Back in the Saddle

It's been a while, folks. 

Now that my favorite presidential candidate has re-declared on this very evening, I figured that the least I could do was saddle up the blog once again and hold forth as a poor (very, very poor in both the figurative and literal sense) version of Hunter S. Thompson during the campaign chaos to come.

I've usually cut back on writing during each year's "100 Days' War," as I call the college football betting season. This year, I stopped altogether as the wagering waters were murky and deep. Meanwhile, I traveled and socialized enough to put myself at consistent Covid risk, but to the best of the knowledge of my unvaccinated self, I have remained virus free. Rumor has it that the plasma of vaccine and Covid free individuals fetches a hefty fee on the black market, but I'll delve into this and other adventures in the months ahead.

In the meantime, let's all settle in for another Trumpian run at absolute power. In keeping with an overarching conspiratorial theme, my suspicion is that the GOP has hired various Wickian enthusiasts to truncate the Trumpster. I can only hope that some of the $90 million war chest that Mr. Trump wisely withheld from all of those lame MAGA senatorial candidates has been invested in Kevlar. I'm thinking if Wilson Fisk could deck himself out in stylish bulletproof-ness as the fictional King of New York, certainly Donald J. can do the same in the land of non-fiction.

Buckle up, people. This should be fun.

Bob Dietz

November 15, 2022

The Saudi Golf Tour (Part Two)

One of the reasons I'm enjoying the PGA versus LIV brouhaha is because it's rare to actually witness this much irony and absurdity packed into a sports argument. The PGA, which for the entirety of its existence has relied on one-percenters to fill its competitive ranks and also to buy its sponsors' products, is shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that a top one percent of its one-percenters has decided to give the PGA a good spanking.

Watching an attempted monopoly twist in the wind because it lacks the funding to compete on equal terms with what amounts to a proprietorship is...quite funny. All that American wealth overmatched by non-American wealth. It doesn't happen that often. We should appreciate the show. 

The Transience of Sponsors and Morality

Some LIV golfers have already lost sponsorships. The Saudis, if they choose, have the ability to compensate folks for any sponsorship losses. One interesting question is whether Nike, they of the civil rights abuses and sweatshops made famous by Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury series, will decide to announce some moral high ground. Nike's worst abuses appear to have been 20 years ago, which brings up the whole morality-as-current-fashion dilemma. The Saudis are considerably behind the Western world curve when it comes to human rights in general and women's rights in particular. The argument being made is that they are so behind the times that no one should partner with them. The problem with this perspective is that it frames morality as some kind of seasonal fashion. Everyone is doing this now; so too should the Saudis. But most nations' mores and morality of a hundred or even fifty years ago don't get drawn into the discussion because, well, such things should evolve, you know? And keeping up with the Westerners should be every bit as important as keeping up with the Joneses.

It's a debatable high-handed argument -- morality evolves and becomes unceasingly better, in some sense. Legality evolves. What was acceptable then needs to be superceded by what's acceptable now, and the now should supercede national or cultural barriers. I'm not trying to fit the Saudis with halos. Khashoggi's murder was hideous. But I'm pretty damned sure, as a point of comparison, that the number of people murdered by the CIA the last decade is not zero, so perhaps no one should hire on with the Americans. As to the manner of Khashoggi's murder, I'm not impressed by style points. Murder is murder, whether by strangling, CIA bullets, or Russian radioactivity. How bodies are treated after death is not a huge moral qualifier for me, either. 

It was just a year ago that Americans wiped out an extended family in Kabul with a drone strike based on lousy intel. Many children died in that drone strike, and the sheer lack of respect for the non-American lives is hard to process. The strike was a blase act of muscle flexing. To me, that was way more horrendous than a strangling followed by a chainsaw. Using consistent logic, no one should allow the United States to sportswash away its disrespect for human life.

Conclusion

The PGA Tour has spent many years as the Great White of the golf world. Now it's whining because Megalodon, ridden by Greg Norman, showed up. Today, Bryson DeChambeau revealed that he got a four-year $125 million deal with LIV, and much of the money was up front. 

Well, PGA, it's going to be fun watching you twist in the sporting wind because you can't show them the money. If I were Jerry Maguire, I'd have a pretty good idea with whom my guys would be signing.

Bob Dietz

July 5, 2022

The Comedic Writings of Eamon Lynch

I had no real idea who Eamon Lynch was before the LIV versus PGA flap. Now I know. He's a grown-up teacher's pet on an insult rampage. An insult rampage that should lead to all kinds of anti-Eamon litigation. He's been so over-the-top with his LIV-is-evil pitch that his writing comes across as comedy, kind of like Chevy Chase's "Jane, you ignorant slut" on old Weekend Updates.

Chunks of titles from some of Lynch's recent tour-de-forces:

"...players are ripping off the Saudis."

"The Saudis put a horse's head in Brooks Koepka's bed."

"Graeme McDowell's reputation the latest victim of the Saudi rent-a-stooge scheme."

"Dustin Johnson was presented a test of character by the Saudis. Unsurprisingly, he failed it."

Lynch is obviously an institutional hack, a hired hand fronting for the PGA in such a crude manner that he makes Jim Carrey with a megaphone seem elegant and demure. 

I don't know a damned thing about golf (from a professional gambling standpoint), but this kind of blathering is right in the wheelhouse of my "Propaganda Files" series. Lynch is simply saying those things for which the PGA doesn't have the PR fortitude. It's also economically more efficient to obliquely reimburse an informal front man for defamation/libel charges than for an organization to shoulder the risk directly.

If I were Koepka, or McDowell, or Mickelson, I'd hire somebody to break this guy's right hand. Let him type lefty for awhile, as a double entendre reminder. If I were the Saudis, and I know a few people who have operated like the Saudis in my life, and I were a serious dead pool gambler, well, Lynch would make my roster. 

I'd like to review some lovely comments Lynch made regarding Brooks Koepka. One of my developing skills is on-the-fly analysis of propaganda. That skill is largely wasted on the following, from a June 21 Lynch spiel at Golfweek, but I'll do my best:

"Beyond now having to labor at the beck and call of people he dislikes (with good reason, to be fair), the decision to join LIV golf represents a humiliation for Koepka, though he will be loathe to admit it. He has always fancied himself more an athlete than a golfer, but this is an admission that he's neither, that he's just an entertainer doomed to play exhibitions against the washed-up veterans and no-name youngsters that he's long considered unfit to sniff his jockstrap."

And:

"There is a trend apparent among the players going to LIV Golf, beyond the obvious thirst for money. In almost every case, their long-term ability to consistently compete against the world's best on the PGA Tour is questionable, be it on the basis of physical longevity (Koepka, DeChambeau), decrepitude (Mickelson, Westwood, Poulter), diminishing skill (McDowell, Kaymer), or apathy (Johnson, who'd rather be fishing). They are stars emeritus, their best rendered roadkill some miles back by younger, healthier, and more powerful competition. Any suggestion that he belongs among their ranks will wound a prideful man like Koepka, but it's true."

Lynch is so full of himself, and so full of spin, that he's missing the obvious. Every time Tiger Woods tees up these days, the PGA and broadcast networks covering Woods are guilty of pandering to someone whose physical longevity is shot, who's suffering decrepitude, who has diminishing skills, and while I'm not going to try tagging Tiger Woods with apathy per se, if someone is dosing themselves with sleep aids and painkillers, that's actually a form of self-sabotage as bad as any apathy. Committing monstrous and disproportionate air time to Tiger Woods makes the PGA and the broadcast networks guilty of every sin Lynch aims at the LIVers, including selling out.

Lynch evidently has had some intimate conversations with Brooks Koepka about jockstrap sniffing. Or Lynch is just making stuff up, which is litigable. More to the point, is any writer not on hallucinogenics going to say that Koepka and DeChambeau are up against "more powerful" competition? Really? Somebody had best get out his Merriam-Webster to look up "powerful." Every word choice Lynch makes is with the intent of insulting the golfers involved. Decrepitude for Mickelson? Lynch is flailing away. If any of the golfers mentioned had not joined LIV, would Lynch have assigned any of these word choices to them ever? Because if not, and I think not, we're looking at pure, PGA-approved propaganda. 

Brooks Koepka, if I were you, I'd sue this guy into oblivion. Or one-up Lynch's teacher's pet act by reporting Lynch to the Saudi PR department. Let them deal with him. Now that I think about it, I lean to the latter.

Bob Dietz

July 4, 2022

The Saudi Golf Tour (Part One)

This is one of those entries that should contribute mightily to my stated goal of offending as many as possible in the time I have left. The Saudi tour visited Portland this week, and the LIV lineup was more star-studded than the PGA's lineup for the John Deere Classic in Illinois.

The LIV tour has drawn slings and arrows from many of the usual woke-oriented sources. Golfers who committed to LIV have endured Rory McIlroy's public scolding. They've experienced a bombardment of media disapprobation, with sources ranging from Zach Johnson (he of Ryder Cup captaincy) to Jack Nicklaus. The PGA is banning LIV participants from PGA events. Sounds very much as if the PGA has decided it's a bulletproof monopoly. We will, however, see how its Kevlar holds up against the best bullets money can buy.

Call Me Cynical

Yes, the Saudis have a long and current history of civil rights abuses, a long and current history of oppression of women, and state agents were recently caught murdering and dismembering a journalist critical of them. Those condemning the LIV golfers say that the Saudis are "sportswashing" the Saudi public image. 

