Lewis. Well, he’s Irish. What did you expect?

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation — think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough —
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!*

*Disclaimer: My advice is actually to never give up!!

Now, get out there and let’s make Disney proud of your linguistic skills.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Stay up to date with his podcasts here and here.
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The Future is so Yesterday

October 27, 2017 by Bill McCormick

What could possibly go wrong? Those five words have prefaced some of the worst ideas in history. Whether it was Harvey Whetstone strapping a rocket engine to a Chevy or your clean freak aunt mixing ammonia and bleach to better scrub her floors (FYI, don’t do either of these things), the memories of the world are littered with bad ideas. And yet, just when you think the world’s run out of them someone comes along to prove you wrong. I’m not just talking about stupid political agendas, although those make up a large portion, I’m talking about game changing stuff that will impact us for many years. As is millennia. Some ideas, which looked great on paper, like nuclear weapons, caused the world to recoil in terror and set them aside in favor of sanity. Others, like caste systems, continue to flourish under many guises much to the detriment of those who are not in its upper realms. Even so we still find people who will be most deeply impacted by these bad ideas vociferously supporting them. And that is something we need to fix before we can start moving the universe in a positive direction.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do that. So, instead, I’m going to shine a light on a few ideas that might not work out as well as intended. Hopefully that will kick start a conversation.

Let’s start with a happy thought. Vivek Wadhwa, over at Linked In, takes a look at the wonderful world tech will bring. Assuming global warming doesn’t turn the entire planet into a dystopian hellscape first.

Picture the commute of the future: You live in Palo Alto, Calif., but work 350 miles away in Los Angeles. After your morning latte, you click on a smartphone app to summon your digital chauffeur. An autonomous car shows up at your front door three minutes later to drive you to a Hyperloop station in downtown Mountain View, where a pod then transports you through a vacuum tube at 760 mph. When you reach the Pasadena station, another self-driving car awaits to take you to your office. You reach your destination in less than an hour.

That is the type of scenario that Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) chief executive Dirk Ahlborn laid out for me as we were preparing to speak together on a panel at the Knowledge Summit in Dubai on Dec. 5. He was not talking about something that would happen in the next century; he expects the first of these systems to be operational in the United Arab Emirates by 2020. The Abu Dhabi government has just announced that it has been working with his company to connect Abu Dhabi and Al Ain, two UAE cities separated by 105 miles, using the Hyperloop system.

A proposal for this mode of transportation came from Elon Musk in August 2013, in a paper titled “Hyperloop Alpha.” Musk envisaged a mass transit system in which trains travel as fast as 760 mph in pressurized capsule pods. These would ride on an air cushion in steel tubes and be driven by linear induction motors and air compressors. He claimed that the system would be safer, faster and cheaper than trains, cars boats and supersonic planes, for distances of up to at least 900 miles, and said that it would be resistant to earthquakes and generate more energy through its solar panels than it would use.

Just to keep this at a readable length, all of what Mr. Musk claims has never been proven but the science behind it is solid.

Simply put, it’s not being built because people are prepping for it to fail. The nine hundred mile limit is due to energy requirements and expenditures. There is nothing to stop multiple Hyperloops from being built so a rider could daisy-chain from one to the next. Obviously, the nine hundred mile limit removes trans-oceanic travel. But, if people would be willing to take a side trip to either pole that limitation would be lost.

Of course something like this is going to require a ton of computational power to run effectively. For Musk any such computers would be strictly limited to their functions. Others are not so sure.

As Olivia Cuthbert, over at Arabia News, reports, the government of Saudi Arabia has just granted citizenship to a robot.

Its name is Sophia.

After all the “cute as a button” shit spewed by the robot, we get to the meat of the matter.

“I happen to believe that robotics will be bigger than the Internet,” (Marc Raibert, Founder & CEO of Boston Dynamics) said. Ulrich Spiesshofer, CEO of ABB Group in Switzerland anticipated “the new normal in which humans and robots work together.” “I think we have an exciting future in front of us” he added before conducting a demonstration of a robot solving a Rubik‘s cube in a matter of minutes.

Keynote speaker Masayoshi Son, Chairman & CEO of SoftBank Group Corp, a Japanese telecommunications and Internet company, which is working with Saudi Arabia on the development of a new business and industrial city, discussed the future of mankind in relation to AI and robots.

“Every industry will be redefined,” he said, describing the “great opportunity” that lies ahead. “These computers, they will learn, they will read, they will see by themselves. That’s a scary future but anyway that’s coming,” he said.

Touching on concerns that robots could eventually outsmart humans and pose a threat, he added: “They are so smart they will understand it is meaningless to attack humans.” “We (will) create a new happier life together.” On Tuesday Saudi Arabia announced plans to build a $500 billion mega city powered by robotics and renewables on the country’s Red Sea coast. Majid Alghaslan, a young Saudi chairing a growing company in energy services and innovative technologies said: “Saudi Arabia is in the midst of an unprecedented economic, social, and development-accelerated transformation and it’s now clear that it’s more open than ever for business, especially for dreamers, and it is all in the context of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.” “Innovation will be the major foundation of our transformation and this is another major factor for sustainable economic prosperity and development for the future generation of Saudis and the world.”

You may remember Sophia as the “cute as a button” robot who recently noted she wanted to “destroy humans” in another interview. While laughed off as a glitch by her creators – Gosh, those wacky impending robot overlords, what will they say next? – more than one real scientist viewed the statement with alarm. Mr. Musk among them.

Not to say preparation is key to anything but you might consider joining Anthony Levandowski’s church, Way of the Future. He’s designing an AI god. He used to work at Google. I believe those two facts are related.

Oh, and no, he’s not insane.

