Watch Those Tenses

"This is a great success story." "Federal government rose to the challenge."  Jared Kushner (April 29, 2020)

It was the first game of the intramural hoops season. Our lineup, featuring four 5'11" guys and one 5'9" dude, stepped into our spots on each side of the foul line. We, members of the branch campus cross-country team, had battled the faculty team tooth-and-nail, but we found ourselves down five with 30 seconds left. The faculty captain, also the coach of the branch campus basketball team, was at the foul line to shoot one-and-one. He turned to me and nodded. "You know," he said, "you guys are going to win some games."

He bounced the ball twice, took his foul shot, and missed. I secured the rebound, dribbled the length of the floor, pulled up at the opposition foul line, and hit a jumper. As the faculty tried to inbound, our best player, George, stole the pass and made an incredibly difficult running one-hander over a 6'5" guy. We were down one. The faculty again tried to inbound. George stole the ball again and made another running one-hander from about 12 feet. The faculty launched a wayward 25-footer as the horn sounded. I turned to the faculty captain and said, "Yeah, you were right. We might win some games."

One thing I have learned from a lifetime of sports betting is that you've gotta watch your tenses. Putting ongoing events in past tense has no magical effect on the events themselves. Perceiving, reporting, and discussing ongoing events as if they have finished does not make them finis. Events tend to not be impressed by the fact that you use past tense. One can use whatever tense one prefers over and over, and still those pesky ongoing events pay you no mind. It's as if they don't care what you think or what you say or what absurd spin you try to impose. Events just go about their business of being events.

Jared Kushner's Fox interview yesterday was grotesque. He looked like Mr. Sardonicus on uppers. His attempt to impose a past tense on the pandemic will go down in history as either self-deluded hubris or cynical sadism, depending on whether he is actually perceived as believing what he said.


April 30, 2020
Bob Dietz

Innumeracy Lunacy

"Right now we are heading to 50,000 and according to the projection we will end up with 60,000 by the end of the pandemic."  President Donald Trump (April 20, 2020)


Today, April 29, we passed 60,000 deaths.

On April 21st, in my entry Innumeracy, I explained that the 60K projection was "mythic" and "a mirage." Well we didn't even make it to the end of April. We didn't cap at 60,000 deaths. We didn't make it to August 4th. We certainly didn't make it to "the end of the pandemic," as the president said.

On Monday, April 27th, we received an update from the University of Washington model. Now they are projecting 74,000 deaths.

Hmm. Well, I'll say it once again. I'm going to go out on a limb here. I realize that a poor professional gambler has no business refuting the University of Washington and the White House, but I'm pretty damned sure we're being massaged with nonsense. Maybe I'm wrong, and deaths will plummet, stopping cold, and all will be well with the world. But who's kidding who? The model estimate is pure hokum.

What is going on here? Why are we being fed numbers like this? First, allow me to explain the editorial process. We are being given numbers from the most optimistic of all available models. Then we are being given the very low end of the range of projection from the rosiest model. It's statistical bullshit.

As I said March 26 in Approval Numbers:  Psych 101, the way to get high approval numbers is to (1) tell people what they want to hear, (2) express as optimistic a view as possible, and (3) create a sense of faux control by assigning numbers and dates, even if it's all just blowing smoke.

Every news source that relies on ad revenue is now stuck in a Catch 22. If you give people a sense of the reality to come, if you explain that we are in month two of a two-year process, nobody will want to watch you. People are frustrated, they are depressed, they are scared. Presenting reality to viewers is not going to sell tickets. Why do you think alternative projection models aren't all over the news cycle, given the horrific inaccuracy of the U of W go-to model?

Americans need to hear the truth, whether we can handle it or not. Without honest information, we cannot plan what to do with our lives. The total death projection is now an alleged 74,000. Did they confuse the end of the pandemic with the end of May? I watched the model spokesperson on CNN Monday. Nonverbally, he reminded me of a used car salesman who just realized he had been trying to sell a car to another used car salesman. He was now just going through the motions. Verbally, he avoided attaching dates to the projection.

The projection, as I said, is now 74,000 for the pandemic. That number is laughable. How stupid do they think we are?


April 29, 2020
Bob Dietz

Would You Believe It Was Sarcasm?

The president has evidently watched a lot of the old Get Smart TV series.

Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, when trapped in an ugly predicament, would try to make everything okay by bluffing the arch-villain. He'd usually say something like, "Right now, this building is surrounded by an army of CONTROL agents in Sherman tanks." The villain would respond with, "I find that very hard to believe." Smart would then respond with, "Errrr, would you believe a meter maid and two mean beagles?" And on it would go.