Some PGA folks have no sense of history. Considering that the very-American PGA golfers are more than 90% diehard Republicans, one would think that they'd bond with the Saudis regarding civil rights issues and oppressing women. But that was in the fog-bound distant GOP past and the Saudis are now, so instead of being praised for emulating the PGA circa 1940, the Saudis are being lambasted for not trying to emulate the PGA circa 2020. 

And while getting caught hacking an adversarial journalist to death carries its own inconvenient and visceral Q rating, does the PGA really want to argue that the American CIA hasn't murdered a soul recently? If the CIA has done such a thing, after all, it would render PGA golf a kind of sportswashing and would disqualify any U.S.-based agencies from running sporting events. On moral grounds, of course.

All of this moral superiority is a clumsy fit for PGA administrators, but they don't seem to realize it.

Nuts and Bolts

I'm not sure why people seemed surprised by Brooks Koepka defecting to LIV. I fully expected it. His brother signed up weeks ago. What were people thinking, Brooks wouldn't enjoy playing with his brother while making a helluva lot more money? 

The LIVers will basically earn a multiple of their previous under-the-PGA income. Some will make double, some will make five times as much, some will make much more. Their number of events will be significantly reduced. At worst, they'll double their money while putting in a fraction of the time. What capitalist in the uber-capitalist U.S.A. wouldn't be on board with this?

McIlroy says the LIVers are retreating from the best competition. Who cares? Can you imagine McIlroy giving Joe Namath a harsh lecture on getting 400K for signing with the AFL Jets when Namath could have signed with the "better competition" NFL? Why would anyone concern themselves with what McIlroy spouts?

If the professional brand-name golfers all made about 50K a year for 25 weekends, and they had an opportunity to make 100K a year for eight weekends, could any American really criticize them? But because the income numbers are higher, righteous certitude rears its media head. The LIV golfers are "selfish," "over the hill," "evading competition," and so on. 

American comedians take well-paying gigs to perform in Saudi Arabia. American thoroughbreds enter Saudi races. Why single out golfers as the morally bankrupt wicked?

Bob Dietz

July 3, 2022

Celtics/Warriors Comments

Well, Golden State wrapped up the title by closing out Boston in Boston. I have just a few brief notes on the series.

-- I thought that the initial series odds of Golden State roughly -160 were a little steep, but I wasn't going to argue much with them, given that the Celtics were coming off back-to-back seven-game series.

-- Celtics coach Ime Udoka summed up Boston's problems really well when, after dropping the fourth game to fall into a series tie, he said that if the Celtics had played proper offense, they would have been up 3-1 at the least.

-- I think two things happened. For four games, Boston was suckered into playing a style of offense like Golden State. Sometimes when the other team does things in what appears to be an easy fashion, you tend to fall into an emulation of them, almost a matching of style and priorities. This, of course, is almost never a good idea. I think that for four games, Boston was seduced and cajoled into a mirror type of game flow and judgement. Then, when the coach bluntly pointed out the mirror issue, I think the Celtics went too far stylistically in the other direction. They did more Hoosier-passing, they passed up quick open shots and quick drives, they looked to attack in the paint off the dribble too much. In other words, they made too much of an emphasis on being the non-Warriors in style and priorities. Frankly, they wasted too much time, they went to post attack with a ball occupier too much, they skewed their priorities too far in a non-Warriors direction.

The irony of losing in Boston due to flow and priority decisions wasn't lost on me. You see, back when Bill Russell led Boston, those Celtic teams were noted (and Russell has emphasized this in biographies) for being able to win games with any style. They could win fast; they could win slow. They could win finesse shoot-'em-ups. They could win physical wars in a slog. They had a huge range of optimal ways to play.

The 2022 Celtics, in contrast, never operated in their optimal style for any significant stretches versus Golden State. Horford's career game won one for them, but they never settled into their best pace or best style. Almost all of their game-flow adjustments were reactions (and over-reactions) to Golden State's dictation.

Bob Dietz

June 21, 2022

Flag Day

Today is Flag Day. As reported by Fox News' Bradford Betz, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser added a 51st star to U.S. flags displayed on Pennsylvania Avenue.

I've reviewed institutional American racism many times before in numerous contexts. Rather than bore you with a list of previous entries emphasizing American racism themes, I'll just mention that I predict that House votes and Senate representation for D.C. won't happen in my lifetime. Why? The District of Columbia has an almost 50% black population. The District of Columbia also has more than 700,000 residents, putting it ahead of Wyoming and Vermont. With a 50% black population, however, D.C. remains in statehood purgatory.

Can you imagine if D.C. were, say, 95% white, like New Hampshire, North Dakota, Vermont, or West Virginia? Do you think those white folks would sit chilly without Senate representation or Electoral College clout?

Welcome to Flag Day. All 50 stars on the flag are white. It's not going to change anytime soon.

Bob Dietz

June 14, 2022

Praying for Praying

"No Way to Prevent This," Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens (Headline from The Onion)

I'm a big fan of thoughts and prayers. I bestow thoughts and prayers all the time. It's fashionable, it doesn't take much time, and it fits my budget. The only drawback to bestowing thoughts and prayers is that I don't seem to lose a lot of weight while doing it. All that being said, however, I've been trying to come up with a way to reduce hail-of-bullets mass slaughters, and I must admit that my very sincere thoughts and prayers don't seem to be having much effect. I don't appear to be making a dent in the body counts.

I'm not the only one at a strategic impasse, either. The Onion, with its fine, consistent reporting of Uvalde, has been covering these massacres for a decade. Here's what The Onion had to say. The fact that this is what The Onion always has to say doesn't lessen the utility of its reporting:

"This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them," said Idaho resident Kathy Miller, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world's deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than other developed nations.

Alternative Facts

I want to point out something science-y that many liberal anti-gun journalists may have missed because they postulate that Americans are hateful, psychotic, irresponsible, held hostage by the gun lobby, irredeemably evil, or complete idiots. I want to point out that correlation is not causation. 

Americans may suffer more mass casualties because we are better shots that any other nationality. This is, after all, the land of Annie Oakley and Wild Bill Hickock. A country where each major comics company has beloved gun-toting assassins as featured characters. Children of all ages aspire to be comic book mainstays Deadshot, Bullseye, and the Punisher. One nation, undoubtedly under God, where rites of passage include buying a car, an assault rifle, and voting (in that order). Americans are simply better shots -- faster, more accurate, with a tradition of accuracy unmatched by other nationalities. 

And that is why we lead the world in casualties from mass shootings. It's not because we're psychotic.

Thoughts and Prayers

I've invested a great deal of thoughts and prayers in how to stop these assault weapon massacres. My investment of thoughts and prayers pointed me to one possible explanation as to why thoughts and prayers haven't been working too well. 

Now hear me out. Is it possible that thoughts and prayers combined have a set limit? In other words, if you do X amount of praying, 1-X is all the thinking you can do. And if you do Y amount of thinking, 1-Y is all the praying you can do. What I'm suggesting is that there's a cap on the useful combination of thinking and praying, and that cap amount just isn't enough to come up with a rational solution (thinking) to gun violence, and it's not enough to get God's attention (praying) to stop the gun violence.

When you think (or pray) about it, my theory of the combined thoughts/prayers limits makes a lot of sense. Republicans, who pray a lot, seem to have some thinking deficiencies. And we all know that the profane American Democrats seem to think too much and pray too little. Thus, thoughts and prayers aren't enough to solve the assault weapons problem. It's a mathematical law of nature. We can label it "Dietz's Sacred/Profane Theorem."

My Solution

I have a workaround for Dietz's Theorem, however. It's genius if I say so myself.

Praying by itself doesn't seem to solve America's massacre problems. Maybe Americans don't pray well. Maybe cell phone towers disrupt prayer waves enroute to God. Whatever it is, we have an issue. 

But what if we augment our prayers? What if we pray for having more effective prayers? If we all pray about praying, God will amplify our prayers so that He can hear our prayers.

Praying about praying should be our new national mantra. Set aside an increasing chunk of your prayer time each day to pray for our praying. Churches should also set aside a portion of each service every week to pray for praying. If the assault weapon massacres continue, we should just devote more and more of each church service to praying about praying. And there's a built-in backup plan if our praying for praying doesn't impede the slaughter. I know it's a bit radical, but we could consider praying to improve our praying to improve praying.

These are just my thoughts on the matter. And my prayers, of course.

Bob Dietz

May 29, 2022 

Cocytus to Lethe to Cocytus

The United States leads the world in per capita gun ownership. We're the only nation with more than one gun owned per person. Serbia, which is a pretty rough place, is second at roughly one gun for every two people. 

I've been unable to reorient after the Uvalde massacre. Living in a red state, I perceive myself as surrounded by "the other." What kind of human being thinks that owning an assault weapon should trump preventing the slaughter of children in a classroom? I am at sea, or more accurately, the River Styx. But, as Steve Kerr pointed out in his presser the other night, 90% of Americans want some kind of red flag federal gun laws. So maybe American life is not as insane as Republican politicians would have us believe.

Why is the United States plagued by these repeated mass slaughters? Perhaps how we entertain ourselves, how we occupy our time, is at the heart of it. I went to two local bookstores, Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million, to survey the kinds of magazines sold. At Barnes and Noble, I counted 44 science/nature magazines, 20 travel, and 34 magazines devoted to guns and ammunition. I did not count hunting magazines with the guns and ammo. At Books-A-Million, I counted 14 science-y magazines, 50 travel, and 33 devoted to guns and ammunition. I'm not sure if I caught Books-A-Million on a bad science inventory day or something.  In any event, I was mightily impressed with the number of guns and ammo mags. They outnumbered all sports mags combined. 

