Grim's Hall

Diplomatic Jokers

The British Embassy is having some cake.

Alarms are beginning to sound a little less shrilly over the possibility of a big air-travel disrupting volcanic explosion under one of Iceland's glaciers.

I give this volcano high marks for its name, Bardarbunga. Not that I'm likely to be able to remember it an hour from now--except as some kind of mashup between Mordor and Cowabunga--but it sure beats Eyjafjallajokul.

UFOs

These sights in the sky would certainly get me thinking about alien invasions.

Seriously, I need to do some more doomsday prepping.

Bugging out, New-York style

Cheer up: doomsday preppers no longer are restricted to those scary hyper-male government-conspiracy-obsessed Christians you see on TV. Manhattanites are embracing the trend, in their own Manhattanish way.

Speaking strictly for myself, I'd say that Rule #1 for surviving an apocalypse would be "move out of Manhattan this instant." For some New Yorkers, though, that's unthinkable, so they've turned their attention to practical plans for escaping the island in an emergency. Inflatable kayaks are one approach.

As a species, we don't seem to have much imagination when it comes to the sudden loss of the intricate web that supplies us with food, water, and other necessities of life--and that goes eleventy for people who live in tall buildings on a small island crammed with 3 million people:

Urban survivalist culture also overlaps with sustainability and homesteading culture. Many preppers are interested in organic and local foods, farmers' markets and the reduction of toxic chemicals. Some meetings, for instance, have focused on such things as how to make deodorant and laundry detergent at home . . . .

Curves bending the wrong way

For a week or more recently, I hunted for new statistics on the Ebola outbreak, but the official death toll was stuck in the 800 range, despite hints that the reporting system had broken down. It now looks as though the infections and deaths were indeed piling up silently. Reported deaths are now over 1,400. WHO now admits that the outbreak has spread to the Congo, after initial denials. The Ivory Coast has closed its borders.

Ebola remains a relatively difficult disease to transmit, or we wouldn't be seeing deaths in the 2,000 range six months into an epidemic in countries with almost no institutions capable of slowing its spread: we'd be seeing millions. The 1918 influenza spread worldwide in a few months and killed something like 50 or 100 million people (the world was in such a mess, and reporting systems so rudimentary, that it's hard to be sure). Now, the flu: there's a virus that knows how to spread. It's contagious before symptoms occur, for instance, which is not the rule with Ebola.

Ebola kills just over half of the people who contract it, in horrific conditions. We have no information to speak of on what percentage of people it kills in a modern hospital capable of delivering good supportive care while the body mounts its own immune response. As infected Europeans come home for decent treatment, though, we may be about to find out.

Like many of the diseases that have intruded themselves on human attention, including HIV, influenza, West Nile virus, bubonic plague, Lyme disease, and salmonella, Ebola is an example of zoonosis, meaning that it has an animal reservoir and occasionally spills over into the human race. The current thinking appears to be that Ebola, like rabies, Chunkunguya, influenza A, SARS, Hendra virus, and Nipah virus, may have its reservoir in bats. Bats make a good reservoir for human disease. They resemble humans in several important respects: they're long-lived mammals, they cover long distances on the wing, and they live in huge communities capable of sustaining an infectious disease. Bats are lovely creatures that serve their neighbors well by eating lots of insects, but it's a really terrible idea to go into a bat-cave, especially in Africa.

Lately it's a bad idea to go anywhere in Africa. Ebola is the least of their worries.

Seven Stars and Seven Stones

Getcher red hot t-shirts here

Rick Perry PAC offering.

Complacency

An American Enterprise Institute article cautions dying industries against merely tweaking their business models. Universities, for instance, can't afford to ignore MOOCs just because they start out crude and non-competitive:

[I]n 1955 Sony of Japan introduced the mass-produced battery transistor radio. It was cheap, plastic, and the sound was, well, pretty awful. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t aimed at dad. It was marketed to teenagers, a customer base completely ignored by firms like RCA and the makers of high-quality vacuum-tube technology. Crackly sound was good enough for rock ’n’ roll, especially if one listened to it under the bed covers rather than in the living room. But Sony didn’t stop there. It steadily improved the technology while still focusing on its new listeners. Within a decade the transistor radio had been perfected into a direct competitor to RCA and the old technology, delivering similar quality at a fraction of the size and cost. That combination of comparable quality and sharply lower cost enabled the transistor radio to invade the living room market, crushing established industry leaders and transforming the family sound system.

* * *

Low-cost ventures of so-so quality also pose a potentially devastating threat by undermining cross-subsidies in a traditional business model. Website advertising and Craigslist were deadly to the economics of newspapers because experienced journalists and news bureaus need cross subsidies to survive, just as full-service hospitals do. The reason why getting a few stitches in the ER can cost a small fortune is that ER procedures make possible high-quality care in low-revenue generating areas such as pediatrics. That, in turn, is why the growth of walk-in clinics and other providers offering low prices for low-cost services is such a threat to big hospitals. The breakup of such cross-subsidized services is often referred to as “unbundling”, and it is a worrying phenomenon for “full-service” providers in any industry. This is precisely what we are seeing in higher education.

As with hospitals and newspapers, bricks-and-mortar institutions of higher education are particularly vulnerable to unbundling. Universities are modular institutions, and lower-cost competitors can easily siphon off customers and revenue from individual modules. For instance, universities are partly a hotel and food service industry, and partly sports and entertainment centers. They have invested heavily in buildings and services that package these elements together at essentially one price. But this makes them vulnerable to competitors that find much less expensive ways to provide discrete modules like housing or even basic first-year classes—or that simply shed costly facilities like libraries or student centers, as online colleges have done.

