May 30 -- News and Notes

Just a heads up regarding two things:

1) Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler has a wonderful opinion piece in The Guardian. "Policing in the US is not about enforcing the law. It's about enforcing white supremacy" impressed on me that America's police kill about a thousand people a year, as opposed to the two who annually die in the UK. He also mentions the idea that perhaps U.S. police should not be tasked with arresting people who commit non-violent crimes, which I had never previously considered.

2) As reported by CNN, the CDC has begun its own series of regular briefings, which should occur at least several times a week.

I had to roll my eyes at the CDC announcement. This means, in essence, that people in places of power expect things to go off the rails fairly quickly and don't want to be the ones detailing the disaster. Let's face it, if things were going swimmingly, the president and his folks would be giving us the good news in first person, so to speak. We're going to switch on over to the CDC. That means questions will be answered after the briefings. It also means we're about to hit deep water without a paddle. I think former Bears' defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan (1931-2016), referred to this handing off of responsibility as "chucking and ducking." God bless us all.


Bob Dietz
May 30, 2020

The Equivalent Deaths Debate -- Part Two

In the first installment (May 23), I tried to define the nature of the equivalent deaths or equi-misery debate. Then I discussed how proponents of early re-opening are trying to assign a misery heft to the consequences of delaying a return to "normal" economic life.

These consequences are usually listed as increased suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. The early opening supporters fail, however, to assign any kind of misery heft to the tens of thousands of additional lives lost to the virus because of early opening. They ignore the "spin-off" miseries of the added deaths, as if those deaths stood alone and had no impact on others. At its core, this is an asymmetrical and dishonest argument.

Today, I'd like to discuss some additional problems with the equi-misery argument for early opening. The first has to do with a basic structural issue that renders the argument virtually impossible to prove.

Early re-opening supporters attempt to balance additional lives lost to COVID-19 with a counter-tally of suicides prevented and depression/drug use/domestic violence averted by "getting people back to work" quickly. It is impossible, however, to attribute increases in suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence solely or even primarily to something called "economic hardship due to delayed re-opening." The reason you cannot do this is because the economic hardship is taking place during an actual, life-threatening pandemic. The pandemic creates an immersive cultural and psychological context in which the additional economic hardship is occurring.

You simply cannot assign suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence solely or primarily to economic hardship because all of the aforementioned misery indices may be more the result of an existential disease threat than any economic factors. It appears impossible to tease out consequences of economic hardship from the consequences of disease stress hardship. Any data from 1918 would face similar difficulties and would not be applicable anyway, given the vast cultural and social psychological differences between the 1918 and 2020 milieus.

Economic hardship does indeed correlate with increased suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. However, so too does an ongoing, months-long omnipresent viral threat that kills people. There is no way to separate one or the other out of the real-world equation, and therefore no way to assign cause-and-effect to one rather than the other. Americans are experiencing the pandemic and economic hardship simultaneously. Labeling economic hardship as the primary cause for increases in suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence is a political assignation, not a scientific or even necessarily a logical one.


Libertarian Angles

The equi-misery argument for early re-opening has some libertarian underpinnings. Eventually, these libertarian underpinnings come into self-conflict.

For example, early re-openers emphasize a "right to work," regardless of lack of COVID-19 testing and the resulting inability to ascertain who is asymptomatically contagious. Similarly, themes of libertarianism are invoked to provide support for protest rallies which feature few masks and little social distancing. Libertarianism is used to argue for the rights of Kentucky shopkeepers and Texas bar owners to ban people who are wearing masks, despite overwhelming evidence that masks protect public health. "My body, my choice," is now a libertarian battle cry for people who do not want mask-wearing or social distancing laws. In all of these examples, the historical libertarian ideal is hailed as on the side of early re-opening and personal choice.

Curiously, however, when the equi-misery proponents try to balance additional lives lost to the virus with other events, libertarian perspectives are completely abandoned. Suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence have historically been considered, from a libertarian perspective, to contain significant elements of self-choice. The equi-misery arguers ignore these self-choice components when they make their case for early re-opening. Economic hardship becomes some irresistible force that whitewashes personal choice from the equation. Suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence become forces of nature not amenable to personal or societal intervention.

I'm not trying to channel Thomas Szasz here. I'm simply pointing out the convenient parlor trick of relying on libertarian views to anchor Part A of an argument while abandoning these same views (and in fact arguing against them) in Part B. This is what early re-opening supporters are doing.


Conclusion

Using the equi-misery argument to justify tens of thousands of additional lives lost to COVID-19 is logically flawed, impossible to clearly demonstrate in any provable way, and simply a political point of view clothed with some self-contradicting themes. Equi-misery is an excuse to impose a non-scientific pandemic strategy on the American public instead of a scientific one. Viewing the U.S. as an economy rather than a society, its supporters attempt to elevate untethered economic values over intricately connected familial, cultural, and religious values.


Bob Dietz
May 30, 2020

More Popular Delusions

"Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason."  James Randi

Gallup surveys taken in April showed that just 40% of Republicans believe that COVID-19 has a greater death rate than the seasonal flu.

The seasonal flu has a roughly .1% fatality rate. That is 1 in 1000. The absolute most conservative estimate I have seen for COVID-19 is five times that. The majority of epidemiologists have estimated it's closer to 10 times that. In some areas, such as the United States, it superficially appears to be much worse. So how or why would anyone decide that they, as civilians, are more expert than physicians and infectious disease specialists? What mechanisms allow Americans to blithely go through day-to-day life presuming to know more than experienced credentialed professionals? 

My first thought is that Republican survey respondents were simply giving "cheerleading" answers to such questions. The questions themselves have been yoked to political commitments, so some U.S. citizens decided they'd make statements about what they prefer to believe whether they actually believe it or not. 

My second idea is that Americans really do think the individual is omniscient via some sort of direct gnosis. I find this an incredible development for the world's technological leader, but perhaps it's the inevitable destination for a population bloated with an unrelenting national narcissism. When the president points to his temple as the source of his expertise on subjects in which he has not been trained and has no expertise, it's a flashing guidepost for cultish supporters. 

My third theory is that maybe Americans are so rocked by an actual threat to their existence that they revert to very childlike magical thinking. Believing something, so the idea goes, makes it so. Retreating to an inner psychological sanctum that rejects evidence provides both stress reduction and the solace of routine, where one year's flu is like any other. 