Today the president tweeted something about journalists needing to return their "Noble" Prizes. He also said he'd be contacting the "Noble" committee to complain. A few hours later, after people poked fun at him for conflating Pulitzer Prizes with Nobel Prizes and the misspelling of Noble/Nobel, the president deleted the tweets. He then claimed, for the second time in four days, that his presumed errors were just sarcasm.To which the villains in the media will say, once again, "I still find that hard to believe."

So I am left with trying to frame the key observations regarding today's tweets. Here they are.

1) The president does not use editors, even when he doesn't necessarily know anything about that which he's tweeting or discussing. Nobody checks to make sure he didn't put an enormous boner on paper. This smacks of such spoiled hubris, I don't really know what to make of it. It does suggest that the origin of his beefs with the press lies in the president never fact checking himself and understanding that the press fact checks everything.

2) When confronted with something of which he is unsure, he doesn't even bother to google the topic.

3) Taken together, these impulsive habits reveal someone either (a) too emotional to take the time to fact check or get a correct spelling or (b) someone who thinks/knows the readers won't care if he gets everything wrong.

Circle back to the "bleach and bright light" press briefing last week. Superficially, the core problem seems to be, as Dr. Birx said to cover the president's ass, that he processes new information out loud to audiences. If you look deeper, however, this isn't the crux of the issue.

The real problems are twofold. First, according to multi-sourced reports, President Trump rarely attends the daily task force meetings in the situation room. For whatever reason, he sits in on the meetings about once a week. The task force reportedly doesn't mind this, as they get more accomplished without him there, but it leaves the president woefully underinformed considering that he is the primary briefing speaker most days. Second, his absence from those meetings necessitates a short pre-briefing verbal cram session where they inform President Trump of the topics of the day. The president thus gets new information verbally before stepping to the podium.

Basically, the president doesn't really read, has neither the patience or concentration to attend every task force situation room session, and gets a pre-briefing immediately before the start of the actual briefing. He then goes out on stage and attempts to wing it.

This is a slovenly, lazy way to communicate crucial information to the American public. Expecting to inform and impress a national audience while blindly winging it is both incredibly arrogant and unbelievably stupid. Then, when he spews the inevitable blunder, similar to Smart's "army of CONTROL agents in Sherman tanks," the president's fallback is, "Would you believe it was sarcasm?"

Dr. Birx, playing the role of Barbara Feldon's Agent 99, is trying her best to thwart KAYOS while also maintaining the president's competency cover. Tough jobs. Meanwhile, all of America's fate lies in the hands of a man who, day by day, makes Maxwell Smart look increasingly, well, smart.


April 26, 2020
Bob Dietz

Public Service Announcement

Do Not Drink Bleach! Do Not Pour Bleach Into Your Orifices! Do Not Inject Bleach!


My mother explained the hazards of drinking bleach when I was about six. She said that it could kill me. I'm proud to say that I have followed my mother's advice for the last 56 years and have not ingested any bleach.

My father had a bad run-in with bleach when I was about 10. He mixed bleach and ammonia while cleaning the bathrub. My dad rarely cleaned the bathtub and had no real idea what he was doing. He wound up in the hospital, hallucinating a third-person perspective from the ceiling of the room. I have learned from my father's example and clean bathtubs only when absolutely necessary.

To the topic at hand, yesterday's "bleach and bright light" task force briefing. I am not going to pile on President Trump. The guy is 73 years old, trying to play a role for which he is miserably equipped. He knows New York real estate. He pretty much intellectually whiffed at everything else until his presidential run. He was about as prepared for a pandemic as either of my grandfathers would have been at 73. My paternal grandfather was a milkman; my maternal grandfather was an anthracite coal miner. They were smart men. They knew their businesses, but weren't really expert at anything else. They would have been as lost as President Trump. The advantages my grandfathers had were that neither was presumptuous. They knew what they didn't know, and they weren't motivated to fake it.

In some ways, I understand what President Trump is experiencing. My last term at Penn State as an English major, I needed one additional credit of English, and there were no one-credit English offerings. I suckered my advisor into approving an ENG 400 exit course, which he assumed was English. It was, however, a job prep course for people graduating in engineering. I had absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about in any of the classes, but I kept my mouth shut, wrote the required job application cover letters and inquiries, and got an A. Had I actually volunteered to ever answer a question in class, I would have been dead meat and probably tossed from the course. The president's problem is that he hasn't learned to keep his mouth shut.

That brings us to the core issues with the president's social history. How does any man go through adult life without anyone telling him that he has no idea what he's talking about? What kind of weird insular psychological existence is that? And does President Trump understand that he's in a bizarre narcissistic social cocoon?

