Not many people watched the Democratic National Convention

. . . and that's the good news, says Glenn Reynolds.

He also says he got an unusual amount of hate speech for this USA weekly article, which he attributes to people having moved from the denial to the anger stage of bereavement. 

Choosing America

 Cuban-American Maximo Alvarez warns us what his father warned him when they arrived in this county:  Don't lose this place.  If we let happen here what we let happen in Cuba, there is nowhere else to go.

How transmissible is COVID really?

 A Chinese study (I know, I know) of 391 primary COVID cases did some good work sorting out the incidence of transmission to the patients' aggregate 3,410 close contacts--about 9 close contacts per index patient.  It found that only 3.7% of those close contacts caught the disease.  Of that 3.7%, 6.3% of cases were asymptomatic, 16.8% were mild, 73.1% were moderate, and 10.1% were severe or critical.  That means less than half a percent of the close contacts of the original patients picked up a severe or critical disease as a result.

There was considerable difference in the kind of contact that encouraged transmission as well.  The transmission rate to household members was 10.3%, much higher than the average 3.7% rate.  The transmission rate to healthcare workers was 1.0%, much lower than the average rate.  The transmission rate on public transportation was even lower:  0.1%.

It also makes a big difference whether the index case is mild or severe.  For asymptomatic index cases, the transmission rate was only 0.3%.  For mild index cases, it was 3.3%; for moderate cases, 5.6%; and for severe or critical cases, 6.2%.  The highest transmission rate was for index cases "with expectoration," 13.6%.  The overall transmission rate for all kinds of cases without expectoration was 3.0%.

The lesson here is that the transmission rate is surprisingly low, even for obviously ill index patients, and the biggest societal risk factor is the size of their group of "close contacts."  If infected people managed to keep their close contacts under 9, they'd be spreading their illness even less on average.  That might prove difficult for severely ill people who require intensive care, but it shouldn't be that hard for anyone with a moderate case.  The spread rate for asymptomatic cases is so small--a tenth or twentieth of the spread rate for symptomatic cases--that it barely figures into public policy.

The bottom line is that the disease will bounce off of 86% even of people in close contact with an "expectorating" COVID patient.  It will bounce off an astounding 99.7% of people whose only exposure is to a completely asymptomatic COVID patient.

Who had simultaneous Gulf Coast tropical storm landfalls for August?

 

How to Be a Woke White Person

 

When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything

 Another Ryan Long video:

What internet politics looks like to normal people

I'd embed the YouTube video directly, but that way it comes with an intro ad.  This is a link to PowerLine, where you can watch it without that annoyance, and maybe enjoy other PowerLine articles while you're at it.

I sure hope this is how the independents are seeing it.

Why'dya believe me? It was just a debate

 Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris seems to be confused about the difference between a lawyer taking a position she doesn't believe during a trial, on behalf of a client, and a candidate for president taking a position she doesn't believe during a debate.

"These are my principles.  If you don't like them, I have others."

"The Walls Are Closing In"

The first Durham indictment! Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith will plead guilty to

doctoring an email used as part of a process to secure court approval to renew surveillance on a onetime Trump campaign junior adviser, Carter Page. The Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, referred the matter for criminal review. . . . Despite the federal surveillance of Carter Page, he was never charged with any crime.

NPR reports the Klinesmith indictment pretty straight, with nothing like my title's nostalgia for how this kind of thing was reported when the shoe was on the other foot a couple of years ago. Not to worry, most of the rest of the NLMSM are is accompanied by headlines and ledes suggesting that the investigation does not, repeat not, point to any higher-up conspiracy of any kind, quit saying it does, nothing to see here, move along.  When they're done with that message, they turn to worries that the timing of further Durham indictments may be calculated to affect the election.  They also spend some time explaining that there's no indication--really! none!--that Klinesmith has cut a deal and is singing like a canary.

Medical Politics

I don't claim to know much about how COVID treatments work, but I find this article pretty persuasive.

Hiatus

Thanks for all the commentary on the post below about closing the Hall.  For now I will follow the advice some of you gave and leave the Hall open for archival use and for my co-bloggers to continue to use as they prefer.  AVI's recommendation based on his own experience is what I'll follow:  for now consider me on at least temporary hiatus, which may become permanent if I don't rediscover a desire to do this. 

I might be around to comment on posts from time to time, but I will not be visiting or posting on a daily, weekly, or any regular basis.  

Some posts from the archive will be deleted if I want to publish them elsewhere, or if in my review of the archives I decide to remove them.  

