More Action from Barr

It's encouraging to see the Justice Department actually attempting to restrain unconstitutional acts by the governors.

‘There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.” That, yet again, was the Justice Department’s message as it intervened on Sunday on the side of a Virginia church, which is suing Governor Ralph Northam’s lockdown against communal worship.

That's right, and it's crucial to fight for that principle. Far more Americans have died in wars to defend our freedoms than are at risk today even under the plausible worst-case scenarios. We cannot simply lay down what they won and preserved at so costly a sacrifice.

I'm not opposed to constitutional, sensible acts to limit the damage. Even where religion is concerned, it's reasonable for the government to issue warnings, advice, even attempt persuasion that people ought to voluntarily choose to forgo communal worship. It's not acceptable to simply ban it.

Smoking Guns at the FBI

Had the Department of Justice (DOJ) released the newly disclosed documents related to Gen. Michael Flynn three years ago, instead of fired FBI Director James Comey improperly leaking his “memos” on President Trump, there definitely would have been a special counsel — only it would have been investigating the FBI for gross abuse of power, not the Trump administration.

The new documents are in effect the “smoking gun” proving that a cabal at the FBI acted above the law and with extreme political bias, targeting people for prosecution rather than investigating crimes.

Sovereignty Resurgent

The Spectator USA published a collection of reflections arguing, inter alia, that borders work.

A Georgetown University public health expert confidently tweeted that ‘germs don’t respect borders’. If this is true, it is true only in the sense that respecting borders is a human trait. Viruses don’t write novels or read Playboy or develop gambling addictions or say ‘for all intents and purposes’ until it gets on your nerves, either.

This viruses-don’t-respect-borders business is a perfect globalist slogan. It conveys absolutely nothing but aggressively enough so as to cow others into swallowing any inclination to stand up and disagree with you. It is what is called in zoology ‘display’.

But in fact, the scientist is wrong. This virus happens to travel on people. If people can be made to respect borders, viruses will ‘respect’ them too, in the sense that they will not cross them. If this is true of households, then it is true of nations.

I think his point about the patience of working people like delivery drivers with more privileged classes being limited is valid, as well.

Transformative hermaneutics

Hey, where'd y'all go?

Where are the usual attacks on white male-dominated science? Where’s the “standpoint epistemology” to tell us how different is the knowledge intersectionally-appropriate feminist scientists would bring to this crucial problem? How many of those labs fiercely trying to find a treatment, a vaccine, a path forward, have a demographically appropriate number of women researchers? Not to mention racially and sexually “diverse” ones? What can possibly explain the lack of attention to this terrible problem of marginalization of the already oppressed?

Security theater

From Jim Geraghty's interview with a hospital honcho:

“Go out to the supermarket or the hardware store or wherever else people are being instructed to wear a mask or other facial covering, and you’ll see about half of them have pulled the mask down off their nose because it’s uncomfortable to breathe,” he said. “That totally defeats the purpose. There are people spending stupid amounts of money to buy N95s, and then wear them with big gaps around their mouth because they don’t take the time to learn how to use them properly — and they keep using them, even after they’re physically broken down and can’t seal properly. If I wanted to be one of those Karen scolds, I could get my [thrills] all day lecturing those folks, but since this is the epidemiologic equivalent of TSA Security Theater, and the typical American puts personal comfort and convenience first, it’s not worth doing. Then again, I’m not one of those persons who gets their [thrills] bossing others around.”

The man could turn a phrase

I don't when I've ever read such a brief, deadly letter, especially the devastating use of the "Yours" convention in the closing:

Philadelphia, July 5, 1775.

Mr. Strahan:--You are a member of parliament, and one of that majority which has doomed my country to destruction. You have begun to burn our towns, and murder our people. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations. You and I were long friends:--you are now my enemy, and I am

Yours, B. Franklin.

Good if True

ROK scientists believe that you develop a firm immunity from recovering from the virus.  Of course it’s too early to know if it lasts from year to year, and of course there are frequent mutations; but good if true all the same.

