Data, Debates, and Dystopia

Today’s post is about three somewhat disconnected things: coronavirus data, the senate district convention, and mayhem of anarchists. Maybe we’ll relate them somehow.

Coronavirus Data

I spent some time yesterday going over coronavirus data. We’ve been opening up here in Texas, with enough time to see if there’s a spike. I wanted to see if there was anything to worry about. The county judge says she’s going to issue a new stay-at-home order in a day or two, although it looks like the community is going by the governor’s recommendations regardless of what she says. That means we’re entering phase 3, in which restaurants and some businesses can open at 75% capacity.

The Houston Chronicle has provided a page of data every day since March 31^st. It has a map of cases per county, and other charts. Mainly the page gives cumulative cases and deaths, with an ever-rising chart. Of course ever-rising. Because those numbers aren’t going to go down. There are other places to look at data that recognize a given estimate of recoveries; I think that number is low, but at least it doesn’t imply that each new case means the total number equals people wandering around possibly infecting you.

More useful data are daily new cases and daily additional deaths. And then, we need to ask questions to know what we’re seeing. Case counts and death counts both depend on when things get reported. Some numbers might be held over a weekend, or accumulate for a particular lab for a couple of days, and then it appears there’s a spike when there really wasn’t. So it’s more accurate to look at the 7-day rolling average. That means you look at the last 7 days, add them together, and divide by 7, to get the average of those 7 days. There’s a new number each day, but it’s less volatile and provides a more accurate picture than a simple daily count.

So, using all those daily counts, I figured out the 7-day averages and made charts. Here’s the 7-day rolling average of new cases in the Texas.

Yes, there has been an uptick in cases. But, unlike when this first started to spread, we are behaving differently. We’ve educated the public enough to know to protect the elderly, who are most susceptible to a severe case. And people with preexisting conditions know to be more cautious for their own safety. That means, even when there are more cases, that doesn’t necessarily mean that many more deaths.

There’s a lag of one to three weeks between the cases chart and the deaths chart. Here’s the 7-day rolling average of additional deaths in Texas. We’re not yet seeing anything like a surge in daily deaths.

Some people are predicting a dangerous surge in deaths in a week or two. We may see some, but the goal always was to keep from overwhelming the medical resources. I think it’s safe to say, we’re going to stay within those parameters.

I wanted to know things more locally. I didn’t have ready access to daily death rates covering this same area, but here’s a chart of the 7-day rolling average of new cases in the Houston area (Harris County plus several surrounding counties). There was an uptick a week after Memorial Day, but it appears to be going down already.

One thing I’m finding frustrating is that “confirmed cases” seems to be low. We don’t know actual death rates for those who contract the virus. Estimates are that Texas is probably 0.1% to 0.5% by the end of this. But if you do the math of confirmed cases to fatalities, Texas is at about 2%.

I looked up data by zip code. Mine is still fairly low. I was surprised to see there have been 2 deaths; there hadn’t been any when I looked a couple of weeks ago. There have been a total of 136 cases. That comes out to 1.47%. We know the death rate is not actually that high. So why is the “confirmed cases” number so low, causing the skewed death rate? That’s been frustrating from the beginning.

I found this chart helpful for perspective. It compares deaths per 100,000 in the US (green), Texas (yellow), and Harris County (red). Texas is still way below the US average. Harris County has at times been below the Texas average, but right now they’re about the same. But, unless something drastic happens that causes us to go up where the US average was during its apex, which still didn’t overwhelm the system, we ought to feel safe opening up cautiously.

Data put together by Leslie Joan May

Senate District Convention

I’ve been thinking about the data, again, because this weekend is our District Convention. This was supposed to be held back on March 21^st, but the stay-at-home began the Saturday before that—a date we’ve been able to keep track of, because Mr. Spherical Model broke his ankle that day, so stay-at-home orders coincided with his need to heal. He’s back to walking and doing physical therapy—not quite at full capacity, but getting there, which seems like a good comparison.

Anyway, the senate district convention could have as many as 300 people, although maybe less this year because of the virus and people’s worries. Masks are welcome but not required. This is the biggest (only) gathering we’ve been to since early March.

I don’t expect a guarantee that I’ll be safe. But I want to be safe, without having to spend the entire day breathing through a mask if possible. Hence the dive into the data.

