Hospitalizations are not all unhappy in the same way

I was pleasantly surprised by this Atlantic article about recent attempts to figure out what COVID hospitalization rates are telling us. It avoids hyperbole and rigid black-or-white thinking, instead focusing on a spectrum of results that are influenced by age and immunological status (natural or vaccine-induced). The author notes that case counts are of little use without a way to distinguish asymptomatic cases from symptomatic or serious ones, and that death rates are a lagging indicator besides often failing to distinguish between deaths from or with COVID. Hospitalization rates suffer from some of these same problems, but studies that focus on oxygenation rates can be very helpful.

The studies cited in the article confirm the news from other sources that perhaps half of "COVID admissions" really are admissions for other reasons where a routine COVID test reveals a previously unsuspected infection. By looking at oxygenation rates, the studies provide more insight into how many people are still being hospitalized specifically for COVID complications, how intensively they have to be treated, and how quickly they can be released.

The article quotes a doctor who says he has patients who complain, "Why did I bother with the vaccine if I'm still in the hospital?" to which he answers, "But you're going to leave the hospital alive." A brief supportive stay in the hospital may not be a huge deal, much as we'd like to avoid it. A bad COVID hospital stay can be a real nightmare even if you survive it. The case that spooked me early on was a fellow in his 20s from my county, the son of a co-worker, who came down with a severely unlucky case, hugely complicated for no obvious reason, which kept him in an Austin hospital for months teetering between life and death. He was so young and otherwise healthy that they really pulled out all the stops for him, using convalescent serum and all kinds of treatments that were quite experimental in early 2020. He did survive, but lost some toes to sepsis. Although I know that's an extreme outlier, a sort of auto-immune storm that's almost impossible to predict, it still made me a lot less likely to go out into public unnecessarily until the vaccine came along.

There are some protective measures that aren't 100% effective but are still worth the effort. Masks may be among them, though I'm not entirely convinced of it, and not at all convinced in the case of casual cloth masks, particularly for asymptomatic people (symptomatic ones should be home anyway). Staying out of public surely helps even though it's not observed rigidly. As I read the data, vaccination is very, very helpful even though it's not a panacea. These are all things I'm happy to see people voluntarily put into practice; I've practiced many of them myself and often recommend them, not counting masks.

The lack of attention to monoclonal antibodies is puzzling and frustrating, so I tout this treatment whenever I get a chance, especially because you have to be ready to move fast once symptoms declare themselves, so you need to have figured out where they're available and what hoops you'll have to jump through to get access to them. If we really want to avoid clogging up hospitals, we should stop downplaying antibody infusion centers, which can administer their treatments in a 2-hour outpatient procedure that needn't even be administered anywhere near a hospital. But I swear I tell people about them all the time and get blank stares: all the oxygen in the room is taken up by fights over whether 2-year-olds need to be forcibly masked and massive numbers of people need to be driven out of their jobs by vaccine mandates.

My society has simply lost its mind. All I can conclude is that we're very bad at assessing and responding to brand new types of risk, so we revert to primitive thinking and superstition.

Unity

Woke failure

Via Powerline: "The Charlottesville city council played with fire. It got burned. I hope its response won’t be to set the flame at a lower temperature." I hope the same about the voters in 2022.

Vaccine Mandates

Way back when all this started, I 'went in' and locked down well before the government mandated it. At the time it seemed the appropriate thing to do, and so I did it without needing anyone to tell me. I greatly resented it, however, when the governor followed up with an order telling me to do what I'd already decided to do, and daring to assert legal threats should I stop doing what I'd already begun on my own. 

Likewise, I reasoned months ago to the conclusion that my work would eventually require me to be vaccinated. Simply should international travel be required, it was obviously going to be necessary; and working with the military, as I often do, was going to require it because it was clear that the military was going to require the vaccine for all servicemembers. I accept that I have a moral duty to provide for my family, and thus to run the hazards required to do the work I know how to do. My ancestors accepted risks to their lives and health to provide for their wives and children, whether from livestock or from mining, and so too must I. Should I die, I have life insurance; but I cannot live and be useless to those who have a right to depend on me. 

Once again, the government is coming behind to threaten and bully, trying to force people like me to do what I already decided to do and did do. They can go hang. 

