The Mystery of Governor Kemp

Inspector Gregory:  "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes:  "To the curious incident of what the Georgia governor had known."

Gregory:  "The governor of Georgia said he'd known nothing."

Holmes:  "That is the curious incident."


Just when I thought a day of COVID-19 might go by without anyone saying anything abominably stupid, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia decided to finally enact a stay-at-home order because in the last 24 hours, he said, he had learned of the virus' asymptomatic transmission, which he labeled a "game changer."

In my March 14 opening entry regarding coronavirus, I mentioned that asymptomatic transmission was finally being given its due in terms of causing a big chunk of transmissions. The only way to explain transmission rates in Italy and Iran seemed either asymptomatic transmission or that the virus was airborne. So what is one to make of today's proclamation by Gov. Kemp that he had just learned about asymptomatic transmission?

I considered some theories as to why the governor might not know this. Theory number one was that he had just awakened from a two-week oxycodone bender. Theory number two was that he had been busy fighting Thanos in an alternate timeline.

I just do not get it. Was he somehow the last name on President Trump's rolodex, and nobody gave him the "Ummm, you should probably shut it down, dude," until today? Was he waiting for the NRA to give him the okay? I mean, what the hell? Did no one around Gov. Kemp tell him how tone deaf and uninformed he sounded?

Watching the governor's press conference explaining the stay-at-home, I have to assume he's either lying through his teeth or stunningly incompetent. Asymptomatic transmission has been in the news, a lot, for three full weeks. Has Gov. Kemp not engaged medical experts in conversation the entire time?

I am just amazed at the buffoonery of our elected officials. I grew up in the era of moon launches and respect for science. That America appears long gone.

What must the rest of the world think?


April 2, 2020
Bob Dietz

The Man Who Wouldn't Cry Wolf

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


I'm a layman. I handicap sporting events for a living. As far as superpowers go, I have the ability to read. That's about it. So I have to ask myself, how could I nail the COVID-19 timeline and projections so closely while the President of the United States of America could be so wrong? How is that even possible?


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

I had one last flight to take in February, and I had read the reports coming from China. I wore disposable gloves, but as I made my way through both the Las Vegas and Charlotte airports, I realized how indefensible air travel was from the virus. It was literally impossible to feel safe. Every inch of surface and every cubic foot of air were potential infection sources crisscrossed by hundreds of people. Going through security, my bag and personal effects shared contact surfaces with every other person who chose that conveyor belt or plastic tray. This didn't even address the issue of being in the planes themselves.

Back at home on February 29, I read the international news. Even as a layman, when I saw the stunning infection explosions in Iran and Italy, I figured one of two things. Either the virus was airborne or asymptomatic transmission was happening a lot. If the latter, this meant that the fever screenings at airports, casinos, and banks was really all for naught.

My girlfriend and I knew what was coming, so we shut down our social lives, stockpiled what we needed, and began isolating mail and deliveries in the garage where they could be cleaned. We figured this stuff out for ourselves, days before it became nationwide protocol. Someone was wrong, either us or the president. We hoped it was us, but we didn't think so.

And now it's here, and I ask again, how could a layman be a month ahead of a president? How could that possibly ever happen? Frankly, I don't believe that it can. I think this was a case of people who knew keeping that reality from the American people for as long as they could. Now that reality has arrived.

Just because the man wouldn't cry wolf, however, should not have kept his followers from using their eyes. An NPR poll conducted March 14 and 15 yielded 40% of Republicans grading the virus as a serious threat and 54% saying the public was overreacting. Among Democrats,76% of those polled reported the virus as a serious threat.

The follow-up questions are fascinating and will be examined for generations to come. Evidence was in full view for anyone who could read, so who will Republicans blame for their faulty judgements? Fox News embarrassed itself for a month, to what end? And how does a president deal with his own words on camera repeatedly making light of the most devastating human event of this century? How does he maintain any credibility whatsoever?

For me personally, I've been amazed at the ability of people to actively ignore information bearing down on them like an avalanche. Are Americans so easily duped, or as Jack Nicholson's Colonel Nathan Jessup says, are they not able to handle the truth?

Over the last 40 years, one credo has served me particularly well in the world of gambling. I try to not believe anything I prefer to believe. Keeps me cynical. Keeps me self aware. Keeps me safe.