First Person Shooter Games

Back in the 80's and 90's there was quite a debate among sociologists and psychologists regarding whether first person shooter games led to violence or, conversely, were some kind of escape valve catharsis. No firm conclusions were reached.

Now we are in 2022, and I don't think pre-teens and teens spending hundreds of hours as first person shooters is a helpful thing. The games are ubiquitous and boringly similar, regardless of whether you're killing zombies, aliens, or soldiers with uniforms different from your own. Training hundreds or thousands of hours at killing simply can't be a healthy psychological endeavor. 

No matter the conclusion to the debate about whether these games are amping up or defusing violent behaviors, one fact is clear. Since all branches of the American military use simulation training, training to kill must make one better at it. Practice makes perfect. The more experience one has as a first person shooter, the more damage one can do as a first person shooter. I don't see how one can argue differently.

Conclusion

Every Disney/Marvel film ends with some kind of extended massive conflagration. The routine blueprint is frankly annoying to true comic buffs, because not all comics are written this way. These movies all have two-hours plus of action culminating in an over-the-top battle royale where characters survive through implausible means during unwinnable battles. My point is, every real life showdown with police is also an unwinnable battle.

For more than a generation, we have been training our children to shoot at figures on a screen as entertainment. To kill, over and over, for hours and hours, and to be graded on effectiveness and mass casualties. Points for casualties. We have also inundated our children with television shows and movies where probability is suspended and the self either miraculously survives or sacrifices itself for a greater purpose.

We've trained our children to go out with a bang. And an invoice of casualties.

Bob Dietz

May 26, 2022

Death and Basketball

 

I was in first grade, and the teachers sent us home around lunch time, as I recall. I lived just a block from the school, and when I got home, I still didn't know why we had been sent home, but my mother was crying. My grandmother was there and said nothing. The date was Friday, November 22, 1963, and President Kennedy had been shot. My mother, who was Catholic, tried to explain it to me. Being six years old. I didn't understand how a president could be killed or why.

Two days later, the NFL went ahead with their schedule of games. Pete Rozelle, then NFL commissioner, said later that it was his biggest mistake. 

On Tuesday, May 24, a newly minted 18-year-old, sporting body armor and bullets bought with birthday money, went on a sociopathic rampage that killed 22 people, including 19 children, most 10 years old. The NBA decided that their playoff game between Golden State and Dallas scheduled for that night should be played. The game was in Dallas.

Golden State head coach Steve Kerr gave a pre-game presser commenting on the insanity of American gun laws. He said the game was irrelevant. The game was indeed irrelevant, but they played it anyway. I wrote "played it anyway," which is active voice, rather than "it was played anyway," which is passive, because I want to underline the fact that the playing of the game didn't occur via the hand of God. People decided that the game should be played, which I find somewhat nauseating.

Yesterday's Questions

That brings me to my question, "How many children need to die before the NBA cancels a game?" I'm going to email various league officials to try to pin down some kind of specific answer. Obviously, 19 children wasn't the answer. Is the answer 30, 50, a thousand? How anaesthetized are we to these deaths, these outrages, these terrors?

American institutions can't cancel a basketball game? Or a slate of regular season baseball games? What exactly are the priorities of this great U.S. culture that seeks to set an example for the world?

Horror and Prayers

Immediately after the massacre, many Republican politicians took to Twitter and other social media. Their messages seemed to unsurprisingly follow some kind of style guide. The words "horror" and "prayers" appeared in most messages, a kind of mantra written by zombies for zombies. 

Personally, I don't think the word "horror" covers it, and I'll tell you why. Back around the same time JFK was shot, my favorite magazine was Famous Monsters of Filmland, edited by Forrest J. Ackerman. Famous Monsters featured reviews, still photos, and interviews regarding classic horror and sci-fi films of the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's. One line from Ackerman stayed with me through all these years.

"Horror," he said, "is when you walk into a dark alley and see someone being murdered. Terror is when you realize that you're next." The children in that Uvalde classroom experienced something far worse than horror before dying. They experienced the very essence of terror. Every one of them, over and over and over again. 

No child should have to experience that kind of unadulterated terror. All because the world's most technologically advanced nation can't vet 18-year-olds buying body armor and semi-automatic weapons.

Welcome to America.

Bob Dietz

May 25, 2022

Propaganda Files: An Inconvenient Theory

Well, they didn't take long to show up, and they've been entertaining in their premeditated spin, their convolution, and their delicacy in what to not say. I'm talking about corporate America's homogeneous reactions to "Replacement Theory" having become a feature on American evening news (and front pages to boot).

The written reactions have been so homogeneous and simultaneous as to suggest an Attack of the Clones, so to speak. That's what happens when writers think The Force is With Them and editors are all spin and manipulation and very little editing (of arguments, of illogic, of opinions presented as facts).

This will be one of those boring, line by line analyses of propaganda. If you have something exciting to do, please go do it and come back when you crave some literary forensics to help put you to sleep. From my perspective, it had to be written, so I'll get to it, as Chris Cuomo used to say.

I'll be taking a hard look at three pieces that were all published in the last 72 hours. What I'm going to do is pull quotes from each piece that highlight the manipulation of readers. Anyone can do what I've done here. A journalism degree is helpful but not necessary.

CNN

I'll start with CNN. An opinion piece updated yesterday by Jane Greenway Carr is titled "Opinion: What a Nobel laureate's take on Donald Trump reveals about today." The Nobel laureate in question is Toni Morrison. I want to quote and briefly review Carr's second paragraph. Here's the first sentence:

In Morrison's formulation, fear-driven devotion to racial status is more powerful to many White Americans than even self-interest, shame, or any belief in humanity.

I think Carr is laying it on a bit thick here with a touch of Disney and a touch of hyperbole (all Disney films end with big culture or universe-saving showdowns), but I have no qualms with the logic or sentiment. Then we get to the second sentence:

And it is this reality, that White Americans' anxieties in the face of a changing country have been and continue to be weaponized with disastrous and violent results, that has been instrumental in fueling the spread of so-called "replacement theory," the false and bigoted claim that elites are conspiring to replace Whites with minorities.

Now this sentence is interesting. I'm okay with the use of the word "weaponized" here. Understand, however, that using "weaponized" clearly means that the weaponization is not just happening free of human influence or planning. Saying that the violence is a result of a population segment being weaponized points the finger at human planning and design, and U.S. politics with its human avatars, as pre-meditating the disastrous results and massaging the violence into reality. If Carr wants to present things this way, I'm good with it, but I will circle back to it in a moment.

The line that serves as the backbone of Carr's piece and with which I have issues is the clause that closes the second paragraph, "...so-called 'replacement theory,' the false and bigoted claim that elites are conspiring to replace Whites with minorities." It must be nice to write whatever you want about something because you're so on the side of justice and The American Way. Here are the problems with that final clause:

1) Whites ARE being replaced by minorities. If not directly tit for tat, then outnumbered and replaced in terms of voting counts and political power. So the falsity alleged by Carr must lie not in the argument that Whites aren't being replaced, but in the claim that "elites are conspiring."

2) "Conspiring" has quite a few definitions, so please review them yourself. My point is that if a writer is going to claim that there is no "conspiring," he has a tall, tall task. Because every law, ordinance, speech, and meeting that affects racial policies or immigration policies is a form of conspiring. It would be difficult to place interactions and activities by elites regarding these policies as outside a Venn diagram defining "conspiring." Carr seems to want to define "conspiring" as membership in Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil.

If Whites are indeed being replaced, and elites are indeed having meetings and forming policies that affect and control the pace of it, where exactly is the falseness of the claim? And if these things are true, how are such claims "bigoted?" I don't even know if claims can be bigoted in and of themselves, but I learn something new every day.

My problems with that last clause are simply these:  Whites ARE being replaced. Elites ARE affecting the pace of it, regardless of whether they are card-carrying evil mutants. Basically, it's disingenuous for writers to present the whole demographic shift as some kind of natural law that's happening in a political and influence vacuum. Carr is on a moral high horse, and she's going out of her way to spin her presentation and manipulate her readers. The giveaway to her writing dishonestly is that she never broaches the actual numbers regarding immigration or demographic shifts. This ignoring of numbers and trends seems to be a strategy all of these writers employ, and it's not a coincidence. Maybe it's a conspiracy?

I want to take a moment to return to Carr's declaration that White Americans have been weaponized. Her perspective doesn't assume that violence is simply happening as a natural result of cultural fault lines and a snowballing of frictions. No, it posits people and organizations as key parts of the provenance of the violence. Carr assigns cause-and-effect rather than accepting some naturalistic explanation sans specific boogeyman individuals and organizations. What's interesting, however, is that she refuses to explore or even mention the fact that individuals and organizations are part of the cause-and-effect of White Americans becoming a minority. She employs different perspectives, language, and questions depending on what suits her sermon when. And to repeat, she mentions no numbers, no historical markers and trends regarding the demography of Whites becoming a minority. She ignores laying out the statistical details for replacement theory's claims. She recognizes that NOT stating the numbers helps what effect she's trying to have on her audience.

Business Insider

The second piece I'll examine is by Yelena Dzhanova, published about 48 hours ago by Business Insider. The gist of Dzhanova's piece is about Tucker Carlson and how he should be held accountable in some legal sense for promulgating the idea of replacement theory. First, let me explain the structure of the piece. Dzhanova is writing about an interview conducted by CNN's Jim Acosta. Acosta's subject was former Fox political correspondent Carl Cameron. Cameron had some strong declarative opinions regarding how Tucker Carlson should be held accountable for "lying."

