Here we are. It's June 30, 2020. Everything I've been saying for the last four months has come to pass. On May 7th, at the conclusion of the entry, "Innumeracy: Lying and Dying," I said "The innumeracy has been exposed. The horror, however, has just begun."
When I wrote that, I paused after the last sentence. I paused because I momentarily considered whether the word "horror" was melodramatic and unnecessary. I realized, however, that with 75,000 American COVID-19 deaths at the time, the word "horror" was completely appropriate. I also realized that my momentarily considering "horror" as perhaps overly dramatic spoke to how desensitized I was becoming to discussing illness and death in the tens of thousands. And that is what the Trump administration was trying to do -- desensitize all of us.
Now that we're eight weeks later and the GOP has had its stab at early re-opening, it's time to pull that knife out of the American jugular and try to clean up the spurting, hemorrhaging mess.
It has been science versus the GOP. Somebody was going to be correct. Somebody was going to be wrong. Wish there had been odds available. The virus didn't disappear on wafts of warm summer breezes, as the president suggested. New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and Germany all provided templates as to how the U.S. could successfully deal with the virus. Italy, Spain., and France exemplified how to recover from brutal starts and regain some means of control. The United States ignored these examples and the accompanying protocols. Call it hubris or American stupidity or sheer one-percenter greed, but the U.S. virus response resembled a drunkard pausing to nap under a guillotine blade while slurring, "I did it my way."
I'm stunned, but I've been saying that every day for four months. The sheer inability of Americans to evaluate evidence, think critically, and demonstrate behavioral discipline has all been shocking. The United States as an entity has been exposed as dumb as a rock.
I've said ad nauseum that this was going to be a 24-month marathon. Did anyone really think those red state governors knew what they were doing from a scientific standpoint? I grew up watching the Apollo program unfold. Now I've been witness to the worst application of science and resources ever seen in my lifetime. Maybe the United States deserves all of this. If you have no mechanism in place to vet national leadership or evaluate abilities, you run the risk of undisciplined, narcissistic idiots with no relevant skills getting their hands on the wheel of America's future.
Which of us suspected that other countries would flip the "build the wall" motif on its head and strive to keep COVID-laced Americans in the United States? Who knew two months ago that a recovering New York would ban red state zombies from breaching its border?
This is where we are. It's all gone to hell. American citizens have been banned from EU travel. President Trump has surrendered any real leadership role. He ducks coronavirus responsibilities and spends his days tweeting about Confederate statues. Our nation is a lurching embarrassment, still trying to sing "I did it my way" as the blade descends.
Bob Dietz
June 30, 2020
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Task Force Review
Time to take the task force to task. Yesterday (Friday) was the first public briefing in two months for Vice-President Pence's Coronavirus Task Force. It was, to say the least, interesting.
While it's true that I read and researched a fair amount of non-verbal and language analyses back in the day, that day was 40 years ago when Edward Hall was the only semi-popular human spacing and non-verbal science author. I'm about three decades out of touch with anything current, including FBI non-verbal specialists moonlighting as consultants for professional poker players. But I'll take a crack at analyzing yesterday's task force briefing, especially since about half of my observations are missing from popular media analyses.
Okay, where to start? Well, first of all, President Trump was absent. As I stated in previous entries, this means that things aren't going well. President Trump is one of those dudes who takes victory laps before running races. If he ain't getting a ribbon, he ain't running the race. Well, in the case of the current pandemic scorecards, he is not in possession of any ribbons. Thus, his absence was eminently predictable and indicates that the U.S. is in the proverbial deep water without a paddle.
Next, Mike Pence. I'm hoping some credentialed language experts chime in and do the analytic legwork. I've watched about half of the task force briefings, and I have never heard Pence cram so many "Umms" into such a brief statement. Every sentence contained an "umm" or a pause worthy of William Shatner. Normally, from what I'd seen, Pence doesn't speak like this. What does it suggest to me? It suggests that he was sticking to a script, and the script was something he was having a hard time selling. Pence bent over backwards to use very specific contortionist criteria to make the case that things were going to hell in "only" 16 states.
National media has highlighted the gaping black hole of what Pence did not say, namely that the CDC recommends masks. How can you tick off a list of CDC recommendations and try to unobtrusively skip "wearing masks?" In terms of subtlety, may as well bang the giant cymbal from The Gong Show. Pence, dubbed "Pinocchio Pence" by David Smith of the UK Guardian after the performance, didn't reveal any hint or outline of a federal plan, but instead recommended the American public pray. Four times. He told Americans to pray four times. I cannot believe that during the Q&A nobody asked Pence about the statistics for pandemic prayer efficacy.
Next is Dr. Birx. I think that Dr. Birx is broken. When the administration pulls her string, she talks too fast, like your sister's Talking Barbie that's been bludgeoned with a ball-peen hammer. I have never heard Dr. Birx talk that fast. She normally jams in quite a few words-per-minute, but this was ridiculous. She blew through charts demonstrating how bad things are in bright red states, and then presented county-by-county, color-coded stuff, evidently in service of rendering swaths of the bad maps in something other than red. Dr. Birx makes a very transparent sycophant; she probably needs a few acting classes.
My initial take on Pence with his continual "umms" and Birx with her verbal land speed record is that both perceived themselves as deceiving the audience. Pence had to constantly pause and gather himself to maintain a Joe Friday pseudo-integrity. Birx found what she was doing to be so distasteful psychologically that she went to her own "warp speed" just to get it over with ASAP.
Then we have Dr. Fauci. Fauci looked as if he had finally gotten some sleep. I'm not sure that the general media picked up on my interpretation of what Fauci did. He spent his first five minutes at the podium basically debunking the spin of both Pence and Birx. He debunked what Birx had implied with her color-coded county charts and compartmentalization, and he debunked Pence's cheerleading nonsense. Fauci did it obliquely but obviously.
Looking back at my impression of the task force non-verbals, I think it's clear that Pence knows he's on the way out. Birx has gone the fealty route and realizes that she has embarrassed herself. She'd best wear ear plugs at most professional conferences going forward, because people are going to have a lot to say about her. Fauci has recognized the clusterfuck nature of the task force from the beginning. He carries the assurance of an old mob boss who knows he's going to outlast all the morons around him while maintaining everyone's respect. I still have my Fauci bobblehead on back order, but the public may have been better served had he simply resigned three months ago and gone on a have-some-brains tour of American media 24/7 to sell what people should have been doing.
Conclusion
When the best that the head of the Federal Coronavirus Task Force has to offer is to pray, and pray, and pray, and pray some more, it's time (as Benchley wrote and Spielberg directed) to get a bigger boat. And a much better crew.
Bob Dietz
June 27, 2020
Thursday, June 25, 2020
Gambling with Lives: Casinos and COVID-19
Casinos re-opened in Arizona on June 1st, with lines of patrons stretching hundreds of feet, waiting for the doors to open. Here we are on June 25th, and right on schedule Arizona case counts and COVID-19 hospitalizations have blown up. Many Nevada casinos opened June 4th. Here we are, exactly three weeks later, and Nevada's cases have spiked to roughly 500 in the last 24 hours.
The situation in Nevada is worse than it appears. Nevada does not count out-of-state visitors who likely caught the virus while visiting. This statistical trickeration has consequences. It plays down the number and severity of outbreaks originating in Nevada. It makes these outbreak events more difficult to identify. And it renders contact tracing virtually impossible and not the concerns of the state of Nevada. The casinos know this; casino management isn't brain dead. They're just playing along with this state versus state game of handing off responsibilities and costs. The casinos shield their own state from bad public relations as long as possible. Lives will be lost and avoidable misery will ensue, but more money gets made for the state.
