The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 51 – The Police and the News
June 23, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is policing in America now?
Rick Rosner: Right now, in America, there is a big push to fix policing. There are various names for it. Some are saying, ‘Defund the police.” Others are saying, ‘Don’t say that. It’s scare people and make them vote Republican.”
There is a push to make police less killy, less militaristic, less aggressive. Throughout all of this, there are still cops who continue to act like dicks, even though they know that they are on camera. There is a push to reduce the power of police unions, which are bad in terms of them helping cops avoid accountability.
They help police departments avoid change. But there’s this big push. If we do manage to fix the police, or even if we don’t, there needs to be a push to fix the news. The news is shitty in America. It’s profit-driven. It didn’t used to be. Now it is.
Watching the national news, when I was a kid, used to be a treat, you’d get a sense of a bunch of the most important shit happening around the world in half of an hour. When you turn on the national network news now, and you shouldn’t, there’s no need to watch it.
You’d hope to get a half-hour summary of the news. You don’t. You get 19 minutes of news. Towards the end of the show, 20 minutes in, they run five minutes of ads. They come back for 45 seconds. They, maybe, manage to squeeze 4 or 5 minutes of stories in.
Then they squeeze more news. It is incomplete. It is mawkish. It is just shitty. I don’t know if the government, as it will be constituted after the election, can be persuaded to do anything about it. Fox News is a non-sense engine. It pumps bullshit into gullible people’s brains for hours a day.
They will watch Laura Ingraham, Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Judge Jeanine. They just say bullshit all the time. There needs to be, and there probably won’t be, legislation to run a strip down the side of the picture.
A ticker or something that face-checks what is being said or gives sources, and holds the news to account, particularly Fox News, but other news stations too. There needs to be a push, so that more stories and different stories are covered on CNN.
When the Malaysia air flight went missing, it was on that all the time. There should be a rule that news channels can’t spend more than 10 minutes of every hour on one story. There are all sorts of fixes that are needed. I’m not optimistic that those fixes will be made.
Jacobsen: What about some of the counter-movements coming forward that make real change? If we look at New York state, Cuomo has made serious proposals with deadlines for the entire state in terms of drawing people into real change with the police and community involvement at all levels in addition to transparency.
Rosner: I think we will get change. The police have always been racist assholes – some of them. We have been taught the police started as slave hunting teams, to capture runaway slaves. They evolved out of that. They began with a racism.
But the militarization of the police is fairly recent. Some of it comes from the war on drugs. Some comes from the feds making it available. If you want to get advanced for your police like armored vehicles and shit, there was money for that from the government. 9/11 was 2001.
So, the militarization can, probably, be turned around, somewhat. So, I think not enough change, but some change, will happen. Not the crazy change like Chaz in Seattle, the 9-acre autonomous zone.
That shit’s just crazy hippie shit. Maybe, it will persist. But America is not going to turn into hippie land.
Jacobsen: What about backlashes? Many Americans have had violence committed against them in reaction to some of these protests on both sides.
Rosner: There will be a push for the Law & Order angle. There’s enough video. Somebody said that the police haven’t change, but video has changed. Now, we see shit that has been going on all the time.
The majority of everybody regardless of political party, including the Republicans, were appalled by that guy kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. There is enough video of stuff like that that the nation is in rough agreement that changes need to be made.
The cops help with that because they keep getting caught on video being shitheads. There was a video being a shithead all tattooed up drugged up who got in a fight with a guy who was in a fender-bender.
Cops keep getting suspended for doing stupid shit and worse, homicidal shit.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
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For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 