Juxtaposition

Last Thursday, February 4, the United States suffered 5,077 Covid-19 fatalities. This was the largest single-day death toll thus far. Although diagnoses of infection have been falling, deaths (which usually lag by a couple of weeks) have not.

Today, February 11, the death statistics again appear to be broaching record territory. I will hold off on commenting about what this implies until final tallies have been recorded and examined. 

Also last Thursday, Donald Trump submitted a letter to the Screen Actors Guild. Evidently he had learned that he was about to be booted from the union, and in his never-ending quest to disallow anyone from dissing him first, he decided to attempt an "I'm breaking up with you first" bit of publicity.

This was the former president of the United States, on a day he knew was the worst of the pandemic, spending time and energy to play spin-master with the Screen Actors Guild. His sense of priorities, his lack of empathy or solemnity for the raw awfulness of the moment, his usual self-absorption and anesthetized sensibilities, were all on display. I present the letter verbatim, so readers can share in the insulated and unintentionally comical wonder that is Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States. 

"Ms. Carteris:

I write to you today regarding the so-called Disciplinary Committee hearing aimed at revoking my union membership. Who cares!

While I'm not familiar with your work, I'm very proud of my work on movies such as Home Alone 2, Zoolander and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; and television shows including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Saturday Night Live and of course, one of the most successful shows in television history, The Apprentice -- to name just a few!

I've also greatly helped the cable news television business (said to be a dying platform with not much time left until I got involved in politics), and created thousands of jobs at networks such as MSDNC and Fake News CNN, among many others.

Which brings me to your blatant attempt at free media attention to distract from your dismal record as a union. Your organization has done little for its members, and nothing for me -- besides collecting dues and promoting dangerous un-American policies and ideas -- as evident by your massive unemployment rates and lawsuits from celebrated actors, who even recorded a video asking, "Why isn't the union fighting for me?"

These, however, are policy failures. Your disciplinary failures are even more egregious.

I no longer wish to be associated with your union.

As such, this letter is to inform you of my immediate resignation from SAG-AFTRA. You have done nothing for me."

I had a difficult time, reading this letter the first time, believing that Trump had actually written it. It sounded like something The Onion might have put out there in cyber space as a skewering dig. But no, the former American president wrote it, and then sent it on the day of the worst death toll from the pandemic. 

More than 70 million Americans voted for this man. The wonder and horror of that fact never grows old. It is a bit jarring to realize, at the age of 63, that one has spent the entirety of life in The Asylum. I'm not sure that I prefer having been stupidly unaware of my bunkmates' psychiatric issues to actually being one of the mentally challenged, but one thing is certain. I still have much to learn, even in The Asylum.

Bob Dietz

February 11, 2021

Another Saturday in The Asylum

Just another week of antics and pratfalls worthy of DSM-5 inclusion. First, your favorite and mine, the inimitable Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, proclaimed that she was "just like many regular Americans." See, this is what I've been arguing for months. There's nothing discernibly different about Greene that would set her apart from her northwest Georgia compatriots (and I do mean patriots).Green's not some bizarro American outlier; she's representative of the red-blooded American southern spirit. She's been using her ouster from committees as a fund-raising tool, a la Mr. Trump. This keen entrepreneurial sense is what has made America great...again.

That entrepreneurial energy was even more in evidence with Missouri state representative Tricia Derges, who was indicted Monday for allegedly selling regenerative stem cell treatments without stem cells. Her nimble marketing even suggested that the treatment could help with Covid-19. She made 200K selling her schlock, and yes, of course she's a Republican. Democrats lack entrepreneurial spirit.

Finally, Thursday evening, the Los Angeles Lakers made their pitch for being "regular Americans," as two starters managed to air-ball free throws against Denver. In 20 years of recreational leagues, I never shot a free throw air ball, including the year I tore a ligament in my right hand and shot free throws underhanded, Rick Barry-style. One of the Laker air balls was courtesy of Lebron James, who then decided being a regular American was not for him as he led the Lakers on a 68-35 second half rampage for the convincing 114-93 win.

The Asylum is a special place, my friends. I just hope that the outer walls are high enough to withstand the tsunami that one of the resident physicians, Dr. Michael Osterholm, has warned is on the way. We shall see.

Bob Dietz

February 6, 2021

Tsunami Watch

First, let me be clear. The Trump administration response to Covid-19 was the proverbial unmitigated disaster -- unmitigated by American expertise and unmitigated by American resources. The entirety of the 2020 American pandemic coping was a clown act to protect perceptions of the American economy.

My concern with the first week of the Biden administration was that most of the task force briefings were focusing on the logistics and minutia of vaccine deployment rather than the big questions. The national media focus wasn't on context but on being thrilled to get real answers to questions, something that had been lacking for the first year of the pandemic. The American media seemed blithely ignorant of virus concerns being raised by other countries.