All of these paths combined have helped lead to 100,000 deaths. If 100,000 deaths haven't cleansed political vanity, narcissism, and magical thinking from the American psyche, nothing will. 

Bob Dietz

May 28, 2020

May 28 -- Articles of Note

It took seven or eight weeks for journalists in the United States to get some kind of handle on the pandemic, but they have finally risen to the challenge. American journalists have more or less figured things out and synthesized the available information. They're not just flailing at the crisis/confusion of the day, but asking the right questions in a targeted way while grasping the speed and consequences of COVID-19 as it permeates the United States.

Here are a couple of grounded insightful pieces that became available in the last 48 hours.
The first, at medium.com, is "The Psychopath in Chief" by Tony Schwarz, President Trump's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal. Schwarz spent hundreds of hours with Donald Trump while writing the book over an 18-month period. He brings a deep experience to bear on the subject of the president's behavior.

The other article is Politico's "Bad state data hides coronavirus threat as Trump pushes reopenings." Darius Tahir and Adam Cancryn sort and collate the numerous data tweaks, spins, and manipulations being employed to boost the case for reopening. A third of states, they advise, aren't reporting hospital admissions data. Although I anticipated data editing and suppression, as I said below in the quote from May 8th's "Every Which Way but Truth," even I am surprised by the immediate and ubiquitous attempts to obscure what's actually happening.

Check out both pieces of solid writing.


"It's a cynical, barbaric strategy. Open the red states, where the GOP has great information control, and then spin and depress numbers and hope for the best. The way they lose is if things get really, obviously bad. Then the GOP will rotate a daily spotlight on whichever states are not taking a virus beating. If things go as anticipated, the GOP will eventually become an extension of the Montana chamber of commerce."  Bob Dietz (May 8, 2020)

Articles of Note

I'm somewhat stunned by what I've seen on television this Memorial Day weekend. I'm hoping that CNN, MSNBC, and other news outlets have used shock value interview snippets and footage of various beaches and restaurants, because if what I have seen is representative of widespread behavior during the preceding 72 hours, this country will be in far worse shape in a month than I thought. And I was not an optimist to start.

For now, here are some insightful pieces that have appeared in the last few days.

The first is by one of my favorite authors, conservative national security expert Tom Nichols. In The Atlantic, Nichols' "Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President" asks many common baffling questions regarding the president, but manages to hang a coherent theory on the answers. One of Nichols' explorations particularly resonated with me, namely the similarities and differences between President Trump and Howard Stern, who share both a fanbase and a history of ubiquitous media presence.

If you pair Columbia University's John McWhorter's linguistic analyses of President Trump with Nichols' arguments, you'll notice some thematic overlap. Clips of various McWhorter interviews from years past can be found on MSNBC.

Another striking piece is "America's chilly experiment in human sacrifice" by Lynn Parramore and Jeffrey Spear. Nineteenth-century political economist John Ruskin features prominently, and the authors use a number of gambling references throughout the article.

I highly recommend giving both pieces a read. Meanwhile, sometime today, the "official" U.S. death count will reach 100,000. We are just 90 days into this pandemic. If Memorial Day weekend was any indication, we will have a long and painful way to go.


Bob Dietz
May 26, 2020

Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

"When you test, you have a case. When you test you find something is wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases."  President Trump (May 14, 2020)

"No one in this world, so far as I know -- and I have searched the records for years, and have employed agents to help me -- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."  H.L. Mencken


When I was 10 years old, at the height of the Apollo program, I had great respect for the American public's science savvy and ability to think critically. It's been all downhill since.

I am trying to process the latest tidbit regarding populist critical thinking. As reported by Business Insider, a survey by Yahoo News and YouGov revealed that 44% of Republicans think that a COVID-19 vaccine is an excuse for Bill Gates to microchip everyone. Swirl that around in your mind for a bit. Not only do we have a microchipping conspiracy theory, but we have a Bill Gates-specific microchipping conspiracy theory. Here's a great additional detail:  among those who use Fox News as their main TV information source, the number goes up to 50%.

This was a poll, by the way. So it didn't necessarily count everyone who actually believed it. It counted just those with the audacity to report that they believed it.

Americans' grasp on reality must be really tenuous these days. The poll indicates that half of Fox News viewers are delusional, as in clinically delusional. Imagine, if you will, that your grandma or neighbor told you that Michael Jordan or Clint Eastwood or the Pope was behind the COVID-19 virus and wanted to microchip everyone. I don't know about you, but to me that suggests my grandma or neighbor is a danger to themselves and others. I'd contact the police so somebody could do a psych evaluation. Now does the fact that Bill Gates (as opposed to, say, Lex Luthor) is the stated villain supposed to make it all okay? No, it's still serious paranoia and delusion.

Basically, a poll has just revealed that 44% of a major U.S. political party is delusional. Clinically delusional. And this is a par-for-the-course bit of everyday news in 2020. The fact that we accept such a thing as a normal news item is delusional in itself.

The poll explains much, I suppose. On this day before Memorial Day, out of the televised hundreds on Georgia's Tybee Island, none were wearing masks. In Kentucky, some shop owners have banned people with masks from entering their stores. In North Dakota, the governor asked people to refrain from shaming or threatening those wearing masks.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on in my fellow Americans' minds. Maybe they want to die. That's mental illness. Maybe they want to kill. That's mental illness, too. A quarter of an electorate tasked with guiding the most powerful military in history believes that a vaccine is a mechanism for Bill Gates to microchip them. While I suppose that this may appear more reasonable than believing that giant invisible rabbits escort people through life, it is no less worthy of intervention, mainly because the microchip delusion promises more dangerous consequences.

This microchip fantasy will prove impermeable to disconfirmation. When no microchips result from the vaccinations, the belief will simply swing to another conspiracy with the same thrust but different details. When Bill Gates dies, either his persona will allegedly have been transferred to a computer program or someone else will take his place.

Americans have been heading down the road to irrationality for a long, disturbing time. When a president and a major political party shine light down this road for their own advantage, we have reached the point where promoting clinical insanity has become an everyday political strategy. A party that values voter eligibility over voter sanity is a threat to every living thing on the planet. Yet we're doing nothing about it. Instead, we acknowledge that clinically deluded is the new voter normal.

Blithely accepting voter insanity, however, may be worse than the insanity itself. It means that we too have become a danger to ourselves and others.


