Beauteous interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Philip” brought up the composer Dvorak in the comments of a previous thread today, and I replied by adding video of a well-known Dvorak string quartet known as the “American Quartet,” which has long been one of my favorites.

I loved it so much, listening to it again, that I thought I’d highlight it in a post of its own. What is it about this music that conveys such wordless emotion?

And why “American”? Dvorak was Czech, but he wrote the piece in 1893 during a stay in America as director of the National Conservatory in New York:

[Dvorak] spent his [summer] vacation in the town of Spillville, Iowa, which was home to a Czech immigrant community. Dvorák had come to Spillville through Josef Jan Kovarík who had finished violin studies at the Prague Conservatory…He told Dvorák about Spillville, where his father Jan Josef was a schoolmaster, which led to Dvorák deciding to spend the summer of 1893 there.

In that environment, and surrounded by beautiful nature, Dvorák felt very much at ease…

Dvorák sketched the quartet in three days and completed it in thirteen more days, finishing the score with the comment “Thank God! I am content. It was fast.”…The American Quartet proved a turning point in Dvorák’s chamber music output: for decades he had toiled unsuccessfully to find a balance between his overflowing melodic invention and a clear structure. In the American Quartet it finally came together. Dvorák defended the apparent simplicity of the piece: “When I wrote this quartet in the Czech community of Spillville in 1893, I wanted to write something for once that was very melodious and straightforward, and dear Papa Haydn kept appearing before my eyes, and that is why it all turned out so simply. And it’s good that it did.”

I think what I respond to in the piece is indeed its many gorgeous melodic themes, and yet I don’t think it stints rhythm, either.

And so, without further ado, I bring you:

Camille Paglia, women, and #MeToo

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interview of Camille Paglia appearing in Quilette. The entire thing is worth reading, but here’s one of her most interesting statements [emphasis mine]:

As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They “frame” the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind.

But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature. Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils , godlike avatars of Good versus Evil.

Paglia then goes on to discuss #MeToo and Kavanaugh:

The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote. I found the blanket credulity given to women accusers during the recent U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh positively unnerving: it was the first time since college that I truly understood the sexist design of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, whose mob of vengeful Furies is superseded by formal courts of law, where evidence is weighed.

During the Kavanaugh hearing, I discussed the parallels to the Furies, as well. And the hearings were worse than “dismaying,” and I guess the whole thing was startling, but it was not really surprising. This is the way things have been going for a long time, and decades of talking to friends of mine has convinced me that a vast number react to politics and sexual offense accusations in a very emotional manner. Therefore I agree that this entire phenomenon has “has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality,” but what it really has done is even more extreme. It hasn’t just resurrected those stereotypes; to a certain extent it has actually tended to validate them.

I say that with great sorrow and a sense of horror. And I certainly do not think that women should not be allowed to vote. But not only have I been observing this phenomenon of all-too-common irrationality in women for a long time, I’ve also observed that a small but vocal number of women say this makes women superior to men, because rationality and due process are the inventions of privileged white guys and therefore bad.

I will add that the last couple of decades have brought home to me the irrationality not just of so many women, but of so many men as well. And that seems to be increasing, too. I have no way to measure the relative rationality of each sex as a group, or the numbers of those who display it. But I have noticed a great deal of emotionalism and a great lack of rationality in both sexes. And I find it highly disturbing and troublesome, although I’m not suggesting we all should become like Star Trek’s Spock (that would create other problems).

There is a great deal of overlap between the sexes on the emotional/logical axes. But it is my observation—anecdotal and fragmented though it may be—that the dominance of emotionalism over rationality is indeed at least somewhat more common than women than in men. But as I said, it’s pretty prevalent all around.

That same issue of Quillette contained another article on #MeToo that is well worth reading. It demonstrates how the movement has helped false accusers create “credible” scenarios. The example used by the author occurred in Canada, but it certainly is not limited to Canada:

The #MeToo movement, along with other previous movements and hashtags, has opened up vast resources online that help victims of sexual assault seek justice, network with allies and other survivors, and recover emotionally from their trauma. This is all to the good. But as Chloe’s case helps demonstrate, these same resources can also be used as tools to create a realistic backstory out of whole cloth.In 2016, a young British woman admitted, after just a few minutes of cross-examination at trial, that she had manufactured a sexual-assault complaint against her father, using the lurid plot of Fifty Shades of Grey as her source material. The father might well have been convicted if he hadn’t mentioned to his lawyer in passing, just a day before trial, that his daughter’s favorite book was, by his recollection, “about a millionaire who takes a young woman under his wing and ‘teaches her about art.’”