Week in Pictures is up

Gotta be a spoof

Can't be serious.

John Keats, 1795-1821

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.

I fall to pieces

Wake up, Jonah, and pray

The fog of medical war

WIRED so often runs annoying agitpop articles that it's a pleasure to find another piece there without an axe to grind, this time examining the continuing confusion over whether chloroquine is effective in COVID-19.  The author manages to point out that the opponents of the drug aren't yet in any more position to be sure that it's a failure than its advocates are in a position to know that it's a success.  All this without taking more than a few tiny potshots at President Trump.

I admit, however, to some disappointment.  I hoped by now we'd have clear evidence, and obviously it would have been nice to get confirmation that the drug works.

Georgia Leads the Way

Governor Kemp, scoundrel though he is, has been making some strong moves lately. Georgia has scrapped driver's license tests for teenagers, leaving it to parents to determine when skills are strong enough to justify the state issuing a license. They're pursuing the most aggressive re-opening plan in America. And they've ordered state agencies to plan for $3.5 Billion in cuts to balance out extra spending from the emergency.

Maybe being the most aggressive isn't the right road; maybe a middle path is wiser. The state is definitely showing commitment to individual liberty in a time of crisis, though, which is praiseworthy. I hope it works out well, and that the harm is as minimal as possible along the path they've chosen. One harm or another is unavoidable, whichever path is chosen.

May Day

God send us a merry month of May.

Here also are some of Tex's favorites, nominated in years past.

Armed Protesters Swarm Michigan Statehouse

The armed protest in Virginia a few months ago was friendly, peaceful, and completely failed to prevent the governor and legislature from enacting unconstitutional laws. In Michigan, today, a much smaller but much angrier protest is likely to encourage a governor with proven disdain for the Constitution and its norms to call out the National Guard. Of course, sentiment in the National Guard probably runs against her; and the President can always call the guard into Federal service and overrule her orders if he decides to do so.

Interesting times.

UPDATE:

She's calling the thunder.

Karen

You're probably aware of the development of a new stereotype called "Karen," a middle-aged white woman who acts from a position of tremendous cultural privilege. She's rude to workers, demands to see the manager and then chews them out because she isn't satisfied with the service, demands freebies and discounts and generally to be satisfied by someone else doing more for her.

I noticed today that both sides of the American virus discussion think that Karen is on the other side.

If you're on the keep-it-closed side, Karen is a woman who is ridiculously pushing for business to re-open even though it will endanger workers, because she wants those businesses to provide her with hairstyles and manicures and other luxuries, and to use shopping as an escape from her horribly-behaved children.

If you're on the open-it-up side, Karen is privileged enough to work from home or have a husband who supports her, and she is unconcerned with suffering and ruin being brought on business owners or workers put out of a job. Instead, she's calling the cops on you for letting your kids play at the neighbor's house, and leaving aggressive notes on your door if she noticed someone delivering groceries 'because quarantine means no visitors!'

Of course there are probably many tokens of both types in the real world, but it's amusing to me to see the disconnect. Both sides are sure Karen is a bad person, but they both think she's the other kind of person.

Overconfidence

A military AI outperforms humans in correctly lowering its confidence when judgments are made on limited information:

They couldn’t explain why they were overconfident; they just were. Overconfidence is human and a particular trait among highly functioning expert humans, one that machines don’t necessarily share.

It's worth remembering that, especially if you happen to be a high-functioning expert human. At least some of you are.

Go North From Jupiter

A fascinating article explores some new findings in the world of physics.

“And it seems to be supporting this idea that there could be a directionality in the universe, which is very weird indeed,” Professor Webb says.

“So the universe may not be isotropic in its laws of physics – one that is the same, statistically, in all directions. But in fact, there could be some direction or preferred direction in the universe where the laws of physics change, but not in the perpendicular direction. In other words, the universe in some sense, has a dipole structure to it.

