Meet the hemimastigote

The New Neo Posted on by

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy—such as, for example a whole new supra-kingdom of living creatures.

And it consists of some organisms that were discovered over a hundred years ago but until now have never been captured and studied. However, two types were recently scooped up, by chance, in some dirt collected by a grad student while on vacation:

Canadian researchers have discovered a new kind of organism that’s so different from other living things that it doesn’t fit into the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom used to classify known organisms.

Two species of the microscopic organisms, called hemimastigotes, were found in dirt collected on a whim during a hike in Nova Scotia by Dalhousie University graduate student Yana Eglit.

A genetic analysis shows they’re more different from other organisms than animals and fungi (which are in different kingdoms) are from each other, representing a completely new part of the tree of life, Eglit and her colleagues report this week in the journal Nature…

About 10 species of hemimastigotes have been described over more than 100 years. But up until now, no one had been able to do a genetic analysis to see how they were related to other living things.

The results of such an analysis are that this type of creature appears to have branched off from a common ancestor to other forms of life on earth about a billion years ago.

Now hemimastigotes can be studied because one of the forms can be raised in the lab:

Once she knew what it ate, she reared its prey in captivity so she could also feed and breed captive Hemimastix: “We were able to domesticate it, in a way.”

That means scientists can now give captive specimens to other scientists to study, and their rarity is not the issue it was before.

Somehow this sounds like the beginning of a Michael Crichton novel, doesn’t it?

Amazon users: please order holiday gifts through neo

The New Neo Posted on by

To all of you who like the convenience of Amazon for holiday gifts—please use my Amazon portal for your orders. Clicking on the Amazon widget on the right sidebar is the best way to accomplish it, although if your adblock is on you won’t see it. But just disable the adblock on the page and it will appear.

Or you can go here. I’m not 100% sure that will work as effectively, however.

Thanks to everyone who orders. It gives me a small gift, as well, and at no extra cost to you.

[NOTE: I’ll be announcing this quite a bit until Christmas is over, just as a reminder. Thanks again.]

Netanyahu’s coalition government…

The New Neo Posted on by

…reportedly is in trouble.

Some of it is connected with “the recommendation of the Israeli national police anti-corruption unit that Netanyahu be indicted on charges of corruption and influence-peddling.” There are several possible charges.

Also, in view of recent events in the western part of the US, the following problem facing the Netanyahu administration was of particular interest to me:

Hamas found a method, several months ago, of terrorizing Israelis and threatening to ruin Israel’s agricultural sector by floating incendiary kites and balloons over the Gaza border to land and start fires all over the southern half of Israel. This was especially dangerous over the summer dry season in the country, when little rain falls. As a result, massive fires ravaged forests and crop-lands throughout the south, spurring loud protests and demands for the government to “do something.”

The primary response has been limited, targeted air strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza. These did little or nothing to halt the onslaught of deadly kites and balloons.

Much much more about Netanyahu’s myriad problems at the link.

But if Netanyahu goes, it doesn’t look like his replacement is likely to be to the left of him politically. Au contraire.

Israeli politics is nothing if not complex, however. For example:

In today’s Israel, forecasting the end of Netanyahu’s political career is so outlandish, it attracts attention. After all, we’ve been there and done that: Convinced ourselves that the signs point to a Netanyahu loss only to find out that the Israeli public didn’t see them and voted him into office. The collective memory holds that Netanyahu is perennially written off up until the polls close, at which time it turns out that news of his political demise was premature.

History, on the other hand, has a different version of events. No one can take from Netanyahu either his phenomenal rise from UN ambassador in 1988 to prime minister in 1996 or his lock-hold on power and trifecta of electoral victories since 2009. But Netanyahu is far from invincible: He lost badly to Ehud Barak in 1999, was trounced by Ariel Sharon in the Likud primaries in 2002 and was drubbed by Ehud Olmert and Kadima in the 2006 elections, in which his Likud mustered a measly 12 seats in the Knesset. So it can be done.

The article goes on to list 12 reasons it might indeed happen that Netanyahu is ousted.

On the 40th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, an event that caused the death of close to a thousand people (about a third of them children) who were killed in the group’s compound in Guyana.