I’ve been on the resolutions committee—that is, the platform writing committee. We took all the resolutions submitted by precincts, compared them to what is in the 2018 state platform, decided what to incorporate, worked on wording, and worked on improving wherever we could.

When we get to the district convention, we temporary committee members get installed as permanent committee members, and then we consider additional resolutions and testimony, and put together a draft for the entire floor to consider. Then that gets taken to the state convention in July.

[Note: I heard today that, because of logistical challenges related to the national convention, they will not update the national platform this year.]

I don’t know how to predict what the floor will find important. Sometimes the arguments there surprise me, because I think we committee members are pretty agreeable on conservative philosophy. But here are a couple of things I think will get noticed.

On abortion, we’re shifting from an incremental, piecemeal approach to an abolish-all-abortions single bill strategy. It’s time, I think. Decades of the other approach have not gotten us where we want to be. And every incremental bill tacitly enshrines the right to kill innocent human life. Certainly there will be arguments about the tiny percentage of unwanted pregnancies related to rape or incest—which happen against the choice of the woman—and also instances where the life of the mother and the baby can’t both be preserved (the latter of which the platform does acknowledge). But the platform isn’t to write law; it’s to present philosophy. So we’ll see how that goes. Texas is already behind other states taking this approach.

We’ve added in some concerns about contact tracing, which have come up during the pandemic. Contact tracing is a somewhat useful tool at the very beginning of an outbreak, to completely prevent the spread. Once the spread has happened, it’s almost useless. What it does do is put a lot of power into the hands of government bureaucrats. Picture, for example, you go to dinner, and someone at the restaurant—someone you don’t know and did not even have close contact with—learned the next day that they had covid-19. Everyone that person was around for the past couple of weeks gets notified. You get contacted, because you were at the restaurant; contact tracing uses, for example, a phone app to track you. You are then required to be in quarantine (lockdown without being able to go out for food or other essential reasons) for at least two weeks. At last you’re released, and you go to the grocery store to resupply. The next day you get informed someone at the grocery store tested positive, so you’re required to quarantine for at least another two weeks. And so on.

During none of this time are you sick. You don’t prevent any spread, because you never had the disease. But your life, your livelihood, and your “pursuit of happiness” are denied you by a government entity exerting more power than is useful. If you volunteer for such tracing, that’s up to you. But forcing it on healthy law-abiding citizens is unacceptable in a free society.

Another issue relates to gun-free zones, which can include churches, schools, theaters, places of businesses—anyplace that declares itself to be a gun-free zone. A place that denies citizens the right to protect themselves is held liable for their protection. It’s a pretty simple idea that hopefully will cause businesses to think about the ramifications before declaring themselves a gun-free zone. Again, this isn’t legislation; this is the expression of ideas.

Anarchy

The temporary committee finished our work two weeks ahead of the convention. Since that time, there’s been a breakout of protests, riots, and anarchic terrorism. I expect we’ll see a resolution or two to address that. Conservatives think it’s bad. Are there reforms to be made for various police departments across the country? Maybe, although my sense is (according to the data I’ve looked at) that the need is highly overblown—for the purpose of stirring people up to anger. I don’t think it’s wise to cede any ground with these people.

The anarchists who have seized ground in Seattle are, I think, an example we should be noticing—to prevent any pandemic spread of their diseased thought processes.

Someone posted the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement’s 10 Points of Action. I think these are put out by the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous  Zone) militants in Seattle. I’ve responded to each one.

Image found on Facebook, my comments added.

I'm reminded of the inane demands made by Occupy Wall Street, back in the olden days of the previous administration. And I'm wondering if some of the same supporters of that encampment are supporting this one. You can find a list of those OWS backers here.

In a normal world, you would see that, if you set yourself up in a “fortress,” walled in, with the enemy on the outside, you survive only as long as you have supplies. These guys don’t have any resources inside. They’re using electricity, water, cell service and even their barricades from the City of Seattle. They had some food. But they invited a bunch of homeless people in, who stole all the food. Because—no laws, no police. So, using their cell phones, these militants against the greatest military force on earth asked for donations of vegan meat replacements, oats, soy, and other “foods” to be delivered to them.

Seattle's lost hill, called CHAZ
image from here

The city, in an effort to be accommodating (for unfathomable reasons), provided port-a-potties.

While streets are blocked, they are allowing residents of the 500 or so homes and businesses in their non-America to come and go when they provide ID (which, of course, comes from the enemy state).

