Pushing Back on the Narrative of Modern Systemic Racism

 A former infantryman and current electrical engineer takes on the narrative of modern systemic racism and white privilege.

Swing states

 This is a good 538 piece about red-blue swings in key states.

The New York Times gets the memo

Don Lemon let the cat out of the bag by complaining that the rioting was affecting the polling now, you guys, time to cut it out.  By the next day the memo clearly had gone out to practically everyone, because the messaging was disciplined and unified.  The New York Times made it official by running a piece that actually quotes moderate voters and attempts to explain their disgust with the collapse of law and order and the paralysis of leaders in its face.

I try not to link to the NYT, but you can read excerpts from it here at Powerline.

Backup Contact Info

I'd like to have a way to stay in touch with the regulars if the blog ever goes away, or if we ever decide to have a reunion party (Can it be a "re" union if we've never met?) or whatnot.

I'm putting a contact email in the comments for anyone else who is interested in staying in touch. Just send me an email and I'll add you to the list.

Laboratories of democracy

My messy local government spat over tax policy, debt, and voters' rights is still evolving.  To my amazement, the relatively non-functional county government managed to get its act together in time to put our proposed bond on the November ballot by the August 17 deadline, thus ensuring that (if we win voter approval) we can borrow our funds by early 2021 and not blow the construction schedule for our new courthouse or imperil our partial grant funding.

Meanwhile, the comparatively transparent and orderly city government simply didn't.  They'd just witnessed a rapid and successful petition effort to force an election on the county's separate $20MM bond proposal to build a courthouse.  The city was using the same negative-notice bond proposal statute to attempt to borrow its own $20MM for a city hall without an election.  The petitioners moved off their county bond triumph to mount a petition drive on the city bond.  It was obvious they would quickly succeed--it took only one weekend--but their deadline for presenting the petition was the day after the deadline for putting the city bond on the ballot.  The city, which should have taken the same pre-emptive action the county took, simply missed its deadline to put the city bond on the November ballot.  Denial?  Fury?  Distraction?  Inability to escape the bubble of their like-minded friends?  I really don't get it.  They're usually pretty sober.  Now the city has to wait until next May for an election to approve its bond, if they don't abandon the bond effort completely.  This is disastrous for the city but not an overwhelming problem for the petitioners.  It makes no sense.

Meanwhile, as we all gear up for a November election on the county bond, both the county and the city boosters seem to want to continue to spend time complaining about those deplorable voters who exercised their right to demand an election.  Why, oh why, did they demand it at the last minute?  Why didn't they get comfortable with the proposed bonds, as the government leaders vaguely hoped they would, though without troubling themselves to inform or convince anyone that $40 million in debt was a fine idea?  I find myself having to say repeatedly that the city and the county had complete control over their own schedules for when to publish the twin 45-day notices of intent to borrow without an election, both of which were always and by statute subject to the right of voters to petition for an election.  The voters could not force the city or county to publish the notices weeks or months earlier, but I cannot find any reason why the city or county couldn't have done so.  The numbers may not have been crystal clear last spring, but they're not crystal clear now, either.  You pick the best number you can and try to borrow that, explaining to the public as best you can why it's the right number.  What is the difficulty here?

There is also continued grousing over the idea that 5% of voters can override the presumptive will of most voters to approve these wonderful bonds.  My own view:  the alternative is to let 5 people control the bond decision for the entire city full of voters, and another 5 people control the bond decision for the entire county full of voters.  At least this way, all the voters will get a chance to decide how wonderful the bonds are.

Did either the county or the city leadership deliberately wait until the last minute?  I can't think why they would, but I guess it's possible.  They're not talking.  They're just resentful it didn't work.  I understand the resentment, in a way, but I'll be darned if I can understand why they think it's a good idea to keep talking about the resentment when what they really need is to win a vote on the bonds.  They should be falling all over themselves to congratulate the voters on their franchise rights, and working hard to give them good facts and arguments in favor of the bonds.  Instead, they're up to their usual strategies of fighting transparency with a bitter determination born of the conviction that it's simply wrong to distrust them and joggle their expert elbows.  Monday's Commissioners Court meeting was practically a morality play entitled "what local government officials act like when you presume to ask questions and they despise you for it."

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.