Articles of Note -- October 29

Here's a quick survey for some pre-election reading. These four pieces provide a range of thought-provoking subject matter. 

My first two recommendations discuss perspectives on living in America during the Trump years. Mira Kamdar's "Why I'm Glad I Left America" was featured October 14 in The Atlantic. "This Election is Going to Reveal Who America Really Is" by Umair Haque features a different kind of international vantage point. Haque's rundown of various views of America and Americans can be found in Eudaemonia on Medium.com.

For those who wonder just how many more have died in 2020 compared to normal recent years, regardless of "official" Covid-19 numbers, I recommend "US sees 20% more deaths than expected this year" by Naomi Thomas and Lauren Mascarenhas, featured October 12 on CNN.com. This column debunks much of the "overcount" nonsense promulgated by tweets from Sarah Sanders and others.

Finally, I want to point out a Washington Post piece, "New research explores authoritarian mindset of Trump's core supporters." The author is Christopher Ingraham, and it was published October 12. Those who most fear authoritarianism are often quite devoted to it. This column discusses the why.

For people who want to experience a full continuum of tones and approaches to the undemocratic mess that is the 2020 U.S. election, I give a shout out to two different shows available on YouTube. Both the David Pakman show and Keith Olbermann's are enormously entertaining with wildly different presentations. I recommend both, as it's hard to predict which contributes more to one's sanity in these trying anti-science times. 

Bob Dietz

October 29, 2020

The Price of the Power of Positive Thinking

The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale (1930-1993) influenced President Trump greatly during the president's youth. The president's family attended a church helmed by Peale. Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking espoused a worldview exercised by the president's father, Fred. Peale's Trump family spiritual advisor status has led to serious consequences in 2020.

Always identifying benefits but never acknowledging costs may work as long as one is a mega-millionaire and dad's money can cure all errors in judgement. Even then, however, problems can arise. Bankruptcies, for example, might be expected with so much focus on upsides rather than downsides. Then friction and lawsuits as sales pitches to others edit out all vestiges of the negative. Reality-based projections get buried under a veneer of positivity. Personal relationships get screened according to who provides the biggest doses of positivity and sycophantism. All interactions become components of an ego-boosting echo chamber.

In many of my hundred blog entries since the start of the pandemic, I've said that the inability to handle cognitive dissonance has been a severe problem for both the president and his supporters. Their refusal to actively recognize disconfirmation of their beliefs or to seek out such disconfirmation has brought us to our current widespread cultural irrationality. Millions of Americans accept irrationality in themselves and others as preferable to a change in attitudes or beliefs. Vice President Mike Pence, head of the Coronavirus Task Force, refuses to follow his task force's quarantining recommendations. President Trump holds large, mostly maskless rallies, risking the creation of more super spreader events. As logical reasons to support the GOP's Covid-19 response erode away, millions of Trump supporters retreat to conspiratorial nonsense so as to preserve their irrational world views.

Journalists as Enemies

Trump not only expects those in his orbit to adhere to his constant positivity requirements, he expects the world in general to do the same. Those who do not subscribe to his unyielding blind positivity are labeled as "losers." Journalists' need for objective facts puts them directly in opposition to Trump's priorities and view of the world. Trump and journalists are, in fact, obvious and natural enemies.

President Trump's inability to tolerate criticism was no historical secret. In a 1990 CNN interview featuring Trump being asked about the tortured state of his casino finances, the president-to-be said, "The news media gets away with murder." 

The reporter, Charles Feldman, asked, "What was inaccurate so far?"

Trump responded, "I thought your demeanor was inaccurate. I thought that questions you were posing to people in my organization were inaccurate and false and unfair." 

To which Feldman of course replied, "Questions by definition can't be inaccurate."

Fast forward 30 years. We had the semi-famous truncated 60 Minutes interview with, or versus, Lesley Stahl. And yesterday Trump said that reporting on the pandemic should be an "election law violation" because it's anti-Trump. 