Likewise, if Chloe hadn’t promoted her interest in sexual-assault prevention on social media and recorded videos about her activism, how would the evidence in her case have come to light? The prosecutor and police reportedly didn’t research any of this in detail before the case went to trial; and when issues were raised by the defense, the Crown made no effort to examine or provide exculpatory evidence. Indeed, the court transcripts indicate that the prosecutor’s behavior was so outrageous that the judge warned about possible contempt charges. Yet this episode produced no social-media outrage, despite the fact that a likely innocent man might easily have gone to jail.

One of the reasons the Kavanaugh hearing energized so many women (and others) on the right to support Senate Republicans in the 2018 election is that it was a graphic example of how easy it is to “credibly” accuse an innocent man, and how even someone with a sterling previous reputation such as Kavanaugh is highly vulnerable to a woman who tells a good story in a believable manner, even without corroborative evidence, without important details such as time and place, and even though the events the woman alleges to have occurred supposedly took place many decades ago. It was a chilling prospect for anyone who believe in due process, the rule of law, and rationality over emotion when making a judgment about an issue so important.

Did John McCain kill the House in November of 2018?

The New Neo Posted on by

Why would anyone say that? After all, McCain was already dead when the election occurred. And he’d been in the Senate anyway.

But I have had the same thought as that expressed in this WSJ piece (at least, the first few sentences of the piece and the headline; I can’t get behind the paywall to read the article).

Here’s how it went:

The Republican Party lost its House majority on July 28, 2017, when Sen. John McCain ended the party’s seven-year quest to repeal ObamaCare. House leadership had done an admirable job herding cats. On the second try, we passed the American Health Care Act in May. Then McCain’s inscrutable vote against the “skinny repeal” killed the reform effort.

I already have written on the matter, and I reproduce it here [bold indicates quotes from links; the rest of the indented and italicized paragraphs are my own commentary]:

…[O]ne of the final reasons that many on the right feel a great deal of anger at McCain, his July 2017 vote against so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare:

…[McCain] stunned his party when the final vote was at hand early Friday when he voted “no” and killed the legislation.

In the process, the maverick dealt what looks like the death blow to the Republican Party’s seven-year quest to get rid of President Barack Obama’s 2010 health law.

Along with McCain, GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined Democrats in the dramatic 51-49 vote rejecting the bill despite intense pressure from the White House…

Before voting, McCain would not say how he would vote, but told reporters to “wait for the show” as he arrived in the Senate chamber.

Note that last paragraph. It was not just the vote itself that rankled—although that was bad enough, considering how long and hard the GOP had campaigned for the repeal (whether you think they were serious or not), and the fact that McCain himself had campaigned in 2016 on a promise to repeal Obamacare [written in September of 2017):

McCain did run [in 2016], as Trump is drumming, on a strong repeal-and-replace platform. In fact, it was the principal distinction he drew with his Democratic opponent, Ann Kirkpatrick. He would vote to repeal Obamacare. She would not.

McCain did not say that he would vote to repeal Obamacare, provided Democrats agreed. If he had, his Republican primary with Kelli Ward might have turned out differently.

McCain now says that Democrats made a mistake in passing Obamacare on a partisan basis, and that Republicans shouldn’t undo it on a similarly partisan basis. But that’s the equivalent of a Brezhnev doctrine on domestic policy. Democrats can enact legislation on a partisan basis. But Republicans can undo it only if Democrats agree.

McCain is undoubtedly correct that bipartisan policy changes are more enduring. But when one side acts unilaterally, it shouldn’t get a veto when the other side attempts to undo it.

More importantly, there is no bipartisan agreement possible to repeal and replace Obamacare, as McCain vowed to do. That’s because there is no Democrat willing to agree to the first step, repeal.

It was not just the complete impracticability of McCain’s stand, its divorce from political reality, that rankled, although that was the major thing (I wrote about it here). It was also the seeming hypocrisy of his campaign promises vs. his later actions, as well as the theatricality of failing to reveal his vote in advance and telling reporters to “wait for the show.”

These things did seem characteristic of McCain, at least some part of McCain, although somewhat exaggerated. But I have one caveat to offer when thinking about this episode, and that’s the fact that McCain had already been diagnosed with a glioblastoma and had undergone a three to four hour brain surgery about two weeks prior to the vote. Though widely reported to not be suffering from any cognitive decline, this is part of what led to his diagnosis:

He also told his doctor he had, at times, felt foggy and not as sharp as he typically is. In addition, he reported having intermittent double vision. These symptoms and doctor intuition prompted a CT scan.

