By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, February 8, 2020)

“Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge. “

— Lao Tzu, 6th Century BC Chinese Poet

In reality, Lao Tzu is quite wrong — knowledge and prediction are inseparable. Those with the most knowledge are, in fact, the best at prediction. But his admonition of overly confident forecasters (like myself) is duly noted.

A week ago, I predicted the growth of the Wuhan virus (2019-nCoV) would peak at around 17,000 confirmed cases based on a simple application of the Ratkowsky Sigmoidal Growth Model (RSGM) which has been used to model the 2013 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak.

It took the Wuhan virus about two days to blow past my prediction and its spread has continued seemingly unabated. As of today (7 February), over 34,800 people have contracted the Wuhan virus and 723 have died.

What went wrong with my forecast?

Pretty much everything.

First, the RSGM may be too simplistic to generate forecasts in real-time (i.e., during a crisis). The RSGM is good for retrospectively modeling the cumulative distribution of virus cases; however, using it for forecasting a pathogen like the Wuhan virus while it is still dynamic within a population is problematic.

The RSGM estimates three parameters: (1) maximum number of cases, (2) position of the S-curve along the time axis (i.e., inflection point), and (3) the steepness of the S-curve. Forecasting becomes difficult as these parameters are not necessarily constant during an outbreak and any or all of them can vary with the occurrence of a secondary outbreak, multiple outbreak waves (as occurred in Canada with SARS), or when the virus mutates and becomes more contagious and/or lethal.

The net result is that forecasts generated early in an outbreak can be far off the final mark. As an example, Figure 1 shows how the RSGM forecasts for the total number of cases in the 2013 SARS outbreak varied systematically depending on the time of the forecast. The RSGM forecast generated for SARS at the 30-day point predicated only 40 percent of the final number of cases. Not until about 45 days into the SARS outbreak — about the halfway point — did the forecasts start to converge towards the final number. That is probably not a coincidence.

Figure 1: Ratkowsky Sigmoidal Growth Model forecasts for the total number of cases during the 2013 SARS outbreak

Second, my original forecast for 2019-nCoV occurred only eight days into the outbreak, and as I noted at the time, that was probably not enough data to generate a reliable forecast. As seen in Figure 2, at the time of my first forecast, there was a dip in the number of new daily cases (from 1,795 down to 1,472). This one-day decline heavily influenced the RSGM forecast. Had the number of new cases on the eighth day continued the prior upward trend, my forecast for the final number of 2019-nCoV cases would have been around 35,000 cases (not 17,000 as in the original of forecast).

Figure 2: Daily number of new 2019-nCov cases

Finally, I did not incorporate all available information at the time of my first forecast. While I only had eight days of data for 2019-nCoV, I could have incorporated prior information from other coronavirus outbreaks to help estimate the parameters for the 2019-nCoV forecast model. In fact, it was the RSGM parameter that places the S-curve along the time-axis that is most responsible for my first forecast’s poor performance. My first forecast predicted new 2019-nCoV would end at 21 days into the outbreak (see Figure 3 below).

We are 19 days into the 2019-nCoV outbreak (as measured from the point the WHO started tracking the outbreak on its public website) and there is no sign that this crisis is abating soon. The financial news service, Caixin Global, has reported that investment banks and economic forecasters are operating on the assumption this crisis will not end until late March. Even that is starting to feel optimistic.

Figure 3: Daily percent change in cumulative number of 2019-nCoV cases

Had I built into my first RSGM forecast the assumption that the time frame for the 2019-nCoV outbreak would be similar to SARS (i.e, about 90 days), the forecast would have approached 80,000 cases (and 1,760 deaths) before this crisis is over.

An new forecast and some final thoughts

Ten more days worth of WHO data on 2019-nCoV have been added since my first forecast (see Figures 4 and 5 below) and it is clear 2019-nCoV is on a far different trajectory than SARS, a virus with a much higher mortality rate (10%) than 2019-nCoV (2%), but much less contagious.