April 1, 2020
Bob Dietz

Sixty Days of Addiction

I'd seen it all before, of course -- presidents of companies, CFOs and other captains of industry, legislative leaders, world class athletes considered the best of the best. All show up in Las Vegas with plans, with systems, with great concentration, energy, and indomitable will. They come to conquer the games, to feed at the great cash trough in plain view, and to collect the respect and acknowledgement of further greatness that comes with that conquest.

They play negative EV games, using all of the skills and abilities that have made them the very definition of American success. They play negative EV games, the science of which has been crystalline and solved for decades. They challenge the math. And they lose.

The more they play, the more they lose. Panache doesn't help. Channeling James Bond doesn't work. Thoughts and prayers have no effect. The more they try, the more they lose. At home, they start with the small lies to friends and family. Lies they themselves almost believe because their checkbooks are barely dented, or they have separate secret stashes of funds. They tell lies about breaking even or losing just a little or bigger lies about winning this or that. In their minds, they compartmentalize the  results of one session from another, convincing themselves that maybe they aren't really lying.

The days pass. The math looms, intractable. Implacable. The science and the math and the models of risk of ruin sit there, facing them each time they play.  The will, the influence, the charm and experience that led these people to all of their worldly successes can't budge the math or the science or the charts. The reality of the situation cannot be seduced by their skills or reputations.

So these people lose more. Since they cannot affect the games, they turn their will and influence and seduction to the people at home. They hide the reality. They borrow, they lie, and still they play. They need to be a winner, but their financial straits start to slowly leak, oozing into view for those closest to them. The friends who notice are dismissed. The players take up with hosts who tell them what they want to hear. They surround themselves with enablers, who augment their lies.

And then, one day, the checkbook reads zero, and all that could be borrowed has been borrowed. The president of the company, the world famous athlete, their behaviors are laid bare by the stark reality of their gutted finances. By now, their families know that they have lied  and that they've been lying for a long time. So the business elite and former mega-rich athletes step to the public podium at long last and admit what they have done.

The math was always there to be seen, the statistical models of risk of ruin clearly laid out. But for whatever reasons, no matter the cost to themselves or others, they had wanted to play the game. The game of perceiving themselves as expert, as winners, as above the mere models of mortal man. As beyond the science of probability.

Addiction to hubris, to accolades, is a terrible thing. In gambling, it doesn't matter if your name is Barkley or Milch or Tose or Mickelson or Jordan or Bennett. The numbers do not care. If you play negative EV games, you lose. When science and math are ignored, when risk of ruin models take a back seat to hunches and "knowing a lot," that ignorance doesn't change the science, the math, or the models, and it doesn't detour the oncoming freight train known as reality.

For the last 60 days, the addictions of an American president have been on display. On Sunday, March 29, he was finally forced to come clean, admitting that his two-month take on reality had been seriously flawed. Hopeful adjectives finally stepped aside for the math and the models. Because some of us lost 60 days of preparation, the cost of this American president's addictions to hubris, self revelation, and applause will be enormously high.

He should have known his day of public reckoning would come. After all, he once owned casinos.


March 31, 2020
Bob Dietz

American Business Resurrection

"And again, I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."   Matthew 19:24



For a week now, President Trump has been pushing for a loosening of social restrictions and a firing up of American business. His stated target date?  He wants America "opened up and just raring to go by Easter," as he said Tuesday on Fox. The implication is that lives lost by reducing social restrictions are worth the potential short-term economic gains.

This Easter target date, two weeks from now, has led to some support from far right American conservatives, but also considerable pushback from virtually every medical expert. The Easter deadline has not generated any kind of widespread public support. Media pieces regarding the "cost of a life" made the rounds earlier this week, but the general public has not jumped on board, despite Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick announcing that he was ready to risk survival.

Choosing Easter as a target was a fascinating choice that could be interpreted as shockingly irreverent, deeply symbolic, or both. Americans across the country assembling in pews for Easter? Maybe it allowed people watching Fox to visualize a nationwide feel good moment. I have yet to see or read, however, an epidemiologist saying that it's a good idea. Some writers may have served as minesweepers for the administration on this "cost of a life" topic. They seeded the media with language and analyses that ran the risk of being deemed both unseemly and un-Christian if pushed directly by the administration. If these media pieces had gotten footholds and generated positive responses, then the administration could push them further into the public sphere. Fortunately, Americans do not seem to have given a thumbs up to the "lives for business" credo.