A brain tumor can affect a person in global and obvious ways or in subtle ones. Perhaps McCain’s tendency towards what, for want of a better word, we’ll call maverickyness was accentuated by brain changes accompanying both his illness and his surgery. So personally, I think that all the decisions he made post-brain-tumor should have an asterisk next to them.

Note also that McCain wasn’t alone among Republicans in voting against the measure. Collins and Murkowski joined him. However, it was McCain’s vote that counted and was purposely dramatic. Had he voted “yes,” the tally would have been 50/50 and Pence could have broken the tie.

Did McCain’s “no” cause the GOP to lose the House? Maybe. If so, however, it was certainly misplaced anger on the part of any GOP voters who stayed home because of it. The fault was the Senate’s and McCain’s, not the House members’ at all.

I’m actually not at all sure it mattered in terms of the outcome in the House in the 2018 election, however. First of all, the Democrats had history on their side; there is almost always a big gain for the opposition party in the midterms. Secondly, I think voters were already very negative in polls on all the GOP’s proposed bills. Every single one (and there were many) had generally gotten terrible press from the MSM, and even many Republicans were against them.

Would the passage of this particular bill have mattered? At the time of McCain’s “no,” I wrote this about the bill and its flaws as well as its opportunities:

Here is [McCain’s] statement [on why he voted “no”]; you can read it and judge it for yourself. On the surface, this sort of thing makes sense:

The so-called ”˜skinny repeal’ amendment the Senate voted on today would not accomplish those goals. While the amendment would have repealed some of Obamacare’s most burdensome regulations, it offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens. The Speaker’s statement that the House would be ”˜willing’ to go to conference does not ease my concern that this shell of a bill could be taken up and passed at any time.

The idea that the details of a “replace” bill should be ready to go when “repeal” is passed, and that we shouldn’t trust promises that it will be taken up in a timely fashion, seems sensible. The problem is that this was originally tried, and it couldn’t pass, either.

The “skinny repeal” bill was a compromise arrived at in order to get the negotiations to continue, including probably some changes in the House. “Skinny repeal” was a Sancho Panza bill, as it were. McCain is the Don Quixote here (that is, if you think he’s sincere—and many people would say he’s not).

Here’s an example of what he’d like to see happen, taken from his statement on the reasons for his “no” vote [emphasis mine]:

I’ve stated time and time again that one of the major failures of Obamacare was that it was rammed through Congress by Democrats on a strict-party line basis without a single Republican vote. We should not make the mistakes of the past that has led to Obamacare’s collapse, including in my home state of Arizona where premiums are skyrocketing and health care providers are fleeing the marketplace. We must now return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of aisle, heed the recommendations of nation’s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people. We must do the hard work our citizens expect of us and deserve.

Everything except that highlighted bit is possible, but bipartisanship has gone the way of the dodo and “reach-across-the-aisle” McCain fails to realize it (although if you think he’s insincere, you’d amend that to say he realizes it and doesn’t care because this is all a pose on his part). The problem is that McCain’s own voting “no” on the skinny repeal is probably the best way to ensure that none of the things on his list will be happening.

So McCain’s “no” was very effective in blocking further action on Obamacare repeal, and although I’m not sure the GOP wouldn’t have lost the House anyway had the Senate passed “skinny repeal” (for example, could they have actually passed an effective and popular “replace” bill in time?), I am sure that the failure of the GOP in Congress to do anything about Obamacare when they controlled the legislature, after all the promises they had made, did in fact hurt them in November of 2018. Whether it struck the fatal blow for the GOP-dominated House—or rather that blow would have landed anyway—I do not know.

Veterans Day; Armistice Day

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

Yes, indeed, I am that old—old enough to just barely remember when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day. The change in names occurred in 1954, when I was very small, in order to accommodate World War II and its veterans.

Since then, the original name has largely fallen out of use—although it remains, like a vestigial organ, in the timing of the holiday, November 11th, which commemorates the day the WWI armistice was signed (eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month).

I’m also old enough–and had a teacher ancient enough—to have been forced to memorize that old chestnut “In Flanders Fields” in fifth grade—although without being given any historical context for it, I think at the time I assumed it was about World War II, since as far as I knew that was the only real war.

You can find the story of the poem here . It was written by a Canadian doctor who served in the European theater (there is no separate URL for the discussion of the poem, but you should click on the “John McCrae´s Poppies in Flander’s Fields” link on the left sidebar). It’s not great poetry by any means, but it was great propaganda to encourage America’s entry into what was known at the time as the Great War.

The poem’s first line “In Flanders fields the poppies blow” introduces that famous flower that later became the symbol of Armistice—and later, Veterans—Day. Why the poppy?