I'm going to start by quoting two paragraphs and then taking a look at them. Here's the first paragraph:

As Insider's Connor Perrett and Kieran Press-Reynolds reported, police say they found a document belonging to the Buffalo shooting suspect that was rife with conspiracy theories such as white nationalist "replacement theory," which claims immigration by non-white people is an attempt to replace the white population in the United States.

Now here's my issue with this paragraph. Saying that replacement theory "claims immigration by non-white people is an attempt to replace the white population in the U.S." is not a problem. The problem lies in implying, assuming, or declaring that the line itself is somehow wrong. Non-white people are replacing white people. They are enroute to outnumbering them, first of all. Second, if you're talking about political power, then overwhelming immigration flooding does replace white political power with non-white political power. One doesn't necessarily need an Invasion of the Body Snatchers body-for-body direct substitution for the word "replacement" to be appropriate. Third, demographers do predict that in a few years, the white American population will actually begin to decline. White deaths will outnumber white births. When that happens, there is an almost Invasion of the Body Snatchers vibe to foreign born citizens replacing dying Caucasians.

This brings me to an important point that I'll explore more fully in future entries:  If a theory is more or less correct, what is the true utility in labeling it a "conspiracy theory?"

Moving along, I want to highlight the author's somewhat torturous use of the phrase "is an attempt" in this paragraph. The author tries to anchor the falseness of the theory in the falseness of the words "an attempt." "An attempt" suggests coordination, planning, policies, and effort mustered in pursuit of a goal. If this is what "an attempt" means, then in reality there is "an attempt." Demographic shifts that are primarily fueled by policies are not acts of God or laws of nature that occur without man's hand on the wheel. There are indeed plans and policies and attempts involved. To argue otherwise is absurd. 

Dzhanova's next paragraph states:

Carlson latched onto that theory in his coverage of the Buffalo shooting, said Cameron, adding that the US government has to take action against people who spread and amplify misinformation.

I am no fan of Tucker Carlson, but since when is telling it like it is spreading and amplifying misinformation? If the information being spread is for the most part factually correct, what trick of linguistics, logic, or morality allows one to label accurate information as misinformation? 

Next, I'd like to comment on Dzhanova's second bullet point at the opening of the article. Here it is:

* Carl Cameron said Carlson has been "screaming fire in a crowded movie house for years."

If the movie house is on fire, is it lying to shout fire? Or are we to blithely accept the occasional movie house fire as the natural progression of things, propelled by laws of nature best left unimpeded?

I want to wrap up the Business Insider discussion by pointing out that this piece curiously avoids demographic numbers or laying out immigration trends. What it does not say is wholly in lockstep with the CNN piece examined previously.

USA Today

Written by Will Carless, the title is "Yes, American voter demographics are changing. No, that's not what Replacement Theory is." The piece was published 24 hours ago. At the top of the piece are three bullet points. Here they are:

*  Last week's mass shooting in Buffalo has drawn renewed attention to a racist conspiracy theory known as "replacement theory."

*  The theory is often mischaracterized and confused with demographic changes that are happening in the United States. 

*  True "replacement theory" posits not just that demographics are changing, but that this change is being orchestrated by a sinister cabal.

Let's review Carless' bullet points one by one. I'm going to get a little bit snarky with the first two.

Regarding the first bullet point. Ahem. I am not a fan of using "racist" as an adjective, especially when the noun is not human. This is a relatively new thing. I have issues with the word "racist" attached declaratively as an adjective to theories and events. If you want to use "racists' theory," be my guest. I'm better with that.

Regarding the second bulletin point. Ahem. We have two uses of passive voice in the second bulletin point. Hard for a reader to not notice that. This second bullet feels like it's contorting itself to make some oblique point. When writers resort to passive voice, it usually means they prefer to not spell out who is doing what to whom. The best use of passive voice I've ever encountered was while trying to edit an army report about a tank that was accidentally driven into a swamp. It took three pages before I had any idea what the report was about or that tanks were involved.

Once again, as in the CNN and Business Insider pieces, "demography changes that are happening" tries to passively ignore that they aren't occurring purely through laws of nature. No mention of policies or people formulating policies. No numbers or trends. Same as the two pieces previously discussed. 

The third bullet point attempts to impose a particular straw man definition of replacement theory. Carless has decided to define "true" replacement theory as one that requires demographic change "being orchestrated by a sinister cabal." And we're back to Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil once again.

Frankly, I don't know what to do with this. Carless is an expert on extremism, so perhaps he has a sense of what percent of people who espouse replacement theory are "true" replacement theory believers. From my perspective, and I did a fair share of cult research in my youth, Carless is generating a false dichotomy.   I see replacement theory as anchored in facts. I also see advocacy as existing on a large continuum. Assigning belief in a "sinister cabal" as necessary for being a "true" replacement theorist seems quite a stretch. It's almost as if Carless is attempting to undermine any legitimacy, any reasonable conversation, about the topic by defining all "true" believers as paranoid psychopaths. I think this exacerbates the problem and is the wrong approach. I do wish him luck with this endeavor (and yes, Sheldon, that was sarcasm).

Looking back on Carless' piece, again there are no clearly stated demographic numbers or trends. No math to make real the replacement theorists' concerns. No mention of policies and people making policies as being part of the American demographic process. 

Conclusion

A big chunk of the people who read this will decide that I'm somehow defending Tucker Carlson and a psychotic murderer. The fact that some readers may react to this entry that way is why I'm writing it. The behavior of the Buffalo shooter isn't the debate; the debate is why corporate media responded in predictable and journalistically inappropriate ways regarding a complex subject, replacement theory. 

The propaganda that's most insidious is propaganda that you don't notice because you're already on board with the emotions it's trying to generate. You're resonating with it, and amplified by it, and you don't notice what it's not telling you. I anticipated how American media would respond, and I was correct. I didn't go searching for these three pieces to make my own argument. They all popped up at the same time, written with the same emphases and the same holes highlighting what they don't want to publicly acknowledge, much less discuss. 

In some ways, these are the best examples of current American propaganda. They manipulate, they influence, and they avoid mentioning anything that may clog their filters. I'll return to this subject next week, featuring my own bullet points.

Bob Dietz

May 23, 2022

 

 

Debunking "Replacement Theory"

Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say I would be debunking replacement theory? My apologies. Since I see no rational, logical way to debunk replacement theory, I'll take a shot at debunking the debunking of replacement theory. This way, I'll contribute mightily to this blog's mission, stated many times, to offend as many as possible in the time I have left. Let's get the ball rolling.

Since the Saturday, May 14, attack on the Buffalo supermarket by a white 18-year-old in body armor, replacement theory has been all the rage on the nightly news. Every broadcast mentions it but doesn't really seem to explain what it is. The attack left 10 dead, and based on the screed left by the shooter, and the fact he had "nigger" painted on the barrel of his weapon, the attack appears to have been your classic Caucasian dude on a psychotic rampage in service of keeping America majority-white.

Replacement Theory

If I'm going to explore the debunking of the debunking of replacement theory, I'd best first attempt to define replacement theory. To make my argument, I'll divide replacement theory into what I see as two separate components. The first argues that whites in the United States are being replaced over time by non-whites. Is this really happening? Well, gosh darn it, yes indeedy.

For the last 10 years, the Census Bureau projections have consistently predicted the United States to become majority non-white in 2044 or 2045. The consensus is that the U.S. will, barring some virus that disproportionately kills non-whites or something like that, have a non-white majority by 2050. This should be no surprise to anyone. As early as 1990, the handwriting was clearly on the wall. The only debate was regarding whether it would be sooner, say 2035, or more like 2050. My late wife had a doctorate in demography, so I try to keep tabs on most of this stuff. Let me throw some numbers at you that are a couple of years old. To get absolutely up to date stats, I recommend visiting the closest university library and surveying the latest demography or population studies journals. As of about a year ago, the majority of Under 18 Americans became non-white. Also, non-Hispanic white Americans 15 years of age or less have now been confirmed as a minority. Back in 2015, just over half of American 1-year-olds were racial and ethnic minorities. 

There was absolutely no mystery about any of this. These demographic trends have been writ large in the American firmament for decades. Thus, if you want to refer to whites being replaced by non-whites as "Replacement Theory," my only argument would be that it's long past the theory stage and should be referred to as "Replacement Fact." Anyone who says this hasn't been happening and isn't going to happen is delusional.

The second component of "replacement theory" posits that liberal leaning elites have plotted and planned this all in advance. These evil elites are making it happen. 

I don't want to get into the nuances of some folks considering Jews as non-whites and the borrowing of storylines from The Elders of Zion. I just want to point out that to consider this replacement of whites by non-whites via money-driven policy as "just a conspiracy," one must decide that political actions by elites have no effects on the outcome. This is by definition not the case and frankly absurd. Of course politics plays into the pace of replacement.

In 2005, roughly one in eight Americans was a foreign-born citizen. That's about 45 million people, which is a lot by any metric or from any political perspective. If current trends continue and the great American racial see-saw pivots in 2050, one in five Americans will be foreign-born. Immigration policies have undeniably played and will continue to play a huge role in when the pivot occurs. Those policies are the result of political emphases and decisions driven by American elites. Thus, no matter to what degree replacement theory is presented as mean-spirited, parochial bordering on paranoid, and unfashionable, it's pretty much correct.

"Replacement Theory," stripped of sociopathic and white supremacist labels, checks most of the reality boxes.