“In one particular direction, we can look back 12 billion light years and measure electromagnetism when the universe was very young. Putting all the data together, electromagnetism seems to gradually increase the further we look, while towards the opposite direction, it gradually decreases. In other directions in the cosmos, the fine structure constant remains just that – constant. These new very distant measurements have pushed our observations further than has ever been reached before.”

In other words, in what was thought to be an arbitrarily random spread of galaxies, quasars, black holes, stars, gas clouds and planets – with life flourishing in at least one tiny niche of it – the universe suddenly appears to have the equivalent of a north and a south.

He goes on to say that these findings are so new and so weird that he's skeptical of them for now, even though it's his own work. That sounds like a real scientist to me.

Ethics and Re-Opening

Here is a proposal by an author you know well for approaching the problem of re-opening given that all options entail highly undesirable consequences.  It may be right or wrong, but it does at least lay out clear principles.

There is no option that does not entail extra deaths. Medical professionals seem to think that we will experience thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of extra deaths if we re-open quickly. The UN has produced two reports lately on the effects of the shut down, one of which says that hundreds of thousands of extra children will die of starvation; the other of which says that over a hundred million people will be pushed to the edge of starvation by the economic lockdowns.

So we have to choose between dark roads. That's the problem the model tries to address.

Intellectual relativism

This is a very peculiar article at Politico, arguing that in a pandemic, everyone is a "moral relativist," because if you're honest with yourself, you're willing to let someone die in order to open the economy back up.

If you've ever wondered why it's so hard to talk to a moral relativist about moral relativism, the article sheds a little light.  The author, at least, thinks that moral relativism means being willing to accept the idea that a policy might not be effective in producing 100% safety.  It doesn't occur to him to wonder, on the other hand, whether the policy he would prefer--keeping the economy shut down--would produce 100% safety.  Has he asked himself whether he's willing to let someone die in order to prevent the economy from opening back up?  I suspect he operates entirely on emotion, which makes these questions meaningless.

A standard definition would be that moral relativism is the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint (for instance, that of a culture or a historical period) and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others. What would be the moral judgment here? That saving a life is, on the whole, a worthy objective? That's the one area where there's no particular disagreement in the current pandemic policy debate. We're not even arguing about whether one probable saved life is more worthy than another, or how to weigh non-fatal damage against fatal damage. It's not moral relativism to consider whether a cure is more damaging than a disease. A truly morally relativist approach to the COVID-19 policy dilemma would be to question the assumption that saving lives is a moral imperative at all, and to criticize a would-be life-saver as privileging his pro-life fetish over some other value, such as community sacrifice, or extreme personal liberty, or strengthening the genome by Darwinian ruthlessness, or making more room in over-crowded nursing homes, or fattening the profit margins of Big Pharma. Alternatively, a moral relativist might argue that there was no infallible basis for preferring sacrifice, liberty, profits, etc., over longevity.

But if someone merely argues that he can tolerate the possibility that someone will die after a policy is implemented, you don't learn much about his view of moral relativism. He might think the body county is inevitable, or no greater than is likely in the context of some competing policy, or frankly unknowable at this point. He might come to all these conclusions despite entirely agreeing with his critic on the relevant moral judgments. He might equally well disagree on all the relevant moral judgments, without that's having any effect on his policy preference. The big difference would be that he openly acknowledges a belief that his moral judgments are based on a standard independent of his historical or cultural standpoint or personal preferences, and are "privileged" over moral judgments he considers wrong. His critic, on the other hand, is just as strident and inflexible in his moral judgments, but thinks he escapes the error of believing they are "privileged" simply because he can't articulate a reason for adopting them, clinging to them, or imposing them on skeptics--though he will certainly go on doing so.

The Flynn prosecution looks worse and worse

The notes the prosecution finally had to cough up, and even unseal, are deadly.

No Opening in North Carolina

Governor Cooper is taking a more cautious approach than Georgia, Tennessee, or South Carolina. I had a moment of hope when he scheduled a call today specifically for the rural parts of the state. It would make a lot of sense to do as Texas is doing, and begin with areas of low population density and where new cases are not emerging.