Wild poppies flower when other plants in their direct neighbourhood are dead. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, but only when there are no more competing flowers or shrubs in the vicinity (for instance when someone firmly roots up the ground), these seeds will sprout.

There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him bloodred poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

But in this poem the poppy plays one more role. The poppy is known as a symbol of sleep. The last line We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields might point to this fact. Some kinds of poppies are used to derive opium from, from which morphine is made. Morphine is one of the strongest painkillers and was often used to put a wounded soldier to sleep. Sometimes medical doctors used it in a higher dose to put the incurable wounded out of their misery.

Now a day to honor those who have served in our wars, Veterans Day has an interesting history in its original Armistice Day incarnation. It was actually established as a day dedicated to world peace, back in the early post-WWI year of 1926, when it was still possible to believe that WWI had been the war fought to end all wars.

The original proclamation establishing Armistice Day as a holiday read as follows:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

After the carnage of World War II, of course, the earlier hope that peaceful relations among nations would not be severed had long been extinguished. By the time I was a young child, a weary nation sought to honor those who had fought in all of its wars in order to secure the peace that followed—even if each peace was only a temporary one.

And isn’t an armistice a strange (although understandable) sort of hybrid, after all; a decision to lay down arms without anything really having been resolved? Think about the recent wars that have ended through armistice: WWI, which segued almost inexorably into WWII; the 1948 war following the partition of Palestine; the Korean War; and the Gulf War. All of these conflicts exploded again into violence—or have continually threatened to—ever since.

So this Veterans/Armistice Day, let’s join in saluting and honoring those who have fought for our country. The hope that some day war will not be necessary is a laudable one—and those who fight wars hold it, too. But that day has clearly not yet arrived—and, realistically but sadly, most likely it never will.

Like explaining colors to a blind man

The New Neo Posted on by

A color-blind one, that is.

And one picture is worth 1,000 words:

Here’s the website for the glasses.

Most of the color-blind people in the videos who put on the glasses are overwhelmed. At first they usually pause (it often takes a while for eyes and brain to adjust), and then it hits them how different what they are seeing with the glasses on is from what they usually see without them (which is what they’ve seen for their entire lives until then). And though red, green, and blue are favorite colors, there is no question that for most of them the hands-down flabbergasting topper of all is purple. Usually they’ve seen some attenuated version of red, green, and blue before, but they’ve had no experience of purple, which has previously looked the same to them as blue.

This video’s great. Actually, they’re pretty much all great, and there are a lot of them. Whenever you’re feeling blue (!), just watch one and it’ll cheer you up (sometimes through your tears). As the very last guy in this one says, right at the end, “Why doesn’t everybody have flowers everywhere?”

Some commenters at YouTube think the glasses and the videos are a hoax and that they’re actors. To me, it’s clear they aren’t actors, because if they’re actors then they’re the best actors in the world, as are their families. Plus, if you read the explanation by the people who put the video up, it explains how the glasses work:

EnChroma glasses are an optical assistive device; they are not a cure for color blindness. The underlying cause of most color vision deficiencies is that the red and green-sensitive retinal cone cells have an overlapping response to light. Instead of responding separately to each wavelength of light, their response is highly similar. To compensate for the overlap, the EnChroma lens contains proprietary optical materials that selectively remove particular wavelengths of light exactly where the overlap is occurring.

Some skeptics are also doubtful because many of the people already seem to know the names of colors (although previously they didn’t always affix them to the correct colors as most of us see them). But that’s not odd at all; as one commenter who is colorblind wrote:

I am color blind, and the bigger majority of color blind people can see all colors, just not as vividly. I am red-green color blind and I know what red and green looks like, they just not that powerful. They are hard to distinguish if the saturation is low.

There are indeed people who are completely colorblind to all colors, and the glasses can’t help them. But that’s an extremely rare condition. For the majority of colorblind people, these glasses can help.

A great many of the people not only love the newly-discovered color purple, but they use the same word to describe the colors they now see: “vibrant.” In the comments for one video, someone said, “I watch these like every week to remind myself not to take things for granted and to appreciate purple.”

This is my absolute favorite one of these videos so far. This man is an artist, by the way:

It’s Florida, Jake

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t bear to do too much in-depth reporting on what’s been going on with the Florida election. It makes me too angry.

I don’t like losing close elections. Nobody does. But it’s one thing to lose them fair and square. Election fraud is quite another thing. And of course it exists.

Arguments that election fraud doesn’t exist always remind me of those people who swear they can invariably detect when a man is wearing a toupee. The logical flaw is so obvious, and yet they don’t see it (despite their supposedly eagle eye for hairpieces). But here it is: what about hairpieces that are too good to detect?