Wakey, wakey

A liberal psychological describes his dawning realization that it's not only conservatives who kowtow to authority.

I'm too mean to myself

Here's a new justification for the Nanny State's restless urge to protect us from ourselves: the danger of "self-exploitation." The only thing worse than a tyrannical boss with a monocle and a top hat is working for yourself, and not providing your employee with good enough pay and benefits. We've got to nip this new "sharing economy" in the bud! We can't just let layman put prices on the services they're willing to offer to others.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Conditional perfection

The "conditional perfect" grammatical construction is dropping out of the English language. It was once standard usage to say, for instance, "If I had worked harder, I would be enjoying a more secure retirement." I almost never hear that any more, or read it in informal electronic prose, or even the slightly more formal prose contained in the average sports story. These day, it's more often "If I would have worked harder . . . ." I was just reading about a Cory Gardner Colorado senate campaign ad and noticed that the reporter rephrased part of it in brackets:

“Mark Udall has voted with President Obama 99 percent of the time,” Gardner said in a new campaign ad released Thursday in which he address the issue head on. “I just wish that 1 percent [would have] been a vote against Obamacare.”

A nice quip, but what did he say in the original, I wondered? Had he used the traditional conditional perfect, "I just wish that 1 percent had been a vote . . ."? Well, sort of: in the video, he says, "I just wish that 1 percent hadda been a vote . . . ." His grammar is a hybrid, like a werewolf caught in mid-transformation. Even at the halfway point, it sounded so wrong to the reporter's ear that he went to the trouble of "correcting" it to something even less traditional. I suppose that's when real change occurs in a language: when the old way of saying something is not only no longer required, but actually sounds wrong enough to correct in print.

Backpacking

As mentioned in the comments below, I'll be off hiking this weekend. See you on or about Monday.

A Rising Antisemitism?

The BBC asks the question, and thinks the data says the answer is 'probably not.' There's a big spike since the Gaza offensive, but...

Over the longer term, 2013 saw the lowest annual number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain since 2005. During the past decade the levels have fluctuated making it difficult to identify a long term trend - although the number of incidents has declined steadily from a peak in 2009 to the end of 2013, it is higher than it was 10 years ago.

What about Europe? The European Union Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) publishes a report every year summarising data on anti-Semitic incidents supplied by governments and NGOs. The problem is that only around half the EU states collect this data, and the quality varies hugely.

"It is very incomplete - it's really difficult to tell trends over time at present," says FRA spokesperson Katya Andrusz

In the countries with better data, the picture is mixed. In Germany anti-Semitic acts declined in the decade to 2011, before rising slightly in 2012. In Sweden the trend has been upwards, although the overall number of incidents is low.

So that's good news.

Father and Parent

So, my question is, if the child wants to know who his mother was... say out of interest in whether he has inheritable diseases... is there just going to be no record kept? That strikes me as more than mildly insane.

This Is What I'm Talking About

I've known Deputy Pirkle since Junior High. He was in my Boy Scout Troop, many ages ago when his hair was not yet gray. (It's not that he's that old -- it's just that he's the only non-female in his house.)

Earlier this year, our very own Deputy Pirkle responded to a call involving a Forsyth County resident who had been the victim of an entering auto. Several hundred dollars in cash was stolen from her, money she had planned on spending on a church trip. While investigating the theft, Deputy Pirkle took it upon himself to reach out to the rest of his shift and dispatchers to collect up enough money to donate to the victim. They raised over $400 in three hours.

He didn't realize his actions would become public, and only did it because he felt it was the right thing to do.

It's worth looking at their whole photo stream. They do have that one armored car, though it's not military-spec; but what you mostly see is citizenship. Swimming lessons for the kids. Working with the Fire Department (no longer purely volunteer) to rescue some horses. Soccer matches.

That's the county where I grew up. I don't live there any more -- since Atlanta expanded into it, it's become too crowded and too rich for my blood. Out here where I live now we don't really have deputies around, but I did have one come by the house the other day. Some lady had hit my mailbox because a miscreant teenager had knocked it out into the road with a baseball bat. She called the deputy out to get my contact information and to file a report so her insurance agency could send us a check for a new mailbox. Even though they rarely come out here, when she called, he trucked what must be an hour out of his way, round trip, to save me fifty bucks or less.

That's the kind of full-time good citizens that exemplify the best of police work. They're the kind of people you're glad to have as part of your community.

So once I hit the [Obamacare plan's] deductible (and thus got halfway to my out-of-pocket max), I Iooked in our HSA, saw there was more than $2,500 and thought, "Good, we can afford any health care expenses that might come with a new baby."

But then my wife reminded me that some of the doctors or specialists who see us at the hospital might not be in network. And we have a totally separate (and higher) deductible for out-of-network care. We'd pay every penny for doctor out-of-network.

My wife called the hospital. The hospital said that some specialists are in network, some are out. Can we request an in-network anesthesiologist? Nope. We get whoever is on duty at the moment the contractions get too painful.

Doubtless this is part of the war on women.

"Semantics"

“Let me finish, Ben. But listen. I think you are getting into semantics. Regardless of what you want to call it, an automatic or a semi-automatic weapon.”

So, conceptually, you'd be OK with me exchanging a semi-automatic weapon for a fully automatic one? There's no difference worth discussing?

Jackie Chan is A Great Guy, Part XXVIII

If only every father felt it proper to apologize for his son's arrest on drug charges.

"Jaycee and I together express our deep apology to society and the public," Chan wrote... "I say to Jaycee that you have to accept the consequences when you do something wrong. As your father, I'm going to face the road together with you."

Now that's a man.