But no, what he wanted to talk about was government programs. Reopening will have to wait until we have “sufficient” testing capacity, whatever that means, and he wasn’t clear about exactly what the standard for sufficiency is. It also has to wait until they’ve fully staffed a 500-person task force whose job is to track down all the people who’ve come into contact with any new positives and quarantine them.

Until then, hey, we’ve got all kinds of welfare options, and eviction protections, and we hope you’ll apply for loans to keep your business paying people. And we swear that improving internet access and quality out there is a real priority for us so you can work from home. That’ll happen any year now.

A welcome shot of info

This WIRED article contains useful coronavirus information, with practically no slant or agenda.

The salacious, unverified Mr. Steele

Christopher ("The Dossier") Steele has been giving testimony under oath in the UK, implicating both Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice in the lucrative oppo research that became the dossier that became the Russia Collusion Special Counsel debacle.  At one point he identifies a DNC Perkins Coie lawyer as the source for one of his tidbits; other tidbits he simply paid for.

This striking at the head of the snake is intolerable and clearly has to be denied and denounced.  I'm curious whether they'll come up with a defense more convincing than "only a partisan idiot would rely on anything that man has to say."

Radio Silence

Democratic Senators mostly are keeping silent about the sexual assault charge against Biden. So-called “women’s groups” are refusing comment as well.

One prominent women’s political group cited a scheduling conflict and asked to be kept “in mind for other opportunities!” When pressed if the following day would work better, an associate said it would not, citing another scheduling conflict.

A few potential VP candidates have summoned up the courage to say they don’t believe Biden’s accuser, Tara Reade.  That answer is problematic for the party too, but it’s what they have to say if they say anything. So...

Where are the Hearings?

Were Joe Biden up for a SCOTUS position instead of the Presidency, at this point he would surely be facing a Kavanaugh-style hearing into these charges. The charges come with much more corroboration than any of the ones pointed at Kavanaugh (which is to say, more than none whatsoever plus exculpatory evidence suggesting that the charges were probably to certainly false).

So who runs the hearing on potential Presidents? The mainstream media, right? When do we get started with that? Or is it just going to be The Intercept and some right-wing publications?

Some Action

Barr sent formal instructions to Federal prosecutors to look for unconstitutional restrictions in emergency orders.

The Flynn gambit

There's no getting around the problem of Michael Flynn's guilty plea.  I'd say his case should have been thrown out a long time ago if it weren't for that horrible strategic error.  It's very tough to win a motion to withdraw a guilty plea no matter how seedy the prosecution's actions were; it almost requires the defense to argue that the defendant himself was misled into believing he broke the law.

Early reports, however, suggested that Flynn might have pled guilty in a desperate attempt to shield his son from a bad-faith retaliatory prosecution.  That's not quite like believing one's son is really guilty; it's more recognizing that these people can and will stop at nothing to ruin the life even of an innocent man.  By this standard, Flynn leapt on a grenade, which tells us absolutely nothing about whether he had a guilty conscience or a well-founded fear that the government could prove its case against him--which, to be honest, always looked terribly thin, even by Kafkaesque standards.

Last Friday's document dump included some material that's still secret, which requires the interested public to draw conclusions from how people are reacting to it, like intuiting the existence of a new planet by its perturbation of the orbits of others.  Certainly Flynn's new (and much better) counsel Sydney Powell was galvanized into doubling down on her motion to withdraw the guilty plea.  Andrew McCarthy believes the documents show that the prosecution withheld from the court the information that Flynn's guilty plea was predicated on a secret agreement not to terrorize Flynn's son.  I hope this will be the straw that broke the camel's back, even for a trial judge who's not demonstrating much concern so far.

There should be some jail time here, but not for anyone named Flynn.

Scorecards

When it comes to lockdown orders, the media standard has been hard to justify.  The only reliable rule I see is blue states good, red states bad.  From time to time, good/bad has meant early/late, or stringent/lax, but the goalposts move so fast and so inexplicably that I'm left concluding the only robust metric is blue/red.