Well, if election fraud is done well, it’s the same thing. How would you know?

But whatever is going on in Florida right now is not hard to detect. At the very least (and I think what’s really going on is more than the very least), the law that governs the counting and reporting of votes was not followed. As Mollie Hemingway writes:

It is without question that lawful processes were not followed. To say otherwise is scandalous and insulting to the intelligence of most people. Everyone knows what is going on here and to say that there is no evidence, when evidence is obvious to everyone, including those who are pretending it isn’t there, is offensive.

A media that were something other than the communications leaders of the progressive movement would note that Palm Beach County is violating Florida law by refusing to provide required information to the public, and by illegally refusing to allow officials into the ballot counting area to observe what is occurring.

I noted recently that the press plies its trade—which has come to be promoting the fortunes of the left—not just by what it writes but by the stories it emphasizes and those it ignores or minimizes. To report honestly on this story is not in the interests of the left, so they minimize it or mock and try to debunk those who want to spread the word about it. You can be 100% sure that if the parties were reversed, the press would be saying something very different about the actions of the authorities in Florida.

But perhaps the worst aspect of this is that I’m fairly sure that an enormous number of Democrats could hear the entire story rather than the part the MSM is telling them, and would say, “So what?” After all, it benefits their side, and I think increasing numbers do not care about the principle of free and fair elections in which following the rules in a non-partisan way is one of the only guarantees we have of liberty being preserved. But to too many people, it’s become all about winning.

I’m surmising that; I don’t know it for sure. But events in recent years have convinced me of its likelihood.

NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on this:

California needs more controlled burns? Yes, but it’s not that simple

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems like a no-brainer: the catastrophic fires that have swept through California in recent years could be made much less severe by a more effective and frequent use of controlled burns to thin the forest more. But although that seems to have some basic truth to it, the situation isn’t so simple nor is it so easy to achieve these burns. And the problem is not just the “save the endangered animals” groups. In fact, in reading about the pros and cons of the process, I haven’t found much about the environmental effect on animals as being the stumbling block. More problematic are the health problems of humans when the air quality suffers, as well as their perceptions about how much planned fire is tolerable.

At this point, California seems willing to increase the number of planned burns:

“Putting prescribed fire back out on the landscape at a pace and scale to get real work done and to actually make a difference is a high priority,” says Cal Fire chief Ken Pimlott. “It really is, and it’s going to take a lot of effort.”

In a February report, the watchdog Little Hoover Commission concluded that the way California landowners have collectively managed forests is an “unprecedented catastrophe.” In May, Gov. Jerry Brown issued an executive order to improve forest management, and with it, a dramatic change.

Now Pimlott says that Cal Fire intends to triple the amount of prescribed fire on lands the state controls.

“We can prevent these large catastrophic fires or at least reduce the intensity when fires do occur,” he says. “So a little bit of smoke now and a little bit of inconvenience now is well worth offsetting these large damaging fires.”

That’s a small step toward addressing a major deficit. According to the commission’s report, an area the size of Maryland—including state, private and federal land—needs maintenance or planned fire to become healthier.

So even Jerry Brown has been on board recently—although of course he’s not going to be governor for very long.

There are the obstacles to doing this, however:

Even with approval, federal wildland managers waited months for the right weather and environmental conditions here. Hinckley says those criteria range from wind speed and temperature, to how much water is in the soil. It was a very wet spring; on-and-off rains created several months of delay here.

Thick vegetation in the understory is a limiting factor, too. Hinckley says her crews often need to chop and flatten vegetation to make safe conditions for burning.

Even when all of the stars align, Hinckley says she might not have warm bodies for the job. That happened last fall, when fires up and down the state kept fire crews hamstrung.

“I didn’t have crews to perform prescribed burns,” she says, “because the wildfires take priority.”

Even when the permit is done and the weather is right and crews are available, the air might already be too polluted to add more smoke to the mix. Air regulators grant permission for burn days, and it’s hard to get: regional atmospheric conditions mean that smoke from Sierra Nevada forests funnels toward the central valley, where air pollution is consistently bad.

Whether from wildfire or planned burn, smoke feels like pollution to vulnerable lungs…

“We have to protect public health; that’s our mandate,” says Dar Mims, a meteorologist with the California Air Resources Board. “But we also recognize that we need burning in the forest, and a lot of those trade-offs have to happen in real time because the decisions have to be made—do we want to potentially impact the air basin, or do we want to burn.”