It is commonly remarked that the Supreme Court decided this vaccine issue a long time ago. This history is misunderstood on two levels, but I also think it is irrelevant for an additional reason. First, the Supreme Court decided that states might issue mandates on vaccines, not the Federal government. Second, and more, what they really decided was that states might fine you for refusing a vaccine -- not that you must in fact be required to take one. (The fine, in the famous case, was five dollars.) 

Yet more importantly, the whole philosophical understanding of the American people on this issue has undergone a fundamental transformation. In the Progressive Era, the Wise who sit on high courts believed that government and its experts might properly sterilize you if they thought you were unfit to breed. They thought themselves wise enough to order every aspect of your life better than you could, and thus ordering you to accept injections or hysterectomies was aligned with their sense of what right looked like. Buck v. Bell was just such a case; and this mindset led to eugenics, the Tuskegee experiments, numerous secret psychological experiments on the American people, and abroad many of the worst horrors of the 20th century. 

Today the American people have adopted a very different moral standard: self-ownership, which is often described as 'my body, my choice.' The abortion debate turns on this understanding, with the two sides either affirming that a woman has an absolute right to abortion because her body is affected, or else that the right might be fettered because in fact there is another human's body that will be affected -- indeed destroyed -- by the procedure. The issue here is the same one; one's refusal of a vaccine might possibly affect others, though (unlike in the abortion case) it is ultimately your own body that is going to be definitively altered by the experience. 

Indeed, the differences in the cases are on the side of rejecting the mandates. Abortion always kills a human being; a refusal to take a vaccine may never kill one, and indeed probably will not. You worsen your own odds of serious illness, but even if you were vaccinated you would still be capable of becoming sick and transmitting this to others; thus, you are taking on the extra risks yourself, rather than pushing them off onto another from whose death you hope to benefit in some way. 

Thus, the principle governing our contemporary understanding -- self-ownership -- makes this act an affront. The attempt to launder it through the private sector rather than taking responsibility for doing it does not make it better but worse. The attempt to evade Constitutional restrictions on Federal power by using corporate power as the state's agent is fascist in the literal and proper sense of the word. 

Therefore, though I have already done the thing they wanted done and these mandates affect me not at all, I utterly reject them. They are improper, unacceptable, and a violation of our moral order. Anyone who wishes to defy them ought to do so, and we should support their defiance as we are able. 

A Rally on the Reservation

It was sedate as such things go. 

Here's a 1927 Indian on the Wall of Death.

This next one is just for fun with one bike, and becomes a challenge with two or more. At one point we had a Marine on leave before his next duty station volunteer to stand inside it while they rode around him. I didn't video that to protect him from his chain of command, who would have had a fit if they'd learned of it. 

These are just games, of course. The real dangers are on the highway. We rode to the rally Friday, camped in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, rode the Park on Saturday with lunch in Gatlinburg, and then back home via the Blue Ridge Parkway on Sunday. 

I saw some magnificent elk, including late at night and also including a magnificent bull with 14 points we counted. Sadly I was moving too fast to get a picture of him. Here’s a smaller fellow who wasn’t with the main herd, probably having been chased off by the big bull. 

The event was called the Blue Ridge Run, and in addition to games and the like there was music. The closing bands on Friday and Saturday were both notable. The Friday night band was billed as a Black Sabbath tribute band, called Sabbath, which proved to secretly be a Dio tribute band in disguise. They were serviceable on the Sabbath covers, but at some point the singer said, "To give you the full experience we should do some Dio, as they toured together so often over the years." Those songs proved to be the heart of their set.

The headline band was led by Jasmine Cain, a female rocker out of Nashville who was absolutely delightful. Her band has played this rally every year it's ever been held, but always as opening act. This year she was asked to headline the show, and you could tell it meant the world to her. She has a lot of spirit and a good little three-piece band. You may hear of her again. 

You'll be happy to know, Mike, that I never set foot in the casino. 

Without firing a shot

You could have knocked me over with a feather when, first, the pro-abortion movement barely made a peep when the Texas "heartbeat" law was passed last spring and, second, the Texas abortion clinics all spontaneously ceased all post-six-weeks abortions on the day the law took effect.  It turns out, however, that neither development was a complete surprise to the anti-abortion movement in Texas.  This National Review article describes the jurisprudence and legal strategy that went into crafting and passing the bill. 