Despite being a Trump fan in 1990, I recognized patently ludicrous stuff when I heard it. Ludicrous and outrageous was his stock in trade. Unfortunately, he's still ludicrous while holding the office of president in 2020. This expectation that everyone should share Trump's positivity regarding himself and his ideas has been a staple of Trump's personal mythos for 50 years.

The Kushner Reveal

This "power of positive thinking," which is not much more than simple magical thinking, appears to be highly contagious. Yesterday, Jared Kushner said, "One thing we've seen in a lot of the black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump's policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they're complaining about. But he can't want them to be more successful than they want to be successful." That's quite a reveal of the Jared Kushner philosophical mindset.

Wanting to be successful, evidently, is supposed to make it so. If only we lived in such a magical world. A world where anyone who infringes on our positivity could be described as an enemy. A world where our friends label our enemies as cannibalistic pedophiles because, well, they are the worst kind. The positive folks on one side; sheer raw evil on the other. And if you've failed, it's probably because you didn't want to be successful enough.

Positivity, alas, is no substitute for policy. In the middle of a historic pandemic, magical thinking sans science kills. Against Covid-19, the power of positive thinking has not and will save the day.

Bob Dietz

October 27, 2020

Tales from The Asylum -- October 24

Here in The Asylum, we know something about "Rounding the Corner." The psychiatrists continually tell us that we're rounding the corner to sanity. What they don't tell us is that sanity requires recognizing and experiencing pain. So we invented a game to remind us. It's a boatload of fun. You get a group of people, choose a rectangular building, and run as fast as you can around it. Hidden from view, around one of the corners, you've had somebody prop a shovel against the wall. Whoever is leading when they round that corner grabs the shovel and takes a healthy swing at the second place person rounding the corner. After you've whacked him or her, you yell "It," drop the shovel at their feet, and re-assume the lead and keep running. The person who got whacked, if they are alive, takes the shovel and whacks the next person rounding the corner, who then becomes "It" (note the Stephen King reference). The eventual loser is whoever, after being whacked, suffers such egregious injury that he or she is unable to hold the shovel and damage the next person. We call our game "Rounding the Corner." So much fun at so little cost. 

This week in The Asylum, things have gotten even more grotesque than usual. Since the U.S. yesterday set daily Covid-19 case records, we can expect hospitalizations and deaths to hit the gas pedal. So of course the U.S. is going to follow the Coronavirus Task Force recommendations as laid out by Mike Pence in my June 27 "Task Force Review." We're going to pray, and pray, and pray, and pray some more. Evangelical "worship leader," former California Republican Representative candidate, and Fox News regular Sean Feucht has somehow wrangled the National Park Service into allowing he and an estimated 15,000 like minded souls to pray maskless at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. this Sunday. While fish and loaves are reportedly not on the menu, covid-spewing hallelujahs should be plentiful. The event has real potential for going viral, if you get my drift.

If praying is not your cup of tea, have no fear. Many pseudo-secular events are on the U.S. special events calendar. Super spreader rallies have been scheduled across the entirety of The Asylum. While the secular-ness of these rallies may be debatable, they will all feature plenty of opportunities to play "Rounding the Corner." The fun never ends, as they say, unless it ends for you.

The rest of the civilized world may look askance at our American pandemic response, but that's because they haven't played "Rounding the Corner" as we have. And if those travel bans on Americans stay in place, how are we going to export our game of games? The foreigners will never learn. Those travel bans on Americans, by the way, don't get mentioned much in polite company these days. I'm sure other governments are intensely ashamed of not allowing our stable genius-ness to cavort on foreign soil.

Meanwhile, the liberal media was caught completely misreporting what the president did during one of his initial high security briefings at Mar-a-Lago. Various left wing outlets have said that the president called a waiter into the secure meeting room so he could order a milkshake. The agenda-driven media has it all utterly wrong. President Trump ordered a malt, not a shake, and malts are totally different. As a fervent malt fan, I can vouch for the dramatic difference.