Note that I write “were killed” rather than “killed themselves.” One of the many many misconceptions about the Jonestown tragedy was that for most of its victims it represented an act of suicide. For some it did, but for many it did not. The children, of course, did not have that capacity (some were infants and toddlers). And although the adults had all signed onto the Jim Jones enterprise of their own free will, many (perhaps even most?) had essentially been kept prisoner there against their will, long after the nature of the movement had changed. What’s more, as I wrote previously in a lengthy post on the subject:

There is also forensic evidence that those adults who did protest or try to escape were forcibly injected with cyanide as they attempted to flee…

According to the testimony of many of the survivors (a small group, but an articulate one), once they realized the true character of the man in whom they’d placed such hope and faith, it was too late. They were in a prison, subject to various forms of physical and psychological torture in Jones’ attempt to control the inmates. And in the final year before the terrible end, the prison we know as Jonestown was at least as isolated as Alcatraz, because it was located in the heart of the Guyanese jungle.

Two forms the psychological torture/indoctrination took are especially instructive. The first is that as Jones became increasingly paranoid, he regularly harangued his followers that they would be under attack soon, either from the CIA or the Guyanese authorities, and that mass suicide would be the only way out. In fact, he had many rehearsals for the killings, which had the effect of getting people used to what would be happening and more ready to accept it, as well as more doubtful when the real thing began to happen that it actually was the real thing; maybe it was another rehearsal?

The second was a particular type of psychological coercion described in Deborah Layton’s very fine and highly recommended book Seductive Poison. I am describing this from memory (I read the book many years ago), but my recollection is that they were encouraged to inform on each other if they heard anyone complain about or criticize Jones or Jonestown. The tattler was then publicly praised, while the complainer was subject to public harangues, physical punishment, withdrawal of privileges, and ostracism. In a totally controlled environment, this was especially difficult to take, even for those with strong personalities.

What was even more terrible—and diabolical—was the fact that Jones made some of his close confederates pretend to be be discontented, confiding their criticism of Jones and Jonestown to others. The listeners had no idea that these were false “confessions.” If they listened sympathetically and perhaps shared their own discontent, they were reported and punished. But worse, if they failed to report the confidences of their “friends”—who were actually, unbeknownst to them, Jim Jones plants—then they were punished as well.

And it is no accident that Jim Jones himself was a socialist who apparently was not really religious at all but who used religion as a screen to further his socialist ends.

Not only do I highly recommend Deborah Layton’s aforementioned book, I also recommended this much shorter article (from a book I haven’t yet read) by Jackie Speier. She was in Guyana as an aide to Congressman Leo Ryan, who had led the delegation to investigate Jonestown. Ryan and four others were murdered at the airport by some of Jones’ most devoted followers. Speier herself, 28-years-old at the time, was wounded severely.

Speier’s story is astounding. It not only tells some of the tragic and terrible tale of Jones and Jonestown, but because she was part of Ryan’s crew it sheds some light on their approach and activities there. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but it seems to me that some of Congressman Ryan’s actions were somewhat naive in view of what he did know even before going down there. There was enough evidence of possible violence to come. Ryan and Speier had met with defector Deborah Layton (the same person who later wrote the book I read) and this is what they learned from her:

We listened as she offered a detailed and disturbing account of her experience. She mentioned a Bay Area couple, the Stoens, who had defected and were fighting for the return of their young son, John. Debbie said the couple had gone to court to try to compel the Guyanese government to intervene; Rev. Jones responded by telling them that if any actions were taken to remove John, the entire Jonestown population would commit suicide.

Once, Debbie continued, Jones woke up the camp in the early hours of the morning. It wasn’t unusual for Temple members to be awakened at dawn over the loudspeaker and summoned to the pavilion for one of his increasingly unhinged sermons. But this particular morning, Jones told his followers that they had to kill themselves to keep from being tortured by mercenaries who were preparing an ambush. Debbie stood in line to drink the red liquid that she was told would kill her in a matter of minutes. When the time of their supposed deaths came and went with everybody still alive, Jones announced it had just been a drill to test their loyalty. They had passed.

