Sympathy for the Working Man

Glen Reynolds notes that some Americans, still drawing pay, are not that sympathetic to the ones who aren't.

...it’s hard not to notice a class divide here. As with so many of America’s conflicts, the divide is between the people in the political/managerial class on the one hand and the people in the working class on the other. And as usual, the smugness and authoritarianism are pretty much all on one side.

If they keep staying home, they'll have no homes to stay in. That's not a trivial problem, nor one that can be wished away.

There are even more dire consequences when we consider the world as a whole. How much sympathy is there for Africa and Asia among our political and managerial class, who talk about 'people of color' almost as much as they talk about 'working Americans'?

San Jacinto

Texan denizens, we join you today in celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto. For those not from Texas, this was the battle that redeemed the sacrifice at the Alamo. As Marty Robbins describes in this song, the men of the Alamo bought thirteen days for Sam Houston to assemble an army to contest the army brought north by Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna.



This day 1836, Sam Houston's forces met Santa Anna's and won a decisive victory. Ironically, it will take you longer to read a thorough account of the battle than it took to fight it: from the opening volley of artillery to the Mexican rout was eighteen minutes. As the article says, though, "the killing lasted for hours."

The Republic of Texas was born.

"Decaying" Communities Can Survive, Dude

The Atlantic is hysterical. Can you still say "hysterical"? The author's not a woman so we're going with it.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

I'm pretty sure that labor's wages were rising faster than we've seen lately before this happened, led by the 'empty government con man.' That's not what I want to talk about.

As for the 'decaying communities in revolt against the modern world,' son, we've got this if you can just take your systems of debt off our necks. I'm planting a garden, as are all of us. I never thought of myself as a gardener, but because I married a woman who loves gardens, I've built literal tons of them. The current one has three raised beds, more than twenty feet long, with the soil carefully broken and double-dug. They're amended with all organic things like ash and charcoal and manure.

We're going to have food in the harvest like you can't imagine. The forest is full of turkey and deer, the mountains full of bear and grouse. Our population density is minimal, and we live in fresh air and sunshine. School is canceled, but the school buses are still running to drop off food daily to the poor. If only we could figure out a way to push back mortgages, so we don't unhouse a bunch of people in the middle of the growing season, you could otherwise just stop worrying about us and focus on the afflicted cities.



It's the modern world's system of universal debt that's dangerous. Our community isn't decaying, it's growing. It's growing crops.

Gloves Off

I'm not sure that invoking the French Revolution is a great idea right now, but here we are.



And then there's this truly astonishing ad. This is World Wrestling Federation stuff. If Biden happened to win after seven more months of ads like this, he'd be a laughingstock the day he took office. If he's up to taking office, of course. That's looking unclear, which is likely to be the focus of yet more forthcoming ads.

Demagoguery seems to be the order of the day. Not that these people deserve better, but there are some pretty clear warnings from history about following this path.

Havamal 38

Raven sends a piece about a Norwegian mountain pass that has recently become clear for the first time in a long time. The last time was apparently the Viking Age, and many artifacts are being discovered. Along the way they quote my favorite verse from the Havamal.

There are photos of some artifacts, and video of the pass and another about tunics.

Judicial Review of Petty Tyrants

An argument that we should see more of it, and no deference given by the courts to "authority figures" who exceed their constitutional powers.

Motions to get real

Some of the legal pushback against seemingly punitive religious restrictions appears to be working.

Thank you, Captain Obvious

It's almost as if an unusually high proportion of inmates didn't share your notion of what's conscionable.

With this guy at the helm, I can't imagine why NYC is having so many problems.  Income redistribution, universal pre-K, free health care for illegal immigrants in a sanctuary city--it shoulda been a paradise!

Newbie lawyers can't take the bar for a while

Glen Reynolds discusses the dilemma of law school grads who will be delayed by coronavirus in their quest to hang out a shingle.  I'm all over the place on this one, between sympathy and indifference.  I'd certainly have hated to have to wait, after working for three years to grab the brass ring.  On the side of declining to shed a tear, however, I note that law students of only moderate ability in OK schools already earn a pretty good living working for law firms for several years before they take the bar.  It's not a huge burden for them to keep that up for another year or so before they snag a license.  The biggest inconvenience is that they can't go into immediate independent practice as brand-new lawyers, but that's very hard to pull off under the best of circumstances.

People are discussing the possibility of granting new graduates some kind of provisional license until we can go back to administering the bar exam to crowds.  Others are arguing that the bar exam is outmoded and should be ditched entirely.  Re the former, it's beyond me why a written exam can't be administered consistently with social-distancing measures.  Re the latter, it's the same unending argument we face in public schools:  whether our schools have degenerated into "teaching to the test."

There's no doubt the bar exam is a rudimentary test, a low standard of competence.  It would be a shame if most law schools did no better than enable their graduates to pass it.  In fact, however, a surprising number of law school graduates can't pass it, which should suggest either that some schools are doing a wretched job of teaching, or that students are being accepted to law school who don't belong there, or both.  What's more, absent a standard test, it's hard to imagine that an awful lot of law school administrations wouldn't drift into social justice legal basket-weaving and navel-gazing, in which a passing grade depended on attending the right protests, and graduates gained practically no mastery of the nuts and bolts of even the most straightforward kind of law.  Basket-weaving and navel-gazing are easier and more fun to teach.

Clearly only the fear of loss of accreditation and/or failure to secure tuition checks spurs some law schools to find some way to avoid letting the percentage of its bar-passing graduates drop below a certain level.

No. Good talk

A few proposals that are going over like a flight of bird dogs:  how about if we close the grocery stores, too?  Also, why not outlaw homeschooling?  My favorite rationale from that one is "to ensure the proper role of government" in our kids' lives.  It's been keeping me up nights for sure.  A heartbreaking number of kids have too little government in their lives.

Another good rationale is "with homeschooling we have no way of knowing if kids are learning anything."  Apparently we lack data about how homeschooled kids blow the doors off public-school kids.  Yes, I know the sample is skewed, but that's irrelevant if the proposal is to outlaw the homeschooling that's actually occurring.  It matters only if you want to argue about closing the public schools instead, and replace them with 100% homeschooling.

I used to wish I'd been able to afford Harvard.  I don't wish that any more.