Speaking of malts, which are somewhat rare these days, I wish to explain that the president's recently uncovered Chinese bank account was simply a means to finance malt shops when he visits China. One cannot overestimate the importance of malt availability in international environs. Current American travel statuses, however, do pose an indelicate question. If Americans are banned from almost every country, will China allow President Trump to visit even if he offers to buy everyone a malt?

I'm thinking of subletting my wonderful room in The Asylum, since demand for my room should be overwhelming in another 10 days or so. A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll last week revealed that fully half of Trump supporters believe that Democrats are running an elite international pedophile ring. I'm assuming once sanity takes over government, my room here will be in high demand. It's likely that this will be a very popular destination for the folks who are hunting pedophiles for the president, once they are rounded up. They belong behind these four walls. And there are quite a few million of them. Best time to sublet, wouldn't you say?

As I type this, the significance of the malt topic has finally dawned on me. When it comes to keeping children safe, malts are a useful way to lure youngsters from Democrat pedophile clutches. Sometimes the president is three genius steps ahead of everyone else. 

Well, they're calling me to recess, so it's time for another session of "Rounding the Corner." I hope we use a snow shovel this time; the game tends to last longer. All you really need to thoroughly enjoy the game is blind faith, a shovel, and a willingness to talk others into doing things that cause them harm. No shortage of any of these in The Asylum called America.

Bob Dietz

October 25, 2020

 

Addiction Prediction

I've made some very accurate predictions during this pandemic, most of which resulted from simply paying attention to scientists. One of these days I'll do a summary. Today, however, I'm going to make a real long shot, out in left field, bizarro prediction. Despite the craziness of it, I think that there's a very good chance that I'll turn out to be correct.

Here's the unvarnished prediction:  I think that after President Trump loses the election November 3, he'll attempt to hold more rallies between then and the transfer of power. To what degree the GOP tries to dissuade him from doing so will be the big question.

Of course, it serves no productive purpose for the president, after losing, to schedule rallies. It makes zero sense. I think he's going to try primarily because he's addicted to them. After the general electorate rejects him, his inability to face the reality music will compel him to get more tastes of echo chamber public adulation. His entire life has been a climb into the insular narcissistic cockpit he now occupies. He won't be able to spend even two months cold turkey out of the rally environments. 

Part of it will be sheer addiction to in-person adulation. Part will be the cognitive dissonance. He won't be able to process his rejection and the perception that he failed. He will desperately seek counter evidence to sustain his self esteem. And part of it may an exercise in spite, to damage the country as a parting gesture, but under the aegis of challenging the fairness of the election. More rallies will ensue, either under the guise of publicizing the election rigged-ness or as potential fundraisers for a nascent third party that he'd like to helm. The interaction between a lame duck president and a GOP trying to clean up the mess should be fascinating.

The president is addicted to the cheers, the spotlight, and the adulation. He's going to do all he can to prolong the love and attention. Things may get ugly and even more unreal. This president as an out-of-control lame duck during literally the worst months of a once-a-century pandemic is a bad conjunction of events. Historically, lethally bad.

Bob Dietz

October 21, 2020

Every Lie Has a How and a Why

Last week, President Trump said at both a rally and during an interview that 85% of people wearing masks get Covid-19. The CDC study in question said no such thing. What it found was that among people who were tested because they were experiencing symptoms, self-report of mask wearing "often or always" was not a predictor of whether they would indeed be negative or positive. Various summaries of the study can be found at CNN and other national news sites, so I won't address the details here. The summaries are quite clear and include interviews with the doctors who wrote the paper.