Reality Check

If my stating the simple and obvious results in readers perceiving me as a white supremacist or conspiracy righty, I submit that such readers are victims of propaganda. In the days ahead, it'll be fascinating to discover how American media tackles the indelicate subject of replacement theory. Those foreign-born immigrant stats I mentioned -- will CNN discuss them? Will The New York Times? Will any American media attack the psychopathy of the Buffalo shooter while acknowledging that the shooter's perceptions and stated motives are not fantasies? 

Those numbers for the in-progress massive scaling up of foreign born immigrants -- how often in the last two years have those stats been delineated on CNN or MSNBC or major networks? And if not, why not? The projections are clean, clear, and unambiguous. Yet major corporate media desperately avoids spelling out the bald numbers. 

One of the ongoing themes of this blog has been that what is NOT mentioned usually tells you more than what is. The absence of information that's germane to policies is a powerful form of propaganda that too often goes unexamined. When the Buffalo shooter's motives are discussed by media, when his treatise is publicly analyzed, "Replacement Facts" need to be part of the conversation. Will they be? It'll certainly be interesting to find out.

Bob Dietz

May 21, 2022

Propaganda Files: Phil Harper, Dr. Been, and the Whore(s) of Babylon

As I mentioned on April 21, I intended to revisit Phil Harper and his substack.com publication, The Digger. Harper has bolstered his invaluable Ivermectin series with follow-ups and a podcast interview. After providing specific details regarding the whys and wherefores of the TOGETHER trials, Harper's continuing investigative journalism has framed the often-contradictory narratives surrounding Ivermectin in a context that features all of the right questions. And that really is all anyone can do -- legwork, ask the obvious questions, do more legwork, ask some less obvious questions, and then more legwork.

Harper has been patient, dogged, and in some respects lucky in following the threads that he weaves into an evidentiary and logical tapestry that any civilian can understand. I have great respect for both Harper's investigative patience and attention to detail. Had I been privy to some of the information he's uncovered, I think my head would have exploded before I was able to clearly communicate the storylines in an even-handed, logical manner. I salute Harper's Joe Friday-style connecting of the dots and his take on not just what's been available for analysis, but the implications of what's unavailable, and also what's implied by the timing and sequencing of events.

Harper and The Propaganda Files

People who have followed me awhile know that I've done some line-by-line analyses to create frames and connect dots. I've also gone where I felt evidence and logic demanded. Some examples include the August 17 and 18 (2020) two-parter regarding Louis Gohmert's radio show appearance, the February 1 and 10 (2022) two-parter analyzing media responses to Aaron Rodgers public Covid stance, and the February 23 and 25 (2022) two-part analysis of Apoorva Mandavilli's CDC expose'. As opposed to my brief analytical essays, what Harper has done is true investigative journalism. He has, as his publication's title suggests, dug up the details and given them to us.

The key question for me, from the perspective of writing "The Propaganda Files," isn't whether Harper is more right than wrong. The key question is why hasn't every major news organization already trotted him onto the public stage and interviewed him. His research is painstaking and precise with major implications for how the public has been manipulated during the pandemic. How is it that Phil Harper isn't front and center on CNN every blessed night until everything he examines has also been put in front of the American public? The fact that he isn't is unbelievably ominous. 

As cynical as I've been, as much as I've questioned pandemic narratives presented to us, I may have vastly underestimated the self-serving venality of all of the involved institutions. Given my normal baseline cynicism, to discover that I'm not cynical enough is a bit of a shock.

Dr. Been

I wanted to mention a particular lecture by Dr. Mobeen Syed (known as "Dr. Been" on YouTube) as a good example of a necessary line-by-line analysis of both a study and particular posted criticisms of the study. The paper was published in Nature on April 28. The title is "Increased emergency cardiovascular events among under-40 population in Israel during vaccine rollout and third COVID-19 wave." 

I recommend that everyone take a look at the study, but the study itself is not my focus today. I wanted to point out how Dr. Syed very patiently analyzed the posted criticisms of the study that were presented by an organization called Voices for Vaccines. Syed does a very thorough line-by-line analysis of what Voice for Vaccines has to say.

From my perspective with "The Propaganda Files," here's the scary thing:  Voices for Vaccines flat out lies about what the paper is saying. Personally, I can't call their ongoing comments misrepresentations, because "misrepresentations" doesn't cover it. In its posts, Voices for Vaccines declares that the study says various things that the study simply and clearly does not. The statements made by Voices for Vaccines are so consistently incorrect vis-a-vis the paper that the inaccuracy must be purposeful. 

I have rarely seen anything like this in science. The actual Voices for Vaccines posts are not signed by any individual but by Voices for Vaccines as an organization. If you go to Voicesforvaccines.org, you will see many familiar pandemic faces. Some, such as William Schaffner at Vanderbilt, I had considered reliable science sources for the general public. Now I don't. Whoever was posting criticisms of this paper in the name of Voices for Vaccines was trying real hard to impose a nuclear-powered spin to undermine the paper. Now remember, this paper appeared in Nature of all places, not some backwater niche journal.

Nature's papers undergo gold standard peer reviews. Perhaps comments by organizations that are supposed to have at least read the paper should undergo similar peer review. Fortunately for me, Dr. Syed did a line-by-line rebuttal peer review of the Voices for Vaccines' comments. If someone like Schaffner is lending his name and clout to these kinds of dishonest hit jobs on peer reviewed papers in Nature, imagine how bad the overall pro-vaccine spin and pro-vaccine pressure must be. 

I'm appalled at Scheffner's involvement. Schaffner is one of CNN's go-to talking heads. He's part of Vanderbilt's Medical School, which is a straight drive for me west on I-40 across the state. I am just horrified that some of the most respected experts are on board with this kind of over-the-top targeted hit job on a Nature paper. I'm flabbergasted.

The Whore(s) of Babylon

Since I've done the line-by-line analyses myself on a very limited scale, I sit up and take note when Dr. Syed (aka Dr. Been) does the same. I greatly appreciate his taking the time to do so, all without saying anything so blatant as to arouse the YouTube censors. 

I thought, coming from the realm of professional gambling, where everything is misdirection and concocted narratives and contextually The Sting, that I was cynical enough to handle (without barfing) whatever big pharma, American medical institutions, and the American government could throw at me. I was wrong. 

We are mired in an institutional hellpit, stuck in a quagmire of massive manipulation and outright lies. I'm relying on people like Phil Harper and Dr. Been to hold my head out of the propaganda toilet.

Bob Dietz

May 14, 2022 

Day Dreaming Constitutionality

Here in northeastern Tennessee, it's not unusual to see caravans of vehicles flying Confederate flags, the occasional sheriff's department sending their robes out to be dry cleaned, and a street or two named after Grand Dragons. This is one of those stories.

Elizabethton's Crosses

Elizabethton, a city of 14,000, is about 10 miles from my home. As reported April 16 by The Johnson City Press, Elizabethton's city attorney, Roger Day, had issued a formal statement on the 14th. He said that the three crosses on city-owned property on Lynn Mountain did not violate the First Amendment. The three crosses have a mountainside view above downtown Elizabethton. 

The Freedom From Religion Foundation had written to Elizabethton twice, arguing that the crosses on city land were a violation of the Constitution. City Attorney Day said in his statement that the Supreme Court's 2019 decision to allow a 40-foot cross at a veterans' memorial in Maryland was applicable to Elizabethton's situation. The Supreme Court had decided that the 40-foot cross had accepted secular meaning vis-a-vis wartime sacrifice. The giant cross could therefore stay.

Day Dreaming

Here's what I think about local GOP operatives. They gussy themselves up in the prettiest culture war garb while absolutely knowing that what they're spouting is nonsense. Day cannot be as dumb as he sounds, but he's going to try to pull this off under the auspices of both naivete and innumeracy. His legal analogy is self-serving garbage, and here's why.

The three crosses in Elizabethton are plural. Yeah, what insight, mathematical sophistication, and observational expertise I bring to the table. My point is that three crosses are undeniably NOT a secular symbol. The New Testament features three crosses on Calvary, the hill on which Jesus of Nazareth was ostensibly crucified. On the Nazarene's right was a criminal who repented and went to heaven. On the left was a criminal who did not go to heaven. The Nazarene was in the middle.

The three crosses are classic Christian religious iconography. Their presence on the Elizabethton hill speaks to the detailed storylines of the famous crucifixion. Three crosses is not by any Reed Richards stretch a secular symbol. To argue such a thing is obvious nonsense.

The Christian Way

Personally, I don't care if there are crosses, windmills, or giant blow-up dolls overlooking downtown Elizabethton. I'm just annoyed by a city attorney making a disingenuous argument so as to drape himself in a culture war flag. These cloistered GOP small towns scream for the Constitution until they run afoul of the Constitution. Then they bullshit.

I have problems with the incessant, insulting bullshitting. Just Christian up, flex your anti-Constitutional muscles, and proclaim Elizabethton a sanctuary city for hard-core cross worshippers. If it costs you federal money, it costs you federal money. If God's on your side, after all, there's really no pressing need for federal funding.  Have more faith in your finances.

Bob Dietz

April 25, 2022

Phil Harper's Ivermectin Series

Well, it's about time that I stepped into the breach and discussed Ivermectin. The social media protocols and propaganda surrounding Ivermectin have been fascinating. In this blog, I've tried to steer clear of Ivermectin because I'm simply not qualified to talk about it. What I'm going to do, however, is recommend that everyone read Phil Harper's series on Ivermectin. Harper is an investigative journalist and filmmaker. The Digger is his substack.com site, and he has done us all a great favor with his ongoing Ivermectin series. 