In my business, I am wrong more than 43% of the time regarding things I really care about (mainly because my money is at stake). On not-so-rare occasions, I am horribly wrong. It's true that I once won 17 consecutive games in a public contest. But it's also true that I've lost eight in a row and nine out of 10 quite a few times. What must it be like to have people acknowledge your 17 in a row, and never give you grief for any of the losing-eight-straight? After 50 years of nobody in your immediate orbit highlighting your losses, what does that do to you? Do you come to believe the terrible mistakes didn't really happen? How do you get to know what you don't know?

So no, I'm not going to pile on the president for his sudden love of bleach. In fact, I'll leave you with my version of a gentle song.


(To the tune of "The Bitch is Back," and with serious apologies to Sir Elton John)

I was corona-fied as #45,
Caught the bug cause
China spit in my eye.
Times are changin',
Though the rich stay fat,
But the fever will not get you
If you bleach your back, oh, oh, oh.

Open Georgia Friday,
That's all right.
Friday night steakhouse,
Sick by Saturday night.
I can bleach you all
At your social do's.
I get high in the evening
Sniffin' chloroquine, too, oh, oh, oh.

Use the bleach, use the bleach,
Have it as a snack.
I'm stone cold sober, an unfortunate fact.
Use the bleach, use the bleach,
Cause I'm smarter than you.
It's the reason I say
The things that I do, oh, oh, oh.


April 24, 2020
Bob Dietz

Great Minds Think Alike

After I wrote yesterday's blog entry, an odd thing happened. The president decided that he agreed with me. I had argued that Georgia re-opening tomorrow (Friday) is way too early and very dangerous. At yesterday's task force briefing, the president said exactly that. Wow. Who woulda thunk it?

As yesterday's briefing unfolded, I realized another very strange thing. All of the folks who castigated me for being anti-Georgia-opening and called me a libtard, coward, and un-American were faced with the awful reality that President Donald Trump publicly agreed with me. If my blog entry had made me a cowardly libtard, what did that make the president?

This was truly a fascinating and unusual real-time study in cognitive dissonance and how individuals deal with it. People assumed that my anti-Georgia opening spiel would be at odds with their president "chomping at the bit" to re-open. They not only had to come full stop, they had to swivel their minds 180 degrees in very turbulent waters.

I intend to tackle the whole cognitive dissonance angle somewhere down the road while discussing why people cling to this president, but after yesterday's weirdness, I felt as if I should at least broach the subject.


A Fixed Faith

Trumpism, I think, is more of a faith than a political persuasion. Sit ardent MAGA folks down and ask them, in all seriousness, "What policy position by the president would result in his losing your support?" Then reach into your pocket and start your stopwatch. There will be a long, interminable pause. The kind of pause that tells you (1) they haven't considered such a thing, (2) they have absolutely no idea what those deal-breaker policies might be, and (3) their loyalty to the president is a matter of faith, not facts.

When confronted with lies-as-cheerleading or sudden unexpected pivots of position (China, Kemp, Stormy), they don't really allow what's transpired in front of their eyes to affect their worldview. They simply shoehorn what they've experienced into the crystallized storylines of their faith.

For a good 30-something percent of the American public, science has become the enemy because it  contradicts the daily feel-good reality script the president imposes on the task force briefings. The president's supporters want to believe more than Fox Mulder, and science is in the way. So they ignore the science. This is, as Leon Festinger explored many years ago, what one should expect. In the years since Festinger's initial research, cognitive dissonance theory has been subsumed into other subfields. I have a feeling, though, that in the decades ahead, it's going to be dusted off when discussing this presidency.


Friday's Reality Show

Tomorrow, Gov. Brian Kemp re-opens Georgia without the presidential support he presumed he had 48 hours ago. This turn of events actually isn't all that surprising. The president's penchant for treating each day as a reality show episode should have prepped us for the episode-ending surprise. The assumed apprentice favorite is told he is to be fired, and we go on to the next installment. Same Trump time, same Trump channel.


April 23, 2020
Bob Dietz

Dying for a Massage

If Brian Kemp, Bill Lee, and Donald Trump all tell you that it's safe to go back in the water, it's time to get a bigger boat.


Guidelines be damned. It's full death ahead. Governors Kemp of Georgia, Lee of Tennessee, and McMaster of South Carolina, fine Republicans who would all look at home in The Cattleman's Club, are going to ignore coronavirus task force guidelines for re-opening, and will get their businesses cranking. Some business owners will re-open as early as Friday, April 24th. Others will get the American way of life back on track May 1st.

None of these states fit the re-opening statistical protocols, and I have yet to read or see an epidemiologist who thinks that this is a good idea. I can't imagine what the rest of the world thinks of the United States.