The United States is roughly two-thirds Christian, with two-thirds of these Protestant. Americans, regardless of their Whore of Babylon leadership (and is anything more whorish than trading lives for an economy "raring to go by Easter?"), are evidently not as addicted to their consumerism as some had hoped. Thankfully, they seem to have asked themselves what the Nazarene would do.

These days are historic, and many a 22nd century dissertation will be written regarding the plunders and blunders, the tactical feints and commitments, of the Trump administration. I suspect that the rhetoric of the past week will provide especially fertile fodder.

"Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."  Luke 18:25


March 28, 2020
Bob Dietz

Approval Numbers: Psych 101

As the number of confirmed U.S. COVID-19 cases approaches 100,000 this evening, some have questioned why President Trump's approval rating has matched its all-time high. As the U.S. takes over the world's number one spot for confirmed cases, why does 60% of he public think he is doing a good job with COVID-19?

I'm not surprised in the least. This is exactly what I would have expected. It's basic Psych 101.

To get a high approval rating during this crisis, I expect a person to:

1) Tell people what they want to hear.
2) Express as optimistic a view as possible.
3) Create a sense of faux control by assigning timelines and specific dates to future results, even if it's just blowing smoke.

To get a low approval rating, I'd expect a person to:

1) Tell people what they do not want to hear.
2) Express a less than optimistic assessment.
3) Talk about the uncertainty and lack of control inherent in the situation.

Approval ratings aren't rocket science.

If the assigned dates and timelines become exposed as fallacious, one simply finds scapegoats on which to blame the results. When prophecies fail (to paraphrase the title of the Leon Festinger classic), those who believed rarely reject the prophet. They usually double down in their beliefs and buy into the next set of predictions and timelines. And this can occur again and again and again.

When COVID-19 swamps the 50% of America that thus far has been relatively unaffected and deaths hit five figures, perhaps attitudes and approval ratings may change. Even then, however, we will be told what we prefer to hear, and we will be fed timelines to salve our uncertainty.


March 26, 2020
Bob Dietz

The Trump-er Games

Sending young people back to work to restart the economy. Allowing their immune systems to duke it out on the low-income service economy front lines. Knowing with crystalline certainty that many will get ill and some will die, but sacrificing a few in service of the one-percenters to preserve the status quo. Sounds a lot like the Hunger Games to me.

Since that title is already taken, may I suggest The Trump-er Games? Scheduled to kick off on Easter, of course, so we can all better appreciate the grandiosity of an American business resurrection.

P.S. If anyone asks, the "er" was added for phonetic similarity to the original, and because the emergency room is likely to figure prominently in the story.


March 25, 2020
Bob Dietz

COVID-19: Individual Exceptionalism

Governor Cuomo of New York appalled by groups of New Yorkers socializing in public after the lockdown order. Florida beaches full of spring breakers who inter-infect themselves, then quickly retreat to colleges everywhere in the country, spreading disease like terrorists. Red Rock Canyon, just outside of Las Vegas, closing not because of the shutdown but because the park has reached capacity. In Washington, D.C., a few yards from where federal emergency guidelines are being put in place, hundreds gather to see the cherry blossoms.

Finally, here is something in my professional gambling wheelhouse, something with which I have decades of familiarity. That something is the inability of most Americans to grasp or internalize or accept that probability applies to the self. I'm not talking about being able to do the math or understand the concepts of probability. I'm talking about the acceptance that not only are the numbers correct, but that what happened elsewhere can, if variables are similar, happen here in the country of the self. That it can happen in the town of the self. That it can indeed happen to the self. I'm talking about the basic inability of many Americans to subordinate themselves so as to view their actions and the consequences of those actions as being not special, not unique, not outside the probability purview in which "the others" function.

Probability can't be seen directly or touched or smelled. It is removed from our senses, yet all around us. The Greek aether was considered an unseen mechanism through which cause-and-effect manifested itself. Probability is our modern-day aether. Probability surrounds us, unseen and everywhere. We rejected the aether a long time ago. We tend to abide by probability unless we are asked to accept that it applies uniformly to us as well as others.