New York has been a horrorshow, but the smart take continues to be that Cuomo is doing a bang-up job whenever he's not being personally sabotaged by the Bad Man.  Florida has done very well, but it's better not to talk about it, because Florida is demographically similar to New York, while experiencing virtually none of its severe problems, and we really don't like the cut of that de Santis fellow's jib.

In an imaginary world where the point of all this ink was not to influence the November elections, it's hard to imagine we wouldn't be concluding that lockdowns work best when they're targeted, flexibly responsive to hard-data results, and as un-intrusive as possible.  I do continue to wonder, though, whether the biggest difference isn't mass transit and single-family homes.  Remember, mass transit kills, while sprawl will save us all.

Keeping us safe from bad information

I didn't find the widely-shared interview with two moderately anti-lockdown California ER doctors all that persuasive, but I'm getting pretty tired of being protected from information that people think is too dangerous for me to hear.  So although I didn't link to the interview to begin with, I'm happy to link to it now, while it's still possible.

And the fact-checkers and community-standards police can bite me.  I'll decide what's misinformation and what's not, thank you.  I'd have a lot more patience with this approach if half of the garbage I see on "respectable" news sites didn't clearly fit my own definition of misinformation.

For AVI

Dark muttering, bright lines.

UPDATE: There is debate about the photo. See the comments here and at AVI’s.

Texas re-opens a bit

The governor announced a re-opening plan to begin this Friday, under which most businesses, including restaurants, may re-open at 25% of capacity.  There is an exception for hair salons and gyms, which remain closed.  Businesses in counties with fewer than 5 confirmed cases, which is almost half of Texas counties and includes my own, can operate at 50% capacity.

Counties have some leeway, but our County Judge and the two local mayors are going along.  Although my neighbors are disappointed that we apparently are not opening the public beaches and boat ramps, the aim of the order is not to give people more leisure options.  It's to restore jobs.

If case counts are not disappointing, all counties will shift to the 50% rule in a couple of weeks.

This is strictly a permissive order.  Businesses that don't feel ready to open aren't required to do so.  After the 2017 hurricane, most of the restaurants with good business-interruption insurance opted to stay closed as long as possible, knowing that it would be hard to turn a profit before most residents and tourists returned.  As I understand it, though, nearly all business insurance contains a pandemic exception, so owners will have to make difficult decisions about whether they can afford to stay closed, or for that matter can afford to re-open with reduced traffic.  Some will be able to thread the needle by operating with reduced staff, which will help with overhead.

Arms and White Samite

My novel is now published on Amazon, both in Kindle and paperback form. The Kindle version is as cheap as Amazon would allow me to set it, in order to make it as accessible as possible at a difficult time. If readers of the Hall are out of work, though, email me at grimbeornr (note final 'r') AT yahoo in order to obtain a PDF copy. I don't want any of you who might like to read it not to be able to do so.

I suppose the strangest thing about this is acknowledging my real name. Of course many of you knew it already, and any of you who cared would doubtless have figured it out without difficulty. The point of incognito is not that we do not know who each other are, but that we pretend not to know in order to enable more honest discussions than we can have otherwise. We will continue to operate in the same manner as always.

Puzzling numbers

The differing regional approaches to testing make it hard to figure out what the "positive" rates mean. In some areas, there's almost random sampling going on, while in others, most people are unlikely to have access to a test unless they have clear symptoms plus a troubling contact or travel history. A few samples included nearly all of a more-or-less captive population, like the souls aboard the Diamond Princess or the U.S.S. Roosevelt. Until today, all the results I'd seen suggested that well under half of the ordinary closed population will test positive, while something close to half of detectable cases were asymptomatic. (Note that "asymptomatic" doesn't tell you anything about whether a case is contagious. Pre-symptomatic or permanently asymptomatic patients may be very contagious, barely contagious, or variably contagious depending on the patient, the severity of the case, or the days since exposure, or all three.  Not every asymptomatic patient is a Typhoid Mary.)