We compiled similar testimonies from other defectors who corroborated Debbie’s reports of physical and sexual abuse, forced labor and captivity. We heard that the church had weapons, and that Jones was paranoid and possibly on drugs. He had engineered complete authority—collecting members’ Social Security and disability checks, and determining when and how his disciples could communicate with their families. Anyone running afoul of Jonestown’s security detail was put in a labor camp and forced to clear jungle. Repeatedly, the defectors mentioned forced participation in mass-suicide rehearsals known as the “White Night trials.”

Leo Ryan wanted answers. Never one to accept second-hand information, he decided to embark on a fact-finding—and potentially life-saving—trip.

Knowing all of that, wouldn’t it make sense that there would be terrible repercussions if the Ryan group helped a whole bunch of people defect? That was what they arranged, and not only did it cost many in the Congressional delegation their lives, it also cost the entire population of Jonestown their lives. The intentions of the Ryan group were laudable, but their failure to protect themselves (or even to take a security detail) proved fatal—although I assume that had they brought obvious security, they wouldn’t have been allowed in.

And all of this occurred at the hands of one demented, paranoid, and powerful person who had initially attracted followers to a Utopian ideal through his charisma and eloquence but turned out to be a Pied Piper leading them to their doom. By the time many of them realized their error they were trapped.

The details of Jonestown were unique, but the trajectory of leftist Utopian promises leading to murder was not.

RIP to all the victims of Jonestown and to all the victims of other leftist Utopias that turn into nightmare.

When Republicans win close elections, the results are illegitimate

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the accusation from the Democrats.

But when Democrats win them, they’re hard-fought victories as well as evidence for the increasingly blue nature of the city or state in which they occur, or the country as a whole.

When did this begin? I think 2000 was a kind of turning point. That situation was unusual to begin with because it really really was a national election that was almost unbelievably close, so close that declaring a winner was nearly impossible by the usual means. The Democrats—and I was one of the Democrats at the time—generally felt robbed, although I have to say I was not among those who felt that way. At the time, I figured that if Gore (not my favorite candidate in the world, although I had voted for hm) had ended up losing the election it was because the system played itself out relatively fairly in a situation in which it truly was almost impossible to figure out who was the winner. The cards just didn’t fall his way.

But a lot of Democrats felt angry and betrayed, and never considered Bush a legitimate winner. And now this sort of accusation has become more or less the norm in close elections, as Liz Shield points out:

Do you notice that whenever there are close elections, possibly resulting in a recount, the narrative the media and its left-wing puppet masters trumpet is that the winner, if a GOPer, is illegitimate? Are there any consequences for these people for undermining the faith in our election system? There were all kinds of public shame and ridicule when candidate Trump talked about “rigged” systems. Meanwhile, a few Democrats are scraping out victories from recounts in California, but no one is talking there about illegitimacy.

This is what has happened with the Georgia governor’s race. The winner is illegitimate because it should have been the Democrat. “I certainly would not have treated the ‘winning’ candidate as the normal head of the state, & we should not do so here,” former Obama admin Norm Eisen wrote. Right out of the Trump playbook: if our candidate loses, we will treat the real winner as illegitimate.

“I acknowledge that former secretary of state Brian Kemp will be certified the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial elections,” Georgia gubernatorial loser Abrams said. “But to watch an elected official — who claims to represent the people of this state, baldly pin his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote — has been truly appalling.”

The argument now seems to hinge on this idea that every effort Republicans make to reduce or prevent voter fraud is a case of suppression of the liberal vote. Requiring voters to show IDs or even citizenship is now voter suppression. And “voter suppression” means that every election that is close would have “really” been won by the Democrat but for this phenomenon of constant voter suppression.

The flip side of this is that Republicans are rather quick to shout “fraud” when close elections are won by Democrats. Democrats respond by saying there’s no “evidence” of vote fraud. You can find many articles like that, as well as articles from the right saying “of course it exists.” An example of the latter is this:

When it comes to election fraud, the question is not “if,” but “how much?” For years, The Heritage Foundation has been documenting instances of proven election fraud in an online, searchable database.

…the database is only a small, illustrative sampling of election fraud.