Harper is eminently readable; it's all non-technical writing. He has uncovered some absolutely damning material regarding a particular key Ivermectin paper. I would be doing him a disservice by attempting much of a summary. His summaries are absolutely clear and to the point, so check them out. Suffice it to say that Harper has pinned down ghostwriting of an academic paper via writing analyses and metadata analyses. His reveals are so irrefutably damning, all I can say is go to The Digger and read. The articles on Ivermectin are currently sharable. A subscription to The Digger is just seven dollars a month and well worth it. Please review his series (they are all quick reads), and I'll revisit Harper in a week or two.

My Take on Phil Harper

If what Harper reports is true, it indicts American academia, the pharmaceutical industry, and American health care institutions, along with WHO. Putting aside the absolute truth or falsity of what Harper reports, however, here's what bothers me.

Harper's research should be debated front and center on every major news network in perpetuity. He should have been interviewed by 60 Minutes. Instead, searches of CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times yield no Phil Harper/Ivermectin results. How can this be? Harper's investigation uncovered evidence of ubiquitous coordinated corruption of American academia and health care organizations throughout the pandemic. How can this not be newsworthy?

Daniel Horowitz's Apple podcast featured Harper on March 10, so Harper's not an unknown. With American news companies grinding for every shred of newsworthy fodder, the idea that Harper's findings have gone unreported by corporate media is stunning.  As I have said repeatedly in this blog, it's the absence of reportage that is usually the most obvious exercise of propaganda. 

Welcome to the American Ivermectin prism.

Bob Dietz

April 21, 2022

Propaganda Files: The Three P's of Parochialism

Parochial Perspectives. Parochial Pundits. Parochial Propaganda.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I've decried the parochialism that has swamped the United States. I mistakenly perceived the parochialism, spewing from our institutions and citizens alike, as simply a passive result of our uniquely American arrogance. What I've learned during these two years of Covid is that much of what is presented to us and many of our limitations in perspective are no passive accident.

Americans love their parochialism. Some consider it, intellectually, as almost a badge of honor. American institutions are allegedly on the cutting edge of science; American media allegedly propagates what those institutions learn directly into the U.S. intellectual ecosystem. We are the best and the brightest. Plus we have the deepest pockets during emergencies. Doesn't that justify parochialism, at least of a kind?

The fable goes something like this. The U.S. has the most respected experts, the most money, and vast organizational abilities that allow it to analyze and adjust to scientific challenges like Covid-19. The rest of the world is slaving away in catch-up mode, relying on human and material resources much inferior to ours. In terms of propagating science theory and strategies, the American media is nimble and can more easily inform the public than the media in most other countries.

Parochial Perspectives

It turns out, all the while that I've been criticizing American parochialism, I've often been guilty of parochialism myself along the way. As I've described in previous entries, early in the pandemic I was faced with Fauci/CDC recommendations to wear gloves but not worry about wearing masks during air travel. I knew South Korea and other countries with recent pandemic experience were recommending masking as essential. Idiotically, I prioritized the CDC advice. I was wrong and could have paid the price while flying in February 2020.

Why did I have such a parochial perspective, giving American institutional advice heavier weight than it deserved? I think that the answer lies in my growing up during the glory days of the race to the moon. I trusted American science and the ability of American institutions to work with science to get things right. Ultimately, growing up while the United States was at its scientific peak vis-a-vis the rest of the world made me think that somehow the U.S. scientific community that handled the moon landing was the same U.S. scientific community tackling the pandemic. I could not have been more wrong.

I spent long months in 2020 and 2021 criticizing the Americans lack of Covid testing, lack of state-to-state coordination, and the lack of reporting of demographic data as the pandemic unfolded. What was most surprising and galling was American media's inability or unwillingness to compare U.S. institutional responses to the responses of other countries. 

Parochial Pundits

One of the great manipulations of the pandemic has been American institutions and American corporate media relying almost exclusively on American pundits to provide a very skewed, limited, and parochial perspective on the pandemic.

Rather than using its media organizations to scour the globe for international opinions, differences in strategies, and reports on results as they fluidly transpired, the United States trotted out its own experts, placed only those experts in front of audiences, and never promoted the kinds of comparisons that would put particular narrow approaches at risk of being undercut or disbelieved. Other countries used a wide range of Covid strategies. Other countries had more and recent experience with pandemics, but American institutions stayed in-house as much as possible both for expertise and who was put in front of the public. 

From the beginning, I had expected multiple eyes on the demographics and results pouring in from other nations. I had expected real time summaries and comparisons. The more different the treatments, the more I expected thorough analyses by American institutions and public data. Nothing of the sort happened. 

Under Trump, we were fed baldly manipulative and wildly inaccurate predictions. The Trump administration kept touting ridiculous numbers and glee club optimism. Under Biden, I expected data to be made public, comprehensive comparisons with other countries, and a more multi-national assessment of treatments. We received nothing of the kind.

Michael Osterholm, as I reported from the beginning, was a straight shooter and accurate Covid handicapper. That's probably why he wasn't on the Trump task force. The task force turned out to be a less-than-well-meaning clusterfuck, as I described June 27, 2020 in "Task Force Review." Under Biden, things have actually gotten informationally worse, which I thought was well-nigh impossible.

Back in February and March 2020, some punditry from the South Korea Infectious Disease Institute would have been quite helpful. As months passed, comparisons of U.S. results with results from other countries should have been featured every night on major news networks. 

Our American pundits during these two years have studiously adhered to the favored narratives of the day, which have embarrassingly changed on a regular basis, a la the sloganeering in Orwell's 1984. Without televised debate, without American pundits being challenged by adversarial interviewers, the U.S. citizenry was never put in a position to meaningfully compare and contrast the Covid priorities and results from around the world. When was the last time a major network's science talking heads were actually challenged on air by experts from other countries that have had different, often better, results? The classic case is CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Dr. Leana Wen, who get to do monologue snippets on air rather than field actual adversarial questions.

Parochial Propaganda

During a historic pandemic, a reasonable person might have expected American media to interview those experts from countries that have more experience with pandemics than the United States. Similarly, one might have expected that as the pandemic unfolded (with the U.S. not doing well by any particular metric) that American media would hold U.S. institutions' feet to the fire to make U.S. experts explain why the U.S. was lacking. These kinds of questions, however, were rarely broached by American media and certainly not featured on an ongoing basis.

The lack of featuring this information, the lack of holding U.S. Covid response up to an international mirror, is its own kind of propaganda. As I have emphasized repeatedly in these "Propaganda Files," what's NOT said is usually the most salient tipoff to propaganda.

Ivermectin has been one of the crucial debate points during the pandemic. One would reasonably expect a healthy adversarial dialogue between Ivermectin advocates and naysayers. That hasn't happened. It's not that the Ivermectin advocates don't have the credentials. It's not like Ivermectin hasn't been widely used in other countries. One would expect William Campbell and Satoshi Omura, who received the 2015 Nobel Prize in medicine for inventing Ivermectin, to be featured guests on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and 60 Minutes on a regular basis, not necessarily to advocate, but to discuss. I'm not aware of any major corporate American news show that has interviewed either. How can that be?

This is one of those occasions when the American penchant for thinking the U.S. is the center of the universe has provided cover for propaganda. We're so respectful of American scientific wizardry and bottomless material resources that we Americans blithely assume we've cornered the market not just on science, but on reality itself. Our reflexive narcissistic assumptions make us particularly vulnerable to parochialism that blinds us to the limits of both what we see and what we are being told. And these limits have consequences, rarely of the good kind. Our narrow American perspective is easily manipulated by those who prefer to keep us unaware of how parochial we are.

Conclusions

Pick your cliche. Pick your stereotype. Americans think they're the smartest guys in the room, and they fail to notice that there are no windows in the room and the doors have been locked. A kind of incestuous retardation of thinking results, but because we stay inside the room, we're barely aware of our disabilities.

Bob Dietz

April 16, 2022

Covid Brain Damage: Article Recommendation

I wanted to mention Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Pam Belluck's March 7 New York Times piece regarding the Oxford study demonstrating brain shrinkage in Covid-19 patients.

Belluck tackles many of the unanswered questions, including whether severity of illness is correlated with brain shrinkage, disparities in brain shrinkage by age, and how long-term Covid fits into the brain shrinkage questions. She also addresses some of the limits of the study, including the 51 to 81 age bracket.

In addition, she discusses the types of cognitive damage suggested by the study. Memory per se, for example, appears relatively undamaged, but Covid patients did poorly with the trail-making test, which involves speed of analysis and ability to focus. 

Given that The New York Times did such a serious piece, it's baffling that the study wasn't featured on CNN or MSNBC. My question is why. If the study's results are confirmed by other studies, the ramifications are enormous. Belluck underlines the key questions going forward. Will a Covid-infected population experience earlier dementia onset and more severe dementia compared to previous non-Covid populations? 

I don't understand why this topic isn't front and center in American news cycles. The study needs to be replicated as soon and as often as possible. 

Bob Dietz

April 8, 2022

Salute to Russell Brand

Ten years ago, there were two things I could never have predicted. One was Donald Trump becoming president of the United States. The other was Russell Brand becoming the face of rational, empathetic progressivism. 

Brand is the famous actor and comedian. Most know him for his roles in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek. I loved him in Rock of Ages. Brand's YouTube podcast covers a range of topics, with an emphasis on examinations of the increasing wealth inequality, the consolidation of information available to the public via corporate media, and the oppressive features of interlocking institutions in modern capitalist culture. Often seating Covid questions in the context of these themes, he has covered the pandemic remarkably well.