Relative dangers

We're far from understanding the health and safety impacts of quite a few inter-related factors over the last couple of months.  Many people point to the danger of increased alcoholism--not to mention more immediate outright suicide--from the lockdown combined with joblessness, but that's still an awfully fuzzy, speculative, unquantifiable picture.  There's also a concern about deferring non-emergency procedures long enough to be nearly as dangerous as ignoring emergencies, but again, we're still guessing there.

I've been wondering about the bullets we may have dodged from hospital-acquired infections and simple medical error.  There's also clear reason to think that extreme social distancing has blown a giant hole in normal seasonal rates of sometimes deadly respiratory illness.  This chart is pretty amazing:

Improvise and overcome

If it saves one life

CBS notes that March 2020 was unusual for its lack of school shootings.  Yay for homeschooling, the only way to keep the kiddos safe!  Snopes was on the job immediately, crowing "Trump halts school shootings!"  Just kidding, they gave the CBS report a sniffy "Most false" rating, a/k/a "Needs context," which is Snopesian for "inconveniently true, but it depends on how you define your terms, and anyway shut up."

I keep seeing posts worrying about helpless children stuck at home with their abusive families, not so many about kids relieved they don't have to worry about being raped or knifed in the girl's room or behind the gym.  There's a lot of angst about losing everyone's favorite source of daycare and free lunches, less about whether kids are missing out on the acquisition of knowledge.  Some kids are pretty happy about skipping the 3-hour-a-day commute.

Sword Welding

An article explains the spread of bronze sword making techniques across Europe. It also makes some guesses about fighting techniques.

Unlike axes, spears, or arrows, “swords are the first objects invented purely to kill someone,” says University of Göttingen archaeologist Raphael Hermann, who led the new study. Bronze swords—used across Europe from 1600 B.C.E. to 600 C.E.—were made of a mixture of copper and tin, which was softer and harder to repair than later iron weapons. That meant Bronze Age weapons and fighting techniques had to be adapted to the metal’s properties. “Use them in a clumsy way, and you’ll destroy them,” says Barry Molloy, an archaeologist at University College Dublin who was not involved in the study.

As a result, some archaeologists suggested bronze blades served a largely ceremonial purpose. At most, they argued, fighters adapted their technique to the metal’s limitations: Perhaps Bronze Age warriors actively avoided crossing swords to spare their weapons. “Stab somebody in the guts, and you won’t have a mark on your sword at all,” Hermann says....

For example, marks on the replica swords made by a technique known to medieval German duelists as versetzen, or “displacement”—locking blades in an effort to control and dominate an opponent’s weapon—were identical to distinct bulges found on swords from Bronze Age Italy and Great Britain.

Next, Hermann and colleagues put 110 Bronze Age swords from Italy and Great Britain under a microscope and cataloged more than 2500 wear marks. Wear patterns were linked to geography and time, suggesting distinct fighting styles developed over centuries, they report this month in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Displacement, for example, didn’t show up until 1300 B.C.E. and appeared in Italy several centuries before it did in Great Britain.

“In order to fight the way the marks show, there has to be a lot of training involved,” Hermann says. Because the marks are so consistent from sword to sword, they suggest different warriors weren’t swinging at random, but were using well-practiced techniques.

Our studies of fighting techniques even of steel swords in the Middle Ages -- which were quite well-made -- suggests that most parries were done with the flat rather than edge-to-edge. No surprise this would have been even truer of bronze swords.

Have you noticed the air pollution clearing up?

The Vices Around Alcohol

I think we can all appreciate this tweet:

Symptom-free viral infection

This ZeroHedge article expresses alarm about "stealth transmission," but jumps to a huge, unwarranted conclusion.  Almost all of the sailors aboard the Roosevelt have been tested, the results showing that about 600 out of 4,800 contracted the virus.  Of those, about 60% never showed any symptoms.  The article assumes this is terrible news, because it means that asymptomatic transmission is a huge, scary risk.

But I don't see that the article makes any kind of case for asymptomatic transmission; it could be that nearly all the sailors who fell ill were infected by one of the 40% who did show symptoms.  What's more, another reasonable interpretation is that we lucked out:  we may be able to get to whatever percentage of the population is required for herd immunity--I've heard estimates from 40% to 80%--with less than half of those unlucky citizens suffering so much as a sniffle.  Is it conceivable that people are contagious when asymptomatic?  Sure, we haven't ruled that out, but even if it's true, they may still be much less contagious than people with symptoms, so there remains a lot of use in checking people for fevers and quarantining them when they're spotted.  It's not uncommon for a virus to be slightly contagious when asymptomatic (or within a couple of days of becoming symptomatic) but to become wildly contagious when symptoms appear, so clamping down on people with symptoms is still effort well spent, along with tracing their contacts for the prior few days.  We may miss some Typhoid Mary's, but that doesn't mean we're utterly helpless to use testing in combination with contract tracing.  It's just not clear yet.

That means we are far from an ability to reassure people that coronavirus is perfectly risk-free, but so what?  We don't need to reach zero risk.  Not just the existence but the level of risk matters when you're considering economy-crushing curative measures.  A few people will be very unlucky about this pathogen; I don't want to be among them, nor do I want my loved ones or even remote acquaintances to be among them.  I also don't want anyone struck by lightning, but I'm not going to ask anyone to stay inside for the rest of his life to avoid it.  We need to reach a reasonable level of confidence that we know the worst damage this thing is likely to do, then take whatever steps are sensible in light of the risk.  When that happens, this really will be "sort of like the flu"--or sort of like car crashes--risks to minimize, but not at the cost of the rest of our lives and society, no matter how much we grieve for the tens of thousands of people we lose every year from the irreducible risk.

Confidence at such a level is going to take some more data about transmissibility, a grasp of what it will take to reach herd immunity, and perhaps a better understanding of why hospitals in Italy were overrun but hospitals in many other countries, like ours, were not, whether because our "inequitable" health systems are better at handling sudden emergencies, or because we're less crowded, or because doctors are getting a better handle on all kinds of potential treatments.

Update:  some even weirder numbers from a Boston homeless shelter, where 146 out of 397 residents (37%) tested positive, and 100% of the positives were asymptomatic.

*Blink*

Headline: “ Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: Abortion During Coronavirus ‘Is Life Sustaining’”

I mean I guess I know what she means, but man.

