Things are moving very rapidly with the coronavirus. Last week and this week, I think, are going to be the watershed period for this pandemic going from an abstraction to a reality. I guess I’m writing this to keep track of how things are developing. It’s already a little hard to remember what my perspective was two weeks ago. I do recall that maybe two or three weeks ago, I was doing some legal research on local government’s options for dealing with disease. At the time, I was mainly focused on the procedures for requiring an individual to remain in quarantine. I also looked a little bit at how things would work for dealing with a more community-wide epidemic. That seemed a little drastic. Today it seems more on point than an individualized approach. (Generally speaking, the local health officer and board of health has the most specific powers to deal with epidemics. The local department’s authority is trumped by the state department of health’s authority.)

Today, the Governor announced that bars and restaurants would be closed to in-person dining. Take out and delivery are still permitted. Indiana had its first reported COVID-19 death. The ISDH is also reporting 24 confirmed cases out of 139 people tested. Tippecanoe County has made the decision that walk-in traffic from the public won’t be allowed in most of its buildings. The courts have to remain open to a greater extent, but they are attempting to postpone cases, continue jury trials, allow telephonic appearances, and generally limit the amount of personal contact. The Indiana Supreme Court issued an order giving the trial courts more flexibility to manage their dockets.

I gave my friend in Australia some static about Tom Hanks getting infected in his area. Turns out, this friend is like two people removed from Tom Hanks who tested positive, and he reported that Australia’s 4th death was out of Noosa, Queensland where he works. I have another friend in Spain who is giving daily reports where things are far more advanced. Their movement is very restricted, only allowed out of their houses for very specific reasons. In Madrid, drones are broadcasting the restrictions. She reports that grocery stores are limiting the number of people who can enter at once and aren’t accepting cash. The number of positive cases rose by 2,000 up to 9,800. Right now, the U.S. (with a bigger population and landmass) is at 4,587 confirmed cases with 85 deaths. One source I saw suggested we were tracking 10 days behind Italy which is showing 28,000 reported cases and 2,158 deaths.

So, people locally are starting to take this seriously at varying speeds. Some are ready to live in a bubble. Others still think it’s much ado about not very much. Most people are between those extremes but moving in the direction of the bubble people. Also, the stock market has tanked. I think that’s all I have for tonight.

Obviously I couldn’t think of a title. I just felt like I should write about this pandemic in which we find ourselves. As a history major who studied World War I a fair amount, I’ve long had some familiarity with the flu of 1918. (The “Spanish” flu — mainly gaining this title because the WWI combatants kept their flu outbreaks secret for awhile as part of the war effort, so there was more publicity about the Spanish outbreak.) This isn’t that, exactly. Currently, this doesn’t look to be as lethal as the 1918 flu (which killed more people than the War.) But, God willing and the creek don’t rise, this will be as close as we come to that experience. On the other hand, the 1918 flu and other epidemics and pandemics should inform our response. And COVID-19 does seem to be more contagious and deadly than modern flu outbreaks and other diseases we’ve seen lately.

I’m usually one to reflexively dismiss “kids these days” type grousing about how we’re getting soft. But, in terms of disease, we truly do not appreciate how good we have it. The fact that anti-vaxxers are a thing really underscores that point. Reading histories and reports from before 1918, the disease situation was an absolute horror show. Smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, polio, tuberculosis, and typhoid are all diseases which loomed large the fears of our forefathers but have largely disappeared from our public consciousness. This monthly bulletin for April 1912 from the Indiana State Department of Health is metal as hell.

There are stories about a syphilitic attorney from Shoals; a fly who is born in manure, graduates with all of his maggot buddies, spreads typhoid, lays eggs, and gets into a ladies breast milk; the image featured to the right; and an evaluation of “Dr. Lindley’s Golden Remedy” among quite a bit more.

But the most rapidly spreading and deadly of the communicable diseases have been largely contained in recent generations, so we have sort of lost the muscle memory of how to deal with them. This inexperience has been exacerbated by the 24 hour news cycle. I know it’s popular to blame “the media,” but in this case, I think it’s appropriate to some extent. I see this news cycle as causing problems in two respects – first, it has cried wolf over the years. Anxiety about disease is a reliable way to draw eyeballs, so any time something new and different is spreading around to any extent, it gets intense media coverage. When those hyped diseases don’t materialize locally in any noticeable way, the media reporting takes on a “boy who cried wolf” quality. Secondly, any issue with a vaguely political angle is reliably hyped as a crisis or dismissed as a hoax. So, even reasonably well adjusted people don’t know how to calibrate their responses. People who reflexively catastrophize or minimize everything obviously aren’t going to get it right.