Brand is entertaining while erudite. His presentations are disciplined. He does a wonderful job of enumerating Dragnet-style facts while being funny. That's a very, very difficult high wire act to maintain, but he does it with relentless clarity, verbal patience, and humor. Brand has the material resources and personal abilities to pull this off with style, to connect with vastly different political audiences, and to make a real difference.

Occasionally, Brand's wardrobe choices leave me baffled, but to each his own. Sometimes he's rocking a look suggesting Obi-Wan Kenobi shopping at thrift stores. Other times, he's reminiscent of Jesus of Nazareth if the Nazarene had decided that wearing boatloads of crosses was a good idea. Once my eyes get adjusted to Brand's lack of clean lines, however, he can be mesmerizing. 

Check him out. The podcasts are brief, informative, and intellectually disciplined. Brand does more good in one YouTube video than I can do in a hundred blatherings. I salute him.

Bob Dietz

April 5, 2022

Covid-19 Causes Brain Damage

The above title appears to be the bottom line. I've yet to see a corporate media headline state things quite this baldly, but I attribute that to a corporate tendency to try to bury leads that don't fit prevailing narratives. We're supposed to be recovering, both individually and societally, from the ravages of Covid. Well, guess again.

The paper is titled, "SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK biobank." The lead author is Gwenaelle Douaud, and it was published March 7 in Nature, the gold standard of academic publications. I recommend that everyone search out this paper and read it. I can also recommend the YouTube podcasts of Dr. Been and Dr. John Campbell as useful tools to walk you through the paper.

Essentially, even mild cases of Covid-19 cause brain shrinkage. The findings, summarized in the abstract, are beyond ominous. To quote, "the significant longitudinal effects include greater reduction in grey matter thickness and tissue-contrast in the orbitofrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus, greater changes in markers of tissue damage in regions functionally-connected to the primary olfactory cortex, and greater reduction in global brain size." In other words, Covid shrinks your brain. As such, the effect of having contracted even mild Covid-19 is having brain volume reductions similar to those caused by aging and dementia. The reversibility and permanence of these effects are currently unknown. 

This brain shrinkage was shown to have measurable cognitive effects. Think about that for a moment. Contracting Covid knocks your intelligence down some significant number of points. It debilitates you. It has the same impact as aging your brain. And we don't know if any of it is reversible. These are devastating findings. We need immediate replication studies, worldwide. 

Coverage

When Dr. Fauci finally admitted early this year that Omicron was likely to find everyone, it turned out to be an admittance that Covid was going to age our brains and retard almost all of us. 

I realize that we are in the midst of a Russian invasion of Ukraine and Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, but how does Covid- super-aging our brains not make headline news cycles? Searching CNN and MSNBC yields nothing for "Covid causes brain damage," "Covid shrinks brain," or "Covid causes structural brain changes." Newspapers, at least, paid more attention. The New York Times and USA Today reported on the findings but have not done follow-ups or featured the subject in an ongoing manner.

How is this not a front-and-center everyday topic of headline news? Our brains have been shrunk by a virus in a significant manner, and we do not know if the damage is permanent. It's as if we'd been mentally aged against our will, and the subject is being ignored.

American institutions are not acknowledging, much less discussing, this very frightening problem. If we thought they had protected us from the worst of the virus, we appear to have been very wrong.

Bob Dietz

April 4, 2022

Articles of Note

I'm going to conclude my March blog entries with a quick mention of three articles that everyone should read, regardless of science training.

1) The first is a paper from The Journal of Pediatrics. Published March 25, the title is "Persistent Cardiac MRI Findings in a Cohort of Adolescents with post COVID-19 mRNA vaccine myopericarditis." The lead author is Jenna Schauer, MD. This paper follows a small group of adolescents at Seattle Children's Hospital. They suffered severe myocarditis issues after their second dose of Pfizer mRNA vaccine. Three to eight months later, some damage had resolved, and some had not. One particular category of damage, in fact, showed no evidence of resolving at all. 

This is one of those papers that, as I read it, put a knot in my stomach, almost like a scene from a horror movie. It was a quiet, ominous paper. I hope it turns out to be a freakish anomaly, but I doubt that's the case. The paper unnerved me. Everyone should take a look at it.

2) My second recommendation is a "step back and smell the coffee" paper, an essay published March 16 in The British Medical Journal, which has been around for 180 years. The title is "The illusion of evidence based medicine," and lead authors are Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry. The paper tackles the academic, capitalistic, and cultural problems with medical research. 

I've read a number of papers touching on these topics in academia in general, but when these massive structural flaws in integrity take place in medicine during a pandemic, the consequences become real, dire, and ubiquitous, affecting literally everyone. It's one thing for a self-fulfilling and self-enriching academia to grift regarding the inconsequential. It's another when profiteering sets the agenda with billions of lives at stake. This paper is a warning to wake up to the corruption and hypocrisy defining medical regulation and academia itself. 

3) My third recommendation, after the truly frightening ramifications of the first two, is somewhat lighter in tone. It's Carol Tavris' "You Can't Say That" in last month's Volume 26, Number 4 of The Skeptic. Those who follow me know I'm not an advocate of wokespeak, and Tavris does a fine job of pointing out the drawbacks of wokeness in writing. I've been a fan of Tavris for a long, long time. It's an entertaining read.

That's it for today. I'll be tackling more Covid-centric articles next month. Some even scarier studies have been published and, horror movie or not, we owe it to ourselves to take a look.

Bob Dietz

March 31, 2022

 

Will Smith: Racist!

 "You can take the boy out of The Badlands, but you can't take The Badlands out of the man."

I'm happy to welcome Academy Award winner Will Smith to my racist inner circle. Who knew Will Smith was racist? Certainly not me.

I was a fan of Smith back in his youth, when he was a rapper and television star. I am, however, no aficionado. Regarding his film career, I haven't been that thrilled. I've never read a Smith biography, and really, it's never been on my bucket list. People have told me that Smith was great in Ali, but I was a Muhammad Ali fan as a teen, and I'm hesitant to watch a film with an actor portraying him. Ali is the only athlete whose autograph I wanted. He did his banking in my little hometown, and we watched several of his training sessions about 15 miles down the road in Deer Lake. I have no compulsion to see Smith as Ali.

As I was saying, it's good to know that Will Smith is racist, just like me. I'll get to why in a minute. First, though, I want to mention that I knew nothing about what had occurred during the Oscar broadcast until I read a Stephen A. Smith tweet about the slap heard round the world. It's rare that I agree with the declarative hyperbole of Stephen A, but in this case, I think he pretty much nailed it. A black man can't do that shit to another black man live on national television. 

Will Smith's actions reinforce almost every American black male stereotype. Oversensitivity to "your mama" words, lack of behavioral discipline, toxic masculine fixation on being "disrespected," whatever that is. You can take the Negro out of The Badlands, basically, but you can't pry The Badlands out of the Negro, even when he's getting the greatest honor of his life. It's the entire panoply of black man stereotypes on display. Every white dude watching the slap clips is thinking, "So this is how these black guys kill each other all the time. At least he didn't have a gun." Really, speaking for all of us racist white folks, I can tell you that's what went through all of our minds (I'm telepathic like that).

Mitigating Joke?

I'm neither here nor there on the alleged cruelty of Chris Rock's "GI Jane 2" joke. Rock preceded it by saying, "Jada, I love you." Really, I'm not weeping over the horrors of another human being losing their hair due to a medical condition. Hundreds of thousands of people go bald due to chemo. I'm bald. I don't weep over that, either. Kojak, Michael Jordan, Sinead O'Connor, and Jason Statham are all more or less bald. There are more important things to weep about. 

Maybe it's a really sensitive subject in the Smith/Pinkett household. Point taken. I'll try to not spend much time, as Hunter S. Thompson famously wrote, admiring the shape of their skulls. 

Why is Will Smith Racist?

I think that he's racist (and welcome to my club) because his response was tailored to a black man saying something, rather than tailored to what was said. I'm concurring with Stephen A's initial tweet here.

If Ricky Gervais makes that joke, does Will Smith go on stage and slap him? It's possible, but I doubt it. If an older white Academy member is on stage and says the same thing, does Will Smith rush to the defense? I think not. 

I believe that Smith behaved like a classic Badlands bully. Black on black lights the emotional fuse, and because it's black on black, Smith allowed himself to respond with violence. What was worse, he went with a very, if you'll pardon the word, Blackish response. He bitch slapped Chris Rock. Now I don't claim to speak for all white dudes with short fuses, but in general we don't utilize the bitch slap against other men. We put up our dukes. Man-to-man white guy bitch slapping, and correct me if I'm wrong, is very, very rare. Bitch slapping is something one does to women (that's why it's called bitch slapping), children, and the help.

My point here is that Will Smith's haughtiness played into this. He decided that Chris Rock was "the help."

Luke Cage

It just so happened, with Disney making Netflix Marvel shows available with Disney+, that I'm in the middle of watching Season One of Luke Cage. Luke Cage was one of Marvel's first black heroes, and the show deals with his adventures in Harlem. Luke Cage is actually my favorite of the Marvel Netflix series. Something occurred to me as I watched the slapping clip. 

Will Smith has pretty much gone through life as the reality equivalent of Luke Cage. He's good-looking, a black man's hero, saying and doing the right things while staying authentic to his roots and without appearing overly spoiled, arrogant, or narcissistic. Will Smith, to take the Cage analogy further, has been bulletproof. That all changed last night.

