Category: BW Member Blog

Once in a while I can be trusted to take notice of something beyond fishing weather and the price of gas at the pumps. I don’t spend all of those other moments hiding under a rock. Keeping up with important details isn’t so bad. It just seems to me that 24/7 is more time than […]

Posting from my phone because I have a bit of time while out making service calls and I fear I will forget when I get home…

Does anyone remember when Scott might have mentioned what streaming software they use?

Alternately is there a search feature I missed?

Bill:   Some years ago I taught an adult-education class for a local college, on the history of Western Civilization.  The course had been developed around Kenneth Clark’s PBS series “Civilization.”

Clark began by asking “what is civilization?”.  His answer, briefly, was “I know it when I see it” and then the camera focused in on the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.  Then, he explained what was socially necessary to produce some a thing in its time.

That was effective, but I always followed that by reading to the class your essay titled “The Web of Trust” about your learning to fly your airplane using instruments only, your point being, as best I remember it, that civilization is a “web of trust” whereby we all live by the interaction of trust-worthy purposeful human actors.

I’m writing how to suggest that you revive that essay and lecture and apply it to the current social and cultural situation in the US and the world.  Our civilization seems to be falling apart,, and we need some reminders of what is was, of what it could be, and how that can be accomplished.

Just putting a bug in your ear. . .

Greetings to Scott and Steve.  You guys are great!

Terry Elniff, Asheville, NC

So a few years ago I was fortunate to see Bill while he visited here in Phoenix. During the Q/A session I asked him this question, and I would toss this out to everyone here their thoughts as well.

At one point in societal history it was considered normal to drill holes into someone’s head to “release the spirits”, to drink water from a decanter that had radioactive pellets to “give vitality, to treat certain illnesses with leaches and on and on. However there was that societal shift where en masse people stopped doing that. Instead, today it’s normal to wash hands, take a pill for what ails ya, even have a full-body scan if you so choose.

Now the question I posed to Bill, and now out to everyone here, what would you think is that “introduction to Penicillin” moment when the country, if not the world, realizes en masse how bad Socialism is and consider it as quaint as those people hundreds of years ago that tried to beat demons out of people that today we would call schizophrenic?

I have been wondering, why have we reacted this way to Covid-19?  We didn’t react this way for H1N1, SARS, or any other potential pandemics we’ve been told were going to kill us all.  

The cynic in me wants to say that it’s Trump Derangement Syndrome.  They let Obama off easy.  But I don’t really think that’s it because Dems never let a crisis go to waste and would have been thrilled to shut down our economy to the point of forcing a Marxist revolution if they’d had a chance when they had an incumbent in the White House who was raised by feral Marxists (I love that line of yourse, Bill).  Witness Pelosi’s ridiculous stunt holding up the relief package.  (Either the Dems aren’t taking it seriously, or they are trying to destroy the economy so that they can then execute their power grab of wish-list socialist policies.)

The romantic conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that They Know where this virus really came from–see the blogs/vlogs harvardtothebighouse or JC on a Bike–namely labs, and so They reacted as if this were a movie about a pandemic.  

I don’t really like either of those two ideas, and yet it really seems to me that, absent some significant hidden data, the reaction of shutting everything down for weeks just doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Even granting that it is a highly infectious virus, all the calculations of potential death tolls don’t take into account basic seasonal flu experience like herd immunity (which our self-quarantining is slowing down).  

So I’m wondering, why did this–our reaction to a potential pandemic–happen now, to this virus?

I paraphrase, but in one of the BWN episodes (I think it was “Unfearing” but may have been another) combined with TSL on 3/12 Bill emphasized the fact that we’re dealing with the wrong numbers, and that the best plan of action is actually to try to isolate those who are at higher risk, not the entire populace.

I extrapolate, and recognize that these are thoughts and ideas difficult to implement (as difficult as a national lock-down of Americans?) but if the message had been to help isolate those who are elderly or have conditions that make them susceptible to “critical” status instead of to try to isolate everyone, the virus would “run rampant” and burn itself out and (difficult to prove, I admit) possibly have a lessened impact on the people who are actually at risk.

I fall into a trap like anyone: I am an amateur statistician and know little about viruses and how they work. However, while I am willing to have my fear buttons pushed, I am also just enough a fan of math to look at the numbers and scratch my head. I am being asked to panic over an unproven, scary number. I am not seeing it materialize.

What I AM seeing is a constant and dubious, subtle interchange between the numbers of people who are likely to become infected and the number of people who are at serious risk of death. News stories focus on death tolls, yes. But they report such numbers without context (such as relative population samples let’s say between Italy and the USA). I see marching charts of how many new confirmed cases there are without reference (such as the fact that there are now testing capabilities where there weren’t before so of course you’ll have more confirmed cases and that the more confirmed cases we have, the more downward pressure there is on the case mortality rate). If the case mortality rate reduces to 0.6% (already possible if we are not confirming asymptomatic or mild cases or simply don’t have enough tests?) we are dealing with an illustration of what happens during a bad flu season. We do not take these measures during a bad flu season.