Figure 4: Comparing cumulative number of confirmed cases (SARS v 2019-nCoV)

Figure 5: Comparing cumulative number of deaths (SARS v 2019-nCoV)

Using the same RSGM forecasting method as my first forecast, the model predicts this 2019-nCoV outbreak will end with 48,300 confirmed cases and 1,060 deaths. Both figures are a significant increase over the SARS outbreak.

But given that we stand at 34,963 cases and 725 deaths as of 4:00pm EST, according to the Johns Hopkins CSSE 2019-nCoV tracking website, and we’ve added 3,200 per day over the past seven days, my original forecasting method appears to produce another significant under-prediction.

However, if I build into the model the assumption that the 2019-nCoV outbreak will persist for 90 days (like SARS), the revised model’s predictions increase substantially: 161,000 confirmed cases and 3,540 deaths.

If reality comes closer to the revised RSGM forecast, 2019-nCoV is not only going to be the largest and deadliest coronavirus outbreak in modern history, it will register death totals nearer the 2018–19 Kivu Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda (2,251 deaths).

As grim as this sounds, some perspective is necessary. The World Health Organizations (WHO) reports that 400,000 Chinese die each year from communicable diseases (e.g., influenza viruses). The Wuhan virus will add no more than a minor blip to that annual statistic. But comparing the Wuhan virus to a seasonal influenza virus is not a fair comparison. The seasonal flu is predictable. We know, generally, how many people will get the flu each year and how many will die from it.

Since 2010 in the U.S., the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million and 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 and 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 and 61,000 deaths annually. That computes to a mortality rate of approximately 0.14 percent. The Wuhan virus is 15 times more fatal.

“Despite the morbidity and mortality with influenza, there’s a certainty of seasonal flu,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a recent White House briefing on 2019-nCoV. “I can tell you all, guaranteed, that as we get into March and April, the flu cases are going to go down. You could predict pretty accurately what the range of the mortality is and what the number of hospitalizations will be,” Fauci said. “The issue now with 2019-nCoV is that there’s a lot of unknowns.”

What makes a new virus like 2019-nCoV so scary is that if it infected as many Americans as the the swine flu did in 2009 and 2010 (approximately 60 million Americans), with a mortality rate of 2 percent it would kill over 1 million Americans.

That is why there is so much global attention focused on 2019-nCoV.

• K.R.K.

Please send comments and suggestions to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, January 29, 2020)

Last Sunday night, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta comforted his audience by noting that this season’s common flu is a far deadlier to Americans than the Wuhan coronavirus — known as 2019-nCov — which is still concentrated mostly in China.

Similarly, on NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, a Chinese epidemiologist comforted listeners by noting that 2019-nCov was not as lethal as 2003’s severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus which killed 774 people worldwide and infected 8,098 people.

When asked yesterday on the The Hill’s Rising podcast, hosted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, about whether Americans should be worried about 2019-nCov, former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden was slightly more alarmist:

“This is a very serious outbreak. It is spreading widely. It appears to be more infectious than the SARS virus was in 2003 and, though it is somewhat less deadly so far than SARS, it is still far more deadly than a mild virus.”

Somewhat less deadly than SARS? Far more deadly than a mild virus? You can be forgiven if you are not sure how concerned you need to be about 2019-nCov. With only 5 known cases in the U.S. — and no deaths, so far — I would not blame any American for ignoring this newest pandemic scare.

But that might be a mistake in this case. The data on 2019-nCov being released daily by the World Health Organization (WHO) is forming a picture of the virus that is trending in a direction significantly more serious than SARS. Figures 1 and 2 (below) show the current trajectory of 2019-nCov relative to SARS in terms of reported cases and fatalities. Each data series plotted below start from the date WHO started tracking these viruses on their public website.

As you can see, from Day 1 both viruses start from a similar position, but over the course of 2019-nCov’s first week it is already significantly higher than SARS in reported cases (2,798 versus 421) and fatalities (80 versus 14).