To thinking people, this is ridiculous. Send in the national guard to round them up, prosecute them, and be done with it. With some luck, the good guys (America) won’t even have to shed their blood.

But Seattle’s mayor, and apparently Washington’s governor, don’t seem to be thinking people. And people voted them in. It’s the same problem as in Minneapolis; the people voted these anti-Americans in. So I don’t know how to predict how this will go.

It’s untenable to allow the seizure of US soil by anarchic terrorists.

It has always seemed to me that, if you could lay out the truth, the facts, and the philosophy clearly, people will of course choose freedom, prosperity, and civilization. So it has been confusing to me why so many people eschew the good and purposely choose tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

One explanation is that we live in apocalyptic times. But I’ll save that discussion for another day. In the meantime, I guess we watch what’s happening and hope it stays far away from home.

Speaking of—Harris County Commissioners Court met on Tuesday and discussed police reform, but stopped short of calling outright for defunding the police force. The county attorney reminded them that they have no power to direct other elected officials, such as the county sheriff or the DA, to do anything; they are instead accountable to their voters. So nothing much came of it, at least for this month.

The Hunger Games on the Spherical Model

Speaking of tyrannies, today is the day the Supreme Court hears arguments concerning Obamacare. I am not comfortable having what was intended to be the least powerful branch deciding whether or not we have the God-given right to choose which health insurance to buy, of to choose not to buy at all. Nevertheless, I will be joyful if the court come out clearly saying our Constitution does indeed limit the federal government to enumerated powers. At the end of the day, you can listen to the audio of the proceedings here.

fire logo found here

Meanwhile, I’m talking today about what everybody is talking about: The Hunger Games. After a book club last year, I wrote a little about it. But the movie has revived the discussion.

I’m always pleased when a movie based on a book is well realized—instead of disappointing. That was true of The Help this past year—more beautifully visualized than in my head while reading. And it is also true of The Hunger Games. The family joined in a reading frenzy over Christmas break and early January 2011. We read all three books one after the other, which becomes kind of essential once you start reading.

The books are disturbing, and the description isn’t at all something I would seek for my reading enjoyment: a combination of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Survivor (TV series), and some post-apocalyptic sci-fi stuff. The protagonist is female, and there are late-teen love interests, so this appeals to teen girls. But this really isn’t chick-flick fare. The 16-year-old protagonist is more masculine than feminine: she is the breadwinner and head of household since her father died; she has no expectations of ever marrying and having a family in the miserable world she lives in; she has no time for wistful daydreaming when she’s so focused on survival. She's good at hunting and smart at strategy. Women can be good at all of these things, but they're not usually the theme masses of young girls flock to.

The series was recommended to me first by a friend of my son Economic Sphere, someone whose tastes tend toward Japanese anime (that often makes my eyes glaze over) and over-the-top zombie fighting. But when my daughter Social Sphere picked it up with enthusiasm, I gave it a try. The books are upsetting and intense and will not be for everyone (and are not for pre-teen readers). Nevertheless, I thought they were a worthwhile read.

As for the movie (the first in a series of movies, I’m hoping), it was beautifully cast, maybe perfectly. And in most ways carefully faithful to the book. Very satisfying. The violence, while not what I would call sanitized, was nevertheless not overly graphic. (R-rated violence is simply beyond what I can stomach, so I appreciate the limitations of a PG-13 rating.)

Here’s TMI about me: I used to never cry in movies, ever. Occasionally a book would get to me (Where the Red Fern Grows hit me hard in 4^th grade). But I just wasn’t overly emotional well into adulthood. Then pregnancy happened, and my tear ducts got attacked by hormones. When we lived in California in the late 1980s, there was a series of Pacific Bell commercials telling the story of two men and a woman from their young lives into old age. I cried during the commercials. Ridiculous, I know, but I do think they were well done. However, I am resentful of a movie (or book) pressing buttons to get an emotional reaction just for the sake of it—not by getting us to actually know and care about the characters.

I didn’t have any tearful moments reading the books, but I got in the movie, with the story and characters I already knew vividly before me, and the tears came. I cried when Katniss stepped forward to volunteer in her sister’s place—an almost certain life-giving sacrifice. I cried when Katniss and Peeta entered the arena in the fire-blazing chariot (I really can’t explain why). I cried when Katniss said goodbye to Cinna moments before rising on the pedestal into the arena and probable death. Then I pulled myself together and didn’t cry again until Rue fell, which, in my defense, was a perfectly reasonable time to get weepy.

