Goal posts on skids

The anxiety level in my county has jumped significantly, though I'm still not quite able to see a big change in objective danger.  Two articles today, one in Spectator and one by Avik Roy, put their finger on my frustration in reading about 20 headlines a day on the uptick in cases in June (say, what happened in June?), which is that reports focus almost exclusively on new cases.  Of course there are going to be more new reported cases if we test a lot more.  What we need to know is, are we getting more hospitalizations?  In particular, are we getting more serious hospitalizations, more ICU impact, enough hospital and ICU impact to overwhelm our medical facilities?  Ultimately, more deaths? Not only do the press reports avoid these issues, preferring to blame Republican governors for forcing people at gunpoint to crowd up against each other in bars and churches, but I'm finding it harder and harder to find good data anywhere on the burden on hospital resources.  Texas hospitalization rates are up, but why wouldn't they be, given that we made people delay elective procedures for several months?  A good number of all the people who show up for knee surgery will also test positive for COVID.  Is that what they're counting?  It's impossible to tell from any of the data sources I've been able to find.

The Spectator article does try:

There are no crises in hospital capacity anywhere in the country. Nursing homes, meat-packing plants, and prisons remain the main sources of new infections. Half the states are seeing cases decline or hold steady. Case counts are affected by more testing; the positive infection rate captured by testing is declining. The current caseload is younger, which is a good thing. The more people who have been infected and who recover, the more herd immunity is created.

Mind you. I'm not 100% persuaded this is a fair picture overall. For one thing, deaths lag case reports--but deaths lag serious hospitalizations a lot less, so I'd rather hear about the latter. Also, overall U.S. rates may obscure an impending problem in a particular area, such as the state that's nearest and dearest to me.

Still, for the last several months, there's been a very weird inability to keep our eyes on the original ball: hunkering down while the virus works its way through the population--something we never seriously imagined we could prevent--while protecting the people at highest risk and avoiding high-tech medical service crunches of the sort that initially terrified us in reports from Italy.

Somewhere along the way, people seem to have gotten the idea, first, that we could make the virus go poof! if we locked down long enough, and second, that we can really lock the economy down indefinitely.

Reformation

I normally enjoy the New York Post, but this is off-base:  "Democrats in Congress just doomed police reform."  There's no reason for the United States Congress to be involved in any "police reform" except as concerns federal police agencies like the FBI, which admittedly could use some work.  If a local police force work needs work, state and local officials should be taking care of it, unless we want to see results every bit an inspiring as those that resulted from federal reform of public schools.

The underlying red/blue political argument I do get, of course.

OK, now they're just having fun up there

Drones tire of keeping noses to grindstone, strike blow for freedom, teach themselves acrobatics.  Soon they'll be skateboarding instead of looking for jobs.

This just in

Groundbreaking research:

With beauty being a valuable commodity in our society, it's no surprise that women might use it to their advantage when competition heats up.

But only when competition heats up, mind you, which is why they found the phenomenon more pronounced in areas of "gender income inequality."  Get rid of the competition, and everything becomes a reimagined paradise.

Have they considered taxing the rich?

Grizzly Bear Blues

Corb Lund's new album got some of my time today.



Here's a fun song for anyone who might spend part of the weekend with a glass of something.



The young lady singing with him is Jaida Dreyer, if you liked her voice. She's a little too Nashville for me, but she knows her tradition; and she turns out a powerful song now and then.

Compensating the choir unseen

I prefer to think of them as differently vital.  What could better qualify someone as vibrantly alive, helping to weave the exciting human tapestry, than cashing a government check?

We need to reimagine what it means to be among the living, and every other part of society.  I'll begin by denouncing my own part in othering the dead and failing to center their voices.

Ymar’s Post

Friday. All metaphysical commentary goes here.

Drums, drums in the deep

A Balrog stirs.  Or maybe Chthulhu, the results aren't in yet.

Orcs are just Misunderstood

Because of course, Dungeons & Dragons is taking steps to fight racial bias against orcs and dark elves.

Wizards also pledged to take a more nuanced approach with the way it portrays the drow, a race of dark-skinned elves that are depicted as evil, cave-dwelling murderers.... Wizards says it will try to present these races as “just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples” in both the RPG game and its various works of fiction. It also pledged to loosen up the RPG game’s rules around racial bonuses, which previously deemed certain species to be stronger, smarter or more agile than others.

“This option emphasizes that each person in the game is an individual with capabilities all their own,” the company said in its statement.

That's going to make for exciting campaigns, the struggle of good against evil... light against dark, no that one clearly won't do... hm, strong versus weak is right out, because no one is 'really' weak (whatever their Strength score)... 'woke versus unwoke' is too close to 'good against evil'... well, the story's conflict will be, hm, how about 'us against the guys from down the street we just don't like'?

CHAZ/CHOP Down

Good news sometimes comes if you wait long enough.

The New National Anthem: "Imagine" by John Lennon

Honestly, if they don't understand why that's a terrible idea, I don't know where to start explaining it.

Getting Warmer

The President keeps using this word, heretofore unfairly, but his opponents are drifting more and more in the direction of making him right.

Strzok had a big mouth

Well, metaphorically. He was way too explicit in his notes and texts, and inexplicably careless about destroying them. He must have felt completely invulnerable.