Figure 1: Comparing SARS and 2019-nCov (Reported Cases)

Figure 2: Comparing SARS and 2019-nCov (Fatalities)

Admittedly, we only have one week of data for 2019-nCov and many factors that will determine its final outcome are yet to be determined (e.g., vaccine, effectiveness of gov’t intervention programs, etc.). Moreover, the WHO could be getting these higher numbers for 2019-nCov because of China’s experience with SARS which may have led to improved, faster diagnostic methods and a higher propensity among individuals with symptoms to receive immediate medical care.

That would be the good news story. The bad news story would be that the steeper trajectory for 2019-nCov — even at this early stage — is indicative of a much more infectious virus than SARS that will, despite having a lower mortality rate, potentially kill far more people.

Already, as of 29 January 2020, Johns Hopkins researchers are reporting 6,057 confirmed cases of 2019-nCov and 132 confirmed deaths on their daily tracking website — which tends to be more up-to-date than the WHO daily situation report. If the Johns Hopkins numbers are accurate, 2019-nCov has already infected 75 percent of the final infection number for SARS, and while 2019-nCov has a long way to go to reach SARS’ fatality numbers, at the current pace 2019-nCov will reach it in 6 to 7 weeks.

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My intent is not to trigger excessive alarm over 2019-nCov. At this early juncture, it does not look like a major pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu of 1918–1919 — which killed 50 million people worldwide — or even the Hong Kong Flu of 1968–1969 that killed 1 million people worldwide, including 34, 000 in the U.S.

In fact, the national and international news media should be commended for their restraint in covering 2019-nCov — at least for now. That most of the news stories so far acknowledge the early nature of this current outbreak and make a strong effort to put it into historical context is a positive reflection on the journalists covering the story.

For example, CNN’s Dr. Gupta saying the current common flu season is a bigger threat to American lives than 2019-nCov is an important comparison. This U.S. flu season alone (2019–2020), the low estimate is that over 8,200 people have already died and 140,000 have been hospitalized, according the Center for Disease Control. Furthermore, at least 15,000,000 million people have contracted the flu and between 7 and 10 million have visited a doctor for the flu. These numbers still dwarf anything related to 2019-nCov. [Quick math: The U.S. mortality rate so far for this flu season is 8,200 divided by 15,000,000…or around 55 deaths for every 100,000 flu cases.]

But Dr. Gupta’s calming assurance that 2019-nCov isn’t an immediate, dire threat also runs the risk of making the general public too complacent at the exact time they should be taking precautions (e.g., cancel travel plans to highly-infected areas, limit interactions with people recently traveling in those areas, etc.).

Of course, it may already be too late to change the trajectory of 2019-nCov as its die may have been cast.

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How bad could 2019-nCov get?

Epidemiologists rightfully exercise caution when citing any single number regarding the lethality of 2019-nCov. Viruses can evolve during a single outbreak and later mortality rates can differ significantly from earlier rates.

But we do have early mortality estimates for 2019-nCov. As of 27 January 2020, the WHO reported 2,798 confirmed cases of 2019-nCov and 80 deaths, which is a 3 percent mortality rate. However, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, M.D., this is likely an over-estimate as it is hard to know how many people currently have the virus but are not showing symptoms or have not received medical attention.

In comparison, SARS had a mortality rate of 10 percent (8,098 confirmed cases with 774 people dying) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), since 2012, has 2,494 confirmed cases and has killed 858 people (a 34 percent mortality rate!). Interestingly, MERS is still active with 12 new cases diagnosed in November 2019.

The deadliest flu virus of the past two centuries was the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918–1919 that killed 50 million people worldwide with an estimated mortality rate of between 10 and 20 percent. What made the Spanish Flu so deadly was its infection rate of around 50 percent (# of those infected / Population Size).

In contrast, per Johns Hopkins infection numbers, the current 2019-nCov infection rate in China’s Hubei province is about 10 infections for every 100,000 people. Of course, this cumulative number is going to move up (probably dramatically) in the next few months. The point is simply that 2019-nCov is not even near the magnitude of the Spanish Flu. In fact, it is substantially less infectious than the common flu viruses now spreading across the U.S., which have a current combined infection rate of 4 percent That number will also rise over time as we are only half way through this year’s flu season.