Bob Dietz
May 24, 2020

Fudging in Arkansas

Arkansas' governors have a fine history of fudging and squirming with the facts. That old bit about, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," is one of the all-time great lines.

Governor Asa Hutchinson made his contribution to the cause yesterday. As reported by CNN, Hutchinson described this week's increase in COVID-19 cases as a "second peak." Well, there's fudging, and then there's just plain making stuff up.

I squinted at Arkansas' numbers for a good long while, and if there was a first peak, I just cannot figure out where it was. Arkansas' numbers have continually climbed from the get-go. Up and up and up. As one of the states that failed to enact a stay-at-home order, Arkansas has evidently committed to the fiction that at some point they had seen the worst. Not true. Arkansas is in the same boat as other southern and midwestern states. The first wave has now reached them, and it's likely to get ugly.


Bob Dietz
May 23, 2020

The Equivalent Deaths Debate

Introduction

More than a million U.S. confirmed COVID-19 cases and tens of thousands of deaths have accrued. President Trump and Fox News downplayed the virus for months, but rhetoric and bravado didn't slow the virus down. What was eventually required, unfortunately, were massive shutdowns to prevent a smothering of the states' health care systems. These shutdowns came at great economic cost.

The United States eschewed the severe, pristine shutdowns of countries like South Korea and New Zealand. It also refused a shutdown the duration of Italy's or Spain's. Instead, the U.S.  sought to re-open by shortening Italy's shutdown example by more than a month.

All of the models predicted additional tens of thousands of lives would be lost by re-opening quickly without extensive testing or contact tracing in place. The president, the GOP, and key southern governors all jumped on the re-opening bandwagon anyway.

A country that for decades had been the technological and health care leader of the entire world now found itself exposed as knowingly trading thousands of lives to truncate economic damage. Other nations, however, had managed to avoid the same death-generating choices. Questions like, "Why is the U.S. economy unable to handle a shutdown similar to Italy?" were rarely asked by the American media.

Those who pushed for early re-opening invented a rationale for the fast re-opening in an effort to soften the perception of U.S. callousness. The rationale, which I'll refer to here initially as the "equivalent death" argument, has not been adopted by other nations. This has placed the U.S. president, the GOP, and certain red state governors in the position of trying to defend their equi-death reasoning.

I find the language and details of the equi-death arguments fascinating. Exploring them is a real intellectual, cultural, and emotional adventure. What I hope to eventually make clear is that equivalent death arguments are less about logistical harm reduction decisions and more about defending the idea of an unyielding current American societal structure.

Basically, the equi-death rationale starts with the core argument that additional lives lost to the virus due to quickly re-opening are somehow balanced by lives saved because people get back to work faster. The equi-death perspective posits that another four to eight weeks of extended shutdowns would create such economic hardship that the resulting suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence would balance the tens of thousand of lives saved from the virus if shutdowns were maintained until science said it was prudent to open.


Conceptual and Language Misdirection

I'd like to tighten up the language here a bit. Obviously, if depression, drug use, and domestic violence are going to be called into play as variables on the side of early re-opening, the proper term  should be equi-misery as opposed to equi-death. Actual dying is not usually the outcome of depression or other mental illness, drug use, or domestic violence. Thus, the argument being pushed by early-openers becomes loaded with a very subjective component, a misery index of sorts, as opposed to a raw tallying of deaths.

Here's an interesting detail regarding this -- each time that I have seen the listing of bad outcomes from extending shutdowns, "suicide" has always been listed first, followed by other deleterious events that are not deaths per se. The argument is always made in this manner. Increased deaths by virus, it's explained, are balanced by reduced suicides (a death number), followed by events that are primarily misery indices but are rarely actual deaths. The argument is made in this particular sequence so formulaically that I have to think that it's a very purposeful presentation.

Increased virus deaths due to early re-opening are presented as being counter-balanced by far fewer deaths from suicide and measures of misery that are not quantified in terms of deaths. This is what, for now, I'll call an "asymmetrical presentation" that tries to compare a tally of actual deaths to a tally combining real deaths (suicides) with various subjectively defined misery indices.

It's a clever debate trick, as it fails to measure or even mention the misery indices associated with the tens of thousands of extra deaths due to early re-opening. This is why I call the presentation asymmetrical. It's trying to define extra tens of thousands of lives lost as not having its own, very weighty set of misery indices. The equi-misery balance proposed by the early openers does not acknowledge the extra depression, drug use, or domestic violence that might result from the extra virus deaths themselves. Somehow the hardships of added deaths are not considered to have these miseries attached, while economic hardships are. It's a truly obvious blind spot in the argument, and it suggests much about the perspective and priorities of the proponents of early re-opening.


Structural Issues

The equi-misery argument fails to address some basic obvious questions. Why is the American economy so vulnerable as to require the briefest of shutdowns? Why do other nations not feel it necessary to make the same equivalency arguments?

One main problem with the equi-misery stance is that it pre-supposes a completely crystalline, inflexible structure to American priorities and the U.S. budget. Let me give you an example. We have no cure for COVID-19 right now, no real treatment, and no vaccine. The deaths from the virus are going to be in a certain range given an infected population percentage, assuming health care is not overwhelmed. Deaths will be deaths, in other words. On the other side of the equi-misery equation, the open-early proponents have lumped suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. The United States, however, has enormous human, technical, and financial resources that could be shifted and brought to bear on all of these problems. Suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence are each miseries where a massive re-allocation of human and material resources can be redirected to intercede. Massive intervention could have huge positive effects. Those at risk for suicide, the depressed, drug users, and victims of domestic violence do not face inevitable outcomes to the same degree that x number of deaths per virus-infected person are inevitable. Changing crystalline U.S. priorities and resource allocation, however, are not considered options in the early re-openers' equi-misery arguments.

The equi-misery stance also ignores the ameliorating effects that a universal basic income could provide during this pandemic. It would certainly reduce concerns regarding suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. People pushing the equi-misery equation, however, do not mention such a thing, even though it is an obvious tool for preventing these misery events.

The idea that the U.S. is a society, not an economy, is rarely broached by equi-misery advocates, and for good reason. Additional waves of COVID-19 are almost a certainty, and additional pandemics may be only a few years down the road. The head of the South Korea Infectious Disease Institute, for example, expects another in about four years. If the structure of the U.S. is so stressed by a single viral wave that it is willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to quickly re-open, what happens when second or third waves or second and third viruses hit? The crystalline U.S. economic structure would clearly not endure without horrific loss of life. Radical change would be required to prevent an American abattoir. The equi-misery arguers are not ready to discuss or even admit these implications.