Patrons in Nevada casinos are required to wear masks for table games lacking plastic partitions. They can lose the masks anywhere else in casinos without recrimination. Slots, video poker, restaurants, the sports books -- masks are optional. A CET promotional team visited Bally's, Harrah's, the Linq, the Flamingo, and Caesars Palace last weekend, handing out $20 in free play to random wearers of masks. That seems a reasonable if modest attempt to reward good behavior. It also makes sense since the CET properties in general have less cubic air volume per person than CET's biggest strip competitor, MGM/Mirage/Mandalay. I think that CET is more at risk for outbreak events than MGM/Mirage/Mandalay or the Wynn properties.
A friend of mine told me back in February that she didn't see any real difference between cruise ships and casinos. Since then, a handful of newspaper columns have made the same observation. Petri dishes are petri dishes.
The bottom line is that Arizona and Nevada are being overwhelmed by the virus right on schedule. Opening casinos the first week in June was a really bad idea.
Let's Get Meta
Here we go. We have an industry, the casino business, that relies on people either being unable to believe math applies to themselves or being so addicted to certain behaviors that they don't care. This industry runs into a pandemic that shuts it down. The industry then decides it will re-open while ignoring criteria set by epidemiologists, who are using probabilistic models. So casinos decide that ignoring probability to re-open businesses that rely squarely on probability is the way to go.
Meanwhile, customers flood casinos upon the re-openings. The customers are slaves to probability while gambling with their money, thus they are consistent when they are slaves to probability while gambling with their lives and their families' lives.
The curious in-joke twist to this is that President Donald Trump at one time oversaw four Atlantic City casinos, including the Trump Taj Mahal. Despite having probability on their side, they all eventually failed, rotating through four bankruptcies. Thus, the man with probability on his side managed to go bankrupt. Now he has set the stage by ignoring the probability projections of disease experts and thereby cheerleading the re-opening of probability-dependent casinos owned by others. The man who failed at owning casinos, and failed Atlantic City, has heavily influenced policy decisions for all of the nation's previous-to-pandemic successful casinos. Irony, anyone?
Eventually, reality will rear its statistically very likely if not inevitable head. Casinos will be identified as origin sites of outbreaks. At that point, an industry that has relied on probability to make money but has ignored probability to re-open, will shut down again. The sturdy Americans who flocked to early re-opening casinos despite epidemiological warnings, thereby ignoring probability so they could, while gambling, ignore probability, will be sidelined from gambling until they are once more instructed to... ignore probability.
And people wonder why we have a grasping-of-probability problem in this country.
Bob Dietz
June 25, 2020
The situation in Nevada is worse than it appears. Nevada does not count out-of-state visitors who likely caught the virus while visiting. This statistical trickeration has consequences. It plays down the number and severity of outbreaks originating in Nevada. It makes these outbreak events more difficult to identify. And it renders contact tracing virtually impossible and not the concerns of the state of Nevada. The casinos know this; casino management isn't brain dead. They're just playing along with this state versus state game of handing off responsibilities and costs. The casinos shield their own state from bad public relations as long as possible. Lives will be lost and avoidable misery will ensue, but more money gets made for the state.
Patrons in Nevada casinos are required to wear masks for table games lacking plastic partitions. They can lose the masks anywhere else in casinos without recrimination. Slots, video poker, restaurants, the sports books -- masks are optional. A CET promotional team visited Bally's, Harrah's, the Linq, the Flamingo, and Caesars Palace last weekend, handing out $20 in free play to random wearers of masks. That seems a reasonable if modest attempt to reward good behavior. It also makes sense since the CET properties in general have less cubic air volume per person than CET's biggest strip competitor, MGM/Mirage/Mandalay. I think that CET is more at risk for outbreak events than MGM/Mirage/Mandalay or the Wynn properties.
A friend of mine told me back in February that she didn't see any real difference between cruise ships and casinos. Since then, a handful of newspaper columns have made the same observation. Petri dishes are petri dishes.
The bottom line is that Arizona and Nevada are being overwhelmed by the virus right on schedule. Opening casinos the first week in June was a really bad idea.
Let's Get Meta
Here we go. We have an industry, the casino business, that relies on people either being unable to believe math applies to themselves or being so addicted to certain behaviors that they don't care. This industry runs into a pandemic that shuts it down. The industry then decides it will re-open while ignoring criteria set by epidemiologists, who are using probabilistic models. So casinos decide that ignoring probability to re-open businesses that rely squarely on probability is the way to go.
Meanwhile, customers flood casinos upon the re-openings. The customers are slaves to probability while gambling with their money, thus they are consistent when they are slaves to probability while gambling with their lives and their families' lives.
The curious in-joke twist to this is that President Donald Trump at one time oversaw four Atlantic City casinos, including the Trump Taj Mahal. Despite having probability on their side, they all eventually failed, rotating through four bankruptcies. Thus, the man with probability on his side managed to go bankrupt. Now he has set the stage by ignoring the probability projections of disease experts and thereby cheerleading the re-opening of probability-dependent casinos owned by others. The man who failed at owning casinos, and failed Atlantic City, has heavily influenced policy decisions for all of the nation's previous-to-pandemic successful casinos. Irony, anyone?
Eventually, reality will rear its statistically very likely if not inevitable head. Casinos will be identified as origin sites of outbreaks. At that point, an industry that has relied on probability to make money but has ignored probability to re-open, will shut down again. The sturdy Americans who flocked to early re-opening casinos despite epidemiological warnings, thereby ignoring probability so they could, while gambling, ignore probability, will be sidelined from gambling until they are once more instructed to... ignore probability.
And people wonder why we have a grasping-of-probability problem in this country.
Bob Dietz
June 25, 2020
Thursday, June 18, 2020
Trickerations
"If we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, actually." President Trump (June 15, 2020)
"In recent days, the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a 'second wave' of coronavirus infections. Such panic is overblown." Vice-President Pence (June 16, 2020)
The president's quote is really deep, in a Monty Python kind of way. If we stop prosecuting people for murder, the United States would have no murderers. If we all stop watching porn, we'd have no porn stars. True dat. I'm not sure if the president was implying something or confused or just at a momentary loss for anything meaningful to say, but I will give him props for rhetoric akin to the truth.
Mike Pence likewise told some version of the truth. If you include the plummeting virus numbers in New York, the country has "stabilized." If you look at the U.S. minus New York, the virus is on a rampage and overwhelming many of the early re-opening states. Best, I suppose, to include New York in the mix and hope nobody notices. Even then, however, Pence left himself an out when he claimed that talk of a "second wave" was overblown. According to experts like Dr. Fauci and Mike Osterholm, we are in the middle of the first wave. So, technically, all the current illness and death is still under a first wave aegis. The vice-president is technically correct when he pooh poohs second wave concerns because the second wave is months away. Don King would be proud of Pence's rhetorical style.
My doublespeak hat is also off to a certain west coast university that announced in an email to faculty that "4,000 people were tested; no students tested positive." Wow. Sounds amazing. Until one realizes that just 5,000 students were on campus and "people" and "students" are not synonyms. Very few students were actually tested. The email, while technically true, may as well have said, "4,000 campus walruses were tested; no students tested positive."
I've never seen a western democracy mislead its citizens the way American leadership is doing right now. All these lives at stake, and we are being fed contortionist rhetoric and flat-out anti-science nonsense. I grew up during the Apollo program. Science was popular, it was respected, and citizens actively sought the best science information. What is taking place right now in the United States is horrifying. Literally a fourth of the populace has committed to anti-scientific conspiracy theories. People refuse to accept sound scientific advice, and they value their own opinions over lifelong, credentialed experts. If tens of thousands of lives weren't on the line, the whole situation would be absurdly comical.