In fact, to quote from my own op-ed, which apparently inspired Gibble’s reaction, “Heritage’s database is not comprehensive, so for every case we identify and track through to conclusion, many more likely go undetected or hidden in court records that are not easily accessible.”

Not only is there plenty of proof that some degree of election fraud exists, but common sense dictates that there is plenty of motivation to commit election fraud. In addition, as I’ve written recently:

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?

So if election fraud exists, what about voter suppression? Does it exist? Well,it certainly used to exist—particularly in the South at the hands of Democrats via the poll tax. I assume that even now, each side wishes to maximize the number of its own voters and to minimize the number of the opposing party’s voters. The point is to make sure that the rules for voting are reasonable and as fair as possible in order to reduce both voting fraud and suppression of bona fide voters.

As Florida recounts go…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I guess this one was pretty quick.

I want to hear that fat lady singing, though. Not sure I hear her yet, but she’s certainly practicing her scales.

I keep thinking of the title of a book by Hugh Hewitt, written in 2004 and titled If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It

Actually, I hadn’t remembered the subtitle. Only the “if it’s not close, they can’t cheat” part had stuck in my mind.

Whether the Broward County vote-tallying in 2018 merely featured rank incompetence, or whether outright and intentional fraud was executed or at least planned, I don’t know. But it was one or the other, or perhaps both, and none of this would matter all that much if the election hadn’t been very tight in the first place.

The GOP certainly hasn’t come close to “crushing” the Democrats in the years since 2004, have they? For every state like Utah, which is consistently red, there are several that used to be that way but are threatening to turn blue or have already done so, and this includes some of the biggest states (and other very big states are already completely bule).

Why has this happened, when the right sees the left as increasingly bankrupt of ideas and/or increasingly far left? I’ve written many posts trying to explain, as have commenters here (as well as many other bloggers).

So at the moment, I’m not going to go into a lengthy discussion here of the “why” or the “how.” I’ll just say that, although some people saw Trump’s election as a possible turning point towards the right (particularly if he could improve the economy and successfully tackle other issues in ways that people could easily perceive as helping them), his abrasive personality and the 24/7 drumbeat of the press and “resistance” have made it very difficult to see Trump as starting a more permanent shift to the right. The election of 2018 certainly wasn’t a hopeful sign, although it could have been worse, particularly in the Senate. But the loss of Arizona and Montana, and the near-loss of Florida, is very troubling.

When laundry day is every day

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I’ve been doing my laundry, a task I hate. I love having clean laundry, but for some reason—although it’s not really that onerous at all, as tasks go—I hate doing it. I can’t stand ironing, either, and fortunately for the most part modern clothing and fabric has eliminated the need to iron.

It’s also fortunate that the modern economy means that most of us have plenty of clothes, and so we don’t have to do laundry extremely often in order to have clean ones all the time. That’s fine with me.

Or, clean enough ones. The question is: what’s clean enough? I consider myself quite clean, but different people answer the “how often to do laundry?” question very differently, as I learned years ago when I was staying with some relatives.

It seemed that their washer and dryer were going nearly all the time. The machines were located just off the kitchen, so their near-constant busyness was easy to notice. One would think the couple was running some sort of industrial operation, but there were just two of them in the house at the time because their children had grown up and moved out by then (and were not the type to bring their laundry home).

I was puzzled. Why on earth would this couple generate such reams of laundry? At one point I grew bold enough to ask, and the answer was that they only wore each item of clothing once, and only used each towel or washcloth once. In other words, once something had touched their bodies, it was laundry time. I’m not just talking about underwear or socks, either; this was everything except coats (maybe it was even coats, too; I didn’t ask about that).

It flabbergasted me. Then again, I should have realized there were people for whom this type of behavior was the norm. In college I had once lived in a four-person suite (that’s two bedrooms shared by two persons each) having a small kitchen and bathroom. My roommate and I were content to wash the kitchen and bathroom floors every now and then, as the spirit moved us, and although the spirit didn’t move us all that often, believe me those floors were basically clean.