That’s why we rely on experts. It’s fashionable to glorify “street smarts” and to ridicule “book smarts,” but sometimes we really do need book smarts. And, our national leadership doesn’t have them. We have to allow some leeway for making mistakes during a rapidly evolving and uncertain situation, but even so, the federal government has not been making good decisions. I’m not blaming Trump for the virus or the fact that got to the U.S. That was probably inevitable. The travel restrictions to and from China probably did some good. However, the delays in testing and the decisions about making our own tests have left us blind and behind the curve. Many of the decisions seemed designed to limit the available data so as to control a media narrative and allow the White House to deny that there was much of a problem. I don’t care much for Ayn Rand in general, but there was a passage from John Galt’s rant that stuck with me where he talks about how “A” = “A.” At some point, no matter what you say about reality, certain aspects of reality can’t be talked away and are indifferent to anyone’s wishes, whims, or feelings. You don’t have to believe in a pandemic for it to hurt you and your family.  To the horror of the reality-based community, Trump’s approach was to wish it away. Also, he put Mike Pence in charge which, given his inadequate response to the HIV epidemic in Scott County while governor, was a poor choice.

The state level response has been a little slow maybe but not necessarily bad. Much of that can probably be attributed to difficulty getting coronavirus tests. As I write this at 10:22 on Saturday, March 14, the ISDH website is reporting a total of 89 people being tested. That has to be insufficient. South Korea is testing something like 10,000 people per day. They can just drive up. South Korea has a little less than 10x the population of Indiana. A proportional response on our end would be testing 1,000 people per day. Sounds like we’re doing maybe 10 per day. Our county health officials are busting their collective asses and doing the best they can with the resources they have. They’ve been communicating with the public and issuing advisories about how the public can slow the spread.

One driving sentiment is that we don’t want to become like Italy. This disease is quite a bit more serious than the flu, but our health system seems to have the ability to treat the people who do become seriously ill if we are able to “flatten the curve.” In other words, if everyone gets sick all at once, the sheer numbers will overwhelm the capacity of our medical system in terms of available beds, ventilators, and health professionals. If we can slow the spread such that people get sick at different times, the health care system is better able to care for people as they get sick. This idea of flattening the curve is probably the critical piece of information being missed by people who regard our current response as a media-driven overreaction. There are some who just simply don’t understand exponential math, but there are others who understand the math but regard the deaths that are coming as sad but inevitable — such that we’re disrupting lives and the economy with no proportional payoff for the sacrifice. Ultimately, it will be difficult for decision makers to win. Do too little, and they will get hammered for inaction. Do enough or too much and people will complain that the pandemic wasn’t such a big deal after all.

On a personal level, my main hope is that my friends and family come through unharmed. Beyond that, this does provide an opportunity to look at people and the workings of society from a slightly different angle. In terms of business functions, many of us will have to take a hard look at what we do, why we do it, and whether it provides short term, medium term, long term, or no value. We’ll get a better idea of who among us really rely on direct, person-to-person contact and being constantly in motion versus those of us who are better suited to less in-person social contact and are more tolerant of a slower pace. Who is enjoying the break and who is climbing the walls? We’ll get a better idea of how people deal with stress and anxiety. Does having a problem calm you down and allow you to focus? Or does the stress make you manic and your thoughts chaotic?

When Isaac Newton was sheltering from the plague, he invented calculus and discovered gravity. No pressure.

So, 10 or 11 years ago, there was an especially showy Indianapolis business guy by the name of Tim Durham with connections to folks like Burt Servaas and Carl Brizzi. In a story reminiscent of the movie “Wall Street,” Durham bought a long-established company called “Fair Finance” that had been a going concern since the 30s and used it as a personal piggy bank. Investors and depositors in Fair Finance lost about $200 million. Greg Andrews, writing for the IBJ, reports that the bankruptcy trustee has been trying to get some of that money back from various sources but has suffered a major set back after a jury trial against a company called Textron who provided financing to Fair. I couldn’t quite make out the exact legal claims from the article (maybe I didn’t read closely enough), but I gather that Textron got a lot of its money back in one way or another while ordinary investors got stiffed. The bankruptcy trustee was likely trying to claw that money back from Textron to distribute to the regular investors. The trial hinged on whether the debt owed to Textron was secured or unsecured. The jury apparently decided it was secured and the bankruptcy trustee won’t recover those funds.

To date, the bankruptcy trustee has recovered something like $0.11 on the dollar for Durham’s victims. Durham was convicted in 2012 and currently has an earliest possible release date of 2056. (That assumes Trump doesn’t pardon him.)