At the rally, Trump said, "Did you see the CDC? That 85% of the people wearing a mask catch it, okay?" This was a gross and false misrepresentation of the study, but because it was Trump, the lie didn't even make me blink. He was obviously spouting nonsense. What gave me pause was thinking about how the lie originated. What were the processes and mechanisms by which this lie was told to millions during the NBC town hall after the president had tried it out on a rally audience? I decided to sit down and calmly create an outline for how these words made it on air.

The Provenance of a Lie

My first question is, "How did the president become aware of this study?" I doubt that this study was part of any daily security briefing. I doubt that the president was talking to some CDC administrators who mentioned it. I find it highly unlikely that he read the original journal article. It's not likely that anyone on the task force, who presumably would understand the study, would point it out as supportive of no-mask arguments, unless of course Dr. Scott Atlas had an eye out for such things. Who else in Trump's inner circle would be surveying current studies in search of some idiosyncratic line or two that could be torturously misinterpreted and twisted as a kind of lame evidence for not wearing masks?

The study came from the Health Data Services Center at Vanderbilt. How was the president alerted to the study? Who pointed it out to him? My speculative guesses are that it might have been Dr. Atlas or one of the researchers at Fox News. 

The next questions regarding the processing of the lie are more interesting. Once the study was mentioned to him, did President Trump read it? I find that highly unlikely. Did he read the abstract or a summary of the study, or at least read its conclusion? If he had read any of these, then presumably he would have understood that the study was not about "85% of people who wear masks get Covid-19." Now I suppose it is possible that the president could have read the abstract or conclusion and not at all understood them, but this seems farfetched. And if he didn't understand them, why would he use the line? So I am going with the theory that in all likelihood President Trump did not read the study, or the abstract, or conclusion, or a summary of the study.

The most likely sequence of events is that the president was told of the study, did not read it in part or whole, and then did not think it prudent to ask anyone about it, including task force members who would, presumably again, set him straight regarding the gist of the study.

The plot thus far:  Someone tells President Trump about the study, then invents and emphasizes the odd incorrect line Trump eventually uses in a rally and during a televised interview. The president takes the person's word for the accuracy of the lie, does not vet the information with anyone else who would be able to verify it or shoot it down, and makes the decision to use the line at the rally and then in the interview.

Now it becomes even stranger. President Trump uses the line, which is a complete mischaracterization of the study, at a North Carolina afternoon rally. His people, his family, all hear it, but nobody thinks to vet the line and verify it. So the president goes blithely forward and trots it out at the televised town hall, where he is informed by the moderator that he is misinformed.

The misinformation being introduced to the president, not vetted by the president, and then nationally promulgated all have consequences, none of them good for anyone's health.

The Why of the Lie

The next questions regarding this lie are about motives, the why of the lie. Why would anyone point out this kind of misinformation to the president? Whoever introduced Trump to the study must have pushed the false line about "85% who wear masks get Covid-19." Why do it? Why send the president out in public with a lie that makes him sound like he knows absolutely nothing? Or did the president know that it was a con line the whole time, and did he know this while feeding it to his rally attendees and then a national television audience? Does President Trump think Americans are dumb and would buy the line, or did he actually believe the line because it fit the narrative he wanted to push?

The president not vetting the line suggests that he doesn't care about truth even if the falsehoods can kill. The person who fed him the study and the line also cares nothing for truth or the consequences of its lack. And those in the Trump camp who heard him use the line at the rally evidently did not or could not dissuade him from using it at the later town hall interview.

At each step in the provenance and distribution of this lie, a proper accurate interpretation of the study was tossed out the window and consequences were ignored. Anyone intervening at any point could have derailed the lie.  No one did. 

Cost/Benefits of this Lie

How does a lie like this, which has really limited utility for the liar, evade disconfirmation? Why does such a lie, with marginal value, get used when life threatening consequences result if people buy into it?