Numbers and Next Tme

Suicides in the U.S. have been on the rise, recently averaging about 45,000 per year. The U.S. is currently 42nd in the world in suicides per capita. Allowing for a 50% increase in suicides this year due to economic hardship and stress (and no cultural response or mitigation), the number of lives lost to virus due to early re-opening will dwarf any suicide addition that might have occurred due to an additional four to eight week shutdown.

In next week's second installment on this topic, I'll explore three additional problems with the equi-misery argument, including the absurdity of trying to attribute all suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence to economic hardships as separate from the contextual stress of an existential disease threat.


Bob Dietz
May 23, 2020

The Problem with Fudging

"You better cut the pizza into four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six."  Yogi Berra


You can fudge numbers. You can't fudge reality. All you can do is obstruct the view.

If the governors of Florida and Georgia really are imposing top-down spin on reported COVID-19 cases and deaths, it creates a kind of Yogi Berra data moment. Both states decided to reopen despite the best recommendations of science. Results from other countries suggested they should not open. American epidemiologists did not want them to open with current limited testing and contact tracing. The guidelines of the president's own task force say they had not met the necessary criteria. In each case, science said they should not have opened, but they opened anyway. So now, Florida and Georgia want to present the goosed-numbers perception that their numbers had been coming down and continue to decline. Why do that if it's not in the interest of the public good?

Massaging the numbers serves a purpose. It gives the states' leaders multiple outs to shirk responsibility if things go bad. First, each state can point to the falling numbers as their rationale for re-opening. If everything goes to hell, they can point to the science as flawed: "We (sort of) had the numbers the scientists wanted, but it didn't work. It's the scientists' fault." Second, the responsibility can also be foisted off on the citizenry: "We hit the benchmarks, but something went wrong. People didn't listen."

The governors have ignored science, but will attempt to blame science when it all blows up. The deluge will come, not as bad as New York, but bad enough. With illness on a week to two-week delay (and possibly more -- newer cases seem to have longer incubations), and death counts on a four or five-week delay, June should prove especially challenging for states such as Florida, Georgia, Texas and Tennessee.

Attempts at excuses and spin in the weeks leading up to July 4th should be worthy of Cirque contortionists. Or Yogi Berra with a southern drawl.


Bob Dietz
May 20, 2020

(Accurate) Quote of the Month

"It's a cynical barbaric strategy. Open the red states, where the GOP has great information control, and then spin and depress numbers and hope for the best. The way they lose is if things get really, obviously bad. Then the GOP will rotate a daily spotlight on whichever states are not taking a virus beating. If things go as anticipated, the GOP will eventually become an extension of the Montana chamber of commerce."  Bob Dietz (May 8, 2020)


Well, that didn't take very long. I say it; the GOP does it. Like clockwork. If there were betting lines on this stuff, I'd be dangerous.

Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon reported for Florida Today that scientist Rebekah Jones was fired May 18 for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 data for the Florida Department of Health. The dismissal of Jones, who designed the data-tracking portal, highlights Governor Ron DeSantis' drive to create the impression that re-opening was less risky than the data actually suggested. The response from the Department of Health was a non-response. It didn't dispute the facts; it merely attempted to downplay Jones' importance as the person who not only oversaw but wrote all of the code for the project. She was cited as someone who had been guilty of repeated "insubordination," although none of her direct statements about refusing to manipulate data were refuted. This could very well turn into a he said/she said event between DeSantis and Jones.

Previously, Florida had been flagged the last week in April for trying to massage medical examiners' reports. At the time, the state was trying to remove cause-of-death statements from the reports. As a result, the state coronavirus death numbers had been running 10% behind the medical examiners' totals.

Meanwhile, Georgia's Department of Public Health was caught publishing a graph that made it appear virus case totals were steadily declining. The only catch -- they didn't arrange the dates in chronological order. They arranged them in declining order. That would get a helluva grade in a college stat class, one would think.

Good to know that the well being of Floridians and Georgians is in such trustworthy hands.


Bob Dietz
May 19, 2020

Outside the Box

Shutdowns in the United States have emphasized protecting the people at highest perceived risk. The recommendations for those older than 60 and those with diabetes or heart conditions have been to stay at home as much as possible and to avoid risky social environments. The most vulnerable are told to follow the strictest guidelines.

There is, however, another possible perspective from which to view this. Now that analyses are in progress regarding virus loads spewed by breathing, speaking at various volumes, and singing, it's become clear that individuals have very different capacities to spread the virus. One person can deliver a hundred times the virus load of someone else. Not only that, but age categories have very different virus load delivery averages. Children do not generate much of a dose. People over the age of 70 also do not deliver much of a viral load dose, either.

It would therefore be possible to categorize people not just by vulnerability to virus, but also by how much threat they pose to others. People over 70, although at high risk themselves, present the least risk to others. This opens an entire realm of possibilities and questions. By acknowledging different threat levels posed by individuals, we can flip the standard protect-the-vulnerable strategy on its head. Degree-of-threat as a restriction, rather than degree of vulnerability, is currently an undiscovered country.

Briefly consider the ramifications. Perhaps confining or restricting the most vulnerable could give way to restrictions on those who have the most potential to spread the virus. This would take us down a path that could include churches without choirs, no singing in general, no environments requiring loud speaking or shouting, and silent, mask-wearing fans at sports events. Certainly these are behavior options that would reduce risk for everyone. One of the reasons for the viral explosions in meat packing plants is the high decibel background that requires people to shout to each other. Religious services have been viral sparking points because of the loud singing and chanting. Perhaps the movie, A Quiet Place, provides a creepy analogous fable.

At the moment, restricting the power to kill as much as restricting the behavior of those most likely to die is thinking outside of the box. We're going to need plenty of that in the months ahead. 

Bob Dietz

May 18, 2020

More Speculation

"Horror is when you turn into an alley and see a fiend slashing someone to pieces. Terror is when you realize that you're next."   Forrest J. Ackerman


We had plenty of warning. First came rogue videos from Wuhan warning of overwhelmed hospitals. Then Italy and Iran gave us previews of what would happen when the COVID-19 tidal wave hit the United States. We watched in horror for weeks, but somehow terror never kicked in. We just kept walking down this alley.