I simply cannot believe the populace that cheered on Apollo has ended up at this intellectual destination -- stuck in a viral fog by an anchor of idiocracy. We have had every generational advantage to exercise critical thinking and unyoke ourselves from demagogues. If we can't recognize the trickerations that the president, vice-president, and various governors are feeding us, we deserve what we get.
Bob Dietz
June 18, 2020
"In recent days, the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a 'second wave' of coronavirus infections. Such panic is overblown." Vice-President Pence (June 16, 2020)
The president's quote is really deep, in a Monty Python kind of way. If we stop prosecuting people for murder, the United States would have no murderers. If we all stop watching porn, we'd have no porn stars. True dat. I'm not sure if the president was implying something or confused or just at a momentary loss for anything meaningful to say, but I will give him props for rhetoric akin to the truth.
Mike Pence likewise told some version of the truth. If you include the plummeting virus numbers in New York, the country has "stabilized." If you look at the U.S. minus New York, the virus is on a rampage and overwhelming many of the early re-opening states. Best, I suppose, to include New York in the mix and hope nobody notices. Even then, however, Pence left himself an out when he claimed that talk of a "second wave" was overblown. According to experts like Dr. Fauci and Mike Osterholm, we are in the middle of the first wave. So, technically, all the current illness and death is still under a first wave aegis. The vice-president is technically correct when he pooh poohs second wave concerns because the second wave is months away. Don King would be proud of Pence's rhetorical style.
My doublespeak hat is also off to a certain west coast university that announced in an email to faculty that "4,000 people were tested; no students tested positive." Wow. Sounds amazing. Until one realizes that just 5,000 students were on campus and "people" and "students" are not synonyms. Very few students were actually tested. The email, while technically true, may as well have said, "4,000 campus walruses were tested; no students tested positive."
I've never seen a western democracy mislead its citizens the way American leadership is doing right now. All these lives at stake, and we are being fed contortionist rhetoric and flat-out anti-science nonsense. I grew up during the Apollo program. Science was popular, it was respected, and citizens actively sought the best science information. What is taking place right now in the United States is horrifying. Literally a fourth of the populace has committed to anti-scientific conspiracy theories. People refuse to accept sound scientific advice, and they value their own opinions over lifelong, credentialed experts. If tens of thousands of lives weren't on the line, the whole situation would be absurdly comical.
I simply cannot believe the populace that cheered on Apollo has ended up at this intellectual destination -- stuck in a viral fog by an anchor of idiocracy. We have had every generational advantage to exercise critical thinking and unyoke ourselves from demagogues. If we can't recognize the trickerations that the president, vice-president, and various governors are feeding us, we deserve what we get.
Bob Dietz
June 18, 2020
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
Blue Myths: Analyzing American Police Shows
Now that the show Cops has been pulled and people are analyzing the accuracy of police representation on ultra-popular shows such as the Law and Order and NCIS franchises, I have a question. What took so long?
It's strange. For a decade, I've been meaning to write a really nasty monograph about Law and Order. My personal concerns actually have little to do with these shows' inaccuracies regarding the number and severity of bad police behaviors. On television, a superior officer saying "I'll have your badge" is a cliché that occurs on a handful of networks about as often as it does during all real-world oversight of roughly a million federal, state, and local American police. We'll get to my particular gripes later.
Television has always misrepresented not just police behavior, but virtually all of the probabilities of life in these United States. Usually, the disparity between television and reality is most obvious from a socioeconomic perspective. The characters on Friends could not have afforded their apartments or lifestyles. Even classic working class families like The Conners outspend their likely income. In addition, considering that the majority of Americans are overweight and close to 40% are obese, American television characters simply don't reflect the demographics and physical attributes of reality.
If the socioeconomics and weight of television characters don't mirror America, is it any surprise that shows involving the police may venture even further afield from reality? What if these shows adhered more closely to real life? Imagine if Law and Order featured abuses of police power every other episode. Imagine stories that reflected actual stats of cops killing 1000 U.S. citizens a year versus roughly 50 police a year dying because of citizens. Consider if Cops episodes were edited to make police look bad.
The rose-colored lenses through which both reality shows and scripted television present police does civilians a disservice. They portray a fiction that is very, very different from the real world. The problem is twofold. First, American television shows feature statistical relationships that are simply incorrect, whether income/lifestyle or habits/weight. In the case of police, the fictions involve the percentage of bad police behavior and the ratio of police killing others versus others killing police. Second, this would not be much of a problem except for the fact that police television shows purport to show our real world, not some alternate universe where things are acknowledged as being different. Faking a representation of reality is more of a problem than, for example, an unreal Star Wars police procedural.
My Problems with American Police Shows
American police shows almost always overemphasize the role of the individual as a cause of events. And they also overemphasize the vague but automatically accepted concepts of choice and individual responsibility. Societal structure is inviolate in American television. To wrap up a show in a satisfying way in an hour requires that ultimate responsibility for every bad outcome or illegal event be heavily yoked to an individual rather than a context or a milieu or the culture's rules and regulations. Responsibility for behaviors is pinned to people rather than experiences of those people or other aspects of context.
These are, admittedly, rather banal statements. Banal but still unsettling. What's most frightening is the sheer popularity of these television mythologies. Law and Order, the old CSI franchise, and NCIS, for example, are not just any television shows. They were and are enormously successful. This speaks, I think, to the American public's blatant insecurities and need to feel safe and protected by technologically super-equipped and pristinely behaved police. The ubiquity of these shows and others such as Bones and Criminal Minds suggests a public craving to believe in some paternalistic but heavily armed troop of boy scouts, and a separate craving to deeply believe that crime and evil itself are caused by corrupt individuals rather than the inevitable outcome of context. To me, the most egregious misrepresentation is the assigning of the ultimate cause of society's ills to people rather than institutions.
Institutions, however, are difficult to change in hour-long dramas. It's much easier to put individuals behind bars for relief-generating conclusions than to commit attempts at institutional change to a television screen. The latter would get lousy ratings and leave a radically different show backdrop for ensuing episodes. Bad ratings and a continually changing show make for short-lived episodic television.
The Individual as Arbiter of his Fate
A hundred years from now, when AI is able to predict highly accurate life paths based on contextual data, people may look back at these "I take full responsibility" days as a naïve Middle Ages.
Police shows usually wrap up with everything reverting to "the way things ought to be" in an hour. Bad events are depicted as the doings and responsibilities of individual people. Structure and context, which may provide the bulk of the cause-and-effect for these bad events, are never behind bars at episode's end. In truth, they don't even wind up on probation. If they get a mention, it's a rarity.
The individual as arbiter of his own fate and as the driving force behind all things bad is the police procedurals' primary fairy tale. If only some elements of the upcoming Dr. Strange: Multiverse of Madness film made their way into cop shows. Maybe some flash-sideways between alternate universes demonstrating that heroes in one dimension are villains in another. Occasional nods to the crucial aspects of context would be refreshing.
Adopting social psychological language, American police procedurals assume wholesale internal locus of control for all human behavior as opposed to external locus of control. This undoubtedly makes for easier writing and more satisfying conclusions.
Fiction Masquerading as Non-Fiction
Circling back to the current protests and public spotlight on disparate life experiences for different ethnicities, we can put it all together. Police shows statistically misrepresent how often cops behave badly and the severity of the bad behavior. Television procedurals feature a fiction overly favorable to law enforcement. Perhaps more important is television's willful ignoring of institutional cause-and-effects. In real life, context runs the show. In television police shows, individuals are presented as if they are knifepoint, blade, handle, and the muscular arm driving home the weapon. In the real world, however, individuals are usually just the tip of the knife, at best.