San Franciscan Nights

Here's a song by the Animals, of "House of the Rising Sun" fame, which I'd never heard until this week.



I went to San Francisco in 1993. It was fine, but the experience wasn't life-changing for me. I suppose it had a moment in around 1969.

It's a plan

I'm hoping this will get us back on a path where those who feel a need to shelter can continue to do so, and everyone else can ease back into society.  The President's plan puts a lot of emphasis on ensuring that the hospitals are ready to handle whatever load they're going to get.

The point of the lockdown was never advertised as eliminating the disease, only ensuring that cases didn't hit so hard and so fast that we faced the intolerable image of hospitals turning people away, or parking them helplessly in the hallways or parking lots.

“Above My Pay Grade”

The governor of New Jersey thinks the Constitution is above his.

It’s the first line in his oath.

Beds available

Whether because we overestimated the spread of infection, or because social-distancing worked, or both, we seem to have staved off the worst scenarios of overloaded hospitals.

Quality News Reporting At All Time Lows

Georgia Governor Kemp, whom I don't especially admire, made a reasonable decision to exempt anti-virus masks from Georgia's long-standing anti-masking law. That law was written for the express purpose of preventing Klan rallies designed to intimidate people.

So...

I'm beginning to lose my commitment to trying to keep the language on this blog clean and PG-rated.

Tombstone

Twenty-five years old, it was late to be a great American Western. But it was.

For veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was their “go-to” movie, that one cassette or disc every outpost played repeatedly. Troops adopted the lingo, calling each other things like “lunger” and “law dog.” Alpha-male admirers include police officers; one pulled up his shirt to display Ringo’s likeness sewn onto his Kevlar vest. The movie has no lack of female devotees, and younger fans often tell [Johnny Ringo's actor] that they have bonded with parents and grandparents while enjoying the movie together; Tombstone now boasts three generations of fans. It’s very much one of those compulsively watchable movies that whenever you come across it on television, you wind up watching again until the end credits roll. How odd it is, then, that a movie that now seems so perfectly realized was once a patient whose heart had stopped beating and required the movie equivalent of a defibrillator to start pumping again.

It's a movie with a lot to recommend it. REBELLER has a two-part series on the hardships of shooting it; one and two.

Testing, testing

Another good Powerline analysis picks apart some of the wilder attempts to filter every controlavirus theory through the filter of "which factors might help or hurt the situation while enabling us to link them to something CheetoMan did more or less than other countries."  Germany has a surprisingly low case fatality rate.  Is it because Germany has universal care?  Then why is its rate more like ours and less like that of, say, Italy or the UK?  Is it because Germany tests a lot?  That's a tempting theory, because Trump inexplicably failed to keep the CDC and FDA from bollixing that one up by the numbers.  Anything good a bureaucrat does is courageous Resistance; anything bad is Trump's dereliction of duty.

Powerline makes the interesting suggestion that testing can work pretty well in the special case where the outbreak happens in a young healthy population, in this case returning skiers, and robust testing and contact tracing keeps infections from exploding in older, more vulnerable populations.

Testing's nice, but I'd rather see attention to treatment and vaccine development, along with new distancing protocols that are tailored carefully to protecting vulnerable populations while allowing others to get back to work.

Herd immunity vs. herd mentality

There are good reasons for and against state-mandated lockdowns.  There are no good arguments for the shoddy press coverage given to South Dakota's relatively libertarian governor.

Fake News Today

The Indispensable BB: "More Government Officials Calling For Common-Sense Religion Control."

Usually I'm content to quote the headlines. This one deserves a fuller reading.

More government officials across the country are calling for common-sense religion control.

The officials insist they don't want to ban religion entirely -- they just want some basic, common-sense laws to regulate it. From background checks to licensing requirements and forced church closures, state officials everywhere are leading the charge to implement much-needed regulations on the practice of religion.

"It's past time that we begin implementing basic, common-sense laws against potentially problematic religions," said Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. "Nobody's coming for your religion -- we just want some safe and sane restrictions on it."

All analogies always break, but this one is fairly robust. As you would defend your faith, keep ahold of your rifle. If you have no rifle, by God go get one -- if you can still find one for sale.

Raising a Comment to a Post

Thos. wrote something that I thought deserved to be raised to the front page.

I see the present wrangling over pandemic-related issues (both epidemiologic and economic) as an indicator that we are strongly trending from a high-trust to a low-trust society.

At the (admittedly not-achievable-given-human-nature) upper bound, a high trust society would look like this: public officials and other experts would clearly lay out what they know (and don't know) about the public health threats, and the best-available understanding of how to address them -- all while trusting the public will neither ignore the possible risks, nor panic over the information. The public, on learning of the risks, would voluntarily agree to the official recommendations, even if the burden was heavy, understanding that the response required a significant public cooperation, but with the understanding that they could trust the public officials and experts to not extend those burdens any longer than necessary (and likewise trusting that no public official would make a temporary expediency into a permanent restriction on freedoms).

A low-trust society looks a lot like what we have today: Public officials and experts withholding information to avoid public panic. (Also, withholding information about mask use to protect the supply for their own use.) Using emergency declarations to further political agendas. Spreading rumors to discredit other public officials or experts. Regarding any discovered uncertainty about facts or data as proof of intentional deceit.

In short, IF we had reason to trust each other, we wouldn't need to worry that pandemic-response measures - even extreme measures - were the death knell of personal liberty. It's pretty clear that we don't live in that world anymore.

This is a very good point. It's also easier to trust when the government is asking rather than telling. I 'went in' on the seventh of March, long before there were orders to do so, because it was clearly the right thing to do. I voluntarily agreed to what were still only recommendations, and did my best to think of ways to make it work more effectively.

The harder they push, though, the less willing I am to tolerate it. It's harder to trust a government that bans your right to protest it. It's harder to trust a government that will arrest you for showing up to criticize them. The government has also been lying, as noted, about things like masks' effectiveness. They are treating us and our rights with contempt, and there is very little reason to trust anyone who holds you in contempt.

There is a great deal of damage being done here.

All Basic Rights Suspended

First religious ceremonies, now the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances. I assume we'll be receiving orders to quarter soldiers in our home soon.

It may be unwise to assemble to protest the government, but the government cannot legitimately rule the right to protest 'non-essential.' They've done so illegitimately, and the police have made arrests and dispersed the protest.