The ending was a little unsatisfying—considering we’ll need to wait at least a year for a second movie. But it did leave us with the unsettling sense that all is not resolved, as the book does. We need to feel unsettled when a world is left in tyranny.

Let’s review what you’d expect from tyranny, according to the Spherical Model. Under tyranny, the state can do anything it wants, and individual freedom is limited to whatever the state decides to grant. That is precisely true in Panem, the post-American collection of districts in The Hunger Games. You can also expect savagery and poverty.

District 12, where Katniss and Peeta live, is a mining community, with pay limited to just above subsistence. Peeta’s family runs a bakery; he has worked there all his life. It is very low-tech, like you’d see in the early 1900s. Very few people can afford anything special, like a frosted cake. Katniss only gets bread when she trades it for a squirrel (meat), which she illegally poaches. A few government officials have a slightly better standard of living, but in general the whole district understands poverty.

Other districts are similarly specialized and limited. Rue’s district produces crops, but the people are not allowed (on penalty of death) to eat their own harvest, so despite food around them, they are on the verge of starvation.

Meanwhile, in the capital, there is opulence undreamed of—along with the decay of boredom, extreme fashion, and triviality. These decadent people are entertained by watching teenagers murder one another—or die due to the cruel creativity of the game makers. This spectacle is supposed to remind the people that they should be grateful for the iron-fisted rule of the government, because the chaos and cruelty of anarchy and famine were worse.

Here’s where the Spherical Model can be helpful in understanding. State tyranny and anarchy are not the only alternatives; they are simply the two sides of the lower half of the sphere. It’s true most of the world’s real history (let alone fictional worlds like Katniss’s) alternates between these two choices. But that is because so many people are blind to the entire northern half of the sphere—the freedom sphere.

What you can expect is that when a people are under extreme tyranny, they will gladly risk their lives to rebel and overthrow the regime. The rebellion brings about the chaos of anarchy, at least for a time. Then someone steps up and says, “Give us power; we can give you safety and order.” And then a new tyranny appears.

The American exception was a deliberate move away from both chaos and tyranny—toward organized and institutionalized freedom. It took an intelligent and righteous people to both come up with the concepts and to live in ways that made the ideas more important than the personal power. George Washington was a man provided by God for such a moment in history. Much the same can be said of the other founders. They risked their lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor—not for a chance to be the next power, but to return the power to the people, where God had originally placed it.

Looking at the character of Katniss and Peeta, they have goodness about them beyond the expectations from their upbringing. But they aren’t the power seekers. So we’ll see if they can bring about freedom-directed change in their world, rather than just more oscillation between the various southern hemisphere tyrannies.

There is one detail about the book that defies belief: the capital has extraordinarily advanced technology compared to the outlying districts. They have hovercrafts. The arena for the games is detailed and controlled well beyond The Truman Show. Medical care and healing are miraculous compared to the very limited resources available to the people (compared to most of our experience today). I’ve talked about this with various people, who solve the question by saying the technology existed before the fall of the previous civilization and rise of Panem. Maybe so. But what we do know is that tyranny limits creativity and invention. You get those things from the interrelationship of political freedom, economic freedom, and civilization—our goal.

Year Two Begins

This is day one of the second year of the Spherical Model blog. If you read just occasionally, you may not have a clue about the meaning of the name. The Spherical Model is an alternative to the right/left line model for looking at political ideas. You can read in much more detail at SphericalModel.com.

The purpose of the blog is to look at examples and ideas that come up in the news or in life, to support the Spherical Model concepts. From March –December 2011 I wrote weekdays (and a few Saturdays). Since the first of 2012 I’ve gone to posting three times a week. The archives might be worth checking out. Writing that much in a year is a good sized book’s worth of material (222 posts as of today).

I continue to search for easier and clearer ways to convey the Spherical Model ideas. I hoped that by now I would have a video (at least what I could accomplish with my simple camera and very limited technical skills) to give a visual Spherical Model lesson in about five minutes. Still working on that. The raw version of Take I is actually on my computer, but not yet usable.

So, in lieu of actual video, today’s anniversary celebration post is the script for the video:

The Spherical Model

Is there a better way of looking at political ideas than right or left?