Things, however, changed this last week as both Dr. Fauci and Dr. Osterholm stepped up and said what had to be said. Fauci explained that the South African variant was more transmissible and, more importantly, that having had a different variety of Covid-19 promised very little protection from the South African variant. Fauci referred to mutant strains as "wild cards" in an MSNBC interview, and said that if they became the dominant strains, we would see another surge. What he didn't explicitly state was that these mutant strains will almost certainly become the dominant strains, and that any surge will be on top of the current surge, which will be dire.

Osterholm's comments were more direct than Fauci's. Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious disease icon, has been deadly accurate with virtually all of his pandemic predictions. Early on, nobody believed his projections and warnings. As reality unfolded, however, it became clear that Osterholm has a grasp not only on Covid-19, but on how Americans respond with flawed, undisciplined behaviors. Osterholm said that he expects the mutant variants to surge in six to 14 weeks. His comment regarding the "capitalism uber all" attitude the U.S. has taken, " As fast as we're opening restaurants, we're likely going to be closing them." He likened the coming surge to a tsunami out of sight over the horizon.

All we can ask for is the best American science has to offer and the truth. I was concerned that the opening week under Biden had soft pedaled what international experts felt was coming. Fortunately, Fauci and Osterholm began beating the drums to warn us.

To put this in an overall context, some countries are now testing every infected individual to identify the strains of the virus. Obviously, doing this should be a priority. The U.S. has tested less than half a percent. This means that the U.S. is flying blind as to the prevalence of the mutant strains around the country, and it almost assuredly means that community spread of the variants has already occurred on a large scale. Thus, mutant surges on top of the current surges are almost inevitable.

If this happens, Osterholm stated on Meet the Press, "We are going to see something like we have not seen yet in this country."

Bob Dietz

February 5, 2021

A Gambler Looks at the GameStop Adventure

During the last 72 hours, I've received some requests for my opinion regarding the whole GameStop situation. Is it just pure gambling, I've been asked, or is there something broader in progress? An army of investors, mostly residents of Reddit WallStreetBets, has used the Robinhood app to make and lose fortunes. The whipsawing of GameStop stock is the latest and evidently one of the greatest consequences of this army's newfound logistical power.

Initial Thoughts

Well, now that I've taken a quick look at the storylines, I have a few opinions. First, however, let me be clear. I know nothing about stock trading, less about subreddits, and my only familiarity with Robinhood is that I once lived on Robin Hood Drive in Clarksville, Tennessee. This will be one of those rare occasions when I attempt to opine regarding something I know nothing about. But bear with me.

An article that provided some contextual footing was Jon Sarlin's CNN piece on January 29 titled "Inside the reddit army that's crushing Wall Street." I recommend it as a starting point. Anywhere you look in mainstream media, you'll find interviews with people who have made sudden fortunes from very little starting money, and a few interviews with those who have then lost those fortunes. For example, today CNN ran a piece about a 10 year-old investor who made more than $3,000 on an initial $60 investment. A similar story features CNN interviewing a Missouri man with a 35K salary who quickly made a million dollars. So what people are asking me is, "Is all of this just pure gambling?"

I know a gambling subculture when I see one, and WallStreetBets appears to be its own two-fisted degenerative subculture. If you substituted "sports gambling" for "options trading" and read the subreddit forums, you'd come to the conclusion that you're dealing with out-of-control, hardcore gamblers who have no idea of the likelihood of making a profit. Somehow, because this is stock market investing, the media tone is more forgiving. 

Before criticizing this stock gambling subculture, however, I have some caveats. Having some background in journalism, I'll point out possible pitfalls in taking all reportage at face value.

Journalism Caveats

Since the landscape of sports gambling is generally sampled and reported in certain flawed, misrepresentative ways, I think it's helpful for me as a member of the not-savvy-about-options-trading club to understand that the same kind of misrepresentation may be occurring for GameStop reporting.

For example, the Jon Sarlin CNN column I referenced earlier was very, very helpful to me in providing an understandable framework, so kudos to him. However, and it is a big however, it's important to understand that for someone familiar with the material, it was easy to impose tone and spin to the piece. The big responsibilities of the author include his choice of interview subjects, what he chooses to ask those subjects, and the decisions he makes as to whom to include. Plus the author gets to edit the responses to his questions. So basically what I'm saying is that the entire tone and spin of the piece, and what the public takes away from it, is dictated by the cherry-picking of interview subjects and the cherry-picking of what they said. 

The fundamental challenge of writing this kind of story is to responsibly blend the objective, historical background and seating material for the piece with interview segments that are chosen because they are representative of the whole, not because they make for compelling reading or sexy clips that grab attention. At least that's the way I see it.