Some Federal courts are still open; perhaps one will act to restrain the governor of North Carolina. If not, well, we aren't permitted to protest him. I suppose we could still write a sharply-worded letter.

Or, you know, do other things.

Threat levels

I'm with the Scots.

Fake News Today

BB: “Medical Experts Confirm Democrats Have Developed Herd Immunity To Sexual Assault Allegations.”

A Soft CALEXIT

A new trade pact on the West Coast forms.

The Great Escape

Wretchard:

As the northern hemisphere begins to emerge from the worst of the pandemic, political punditry is focusing on two issues: how to reopen the economy and how to decouple from China. The two subjects are related because a large part of the Western economy is joined at the hip with Beijing. To a substantial degree, China produces what America consumes. Each country's holdings in the other are enormous. They are bound by innumerable contracts, deals, projects and cross-posted personnel that are not easily severed.

This system of cross-dependency was consciously pursued to vaccinate the world against a repetition of the two world wars. However, globalization also significantly eroded the independence and freedom of action of individual nations, though not each to the same degree. It permitted asymmetries to arise between the more aggressive and secretive regimes at the expense of those which, perhaps naively, adhered more closely to the posted rules.

The Great Firewall of China, currency manipulation, the infiltration of network equipment, island grabbing in the South China Sea and technological espionage are examples of asymmetry which the great economic interests were willing to turn a blind eye to to preserve existing deals, though the populist uprising in the West served notice that things could not continue that way forever. When the coronavirus erupted in Wuhan in mid-December 2019 and Beijing misled the world to catastrophe, the model was no longer viable.

So what now?

Perhaps nothing will prove more difficult to salvage from the train wreck than individual rights, the fundamental building block of subsidiarity, which are being eroded at an unprecedented rate. The need to track the whereabouts of literally every citizen in the name of "contact tracing" the public means government will demand to know exactly where you've been and who you've ever met with. Scrupulous records will be kept on the public's biometric profile to make offices habitable again.

Or not. Death is preferable to the loss of liberty; and governments that insist on that deserve to be destroyed. George Washington fought his revolution during a smallpox epidemic. We don't have to accept the loss of freedom, as long as we are willing to accept the risk of death.

Stranger on the Shore

Some good un-fake news

Boris Johnson has been released from the hospital.

Easter Fake News

BB: “Roman Authorities Investigating Jesus For Violating Stay-In-Tomb Order.”

Happy Easter

A selection of verses.

Old number 236

Holy Saturday

Are there hymns for Holy Saturday? My experience has always been that no Mass is said, and so no hymns are sung. We have only secular comforts.

Well here is one of those. It's a mournful song, but the singing itself means something.



And here is Elvis -- I don't think I've ever posted an Elvis piece before, in spite of all the rockabilly I've put up over the years. It's secular, except for being addressed to the Lord; and you can imagine a similar objection being raised in the face of the crucifixion, by a man who would have preferred a different cup.

Good Friday

I don’t have any great words this year, but it is right to mark the occasion. Endure the fast, have faith that better things will come.

Go in Peace

A deliberate lack of subtlety, the analyst suggests; or perhaps a declaration of intent.

California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America’s budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California’s multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear.

Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state” to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”

“Nation-state.” “Export.”

The analysis is entirely partisan as usual, but California going its own way is a perfectly acceptable solution.

UPDATE: The sound is different here.

What would we do without the press

 This would make a better press conference:

 

A Conservative Revolution

This is a good piece. Bdoran will be pleased that its constitutional critique goes beyond the Bill of Rights, and invoked especially Article I Section 8.

Encryption is Good

We should oppose this law, and any other attempt to force government backdoors into our encyrption.

By the way, if you don't already use Signal, it's a pretty good system. From what I can tell, it's as secure as anything is -- which is to say, not perfectly.

Better Watch Out

This report that people are 'panic buying' baby chickens reminds me of a story about my grandmother. This was my mother's mother.

One time there was a special deal on baby chicks, so that they could be had for a penny apiece. She bought a dollar's worth, that is a hundred baby chicks, on the assumption that many of them would die before attaining adulthood. As it happened, every single one of those chicks grew into full-grown adult chickens. As a consequence, she had to kill and pluck a hundred chickens that year.

That's the sort of thing that can happen if you don't watch out.

Masterful Storytelling

The brilliance of this cartoon is that you don't need to see the setup to understand the dynamic. No words are required, either. This was very well done.



I've been thinking about the old cartoons lately, and how well they were able to express things. This is a good example.

Return of the Hyborian Age

Holy Week

I guess I clean missed Palm Sunday this year. Truly, Lent seems to be going on longer than usual. Officially Easter is on Sunday.

Maybe we'll have a miracle. It happens, I've heard; maybe I've even seen one or two. Maybe more than one or two.

Breaking ranks

For a nice change of pace, one of the President's political opponents responds to him like a human being. Earlier I predicted that, if chloroquine proved effective, the press would switch instantly to complaining that President Trump didn't provide it quickly enough. It looks like we have an intermediate step to get through, which is to suspect that he's making money off of supplying it to needy people.

Since We're Doing Language Warnings Today....

...a cautionary tale from Twitter on the use of Zoom.

With appropriate music.

Liberties Lost to be Restored

We have much work to do.

Guns are Durable Goods

The British don't seem to grasp that.

Royal bodyguards responsible for keeping the outcast Prince Andrew and a number of other royals safe have had their guns swapped out for cheaper tasers, it has been reported.

The royal protection officers assigned to Princess Anne and Prince Edward have also allegedly lost their firearms as part of a drive to reduce protection costs for minor royals and politicians, the Sun reports.

So you're going to replace the firearm you already paid for with a taser you're buying new? It's not like you have to replace these things very often. Even with regular training fires they last a long time, and can be maintained at relatively low costs.

It's a false economy in another way, too: how much is the ransom for a kidnapped royal going to cost?

Flyting

Language warning, although it's 500 years old.

The five sections to the compilation are devoted to religious themes, moral or philosophical themes, love ballads, fables and allegories, and comedy, especially satire. The latter section is where one is most likely to encounter the swears, particularly in the poetry of William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy. Both poets feature in the poem where the notorious F-word appears: "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie."