Gamblers can explain to exhaustion that this game has a particular house edge and that game even worse. We can nod our heads, yes, one need win just 52.4% of sports bets to profit, but maybe one person in a thousand pulls that off. And yet people still believe that they are either, without evidence, that one-in-a-thousand or that they are entirely exempt from the odds. It isn't as if these folks, when asked, state that they are exempt. They acknowledge they are not, then they go and behave as if they are. Whether that's due more to lack of impulse control or psychological compartmentalization or schizophrenic thinking, I have no idea. However the strategy through which they manage  to do it, they don't behave as if they are part of the probability panorama in which they perceive everyone else. And the bottom line is that they lose.


Individual Exceptionalism

I want to mention a few examples of individual exceptionalism from the psychological literature. First of all, Americans tend to radically overrate themselves regarding their abilities and competence. When polled as to where they rate themselves on intelligence, looks, or sexual skill, most people place themselves in the top fifth. Second, when put in situations over which they have no actual control or effect, people perceive that they have significant control. These are bad behavioral habits with which to deal with a pandemic. People overestimate their personal hardiness and their ability to influence events around them.

American consumer culture doesn't really help matters, either. As a number of economists have noted this past week, an economy that relies primarily on fulfilling wants rather than needs is going to suffer greatly in a war-time type of environment. Furthermore, a populace exposed to hundreds of want-based ads every day is going to have a very difficult time behaviorally shutting down their wants cold turkey. Instead of doing the smart individual and communal thing, people will squeeze every bit of irresponsible consumer "freedom" out of the situation until they are legally constrained from doing so.

Behavioral discipline 24/7 is absolutely essential for a professional gambler. If odds are +EV, you play. If odds switch to -EV, you stop. Not next month or next week. You stop now, this moment. It doesn't matter if you've been playing the same game every day for 20 years. It doesn't matter if it's the only game in town. You trust the math, and you come to a cold turkey, dead-on stop.  And that is what is required right now in the United States. Come to a physical social stop, preferably yesterday. Lives are at stake. It doesn't matter what you've done for 20 years. As Professor Robert Sapolsky said in "Our brains on coronavirus," people under duress retreat even further to routinized behaviors. If these routinized behaviors involve being physically social, you must shut them down. Fight against your own impulse to seek stress relief through routines that defeat our common purpose.

And there's a phrase, "common purpose," that in recent time has usually gotten one labeled as a lefty, a radical, or a libtard. Today, unfortunately, the connotations attached to the phrase create psychological friction that further impedes our proper course of action.


The Problem with Culture

We face a common purpose. At least some of us do. A handful of white nationalist groups have already decided that spreading COVID-19 is a serendipitous way of achieving their goals. It's also possible, I suppose, that American youth now wield a potent Freudian weapon against their elders. Let's assume, however, that most Americans agree with our "common purpose" of flattening the curve and saving lives. Why are they ignoring the probabilistic consequences of social gatherings in New York's parks or Red Rock Canyon? Why don't they get it?

Well, to state the obvious, if American culture wanted people to think probability applied to them, then people would think just that. My rather cynical take is that individual exceptionalism is largely taught by the cultural milieu. People in American culture are not encouraged to examine probability, but rather the possibility or the opportunity. American culture papers over the fact that probability, possibility, and opportunity are very different terms. Instead, these words, and therefore the concepts, get jumbled together as equivalents. When Jim Carrey's Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber asks about his chances with a woman and is told, "More like one in a million," he responds with "So you're telling me there's a chance! Yeah!!" American culture, in a sense, teaches us that same kind of optimistic response when we are faced with situations involving self.

We are all saturated with the idea that probability can be circumvented when it comes to us, that we as individuals somehow operate outside the probabilistic realm. If subordinating our behaviors in service of probabilistic outcomes was something the culture wanted us to do, then we'd be taught to do it. If we were supposed to know national vertical mobility rates and variables correlating to income, they would be taught in junior high. They're not. The United States is not really interested in a citizenry of probability savants. I think that this almost purposeful disconnect from probability has recently gotten worse. As income inequality in the United States has increased, the conflation of probability/possibility/opportunity has increased.

So when spring breakers shrug off probabilistic life-and-death consequences of their behavior, it shouldn't surprise us. They have not been trained to accept probabilistic outcomes as applying to themselves. They have been trained to think of themselves as individually exceptional. Unfortunately, COVID-19 disease models are accurate. Probabilistically irresponsible behaviors will have real world consequences. Unless we accept that our behavior has consequences as predicted, unless we subordinate those behaviors to the common good, additional tens of thousands will die.

March 23, 2020
Bob Dietz