Outside of the coronaviruses, the average Ebola virus outbreak has a mortality rate of around 50 percent, according to the WHO. Most recently, the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak that hit primarily West Africa generated 28,652 confirmed cases and caused 11,325 fatalities (a 40 percent mortality rate).

So there you go — 2019-nCov isn’t Ebola or the Spanish Flu, so rest easy.

Well, not so fast. Given that the China’s National Health Commission Minister, Ma Xiaowei, said on Sunday that the incubation period for 2019-nCoV could range from one to 14 days, it is obvious the situation remains too fluid for making strong forecasts about this virus.

The reality is, the range of possibilities for 2019-nCov’s final outcome is still broad. If the current numbers are a significant under-count of the true infectiousness of 2019-nCov, or if the virus evolves into something even more infectious, worst-case scenarios start looking more plausible and we’ll see a final death count closer to 10,000 than the 774 deaths during the SARS outbreak.

On the other hand, scientists are moving on a 2019-nCov vaccine at a record pace, thereby raising the possibility of a vaccine being deployed early in 2019-nCov’s evolution, thereby stunting its impact. Other factors as well, including the effectiveness of Chinese government’s mitigation efforts which will most certainly play a large role in determining final outcomes.

The bottom line is, outside of China and its neighbors, there is no reason to be too anxious about 2019-nCov. It is much too early for exhibiting excessive caution. That said, I wouldn’t travel to China’s Hubei province in the near future and I might even consider wearing a face mask if I was doing any international airline travel. But, beyond that, a far more important action you can take is to protect against the common flu already in this country. It is far, far more likely you will contract and die from that than contracting and dying from 2019-nCov.

• K.R.K.

Send comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, January 24, 2020)

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This is not a movie or TV series review. However, I will be revealing key plot twists from the latest Disney Star Wars installment — The Rise of Skywalker. If you have not seen this movie, but intend to, consider yourself warned.

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“When it comes to fans, it is a fan’s right to have whatever opinion they want to have, and people are going to be upset, especially when you’re talking about books or games, because you’re never going to be the exact person who they had in their head, or who they played on The Witcher 3, for example. I don’t necessarily consider that toxic, I just consider that passionate.” — Actor Henry Cavill (‘Geralt’ in Netflix’s Witcher series) interviewed on YouTube’s Jake’s Takes.

Actor Henry Cavill, best known for his portrayal of ‘Superman,’ has taken his share of criticism from fans and critics.

Having depicted the comic book realm’s most iconic superhero, Cavill understands the importance of fan expectations when these characters are rendered on the big screen. The source material for Superman alone consists of over 1,000 separate comic book issues since DC Comics’ Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster debuted Krypton’s most famous refugee in 1939 — not to mention the late-Christopher Reeves much loved movie versions of the Man of Steel in the 1970s and 80s.

So when asked about what some entertainment journalists call ‘toxic fans,’ Cavill surprised many of us when he calmly dismissed the derogatory term as mostly a media creation meant to marginalize ‘passionate’ fans by linking them to a small, unrepresentative group of pernicious outliers who are motivated, to varying degrees, by racism, misogyny and whatever else that comes with white male privilege.

[Spoiler alert: Cavill nails it when he says passionate fans should not be smeared this way.]

If the reactions within the Twitter and Podcast community are indicative, Cavill’s stock will stay on a fast rise among sci-fan/fantasy fans — which may explain why the ratings for his newest fantasy-genre project — The Witcher (airing now on Netflix) — have been so strong, despite mixed reviews from critics. Further evidence that mainstream media critics often can’t be trusted, especially when they don’t bother to watch all available episodes for a new series before they review it — as was the case with Entertainment Weekly’s Kristen Baldwin and Darren Franich in their review of The Witcher.

My own review of The Witcher, produced by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, is based on all eight episodes:

The Witcher requires significant cognitive effort when first following its complex narrative structure; but, by the fourth episode, the investment is well worth it. It is a brilliantly crafted TV series. Moreover, Henry Cavill overcomes the ‘Excessive Attractiveness Bias’ (EAB), which assumes good-looking actors can’t really act, and energizes one of the most multi-faceted, substantive characters found on TV today.