HotAir has a piece today that reports anomalous results: the infection rates in prisons are sky-high, nearly 90%, and the percentage of asymptomatic positive testers is even higher. The only similar result I'd heard rumors of so far is the puzzling lack of severe cases among the U.S. homeless, and in the entire population of Bali. In the former case, speculation included the possibility that life outdoors was protective, while in the latter case people bandied about the notion that the Balinese lifestyle confers special advantages for immune systems. Neither explanation leaps out as likely for the prison population.  I suppose it's possible that both the homeless and the prison population have led such rough-and-tumble lives that they've been exposed to everything under the sun and have robust immune systems.  Maybe they're poised to take over the world.

Strategy vs. Consistency

Some deployments are worth more than others. This can be reflected in US policy. Right?

[Officials] said the president's military advisers have made the case to him that if the U.S. pulls troops out of Afghanistan because of the coronavirus, by that standard the Pentagon would also have to withdraw from places like Italy, which has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, officials said.

That's not how this works. We don't set blanket standards for where we will deploy troops; we deploy them where we think it is in our interests. If the additional risks of a major outbreak in Afghanistan outweigh the value of keeping a smaller number of troops there, you don't have to do it. If the advantages of maintaining air bases in Italy that can strike terrorist camps in Africa as well as providing air cover in Europe are bigger, you can maintain them even if the risk of an outbreak is worse. This is one of those places where consistency can be foolish.

Viral austerity

Texas is a pretty red state, but that doesn't mean it doesn't blow big bucks on all kinds of state-government fantasies when it's got the cash.  The talk now, however, is about "austerity," which I hope will mean serious thought about inducing the government to get back to tending to its knitting:

Just a few months ago, the Texas economy was growing at rates that outpaced those nationally. Lawmakers last session approved a quarter-trillion-dollar budget, and state income was projected to grow faster than previously expected. The comptroller’s office even estimated that lawmakers would have about $2.9 billion in hand upon their return to session. And that would be an important head start for lawmakers who would need to find new sources of state revenue to support the state’s increased commitment to funding public schools, among other things.

The virus, however, effectively wiped out that $2.9 billion surplus and then some. The choice now is pretty basic: Find new revenue or make significant cuts in basic state services. House Speaker Dennis Bonnen recently suggested that all state agencies cut their budgets by 5% now, rather than wait closer to the start of the next session when budget cuts could be draconian, less strategic and made under greater duress. This echoes Hegar, who has advised agencies to cut spending before lawmakers start deciding what will stay and what will go.

I find myself wondering about ERs, too. For a couple of months, we've gotten some data on what happens when people can't use ERs as the local free clinic for minor ailments. I'm looking forward to some analysis of the effects.

Greenshirting

The "dangerous" Michael Moore film "Planet of the Humans" has been retracted by its distributor.  The powers-that-be have declared that it contains misinformation, some of which contradicts the peer-reviewed consensus.

Maybe Moore can get to work now on a movie about censorship and herd mentality.

Taking a Piece of the Holy Land Home With You

If I ever make it to the Holy Land, I may have to get a tattoo.

It would be a fascinating memento of the journey, and, as of right now, would be a first for me.  It's apparently an old tradition, with deep and interesting roots going back centuries.  The only question would be which design?

Man People Hate Georgia

The most ironic aspect of this "Hitler responds to Georgia's reopening" is that they elected to adopt Hitler as being on their side. 

It's a festival of contempt that is probably by a northerner who moved to Atlanta, as they clearly know the state well (references to things like pollen, 'the same two colleges,' Waffle House, etc, are spot on).  It might be a native of Atlanta who has always hated most of the state, but they'd also have to be an introvert who hates the Southern way of greeting each other and talking to your neighbors.

The latter is hard on even slightly introverted people.  I raised my son to recognize when I was angling to exit a conversation, and never to say anything that would undermine the exit strategy I was employing.  Some of my neighbors will talk to you for hours if you don't find a way to duck out.

New Filing: Corrupt FBI Agents Committed Crimes to Frame Flynn

They’re going hard here.  I’m in danger of confirmation bias in this case, because I liked and admired Flynn for his work in Afghanistan. I never wanted to believe bad things about him, and may be too ready to believe good things.