But the other two roommates called a conference one day to announce that they required that both the kitchen and bathroom floors be fully washed every single day, and that we needed to share that task. This caused a rift that never was resolved (although maybe “rift” is the wrong word, since my roommate and I hadn’t been all that friendly with the other two in the first place and had gotten the apartment by merely answering an ad looking for roommates).

That’s how I learned that there are people who want their floors washed every day. Maybe that’s even most people, for all I know. And maybe most people only wear clothing or use towels a single time before washing them. Maybe I’m the abnormal one.

Evacuation plans: the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men (Part II)

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]

In my research so far about what happened in the Paradise fire and why it went so wrong, I kept trying to get a good timeline, with distances. When exactly did the fire start? How many miles from Paradise? How fast did it travel? When did it first hit the town? When did authorities order the evacuation? It has proved very difficult to get that information, but finally I’ve gotten some of it (although I’m not 100% sure it’s correct).

What is coming out is that the method and timing of the notification of the residents was deeply flawed, despite all the preparation. In addition to the natural and perhaps-inevitable obstacles, there was some sort of disorganization in the notification of the population of Paradise:

A resident of Magalia, about 8 miles west of the fire’s starting point, confronted Butte County Sheriff Kory L. Honea and other officials Monday about why he and his neighbors could not find any information about the dangerous blaze, a full three hours after fire crews first responded to the ignition point, near Highway 70 in Plumas National Forest.

“We use the emergency broadcast system for a tornado warning. But this is a deadly fire,” said the man, who was not identified by county officials whom he addressed at the meeting in Oroville. “I don’t remember any alert coming over my radio. … People in the community are freaking out, you need to get some information up here.”…

The Butte County sheriff’s office said it did deliver notifications about the fire danger: 5,227 by email, 25,643 via phone (to both land lines and cellular devices) and 5,445 by text message.

“I wish we had the opportunity to get more alerts out, more of a warning out, but unfortunately we didn’t,” Sheriff Honea told the public meeting on Monday.

At a news conference Tuesday evening, Honea stressed that the fire’s unusually swift progress south and west into Magalia, Paradise and other mountain communities made timely notification difficult.

“You have to keep in mind that this was an extraordinarily chaotic and rapidly moving situation. The fire started in a remote area. It takes awhile for our fire resources to get there and from that point, trying to determine the path of travel and whether or not that’s going to effect populated areas, that takes time,” Honea said.

He added that it’s possible some people were warned and didn’t immediately act to get out of harm’s way. “We were trying to move tens of thousands of people out of an area very rapidly with the fire coming very rapidly. And no matter what your plan is to do that, no plan will ever work 100 percent when you are dealing with that much chaos.”

Honea, who took office four years ago, also suggested that emergency officials have to be concerned not to over-burden people with excessive or unneeded evacuation orders. He said the region had already lived through evacuations from earlier fires and last year’s threatened collapse of the Oroville Dam, which caused nearly 200,000 people to flee…

Like other counties, Butte has a system that allows residents to sign up for “reverse 911” telephone alerts in times of emergency.

Savannah Rauscher told The Sacramento Bee that by the time she got the 911 alert at 8:30 a.m., embers and dust were already flying around her family’s Edgewood Lane home….

But even signing up for the warnings was no guarantee they came through. Johnson said her aunt, Peg, applied for the 911 alerts, but received no notice at her Paradise home of the Camp Fire. “She said she didn’t get anything,” Johnson said. “It was friends and family calling, or neighbors coming by. That’s how many people found out.”

Taft said she argued fiercely with her mother for more than an hour, trying to convince her to flee. But there were no sheriff’s deputies demanding the neighborhood evacuate. Fire crews, busy on the front lines of the blaze, did not stop by. No one she talked to in her neighborhood was ordered out…

Even a system designed to push warnings to all cellphones, tested recently by the Trump administration, did not reach everyone.

Lewin said he had two cellphones side by side during that test, both serviced by the same phone company, and only one received the emergency alert. “And we don’t know the reason why,” he said.

An exacerbating factor in Butte County may have been the advanced age of many residents. Paradise and its environs are popular with retirees, some of whom are reluctant to leave home because of mobility problems…

Cell phone service is apparently very bad there, and many people don’t even have cell phones. To call landlines and leave voicemails—even with an automated system—is much slower, and my guess is that the majority of those evacuation messages needed to be left on landlines.