People believe what they prefer to believe. When it comes to television, people watch what they prefer to believe. Rogue individuals as the cause of bad outcomes is a lesson hammered home by all police shows. The solution to bad outcomes lying in the hands of credentialed "good guys" is another American myth promulgated by the genre. Unlike comic books or Star Wars, where the fictional worlds can easily be delineated from reality, television police procedurals masquerade as days-in-the-life of the real world. The myth of easily defining good from bad and the myth of the ease with which problems can be solved are themes jammed into the American psyche primetime after primetime and rerun after rerun. Narcotics to put us at ease.
At some point, perhaps it's now, Americans must grow up and get off the televised police-procedural drug. Withdrawal from this propaganda could shake the culture to its core.
Bob Dietz
June 16, 2020
It's strange. For a decade, I've been meaning to write a really nasty monograph about Law and Order. My personal concerns actually have little to do with these shows' inaccuracies regarding the number and severity of bad police behaviors. On television, a superior officer saying "I'll have your badge" is a cliché that occurs on a handful of networks about as often as it does during all real-world oversight of roughly a million federal, state, and local American police. We'll get to my particular gripes later.
Television has always misrepresented not just police behavior, but virtually all of the probabilities of life in these United States. Usually, the disparity between television and reality is most obvious from a socioeconomic perspective. The characters on Friends could not have afforded their apartments or lifestyles. Even classic working class families like The Conners outspend their likely income. In addition, considering that the majority of Americans are overweight and close to 40% are obese, American television characters simply don't reflect the demographics and physical attributes of reality.
If the socioeconomics and weight of television characters don't mirror America, is it any surprise that shows involving the police may venture even further afield from reality? What if these shows adhered more closely to real life? Imagine if Law and Order featured abuses of police power every other episode. Imagine stories that reflected actual stats of cops killing 1000 U.S. citizens a year versus roughly 50 police a year dying because of citizens. Consider if Cops episodes were edited to make police look bad.
The rose-colored lenses through which both reality shows and scripted television present police does civilians a disservice. They portray a fiction that is very, very different from the real world. The problem is twofold. First, American television shows feature statistical relationships that are simply incorrect, whether income/lifestyle or habits/weight. In the case of police, the fictions involve the percentage of bad police behavior and the ratio of police killing others versus others killing police. Second, this would not be much of a problem except for the fact that police television shows purport to show our real world, not some alternate universe where things are acknowledged as being different. Faking a representation of reality is more of a problem than, for example, an unreal Star Wars police procedural.
My Problems with American Police Shows
American police shows almost always overemphasize the role of the individual as a cause of events. And they also overemphasize the vague but automatically accepted concepts of choice and individual responsibility. Societal structure is inviolate in American television. To wrap up a show in a satisfying way in an hour requires that ultimate responsibility for every bad outcome or illegal event be heavily yoked to an individual rather than a context or a milieu or the culture's rules and regulations. Responsibility for behaviors is pinned to people rather than experiences of those people or other aspects of context.
These are, admittedly, rather banal statements. Banal but still unsettling. What's most frightening is the sheer popularity of these television mythologies. Law and Order, the old CSI franchise, and NCIS, for example, are not just any television shows. They were and are enormously successful. This speaks, I think, to the American public's blatant insecurities and need to feel safe and protected by technologically super-equipped and pristinely behaved police. The ubiquity of these shows and others such as Bones and Criminal Minds suggests a public craving to believe in some paternalistic but heavily armed troop of boy scouts, and a separate craving to deeply believe that crime and evil itself are caused by corrupt individuals rather than the inevitable outcome of context. To me, the most egregious misrepresentation is the assigning of the ultimate cause of society's ills to people rather than institutions.
Institutions, however, are difficult to change in hour-long dramas. It's much easier to put individuals behind bars for relief-generating conclusions than to commit attempts at institutional change to a television screen. The latter would get lousy ratings and leave a radically different show backdrop for ensuing episodes. Bad ratings and a continually changing show make for short-lived episodic television.
The Individual as Arbiter of his Fate
A hundred years from now, when AI is able to predict highly accurate life paths based on contextual data, people may look back at these "I take full responsibility" days as a naïve Middle Ages.
Police shows usually wrap up with everything reverting to "the way things ought to be" in an hour. Bad events are depicted as the doings and responsibilities of individual people. Structure and context, which may provide the bulk of the cause-and-effect for these bad events, are never behind bars at episode's end. In truth, they don't even wind up on probation. If they get a mention, it's a rarity.
The individual as arbiter of his own fate and as the driving force behind all things bad is the police procedurals' primary fairy tale. If only some elements of the upcoming Dr. Strange: Multiverse of Madness film made their way into cop shows. Maybe some flash-sideways between alternate universes demonstrating that heroes in one dimension are villains in another. Occasional nods to the crucial aspects of context would be refreshing.
Adopting social psychological language, American police procedurals assume wholesale internal locus of control for all human behavior as opposed to external locus of control. This undoubtedly makes for easier writing and more satisfying conclusions.
Fiction Masquerading as Non-Fiction
Circling back to the current protests and public spotlight on disparate life experiences for different ethnicities, we can put it all together. Police shows statistically misrepresent how often cops behave badly and the severity of the bad behavior. Television procedurals feature a fiction overly favorable to law enforcement. Perhaps more important is television's willful ignoring of institutional cause-and-effects. In real life, context runs the show. In television police shows, individuals are presented as if they are knifepoint, blade, handle, and the muscular arm driving home the weapon. In the real world, however, individuals are usually just the tip of the knife, at best.
People believe what they prefer to believe. When it comes to television, people watch what they prefer to believe. Rogue individuals as the cause of bad outcomes is a lesson hammered home by all police shows. The solution to bad outcomes lying in the hands of credentialed "good guys" is another American myth promulgated by the genre. Unlike comic books or Star Wars, where the fictional worlds can easily be delineated from reality, television police procedurals masquerade as days-in-the-life of the real world. The myth of easily defining good from bad and the myth of the ease with which problems can be solved are themes jammed into the American psyche primetime after primetime and rerun after rerun. Narcotics to put us at ease.
At some point, perhaps it's now, Americans must grow up and get off the televised police-procedural drug. Withdrawal from this propaganda could shake the culture to its core.
Bob Dietz
June 16, 2020
Saturday, June 13, 2020
June 13 -- Articles of Note
For the last two weeks, all eyes have been on the nationwide protests for racial equality. Now that some headline room has been cleared once again, Americans seem surprised that COVID-19 hasn't gone anywhere in the interim. Indeed, right on cue, the states that instituted the least sanctions and reopened early are experiencing ominously increasing caseloads. Two weeks after Memorial Day, precisely as scheduled, the COVID-19 snowball has started rolling. Welcome to Month Four of a 24-month event.
Three articles that stood out to me the last few days are listed below. The first is about being a black FBI agent. The second features an updated projection for the pandemic. The third explains why we are still amidst the first wave of COVID-19. Attempts to put the so-called first wave in past tense are simply rhetorical smokescreens to deflect the blame for the consequences of early re-openings.
1) Andre McGregor's "I was a black FBI agent. White cops didn't always see me as equal."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/i-was-a-black-fbi-agent-white-cops-didn-t-always-see-me-as-equal/ar-BB15bHwm
2) Brad Brooks' "U.S. could reach 200,000 coronavirus deaths in September, expert says."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-idUSKBN23I06D
3) Berkeley Lovelace Jr. for CNBC "New coronavirus spread isn't the feared 'second wave' -- it's still the first, researchers say."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/new-coronavirus-spread-isnt-the-feared-second-wave–its-still-the-first-researchers-say/ar-BB15oFuB?ocid=spartan-ntp-feeds
Bob Dietz
June 13, 2020
Three articles that stood out to me the last few days are listed below. The first is about being a black FBI agent. The second features an updated projection for the pandemic. The third explains why we are still amidst the first wave of COVID-19. Attempts to put the so-called first wave in past tense are simply rhetorical smokescreens to deflect the blame for the consequences of early re-openings.