Texas passed so many other hot-button bills this session that leftists were significantly distracted and nearly failed to make the heartbeat bill a priority.  Meanwhile, the controversial private-enforcement mechanisms that renders the heartbeat bill immune to injunction was a technique that already had survived test-runs in small Texas jurisdictions.

Enid & Geraint

By custom and tradition of the Hall, there will be only one post today. I think this will be the last time we observe this tradition. We are now able to see the end of the war that began when Geraint drew his sword, beholding a bandit realm. We have glutted the ravens, but in the end the bandit realm remains; and our own has fallen into darkness, not because of the war but at least in spite of it. 

The story begun on 9/11 has ended. Now it is time for another story.

Enid & Geraint

Once strong, from solid

Camelot he came

Glory with him, Geraint,

Whose sword tamed the wild.

Fabled the fortune he won,

Fame, and a wife.

The beasts he battled

With horn and lance;

Stood farms where fens lay.

When bandits returned

To old beast-holds

Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,

Purchased by the manful blade.

Light delights filled it,

Tournaments softened, tempered

By ladies; in peace lingers

the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness

Gathered on the old wood,

Wild things troubled the edges,

Then crept closer.

The whispers of weakness

Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid

Whose eyes are as dusk

Looked on her Lord

And weighed him wanting.

Her gaze gored him:

He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey

To ride before or beside

And they went to the wilds,

Which were no longer

So far. Ill-used,

His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where

Once he laid pastures,

The knight halted, horsed,

Gazing on the grim trees.

He opened his helm

Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge

Of a criminal clad in mail!

The Lord turned his horse,

Set his untended shield:

There lacked time, there

Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the

Ancient shield. It split,

Broke, that badge of the knight!

The spearhead searched

Old, rust-red mail.

Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount

Rediscovered their rich love,

And armor, though old

Though red with thick rust,

Broke the felon blade.

The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees

In Geraint's cold eyes

What shivers her to the spine.

And now his hand

Draws the ill-used sword:

Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break

Rang from bandit-towers

Rattled the wood, and the world!

Men dwelt there in wonder.

Who had heard that tone?

They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken

On old, rusted mail,

The felon sought his forest.

Enid's dusk eyes sense

The strength of old steel:

Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,

And he spurs his proud horse,

And the wood to his wrath trembles.

And every bird

From the wild forest flies,

But the Ravens.

To the Wild

I am going to the Cherokee reservation and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for the weekend. I have set up the 9/11 memorial post on a timer. 

Be well. We can talk next week about other things. 

Lawless Judiciary

Here in NC, Democratic justices are preparing to force Republicans off the bench to try to rule voter ID unconstitutional. The terms of the suit would facially appear to disqualify every other law ever passed in NC, and the state constitution. 

This one is worth reading in full. 

All Powers Turn

Every power granted to fight terrorism after 9/11 was turned against American citizens, reminds Reason. 

Good News

The Biden administration has been forced to pull their nominee to head the ATF, David Chipman, more properly known as the Butcher of the Branch Davidians. Dozens including 25 children were killed in that event, and then the compound was bulldozed before any investigations could be conducted. Janet Reno offered to resign, but Bill Clinton told her not to worry about it; and Chipman, a case agent at Waco, continued his career up until this moment. 

At least this one thing has gone right lately. He is a man whose heavy handed tactics have already killed many innocent Americans; he is the last person you should put in charge of an agency like the ATF, which would be better disbanded anyway. 

Speaking of Waco, where the Branch Davidian event took place, Constitutional Carry just went into effect there. The police chief urges you to get training anyway if you elect to carry a gun, which is honestly good advice. You should seek training if you're going to carry.

Doc Watson on Funerary Humor

Perhaps when a man reaches a certain age, his mind turns to funerals. Here is the legendary Doc Watson with a couple of jokes on the subject.

Afterwards they play some good mountain music for a while. Doc's gone to his own reward these days; this recording is from 2004. 

Year Zero

David Reaboi on the destruction of statues.

I feel like I should say something about this, but what's left to say? They intend to destroy all of it. They are actively doing so. We cannot stop them through legal means, because for the moment they have captured the government and all its power. The statues themselves aren't worth the blood that would likely result from resorting to extra-legal means; and so we don't. 