Because there is nothing innately conservative about the right or innately liberal about the left. In fact, the directional terms come from the seating arrangement of European parliaments, in which conservatives favored retaining the monarchy while liberals were in favor of people’s power.

So the typical line model used to describe political ideas as right and left is just a seating arrangement. Yet we’ve come to think of this line as a spectrum.

We tend to think of the far ends as extreme, assuming there’s some virtue in being balanced in the middle. We refer to our nation as center right—just a little more conservative than exactly center.

But what are the extremes? Do we assume communism or socialism at the extreme left, and fascism at the extreme right?

[line with communism and fascism as the extremes]

That can’t be right, because communism and fascism are both totalitarian statist tyrannies, just slightly different flavors. Nazi means “national socialist party” and the communist Soviet Union’s name was Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

So if Nazis and communists aren’t diametric opposites, then what are the logical extremes? How about total government control, or tyranny, versus total lack of government control, or anarchy? 

That’s better. Then freedom is that perfect balance in the middle.

But wait; there’s a problem with this model: It’s common in history for people suffering in anarchy to turn for relief to total government control—anything for security. But in this model, as a people move to the left, they have to pass through that balanced freedom section. You’d think that it would be very common for someone to stop and say, “Hey, this freedom is good. Let’s stop going leftward and stay here.” But that pretty much never happens. But going directly from chaos to state control is common.

Plus, notice that there’s not that much difference between the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of anarchy. Total government control means the state has all the power—the police, the military. The state can do what it wants, and the mere citizen is without any rights except what the state decides to grant. Anarchy, on the other hand, means that power belongs to whoever is stronger and meaner than the next guy. If you threaten to beat people up (or kill them) if they don’t give you all their belongings, and you’re strong enough to mean it, then you have power. If someone else is stronger or better armed than you are, then you have to yield power to them.

In other words, anarchy, while less organized, is power in the hands of the strongest and best armed—just like a tyrannical government.

So maybe government tyranny and anarchic tyranny are pretty close to the same thing.

[bring anarchy and tyranny together at one end, with freedom at the other end]

So tyranny and freedom are really the opposite extremes.

Not bad. But it puts all those different kinds of tyrannies in the same location, and maybe there are differences worth noting.

This simple line doesn’t give us the dimensions we need. So what if we use three dimensions, a sphere? If we draw a line at the equator, we can separate freedom (northern hemisphere) from tyranny (southern hemisphere). And then we can draw a longitudinal dividing line, with more local interests in the western hemisphere and larger interests—from state to nation, to international, in the eastern hemisphere.

We call this the Spherical Model.

Down here in the south, you can see that one side of tyranny is the chaos of anarchy, and the other side is the totalitarian control of government tyranny. It’s easy to get from one to the other—which is what much of world history has shown us. You can have communism, socialism, and Nazism as separate points in their quartersphere, based on how much control they exert on their people (southern direction), or how far they plan to expand (toward the eastward extreme of world domination).

Up in the freedom zone, location is mostly a matter of whose interest. Free people don’t yield power to a governing authority beyond the appropriate interest. Families make their own decisions about the care, upbringing, and education of their children. Communities on up to cities and counties decide on local law enforcement and protection needs. States (or provinces) deal with their particular infrastructure and laws. Only very limited powers would be granted to a nation—as are enumerated in the US Constitution. And that sovereignty would never yield to an international power, but would cooperate with other free sovereignties concerning international issues.

If we identify ideologies according to level of control exerted onto free people, and also their level of interest, we can identify location on the sphere. And that will tell us how close we are to thriving in the freedom zone—up here above the 45^th parallel.

We can use the spherical model again for economic ideas: the north will be free enterprise, and the south will be controlled economy. Those differences have direct relationships with political ideologies, so we can overlay the economic sphere right over the political sphere and see how things interrelate.

And what about social ideologies? Again, we can use the same sphere; the north will be civilization, and the south will be savagery.

Let’s define civilization in a specific way: families remain intact and thriving; neighbors—and neighboring entities—live among one another in peace; free enterprise thrives, and poverty becomes meaningless; creativity abounds; people generally self-restrain, but when they don’t, laws and appropriate authorities deal with the lawbreakers in fair and predictable ways.