1) Andre McGregor's "I was a black FBI agent. White cops didn't always see me as equal."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/i-was-a-black-fbi-agent-white-cops-didn-t-always-see-me-as-equal/ar-BB15bHwm
2) Brad Brooks' "U.S. could reach 200,000 coronavirus deaths in September, expert says."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-idUSKBN23I06D
3) Berkeley Lovelace Jr. for CNBC "New coronavirus spread isn't the feared 'second wave' -- it's still the first, researchers say."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/new-coronavirus-spread-isnt-the-feared-second-wave–its-still-the-first-researchers-say/ar-BB15oFuB?ocid=spartan-ntp-feeds
Bob Dietz
June 13, 2020
Friday, June 12, 2020
A Pattern, a President, and a Pandemic
When Atlantic City's Trump Taj Mahal opened in 1990, my friend John and I made the pilgrimage from Penn State to celebrate the opening. During the drive, we listened to a books-on-tape bio of Donald Trump. He was quite the dude.
The Taj Mahal, unfortunately, directly competed with another Trump casino, the Trump Plaza. Almost immediately, the Trump Plaza was in financial trouble. Eventually, all of the Atlantic City Trump properties (the Trump Plaza, the Taj, Trump Marina, and Trump World's Fair) found themselves wading into and out of four bankruptcies under various Trump umbrellas.
One of the main issues was that they were competing with each other, cannibalizing a limited pool of potential customers. Unlike casinos owned by Las Vegas mega-corporations CET and MGM/Mandalay, the Trump casinos weren't different enough in tone or targeted demographic. Trump oversaw managerial teams waging financial war directly against each other for the same gamblers.
I've never been in the position to ride herd over teams of people fighting tooth-and-nail for the same pie while also competing to curry favor with me. One would imagine that sitting in judgement as they torch each other must be quite an intoxicating position.
One would similarly imagine that having attractive, intelligent women simultaneously competing for your attention and love while you're married to one or the other would be quite the narcotic. Seems like a standard rich boys' game, but heady nonetheless.
Eventually, this "getting off" on people eviscerating or humiliating themselves for your favor could be packaged as a kind of reality show. The orgasmic impact would be greater, one surmises, if well known people were plugged into the spots, begging to be guided, graded, and discarded by you.
Years later, of course, as a lethal pandemic begins to unfold, what better way to play the same game than to set states against each other, competing for supplies, federal money, and expertise?
In the case of casinos, it's not the brand name's fault for failure; it's the managerial teams. In the case of marriages, well, women do "age out," you know. As for television shows, the failure of subordinates is by design. None of them can look as good as the person in charge because episodes aren't written that way. And the states during a pandemic? If the pattern worked for 40 years for everything else, why not try the concept once again?
I think this is the very definition of modus operandi. Or standard operating procedure. A pattern put to good use in one venue may serve well in another. Just a few small problems. How does one file Chapter 11 against a pandemic? Or divorce it? I suppose one trick would be to deny the existence of something not solvable by your pattern. Deny it as along as possible. If and when you are forced to acknowledge the problem's existence, do it as late in the game as possible because then the end will be closer. If the end doesn't occur on cue, blink, swallow hard, and just pretend that it has indeed ended. Fake it. Fake it loudly. As long as someone isn't a shareholder, or a spouse, or a citizen with the disease, perhaps they won't notice. They'll just think it's some television show. A little formulaic perhaps, but the absolute finest in sociopathic entertainment.
Bob Dietz
June 11, 2020
The Taj Mahal, unfortunately, directly competed with another Trump casino, the Trump Plaza. Almost immediately, the Trump Plaza was in financial trouble. Eventually, all of the Atlantic City Trump properties (the Trump Plaza, the Taj, Trump Marina, and Trump World's Fair) found themselves wading into and out of four bankruptcies under various Trump umbrellas.
One of the main issues was that they were competing with each other, cannibalizing a limited pool of potential customers. Unlike casinos owned by Las Vegas mega-corporations CET and MGM/Mandalay, the Trump casinos weren't different enough in tone or targeted demographic. Trump oversaw managerial teams waging financial war directly against each other for the same gamblers.
I've never been in the position to ride herd over teams of people fighting tooth-and-nail for the same pie while also competing to curry favor with me. One would imagine that sitting in judgement as they torch each other must be quite an intoxicating position.
One would similarly imagine that having attractive, intelligent women simultaneously competing for your attention and love while you're married to one or the other would be quite the narcotic. Seems like a standard rich boys' game, but heady nonetheless.
Eventually, this "getting off" on people eviscerating or humiliating themselves for your favor could be packaged as a kind of reality show. The orgasmic impact would be greater, one surmises, if well known people were plugged into the spots, begging to be guided, graded, and discarded by you.
Years later, of course, as a lethal pandemic begins to unfold, what better way to play the same game than to set states against each other, competing for supplies, federal money, and expertise?
In the case of casinos, it's not the brand name's fault for failure; it's the managerial teams. In the case of marriages, well, women do "age out," you know. As for television shows, the failure of subordinates is by design. None of them can look as good as the person in charge because episodes aren't written that way. And the states during a pandemic? If the pattern worked for 40 years for everything else, why not try the concept once again?
I think this is the very definition of modus operandi. Or standard operating procedure. A pattern put to good use in one venue may serve well in another. Just a few small problems. How does one file Chapter 11 against a pandemic? Or divorce it? I suppose one trick would be to deny the existence of something not solvable by your pattern. Deny it as along as possible. If and when you are forced to acknowledge the problem's existence, do it as late in the game as possible because then the end will be closer. If the end doesn't occur on cue, blink, swallow hard, and just pretend that it has indeed ended. Fake it. Fake it loudly. As long as someone isn't a shareholder, or a spouse, or a citizen with the disease, perhaps they won't notice. They'll just think it's some television show. A little formulaic perhaps, but the absolute finest in sociopathic entertainment.
Bob Dietz
June 11, 2020
Thursday, June 11, 2020
Exploring Equi-Death Arguments: Part Three
The consequences of additional COVID-19 deaths due to early re-opening have been pushed to the backburner by protests these last two weeks. Whereas political conservatives' push for economic recovery fuels illness and death, now progressives' need for sizable in-person rallies is generating added deaths. This flipping of the script provides an opportunity to pragmatically examine key questions.
The equi-death argument (as presented here in previous entries) discussed the attempt by early re-opening proponents to balance additional lives lost from re-opening with a tally of benefits from "getting back to work," such as reduced suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. This argument is logically flawed. It presumes an American economic structure so unyielding and crystalline that resources cannot be added or reallocated to ameliorate societal problems such as suicide, depression, drug use, and domestic violence.
More importantly, the equi-death argument is laced with self-contradicting elements. Lives can be sacrificed in service of getting the economy rolling so the vulnerable do not succumb to added suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. Yet the same need to save the vulnerable is deemed not applicable to everyday American life sans a pandemic. Suicides, depression, drug use (with the exception of alcohol), and incidents of domestic violence all clearly have a positive correlation with lower socioeconomic status. The early re-opening advocates see no reason to step in and reduce these problems during non-pandemic times. They are somehow driven by their inner angels, however, to step in during a pandemic at the cost of tens of thousands of additional COVID-19 deaths. Empathy and action are required only during the pandemic and only when, coincidentally, the economy is staggering. Adding income or health benefits to reduce suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence during "normal economic times" is considered unimportant.
Evidently, the mythology we are supposed to buy into is that the American economy in non-pandemic times is a model of perfection, doling out income and health care as it should be doled out. The structure is the message, so to speak. Long live the structure. But when the economy tanks because of a pandemic, for God's sake, let's save the poor from themselves by putting them back to work.