In matters of personal health, almost every American defers to health care professionals. Sure, you have your occasional Church of Christ Scientist outlier group, but on the whole, Americans tend to follow doctor's orders. So what is different now?

I'm not sure what it is about the word "pandemic" that Americans don't quite grasp. Pandemics take their time. They aren't finished in a couple of months. People, however, evidently believe what they prefer to believe.

Dealing with COVID-19 has never been about the false dichotomy between shutting down and being open for business. It's been about seeing what's happening ahead of us in the alley, acknowledging it, and acting. If necessary, copy what has worked for other countries. South Korea has 270 deaths from the virus. That is about 1/45th the fatality rate of the United States. Let me repeat that. The U.S. has 45 times the per capita fatalities of South Korea.

The U.S. was trailing Italy and Spain by five or six weeks in terms of COVID-19 impact. But just as these countries, which instituted more stringent shutdowns than the U.S., begin to open up, the United States decides it will leapfrog those five or six weeks and re-open the same time as Italy and Spain. With this in mind, I tried to boil the re-opening debate down to a few basic questions:

1) Given the success of Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand, why would the U.S. not adopt their strategies as much as possible?

2) What makes the U.S. think that lopping off a month of shutdown should yield a result commensurate with other countries?

3) Given that U.S. rules were gentler than these other countries, shouldn't we have implemented a longer, as opposed to a significantly shorter, application of these shutdown rules?

4) Given the size of the U.S. and its disparate urban/rural texture, shouldn't we have expected that a longer, not shorter, shutdown would be required?

5) If the U.S. leadership recognizes that U.S. results will necessarily be worse than Italy or Spain because we are leapfrogging a month of shutdowns, why are we doing it?

6) Is the U.S. economy so fragile compared to Italy and Spain that we simply cannot handle the same shutdown length?

I do not understand the rush to re-open without testing and contact tracing in place. I don't understand it at all. We are not leaving this alley anytime soon. In fact, I'm not sure that we know our way out.


Bob Dietz
May 17, 2020

Resume (for Dr. Fauci)

With apologies to that genius, Dorothy Parker.



Resume

Covid pains you;
You'll have your own stamp;
Rand Paul blames you;
Bleach causes cramp.

Death threats aren't lawful;
Good science doesn't fit;
Task force is god-awful;
You might as well quit.




Bob Dietz
May 14, 2020

The United States of Thanos

In previous entries, I've mentioned my trepidation with President Trump as role model. My concerns have now broadened to how the United States itself is perceived by its children and by the rest of the world.

Thanos, as I discussed in President Thanos, is a Marvel Comics villain whose solution to overpopulation and economic hardship in the universe is to simply kill half of all sentient life. After the halving, resources therefore become abundant in a relative or per capita sense. It's Thanos' economic solution.

The last couple of weeks during this pandemic, the storyline being sold as necessary by President Trump and the GOP is that additional tens of thousands of deaths are required so as to get the economy up and running as soon as possible. The United States has shifted from an attempt to actually contain and eradicate the virus to a strategy, known well by Thanos, called harm reduction. I'll get into the built-in self-contradictions of this approach in a future entry. For now, I have just a few nagging questions.

How does anyone explain the prioritizing of economic re-opening over tens of thousands of lives to eight-year-olds or 12-year-olds or adolescents? What effect will it have on them to learn that they are, in essence, living in the United States of Thanos?

Children in America have grown up with religious, pop culture, and familial mores wherein lives have intrinsic value far beyond money. What happens when their eyes are opened to the cold-blooded cultural villainy on display by their parents and their president? Will children be horrified by what their parents have become? Or, possibly worse, will children adopt these new economic priorities themselves?

How and why did the United States come to a juncture where its leadership's economic decisions echo the actions of the most infamous cultural villain of the last decade?

Since other nations are not following the United States' example, what will occur when American children realize that the rest of the world views us as callous, sadistic misanthropes? For a generation growing up with Disney films, the sudden unveiling of this new American visage promises to be jarring in a deep and mentally disturbing way.

Isolated from the rest of the world, faced with hostile unfamiliar challenges, American adults are being revealed in all of their Lord of the Flies savagery. What will our children think of us?


Bob Dietz
May 14, 2020

Speculations

"Give me liberty or give me death."  Patrick Henry (March 23, 1775)

"With great power comes great responsibility."  Peter Parker (1962)



A militia man walked up to the drive-through of the Paxton Street McDonald's in Harrisburg (PA). He carried an assault rifle and wore no mask. "Give me liberty or give me death," he shouted to the drive-through window.

"That's a combo these days," the drive-through employee replied, "You get a drink with that. We have chloroquine, diet chloroquine, and bleach."


There are some interesting, tricky questions regarding responsibility during this pandemic. Questions of life and death. Who is responsible for whom? Who should be responsible for whom? What is it that we are missing when it comes to responsibility because this virus milieu is new? Surely a decade or a century from now, we'll realize that we missed obvious angles and questions.

Before addressing the first in a series of intricate debates, I'd like to return to Peter Parker, the amazing Spider-Man. Spider-Man's writers had to tackle some nitpicky questions in the early days of the comic. No matter how powerful, Spider-Man was not allowed to break the law. No matter how much good he strove to do, or how many lives he saved, or his intent, every legal detail had to be covered. Spider-Man was often too broke to afford a cab for a date, but when he stuck to the roof of a bus en route to saving someone, he would leave a webful of change dangling down to the driver or, conversely, web the required fare to the roof of the bus. When a reader wrote a letter and pointed out that Spider-Man's web slinging through Manhattan left a lot of sticky webbing, Marvel wrote into the storyline that the webs actually dissolved after an hour or two. Therefore Spidey was not actually littering.

Very precise legal behavior was the comics code rule. Without precision, in fact, one can argue that there is no modern law.

So what happens when demonstrators in Michigan or Pennsylvania fail to use masks and spew flumes of potential virus at police standing a couple of feet away? Is this not attempted manslaughter, or assault at the very least? Or is it only so if the spewers test positive for COVID-19?