I can't imagine that a lie with such marginal pluses for the liar but so negative in potential outcomes for the public would have made it into a national interview in any other presidential campaign in my lifetime. The basic problem here is the devaluation of the lives of supporters, who are most likely to buy the lie without researching it. The disdain for supporters must be severe. Why throw such a lie out into public when the political benefits are nominal and the costs potentially deadly, specifically to one's own supporters?

This was a case of really bad cost/benefit accounting practices that our president should surely understand. What the provenance of this particular lie demonstrates is the propensity of the president's team to use any piece of questionable information, any quote, to further an agenda by inches. What's at risk are lives, especially of supporters, when these false throwaway lines get inserted into national interviews. By any previous American cultural leadership standards, this cost/benefit calculus would be considered sadistic with a touch of psychotic. 

Bob Dietz

October 21, 2020

 

Debunking Herd Immunity as a Strategy for Covid-19

Introduction

The last week has featured the Trump administration pushing the concept of herd immunity as their solution to the current pandemic. All statistical indications are that we're finally entering the dreaded second surge, so the GOP has decided that now is the best time to do nothing.

This cliff notes debunking will be short and sweet. Understand that the United States does not have any long term data on Covid-19 because the virus has been around less than a year. 

Three Problems

Any reliance on herd immunity requires at least three leaps of faith. First, the effects of having had the virus in terms of conveying immunity are largely unknown. If immunity is conveyed, it likely is for a limited time measured in months rather than years. If people who have had the virus once can get it again, the entire concept of herd immunity is undercut and rendered practically useless. 

Second, the long term consequences of Covid-19 have not been established. If there are indeed "long haul" effects, as seems to be the case, then living through the virus isn't simply a matter of who survives and who does not. Rather, it becomes a case of who is debilitated to what extent and for how long. Regarding lung damage, for example, if a significant percent of Covid-19 survivors sustain 10% or more lung capacity reduction, that is a big deal. We each lose a small percent of lung capacity every year as we age. A good chunk of those who get the virus are, in essence, prematurely aged in terms of lung capacity. Other effects include inflammation surrounding the heart. If getting Covid-19 results in these serious consequences, repeat infections may cause grave add-on effects. Without long term data, any reliance on herd immunity is grossly speculative, risking serious consequences.

Third, herd immunity as an alleged strategy obviously risks overwhelming hospital systems, resulting in more deaths than would occur if infections were staggered over longer periods of time. 

Our Leaders Have Abandoned Us

Herd immunity, on this October 17, 2020, is simply one phrase that substitutes for another phrase, "doing nothing." Since the U.S. appears on the brink of the second surge blow-up, plying herd immunity as a so-called strategy allows those pushing the idea to abrogate their responsibilities. They wish to wash their hands of something at which they have miserably failed. Old time gamblers call walking away from a bad situation for which one is responsible, "pulling a Pontius Pilate."

Defining doing nothing as "herd immunity strategy" the week before our second American surge is a cynical, lazy, self-absorbed joke. When one compares countries that implemented various degrees of herd immunity emphases, the correlation is clear. They have not done as well as their peers. 

Here we sit as Americans, snowballing towards 400,000 dead, and our leadership throws science, lessons learned from other nations, our U.S. experts, and U.S. lives to the wind. Our current leaders are hell bent on passively culling the herd. And that is what they will be doing for the next three months -- killing us in the name of expediency and commerce. Pulling what they consider the perfect Pontius Pilate.

Bob Dietz

October 16, 2020

Confusing "I" with "We" -- Narcissism and Anecdotal Evidence

"One thing that's for certain, don't let it dominate you. Don't be afraid of it. You're going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines, all developed recently, and you're going to beat it. I went; I didn't feel so good. And two days ago, I could have left two days ago. Two days ago, I felt great. Like, better than I have in a long time. I said just recently, better than 20 years ago. Don't let it dominate. Don't let it take over your lives. Don't let that happen."  President Trump (October 5, 2020)

The phrase "anecdotal evidence," to my mind, usually deserves quotes around it because "anecdotal evidence" is almost an oxymoron. There's a reason anecdotal evidence is not admissible in court. It's not really evidence. It's some standalone piece of data that gets introduced into conversation or debate without the benefit of statistical context. "Anecdotal evidence" is either some cherry-picked piece of information or information from a limited perspective. Without the benefit of statistics, the observations of one person are by definition limited, and usually fall under the "anecdotal evidence" aegis.

