Grim's Hall

"Exiled for the good of the realm"

I don't know about you guys, but I haven't had that much success getting useful diagnoses out of doctors, other than in really obscure cases requiring specialized tests. No matter how many doctors roll their eyes at "Dr. Google," most diagnoses occur at home. This flow-chart may be helpful:

It might be better to organize it differently, though. The main thing is whether there's fever or not, but evidently fever tends to appear with a suite of other symptoms: cough, fatigue, and prostration (but apparently not sneezing or a runny nose). If you're in this suite, the big difference between novel coronavirus and ordinary flu is said to be a distinct shortness of breath. Presumably this means the subjective feeling that accompanies a low pulse-ox, something I've experienced only once but won't soon forget.

If there's no fever, but you're sneezing and your nose is running, you probably have either allergies (especially if your eyes itch but your chest is OK) or a cold (especially if your chest is "uncomfortable" but your eyes don't itch).

I remain uncertain whether I've ever had the true flu. What do you call it when there's a little fever but not a lot, some weakness but not a huge amount, and a stuffy nose that turns into a moderate cough that goes on for a week or more? Is that what they mean by "mild chest discomfort"? Maybe all I've ever had were common colds. Maybe I don't need to know, since there's no useful way to treat either them or the flu, and my immune system is going to do its thing regardless of the state of my conscious knowledge. You treat the symptoms if possible, rest, and wait it out. This is the first time I can remember particularly needing to care, since putting what may be an ordinary seasonal cold or flu into the "coronavirus" category would mean a lot more urgency about either quarantine or--nightmare scenario--pushing the panic button and heading to an ER or ICU for respiratory support.

We're self-quarantining anyway, or at least socially isolating. It's the only useful way I know to do my part to keep the spread down, either to "flatten curve" in order to lessen the acute strain on medical facilities, or if possible to bring R0 under 1.0 so as to contain the spread completely.

My husband has just brought my attention to a much-needed distinction made by someone called "Ciaran's Artisanal ****posting": self-isolation is boring and clinical, suggesting that you're following the orders of a government, and a sure way for no one to notice your effort. Being "exiled for the good of the realm," however, is mysterious and sexy and will lead everyone to wonder what you did to deserve it.

Privacy and Elites

Now this is an essay worth discussing.

Isolation Diary 2

So far I'm only doing these on the days when I break isolation. Today I went down to town for what I think will be the last time for a very long time. I've managed to arrange for everyone else on the property to stop having reasons to leave, but for one more trip, until the state of emergency is lifted or we run out of food. We have lots of food. Tomorrow I'll bottle up a few gallons of mead and get another batch started, so alcohol won't be a problem for a long time either.

In principle we could ride out two months here. In practice, I'll probably ride out when the weather is nice. One can hardly get sick on a motorcycle, as long as riding in the clean air is all one does. If we run short of anything I can make limited stops to pick up what we need and put it in the saddlebags, washing my hands immediately after leaving any stores with soap and bottled water.

The novel I'm editing is better than I remembered. It's really pretty good. I am removing a lot of commas, and smoothing some dialogue -- it wasn't bad before, but it sounded like the Medieval sources rather than like anything anyone would know how to hear today. Still, I'm pretty happy with it. I'll never write anything this good again; academic training has killed the instinct for beauty that I once possessed.

Ah, well. Perhaps 'killed' is too strong. There will be a lot of time for meditation in the coming weeks. Maybe I can recover something of what I once had.

A Series of Implausible Arguments

Robert Fisk is still around, it turns out.

"The Saudi royal family appear unaware of the dangers of settling scores among themselves."

I would guess there are no better experts in the world on the subject than the Saudi royal family, but carry on dude.

Daytona Bike Week Canceled

Really everything is likely to be canceled that can be, but you know it's serious when Daytona cancels.

Some appropriate music.

Killing An Admiral From Time to Time

Apropos of the last post, and because it happens to be the anniversary, a sea story.

ON MARCH 14, 1757, Royal Navy Vice Admiral John Byng boarded his flagship HMS Monarch for what would be the last time.