They're still wrong, though, to destroy the art of our ancestors and the peace that was built around it. They don't care, and they intend to continue until all of it is wrack.

Not Sure About This One

 

These folks are technically good, and I often find value in efforts like this. It seems very strange to me to do "Danny Boy" as an up-tempo number, though. Mixing it with "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" forces it into a strange place. 

See what you think. 

A little medical judgment

 I found this article about Ivermectin a welcome relief.  As far as I can tell, the jury's still out on whether Ivermectin does any good in treating COVID, but the jury's equally out whether it does any harm.  It certainly is no ground for the extraordinary paroxysms of hysteria and vilification we've been witnessing.

The problem with a disease that all but a tiny fraction of people survive is that almost anything you can think of can be administered to patients, the vast majority of whom will recover.  Does Ivermectin work better than chocolate ice cream or, for that matter, an amulet worn around the neck?  I have no idea, and I don't much care, because unless you take absurd doses it's pretty cheap and extremely unlikely to hurt you.  It's no nuttier than many medical fads wholeheartedly embraced not only by the journalistic-industrial establishment but frankly by the AMA and rank-and-file doctors.  A low-fat, high-carb diet probably will turn out to be infinitely more dangerous than popping the occasional heartworm pill pilfered from your pup.

This nonsense is no way to conduct public health policy.  We've squandered more credibility than I thought possible in the last couple of years--and I would have said we'd done a pretty horrible job already for the couple of decades before that.  We've devolved into superstition and ad hominem attacks when we aren't sunk deep into outright fraud.

Entertaining an Alternative View

Jan-Werner Müller, writing in the New Statesman ,would like you to consider that the elite/populist division is actually, secretly a means for the elite to retain power by dividing the working class. This is a standard Marxist way of understanding many conflicts -- and it sometimes proves true. For example, the intense encouragement of racist views and actions in the Jim Crow South really was at least partly about hiding from poorer white Southerners the fact that the richer Southerners and Northern banks were the real oppressors in their lives; in fact, they shared intense common interests with poorer black Southerners. The mythology they were offered, which they often bought, really was about keeping the elite in power by hiding the commonality of class interests.

Nevertheless, this has not been my view of the populist rejection of things like Hillary Clinton or Remain in Europe. They begin with a noteworthy observation:

Half a decade on, “Brexit and Trump” remain shorthand for the rise of right-wing populism and a profound unsettling of liberal democracies. One curious fact is rarely mentioned: the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Remain in 2016 had similar-sounding slogans, which spectacularly failed to resonate with large parts of the electorate: “Stronger Together” and “Stronger in Europe”. Evidently, a significant number of citizens felt that they might actually be stronger, or in some other sense better off, by separating. What does that tell us about the fault lines of politics today?

That similarity was not accidental; it is of a piece with how "Build Back Better" became a slogan on the tongue of every Western leader. Observe this montage of, well, all of them saying exactly this phrase.

This strongly suggests that in fact there is an international class who think alike, and find the same language persuasive -- who are learning from each other, at least, if not in fact designing together a common program to govern all of our various societies from a stratum above us (and separated from us). The NS piece is going to talk a lot about the ability to build such strata within societies, but still wants to assert that this is really about wealth and not culture. 

So let's consider that, after the jump.

The Sins of GKC

A new book, here reviewed.

[Chesterton] was content to have Frances manage his life.... His subservience to Frances may be seen as evidence of his gentle decency or alternatively as a weakness. Ingrams, I think, inclines to the latter view.

But what of the ‘sins’ of the title? Here too it may be a question of weakness. Ingrams has Chesterton led astray, like a medieval king, by evil counsellors. There were two: his adored younger brother, Cecil, and his admired mentor Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton had a better mind and sharper intellect than either of them, as well as a kinder and more generous, if weaker, character. 

It's mostly anti-Semitism, although anyone who has ever seen a picture of GKC might have thought of gluttony. In his defense, GKC lived before the depths of anti-Semitism were exposed; and the introductory version he bought on to is a form that masks a valid complaint that is severable from the Jews. "He felt that Jewish finance was corrupting Catholic Europe" is often described as a predecessor to the view that "loyalty to internationally-financed corporations undermines loyalty to one's own nation." You don't need any Jews to be involved to worry, for example, that Apple's or Nike's commitments to Communist China have worrying effects on our political culture here at home. You only even need 'the Chinese' accidentally; it could be any authoritarian nation with communistic values.