Flyting is a poetic genre in Scotland—essentially a poetry slam or rap battle, in which participants exchange creative insults with as much verbal pyrotechnics (doubling and tripling of rhymes, lots of alliteration) as they can muster. (It's a safe bet at this art form.)

Dunbar and Kennedy supposedly faced off for a flyting in the court of James IV of Scotland around 1500, and their exchange was set down for posterity in Bannatyne's manuscript. In the poem, Dunbar makes fun of Kennedy's Highland dialect, for instance, as well as his personal appearance, and he suggests his opponent enjoys sexual intercourse with horses. Kennedy retaliates with attacks on Dunbar's diminutive stature and lack of bowel control, suggesting his rival gets his inspiration from drinking "frogspawn" from the waters of a rural pond. You get the idea.

Flyting is not just "a poetic genre in Scotland," but in fact also Old Norse. Several of the surviving stories about the Norse gods involve them mocking each other in this way, especially Lokasenna (Loki actually did have sex with a horse) and Hárbarðsljóð (in which Odin mocks Thor while in disguise as a boatman).

Golden Ring

So this is a George Jones and Tammy Wynette song.



I never liked their version, but here's a version I kind of do like.



If you only know one Tammy Wynette song, it's "Stand by Your Man," more than likely. George Jones was a difficult husband and her well of inspiration to write that song was deep. This song, which takes a love all the way from beginning to end, is probably similarly inspired.

A Novel Finished

This quarantine has lasted long enough that I actually finished editing this novel.  Now I suppose I need to make some decisions about how to publish it.  I guess Amazon is what everyone does now, especially since no one can go to physical bookstores anyway.

If any of you have any useful advice or suggestions, let me know.  I've never published a book before.

Long Ago in Scotland

Today is the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath. Longtime readers of Grim's Hall know this declaration well, but just in case:

[Robert the Bruce, and not Edward like the Pope thought], too, divine providence, his right of succession according to or laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of us all have made our Prince and King. To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand.

Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

It is one of the great documents of human history, from one of the best moments in human history.

Meanwhile in Scotland...

National Tartan Day

It's National Tartan Day, which is an opportunity for Americans to celebrate Scottish heritage -- both our personal heritage, and the tremendous contributions that Scotland has made to our national heritage. Many states have registered district tartans that residents can wear, including both the state in which I was born and the state in which I currently reside.

The Carolina District Tartan

Georgia District Tartan

Disgrace

Couldn't agree more.

New rules in, but some old rules out

Minor silver lining.As Glenn Reynolds says, let's get to work making it permanent.

Not an OPEC fan

I can live with this:

Trump said Saturday at a White House press briefing he’s opposed OPEC his whole life, and characterized it as a cartel, or monopoly. “I don’t care about OPEC,” he said. He threatened to use tariffs if needed to protect the domestic oil industry, even as he predicted that Saudi Arabia and Russia would come to an agreement.

Test fail

The botched rollout of bottlenecked coronavirus testing is fertile ground for left-vs.-right bashing: it simultaneously shows that the Trump administration callously or stupidly failed to get the CDC to do something right, and that the CDC is the deadly, bottlenecking, calcified, politicized Deep State the Trump administration is saddled with. I remain unconvinced that testing is the most important thing right now, much as I would love to have the luxury of 100% knowledge of who in this country harbors either live virus or effective antibodies.

Powerline notes that the numbers from Japan and Seoul suggest that testing isn't brilliantly correlated with death rates per capita, which is a lot more interesting data than case-positive rates. Early on, fabulous testing might allow a few sparks to be stamped out before they spread; at this point, we're probably past that strategy.  It's possible that masks, or other factors such as social-distancing, ICU beds or ventilators per capita, or treatments will prove more important:

Perhaps these experts should look harder at the actual data and not just their models. The data certainly suggest more testing may not be our savior. Alternatively, the Trump administration should consider asking governors to mandate, not suggest, that their citizens wear face masks in public. South Korea’s and Japan’s experience suggests that combining this policy with one that more surgically isolated the elderly and most vulnerable while allowing most of the country to go back to work would provide more effective protection from the virus and at a far, far lower cost.

The case fatality rate for governments

From Ed Morrissey:

... Europe has rediscovered why borders matter and why government works best on the principle of subsidiarity. The borders lesson got taught the hard way, as I wrote two-plus weeks ago, after Europe and the US precipitated a massive refugee crisis by decapitating the Qaddafi regime in Libya. The flood of refugees from there and Syria created cultural dislocation throughout the Schengen Zone, provoking the Brexit push in the UK and setting the stage for their current disunity.

It should come as no shock that Germans expect the German government to prioritize Germans in an existential crisis rather than a super-national quasi-governing body. Nor should it shock anyone that the same is true for the French, the Italians, and so on. That doesn’t mean that they can’t work cooperatively to approach common interests and problems, but that in a crisis, they’re responsible to their own citizens first and foremost....

And:

"... All these European rules need to be reviewed. In recent years, Europe actually made us close hospitals and schools. Then, in our hour of need, the citizens of Italy realized we are on our own."

Reasserting Constitutional Limits on Government

The Third Amendment to the Constitution is perhaps the one least violated by the government. Yet if the government ever wished to violate it, by quartering soldiers in private homes, it would almost certainly be during an emergency like an insurrection. Governments have an interest in suppressing insurrections, and in many cases it may even be legitimate that they do so. In other cases, governments that have violated natural rights deserve to be overthrown. But whether they are deserving or not, if a future American government desires to place soldiers inside your home to keep an eye on you, it will probably be because of an insurrection. An insurrection is an emergency, but it does not justify setting aside the Third Amendment -- it is precisely for such an emergency situation that the Third was written.

The present emergency has led to a lot of different levels of government violating the Constitution (and state constitutions) in various ways. Always this is said to be a temporary matter with which we should not be overly concerned, because there is a legitimate interest at stake and the powers are only emergency powers. That is not the way the Constitution is supposed to work.

This Reason article focuses on the Second Amendment, which is always in peril as the common right to bear arms is threatening to the powerful in every generation. But consider also the First:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment addresses Congress, but it is supposedly fully incorporated against the states. Lately we have seen bans on worship services being held. That is a violation of "free exercise," and also "the right of the people peaceably to assemble." In fact all of these bans on gatherings of 10 or more people are unconstitutional abuses against the free assembly clause. It may well be wise public policy to suggest that people do not assemble at this time. There may well be an emergency; but that itself cannot be adequate, because governments can always generate emergencies when they wish to do so.