End of my TV review.

Fans of the The Witcher book series had expectations for the Netflix version; and, based on the early audience returns, the show as met or exceeded those expectations.

The success of Netflix’s The Witcher is a happy story for its devoted fans, as well as for those who are new to the series.

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A not-so-happy story has been fan reaction to the Disney Stars Wars trilogy, recently capped by its third installment — The Rise of Skywalker (TROS)— a bad movie by any objective measure of competent film making, but still relatively enjoyable to long time Star Wars fans like myself.

Unfortunately, the J. J. Abrams-directed TROS has brought the ‘toxic fan’ label back to the fore as thousands of passionate Star Wars fans — loosely organized as the Fandom Menace, first emerging with the release of Disney’s The Last Jedi (TLJ) after it unleashed an onslaught of fan criticism — inundated social media with rumors and sharp criticisms of TROS before its December 20th release date (including an August 2019 Reddit post revealing its entire plot!).

Perhaps to stunt the potential negative influence of the nebulous Fandom Menace on TROS’ box office receipts, various corporate media outlets proffered stories charging that the Fandom Menace was, in fact, a thinly-organized, disparate cartel of “unhinged” Star Wars fans motivated by a noxious cocktail of social media-fed paranoia, bigotry and general ill intent. Otherwise known today as ‘trolls.’

From BuzzFeed’s Ryan Broderick:

“The Star Wars fandom is now a nesting doll of speculation, paranoia, and anxiety about corporate overreach — growing more insular and reactionary in the eight years since Disney took over Star Wars.

The misinformation and anger inside the Star Wars fandom is what happens after decades of corporatization and anonymous decentralized networking. It is a glimpse of a future in which anxieties over the motives of the megacorporations that drive our culture — down to our very mythologies — set off conflicts between warring information tribes who inhabit their own artificial narratives. What began with small but vocal insurgent online communities like 4chan or the alt-right has now come for the mainstream.”

Esquire’s Matt Miller dog walked his readers into believing the swelling rise of diversity in Hollywood films is powering most of the Fandom Menace’s rage against TROS:

“A lot has changed since audiences first saw Luke Skywalker gaze off into that binary sunset. Hollywood is slowly, too slowly, becoming a place that embraces performers and stories of all genders, sexual orientations, and races. There’s still a lot of work to do, but progress will not be halted no matter how passionately, how loudly trolls cry online. Abrams’s The Rise of Skywalker will not reverse the progress Disney made when it put a lightsaber in Daisy Ridley’s hands. And for that, fans will still be mad online. They’re not angry with Star Wars in particular, they’re angry at a changing world — one in which their perspective isn’t the only one that matters. I say let them yell, let them whine. Abrams is pissing off the right people.”

The problem with Miller’s beautiful admonition of the Fandom Menace — as with other screeds against passionate Star Wars fans on social media — is that it is unfettered to actual facts.

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In one attempt to bring data to the problem, Washington Post guest columnist and University of Rochester political science professor, Bethany Lacina, systematically investigated online Star Wars-related posts in order to describe the characteristics and motivations of vocal Star Wars fans.:

America’s most iconic movie franchise, Star Wars, has been denounced by the alt-right for unflattering representation of men, casting to pander to diversity and leftist moralizing. That discussion of gender and race in Star Wars went mainstream after the December 2017 release of “The Last Jedi.” The movie has the franchise’s first nonwhite female lead, portrays an elderly Luke Skywalker confronting his failures and leaves the Jedi order in the hands of a young woman.

How did Professor Lacina determine that the alt-right was behind the most toxic components of a tsunami of fan criticism that met the release of The Last Jedi? By looking at Twitter traffic, of course (sigh):

I compared general Star Wars-related tweets to tweets about Kelly Marie Tran, the actress harassed on Instagram, or about Rose Tico, her “Last Jedi” character. The proportion of tweets with offensive language doubled from 6 to 12 percent — and hate speech jumped 60 percent, rising from 1.1 percent to 1.8 percent of all tweets.