When sports gamblers are interviewed, usually they're chosen for some mega-freakish win or because of some degenerate storyline. There's rarely any sense that people being interviewed are representative of any whole. That's the problem I have with many of the initial media interviews with GameStop investors. I don't walk away with a sense of whether they've been chosen for freakish wins, disastrous storylines, or because understanding them helps you understand the entire milieu.

Are They Just Gambling?

Okay, enough with the caveats. Based on what I've read to this point, WallStreetBets traders come across as arrogant, self-absorbed, degenerate gamblers. Now I'm going to defend them in a bit, because I'm going to frame things in a bigger context, but for now, in the context of the resources they have on hand and what they are doing, they seem stark raving mad to me. Many of the quotes from the Sarlin piece reveal out-of-control people who lack long-term financial discipline. Many of the quotes make the investors sound like gambling addicts on a bad tilt, and descriptions of the groups' chats suggest most of them are committed to this lack-of-control addiction.

I want to directly quote a line from Sarlin's column, "But unlike many other online communities, there is also a clear financial goal for the people in it." Now that is an interesting comment on which I almost gagged. A "clear financial goal" is also the wished-for-outcome for the vast majority of those picking up dice, playing poker, or betting sports. Having a "clear financial goal" is like wanting to have eternal life. It's a great idea, but unless you have a sense of how many people actually pull it off, having that goal doesn't, in and of itself, do you any practical good.

Defending the Army

Now I'm going to step back from my immediate impression of this particular subculture and defend these investors, who are generally not one-percenters. I have no real beef with anarchist investors, as long as they are clear-headed about what they are doing and about their chances of financial success.

Way back in 1984, I gave a paper at the National Conference on Gambling and Risk-Taking. The paper appeared to be well received, but a few of my concluding comments garnered some pushback during the socials after the sessions.

I have always argued against addicted out-of-control gambling behavior. However, I also fully defend the use of negative expectation gambling as a tool in a broader context. For example, playing at being James Bond in a casino environment may enhance one's non-material resume, so to speak. Cultivating the perception that one is urbane, worldly, and willing to take substantial risks has value. Whether gambling enhances you in the eyes of business colleagues and potential lovers, or provides a respite from a day-to-day grind, those non-material aspects may have more overall value than the material resources sacrificed while gambling. So I'm always aware of that. I'll lecture recreational gamblers when the mechanics of what they are doing is wrong, but I won't tell them that the actual gambling is wrong. Not my job, and I'm not in their shoes, so I don't really know what they get out of their gambling. I try to correct dumb betting from a math perspective, not an overall context perspective.

The pushback I got during the conference social events was that some people couldn't believe I didn't automatically define losing a big chunk of annual income, say 25%, as a gambling problem or addiction. I refused to automatically do that, as I don't know what the person is getting out of his gambling participation. I'm not God. Maybe it's what gets that person up every morning. Maybe it's the primary context that facilitates he or she having sex. I just do not know.

Conclusion

I circle back to the anarchist investors. The Sarlin piece revealed a burgeoning social network for these people, a political purpose of sorts, a devil-may-care, financial disaster precipice kind of cachet. I don't know to what degree they draw their identity and their purpose from anarchist (and likely idiotic) investing. Not my call. Does it make sense for them to do it? I have no idea. Maybe it's what gets them a date on Saturday night. 

Sarlin's descriptions of the online social interactions of the WallStreetBets investors reminded me of American sociologist Erving Goffman's comments about gambling. Quoting anthropologist Natasha Dow Schull, "Goffman regarded gambling as the occasion for 'character contests' in which players could demonstrate their courage, integrity, and composure in the face of contingency."

This is where I mention some key facts regarding "contingency" facing non-one-percenter investors in 2021. The framing statistics for the anarchist investors' behaviors are that (1) almost 75% of Americans die in debt, (2) the average debt for those in debt is roughly 62K, and (3) things are not getting better.

Once these numbers frame the context for these traders, what appears to be an insane go-for-broke mentality seems a bit more rational. Their attitudes and perspectives make much more sense.

Bob Dietz

January 30, 2021

Learning New Lingo

I was eight or nine years old, reading an X-Men comic book, when I saw the word balloon where Magneto first called his henchman sidekick, the Toad, a "sycophantic simpleton." I had no idea what "sycophantic" meant, so I looked it up in a big, fine dictionary and decided to use the word as often as possible. I still wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it, but I used it nonetheless.

Now, 55 years later, I'm appalled that "sycophantism" has become ubiquitous across the media landscape, all because Republicans have worshipped at the feet of Trump and his bad behavior for the last four years. My favorite word has become overused and banal, and my use of it is now perceived as cliched.