On the other hand, it’s of a piece with many other revelations about the FBI and politics lately.

Blexit

Two stories today about black politicians leaving the plantation.

A Birthday

April 24th was my father's birthday. He died in 2016. He was killed by a cancer we didn't know he had until three days before it killed him; he died within hours of being transferred from the hospital to a hospice. I was at his right hand when he died, and alone marked his shuddering last breath; my mother and some of their old friends were too engaged in pleasant conversation and reminiscence to notice. I said nothing at all, for I think that the mind lingers a while even after the breathing stops, and I wanted his last moments to dwell on the peaceful sounds of voices, his wife's and her friends.

It's hard now that some people can't be with their fathers when they die, but it's hard being there too. The memory haunts me, knowing he was dying and taking no steps to save him. It was what he wanted, and I knew my duty, and I did it. He was a volunteer fire fighter who ran many, many medical calls to the homes of people who were dying. They could be revived with great pain and effort, and kept alive a little longer, suffering all the time. He knew that wasn't what he wanted, and he made his mind up early not to die that way. He told me that when he was hale, and often, so I knew that he meant it when he was not.

When his time came he decided. I was angry to see how much pain he was in, until suddenly it came over me that the pain was a great gift as from on high: because the pain took away all his fear. He did not experience the existential dread at the border of extinction, but set his course straight for death. I heard him say of his own death, refusing treatment and electing hospice care, "Let's get this show on the road."

He was the grandson of a farmer, and the son of a welder and body repairman who ended up owning a service station for long-haul truckers on I-75. I wrote about my grandfather, and my father, in one of my favorite pieces. My grandmother, his mother, had a good heart morally but a bad one physically; she took nitroglycerin and hard liquor from her 40s, in an age and a place when most women didn't drink. She outlived her husband by a decade or so all the same.

God love you, old man. I did too. I'd pray for him, and sometimes have, but I suspect his soul is in a far better case than mine.

Beware this Woman

Hear, O ye free, her hymn to Big Brother.

The Feast of St. George

If you’re looking for a reason to feel festive today, it’s the feast day of the famous dragonslayer.

UPDATE: By coincidence, since the date floats around due to the lunar calendar, today is also the first day of Ramadan. I’m not aware that any of the readers of the Hall are Muslim, but if you are, I wish you well. It was a strange Easter, and I imagine Passover, without family gatherings, and I suppose it will be a strange Ramadan too. Fate has given us all something in common.

Mainstream Constitutional notions provoke frenzy

Attorney General Barr is one of my favorite government officials.  He keeps giving interviews describing what sounds to me like straight-up common-sense Constitutional analysis.  I remain confused what his critics believe about how the law is supposed to work.

On the subject of the federal government's proper role in policing state governments, Barr states mildly that state governments have very broad police powers, but they are nevertheless subject to some federal Constitutional boundaries.  When citizens file suit in federal court to protest that a state government has trespassed those boundaries, the DOJ looks into it and, if it agrees, takes the citizens' side.

How this became either excessive federalism or a betrayal of federalist principles, I have no idea.  The only common thread seems to be abysmal ignorance of the Constitution.  Lately almost every day someone tries to argue to me that in a contest between state and federal governments and citizens, either the citizens always win, or the state always wins, or the federal government always wins.  None of those statements has ever been true.

Michael Moore pries one half of one eye open

Say, did you know that electric cars don't get their electricity from unicorns?

Yes, I know all of you did, but poor Michael Moore has just now noticed.  Apparently all that's left is to decimate and then impoverish humans, otherwise we're all going to die, which would be bad, or else good.

FAFO

That's a language warning too, if you look up the acronym. We're getting more of them these days. It's a function of the age.

Trump orders the Navy to sink Iranian gunboats that harass our warships.

Well past time, if you ask me. I'd have done that years ago.

A Punk Rock Interlude

I'm not convinced that Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards aren't the best punk rock band ever. Also, not Communists.