The equi-death argument, logically flawed, has a rather pungent whiff of convenience and hypocrisy.
Consequences of the Protests
The ongoing protests are going to lead to many more COVID-19 deaths. No amount of righteous indignation or being on the correct historical side is going to prevent that. The question is how many additional people will get seriously ill and how many additional lives will be lost due to viral spread during the demonstrations. My guess is that added deaths will be in the thousands, perhaps five digits.
In a way, progressives' risking their lives and the lives of those at home by protesting is the photographic/logical negative of the early re-openers' argument. Early re-opening proponents refuse to publicly acknowledge that massive budgeting changes could greatly reduce the suicide/depression/drug use/domestic violence issues, whether in pandemic times or not. The re-openers see the existing economic priorities as sclerotic. Progressives are faced with a diametrically opposite dynamic. Roughly a thousand Americans a year are killed by police. If the demonstrations wind up costing 10,000 lives or more due to COVID-19 spread, that's a decade's worth of police killings. Pandemic deaths are a raw, brutal metric that neither God nor Gandhi can change. The only way the protests turn out to be worth those additional COVID-19 lives lost is if long-term changes result. These changes would include not just police behavior, but health care access and outcomes and general socioeconomics. If long-term structural changes occur, then you can make the argument that lives saved going forward outweigh lives lost due to protests during a pandemic.
Conclusion
The early re-openers assume a crystalline, brittle American societal and economic structure. Conversely, the progressives' only way to counterbalance additional COVID-19 lives lost due to protests is to force actual structural change. If significant systemic changes do not result, the demonstrations will have sacrificed lives to the virus in service of people simply feeling good about having done the "right" thing.
Bob Dietz
June 10, 2020
The equi-death argument (as presented here in previous entries) discussed the attempt by early re-opening proponents to balance additional lives lost from re-opening with a tally of benefits from "getting back to work," such as reduced suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. This argument is logically flawed. It presumes an American economic structure so unyielding and crystalline that resources cannot be added or reallocated to ameliorate societal problems such as suicide, depression, drug use, and domestic violence.
More importantly, the equi-death argument is laced with self-contradicting elements. Lives can be sacrificed in service of getting the economy rolling so the vulnerable do not succumb to added suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. Yet the same need to save the vulnerable is deemed not applicable to everyday American life sans a pandemic. Suicides, depression, drug use (with the exception of alcohol), and incidents of domestic violence all clearly have a positive correlation with lower socioeconomic status. The early re-opening advocates see no reason to step in and reduce these problems during non-pandemic times. They are somehow driven by their inner angels, however, to step in during a pandemic at the cost of tens of thousands of additional COVID-19 deaths. Empathy and action are required only during the pandemic and only when, coincidentally, the economy is staggering. Adding income or health benefits to reduce suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence during "normal economic times" is considered unimportant.
Evidently, the mythology we are supposed to buy into is that the American economy in non-pandemic times is a model of perfection, doling out income and health care as it should be doled out. The structure is the message, so to speak. Long live the structure. But when the economy tanks because of a pandemic, for God's sake, let's save the poor from themselves by putting them back to work.
The equi-death argument, logically flawed, has a rather pungent whiff of convenience and hypocrisy.
Consequences of the Protests
The ongoing protests are going to lead to many more COVID-19 deaths. No amount of righteous indignation or being on the correct historical side is going to prevent that. The question is how many additional people will get seriously ill and how many additional lives will be lost due to viral spread during the demonstrations. My guess is that added deaths will be in the thousands, perhaps five digits.
In a way, progressives' risking their lives and the lives of those at home by protesting is the photographic/logical negative of the early re-openers' argument. Early re-opening proponents refuse to publicly acknowledge that massive budgeting changes could greatly reduce the suicide/depression/drug use/domestic violence issues, whether in pandemic times or not. The re-openers see the existing economic priorities as sclerotic. Progressives are faced with a diametrically opposite dynamic. Roughly a thousand Americans a year are killed by police. If the demonstrations wind up costing 10,000 lives or more due to COVID-19 spread, that's a decade's worth of police killings. Pandemic deaths are a raw, brutal metric that neither God nor Gandhi can change. The only way the protests turn out to be worth those additional COVID-19 lives lost is if long-term changes result. These changes would include not just police behavior, but health care access and outcomes and general socioeconomics. If long-term structural changes occur, then you can make the argument that lives saved going forward outweigh lives lost due to protests during a pandemic.
Conclusion
The early re-openers assume a crystalline, brittle American societal and economic structure. Conversely, the progressives' only way to counterbalance additional COVID-19 lives lost due to protests is to force actual structural change. If significant systemic changes do not result, the demonstrations will have sacrificed lives to the virus in service of people simply feeling good about having done the "right" thing.
Bob Dietz
June 10, 2020
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Running While White
I grew up in a small, all-white town. We had an official curfew every night. Being teenage boys, we ignored the curfew as often as we possibly could. Our adventures in breaking curfew were generally silly, lowbrow, and a little bit mean. We raided and stole produce from people's gardens, and pelted moving vehicles with that produce. Occasionally we'd blow up someone's mailbox or picture window with heavy duty, delayed-fuse fireworks. On a few daring nights, some of us tossed smoke bombs into the police station, which was located in a classic town clock building a la Back to the Future.
And here is my point. There were a few times when the police caught us in the act of doing something, and we ran. One of the cops yelled, "Stop or I'll shoot," and we kept running. We absolutely, all of us, knew in our hearts that no police officer was going to shoot us for stealing tomatoes or plopping cars with them. On two occasions, a shot was fired. When those shots were fired, we kept running anyway. All of us knew they were warning shots, probably fired straight up into the air. We absolutely, 100% knew that no police officer was going to aim a gun at one of us for curfew violation or tossing a smoke bomb. In fact, when we would later reconvene after a half mile of madly sprinting across streets and through yards, we would joke about our modestly funded police department now being bereft of ammo because they had used "The Bullet" for their warning shot.
Never did it enter our minds that a cop would consider actually shooting at us. We never even discussed the possibility.
That was our white teenage delinquent experience with the police in a small town. We knew the cops saw us as people. We saw the cops as people. The understood contract was that catching someone doing some stupidness was no reason to beat them up or shoot at them. Growing up in that kind of rational, proportional-response environment, I took it for granted. I cannot imagine what it must be like to grow up actually fearing the police and worrying that they might be trigger happy. That's an entirely different societal context, and a whole different perspective on the world. That kind of alienation and fear of local authority is something you wouldn't be able to shake. Ever. It would color your entire life.
Postscript
I was once told by a gas station clerk that my twenty-dollar bill was no good. I asked for it back. He gave it to me. I got in my car, still squinting at the bill. The clerk could see my license plate, but I didn't think anything of it. I just drove off. The clerk didn't call the police; nobody ever questioned me. My best guess was that my local bank had given me the twenty, so I went there with the bill and demanded they swap it out. I gave them hell. They swapped it for me. That was the end of it.
I cannot imagine someone kneeling on my neck had I managed to pass that bad twenty dollars.
Bob Dietz
June 6, 2020
And here is my point. There were a few times when the police caught us in the act of doing something, and we ran. One of the cops yelled, "Stop or I'll shoot," and we kept running. We absolutely, all of us, knew in our hearts that no police officer was going to shoot us for stealing tomatoes or plopping cars with them. On two occasions, a shot was fired. When those shots were fired, we kept running anyway. All of us knew they were warning shots, probably fired straight up into the air. We absolutely, 100% knew that no police officer was going to aim a gun at one of us for curfew violation or tossing a smoke bomb. In fact, when we would later reconvene after a half mile of madly sprinting across streets and through yards, we would joke about our modestly funded police department now being bereft of ammo because they had used "The Bullet" for their warning shot.