The Cultural Argument

With Will Smith's son tweeting, "That's how we roll," I just shook my head at the juvenility of it all. The pushback against my head-shaking, I presume, will be that non-black folks have little to no right to judge the cultural mores of Badlands blacks thrust into a situation on an Academy Awards broadcast. It's an anthropological argument. Black males settle frictions in ways beyond the ken of alleged civilized white men, and they should be left alone to demonstrate their 2022 blackness. 

Well, I get the argument, and I don't necessarily disagree. I'm neutral on cultural arguments like these. So if Chris Rock's philanthropist ex, Malaak, would have had an issue with the bitch slap and walks up to Will Smith's table and puts a shiv in his eye, I maintain my neutrality. The Academy show would have better ratings in perpetuity, and Smith could finally replace Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.

Will Smith Questions

Well, of course we have the question of what would have happened if a white actor had bitch slapped a black comedian. Standing ovation five minutes later? Uhhh, where can I get a bet down on that?

Now, as to the haughtiness of the act. Will Smith employed a bitch slap as it was a safe thing to do given Chris Rock's size and Will Smith's status. Picture, if you will, instead of Chris Rock delivering the GI Jane line, The Rock delivering it. Think Will Smith would have, in the heat of the moment, walked onto the stage and bitch slapped Dwayne Johnson?  

Am I calling Will Smith a bully or a coward? No, not at all. I'm just suggesting that he employed selective bravery.

Conclusion

Will Smith bitch slapped a comedian, is announced as a winner, then tears up and blathers about God, love, and family. And gets a standing ovation for it. You gotta love America. Last night checked all the boxes.

Arrogance. Check. Unnecessary violence. Check. Appeals to God and family as reasons for the violence. Check. Standing ovation for the appeals to God and family regarding the violence. Check. Just another night of family entertainment. 

Decadent spoiled behavior. Decadent spoiled responses to the spoiled behavior. And a display of racism from the most celebrated actor in the country.

Bob Dietz

March 28, 2022

Propaganda Files: The Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Monongahela

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four

                                                                                                      

                                                                                                              

Back when Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, and Howard Cosell brought football to America each Monday night, Steeler home games were the source of a particular phrase from the broadcast booth. Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium, Cosell would intone, stood at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. 

Cosell always told it like it was, league preferences be damned, while rarely adhering to the broadcast mores requiring a sixth-grade-or-less vocabulary. 

Today, I'm witness to another confluence, this one devoted to NOT telling it like it is. This past week, three narrative threads have come together in an unlikely confluence, a mixing and broadening of simultaneous propaganda unlike any that I've experienced in my American life.

The Rivers 

In one week, the mainstream media has managed to publicize and therefore promote the usual "Ivermectin Bad" academic papers while ignoring any "Ivermectin Good" studies. The Wall Street Journal even ran a feature on a Canadian paper that has yet to be published. The study, of course, has a negative Ivermectin thrust. I've been steadfastly neutral on Ivermectin, but I recognize media bias when I see it, especially bias this blatant. Meanwhile, any "vaccine caveat" studies fail to see the mainstream news cycle light of day. And massive problems with the VAERS system are never broached, much less discussed. One-way propaganda spin has never been more obvious because cracks in vaccine efficacy and safety have now been uncovered by researchers but under-covered by the media. 

The second propaganda river is obliquely related to Covid-19 reporting. This is the sudden publicizing of U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine, allegedly 26 in all, containing dangerous weaponizable (if not already weaponized) pathogens. One day we all woke to find out that the United States has been funding biolabs near the Russian border since 2005, ostensibly to make safe former Soviet pathogen labs. Seventeen years later, the U.S. is still at it. I discussed this topic earlier this month in both "Rubio and Nuland" entries.

Third, we have confirmation that the Hunter Biden laptop and emails were real. Not being a fan of either Trump or Joe Biden, I hadn't paid much attention to this back in 2020. My only interest now is that the story was labeled as disinformation two years ago, so it's another example of a single-minded mainstream media engaging in a muscular kind of censorship, in this case immediately before an American election.

One River to Rule Them All

Those three rivers in Pittsburgh don't just meet, they mix, and the Allegheny and Monongahela actually become the Ohio. So it is with these three evidences of propaganda. They're not really separate issues with individual provenances. They're all roiling together in media space, with propaganda canals in place so info doesn't overflow into broader public view at undesirable times. 

With these three topics juxtaposed right now, they provide truly damning evidence of the institutional frameworks in place to manipulate, direct, and limit public attention. American tax dollars have helped make possible this house of mirrors. And it doesn't appear to have an exit.

"One river to rule them all,

One river to find them.

One river to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."

Bob Dietz

March 26, 2022

A Tale of Four Studies

I promised to report back regarding media coverage of several Covid-19 related stories. I'll lay this out short and sweet.

Anyone can do the same quick media survey I just did today. It will take 20 minutes, and it's well worth the 20 minutes because it demonstrates some very odd elements of current American media coverage. You may as well research the lessons yourself; the lessons are likely to stay with you longer than if you just read my blather. 

The Studies

1) The first study is a January 25 JAMA publication that indicates myocarditis rates in recently vaccinated young males are more than a hundred times the normal rate. Given that the study uses American VAERS data, which seems more-than-prone to underreporting, it is a vaccine-caveat kind of result. Matthew Oster, Davis Shay, and John Su are the primary authors.

2) The second study was published February 18 in JAMA. The authors are Steven Chee Loon Lin, Chee Peng, Kim Hey Tay, et al. The study found no differences in disease progression between control groups and groups receiving five-day Ivermectin treatment. I discuss the study in a little more depth in my February 28 "A Tale of Two Studies." The study, conducted in Malaysia, calls into question Ivermectin effectiveness.

3) The third study comes from Brazil. Lucy Kerr is the lead author. It's a clinician-driven study, with those kinds of built-in drawbacks, but it indicates that Ivermectin has prophylactic value for preventing severe disease and death.

4) The fourth study has, interestingly, not yet been published but has found its way into mainstream reportage. McMaster University in Ontario reported that patients at risk for severe disease derived no benefit from three days of Ivermectin administered after they had sought treatment. 

Media Survey

We therefore had three Ivermectin-related studies, two showing no benefits and one showing benefits. Plus we had one study demonstrating vaccine dangers. So how did media searches highlight these studies, if at all? 

1) A CNN search yielded no report on the myocarditis study. It did, however, pop a February 18 piece immediately after the Malaysian negative Ivermectin study was published. And no mention of the positive Ivermectin study.

2) MSNBC searches revealed no report on the myocarditis study. There was a feature on the negative published Ivermectin study. And no mention of the positive Ivermectin study. The results were therefore identical to CNN.

3) Plugging into searches of The New York Times yielded no mention of the myocarditis study, no mention of the positive Ivermectin study, but a piece regarding the negative published Ivermectin study. The only myocarditis results are from 2021 and 2020 articles. 

4) A survey of USA Today showed no mention of the myocarditis study, no mention of the positive Ivermectin study, and no specific mention of the negative Ivermectin study. There was, however, a February 2 piece examining why doctors continue to prescribe Ivermectin.

5) Curiously, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature on the McMaster Ivermectin study before the study was published. A search for myocarditis yielded years-old articles, similar to The New York Times  results.

Conclusion

For a decade, I had rolled my eyes at the labels "mainstream media" or "corporate media." CNN, MSNBC, the NYTimes, the Washington Post -- I mean, c'mon, there's no grand interlocking editorial board, right? Right? Bottom line:  my days as a journalism major may have buffered my cynicism and made me late to the conspiratorial party. These patterns of media presentation cannot simply be accidental. In some ways, I've been an idiot.

My first tip-off that something really, really wasn't right was an August 24, 2021 CNN television piece about Ivermectin. It broke every Journalism 101 rule and damned near every rule of logical argument. It was a mess. I watched it in wonderment. How had such a thing made it onto the air at an alleged science-based network? I'm neither here nor there on Ivermectin, but this piece, a lengthy televised spectacle, was a complete and biased wreck. 

I grew up, as I say, with Walter Cronkite. Unfortunately, the journalism I knew is dead, and Lazarus it ain't.

Bob Dietz

March25, 2022

First Round Hoops

Since two teams with no business in the tournament are currently in progress, I decided to check in with some further hoops thoughts. 

Iowa State, an 11 seed which was outscored 200-145 its last three games, leads coach-less LSU 24-19 at the half. Pat Forde's March 12 Sports Illustrated piece on former coach Will "the Bagman" Wade and the mess that is LSU deserves a read, so give it a look. It took the NCAA three years to actually have anything to say about the ubiquitous LSU paying of recruits and family members. LSU, in the meantime, paid Wade millions of dollars to keep the slimeball gravy train going until the hammer fell. 

Houston

I mentioned in previous entries that the 28-5 Houston Cougars, with three losses by a total of five points, were hosed in the seedings. The committee assigned them a five seed while two of the more respected power ratings, the BPI and Pomeroy, had Houston as the second and fifth best team respectively. 

Not only did Houston get a bad seeding, they were also placed in a bracket featuring a "Tarkanian gauntlet," so named for how the NCAA routinely tried to mine UNLV's path in the tournament. Houston's bracket features the second, third, fifth, and 15th best teams, according to the BPI. Houston was therefore screwed multiple ways.

Oddsmakers versus Committee

And finally, two games in the first round featured a disagreement between the committee and Las Vegas sports books. Las Vegas made two lower seeds, Michigan and Memphis, favored. The oddsmakers were correct in both cases, and the committee was wrong. That's usually the way these disparities play out.

Bob Dietz

March 18, 2022