The fire started in the early morning, and got to town pretty early in the morning, too. If a person was a late sleeper, or even a moderately late sleeper, and habitually turned the cellphone ringer off at night (or slept in a room without a landline), none of these messages would have been received. Also, of course, disabled people or elderly people who don’t drive would have had to rely on neighbors, friends, or relatives to come and get them out.

The evidence so far is that the vast majority of deaths occurred at home. Were the people asleep, in bed? Or were they somewhere else in the house? Because of the nature of the fire—its extreme heat causing what amounted to cremation—we may never know the full story. But I believe that some sort of more comprehensive warning system, and perhaps a buddy system for the disabled (paired with someone able-bodied), would have helped.

The plans for Paradise called for an evacuation in stages, in order to forestall the problem of backup on the roads. Ordinarily the officials would have enough time, but this time they didn’t:

…[T]his time [because of the history of the 2008 fire, officials] decided not to immediately undergo a full-scale evacuation, hoping to get residents out of neighborhoods closest to the fires first before the roads became gridlocked.

But it soon became clear that the fire was moving too fast for that plan, and that the whole town was in jeopardy. A full-scale evacuation order was issued at 9:17 a.m., but by then the fire was already consuming the town.

The fire is reported to have begun around 6:30 AM in a remote area. I’ve read wildly differing accounts of how far away it was from the town (from 65 miles away to 25 miles away to just a few miles away). Most accounts agree on the time it was detected, and if that’s correct then this full-scale evacuation was about 2 hours and 45 minutes afterward. But it had already traversed the distance to Paradise.

The article gives a fairly close-to-Paradise origin for the fire, around Pulga at 7 miles away. But if you look on the map, Pulga is more than 7 miles from Paradise (by car it’s actually 26 or 27 miles, but of course as the crow flies it is much closer, although it’s hard to tell how close). And the article has the very first (partial) evacuation notice for Paradise being issued around 8 AM, which is about an hour and a half later):

In the chaos of the Paradise fire, many residents said, they never got warnings by phone from authorities to leave. Some said they got warnings from police driving through their streets using loudspeakers. Others got texts from neighbors. But few said they got official text alerts or phone calls from the government.

The fire was first reported near the community of Pulga — about seven miles from Paradise — about 6:30 a.m. By 7:35 a.m., it had reached the nearby hamlet of Concow.

The first evacuation order for Paradise came at 8 a.m., a minute after the first flames were spotted in town. The order was limited to the eastern side of Paradise. The hope was to get the residents closest to fire out immediately, with the rest of the town to follow if needed.

But the fire was simply moving too fast.

“The fire had already outrun us,” said John Messina,

Technical problems were inherent in the phone system used:

The evacuation orders were sent using a phone system called CodeRed, which covers all landlines as well as cellphone numbers voluntarily submitted by residents. But the system doesn’t cover all phones in the town. “In the town of Paradise, I think we’d be lucky to say 25% or 30%” of phone lines are in the system — and that’s after local officials urge residents to sign up, said Jim Broshears, who directs Paradise’s emergency operations center.

Also, the system can reach only so many phones per hour. “I can’t give you the raw numbers, but there’s a capacity per hour of calls. So CodeRed can’t [make] 12,000 calls at once. It’s really fast, but not this fast,” Broshears said.

These types of systems have been criticized because they reach so few people. Instead, some safety experts have advocated using the federal government’s Wireless Emergency Alert system, which sends Amber Alert-style warnings to cellphones within a certain geographical area…

In Paradise, Broshears said officials did not employ the Wireless Emergency Alert system because they initially wanted to stagger the evacuations by neighborhood. He also said that Amber Alert-style alerts do “not go to every phone at the same time.”

According to the Federal Communications Commission, Wireless Emergency Alerts are broadcast to coverage areas that best approximate the zone of an emergency; mobile devices in the alert zone will receive the alert. There has been criticism that the geographical targeting of the system is not terribly precise, and in late 2019, wireless carriers are supposed to improve geo-targeting of the alerts.