You can contact me by email if you need me, but I won't necessarily be checking that regularly either.  I need to focus on professional duties when I'm behind a keyboard; and I need to spend less time behind keyboards, too. More in the wind.

Truth and justice prevail in my hometown

My county's citizens prevailed in their move to force the Commissioners Court to set a proposed bond for election.  The powers-that-be are glum.  The bond is mostly to fund the construction of a new courthouse, a project I believe would have been more likely to win voter approval in November if we (1) made it smaller and cheaper and (2) not tried to pull it off without an election first.  But we'll see what my neighbors think.  The proposed new courthouse, though expensive, is pretty nice, and our post-storm temporary quarters really aren't a long-term fix.

One of the pleasures of the process has been a woman who spoke at yesterday's contentious Commissioners Court meeting.  Oh, she was a star!  The whole package:  telegenic, good writing, good delivery, seemingly effortless ability to deflect bullying.  She spoke simply and intelligently for about five minutes about the importance of preserving the right to vote in a time when our civil rights are under assault.  I'm determined to get her to run for office.

Bats and madness

Powerline notes in The Week in Pictures that the Libertarian presidential candidate has been bitten by a possibly rabid bat, and adds

That’s no way to compete for Biden’s voting base.

Sanity

I am proofreading a book on William Blake by G. K. Chesterton.  Addressing the question whether the passionate Blake was mad, Chesterton argues that the wild supernaturalism of the classical world was conquered by the coolly rational Romans, followed by a reversion to mysticism by Christianity, tempered but never strictly sane in the Roman sense:

it may be said in passing that the

chief claim of Christianity is exactly this--that

it revived the pre-Roman madness, yet brought

into it the Roman order. The gods had really

died long before Christ was born. What had

taken their place was simply the god of

government--Divus Cæsar. The pagans of

the real Roman Empire were nothing if not

respectable. It is said that when Christ was

born the cry went through the world that Pan

was dead. The truth is that when Christ was

born Pan for the first time began to stir in his

grave. The pagan gods had become pure

fables when Christianity gave them a new lease

of life as devils. . . . But it put upon this occult

chaos the Roman idea of balance and sanity.

Thus, marriage was a sacrament, but mere sex

was not a sacrament as it was in many of the

frenzies of the forest. Thus wine was a sacrament

with Christ; but drunkenness was not a

sacrament as with Dionysus. In short, Christianity

(merely historically seen) can best be

understood as an attempt to combine the

reason of the market-place with the mysticism

of the forest. It was an attempt to accept all

the superstitions that are necessary to man and

to be philosophic at the end of them. Pagan

Rome has sought to bring order or reason

among men. Christian Rome sought to bring

order and reason among gods.

Yikes

Help.

Always root for the underdog

Insanity Wrap: 

After seven decades in power, the [Chinese] ruling party has faced potentially existential challenges over the past year, from pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and an economic slowdown to a devastating coronavirus and, most recently, once-in-a-generation floods that have wreaked destruction across central China.

But far from diminishing its stature at home, as some in the Trump administration appear to believe, the party’s response to some of these crises has helped solidify the support of existing and aspiring members — or at least neutralized grumbling.

That’s right: WaPo’s Anna Fifield actually wrote a puff-piece celebrating that scrappy little Chinese Communist Party for overcoming long odds in a difficult year.

Robert E Howard, Gangsters & Bootleggers

A historical essay into the Conan author’s world. 

Violence and Growth

So as promised, here are my reflections on the subject of violence and growth.  We began the discussion in the comments of this post, and continued it briefly here.  You can find links to the Classical readings at the second of those links.

The issue at stake is how violence creates capacities to excel -- a capacity for excellence is arete in the Greek, and virtus in Latin, "virtue" in English -- yet also can create serious damage. That it does both is obvious, as the comments note at the first link; practical experience shows it. 

One might hope that the damage could be avoided, and the good still gained in another way.  This is the subject of the discussion among the Greeks in Plato's Laches, which Socrates is invited to join as he is a man of proven military valor. All the participants in the discussion are. The question is whether having sons practice 'fighting in armor' with masters who travel around teaching fighting techniques -- the ancient Greek version of martial arts teachers -- will also teach their sons courage. The debate ends in aporia, that is, with the members of the discussion stating that they aren't sure about the answer after all the talk.  Yet several things do emerge. One is that, while these men cannot say for certain exactly what courage is, they have all demonstrated it practically. Whether or not 'practicing in armor' can bring forth courage, war certainly can and does. 