As the 52-year-old officer waited on the quarterdeck in the company of nine marine guards, instructions were passed to all the men-of-war at anchor nearby in Spithead to dispatch their officers to the 74-gun ship of the line to witness the spectacle that had been planned.

As the clock struck twelve, a captain by the name of John Montagu stepped forward from the small crowd that had assembled on the Monarch to inform Byng that it was time — the admiral’s execution was at hand....

Upon learning of the execution, the French writer, philosopher and playwright Voltaire satirically wrote that the British needed to occasionally execute an admiral from time to time, “in order to encourage the others.”

Although his comments were written as a form of mockery, surprisingly, the observation was entirely accurate. Byng’s role in the Minorca fiasco led to what was darkly termed in the Royal Navy the “Byng Principle,” which meant that “nothing is to be undertaken where there is risk or danger.”

This sardonic term served as a cautionary reminder to naval officers of the sort of conduct that should be avoided in battle. And just or not, Byng’s death was to instill in them an aggressive fighting spirit that would succeed in turning the war in favour of Britain.

We live in a softer age, for now.

When This Is Over, We Hang the Bureaucrats

After problems arose with the C.D.C.’s test, officials could have switched to using successful tests that other countries were already using. But the officials refused to do so, essentially because it would have required changing bureaucratic procedures.

The federal government could also have eased regulations on American hospitals and laboratories, to allow them to create and manufacture their own tests, as Melissa Miller of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine told The Washington Post. But federal officials did not do so for weeks. The Times’s Sheri Fink and Mike Baker reported this week about a Seattle lab with a promising test that was blocked by “existing regulations and red tape” while “other countries ramped up much earlier and faster.”

So what can we replace the CDC with that is not a bureaucracy, or at least not a government bureaucracy?

Virus Threat? Ban Guns!

You can tell when people aren’t taking a crisis seriously when they try to shoehorn irrelevant policy preferences into their so-called “disaster” planning. I hear Pelosi tried to slip abortion funding into the Federal plan, and this mayor has decided to assume executive authority to void the Second Amendment.

UPDATE: California governor to "commandeer property" to fight the virus.

UPDATE: NYC mayor says this is the time to nationalize factories and industries.

Texans don't get it

The "NewNeo" blog continues to amuse, particularly the comments section. Commenter OldTexan weighs in on the host's thoughts about the loss of meaning of terms like exponential and existential:

My feeling about the existential stuff can best be summed up with [an] experience I had in the Army when about the only General I ever saw was touring our top secret facility in Germany where we did electronic eavesdropping on the various Commie Countries to the East. He stopped to talk to once of our men working a multiple radio intercept position inside a room tucked into the back of a building, free standing inside and old Luftwaffe hanger. He said, "Son, where are you from?" and the reply was, "Texas, Sir!" and then the General said, "Anything I can do to help you?" At that time the Texan took off his headset, we did not have to come to attention because we were supposed to keep working, the Texan stood up and said very clearly and kind of loud, "Sir, Existentialism, Sir I just don’t get it!"

Fix it so I can go back to sleep

John Hayward nails the irritable irrationality of someone woken from a sound sleep to a threat demanding immediate inconvenient action:

Focused intently on the suddenly urgent, all-consuming crisis thrust before our bleary eyes, we lose our senses of time and proportion. We want an immediate solution to the danger that jolted us awake. We eagerly signal to each other that we're fully awake and engaged now.

But we suspect maybe OTHERS are still asleep, still numb to the real danger, foolishly taking risks and making mistakes that could jeopardize everyone else. Our instinct to raise the general alarm level makes us amplify bad news and get angry at anyone who isn't at Defcon 1.

Few want to discuss proportionality during the fearful days after we are jolted awake. We want to spread the alarm and focus on this new terrible thing to the exclusion of all else. We want it to be over fast. We want to go back to sleep.

* * *

We should learn not to sleep so deeply between red-alert crises. We should demand more focus and less mission creep from the agencies that are supposed to be prepared for them. We should begin reacting judiciously to threats before they cross the horizon.

Most of all, we should learn there are costs and benefits to every action, and to inaction. Rationally balancing them against each other is difficult both in times of apathy and white-hot panic. If we learn to do it better when we're not panicking, we'll panic less often.