Fans complain about Star Wars’ first nonwhite female lead in more degrading language than they complain about other parts of the franchise.

It is not inherently racist or sexist to dislike Star Wars or “The Last Jedi.” The point of the comparison is that tweeting about these movies turns belligerent when it comes to race and gender.

The online-based harassment experienced by Kelly Marie Tran (‘Rose Tico’) after the release of TLJ is despicable. Anybody involved in such a deed has a rusty iron maiden reserved for them in hell.

But how does the fact that a few racists and misogynists exploited Twitter’s broad social media platform to spread hate (collectively summarized by Prof. Lacina as the ‘alt-right’) relate to the far greater number of passionate Star Wars fans — the Fandom Menace — who simply hated the movie because it tossed George Lucas’ Skywalker-centered Star Wars narrative into the fire?

Alt-right is not a well-defined political label and Professor Lacina’s operationalization of the concept certainly doesn’t pass empirical muster. Without knowing everyone’s political orientation in her Twitter-based study, how could Professor Lacina possibly such an inferential leap of faith? By her own admission, it isn’t possible, and when she could measure political orientations, she found significant negativity expressed on Twitter also comes from the ‘cultural left’:

Offensive tweets and hate speech did not come only from those identified as politically right wing. Most posts are too generic to infer political views. But I did find that such belligerence also comes from the cultural left. Female podcasters, in particular, are attacked for not supporting diversity and gender equality strongly enough.

Most people who tweet about Star Wars are congenial and skeptical about “trolls.” But as with other cultural icons — whether it’s an all-female “Ghostbusters” or NFL players kneeling during the national anthem — a significant few respond with anger and hate when gender and race expectations change. We know that from the numbers.

While Professor Lacina does not explicitly lump all passionate Star Wars fans into the “significant few” who account for the offensive or hateful online speech, she did not go out of her way to disentangle them either.

To the contrary, how could anyone be blamed after reading the many anti-Fandom Menace stories over the past few years if they concluded this loose confederation Star Wars fans are just a bunch of white, male crybabies?

Never mind that Lacina’s own numbers, unwittingly, confirm the opposite conclusion: the overwhelming majority of passionate online Star Wars fans are ‘congenial’ and do not infect their critiques with offensive or hate-filled rhetoric. And, even in the low number of cases when a Disney Star Wars critic’s political orientation can be discerned through their Twitter profile or tweets, it turns out extreme lefties are as noxious as extreme righties in the Twitterverse.

Anyone that’s spent 30 minutes on Twitter knows that.

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Regrettably, in the Age of Fake News, such dereliction of journalistic duty by the likes of Broderick, Miller, and Lacina goes largely unnoticed as long as it reinforces prejudices pre-approved by one of the two political tribes and their allies.

If you dare articulate — publicly — the opinion that the Disney Star Wars movie scripts were molded out of the intellectual equivalent of poop, you must be a misogynist, racist or both, according to the basic argument Broderick, Miller and others offer their readers.

Rarely do these anti-Fandom Menace jeremiads mention that the Disney Star Wars movies, while visually breathtaking (the Rian Johnson-directed TLJ is jaw-dropping in its beauty), are storytelling monstrosities that do far more to turn off longtime fans of George Lucas’s groundbreaking trilogy than they do to create a new generation of Star Wars devotees. [My teenage son and his friends are more invested in Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi from Lucas’ last two prequel movies than they are in the original trilogy — which my son thinks has ‘bad special effects’.]

From the collective minds at Disney-owned LucasFilm, Han Solo turned out to be a feckless, deadbeat dad who gets killed by his son, Ben Solo (aka. Kylo Ren), for reasons the filmmakers never bothered to show us (it was explained in a throwaway line in one of three movies, I am told). That is shitty storytelling.

J. J. Abrams (affectionately called Jar Jar Abrams within the Fandom Menace) also thought it was a smart strategic move to never allow the Fab Four (Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca) to get back together for at least one scene in The Force Awakens. Instead, in one scene, he has General Leia Organa ignore Chewbacca, just arrived from a bloody battle with the First Order, as if he was there to fix the high-speed internet connection on Resistance Base D’Qar.