Next I see a circular firing squad where medical doctors point out that economists and politicians aren’t qualified to understand the impact of a virus (the implication being that all other people and professions are downplaying the serious, deadly nature of the virus), then turn around and make proclamations about how we (in turn) are clearly OVER stating the political and economic impact of the measures they’re suggesting we take to contain the virus. How can you claim that medical is requisite for credibility on medical impacts and not admit that economic training is requisite for understanding economic impacts?

My views are unpopular. They are grim, but I hope realistic. They are not based on medical acumen (I have been very healthy most of my life and have no medical training whatsoever). They are based on 50+ years of being alive and probably 35 useful years of observation. I may not know medicine, but I have been exposed to any number of genuine events and any number of sky-is-falling cries of wolf. Over that time you develop what is colloquially called “gut instincts”.

Bill said many of these things already so forgive me if I sound like him (I’ll take that compliment any day of the week). Containment is not possible. Nor is it even desirable for the vast, vast bulk of the population. Flattening the curve would have been better achieved by keeping the populace from panic and by focusing our attention on the much smaller portion of society that needs it. Spend $4 trillion on a stimulus package, or contract with several major hotel chains to buy out all their rooms for isolation of those at risk? Just one idea.

Is it too late for this to happen? I think not, but I think we have been handed a much more difficult task by an agenda-driven media that both empowers and is empowered by politicians more interested in control of constituents than coronaviruses. If it is unfair to think that politicians might have a power-gasm over the ability to impose martial law on their populace, perhaps those politicians might want to consider how our opinion of them dipped so low. If we have so little faith in the media that we are constantly second-guessing their sources or data, perhaps they might want to consider how our opinion of them dipped so low.

Sorry, I could not help getting in a dig at the end. Perhaps I should consider how I got to be so cynical.

An old infantryman’s point of view: Maybe it’s time to stop hunkering down and start fighting for our lives

I suppose as you read this you must think, “This guy is full of himself. Does he think he’s smarter than the President and Congress, or all the medical experts in the world?”

Well, no. I’m not smarter than anybody, certainly not all the medical experts in the world, at least not as regards things medical. However, I bet I could stump more than a few of them when it comes to warcraft, government, business, or a few other topics. As for Congress, I would pit my knowledge against their collective smarts any day. Indeed, they operate in a political fog that obscures common sense. Finally, as regards the President, I suspect that we might be on a par in many matters, however, I have an advantage. I’m not laboring under the critical scrutiny that he is.

So, let’s get on with it. What is my proposal to wage war against a global pandemic?

Simply, it is to wage war. We are under attack and we need to fight back. Hunkering down in our foxholes (social distancing) isn’t going to work. It isn’t working. Even if we were able to flatten the curve, sufficiently spread out the infection rate so that it’s manageable, we would kill the “patient” – America. Just as we cannot hold our breath for more than a minute or two, a stalled economy cannot be endured very long.

In war there will be casualties. We must accept that. The medical community can’t. Their whole raison d’être is to prevent death, all death. Economics has no place in their diagnosis and treatment. However, our patient cannot be saved by medical treatment alone and if it dies, so do we all.

Thus, we must prepare to accept casualties. A more realistic goal is to limit them.

In war, we take necessary risks. I well remember a lesson early in my infantry training when we were being instructed in the design, construction, and use of holes in the ground. Foxholes and rifle trenches provide cover and concealment to infantrymen. However, if they only cower in their holes, the enemy ultimately will appear and stick them with a bayonet. At some point, they have to take a risk, stand up and fight back. That is what we must now do.

Our goal should be to limit casualties rather than prevent all casualties. To accomplish that goal, we must gather intelligence before we join the battle.

Data (at least that to which we are privy) tells us one key fact: Covid-19 appears only minimally fatal to the young and healthy. Allowing them to return to their normal lives would provide two key benefits:

1. The economy could return to near normal

2. As they contract and recover from the disease, they likely would develop immunities that might help in combating future occurrences of Coronaviruses.

As an additional benefit, the cost and availability of resources to treat serious cases of the disease would be reserved to the smaller part of the population at risk (the aged and those with pre-existing conditions). 

Simply put, we cannot afford to protect everybody all the time and, even if we could, the patient would die.

How about we use every state’s DMV drivers license issuing photo/identity system and send out “I WAS TESTED POSITIVE FOR COVID-19 ON XX/XX/XXXX” cards. two weeks after issuance it’s a “I can go anywhere” card. zero privacy issues (south korea tracking everyone? nope nope nope.). Iowa already has the info on file to print them. Just need to set up a state department of health db to track who had a positive test and when. which they probably already have, just locked down for privacy. since it would be opt in, zero privacy concerns.  hell, I would pay for the test and the card just to avoid the bureaucratic noise I had to try (and fail) to get past to help a customer in a retirement home get his pc back on the wireless network in the building.  if we’re going to be fighting this for months (building access restrictions) we’ve got to get a system set up to qualify who’s safe and who isn’t.