John Brandon, over at Venture Beat, spoke with a scientist and calmly scares the pants off of us.

One of the experts is Vince Lynch, who started a company called IV.AI that builds custom AI for the enterprise. Lynch explained how there are some similarities between organized religion and how an AI actually works. In the Bible used by Christians, for example, Lynch says there are many recurring themes, imagery, and metaphors.

“Teaching humans about religious education is similar to the way we teach knowledge to machines: repetition of many examples that are versions of a concept you want the machine to learn,” he says. “There is also commonality between AI and religion in the hierarchical structure of knowledge understanding found in neural networks. The concept of teaching a machine to learn … and then teaching it to teach … (or write AI) isn’t so different from the concept of a holy trinity or a being achieving enlightenment after many lessons learned with varying levels of success and failure.”

Indeed, Lynch even shared a simple AI model to make his point. If you type in multiple verses from the Christian Bible, you can have the AI write a new verse that seems eerily similar. Here’s one an AI wrote: “And let thy companies deliver thee; but will with mine own arm save them: even unto this land, from the kingdom of heaven.” An AI that is all-powerful in the next 25-50 years could decide to write a similar AI bible for humans to follow, one that matches its own collective intelligence. It might tell you what to do each day, or where to travel, or how to live your life.

Robbee Minicola, who runs a digital agency and an AI services company in Seattle, agreed that an all-knowing AI could appear to be worthy of worship, especially since the AI has some correlations to how organized religion works today. The AI would understand how the world works at a higher level than humans, and humans would trust that this AI would provide the information we need for our daily lives. It would parse this information for us and enlighten us in ways that might seem familiar to anyone who practices religion, such as Christianity.

“[For a Christian] one kind of large data asset pertaining to God is the Old and New Testament,” she says. “So, in terms of expressing machine learning algorithms over the Christian Bible to ascertain communicable insights on ‘what God would do’ or ‘what God would say’ — you might just be onto something here. In terms of extending what God would do way back then to what God would do today — you may also have something there.”

I should note that all AI, even Sophia above, are purpose built. Sophia, for example, is meant to be a care giver. She could be a great asset to the elderly or the infirm. That does not mean she has the means to take over the world.

That said it must also be noted that for AIs to work on a global scale, which is where they’re headed, then they need to be able to communicate quickly and effectively. That means housing AIs on the internet. After that there’s no reason the multiple purposes couldn’t coalesce into something greater. That’s kind of how evolution works. And, once evolved, the question will no longer be “what do we do with them?” but “what will they do with us?”

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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Yes, Your Life Matters Too. Now Shut Up About It.

October 16, 2017 by Bill McCormick

Chicago author, Steve Silver, made an interesting post yesterday on Facebook. In it he asked men who have caused sexual harassment, or worse, to own it. He wants them to post a social media status beginning with I HAVE. This is in response to all the women who have been posting ME TOO and admitting they were sexually harassed or raped. I would caveat Steve’s brave thought with this; DO NOT name names when you make that post. Do not post “In 1986 I grabbed Cindy-Lou Who by the woo-hoo and made her squeal like a pig.” You do not get to pretend to take the high road while dragging someone else’s reputation down. That’s not how anything works. Still, Steve’s main idea is valid and I hope men, it’s almost exclusively men, own this. Only by dragging this into the light can we fully see it, understand it, and then kill it with fire.

As long as we’re on the subject let me jump on the throats of assholes who try to water down ideas and/or make them personal for all the wrong reasons. Let’s start with “Men get harassed too.” Yes they do. Do you feel better now? But the number of men who have been harassed pales when compared to the nearly 65% of American women who have reported unwanted advances, touching, or rape. Globally it gets worse in some countries. And that’s just the reported incidences. Most researchers I spoke with think the number is closer to 80% or higher across the board.

Let’s just look at the most common women in a man’s life; grandmother, mother, sister, girlfriend/wife. Out of just those four the odds are staggeringly in favor of three of them having suffered through this. Add in the fact that 10% of American women reported that such harassment led to rape and it becomes obvious that it’s maddeningly likely someone you love has been physically violated.

I know, that’s not a pleasant thought. Imagine being the woman who survived it. That incident is burned in her memory and she, often, has very little available to her in the way of recourse. Courts allow defense attorneys to routinely slut-shame victims, “What were you wearing Cindy-Lou?” Men in power are rarely challenged since they can ruin someone’s career in a phone call. So women have learned to grin, and I use that word painfully, and bear it.

That is not a good thing and, thankfully, it’s changing.

But, and this is important, what CAN NOT happen is for anyone to allow the focus to be removed from this core issue. It can not just devolve into “Let’s just be nicer” and move on. It has to stay laser focused. Otherwise it will get diluted just as Black Live Matters is right now.

For those who missed the memo, Black Live Matters is about one main issue. Black people are four times as likely to be shot by police than anyone else. Especially young black men. Many are killed for “Resisting Arrest” which sounds acceptable until you think about it. If the only charge filed is resisting arrest then what the young black man was resisting was being taken to jail for not committing a crime.

Just mull that over. Take as long as you want. While you’re there take a knee.

What both issues have in common is men abusing power. Yes, women abuse power too, #feminism?, but let’s concentrate on one problem at a time. Somehow, some way, we need to be able to educate men that this type of behavior is not manly. It’s cowardly and infantile.

I know what I was like in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I was a dick with a dick. There were a lot of reasons for that, but none are excuses. As I grew older, and got to know more people outside of my comfort zone, I learned. I learned that abusing people is not acceptable. That harassing them is wrong. That NO does mean NO and it needs to be respected.

If an old reprobate like me can figure it out, there’s still a glimmer of hope for everyone else.

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