Never did it enter our minds that a cop would consider actually shooting at us. We never even discussed the possibility.
That was our white teenage delinquent experience with the police in a small town. We knew the cops saw us as people. We saw the cops as people. The understood contract was that catching someone doing some stupidness was no reason to beat them up or shoot at them. Growing up in that kind of rational, proportional-response environment, I took it for granted. I cannot imagine what it must be like to grow up actually fearing the police and worrying that they might be trigger happy. That's an entirely different societal context, and a whole different perspective on the world. That kind of alienation and fear of local authority is something you wouldn't be able to shake. Ever. It would color your entire life.
Postscript
I was once told by a gas station clerk that my twenty-dollar bill was no good. I asked for it back. He gave it to me. I got in my car, still squinting at the bill. The clerk could see my license plate, but I didn't think anything of it. I just drove off. The clerk didn't call the police; nobody ever questioned me. My best guess was that my local bank had given me the twenty, so I went there with the bill and demanded they swap it out. I gave them hell. They swapped it for me. That was the end of it.
I cannot imagine someone kneeling on my neck had I managed to pass that bad twenty dollars.
Bob Dietz
June 6, 2020
Friday, June 5, 2020
Masking the Problem
Wearing a mask can blind you, but only if you live where I live. Allow me to explain.
In previous entries, I mentioned the Texas bar owner and Kentucky shopkeepers who decided to ban people wearing masks from their establishments, despite COVID-19 task force, CDC, and state recommendations to wear masks. Well, it turns out that those anti-mask folks may have been onto something if the people they banned were wearing masks distributed by the Tennessee Department of Health.
Yes, if you dropped in for COVID-19 testing in Tennessee, you were allowed to take home some handy dandy, state-provided masks for which the Volunteer state paid $8 million. Just one small problem. The masks were treated with Silvadur, a kind of fungicide that the EPA says can "cause irreversible eye damage, cause skin burns, and is harmful if swallowed or inhaled."
Evidently this state procurement idea has the occasional drawback, eh? A friend of mine who recently had cataract surgery had been wearing one of these babies. Thankfully, I never picked some up; I would have been wearing them while jogging.
Two months ago, the state of Tennessee was ranked 49th in virus preparedness. Now we can see why, although we might not be seeing much of anything had we been wearing these health department masks.
Bob Dietz
June 5, 2020
In previous entries, I mentioned the Texas bar owner and Kentucky shopkeepers who decided to ban people wearing masks from their establishments, despite COVID-19 task force, CDC, and state recommendations to wear masks. Well, it turns out that those anti-mask folks may have been onto something if the people they banned were wearing masks distributed by the Tennessee Department of Health.
Yes, if you dropped in for COVID-19 testing in Tennessee, you were allowed to take home some handy dandy, state-provided masks for which the Volunteer state paid $8 million. Just one small problem. The masks were treated with Silvadur, a kind of fungicide that the EPA says can "cause irreversible eye damage, cause skin burns, and is harmful if swallowed or inhaled."
Evidently this state procurement idea has the occasional drawback, eh? A friend of mine who recently had cataract surgery had been wearing one of these babies. Thankfully, I never picked some up; I would have been wearing them while jogging.
Two months ago, the state of Tennessee was ranked 49th in virus preparedness. Now we can see why, although we might not be seeing much of anything had we been wearing these health department masks.
Bob Dietz
June 5, 2020
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
The Dominatrix in Chief
"So I say that and the word is dominate. If you don't dominate your city and your state, they're gonna walk away with you...we're going to have that total domination." President Trump on governors' conference call (June 1, 2020)
I'm one of those folks who's always trying to read between the lines or figure out what's meant by what hasn't been said. So I thought I'd pitch in and explain why the president has recently become so fond of the word "dominate," which has not previously been one of his go-to fave words.
On May 28, I recommended Tony Schwarz's "The Psychopath in Chief," published by Medium.com that same day. Schwarz was the president's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal. Initially, Schwarz thought that Donald Trump was driven by narcissism to manufacture love and praise. Schwarz, however, has changed his mind. In his latest piece, he explains what he now thinks is the president's primary motivation.
"...what drives Trump more deeply: the need to dominate. His primary goal is to win at any cost and the end always justifies the means. Ultimately, he doesn't care what anyone else thinks or feels. For Trump, the choice between dominating and being loved -- saving himself or saving others -- is no contest."
Later Schwarz says, "He either wins or loses, dominates or submits" and "His obsession with domination and power have prompted Trump to tell lies more promiscuously than ever since he became president... ."
While it may be a coincidence that Schwartz's "dominating" appraisal of the president was followed days later by the president's new penchant for the word "dominate," I doubt it. The president's weekly reading list may be slim, but it would probably include his former ghostwriter's latest work, especially if it were a 10-minute read. In his public presentations stretching back three years, President Trump has copycatted Fox News on a regular basis. Adopting the language of Schwarz's piece seems very in character for him, with an added aggressive wink-wink of one-upsmanship.
If dominating is the president's aspirational goal, perhaps next time he could don some latex and heels, carry a bible in one hand and a whip in the other. Not only would he dominate TV ratings, he wouldn't even have to give a speech. Just crack that whip.
Bob Dietz
June 3, 2020
I'm one of those folks who's always trying to read between the lines or figure out what's meant by what hasn't been said. So I thought I'd pitch in and explain why the president has recently become so fond of the word "dominate," which has not previously been one of his go-to fave words.
On May 28, I recommended Tony Schwarz's "The Psychopath in Chief," published by Medium.com that same day. Schwarz was the president's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal. Initially, Schwarz thought that Donald Trump was driven by narcissism to manufacture love and praise. Schwarz, however, has changed his mind. In his latest piece, he explains what he now thinks is the president's primary motivation.
"...what drives Trump more deeply: the need to dominate. His primary goal is to win at any cost and the end always justifies the means. Ultimately, he doesn't care what anyone else thinks or feels. For Trump, the choice between dominating and being loved -- saving himself or saving others -- is no contest."
Later Schwarz says, "He either wins or loses, dominates or submits" and "His obsession with domination and power have prompted Trump to tell lies more promiscuously than ever since he became president... ."
While it may be a coincidence that Schwartz's "dominating" appraisal of the president was followed days later by the president's new penchant for the word "dominate," I doubt it. The president's weekly reading list may be slim, but it would probably include his former ghostwriter's latest work, especially if it were a 10-minute read. In his public presentations stretching back three years, President Trump has copycatted Fox News on a regular basis. Adopting the language of Schwarz's piece seems very in character for him, with an added aggressive wink-wink of one-upsmanship.
If dominating is the president's aspirational goal, perhaps next time he could don some latex and heels, carry a bible in one hand and a whip in the other. Not only would he dominate TV ratings, he wouldn't even have to give a speech. Just crack that whip.
Bob Dietz
June 3, 2020
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
You're Never Too Old for a Revolution
"I say the future is ours...if you can count." from Cyrus' speech in The Warriors (1979)
"I've waited my whole life for this. The world's going to start over. I'MA BURN IT ALL." N'Jadaka (aka Erik Killmonger) in Black Panther (2018)
Many Americans seem shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that rampant racism runs through this society's veins, and even more shocked that people are actually doing something about it. I guess structural racism is another one of those things that my anthropologist friends tell me is a sacred cultural secret best not profaned by uttering out loud. Everyone knows it, of course, but it's impolite to acknowledge it in public. Or at least it was, before this particular president turned dog whistles into foghorns so folks could find their way through the smoke and the tear gas.
I find it surprising that anyone is surprised by any of this. The two new laws of nature that cell phone cameras have given us are that (1) contrary to all of those books and movies of the 70's and 80's, aliens are not abducting us, and (2) cops do an awful lot of brutal murderous stuff and usually get away with it.