The public is upset when there are a lot of burn days, but there needs to be more education about why it’s important to do it anyway, plus the fact that there’s less air pollution from a controlled burn than a wildfire.

There’s much more more at the link, and I strongly suggest you read it.

There are dissenting opinions, however, about the value of thinning. Here’s one of them; the basic thrust of that article, however, is that thinning (another supposed forest-control strategy) is not particularly effective in reducing the severity of major forest fires out West:

In fact, mechanical thinning alone often INCREASES fire spread by putting more fine fuels on the ground.

Additionally, thinning in some instances can INCREASE fire spread by exposing the forest floor’s fuels to greater sun drying and greater penetration by wind through the open forest stands. What is surprising to learn is that often the most dense forest stands (i.e. those with the most fuels) do not burn well because they retain moisture the longest, and wind is impeded from pushing flames through such dense forests.

Second, thinning by removing competition between trees and brush often increases rapid regrowth of vegetation. Therefore, any thinning/fuels reduction program must have follow-up maintenance in the form of recurring prescribed burns and/or thinning to be effective. Yet most thinning projects do not even get the first prescribed burning, much less follow up burns.

The author of the article does recommend thinning near structures and towns, but not in general. And what about controlled burning, which is mostly what we’ve been discussing in this post? That’s a lot better, but as we already know it comes with a bunch of problems:

…[P]rescribed burning is risky, and the opportunity for agencies to set fires is limited to short windows of time. Many forest managers are loath to okay a prescribed burn unless conditions are ideal for containment. No one wants to be the person who signed off on a prescribed burn and then had it get away and burn homes to the ground. However, when conditions are good for controlling a blaze, they are usually not good for fire spread.

There is a movement to allow more thinning, but I’m not convinced thinning is the way to go compared with controlled burns (not that it’s either/or):

Members of the Western Caucus have proposed legislation to dramatically change the way forests are managed. If passed, this bill would give power back to local authorities and allow for more aggressive forest thinning without subjecting them to the most onerous of environmental reviews.

While state and federal governments can take measures to enhance forest and wilderness management, private management can also get involved to improve conditions.

One idea is to adopt a policy popularized by the school choice movement: create charter forests that are publicly owned, but privately managed. This would allow forest management to move away from top-down, bureaucratic control to a decentralized and varied system that may better conform with local realities.

Maybe the current fires will jump-start the implementation of better solutions. Knowing how bureaucracies work, however (and the extreme leftward tilt of the California state government), I wouldn’t bet on it.

But maybe there’s really reason for hope. For example, this article (hat tip: commenter “OBloodyHell”) that appeared in the very leftist Mother Jones last year, advocates more controlled burns:

Addressing the problem will require a revolution in land management and in people’s relationship with fire — and there are signs both may be beginning.

As a child in Southern California, Berleman was deeply afraid of wildfire. But at community college, she learned that Native Americans used fire for thousands of years to manage forests and grasslands and protect their villages. Tribes regularly burned California’s oak woodlands, for instance, to remove underbrush and fight pests. It helped them spot prey more easily, keep weevils out of the acorns they gathered for food, and safeguard their homes from wildfire. In 2009, Berleman transferred to the University of California, Berkeley to study fire ecology. There, she worked on her first prescribed burn. “I instantly fell in love with the ability to use fire in a positive way to accomplish objectives,” she says. She trained as a firefighter so she could put fire to use as a land-management tool.

That entire article is worth reading, too, because it indicates a number of ways in which the left—which, after all, is in the driver’s seat in California—could see its way towards supporting a much more aggressive use of controlled burns. One idea is to appeal by saying that Native Americans did it, so it must be good. Another is promoting the knowledge that since controlled burns are more likely to preserve trees than out-of-control wildfires would, the controlled ones disturb animals’ natural habitats far less. Another piece of useful knowledge in appealing to the left would be that the major incredibly hot and uncontrolled wildfires of late are the ones that release a lot of carbon:

The amount of carbon sent to the atmosphere from such an enormous fire is staggering. “It’s ugly,” says Collins. “It’s not only a huge initial loss just from the direct emissions, but it’s slow emission over time as these trees break and then fall to the ground and the decomposition process really gets underway. We’re looking at 30 years or 40 years of pure emissions coming from this area with very little on the uptake side,” Collins says.

Just the initial blaze released 5.2 million metric tons, roughly as much greenhouse gas emissions as 1.1 million passenger cars emit in a year, according to an estimate by Forest Service ecologist Leland Tarnay. It’s too soon to analyze the fire’s total carbon footprint.

Controlled burns are very different, and they often preserve the trees themselves, so their carbon footprint is not so onerous. That idea should appeal to those concerned with global warming.