The reviewer continues:

I still read Belloc and Chesterton with pleasure. Few others seem to. Ingrams opines that only Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories remain popular. This is probably true, though The Flying Inn, a fantastic novel about an Islamic takeover of England, has considerable vitality. (It’s not much use, I would add, to modern-day Islamophobes, Chesterton’s Islam being very different from theirs.) His book on Thomas Aquinas has been judged one of the best popular accounts of his philosophy. Chesterton is still admired in American Catholic universities, and a few years ago I was sent a copy of a French intellectual journal devoted entirely to Chesterton. All the same, today’s Catholic Church is very different from the one Belloc and Chesterton defended.

That last is certainly true, at least among the living. The Church believes in a metaphysical self, though, in which Chesterton himself is still a member -- and, hopefully, still praying for his beloved Ecclesia.  

Progressives and Genetics

It's ugly, they admit; "but what if it's true?", they begin to ask.

A Collegiate Theory

"Men appear to be giving up on college," Hot Air worries, citing WSJ data.

U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline, the Journal analysis found.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man...

All of this makes me worry about the future. Having CRT enter public classrooms and emphasize the idea of white supremacy and male privilege at a point where white males are already struggling with education seems like a perfect storm of bad ideas. Based on the data above, we don’t need to be telling boys that they need to check their privilege from the time they can first read and write, we need to be helping them do as well as girls.

Alternatively, it may be that college is objectively less valuable than it was, and men are on the forefront of figuring this out. Just as an initial baseline, college costs have skyrocketed over the last decades due to government making student loans easily available. Colleges responded by raising tuition to the limits the government would support. Thus, college costs a lot more now for whatever value you are going to get out of it.

There's less value to get out of it, too. Feminists sometimes complain that any field that women succeed in entering immediately begins to lose pay, although they read this as 'sexism' rather than as 'supply and demand'; if you add many more workers to the field, the supply increase naturally means that pay can be lessened. Women now are successfully dominating the office jobs that require a bachelors degree, and that means that office jobs are not as prestigious or well-remunerated as once. These environments were always unattractive to men, but the pay made up for the depressing need to be inside all day long. Now there's less pay, too. 

Meanwhile, a lot of college degrees are now education degrees or lower-level medical degrees -- nursing, say. In addition to being inside-all-day fields, these are also areas where there is social pressure to keep men out. Men are essentially unwelcome to be elementary school teachers, and barely welcome in secondary schools; and nursing is a traditionally female field, though of course men do become nurses. These are classic fields that offer security in return for no real chance of making a fortune, which are less attractive to men even absent the social pressures that keep men out of them. 

Outsourcing and offshoring are also an issue. It first affected factory workers, but at this point a lot of white collar jobs can be offshored. What can't be offshored is skilled trade work. Your plumber or electrician is going to have to be there where you are physically. Those are jobs that require certifications and practical experience rather than college degrees. 

I have obviously spent a lot of time in school, and don't mean to run down education's value. Yet an actual education is hard to get in college; you really have to work at finding one. If you want to know the secrets of the universe, it's possible to learn a lot about them in a university. What you'll probably be routed towards, though, is a degree in 'education' or some nonsense 'social science' that teaches you nothing about physics, little about math beyond statistics, and assumptions about philosophy and history rather than a capacity to inquire into them deeply. You'll read Aristotle's name a few times, but you won't read Aristotle. 

For me that was the real value in education, and most degrees do not now even aspire to it. Of course men might lose interest in something that has become less interesting. The question is why women continue to double-down on a play that has become vastly more expensive and obviously less valuable. 

Ritual of Abortion

Everybody knows this 'Satanic Temple' bit is a play-acting legal falsehood. It intends to provide fake 'deeply held religious belief' cover for things like drug usage and abortion, to mock actual religion, and to force communities to build sculptures to Satan if they allow things like crosses for war veterans on public land. It's always been an open joke by people who hate traditional religion and want to mock it, and one that occasionally proves useful to the designs of their real ideology.

One wonders, however, if invoking the abyss often enough won't actually summon it.