The counterargument is that people should die if we allowed assemblies and 'merely' recommended against them. People may well. But many Americans have died to preserve these liberties, and not just while acting bravely under arms: in the Civil War, for example, disease probably killed more people than weapons. "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free," said the Battle Hymn of the era. Making men free was the important thing; dying was a small matter, even a bad death of disease in an encampment.

I have no wish that anyone should die, though everyone shall. But we must not lose focus on first principles. The only legitimate purpose for any government to exist is to preserve and enforce the natural rights. Any government that becomes destructive to those ends may be altered or abolished. This one has been pressing well past its limits. However wise the policy in terms of suppressing disease, if it destroys our natural rights it puts the cart before the horse. The function of government is not to preserve lives but liberty.

I am willing to endure a tactical pause while it seems to enjoy the democratic support of my countrymen. Soon, though, we shall need to reassert limits on the beast we call Leviathan.

The Great Gold Robbery of 1933

It was conducted by the FDR administration against the American people.

Lifeboat rules

If this doesn't inspire residents to rise up and replace their HOA board with something more humanoid, nothing will.

That must have hurt

The New York Times article drips with doubt, but can't quite avoiding the conclusion that doctors find chloroquine helps.  Michigan's governor caved a while back.  Not even Nevada's governor wants to be seen now as obstructing treatment.  Fact-checkers are racing to prove that no one seriously obstructed it in the first place. Within a week, we'll hear criticism that President Trump has blood on his hands for not making chloroquine treatments both free and mandatory in all 50 states two months ago.

Dollars and lives

What "essential" means:

It really hasn't occurred to most of you that businesses fail from not engaging in business. This just tells me the socialist indoctrination centers (schools) have utterly failed to explain how business works.

And let me stick in a note here that no matter what you think of the type of business, they have employees who suffer first. Go ahead and get your hate-on about whomever, but the wage earners will be out of jobs.

Quite soon we're going to need a combination of treatment options, targeted quarantine, and enhanced safety measures that let most workers and customers get back out at least partially into public, not just to buy food, but to support all kinds of economic movement.

That's a relief

What was that about supply and demand again?

This stuff is so intellectually challenging, that must be why we always get it wrong.

The reason we don’t have enough hand sanitizer is because something so simple is so regulated.

The FDA regulates hand sanitizer like a drug. Its ingredients are simple enough that it’s inexpensive most of the time.

But the regulations created a barrier to meaningful competition. And when demand spun out of control, there wasn’t enough supply. Prices soared and people who needed it were left without.

Got to have those barriers to competition, or else some consumer somewhere might have to assume some risk, and some manufacturer might have to be exposed to dog-eat-dog competition. Price spikes are the price we pay for making civilization infinitely safe, and supply crashes are the price we pay for avoiding the dreaded price gouging.

Texas: Religious Services Essential

You guys have a good governor. Now take care doing it so this doesn't become a stick to beat religious people.

Music from Cimmeria

Bye, bye, ER

The sole ER in my little county (we have no hospital) just shut its doors, ostensibly because of concern that doctors had too little PPE gear. In fact, the medical staff desperately wanted to stay open and had made great strides finding PPE donations. So far we have zero reported cases in this county. The ER has been operating in the red for the last year or so and has been taken over by its lender. The red ink results from the fact that the ER is freestanding and therefore ineligible for Medicare, in addition to which Blue Cross hates freestanding ERs and wouldn’t give them a PPO agreement on terms that would cover costs. The lender simply announced, without no warning, that it would shut its doors this morning and “furlough” staff for 45 days, helpfully adding that now they could pursue unemployment and other emergency benefits. I believe the peak for Texas is projected for May 15, i.e., about 45 days out.

The wokest Senator

Senator Tom Cotton was a voice crying in the wilderness:

On January 22, one day before the Chinese government began a quarantine of Wuhan to contain the spread of the virus, the Arkansas senator sent a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar encouraging the Trump administration to consider banning travel between China and the United States and warning that the Communist regime could be covering up how dangerous the disease really was. That same day, he amplified his warnings on Twitter and in an appearance on the radio program of Fox + Friends host Brian Kilmeade.

* * *

When the first classified briefing on the virus was held in the Senate on January 24, only 14 senators reportedly showed up. Cotton’s public and private warnings became more urgent that last week of January. In a January 28 letter to the secretaries of state, health and human services, and homeland security, he noted that “no amount of screening [at airports] will identify a contagious-but-asymptomatic person afflicted with the coronavirus” and called for an immediate evacuation of Americans in China and a ban on all commercial flights between China and the United States. Cotton first spoke to President Trump about the virus the next day. The Arkansas Gazette reported that he missed nearly three hours of the impeachment trial while he was discussing the matter with Trump-administration officials. The outbreak was “the biggest and the most important story in the world,” he said in a Senate hearing that week.

* * *

. . . On January 31, the president announced a ban on entry to foreign travelers who had been in China in the previous two weeks, while allowing Americans and permanent residents to continue to travel back and forth between the two countries. The measure was not as stringent as Cotton’s call for a ban on all commercial flights, but Cotton points out that the president “did not have many advisers encouraging him to shut down travel.” Advisers who were supportive tended to be national-security aides, he adds, while “most of his economic and public-health advisers were ambivalent at best about the travel ban.” 

“I commend the president greatly for ultimately making the right decision contrary to what the so-called experts were telling him,” he says.

Meanwhile, what were most of the other Senators distracted by? Well, you know.

Leadership failed, and by leadership I mean Comey

It was lies all the way down.

The FBI’s former chief of intelligence Kevin Brock, who served under prior Director Robert Mueller, said the new IG findings add to a body of evidence that Comey’s tenure at FBI was infected with a record of noncompliance.“

* * *

Not a single application from the past five years reviewed by the inspector general was up to snuff," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, lamented. "That’s alarming and unacceptable."

* * *

For longtime FBI leaders like Brock, Comey’s tenure inflicted a culture shift that may take years for the country’s premier law enforcement agency to shed. 