Yesterday marked 100 years since Prohibition went into effect, one year after the 18th Amendment was ratified by the states. Indiana ratified the amendment on January 14, 1919. As Douglas Wissing recounts in “IN Writing: Uncovering the Unexpected Hoosier State,” former baseball player and evangelist Billy Sunday thundered on the radio from Winona Lake, Indiana:

The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon only be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and  our jails into storehouses and corn-cribs. Men will walk upright now; women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.

Indiana had already gone dry as a result of statewide legislation passed in 1917. The Indiana Anti-Saloon League had been active in the state for decades and the “dry” legislation was the subject of a massive organizational push by the IASL.  Something like 25,000 supporters apparently descended on Indianapolis in January 1917. 175,000 names showed up on petitions delivered to legislators. The measure passed the House 70-28 and passed the Senate 38-11.

The debate about alcohol had been swinging back and forth in Indiana to some extent since the state’s inception. The battle against alcohol was seen as a battle against immorality, crime, and domestic violence. By the 1840s, some counties were using a “local option” to go dry – Carroll and Cass Counties were the first. In the 1850s, the temperance movement was bolstered by the Know Nothing movement. Drinking was characterized as the habit of foreigners – Germans, Irish, Catholics and the like.  Statewide prohibition was passed in 1855. The law was declared unconstitutional in 1858 and, by then, the state had other things on its mind. The slavery issue and the Civil War put the temperance movement on hold (as it put so many things on hold). After the Civil War, the temperance movement seems to have returned to the pre-Know Nothing status quo with Republicans generally supporting “local option” measures and Democrats recognizing drinking as a “social evil” but wanting to confine regulation to a licensing system. Among other things, alcohol was big business in the state: “In 1879 Indiana still had seventy large breweries and a number of distilleries producing liquor from locally grown corn and rye.”

In the late 19th century, temperance would get another big boost with the Progressive Movement. The Progressives were a mixed bag. Their impulse was to use regulatory authority to combat poverty and disease. They helped bring about women’s suffrage, push back against political machines, break trusts, clean up the food and water supply, professionalize academics and government service, and strengthen the labor movement. But, with the Progressives, you also get things like eugenics and prohibition. During this period, the Indiana Anti-Saloon League formed. In the early 1900s, they were successful in obtaining passage of increasingly restrictive liquor laws. More than 2,500 saloons closed in Indiana between 1900 and 1910.

World War I allowed the temperance movement to roll anti-German sentiment and austerity needs into their campaign. We needed grain to feed a war-ravaged Europe. Former governor Frank Hanly was active on the lecture circuit, advocating prohibition. In 1918, he railed against the brewers, saying Hoosier Brewers had “the arrogance of the Hun.” As a result of the 1917 state legislation, Indiana went dry on April 2, 1918. On January 14, 1919, Indiana ratified the Eighteenth Amendment. Nationally, Prohibition took effect on January 16, 1920. And, of course, since then, slums have become a memory; prisons have been turned into factories; men walk upright, women smile, and children laugh. We’re still working out the lease details for Hell.

I joke of course. Enforcement was a problem. Breweries closed down but prisons did not. Jails became clogged with Prohibition violators and organized crime spiked.  There was a lot of corruption in Indiana, as elsewhere. As Prohibition wore on, the prohibitionists would make common cause with the Ku Klux Klan who shared their conservative politics and would use the machinery of the old White Cap organization, the Horse Thief Detective Association, to enforce the prohibition laws. That said, it’s a mistake to think that Prohibition was the work of some fringe zealots who caught lightning in a bottle, managing to be at the right place at the right time to pass Prohibition against the will of just about everyone else. It was a long term social movement with a significant base of support. It was only hard experience with the failures of Prohibition that was effective in eroding that support.

I saw this on the Indiana subreddit: an interactive legislative district map. Per u/Jelfff:

When the map opens the Indiana state house districts are displayed with semi-transparent coloring showing the party affiliation of the person holding the seat (red=R, blue=D). The data for the map is hosted on a GIS server operated by the state. I am *assuming* the data is current.

To change the map so it shows the Indiana state senate districts:

1. Click the basemap button (Next to the “Menu” button)

2. Look under the “Overlay” heading (mobile users scroll down)

3. Click the house layers to turn them off

4. Click the senate “fill” layer and then the senate “boundary” layer.

Seemed like the kind of thing that might interest readers of this site.

