"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.