Again, remember that most people in Paradise may not have even had functioning cellphones.

What about the good old-fashioned siren of my youth? Do towns still have them? I hated that siren; it terrified me because it sounded like an air raid siren in World War II movies, with which I was very familiar. But boy, could you hear it.

Of course, a siren has three drawbacks in a situation such as that faced by Paradise. The first is that it’s tested a lot and people sometimes have trouble telling test from real alert. The second is that it’s non-specific and doesn’t say what the danger is or what to do about it; it’s just an alarm, unless there’s a sort of code of blasts, and then people have to remember the code. The third is the previously-mentioned problem of a mass exodus all at once. Even if the evacuation notice is given promptly and people receive it, how do you avoid a bottleneck of traffic, particularly in a town with the sort of road geography Paradise has?

[NOTE: For now, I’ve given up on calculating the speed of the fire, except to say it was very very fast. The problem with the calculations involve the differing reports of speed and of distance. Most articles say that at its fastest, the fire moved at the rate of more than one football field a second. The slowest rate I’ve read is that the average speed of this fire was a football field every three seconds. Either way, that’s tremendously fast.]

Evacuation plans: the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men (Part I)

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series.]

Not too long after the Paradise fire, commenter “Cicero” wanted to know why the people of Paradise left town so late:

I am not clear how close the wildfire was to Paradise the town at its start. But I am concerned with what seems to be a commonplace: denial. Why this wait until the last minute? Followed by the rightfully frightening last-minute escape along with so many others?.

It’s a good question. At the time I didn’t really have a good answer, mostly because there hadn’t yet been news on how evacuation orders were issued. But now we have a lot more information.

The reasons were complicated and distressing, some perhaps avoidable and some not. This was not a town that was unprepared, because town officials and many citizens had long known it was also a town that was vulnerable. Whether it was uniquely vulnerable I don’t know, but it definitely was especially vulnerable. And this was also a fire that was so unusually fast-moving and destructive that it truly may have been impossible to have avoided mass destruction as well as a significant death toll (the toll of dead and missing has been rising, and the missing may number above 600 at this point, although it seems some of the people on the list may not remain there).

And yet all the preparations and plans made by the town of Paradise were inadequate to the actual events of November 8, 2018 as they unfolded. You may have heard the old saying that generals plan for the last war rather than the new one they will need to fight, and this was at least somewhat true for the planning efforts in Paradise as well. But it’s also true that in the relative calm of the planning stages, certain contingencies seem impossible.

Until they occur, that is.

And certain solutions may not be available because the problems are intrinsic in something basic about the situation.

For example, Paradise is a town—like many other California towns in the foothills—that was an old mining town built on a high ridge. The roads leading out—the only ways out—all followed natural paths downward that were relatively narrow. This was because of the given of the area’s geography. Paradise wasn’t like a town in most flatter places, where there can be a great many ways to get out, and broad highways can be built. And in the case of Paradise, some of the roads out were closed early by the fire, and the main road was clogged with what amounted to a goodly portion pf the population of 27,000 trying to get out all at once.

Town officials had actually foreseen that possibility and tried to prevent it from happening, but their plans didn’t work for a number of reasons. First and foremost was the speed of the fire in reaching the town. In addition, the “last war”—a fire that had occurred in the outskirts of Paradise 2008—had taught them some lessons:

…[L]ocals knew there was no room for complacency. A decade ago, the Humboldt fire destroyed 87 homes at the edge of town, and a week later dozens of fires set off by a lightning storm threatened the community. One person died.

Residents trying to flee the 2008 fires were caught in massive traffic jams, flames burning on both sides of the road as they sat trapped in their cars. They clamored for local officials to come up with a plan.

The solution created by Paradise city leaders was a plan that evacuated sections of the city at a time, said Phil John, chairman of the Paradise Ridge Fire Safe Council.

They adopted protocols to convert two-way streets into one-way evacuation routes during times of crises. And some 70 people participated in a recent drill, rehearsing an evacuation down the town’s main thoroughfare. All of this work “saved literally thousands of lives,” John said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

“There’s just no way to prepare for what happened,” John said. “Unless you had some kind foresight to say there’s going to be a big fire and it’s going to jump the creek and it’s going to burn down the whole town.”