Whenever there is an act of violence in my community, it’s pretty reliable that people express a belief that things are more dangerous these days. And, just reading national news and related commentary, I think it’s common to think that things are more dangerous these days. I don’t know what the statistics are locally, but I know that – despite how people may feel – violent crime is down over the last 20-30 years. “Using the FBI numbers, the violent crime rate fell 51% between 1993 and 2018. Using the BJS data, the rate fell 71% during that span.”

I think reasons we don’t feel safer include: 1) Nostalgia softens the rough edges of the past; 2) our brains are wired to amplify current concerns about danger; and 3) we’re exposed to more information — including bad news about violence — than we were in the past. On that last point, I don’t think our brains are wired to distinguish very well between reports of violence in the immediate vicinity and reports of violence that are more distant. In terms of how we feel reports of violence, near and far, just get added to one big bucket of anxiety. Intellectually, we know that there’s a difference, but I don’t know that our minds and bodies readily make that distinction on an emotional level.

 

 

The last week or so, I keep thinking of the line in the Declaration of Independence, “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

When I first really focused closely on the Declaration, the word “candid” jumped out at me. Because I’d only really ever heard the word in the context of “Candid Camera,” it was a little jarring. I hadn’t connected the word to “candor.” I looked the word up somewhere and, in addition to the meanings I was familiar with, there were things like unbiased and “free from malice.”

So, that’s in the back of my mind when I read disingenuous and specious commentary on social media. I realize I’m throwing out a lot of twenty-five cent words here. Ever since I got picked on in junior high for using big words, I try not to do it gratuitously. (Ha!) But, George Orwell pointed out that in order to fight against disagreeable things,  it’s helpful to have the proper vocabulary.  “Disingenuous” means “not candid or sincere, usually by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.” “Specious” means “superficially plausible, but actually wrong.”

The flood of overly simplistic memes, deliberate misconstructions of candidate and policymaker statements, and outright false information, make one wonder whether there is a candid world out there to consider facts and arguments; that  the deliberate and sometimes malicious misconstructions seen online are perhaps representative of the world at large. Ultimately, if that’s true, I guess we’re already screwed. At that point, communication becomes noise and force is the only means available to resolve differences. So, probably the best course is to assume that your fellow citizens and other people in the world are possessed of some degree of candor; and also to be candid in your own statements, arguments, posts, and tweets. To do otherwise is to contribute to a degradation of communication that will ultimately have harmful consequences in the real world.

So, the “OK Boomer” meme is making the rounds. There is an energy to the discussion that makes it sound like the retort is something more significant than the time tested strategy of a younger person rolling their eyes at an older person. Someone asked “what does this mean?” I didn’t get around to responding, but I thought it was a combination of:

• Easy, tiger.
• Sure, Jan.
• That is not only not right, it’s not even wrong.

Generational warfare is kind of fun, but ultimately probably unproductive. Still, if this serves as an antibody to the persistent whining about “kids these days,” then maybe it’s useful. Also, since I’m GenX, this was funny:

MY DAUGHTER: OK, GenX.

[I pull the car over to the curb]

ME: Listen Zoomer, as long as the Millennials and the Boomers are at war, we have a truce. But make no mistake, GenX is nihilistic af and if you step to us we will let you drown in student loan debt.

— Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) November 5, 2019

It’s no secret that there is no way Trump would ever get my vote. He’s emotionally fragile, intellectually bankrupt, and utterly corrupt. He believes that the office of the Presidency is there to serve him rather than the other way around. His trading on public resources to induce foreign powers to meddle in our elections was exactly the kind of thing the Founders were concerned about when they wrote the Constitution. Federalist 68: “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

Also, for good or bad, we have a two party system. If Trump is the Republican nominee, that means the choice is either him or the Democratic nominee. So, if an inanimate carbon rod gets the Democratic nomination, that’s who is getting my vote. Right now, Joe Biden is the Democratic front runner. And he may well come out on top. But I was listening to the latest episode of Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History.” He’s on part 3 of his series on the rise of Japan in the late 19th century and its subsequent actions in World War II. He describes a scene in December 1941 as the Japanese are taking down a battleship with aircraft. It’s becoming apparent that there’s a new development in warfare. Powerful, expensive ships can be taken down by low cost, easily replaced aircraft. But that’s a bit of an aside. As relevant to the primary, Dan compared the scene to a pack of predators taking down a larger animal bit by bit. As the larger animal takes more damage, it becomes less maneuverable and the pack goes in for the kill. It made me think of the Biden campaign as compared to the pack of other Democratic contenders. Maybe that’s not how it will go — I’m terrible at these sorts of predictions — but that’s the analogy that came to mind.