Here’s how fires ordinarily work in forests that have been treated differently from each other:

The first patch of forest Collins shows me is the control forest, from which fire has long been banned. The understory is so thick with small trees and shrubs that it’s difficult to walk; we have to step over tangles of dead trees and branches. If a fire were to strike this area, it would easily climb from the ground to the lower branches and up into the canopy. “And then it can really spread,” Collins adds.

In the next patch of forest we visit, loggers cut down and sold some of the medium-sized trees in 2002. Then they shredded the small trees and underbrush using a big machine called a masticator, and spread the remnants on the forest floor. Now, the trees are widely spaced; sunlight shines through the canopy. The High Sierras are visible in the distance. If a fire were to come through here, Collins says, it likely would stay on the ground, and wouldn’t harm the trees or emit much carbon.

Again, I suggest you read the whole thing. It’s actually quite fascinating, and it is in agreement with the idea that although thinning has some benefits, controlled burns are a more effective way to go:

North says thinning is not a solution for much of the Sierra Nevada. Only 28 percent of the landscape can be mechanically thinned, he calculated; the rest is too steep or remote. “You cannot think your way out of the problem,” he says. “You’ve got to use fire.”

Official Forest Service policy has acknowledged this. The 2014 interagency National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy calls for expanding the use of prescribed burns and letting more wildfires burn. “It’s just not being followed; that’s the real problem,” North says. “Everyone knows what we’ve got to do. But it’s not being done.”

Why isn’t it being done more already? Partly because of old-fashioned thinking on the part of fire managers, but a big role is played by increased house-building in areas near or even in forests, and the fear of lawsuits from homeowners if planned fires get out of control and do damage to human dwellings.

The obstacles to controlled burns at this point do not seem to be the conservationists:

Craig Thomas, conservation director of Sierra Forest Legacy, has been calling for more natural and prescribed fire in the Sierra for two decades. He believes that after the Rim, Rough and King fires, the public and policymakers better understand the threat of unnaturally overgrown forests.

That was written before the current fires, and so I imagine that at this point the public understands the problem even better, although they might not understand the difference between thinning and controlled burns.

The article goes on to say that since 2015 the area of California in which fires are allowed to burn without stopping them has increased, and the number of controlled burns has increased as well. It seems it would be a good thing if the recent horrific fires in both northern and southern California would push residents of the state to accept more of the inconvenience and expense of controlled burns, in order to offset the far more catastrophic effects of major and uncontrolled forest conflagrations that spread to population centers.

Paradise lost

The New Neo Posted on by

The name of the northern California Sierra foothill town of Paradise is evocative. Paradise! A place you might want to go. A place you might even want to live.

But reports are that the town of 27,000 is no more, that it has been destroyed by an unusually fast-moving fire (even by California standards) fanned by high winds and drought conditions. The town had been evacuated yesterday morning and afternoon, but it’s very possible that some people didn’t get out: the elderly and/or disabled, and those who just left too late or were stopped by fires started by wind-blown embers, clogged roads, and poor visibility.

Here’s a video that shows you what they faced, taken by some residents fleeing in a car:

Authorities can’t give any figures yet on number of buildings destroyed or lives lost. The first number is probably more or less the entire town, and the second number completely unknown. I just saw this article which says that five people have been found dead in their cars in one area of town, where gridlock allowed the flames to overtake them as they attempted to flee. But there’s no reason to believe there aren’t many more dead people in town.

One person who managed to escape is American Digest blogger (and sometime-commenter here) Gerard Vanderleun, who has lived in Paradise for several years and who left as soon as he realized the town was threatened. He’s in nearby Chico, which is safe so far. But he’s been informed that he’s lost his home and everything in it. [NOTE ADDED: This is the “donate” button at his blog, if you care to contribute.]

I think at this point all you can do is pray for the town, the dead, the survivors, and the firefighters and police and everyone involved in rescue and relief efforts.

[NOTE: Here’s an article on why fires in California seem to be getting worse.]

[ADDENDUM: There’s another must-watch video here, showing the situation and the panic of some other drivers. I can’t seem to embed it, so you have to go to the site to watch it.]

The dancing bears of Dartmouth

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently David Horowitz gave a talk at Dartmouth. He has written the college’s president this note about his experience:

Leading the pack of Dartmouth character assassins who mobilized to combat my presence was Professor Annelise Oreleck, an out-of-control Gender Studies professor who tweeted: “Long-time hater, Islamophobe and anti-intellectual David Horowitz is speaking today in Rocky 3 at 6pm. He is a hater of the first order. If you’re so inclined, support students who are organizing a protest – Bring signs. Turn your back. Stage a walkout.” What justification can there be to have such an angry, close-minded individual teaching Dartmouth students?