Here are two angles on these questions. In the first example, consider a roomful of ISIS recruits. They are told a cannister of SARS will be sprayed in the room, and the majority of them will become infected and contagious. Some will not. Since time is of the essence, however, the operation has been designed so they will all leave the room and immediately head to the nearest major airport, where they will mill about for a few hours and then board planes bound for destinations all over the world. Is this terrorism? Most people, I presume, would answer yes. How, then, is this significantly different from people attending a rally while ignoring social distancing and sans masks, and then a week later attending another rally? Isn't this also terrorism?

Or does intent somehow divide the guilty from the not guilty here? And how do you measure intent in the case of the rally attendees? The effects of the virus, and how contagious it is, are a matter of public record. Does ignoring the public record and believing in conspiracy alternatives somehow render people innocent?

If someone yells, "Fire!" in a theater, that is a crime based on probability. If a person yells "Fire!" often enough in many theaters, people will eventually get hurt. What happens this particular time affects the severity of the crime but not the actual defining of the action as a crime. If you ignore social distancing and don't wear a mask and you are virus positive, the results are clear. You will eventually infect someone. Shouldn't that be a crime?

Opaque chains of contagion cause-and-effect allow people to pretend they aren't really harming anyone. What if cause-and-effect weren't opaque, but were instead precise? Here's my second angle on this.

Suppose everyone who caught COVID-19 overlaid his or her DNA onto the virus in such a way as to be identifiable as the transmitter, a kind of ongoing virus paternity test. Ultra-accurate contact tracing, if you will. Now, if tests for such a thing existed, who would bear responsibility for the transmission? Would the person transmitting the virus be considered primarily or wholly responsible for who is infected by his DNA-stamped virus, or should the person being infected bear some of the responsibility? If the individual who catches the virus from the identified specific other gets ill or dies, should the transmitter be guilty of assault or manslaughter? Does intent matter? And if the transmitter has flouted safety guidelines, isn't his intention legally clear?

Nobody wants to get into an auto accident. But when we do, we are held responsible. If others are injured or die, we are held even more accountable. So if our hypothetical DNA-coupled tracing reveals that Person A has infected Person B and person B dies, shouldn't Person A be held accountable? How much recklessness can be considered "innocent?"

Our lack of answers to these questions means that we have just scratched the moral and legal surface of this pandemic. Any kind of accountability is clearly lacking.

Re-opening without testing and contact tracing in place has the potential to be a disaster. I understand that the culture is rattled and on tilt. Individuals must realize, however, that right now the only power we have to battle the virus is recognition of our responsibility to others.

In this case, great responsibility rewards us with great power.


Bob Dietz
May 13, 2020

There You Go Again

"We'll be at 100,000, 110,000 -- the lower level of what was projected if we did the shutdown." President Trump (May 8, 2020)

"137,000 deaths by August 4th"  IHME model (May 9, 2020)

"The prophecies from the Trump administration have failed. In fact, they have failed miserably. Make no mistake, however, there will be far fetched prophecies to come. And no shortage of believers." Bob Dietz (May 2, 2020)


No rest for the weary, I suppose.

I thought that the ridiculous string of horrifically inaccurate projections had come to an end. I should have listened to my own prediction, quoted above. Once again, we have the assignation of numbers and dates simply for the purpose of temporarily fostering an illusion of control. These attempts at calming-by-metrics and die-by dates have become both absurd and cruel.

The numbers will undoubtedly be wrong. I know, I know, here's where I say some poor idiot professional gambler has no business thinking he knows better than the president and the IHME. The Trumpian number, according to me, might last until the end of May, maybe, hopefully. The IHME number may make it to July 4th or thereabouts. The only way either prediction holds up is if someone orders the virus to go on vacation earlier than the August 4th arbitrarily assigned end date. Not sure how that will work out.

Oh, if only I were allowed to tweak my football predictions while events were in progress and then claim expertise. My world would be a different place.

Speaking of gambling, in the interests of dark humor, I want to report that I may have come up with a reason the president feels compelled to continually throw inaccurate numbers out to the public. Perhaps he found an offshore where he can bet American death Over/Unders. I recall Jimmy the Greek way back when, taking heat because people realized that he was touting one side of a game on CBS, allowing the number to move, and then betting the opposite side. Maybe the president is a fan of  Paul Newman/Tom Cruise in The Color of Money or the ESPN poker series Tilt. Both featured protagonists who, at crucial junctures, made fortunes betting against themselves. It's possible that President Trump is "pulling a Greek," as they say.

I have no alternative explanation, other than that he continually attempts to change the world via magical thinking. He believes, in other words, that his saying makes it so.

All I know is, I wish he would stop. Just when I think that I can take a few blog days off, "There he goes again." Ronald Reagan would not be proud.


Bob Dietz
May 10, 2020

Quote of the Week: Tone Deaf, Tone Blind, Tone Dumb

"If they stay closed for another month, month and a half, you're gonna have body bags of businesses that never recover."  Stephen Moore, co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and member of the president's council to reopen the country  (May 4, 2020)


Sometimes tone deaf doesn't quite cover it. On a day when the COVID-19 death toll hit 70,000, and reports of FEMA having ordered 100,000 body bags echoed through the news, Stephen Moore tried to muster up sympathy for business with the above comment.


Bob Dietz
May 8, 2020

Every Which Way But Truth

The asteroid had struck a hundred miles away mere moments ago. The shock wave had knocked the T. Rex to the ground, but it struggled to its feet and turned in the direction of the blast. Always an apex predator, it feared nothing. What it wanted, it took. A creature of unmatched strength and enormous appetite, the T. Rex made the only behavioral choice it could. It roared threats in the direction of the shock wave and increasing heat. Then, as other creatures ran past it in the opposite direction to buy themselves time, it trotted full speed towards the oncoming threat. As it loped into the increasingly scalding air, it never really grasped that perhaps the other animals had a better idea.

So where are we today, May 8th? The emperor has been revealed as exceedingly naked and has been, it turned out, trying to recruit us for a nudist camp. The administration's farcical official predictions and projections of the last two months have been revealed as desensitization tools. We are now lied to in other ways. Testing is overrated. We need to open businesses now. We are (with all respect to bone spur bravery) warriors of the economic front.

Puh-leese. The good news is that the general public is just about all caught up. Everybody has the information. Everyone can see the numbers. The virus tsunami is no longer some mythical event beyond the horizon. It's upon us, and we can taste the brine.

What we have now are plutocrats trying to direct us down a primrose path by muzzling cartographers who demonstrate that the path in question leads directly off a very steep cliff.

Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona uncouples his states' modeling scientists from the official data base. After the public uproar, he reinstates them (https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2020/05/07/state-un-fires-scientists-but-gov-ducey-listen-them/3092804001/). The CDC's 17 pages of detailed re-opening instructions for businesses and churches are shelved for editing. They are, evidently, too restrictive. States that do not meet any task force guidelines at all are re-opening. And, oh yes, the task force was about to be shelved, but the public feedback resulted in the task force now allegedly serving in perpetuity. Reporting rules for confirmed cases, meanwhile, are tweaked so that "today is fewer than yesterday" numbers result.

The administration is trying to funnel as much information as they can through filters, a la the Vietnam War.  Too many holes in the informational dike, however, to pull this off in 2020. Too many deaths on American soil.

It's a cynical, barbaric strategy. Open the red states, where the GOP has great information control, and then spin and depress numbers and hope for the best. The way they lose is if things get really, obviously bad. Then the GOP will rotate a daily spotlight on whichever states are not taking a virus beating. If things go as anticipated, the GOP will eventually become an extension of the Montana chamber of commerce.

Basically, we have scientists and health professionals strongly warning against these re-openings. You have, opposite them, a cheerleading GOP. Reality is going to choose a side.

Bob Dietz
May 8, 2020

Innumeracy: Lying and Dying

"Our forecast now is 74,000 deaths. That's our best estimate." Dr. Chris Murray, director of the IHME, whose model was promulgated by the White House. (April 28, 2020)

"The model estimate is pure hokum."  "That number is laughable. How stupid do they think we are?"  Bob Dietz (April 29, 2020)


Today, May 7th, we passed 75,000 American deaths due to COVID-19. We didn't make it to the IHME's August 4th date. We didn't even make it to the end of May.

The nonsensical U.S. death projections put forth by the White House and its de rigueur model have hit a brick wall called reality. The brutality of the last week has exposed these projections as lies and misdirection. The "fake figures" were all a holding strategy, a cynical method of lying week after week hoping to desensitize an American public to the mounting toll. A toll that sprinted past 9/11, climbed above Vietnam deaths, and is now projected by that IHME model to reach 134,000 by August 4th, which is an arbitrary date that serves no real purpose other than to create an illusory end point.

The 134,000 deaths matches the number who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. In no way does that figure reflect the pandemic's final American toll. It merely points us to the scoreboard for the end of the first quarter.

Two months of lies and blatantly ludicrous projections gained the administration what exactly? It gained them desensitization. Unfortunately, there was also a cost. The downplaying of deaths-to-come undoubtedly led to less stringent public adherence to stay-at-home and lockdowns. The lies led to more social interaction. They led to more illness. The bottom line is that lying led to more dying.

This massaging of the American public was telling people what they wanted to hear rather than what they needed to know. When you are making life and death decisions for you and your family, certainly your government should owe you the best available information. What we got was trash. The projections the White House fed us for two months were a crock. The only saving grace was that they were so ridiculously wrong that they were an obvious crock.

The day after my Innumeracy Lunacy entry, American media finally woke up and began consulting models other than the White House favorite. They had no choice; the IHME projections had been that wrong. The snowballing death toll had become so large that no president at a podium could hide it behind "fake numbers" any longer. CNN chimed in with its May 2nd feature report The Pandemic and The President. Michael Osterholm's sober analyses finally appeared everywhere in American print. Reality rained stone after stone at the administration's funhouse mirror projections. In the span of 48 hours, the mirrors lay shattered. In this generation's most dire hour, we learned that the emperor had been wearing no factual clothes the entire time.

At least now, we have real numbers, or something approaching that, going forward. Osterholm, for example, does not treat us with kid gloves. We can make personal choices based on some sense of what is likely ahead.

The innumeracy has been exposed. The horror, however, has just begun.


Bob Dietz
May 7, 2020

President Thanos

Being a Marvel Comics fan, I hate to disrespect Thanos, but the comparison must be made.

I don't know whether to attempt some dark humor or just lay out the dry and frightening social psychological resonance between our American president and the comic book character. Times are too serious for the former, I suppose, so I'll just go with the facts.

I have always said that Donald Trump is the first American president with the public persona of a classic pop culture American villain. He's a bully. He uses wealth as some kind of self-measure and a measure of others. He treats women without much respect.  He lies all the time. He brags. He thinks that he's a genius. If you wrote screenplays with John Wayne's characters on one side, or Clint Eastwood's, or Chuck Norris's, or Sylvester Stallone's, or Bruce Willis's, the Donald Trump character would clearly be on the other side. He is an iconic American villain.

Why Americans elected a president who appears to be a villain is a question best left to hundreds of 22nd century cultural anthropologists. For now, I want to point out the chilling and obvious intersection of pop culture evil and COVID-19 politics. Marvel Comics' Thanos is not your usual villain. His goal is to wipe out half of all sentient life in the universe. He's called "The Mad Titan" because of this, but he sees himself in a different light.

Thanos perceives himself as doing the universe a great favor by halving the population. Resources are scarce, he argues, and he refuses to watch people starve or die from overpopulation. His solution is to wipe out 50% of everything that lives so that resources will last and everyone will have enough to eat. He kills half the universe, in other words, for the economic good of all. Depressions are therefore averted and no one starves, at least until eons pass and populations once more infringe on their resources.

Life imitates art, I suppose.

With the pandemic here, and the strategy to re-open America without testing in place or guidelines being met, President Trump is not playing just any villain role, he is playing Thanos. He is making the same exact economic argument as Thanos. Tens of thousands will die, but it's for the economic good of all. In American comics spanning 50 years, such an argument has always been considered evil, mad, and to be fought against at all costs. In the 2020 GOP, this argument is embraced as prudent and the way things need to be.

American character, more than 200 years in the making, is at stake here. And no Avengers are in sight.


Bob Dietz
May 6, 2020

How I Got the Pandemic Right

Truth to tell, I probably owe it to the San Francisco 49ers.

Before last NFL season, I bet SF at 40-1 and 20-1 to win the NFC. The 40-1 was an offshore book, but the 20-1 was in Las Vegas. Since I also wanted to scout March Madness futures in Las Vegas, I started planning a trip from Tennessee to Nevada as soon as the 49ers had won the NFC on January 19th.