For my part, I don’t mind Biden, but I like Mayor Pete and Elizabeth Warren. I don’t have strong feelings about Bernie himself, but his online supporters have been fairly off-putting in a way that doesn’t seem nearly so common for supporters of other candidates. In a perfect world, I should be comparing policies, but Presidential campaigns are won or lost on the basis of personalities. The electorate says they care about policy, but when it comes time to vote, they mostly don’t understand the policies and have shaped their understanding of the policies to conform with their personality preferences. I may have better than average understanding of some of these issues, but ultimately, I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of federal laws, rules, and regulations to truly assess the candidates’ plans beyond a pretty superficial level. Nevermind the fact that whatever they propose will have to navigate the legislative process. I’m going to have to trust that the person will do the best they can and will generally make sound decisions.

To me, Buttigieg and Warren have the deepest understanding of the issues. So far as I can tell, they both have the best interests of the country in mind. Last night, Pete gave a speech in Iowa that was very impressive. He’s still a long shot, but it made me think that this election might not be unwinnable for him.

I am ready to galvanize an American majority that is longing for change, done with division, and prepared to act. Iowa, are you with me? #LJ19 pic.twitter.com/1rUIyDaOig

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) November 2, 2019

There are thousands of people offering their takes on the Democratic primary, so I’m not sure I’m adding a lot of value to anyone’s day with this. But, writing helps me evaluate my own thinking on the subject, and I don’t feel like I’ve been doing enough writing lately. So, here you go.

The Daily Beast and any number of outlets are reporting that Delta Tau Delta at Miami University has been suspended for 15 years due to hazing. I’ve mentioned before, by way of explaining that Paul Ryan never really had a chance to get my vote, that my fraternity did not hold the Delts in high esteem back when I was in college. So, I’m experiencing a fair bit of schadenfreude at the news. The fraternity had apparently had disciplinary problems in the early 2000s and were put on probation in 2016. Then along comes this incident where, among other things:

“Call 911. I feel like I’m going to die,” said John*, laying in his dorm room at Miami University in Ohio.

In the early morning hours of March 17, 2019, John had just escaped an alcohol-drenched violent hazing at the school’s Delta Tau Delta chapter, which featured a spiked paddle, according to a report released by the university last spring.

This month, the university informed the fraternity that it would be suspended for 15 years—until March 2034—because of that night, which resulted in John’s hospitalization with a blood-alcohol level of .231, according to the report. (For reference, the law considers an individual legally impaired at 0.08.)

. . .

That night, John said he was thrown on the ground, had liquid poured on him, was slapped in the face and then forced to do pushups while being kicked on both sides by multiple people.

In the police report, John noted that at some point after he began crying over the pain from being slapped with the spiked paddle, he said, “I am not going to be a part of this. I’m leaving,” but that the whole room went silent and it scared him.

“I was then told by an unfamiliar voice, ‘You will be okay. The first one hurts the most but now you are numb,’” John told the officer.

Why does this kind of thing continue to happen? My own fraternity had abandoned hazing when I was there in the early 90s. The worst I got was being told to Xerox the bottoms of my feet and have ten girls sign the copy. I had to find an out of the way copier, figure out how to get the bottoms of my feet copied, and then embarrass myself walking up to strangers at the library. But it was also kind of fun and nobody got hurt. The girls mostly laughed and none of them seemed put out by the request. I think there were maybe a couple of other things that I don’t remember, but they would have been mild and didn’t involve drinking or pain. Even so, they seemed to serve their purpose as a rite of passage.

But, almost 30 years later, we have the Delts using a spiked paddle, getting their pledges dangerously drunk, and beating them. One of the texts in the Daily Beast report has one of the fraternity brothers saying that it “turns boys into men.” That’s toxic nonsense. There’s nothing manly about letting people abuse you, particularly for no useful purpose.

My Dad told me a story about his fraternity in the early 60s. He and some of the other brothers were talking about getting rid of hazing. There was a fair amount of resistance to this idea based primarily on the notion that they  had to go through it. New pledges should have to suffer the same way. Beyond the “I had to do it, you should to,” I think there are also parallels to corporal punishment. People resist evidence that spanking and other corporal punishment doesn’t lead to better behaved kids and more responsible adults because their own parents spanked them. The idea that the beatings they suffered at the hands of their parents was useless and avoidable is emotionally painful. So, they want to imbue their suffering with meaning. If hazing doesn’t “turn boys into men” or tighten the bonds of brotherhood or whatever, then it’s just your older friends being needlessly cruel to you. And that’s emotionally painful.

Maybe in 2034, the Delts can kick the habit.