The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 56 – Signs of Hope
July 10, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The United States, there’s a lot of misery. What are the signs of hope?
Rick Rosner: Well, Trump’s approval is the most stable of any president since polling began. Him losing two percentage points is significant. He’s lot 5.7 percentage points since April. His approval hasn’t been above 90% since his very first week as president when people are trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Then over the next 6 or 8 months, his approval dropped like 37% as people were shocked at how terrible he was turning out to be. Then people got used to how bad he was, then his approval ticked up to 41%, 42%. When he appeared to stupid people to be showing leadership about coronavirus because he was holding a White House press briefing every day in April, his approval ran to the highest level of 48% since his very first week as president.
Since then, he has been so obviously shitty about coronavirus and everything else, but, particularly, Russia paying the Taliban $100,000 for every dead American and him not doing anything about it, and holding rallies that are increasingly racist.
People getting coronavirus after attending one of his rallies. The whole thing, he just seems have more bad stuff about him. He seems incapable of addressing it competently and in a way that makes people sympathetic to him.
It looks like his approval will not climb back above, say, the mid-42s by the next election, which is in 117 days. He just doesn’t seem to be able to do anything anymore to get the approval of anybody, except among his base, which is deflating.
All of which is a sign of hope. Biden, if you look at the aggregated polls, leads by 9.5 percentage points, which is what Hillary led Trump by this point in 2016. There’s some hope. Of everything that can happen with the various branches.
It is extremely unlikely that the democrats will lose control of the house. It looks increasingly likely that Trump will get beaten. Then the tough thing is the Senate having a 50/50 proposition, maybe at best.
If Mitch McConnell is still in there are majority leader, they could still continue to fuck us all up for another 4 years, or at least another 2 years. We have own House, Senate, and the Presidency, to really clean this up.
Another decent sign was the Supreme Court with various bodies trying to get access of Trump’s taxes. They are evidence of foreign corruption and lying all the time how rich he is. Russia, if you read Seth Abramson, it is 5 other countries: Israel, Turkey. I don’t remember the others.
Jacobsen: Israel and Turkey? That’s hilarious.
Rosner: He’s willing to align himself with whoever is willing to do business with him. He is not ideologically consistent. Anyway, the Supreme Court said the southern district of New York could see the taxes, but not before the election. Unless, they move fast.
He didn’t have the right to keep those private. The thing that is going to continue to really bother people is if he and his surrogates continue to insist that schools be re-opened in August. That plus coronavirus numbers continuing to go up.
This was the second day ever that we had more than 60,000 new cases in a day. The first time in nearly a month that we’ve nearly 800 confirmed deaths every day for the past 3 days. Trump has been insisting hat the death rate has gone down 10-fold. Who even know what that means? Whatever it means, it is not true.
I think the coronavirus is going to continue to get worse. Trump will be reluctant to admit that. I think that will be the thing for the rest of July.
Jacobsen: Could anything shift Trump from Far-Right to Far-Left?
Rosner: No, there was hope he could be a centrist because he doesn’t have any strongly held political beliefs.
Jacobsen: What does that say about centrists? The fact that some Americans or some Americans hope Trump would be a centrist because he doesn’t have any core ideology.
Rosner: People thought that he’d go for popularity, which means being a centrist and allows him to gather the most support. But he clung to his base and told everybody to fuck off.
Jacobsen: What is going to happen with Biden?
Rosner: Republicans keep asserting Biden has dementia. This is very clearly not so. He does have a stutter. He sometimes mis-speaks a little bit. But compared to Trump, he probably speaks better than Trump if you add up all the fuck-ups Trump makes.
The thing Fox News and Trump have been trying to sell about Biden. That he’s losing it. They probably won’t be able to say that for much longer, as we move into the National Convention in August.
Trump is so deluded. He probably thinks he can out-debate Biden. I doubt that he can. Other people are saying Biden should say that he won’t debate Trump. Unless, Trump comes up with his taxes.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Which I don’t think will happen because Republicans will say, “He is going to lose it and coming up with an excuse to not debate Trump.” So, I don’t think Biden will make that threat because I think it will backfire.
Jacobsen: America is rich, so has a lot of room for waste. It is also a creative country, so has dynamism. What about the aftermath of all this craziness? Your wife had a speculation or hypothesis that we will see a flourishing of creativity and industry after coronavirus.
Could this be amplified if Trump is not elected? An after coronavirus, after Trump, phenomenon.
Rosner: If Trump loses, you still have coronavirus for a year. Even if things move as fast as possible, you will still not have enough quantities of vaccine available, which means at the earliest mid- to late next year. We will still be locked down under Biden.
If Biden sets up a Coronavirus Core, which he says we will, and we get contract tracing, then it may still be possible to control the virus enough that we have more normality after 3 months of Biden, where it becomes possible to really try opening up the States again.
But things won’t be normal, normal, until there is a vaccine. That is more than a year away. Yes, we will have a big burst of production, entertainment production. I hope to be one of the people who sells something that I created while we were locked down.
That requires me to finish up what I have been procrastinating on. We will have more shit to watch some time in the next year because nothing else is being made. Unless, we go with these hokey made-at-home things.
People will try to figure out how to make more stuff. But it won’t be nearly as much as stuff as was made before coronavirus. Then we will have a big upswing in production. Another thing that you’re pointing at: Trying to predict what will happen in the future may spur some creative efforts.
From now on, shows set in the near future, which a lot of shows kind of are, like This is Us. It looks at a family in the past, present, and future. On This is Us, there are very few differences in overall culture ten years from now.
They set up their scenes without too many signs that we’re in the future. Given how many outward things are being changed, in the near future, productions set now and 10/20 years in the future are going to have to show a world that is more different than productions currently do.
Which may lead to some decent productions, that take some interesting stabs as to what the changed future will look like.
[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
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Rick Rosner 