The years 2020-21 have been tough on my go-to vocabulary. "Sycophant," "cognitive dissonance," and "delusion" have all become American media staples. My job in this brief installment is therefore to give readers a heads up on words and phrases that will soon flood mainstream conversation. Use them now with relative impunity; three months from now they'll be so fashionable as to be memes.

First of all, get comfortable with the phrase "Christian-American Nationalism." As laid out at the wonderful holykoolaid.com site, our sudden surge in state religions features prophets, over the top evangelizing, and a stunning inability to handle (my old favorite and yours) cognitive dissonance. Mainly, though, what is striking is the assignation of biblical heft to actual current political figures. State-worship and religious worship thus blend in a way that would horrify the founding fathers.

A word that ties into "Christian-American Nationalism" is "Revelator." In case you're wondering, "Revelator" seems to be a self-promoting title that sidesteps the "uh oh; I'm nuts," connotations of calling oneself a "Prophet." "Revelator" sounds much more scientific than "Prophet," and at the same time it hints at somewhat less stringent consequences for being wrong.

See, the problem with being a "Prophet" is that the Bible lays out the consequences of wrongness in the prophecy game. Basically, thanks to the Council of Laodicea and others that canonized the Bible, if a prophet is wrong about something, then they were a Satan-filled false prophet. Only people who were correct all the time were vetted into the Bible as prophets. That's the way good editors, councils, and deities prefer things, and that's the way it is. Calling yourself "Revelator Robert" as opposed to  "Bob the Prophet" softens the consequences of wrong predictions. Since false prophets have often been stoned, it's an important public relations detail.

So keep on the alert for references to "Christian-American Nationalism" and "Revelators" going forward. I suspect we'll soon be fielding various new words to describe people with varying degrees of compartmentalized delusions. I'll endeavor to keep you abreast. In the meantime, let's all do our best to use fashionable, but not cliched, lingo.

Bob Dietz

January 28, 2021 

Masking White Privilege

Sometimes the reality of white privilege pops up and slaps you in the face. There's no masking it, one might say.

As reported January 22 by Abby Haglage for yahoo!life, a study by USC's Center for Economic and Social Research discovered significant ethnic disparities regarding mask wearing. Overall, 51% of those surveyed reported wearing masks consistently when interacting outside of their households. Blacks wore masks 67% of the time under those conditions. Latinos reported 63%, and other races reported 65%. Whites brought up the rear with 46%.

No one should be surprised by the racial disparities in mask wearing because we've all seen the anti-mask protests, and they are overwhelmingly Caucasian. But really, when you ponder this a bit more, the correlation turns a bit ugly. Why should a demographic that went to war to defend its right to own human beings decide to wear masks to protect other human beings? Individual (white) rights would, one should expect, rule the day.

All of the arguments du jour begin to blend together. The U.S. made the decision to not shut down because the priority was to fortify the 401Ks of the 15% of Americans who own 85% of stocks. That's white privilege. Placing an underclass of disproportionally non-white "essential workers" at much greater virus load risk is a version of white privilege. The hell-with-you mask aversion is white privilege.

My thought experiment goes something like this -- if whites were disproportionately vulnerable to Covid-19, would we have mask-wearing laws? What would the national conversation sound like? Would Christian recitations of The Golden Rule be recycled every half hour on Fox News?

At one point during the early summer, my home state of Tennessee was 50th in mask-wearing percentage. Dead last. We're the poster child for wayward white privilege, and we're in awful shape right now. My county has reported a 30% positivity rate, and the more infectious and deadly variants haven't yet arrived in Tennessee.

This is one time in history when white privilege is biting white lives in the ass. We are truly dumb as a box of Saltines.

Bob Dietz

January 25, 2021

Sauron Joins the GOP

"There are no solutions for popular delusions."

What must the world think of "The Asylum," previously known as the United States of America?

On January 23, the UK Guardian reported that attorney Paul Davis, who lost his job after posting selfies of himself at the Capitol riots, filed a lawsuit in Texas to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The lawsuit analogizes the United States to Tolkien's Kingdom of Gondor, whose king (like Trump, presumably) has been exiled. Rumor has it that if the lawsuit fails, Davis will refile using the Count of Monte Cristo argument.

Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, she of QAnon-loving fame, decided to file articles of impeachment against Joe Biden. Yes, we have gotten to that cultural point when the mention of something nuts in the political sphere no longer requires putting an "R" designation after the person's name. Hard to believe, but true.

And then there's Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, who on January 21, the day after Biden's inauguration, tried to bring a concealed weapon onto the House floor. Personally, I don't blame him. That Sauron is a tough sonufabitch, but the jury is out on whether he can handle hot lead. To my recollection, handguns were banned in Mordor.

Bob Dietz

January 24, 2021