Savagery is exemplified by broken families, strife, poverty, cruelty, lack of progress, and unpredictable and unfair enforcement of arbitrary rules. Just as you see in organized crime, gangs and tribal warfare in the southwest anarchy quartersphere, and in the various flavors of totalitarian regimes in the southeast quartersphere. So the civilization/social sphere overlays the other two.

In fact, if we can identify the formula for civilization, we’re set up to spread freedom and free enterprise in the interrelated spheres.

The question becomes, then, not which is better, left of right? But what are the principles of civilization, which then allow for freedom and prosperity?

There’s no too far north extreme; there’s only getting north enough and doing what it takes to stay there, generation after generation, without southward slipping.

Tyranny or Anarchy--Is That Really the Question?

What happened in Norway this past week is savage. Again, I do not mean savage as in culture untouched by the modern world, the myth of the noble savage. I mean the opposite of civilization, the opposite of respect and love for fellow human beings, the opposite of living together in peaceful harmony. 

Savagery is identified with lack of valuing human life, human freedom, God-given rights, fairness and justice, creativity, family, religious freedom—and everything else required for civilization.

Almost immediately the debate about the deranged murderer in Norway was whether he was motivated by right-wing extremism or not. The question is so irrelevant as to be laughable under less tragic circumstances. When a savage act is perpetrated, and the question is whether it was right or left wing, that question is actually this (using Spherical Model terminology): if we assume the upper half of the social sphere doesn’t exist, so there can be no civilization but only degrees of savagery, then we ask whether the political orientation is toward statist tyranny (sometimes thought of as leftist) or anarchical tyranny (sometimes thought of as rightist). OK, but why would you assume, a priori, that civilization cannot exist? 

This particular madman appears to be engaging in anarchical tyranny. He had a “manifesto” of rantings similar to the Unabomber, some of it word-for-word. And there are rumors he had Nazi ties—which is perhaps a different stripe of leftist than communism (the former is nationalist but insists on filling the world with control by that nation; the other is international, intent on filling the world with control by nations subordinate to the leading communist nation(s), but both wielding statist tyranny over the people). But the behavior, when not instigated by a government, is anarchical, whatever the ultimate goals. 

Those who engage in anarchical attacks while “sane” (although it is difficult to imagine anyone in his right mind engaging in tyranny) are following the Lenin/Stalin approach: create chaos so that people will be desperate for order, at which point these power seekers offer to step in as tyrants to restore order. This is also the Saul Alinsky model, a method followed by Bill Ayers (a friend of Obama), and taught by our current commander-in-chief during his ACORN days [see my March 12 post]. The goal for these power-mongers is not actually peace, in the civilized sense; it is tyranny of state. For those being oppressed by a state, it is unlikely to feel better than being oppressed by anarchist tyrants. 

So, whether this particular madman had an ultimate goal of creating enough chaos so that people would turn to him (or his cohorts?) for relief might remain unclear. My guess is that he was too unorganized to even fully follow through that line of thinking, pretty much like the Unabomber. The only thing that is relevant is that we all, without disagreement, recognize his act as savage, and have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who would commit such atrocities—for any purpose.  

I think we can agree the Norwegian people, as any non-savage people, absolutely do not deserve to have these evils done among them. Norway has for long centuries (pretty much post-Viking) been considered peaceful and civilized. The atrocity seems even more shocking because the Norwegians have felt safe—inoffensive and therefore safe from reasonable attack. Their nation is part of a less civilized world, so safety isn’t guaranteed anywhere.  

Their societal trend, unfortunately, is not in the civilized direction: they are less religious (and less respectful of religious beliefs), less family-oriented, less likely to value children and life. And they are more likely to turn to government to care for them, rather than their own ingenuity, free-enterprise, and creativity. On the Spherical Model, I would place Norway in the southeast quadrant, the statist tyranny zone. But because of their residual civilization, I would not put them down below the southern 45^th parallel, qualifying as savagery; I would put them well below the equator but above savagery—as is much of Europe. From this position, a change in attitude, a change in leadership, an insistence by the people on their freedoms, combined with a commitment to living civilizing principles—these things can still yield results that could lift them up to, maybe even above, the equatorial dividing line. 

For their sake, I hope this was only a single deranged madman. I hope he is not symptomatic of a growing savagery. And I hope the terror he has instilled in these peaceful people will have a chance to dissipate rather than grow. And I hope that this tragedy will have the unanticipated effect of reminding them to turn to God, and to the protecting principles of civilization.