The Return of Legends

As the stable world seems less stable, remember that it has happened before.

We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon.

Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a labyrinth of faerie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur.

According to the legends, those were the great times.

The Liberation of Sarah Palin

If I were to guess, I'd say that Ms. Palin was always a Sir Mixalot fan but long felt she had to keep that aspect of her personality private. Now that her political career is over, well, she's free at last.

That looks like a completely ridiculous TV show, but I have gotten the impression that such things are common now.

Grand Bargains

In general I'm opposed to involving the Federal government in anything, or for Congress legislating outside of its very clear Article I Section 8 duties. That said, a global pandemic is the best argument for a coherent approach across many normally divergent sectors. Since you go to war with the government you have, and ours is hyper-partisan and nearly nonfunctional, a bargain may be the only way to obtain the goods we need.

Strong high borders, closed schools, ways to keep people from losing their homes or places of living during times when we ask everyone to stay home; lots is going to have to happen quickly, and for a month at least (though likely not forever). We can get this under control, but time is of the essence.

Free Spirits

Part one and two of a study urging free market reforms for North Carolina's hard liquor industry. North Carolina has one of the most vibrant microbrewery and winery markets going, but hard liquor here is still controlled by "Alcoholic Beverage Control" councils operated not by the state but by 140 local governments. As you might expect, that leads to non-optimal results.

Did you know that North Carolina used to be the nation’s leader in locally owned and operated distilleries? It’s true. In 1904 the state had 745 registered distilleries, 540 of which were operating. And they were all outlawed, an entire industry destroyed, by a series of laws culminating in voters passing the first statewide prohibition in the South in 1908.

It won't be the last industry destroyed in the name of "progress," if certain people get their way.

The Eagles Come Home

SECDEF issues major travel restrictions, at the same time as our withdrawal from Afghanistan begins. I think these are 150th Cavalry Regiment soldiers, from the West Virginia National Guard but assigned to the 30th Armored Brigade that is mostly built around North Carolina National Guard units. If so, I was with this unit for a while during their deployment in Operation Iraqi Freedom IV in 2009.

Isolation Diary

I'm inclined to isolation on most occasions, so it wasn't too shocking to realize I had been an early adopter of the 'social distancing' method being recommended these days. I left my property today for the first time since Saturday, to go down to the county dump to clear the ordinary household trash out of my place. I intended also to check the post office box in the 'town' nearest the house, which chiefly consists of that post office and a gas station. So I expected no social interactions at all. In fact I had two: I ran into my Mexican friend (born in Guadalajara, married these days to a Cherokee wife -- a real one from the nearby reservation, not the Warren type). I also ran into the guy who owns the gas station, who is a friend of mine because he and I both own off-roading Jeeps and enjoy that culture.

Therefore I shook two hands in spite of the elevated risk of doing so; but I still have plenty of hand sanitizer. The wife did her prepping a month and a half ago when the craziness was just on display in China, figuring it would get out this way sooner or later. After that I came home.

In many ways I'm ideally placed for a long isolation. I have a great number of books, plenty of supplies, still lots of firewood even though winter is just ending. There are springs on the property, and not many people around in any case. If it weren't for the need to make money to pay all those bills I could stay up here a very long time without coming down.

Of course my wife and another relative still have business in town, so they may bring the thing home in spite of however much I'm prepared to sit up here. Like Willie Nelson, 'taking it home to Connie and the kids.'

I'm editing a novel I wrote some years ago in my spare time. Maybe if it turns out all right I'll try to publish it when this is all over.

Arthur Koestler wrote about what he called the Tragic and the Trivial planes of life. As explained by his friend, the writer and fighter pilot Richard Hillary:

“K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.”

I think the attraction to ultimate catastrophes…whether the assumed flooding due to Climate Change, or the danger of America being taken over by the Ku Klux Klan, or the exaggeration of the very real dangers of coronavirus…is related to this. People who live entirely on Koestler’s Trivial Plane, looking for a little connection to Ultimate Things.

Restoring Civility to Office

A transcript of the genteel discussion Joe Biden had with a voter today. It's going to be a great election season, isn't it?