Fine, J. J., if you and Disney thought it was a good marketing strategy to openly reject the deep affection the legion of Star Wars fans harbor for the original characters, go for it. But, in doing so, perhaps…maybe…you should have created memorable characters in their place. Instead, you offered moviegoers three poorly-formed (and very forgettable) characters that will never be the stuff of movie legend.

The names Rey, Finn and Poe are never going to be the cultural reference points for the current generation the way the names Luke, Han and Leia were for my generation — and for generations after that through our children and grandchildren.

[As a matter of fact, my friends and I — fitting the classic nerd profile as defined in the late 1970s and early 80s— considered Leia the most competent member of that trio and cringed for actor Carrie Fisher when she wore the “bikini” in Return of the Jedi. So, I discount charges of misogyny when weaved into any explanation for why so many Star Wars fans are disappointed in the Disney Star Wars movies.]

All Abrams, Johnson, and LucasFilm President Kathleen Kennedy had to do is make three great Star Wars movies and this whole Fandom Menace brouhaha would have been stillborn. But they didn’t.

Instead, they jettisoned the original Lucas-created myth for a new one that is incoherent and just plain dumb. Twenty minutes into The Force Awakens, Rey is flying the Millennium Falcon like a savant, and the film’s explanation is that she read flying manuals in her spare time on Jakku (her home planet). That’s lazy screenwriting.

As a result, LucasFilm’s incompetence will force Disney to invest more billions — beyond the billions already spent to create Star Wars-themed lands at Disneyland and Disney World — if the entertainment behemoth ever expects to get a stockholder-friendly return on its initial $4 billion purchase of the Star Wars brand.

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And who could blame Disney if they tried to stigmatize legitimate criticisms of their Star Wars trilogy movies by linking them to the alt-right? Disney has never held back from intimidating professional movie critics and entertainment journalists, why should the Mouse treat citizen critics any differently?

As for actual hate groups and hate-filled people who love to insert themselves into online discussions where their special brand of venom can taint otherwise legitimate opinions, the social research community would be well-advised to tighten their empirical methods before smearing large groups of people with their broad brushes. [I realize that broad-brush-smears are the norm in today’s hyper-partisan society and will be hard to end.]

Nobody disputes that racists and misogynists exist on Twitter and in the podcast ecosystem. What Professor Lacina failed to answer, however, is what variation exists within those who expressed their disdain for the Disney Star Wars movies and how does this compare to the more general category of those of spread offensive speech?

In lieu of evidence, the corporate entertainment media too often defaults to ad fontem arguments: The most frequent critics of TLJ and TROS are white men, therefore, those critiques must be rooted in racism and misogyny.

In the future, if Disney wants to create new Star Wars icons who embody female empowerment, they should start by green lighting good scripts with fully developed characters.

But we don’t have to look to the future for those female cinema icons, we already have them in characters such as Carrie Fisher’s Leia Organa, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor (another iconic sci-fiction heroine who was thoughtlessly trash-binned by the most recent Terminator sequel), or Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from the Alien movie series. All three are infinitely more substantive than Rey Skywalker. Hell, until someone can explain to me how Rey was able to instinctively navigate a catamaran over 50-foot waves, I’ll take Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow or Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn over Rey. And, please, don’t tell me she used The Force.

The problem with the Disney Star Wars saga wasn’t toxic males within the unwashed masses trying to hold down the rise of female-centric story lines. The problem was sub par movie scripts that put political agendas ahead of story and character development.

Bad screenwriting spoiled the Disney Star Wars trilogy, not the long time fans.

If Disney had crafted three classic Star Wars saga movies, there wouldn’t be this exaggerated controversy about the power of the folkloric Fandom Menace. Instead, we’d all be excited about the next Star Wars trilogy up Disney’s sleeve…which, if I can speak for most of my Fandom Menace confederates, we are not.

As it is, I’m officially over Star Wars.

Besides, it is not like Star Wars is as cool as Guardians of the Galaxy, reminds my son. [I know, Disney owns that too.]

• K.R.K.

As always, comments and profanity-rich insults can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com