Lars also plays guitar for a much more famous punk/ska band, Rancid. There's even skateboarding in honor of our recent story.



Language warning on all this stuff. I mean, it's punk rock. You're all adults.

"And It's Ladies' Night, Tonight"

A classic rolls through town, bringing joy to those of us old enough to remember 1980.

Clear Rules

What's the problem people are having understanding this?

Georgia on my Mind

Harry O'Donoghue plays the piece at the beginning of his fifth quarantine podcast, "In Song and Story." If you like it, stick around because he sings a few more. Harry was a regular at Kevin Barry's Irish Pub, in the grand old days in Savannah.

Trump Says Georgia Should Not Re-Open

I'm curious to see if this will cause all my Georgia friends to switch sides on the question.  It's been completely tribal so far, with the Trump-supporters supporting re-opening a la Kemp, and Trump opponents supporting defying the governor by calling on everyone to remain inside until doomsday.

Until now Kemp has been in alignment with Trump, so you could signal your group allegiance cleanly. But now that the Orange Man has come out on the other side from Kemp, which loyalty prevails? Do you suddenly see the light on giving it a week or two more? Do you suddenly suggest that, you know, friends, we really could all use a good haircut right now?

Barr Defends Constitutional Liberties

He’s definitely saying the right things. We will have to watch for action.

Disobedience with Style

A city park in California built a facility for skateboarding. Skaters, not being famous for obeying authority, refused to stop coming in spite of orders. So, the city brought in tons of wet sand and filled the park.

So now they’ve got dirt bikes.

Civil disobedience

My county closed down the public beaches and boat ramps, not so much because they couldn't be used safely, as because the citizens vocally feared an influx of bored tourists fleeing quarantine in the teeming, scary, infected cities.  It surprised me:  I thought the voters would rebel, but instead a solid majority cheered the measure.

Several weeks have passed, however.  We have had only two confirmed COVID-19 cases, neither of which had to be hospitalized, and both are recovering, perhaps even past the presumed contagious phase.

Yesterday the local Navigation District commissioners met.  They are bound by the county's order, but most of the affected beaches and public boat ramps are in their geographical jurisdiction.  The Nav District voted to remove the barricades the county had asked them to place on the beaches and ramps, and announced their intention to ask the County Judge to modify his lockdown order.  In the meantime, everyone appears to acknowledge that the beaches and ramps technically still are closed, but no one from the Nav District or, apparently, the local police, intends to enforce the closure.  Part of the reasoning was that local short-term rentals are still prohibited, so we shouldn't face much of a tourist influx.

I foresee an upheaval in the next few weeks as counties begin to implement the governor's instructions to re-open businesses carefully, starting with curbside delivery.  A constituent called me earlier this week wanting to know whether the county was enforcing any requirement for take-out restaurant workers to wear masks.  There is no rule requiring food workers to wear masks, though I did encourage her not to patronize any restaurant whose safety practices didn't suit her.  She wanted to discuss her unhappiness with a particular restaurant.  I urged her not to eat there.  She wanted to talk about the special health needs of a live-in relative.  I suggested that, given that relative's special needs, she might want to consider not eating at any restaurants for the duration.  I mention her because I get the impression from social media that she's far from alone.  She wants to concentrate on limiting the freedom of others rather than on her own options for hunkering down in safety, at some minor inconvenience to herself, but at no serious cost.

As always, my concern is less with these inconveniences, and almost entirely with the people who are missing paychecks, and for whom the situation is getting critical.  Those of use who want or need to guard ourselves carefully are getting every opportunity to do so.  No one is making us go into any dangerous buildings.  The local hospitals are, if not exactly fine, at least no more inadequate than they ever were.  We're going to have to open the economy back up, carefully but soon.  Lots of masks and spacing, fine, but get those jobs back ASAP.  So I'm pleased to see at least one local government flex its muscles a bit, and I'm curious to see how the public reacts.

Snake Pliskin for Prez 2024

I'm liking Dan Crenshaw more and more.

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.