"This is not the way it has always been in the FBI. Very specific policies and procedures were written in the early 2000s to ensure the proper use of confidential sources, to assess their reliability and credibility, to protect against abuses and mistakes,” Brock said. “Somewhere along the line, actual practice drifted away from these protective policies. And management and legal counsel didn’t step in. Leadership failed.”

Mr. Cuomo has an epiphany

Now, whom do we know who's made a point like this one?

“Where do we get the masks? China. Where do we get the gowns? China. Where do we get the gloves? China. Where do we get the ventilators? China,” Cuomo told reporters at a press conference in Albany.

“I don’t know how we got into this position.”

In another portion of the briefing, he sounded a similar alarm.

“Why don’t we have medical supplies made in this country? Why are we shopping in China for basic medical supplies?

Perhaps he doesn't often think seriously about where the policies he supports lead us.  I can imagine saying, "I see now that the priorities I gave different goals have led us to this emergency, so I'm painfully rethinking my positions."  Nothing could induce me to say something as ridiculous as "I don't know how we got into this position" of relying on cheap imported Chinese goods.  Any semi-sentient person knows exactly how we got here.

Naturally the clamor is for more government intervention to force American companies to supply critical goods.  And yet in this emergency American companies are doing so voluntarily, when regulations don't stymie them.  In the long term, we consumers will have to demand it by being willing to pay more for secure local supplies instead of cheap, tenuous ones.

An Objection

They don't really have the resources to enforce all these mandates, which have proliferated far beyond their capacity to deploy anyone to force the issue. At some point they are going to hit a psychological wall at which the ordinary person is going to stop obeying. What then? Shoot to kill? Gun stores are essential businesses.

"Men's Grooming"

Apparently people think beards and long hair will be fashionable by summer. You can't get to the barber, see.

I haven't trimmed my beard since 2011, but I shave my head myself and have since it became obvious that male pattern baldness was in my genetic destiny. (That's OK; anyone can change their pronouns, but only a real man can display male pattern baldness.) I expect no changes in my 'grooming routine,' whatever that is.

Adjusting Fire as Necessary

UPDATE: For the immersion sects:

Staff of life

We were running out of bread, and I didn't feel like going inside the store, and curbside delivery slots are a week or more out, so I made some easy bread.  This isn't artisanal bread with my neighbor's tasty natural yeast, and I didn't fire up the outdoor oven, either.  It's just the easiest possible indoor-oven bread with commercial yeast, flour, water, and salt.  No kneading, just 5 minutes on a dough hook in a mixer to start, then about two minutes of work separated by 3 waiting periods.  Start to finish, maybe 6-7 hours.  It bakes at 450 degrees for 30 minutes or so, in a dutch oven with a lid, but you take the lid off to finish it.  When the internal temperature gets close to 200 degrees, it's done.

Ad Auctoritati

I started not going out back on the 7th of March. In the time since then I have left my property on now five occasions, two of which were motorcycle rides in the mountains, one of which was a motorcycle ride to town to check the post office and gas up, and two of which were trips to the county dump. I could have skipped the motorcycle rides, but they were through open country air and I enjoyed them.

Today's trip to the dump (and the post office) was the first one of these made under the lockdown order. I told my wife that I hadn't minded at all engaging in all this isolation when it was my decision to do it, but now that someone is trying to tell me that I have to do it I find myself rebelling against it internally. I'm still doing it freely -- it was my decision to start with -- but suddenly I'm aware of a prick of irritation that wasn't there before. I suppose that is just my nature.

Speaking of arguments against authority, read Eli Lake today on how the FBI has proven it cannot be trusted to surveil Americans. I've met Eli a couple of times over the years. He seems like a solid investigator of these sorts of issues, and -- unlike me -- not inclined to oppose authority just by instinct. His questions are always informed, good ones.

I happen to agree with him here, but of course I do.

Taking one's eye off the ball

From Ixtu Diaz:

In the midst of this festival of frivolity, harsh reality landed in Europe. In just ten days, we discovered that neither the tampon issue, nor the participation of transsexuals in the Olympic Games, nor the climate emergency were real problems, nor emergencies, nor anything of the sort. They were just fictitious problems, the pastimes of a generation that hadn’t known tragedy.

More and more my reaction to a lot of people's drama is "I don't have time for your BS."  I have only so much time, attention, and resources to try to solve problems.  Some pseudo-problems have dropped the bottom of my list, to deserve attention when the rest of the world has become perfect.

Michigan caves

Governor Whitmer saw the elephant, especially after the FDA also saw the elephant and authorized the use of chloroquine to treat COVID-19:

"When used under the conditions described in this authorization, the known and potential benefits of chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine sulfate when used to treat COVID-19 outweigh the known and potential risks of such products," FDA Chief Scientist Denise M. Hinton wrote in the approval letter.

Sweden Goes Its Own Way

This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that it will provide a laboratory for testing whether or not this approach is wise. If Sweden comes out ahead here, we may have to consider that our response ultimately did impose unnecessary costs on our nation in order to advance a misguided approach to the pandemic.

The other reason it's interesting to me is that Sweden is one of the premier countries held up as an exemplar by Bernie Sanders et al. Yet this approach is treated as a moral monstrosity when it is proposed by anyone here, or in the UK for that matter. How will they resolve the conflict that will create?

Hard Times All Around

Mexican cartels are really struggling.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has sent the price of heroin, methamphetamines and fentanyl soaring, as the likes of the Sinaloa cartel – and its main rival, the Jalisco “New Generation” – struggle to obtain the necessary chemicals to make the synthetic drugs, which typically come from China and are now in minimal supply.

“The cartels have suffered from COVID-19 due to the inability to get the regular shipments of synthetic opioids and precursor chemicals for the massive production of meth from China,” Derek Maltz, a former special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Operations Division in New York, told Fox News.

...

Obdola underscored fentanyl, which originates from China, has become the most coveted cartel commodity in recent weeks.

“In China, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), around 5,000 illegal drug laboratories have been processing synthetic drugs and chemicals to process them. Most of these drugs have Europe and North America as the main markets,” he continued.

Even the cartels can't trust China, it seems.

Pulling up the drawbridge

My county has now closed the boat ramps, not because it's seriously a public health risk for people to go out in boats to fish, but because leaving them open felt too much like an invitation for careless yahoos to come visit.  New short-term rentals and hotel/motel bookings are also halted for the next couple of weeks.  Right now this tourist town has no patience for tourists.  Everyone remembers the Spring Break and Mardi Gras idiots.  No one wants even casual contact with anyone he doesn't know and trust to have been behaving responsibly.