Where to begin? Well, let's try a quote from Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp, who learned about asymptomatic transmission (he claimed) on April 1st, "The private sector is going to have to convince the public that it's safe to come back into their businesses." How is this supposed to work, exactly? What are the business owners supposed to do to sweet talk customers into their stores? Post flip cards in their windows, "Just -4- virus customer deaths this month?"

The main flaw with Kemp's approach goes something like this. The COVID-19 pandemic is beyond the life experiences and expertise of virtually every business owner and Georgia resident. So your plan is to rely on people making sound judgements regarding existential threats with which they have zero experience or expertise. And there is really no state or federal mechanism in place to "safety test" businesses. Customers will just have to figure it out for themselves. Meanwhile, the Georgia governor says that he was unaware of asymptomatic transmission until April 1st. Clearly he himself would not be qualified to design or maintain a safe business. He wouldn't even be qualified to be a responsible customer. But somehow, through people dying by going to various places and engaging in dangerous activities, folks will eventually figure out what is or is not safe. That, in a nutshell, is the Georgia plan.

Barbershops, massage parlors, gyms, and nail salons will be among the first to open. The plan, therefore, is not only to open, but to have businesses where physical distancing is impossible to lead the way. Meanwhile, confirmed cases and virus deaths have been rising in the state (right on cue after Easter), but Kemp is determined to have individual freedoms extricated from the manacles of science. Maybe he's another dude for whom, "Jesus is the vaccine."

Tennessee, which a month ago was ranked 49th in virus preparedness, is also ready to open for business. As a Tennessee resident, I'd like to report that traffic in the Tri-Cities area is back to pre-pandemic levels already, and it's Wednesday, April 21st. I believe what will happen, now that dates for re-opening have been announced, is that residents of all of these states will jump the gun on the opening dates and engage in risky behavior days early, since there won't be enforcement of much of anything and any stigma is now absent.

This is going to be a literal unmitigated disaster. How can anyone expect civilians to behave correctly, in their best self-interest, when they are immersed in a situation with which they have absolutely no experience? Not only do the individual residents of Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina have no experience with anything like this, but neither do their family members or local civic and religious leaders. Kemp's decision is akin to dumping his constituents on the Normandy beach without so much as basic training, and then expecting them to make all of the proper decisions. Or maybe, conversely, the frontline service workers most at risk are just considered chum --  expendable minimum-wagers who will get the economy revived for the rest of us.

Of course, city mayors in these states are pushing back. The urban areas feature higher population densities, which means more transmission opportunities and inevitable spikes. The urban centers also feature more people of color, who may not appreciate their role as chum.


April 22, 2020
Bob Dietz

Innumeracy

"Right now we are heading to 50,000 and according to the projections we will end up with 60,000 by the end of the pandemic."  President Donald Trump (April 20, 2020)


I have read and re-read that quote a dozen times. I have tried to determine if maybe the president meant "the end of April" instead of "the end of the pandemic." I believe he actually meant to say "the end of the pandemic."

I can't get my head around this statement or why he would say it. Perhaps he thought his audience was deaf or unable to grasp the intricacies of a calendar. Long shot explanations, perhaps, but better than the alternative, which is that the president feels it is perfectly fine to tell absurd lies about this pandemic's cost in lives.

Does he feel it necessary to just invent far fetched hokum for a television audience or is this what he considers his "cheerleading" role? Why would anyone step to the podium and dispense obvious nonsense on national television? He didn't have to volunteer these numbers. Nobody forced him to say it. He just decided, for whatever reason, that Americans needed to hear this. In retrospect, when the pandemic is finally held at bay (perhaps two years from now), his prediction yesterday will stand  as brazen delusion or cynical nonchalant lying.


The Model (Singular)

For the last 10 days or so, the front-and-center model has been the University of Washington's version. Evidently the White House has adopted this particular model as its de rigueur projection. The model is convenient in two respects. It artificially truncates the "end of the pandemic" to August 4th, and it projects the lowest number of deaths up until August 4th.

First of all, kiss the 60K fatality projections of this model goodbye, as they were based on stay-at-home and social distancing through the (artificial) August 4th end date. The super-capitalists have jumped the gun and will re-open businesses in some of the worst possible states in a few days. Second, that 60K number did not account for Easter transmission surges, protest transmission bursts, and the overall inanity of a good chunk of the American public.

Sixty thousand was mythic the entire time. The virus isn't going on vacation August 4th. That date was just a MacGuffin. It's true that I'm going out on a prediction limb here. Who am I, a poor, ignorant professional gambler, to argue against President Trump and the University of Washington? It's possible that the fatality figures will drop off a cliff and a miracle occurs. But no, realistically, that is not what's going to happen. That 60K figure was a mirage. And our reality is a long arduous trek.


April 21, 2020
Bob Dietz