It seems as if the quality of war that does what practice may not is the exposure to the genuine possibility of harm. Some practice, then, looks better than others. This weekend the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit suffered a tragic loss at sea of eight Marines and a sailor.  These men were literally 'practicing in armor,' and trying to develop an excellence of capacity through that practice:  an excellence in amphibious warfare. Their deaths are not in vain, for their comrades will be more successful in developing courage as well as other virtues given the clear example of how perilous the training itself can be. If it felt safe -- worse even than if it was safe -- there would be no more benefit to one's courage than comes from 'fighting' in pads, with padded objects.

Likewise in the Middle Ages, knights engaged in tournaments that were very nearly as brutal as war. An essay whose author and title I cannot currently recall points out that one of the most marked features of knights in the chivalric literature is wounds: the experience of being wounded, and of recovering from wounds (or not recovering from them) suffuses the literature. Even Lancelot is occasionally bed-bound and near death, tended by another and dependent on their care. Sometimes this is a lady, but often it is a former knight who has become a religious hermit or brother -- and whose expertise with such wounds comes from experience. To be brave and skilled seems to require the practice of doing dangerous things, which sometimes entails getting hurt.

This is what we would expect from reading Aristotle. All virtues of character, he notes, arise from practice. This is because the thing exists in us already as a potential (here we have what AVI would point to in terms of genetic heritage). But a potential is only a 'first actuality'; at first one's courage is only that one has the ability to become courageous. One's character changes by actually doing the things, until such time as one does them without needing to work up to it very much. Eventually courage is so habitual that it requires no thought, yet this does not make it irrational, says Aristotle: because it was rationally chosen and inculcated, the courageous man will do immediately what the thinking man would choose if he had time to think it through. So with all the virtues.

Yet Aristotle only gives us the happy part of the picture. Indeed for Aristotle, courage entails success in war:  the brave conquer, if they are brave enough. Practically we know this is not true. Often the bravest fall to superior numbers, but also -- like our bold Marines fallen this weekend -- to bad luck. This is what I think is absent from the Classical discussion: the role of moral luck.

In fact I have been extremely lucky, for which I am deeply grateful. I have been to war three times. I have been rocketed, mortared, machine-gunned and shot at with Kalashnikovs, and so many times that I long ago lost count. Yet I have experienced no serious harm from the wars. Another friend, whom I've written of before, experienced a mortar in a different way. A mortarman himself, one with extensive combat experience in OIF I, he was eventually badly concussed -- badly enough that he was forced to transfer out of the infantry. The damage to his brain is obvious and lingering, and he has trouble keeping it together; indeed, sometimes he doesn't manage to keep it together.  He is still courageous, but now also dangerous in bad ways because of the loss of the virtue of self-control. The loss is not his fault; it was bad luck. 

We have some limited control over this, but only insofar as we are the ones with the sword. We can learn to recognize the kinds of harms that cause trauma, and to avoid doing that kind of damage in preference to others. Sometimes this is impractical or unwise, as it would be unwise to risk your comrades clearing a room full of al Qaeda when a grenade would do it without similar risk (and anyway the hope is not to traumatize the foe, but to kill him, after which he will suffer no harm save from whatever judgment may befall his soul, the justice of which we have no ground to doubt). We can learn, though, not to inflict psychological harms on people in less warlike conflicts; we can choose to fight them fairly, preferring even physical wounds to psychic ones (though there is clear overlap with issues like traumatic brain injury). 

Even this kind of control is limited, and it flows downstream from us to our foes. Hopefully they might respond in kind; probably they will not. This was the ideal of the knights, who praised chivalrous treatment of one's enemies very highly. In practice, even for them, it was rare. The practicality of ransom might save a knight or a nobleman who fell on the battlefield; but as likely as not, a wounded man would be knifed and his body looted. Practically in recent wars our foes would behead captives on film, or burn them alive; or enslave them, if they were women. In the next war our foes are likely to be Communists again, and the Communist treatment of prisoners has historically been built around psychological abuse -- or summary execution. So if we do it, at least at war, we do it because it is right and itself virtuous rather than because it is likely to return any benefit to us. The best we can hope for from it is that it might give us people to negotiate with at the end of the war, veterans of the conflict who will understand the hardships of war as we do and who have reasons not to hate us as much as others do.