Muscular dialoguing

From HotAir via Maggie's Farm: another "mostly peaceful" demonstration in Madison, Wisconsin, last night that started with a guy haranguing restaurant patrons saying "I'm disturbing the peace and I've got a bat" (with "Black Lives Matter" helpfully painted on it), followed by his (resisted) arrest, followed by a riot that included beating up a state senator and leaving him on the ground. Also from Maggie's Farm: but we were protected from violence when Twitter censored a dangerous Trump tweet. I'm so old, I can remember when we were being lectured about over-reacting to "non-violent" riots because they only destroyed property, which can recover, unlike bodies. It could be worse. We could be fishing dozens of bodies out of storm drains. Maybe we will be soon, if we keep trying to pretend that violence isn't violence, or that the real violence is silence, or whatever new drivel is being peddled with every new day.

Cleaning up the blood

We watched an old episode of "House" last night, which makes me a doctor, right? The patient had some kind of autoimmune inflammatory problem, so at one point they treated her with plasmapheresis, describing it as a way to filter out excessive ... I don't know, immuno-particle thingies in her blood. That made me wonder if anyone's using that for COVID cytokine storms.

A search for "COVID and plasmapheresis" mostly gets you stories about convalescent serum, which is finally getting going on a significant scale now that there are more recovered COVID patients worldwide.href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12526">This article suggests that convalescent serum might work even better if plasmapheresis were first used to strain out the excess immuno-stuff, so score one for the House screenwriters. There was a wild, wild story in my local newspaper about the 24-year-old son of a woman I know slightly. Her son came down with COVID back in March, in a sudden and catastrophic form. He seems to have been in ordinarily robust health, just unlucky enough to suffer a vicious immune over-reaction. You can read about it here if you want the gory details, but the short version is that in 3 months in an Austin hospital, where he seems to have received excellent care, he had just about everything done to him that can possibly be done to someone who ultimately survives: medically induced coma, heart-lung machine, dialysis, treatment for septic shock, treatment for a lung abscess, pneumothorax, and collapsed lung, 7 weeks of intubation, tracheostomy, and feeding tubes. One of the things they tried was convalescent serum, the first trial in that hospital. Whether that also included the "coffee filter" aspect of plasmapheresis isn't clear.

I'm also not sure whether they tried dexamethasone, either (the article mentioned "experimental drug to try and treat the cytokine storm"), but that's getting some interest lately, too. We don't hate it yet, because the Bad Man hasn't recommended it.

The New York Times is already cautioning us that it may not be all it's cracked up to be in 100% of cases, so don't start getting optimistic about COVID, the economy, or society, because the important thing is DOOM.

Ymar’s Post

Forgotten yesterday, but here today.

Carts and horses

From Ace: "Old-fashioned virtues like honesty, gentleness, respect, kindness, forbearance, and self-control are not important in a woke environment." The new idea, he says, is that all that matters is the wokeness level. I'd argue that wokeness--however threadbare the concept has become--is not irrelevant to virtue, it's just being applied backwards. The important thing is the traditional virtues. Wokeness comes in when we face the challenge of living up to our virtues even in a conflict with someone from an outgroup, which might be someone with a different race, sex, political philosophy, etc. You don't become a more honest, just, or kind person by self-flagellation over the crimes of your ancestors, or dramatic indulgence in guilt over your previous advantages in life, or stoning un-woke pariahs. You do it by keeping in mind your basic duties even to people who are alien to you in some annoying way. You do it by setting a good example and standing up for people who are being victimized. I mean actually victimized in a particular situation, not per se victimized according to some kind of definition published in a magazine. Unjust situations aren't all that hard to find; we don't need thought police to drum them up for us in our daily lives.

Andy McCarthy: Rule of Law Collapsing

I agree, and have said as much myself; but read his analysis. I do take exception to this line:

Suddenly, Brooks assaulted the police, stole the Taser from one officer and used it on them to help free himself. As he fled, he shot the Taser at the pursuing Rolfe from a little over a yard away, barely missing Rolfe’s head. Rolfe returned fire, striking Rolfe in the back. The police desperately tried to save Brooks with CPR, but he died.

Unless they were able to stop the bleeding from the gunshot wound, I would have phrased that "The police vigorously applied CPR to a gunshot wound patient, significantly contributing to his death." You're just pumping the blood out onto the street at that point.

Did the police know that? Did they have the capacity to stop the bleeding before trying to restart the heart? Was this an attempt to ensure he didn't survive, or an attempt to save him? Those are the sort of questions a trial might well sort out.

However, felony murder (as I've written here before) is an absurd charge, and almost certainly prosecutorial misconduct in this case (and other recent cases). I read it as at minimum an attempt to avoid having to prove the case before a jury by coercing a plea bargain; at worst, an attempt to use the lives of these officers to sway an election, as a kind of blood sacrifice to the demons guiding the mob.

Segregation Leader Joe Biden

So say historians.

JUSTICE Act Wobbly

Sen. Tim Scott's police reform bill just failed to muster the 60 Senate votes needed to proceed to a real vote. Mitch McConnell is using parliamentary procedures to get a second round attempt at getting it past the filibuster.

As has become usual, the motive is not to attain a compromise that nevertheless advances the ball; it's to prevent progress so you have something to complain about.