One of my problems with national media during this pandemic has been that, when conducting interviews or asking questions, they've often missed the forest for the trees. Interviews and press conferences have often failed to generate the most obvious, logical questions. Instead of responding to illogical proclamations with questions that attack a lack of reasoning or lack of data, lines of questioning have too often followed some pre-printed outline designed to elicit sound bites. Cogent follow-up questions have been rare. Interviews have become robotic exercises in leading questions being asked and answered. 

When President Trump made the comments quoted above, I was somewhat taken aback by national media assigning absurdity to Trump's spiel based on his getting medical care far beyond the access of normal men. Expert moment-to-moment monitoring and multiple drugs unavailable to the masses are, to be sure, valid drawbacks to Trump's "If I can do it, you can do it" coachspeak. The more critical point to hammer home, however, was the sheer inappropriateness, the unbelievable statistical idiocy, of using one man's results as any kind of template for what hundreds of millions of people will experience. 

Don't get me wrong. Trump's idiosyncratic treatments and position in society are valid means to debunk the significance of his results. At heart, however, his lack of representativeness really isn't the most damning argument. Simply put, one man's outcome means nothing in terms of predicting outcomes for millions. This is a basic problem with "anecdotal evidence." One man's results are almost meaningless.

The reality of this insignificance should be obvious, yet the statistical absurdity of the argument being made by Trump was not the spotlight criticism. Instead, the unrepresentativeness of his treatments became the media fulcrum for debunking the president's proclamations. Debunking the specifics of one case, however, was silly. The devil wasn't in the details of a single case; it was in the fact that it was a single case, period.

Personal Experience as Gold Standard

Moving on to the president himself, the first question is why would Trump make such an argument, namely that his own experience would forecast the experiences of millions? Why does someone assume, if indeed Trump actually believed what he was saying, that one man's outcome was a valid predictor for all men? How does "I" get conflated with "We?"

I refer back to the Norman Vincent Peale ministry on which President Trump was raised. What Peale "discovered," Peale argued, was applicable to all. This perspective requires a kind of magical symmetry between self and all others. It allows the person viewing the world to assume others' experiences mirror his, and that their outcomes, if they be worthy, should also mirror his own. This perspective is the height of presumptuous narcissism, and it allows the person holding the beliefs to assume his micro social environment is a kind of black box. Since he presumes what happens to self will happen to others, there's really no need to interpret others' actions on the others' terms. No need to exercise any empathy muscles. Everything is a reflection or projection of self. No need to venture beyond one's own black box. No requirement to even see beyond one's own black box. Since others are presumed to be a kind of statistical extension of one's self, there's no need to work to understand others.

This hall-of-mirrors inability to see beyond one's own life events horizon traps the individual in a narcissistic fun house. All evidence references the self. All evidence is, therefore, anecdotal and (unacknowledged by the self) of minimal value. Everywhere one turns is self, and self images fill and define not just evidence and decision-making, but every aspect of life. The president's take on the world is quite literally bounded by his funhouse mirrors. Not only is he unconcerned about what lies outside, but he may be unable to grasp that there is any landscape anywhere that doesn't contain his own reflection.

This is the quicksand of narcissism in the funhouse. The fact that Trump has lived a wholly transactional life, immersed in consumer culture as a kind of capitalist figurehead, adds locks and chains to the outside of the funhouse doors. He has been trapped, perhaps for his entire existence. Everything he sees, everything he does, is a reflection of him.

Bob Dietz

October 13, 2020