Professor Oreleck’s protest instructions happened to be – and surely this was no coincidence – exactly what the Dartmouth Socialists were planning to obstruct my lecture – namely to turn an academic talk into a circus so that no one would pay serious attention to anything that was said. They came in force to play loud porn videos, put on headphones to block out my words, unfurl distracting banners with slogans like “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” and “ICE is the Gestapo,” and to periodically walk out of the room throwing jibes in my direction as further distractions before they left…

All the disrespectful antics of the protesters were in fact disturbing – not least because they were displays of Ivy League students wasting what could have been a valuable educational opportunity, and demonstrations of their total lack of interest in what someone who disagreed with them, and was far more educated, might be saying. When I was a college radical, as I told them to no effect, I always wanted to hear what our opponents were saying because I thought it would make me a better radical. Apparently, today’s radicals are so dedicated to self-righteous know-nothingism that they couldn’t care less what they are fighting against.

There’s more in that vein, including a request that the president of Dartmouth apologize to Hororwitz (fat chance, as Horowitz probably is quite aware) and a suggestion that the school hire some conservative administrators (likewise).

Back in the 1980s when Allan Bloom wrote his magnum opus The Closing of the American Mind, there were conflicts between radical students and professors and administrators who were at least somewhat more conservative. In this previous post I quoted Bloom’s description of one of the seminal events of the appeasement of student radicals by professors and administrators [see *NOTE below]:

Students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.

Well, now that the universities have been purged of just about all remaining conservative professors and administrators, campus activists don’t have to listen to all that blather about academic freedom. Or if they do, it’s all about freedom for the left, freedom to threaten anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.

Nor do they really have to give professors and/or administrators shoves anymore, neither little shoves nor big ones. With few exceptions, the professors and administrators are dancing to the same tune as the leftist students.

[*NOTE: Bloom was describing this event, which he discusses at length in his book.]

Election 2018: vote early, vote often

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s going on with vote-counting in Arizona and Florida—and especially Florida—is profoundly disturbing. It’s one thing to lose a close race. It’s another to have votes dribble out in a slow bleed, always seeming to favor Democrats (and with Democrats being in charge of vote-counting in the districts in question), and in some cases in violation of the regulations for reporting votes.

The Democrats have made it clear, also, that they are not interested in rules. They are interested in winning above all else even if they have to break the rules. If they define themselves as the Good and Republicans as the Evil, whatever they do is justified in their own minds. They proved that indisputably with the Kavanaugh hearings. No one who observed that outrageous travesty can doubt that.

So I would not be at all surprised, not for a moment, if the Democrats in one or several states are committing election fraud. In previous years I was far more reluctant to say that. Now it just seems to be the most likely explanation.

Some commenters from Australia have described how voting is handled in their country (see this and this). They profess to be puzzled by the mess here. But the United States has a history of state-by-state control of voting, and people are loathe to give that up. One reason is that instituting new systems will cost money. Another is that it could make it harder to commit election fraud, and many people in charge want to preserve that ability. A third is just plain inertia.

I remember back in 2000 being shocked by the way voting is handled—or mis-handled—in Florida. I’m sure there have been changes in the nearly-20 years since then, but I don’t know that most of them are for the better. We seem to have done away with “hanging chads” and the “butterfly ballot” (I think we have, anyway), but very serious problems remain. Of course, the powers that be in say, Broward County, no doubt think these things are a feature rather than a bug.

In general, I am against early voting and mail-in voting. I think the old system, which some states still preserve, of going to a polling place and voting all on one day (with a small number of exceptions for absentee ballots obtained by people who cannot attend because they will be out of town or are ill), is the way to go. But that system is more and more being phased out, in the name of convenience and encouraging more and more people to vote. It also encourages more and more abuse of the system.

I have to say I am depressed about what’s happening now. I can’t really look on the bright side at the moment or offer a pep talk. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. If you want to offer something of that sort in the comments, be my guest. I think we all could use some cheering up.

Problem with comment editing?

The New Neo Posted on by

At the moment, some readers are reporting a problem with comment editing. They can comment, but can’t edit afterwards.

I don’t know if it’s the case for everyone, or just a few. I tried reinstalling and reactivating the edit plug-in, and there’s still something wrong. Please bear with this; I hope to get it fixed soon. It has been a bit glitchy lately, so it may just heal itself.

Please let me know whether or not the edit function is working for you.

UPDATE 2:00 PM November 9: It seems to be working now. Let me know if it goes out again.