I was aware of what had been reported from Wuhan, and I knew that physicians there were being muzzled. I was familiar enough with some of the pandemic literature, both fiction and non-fiction, to be concerned. I originally planned to fly to Las Vegas the first week in February. When I realized I'd be arriving in the middle of Chinese New Year, I vetoed the idea. Las Vegas is the top international travel destination during Chinese New Year. I did not want to deal with that at all. So I rescheduled for the last week in February, with an LV arrival late on the 24th.

For the next month, I followed the international news, trying to ascertain how dangerous things were likely to get for me. When virus numbers exponentially exploded in Iran and Italy, I figured that the virus either had to be airborne or asymptomatically transmitted. Cases in the U.S. were minimal at the time, but I was sure it was lurking. For me, traveling to Las Vegas became a matter of dodging raindrops before it became a torrential downpour.

I booked a one-way flight from Charlotte to Las Vegas, and drove a rental the 150 miles to Charlotte rather than spend extra time in the local airport. I wore gloves but no mask in the Charlotte airport, based on the incorrect CDC recommendations at the time. While in the airport, I tried to envision how you could protect yourself in an airport milieu. I had no answers. Airports seemed indefensible, the worst of all environments other than hospitals. All of the shared air, security lines, luggage and personal effects sharing plastic trays and conveyor belts with every other person's stuff -- it was a disaster incubator. I saw one person in the Charlotte airport wearing a mask, and nobody else with gloves.

While in Las Vegas, I kept to myself and stayed in my room when I wasn't actually pounding the bricks. I did make one large error -- I stood in a buffet line once at the Orleans casino. I realized while standing there for my comped $20 buffet that I was a complete and utter idiot. "Mitigation" and "flattening the curve" were not yet common parlance, but anyone paying attention to international news had no business standing in a buffet line.

When I flew back, it was a one-way to Nashville, where I again rented a car and drove the 270 miles home. Working through the details of the trip forced me to insert the virus into my travel plans each step of the way. I had spent a month evaluating overseas news reports and watching videos of  South Korean infectious disease specialists who were coping with the virus. The logistics of the trip had forced me to educate myself.


Fox Was Not Your Friend

Understanding that President Trump was blowing smoke during February wasn't hard if you paid attention to the rest of the world. Pandemics have happened in the past, and it did not require a crystal ball to understand what was coming.

I pity the folks who relied on Fox News during those February weeks. They would have had no inkling of the reality headed their way. "Parochial" is the best word for Fox News viewers. They are locked into such a limited source of information that they have no idea they're in an echo chamber.


Summary

I got almost everything about this pandemic correct. I made some personal risk errors (the lack of a mask early and the buffet line), but the blog itself has been pristinely accurate and occasionally prescient. If you go back, read the entries, and synch them up with media reports, I was routinely 24-48 hours, and sometimes weeks, ahead of the news cycles.

But this was not rocket science. Anyone could have been as in-the-know. All it required was a respect for science, an awareness of who was actually expert, an understanding that the United States is not protected from the virus by manifest destiny, and a healthy disregard for Fox News.


Bob Dietz
March 6, 2020

When Prophecies Fail

"We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine."  President Donald Trump (January 22, 2020)

"We're going very substantially down, not up."  President Donald Trump (February 26, 2020)

"It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear."  President Donald Trump (February 27, 2020)

"Right now, we are heading to 50,000 and according to the projections we will end up with 60,000 by the end of the pandemic."  President Donald Trump (April 20, 2020)

"Our forecast now is 74,000 deaths. That's our best estimate."  Dr. Chris Murray, director of the IHME, whose projections have been promulgated by the White House. (April 28, 2020)

"This is a great success story." "Federal government rose to the challenge." Jared Kushner (April 29, 2020)


So what happens when prophecies fail? And then continually fail again and again?

Cognitive dissonance theory made its debut back in 1956 with the publishing of Leon Festinger's When Prophecy Fails. The book followed the adventures of sociologists embedded in a flying saucer cult that believed the end of the earth was near. Their leader explained that the saucer would come to take them away, and he actually set a date for the big event. Nothing much happened on that day, however, so he eventually predicted other possible dates, none of which triggered the hoped-for intergalactic getaway.

Festinger's observations had to do with the ability of believers to brush off disconfirming evidence. In fact, in some ways, the more dramatic the failure of the prophecy, the more the believers' commitment strengthened. What should have been clear disconfirming proof served only to amp up the solidarity and loyalty of the believers.

During the whirlwind course of this pandemic, we have been told by government non-scientists that bad stuff was not going to happen. Our highest profile leaders and the organization called Fox News repeatedly downplayed the likelihood of pandemic and its consequences, even as COVID-19 unfolded around the world. At each step of their public declarations, they have not only been wrong, they have been ridiculously bad predictors, almost like reverse touts who can't get anything right.

For many weeks, believers didn't allow events occurring in plain view to affect their notions of what was real and what was "fake news." Finally, however, the mortality figures became so ubiquitous that the majority of hard core believers had to reinvent their rationale for labeling people as right or wrong. A few still cling to "COVID-19 is a scam," although that is a tough position to maintain as the death toll mounts. Most of the believers have pivoted to a patriotic fervor to put the poorest American workers at frontline risk in service of protecting the economy and "American way of life."

What would Festinger have predicted? Well, in earlier entries, I incorporated Festinger's themes and reported that I expected conspiracy theories, religiosity, and gun brandishing to characterize reactions to the failed prophecies. Festinger would have anticipated a further tightening of social circles for the believers and a demonization of those pointing out the irrationality of their choices. He would have expected that, as predictions went further and further awry, the core believers would actually increase their proselytizing.

All of the issues mentioned in earlier entries have contributed to this current mess. Americans have this strange sense of cultural and individual exceptionalism that appears impermeable to argument. They expect some sort of manifest destiny to rescue them from virus harm. While all human beings are guilty of seeking out information which supports what they already believe to be true, Americans have made it an artform. Americans also resist the idea that probability actually applies to them. They don't know enough about critical thinking or how science works to have a sense of who is lying to them and who isn't. Cultural respect for science during this pandemic is a lifesaver. Americans, unfortunately, don't have it.

The prophecies from the Trump administration have failed. In fact, they have failed miserably. Make no mistake, however, there will be additional far fetched prophecies to come. And no shortage of believers.


May 2, 2020
Bob Dietz