There's huge anxiety over a Corpus Christi TV news station's report of 2 "Aransas" cases.  Wherever the guy got his information, the chances are they didn't know the difference between two nearby towns with "Aransas" in their name and "Aransas County."  Much Facebook bandwidth is now devoted to nailing down with perfect precision where the two culprits, if they exist at all, are located at this precise moment.

I'm telling people it doesn't make the tiniest difference.  We can't know exactly how many cases are out there.  We already know there are some (probably so far not many) cases fairly nearby.  That's it, that's all you need to know, and as much as you possibly can know right now.  You don't need to know who they are or exactly where they live, and we're not going to put the tiniest effort into finding that out for you or broadcasting it.  You need to behave as though the disease were present, because if it isn't yet, it will be, and you'll never know exactly where it is no matter how infallible you think the TV news anchor or some "expert" is.

Nothing about this news changes how you need to behave:  stay home as much as you can, and wash everything you touch, for your own sake and for the sake of your duty to neighbors.  As far as your own emergency medical needs go, you don't have any yet, so here's the plan:  LATER, if you're short of breath, call an ER and arrange to follow their protocols for going in.  LATER, if you have a fever, be even more careful about contaminating anyone else, including your household.  If you have both, do both.  If you have a fever but aren't short of breath, keep isolating yourself as much as possible, and be ready on short notice to contact the ER if, and only if, you get short of breath.  If you never get short of breath, then you're pretty much golden, so don't borrow trouble.  Just don't spread it.

Cooties

Did the press really just melt down because a guy who converted his factory to mask-making read from the Bible?  Talk about purity obsessions.

As Ben Shapiro said, “If you’re angry at the guy shifting over his factory to produce 50,000 facemasks a day for medical professionals, you’re doing being human wrong.”

A Worthy Question

Do these closure orders constitute eminent domain, being a destruction of private wealth for a public good, and thus merit compensation?  I’d prefer the answer to be “yes,” though as a taxpayer I’d be on the hook for it. Limits on government power even in an emergency are needed. Otherwise government can always manufacture emergencies whenever it wants more power.

A statistical argument for chloroquine

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Roy Spencer noted an inverse correlation between malaria and COVID-19 in hundreds of countries:

If I sort all 234 countries by incidence of malaria, and compute the average incidence of malaria and the average incidence of COVID-19, the results are simply amazing: those countries with malaria have virtually no COVID-19 cases, and those countries with many COVID-19 cases have little to no malaria.

Here are the averages for the three country groupings:

Top 40 Malaria countries:

212.24 malaria per thousand = 0.2 COVID-19 cases per million

Next 40 Malaria countries:

7.30 malaria per thousand = 10.1 COVID-19 cases per million

Remaining 154 (non-)Malaria countries:

0.00 malaria per thousand = 68.7 COVID-19 cases per million

One possibility is the impact of widespread use of chloroquine as a long-term preventative for malaria. There are other possibilities, of course, including heat and humidity, but there also is an indication that patient populations being treated with chloroquine are not coming down with COVID-19. At least, I read that during the last week, but it's getting harder and harder to find a search engine that will generate any "chloroquine" results that aren't deeply skeptical and full of spiteful references to the Bad Man, fish-tank cleaner, and the suffering of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients, even while chloroquine manufacturers are dialing up cheap chloroquine production to 11 and donating doses by the tens of millions.

“We Cannot Direct The Wind, But We Can Adjust The Sails”

Dolly Parton reads bedtime stories. Do you know about Dolly Parton? She’s really something.

Outlaw Cinema For the People

For the next two months, REBELLER is going to be free to read. The legendary Joe Bob Briggs writes there often now.

Paid to be wrong

But wrong in a good cause!

Lockdown Time Now

North Carolina's just started one minute ago, and is scheduled to last until the end of next month.

Relax, We've Got That Climate Problem Licked

A new invention makes vodka from carbon dioxide.

Begging bureaucrats for beds

I'm pleased to see that Texas doesn't have a "certificate of need" program.  Let's make the bureaucrats seek a public referendum to get a certificate of need for a CON program.

A lot of things need to change.  November is coming.

What’s It Like To Be A Bee?

An investigation within limits.

Unfair tactics.

Red tape, red garbage

How many examples do we need of why everything the government touches becomes shoddy, overpriced, and in short supply?

Trends in most places show some promise

Supply lines

One of the things that made me the most nervous a couple of weeks ago was the difficulty of ordering food online. We routinely order a number of things that our grocery store doesn't stock, so when the grocery stock aisles got iffy and I wanted to avoid crowds anyway, my first recourse was to Amazon. It was disquieting how many things suddenly were out, from beans to rice to canned anything to almost any kind of cleaning supplies. I checked again today, though, and found supplies almost in an ordinary condition.

I've been using the local grocery's curbside service. It's clunky; you get a delivery date that's a week out instead of same-day. Once you choose your items, there's a very limited ability to add anything else you may think of. Substitutions and outages are still common. Still, there's minimal personal contact, which is safer not only for us but for the workers. Considering the conditions they're operating under, they're doing a great job and trying hard to be both conscientious and flexible. Our lurking neighbors (hello, lurking neighbors!) are being even more careful than we are, minimizing risk to themselves and to the 99-year-old materfamilias onsite.

Most of the county is being at least fairly careful. There is a growing resentment of outsiders who arrive from who-knows-where having practiced who-knows-what hygiene. My own feeling is that it's more important how we all act in public than whether we've been here for a short or long time. It's all about the hands and the face, and overcoming that careless tendency to think it's no big deal to be in public with a fever or a cough.

The local restaurants are trying to hold on by offering take-out and delivery. Controversy is brewing over whether it's best to support the ones offering discounts, or the ones imposing surcharges. Again, my own feeling is that it's more important to keep the restaurant enterprises together, so they can preserve jobs, than to supply the community with cheaper entertainment. If we just want cheap food, we're all able to cook at home. Food supplies became inconvenient for a while, but never to the point of hunger; mostly we just had to be flexible about substitutions. Because Mr. Tex and I cook most of our food at home anyway, we didn't feel the disruption nearly as much as many did.