The United States is structurally racist. There's no mystery to this. All you have to do is look at the very design of the government. There was a time when African-Americans counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. Well, one current consequence (perhaps the main consequence) of the electoral college is to make minority votes worth about nine-tenths of a white vote. I guess that's better than three-fifths, eh? But how is it not racist? Then we have the Senate, a body that by design provides equal clout for low population/low minority states and high population/high minority states. How is that not structurally racist?
If you're surprised by any of this -- the horrific murder of George Floyd, the demonstrations, the looting, then you've been watching too much Disney for the last 50 years. Wake up and smell the coffee. Police kill a thousand people a year in the United States. In the UK, they kill two. Minorities are overrepresented in the essential worker categories that are supposed to risk their lives during the pandemic. I'm not going to go on a stat rant here. If you want to see how few police are convicted of brutality each year, go look it up. But you won't. You know why? You don't want to know.
I'm surprised at how many people seem surprised by the events of this last week. I'm more surprised that every day of the last few decades hasn't been like this.
And I'm still not sure who I was rooting for in Black Panther, T'Challa or N'Jadaka. I hope I figure it out in time for the sequel.
Bob Dietz
June 2, 2020
"I've waited my whole life for this. The world's going to start over. I'MA BURN IT ALL." N'Jadaka (aka Erik Killmonger) in Black Panther (2018)
Many Americans seem shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that rampant racism runs through this society's veins, and even more shocked that people are actually doing something about it. I guess structural racism is another one of those things that my anthropologist friends tell me is a sacred cultural secret best not profaned by uttering out loud. Everyone knows it, of course, but it's impolite to acknowledge it in public. Or at least it was, before this particular president turned dog whistles into foghorns so folks could find their way through the smoke and the tear gas.
I find it surprising that anyone is surprised by any of this. The two new laws of nature that cell phone cameras have given us are that (1) contrary to all of those books and movies of the 70's and 80's, aliens are not abducting us, and (2) cops do an awful lot of brutal murderous stuff and usually get away with it.
The United States is structurally racist. There's no mystery to this. All you have to do is look at the very design of the government. There was a time when African-Americans counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. Well, one current consequence (perhaps the main consequence) of the electoral college is to make minority votes worth about nine-tenths of a white vote. I guess that's better than three-fifths, eh? But how is it not racist? Then we have the Senate, a body that by design provides equal clout for low population/low minority states and high population/high minority states. How is that not structurally racist?
If you're surprised by any of this -- the horrific murder of George Floyd, the demonstrations, the looting, then you've been watching too much Disney for the last 50 years. Wake up and smell the coffee. Police kill a thousand people a year in the United States. In the UK, they kill two. Minorities are overrepresented in the essential worker categories that are supposed to risk their lives during the pandemic. I'm not going to go on a stat rant here. If you want to see how few police are convicted of brutality each year, go look it up. But you won't. You know why? You don't want to know.
I'm surprised at how many people seem surprised by the events of this last week. I'm more surprised that every day of the last few decades hasn't been like this.
And I'm still not sure who I was rooting for in Black Panther, T'Challa or N'Jadaka. I hope I figure it out in time for the sequel.
Bob Dietz
June 2, 2020
COVID-19 Reality Scorecard
"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)
"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)
"The Trumpian number, according to me, might last until the end of May, maybe, hopefully." Bob Dietz (May 10, 2020)
Well, that was pretty much spot on -- by me, not the president. The end of May figures, which are almost assuredly an undercount, managed to perfectly straddle President Trump's 100,000 and 110,000. We ended May with 105,000 "official" COVID-19 deaths, despite all kinds of accounting shenanigans by Georgia and Florida. The president's prediction, unfortunately, was for the total deaths at pandemic's end. I was giving my estimate for the end of May.
For the last couple of weeks, the president appears to have abandoned his pandemic predicting. Good decision on his part. You would think with the best scientific minds in the world at his disposal, he'd occasionally get something close to correct. But no such luck.
As for me, I wish college football handicapping were this easy. Pay attention, read a few things, identify actual experts, listen to them, put it all together. What a sweatless gig. You'd think all those educated GOP dudes would have caught on by now.
Bob Dietz
June 2, 2020
"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)
"The Trumpian number, according to me, might last until the end of May, maybe, hopefully." Bob Dietz (May 10, 2020)
Well, that was pretty much spot on -- by me, not the president. The end of May figures, which are almost assuredly an undercount, managed to perfectly straddle President Trump's 100,000 and 110,000. We ended May with 105,000 "official" COVID-19 deaths, despite all kinds of accounting shenanigans by Georgia and Florida. The president's prediction, unfortunately, was for the total deaths at pandemic's end. I was giving my estimate for the end of May.
For the last couple of weeks, the president appears to have abandoned his pandemic predicting. Good decision on his part. You would think with the best scientific minds in the world at his disposal, he'd occasionally get something close to correct. But no such luck.
As for me, I wish college football handicapping were this easy. Pay attention, read a few things, identify actual experts, listen to them, put it all together. What a sweatless gig. You'd think all those educated GOP dudes would have caught on by now.
Bob Dietz
June 2, 2020
Monday, June 1, 2020
Drowning Out the Ominous
The week-long protests have drowned out what would have been COVID-19 headlines. Recent developments listed below are all connected, and not in a good way.
First, in a Helen Branswell interview for STAT, Dr. Fauci reported that the task force meetings have been cut back, and his interactions with the president have been reduced from three or four times a week. Fauci has not seen the president in two weeks. This is the initial clue in which direction we're headed.
Second, as reported by CNN, the CDC has begun regular public briefings. President Trump avoids responsibility and bad outcomes like the not-so-proverbial plague, so he has handed off the public face of the crisis to the CDC. Bad outcomes are assuredly on the itinerary, then, and probably not long in arriving. If we were looking at rosy outcomes and optimism, the president's smiling countenance would be front and center, giving us all the good news.
Third, I want to pass along a report from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team. It's the Imperial College of London's "Report 23: State-level tracking of COVID-19 in the United States." The study analyzes data through May 20 and was published May 24.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-05-21-COVID19-Report-23.pdf
Bear in mind that this report does not take into account Memorial Day weekend crowd issues and their impact.
When we combine these three pieces of information, the handwriting is on the wall in glowing neon. Flash bangs, tear gas, and flames may temporarily obscure that handwriting, but brace yourselves. The tea leaves are beyond ominous. For many states such as Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas, the pandemic has begun embellishing its already lethal reputation.
Bob Dietz
June 1, 2020
First, in a Helen Branswell interview for STAT, Dr. Fauci reported that the task force meetings have been cut back, and his interactions with the president have been reduced from three or four times a week. Fauci has not seen the president in two weeks. This is the initial clue in which direction we're headed.
Second, as reported by CNN, the CDC has begun regular public briefings. President Trump avoids responsibility and bad outcomes like the not-so-proverbial plague, so he has handed off the public face of the crisis to the CDC. Bad outcomes are assuredly on the itinerary, then, and probably not long in arriving. If we were looking at rosy outcomes and optimism, the president's smiling countenance would be front and center, giving us all the good news.
Third, I want to pass along a report from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team. It's the Imperial College of London's "Report 23: State-level tracking of COVID-19 in the United States." The study analyzes data through May 20 and was published May 24.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-05-21-COVID19-Report-23.pdf
Bear in mind that this report does not take into account Memorial Day weekend crowd issues and their impact.
When we combine these three pieces of information, the handwriting is on the wall in glowing neon. Flash bangs, tear gas, and flames may temporarily obscure that handwriting, but brace yourselves. The tea leaves are beyond ominous. For many states such as Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas, the pandemic has begun embellishing its already lethal reputation.
Bob Dietz
June 1, 2020
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