It is more beneficial in the cases under discussion in the comments. We have strong practical reasons to oppose abuse of children, the elderly, and weaker parties in general. We know this causes harms that are not easily fixed, even into adulthood. The abused may develop a courageous capacity out of learning to survive abuse, but there are cleaner ways to develop their capacities. I suppose that is not controversial.

What Aristotle might suggest to those who have suffered abuses, or bad luck, is probably that they should continue to practice the virtues they need. Last year I attended a MARSOC-oriented charity dinner (called the Brothers in Arms Foundation, if you happen to be looking to donate to something). One of the speakers was a former member of MARSOC who, after years of what he described as the best possible life -- the life of suiting up in armor and killing America's enemies -- stepped on a pressure-plate IED and lost his ability to walk. He was learning again, and could at this point stand with a cane. His speech was impressive, and he received much genuine admiration from all present, but his case cannot be as happy as he bravely made out. His sacrifice was terrible, yet he is doing his best with it. That may be the best that can be done. 

It may be necessary in less physical matters too. It might be necessary to practice being brave enough to confess (as happened here in the comments of the first post) that one cannot connect emotionally as some do. Perhaps this might give rise to some trusted relationships in which one can practice trying to do so, to nurture whatever potential for it remains. We can often only do our best with what we have; Fate sends what she does, and we must do what we can. 

That is practical advice, but it is not great advice. It is a hard road. Some of us choose to dare it, and our injured Marine shows why:  because it is the best possible life, to live boldly and free. It does not last forever, and it might end at any time. We may hope, as I do, that it ends in a quick and worthy death rather than in trauma, in painful labor without any hope of returning to the glories that went before. We should bear friendship and fellowship to those who have had that bad luck, though, because the bad luck came to them for reasons apart from their virtues. They may well be -- likely are -- better men than we are, in part just because they are having to practice harder with less hope.

As always, I leave the discussion open. These thoughts will be less valuable than your own. 

CItizens rise up

My county government has managed to bungle the roll-out of a proposal to borrow a ton of money to finance a new courthouse so stupendously that it inspired a tax revolt. The county tried to proceed by what's called a "certificate of obligation" bond, which under Texas law requires only a 45-day notice and no election unless 5% of registered voters petition for one. County leadership waited until the 45th day before the deadline for setting the year's budget and taxes, not only to announce the intent to borrow, but even to release the long-awaited plans and budget for a courthouse to replace the one that was destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. On that same day, they announced that we have to borrow the money this year or the world will end, and the only way to borrow it this year is to have the dedicated tax approved by the tax and budget deadline at the end of August. Hey, sorry there's no time for your input! You'll take this courthouse plan and budget and eat it! I say "they," because as a commissioner even I learned about all this when the public did, though clearly the County Judge must have been cooking it up for some time.

If the timeline hadn't been so mismanaged, we could still hold an election and get to work bringing the taxpayers on board, not an impossible task, since it's one thing to get 5% of voters on a petition but another to get 51% to vote down the courthouse project. As it is, however, the next available election date is in November, which means the whole thing has to wait until next year, because that's too late to dovetail the borrowing with the tax rate and approve them both by August 31. It's not ideal to delay the financing by a full year, but it beats denying the citizens a bond election.

The more I learn about "certificates of obligation" the less I like them. They were intended to give county governments a little emergency flexilibility, but there are no caps, so we are legally entitled to jam through $20MM in debt in a county whose typical ad valorem tax receipts are only $13MM, without an automatic election requirement. In some Texas counties, local officials have developed the unseemly habit of floating an ordinary bond proposal, losing the election, then jamming through a CO bond without an election, for the same purpose. The legislature put a stop to that by forbidding a CO bond that was identical to a failed general obligation bond election, which only inspired some counties to make trivial changes in the proposal and jam it through anyway.

It's going to be a serious problem for the county to put its reconstruction plans off for a year, but I'm beginning to think it's well worth it for the lesson in the consequences of overreaching with voters. I'm proud of my fellow citizens who stepped up. It's a small county, and the required 5% of registered means they need only about 850 signatures. In only two days, they've already collected about 500.

Closing Action

I’m thinking about hanging it up with blogging. I’ve got too much to do these days, and little time for an idle hobby. I don’t know that I have much left to say in this format anyway, and taking it offline would allow me to republish the best parts under my right name. 

Still, this is a community. You deserve say in how we wind it up. It’s been going for more than 17 years, and a few of you’ve been around that whole time. It would be wrong not to invite comment and consider your opinions. 

Consider this notice. Whatever you want to say, now’s the time.