Which is what happened.

“I think their plan would have worked for the 97th percentile fire,” said Bill Stewart, co-director of the Berkeley Forests program at UC Berkeley. “It would have worked if they had six hours to move, instead of two.”

That would have been enough of a problem. But it wasn’t the only problem. The transportation infrastructure was old, but as I already stated, geography dictated the way it went:

The town, on a ridge at 1,700 feet above a canyon cut by the Feather River, is basically at the dead end of two roads, the four-lane Skyway slicing west to Chico, and two-lane Highway 191, known locally as Clark Road, dropping south to Oroville. There are only four exit routes running south — all are in fire corridors.

In the 1960s, when Paradise’s building boom began, those roads would have served a population of some 8,000 people.

On Thursday, they were the primary escape to safety for more than 26,000 people on the ridge.

County emergency plans, updated in 2013, set the risk of wildfire as “critical”…The document described mass evacuations as “challenging … due to limited egress availability of roads. Mass evacuations during a fire event clog roads and add to the frustration of evacuees.”

Still, the town has drilled residents on the importance of leaving, mailing out maps of the evacuation routes, along with reminders to pack up important records and other belongings and to make plans for pets.

But Paradise had other problems, too. Quite a few residents were old or disabled, and many of the dead and missing appear to fit that description. Some residents were rugged individualists who lived off the grid, alone and out of touch. Cell phone service was poor in the town, too, so a lot of people didn’t have cell phones or didn’t have good reception, and therefore ordering evacuations or alerts by text wouldn’t have been possible for many. In addition, there had been a number of evacuations in the past that had been false alarms. If there was denial on the part of some residents, it probably rose from the fact that they had grown used to fleeing for what seemed like no real reason, at the behest of nervous officials.

This time, though, the officials probably should have been more nervous and ordered an evacuation sooner. But that’s 20/20 hindsight. And maybe it’s not even 20/20, because if they had done that, perhaps an even worse traffic jam would have occurred, with even more casualties, because the entire town really would have emptied out at once.

[NOTE: Part II can be found here.]

Acosta’s back, for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Jim Acosta’s request for an injunction against Trump’s ban has been granted. In other words, for the moment, Trump is not allowed to ban him from press conferences without due process.

You can read about it in this post by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

Based on reports from reporters in the media room, it appears that the Judge ruled that while the White House doesn’t have to allow any reporters into the White House, by setting up a credentialing process it owes people like Acosta due process, and that it confers a First Amendment interest entitled to protection. The Court appears to have ruled that Acosta’s First Amendment rights supercede the White House interest in orderly press conferences, and that Acosta was not given due process in the revocation process.

Quick Assessment: This is a bad decision which effectively gives an individual reporter control over the White House press briefing process. It the White House can’t revoke the credentials of someone who disrupts a press conference in the way Acosta did, including refusing to turn over the microphone, then press conferences will turn into even more of a circus than they already are. Clearly, the lack of any formal process for revocation of press credentials influenced the court. Trump still appears to have the right not to call on Acosta. But what it Acosta refuses to stay silent, shouts, injects himself into the conference, and otherwise disrupts proceedings when he is not called on? The White House better set up, if it doesn’t have it already, a speedy but “due” process to revoke the credentials.

Trump has made a counter-announcement:

According to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he wants “total freedom of the press,” and that it’s “more important to me than anybody would believe.”

Knoller says, however, that the President added that reporters have to act with respect, and if they fail to do so, Trump will walk out of press events. He added that he told his aides to do the same.

The press stopped doing its job of reporting objectively a long time ago. But what’s more, for some of them (Acosta in particular, apparently) it has become about them—their bravery, their feistiness, their wonderfulness. But the funny thing is that they depend on Trump because they demonstrate those supposed qualities by pushing against him. A walkout would give them less to push back on—although of course they’d excoriate him for a walkout.

Rara avis sighted: a bipartisan bill

The New Neo Posted on by

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the FIRST STEP Act, a bill for criminal justice reform that’s been designed by members of both parties and is also supported by the law enforcement community.

This bill is apparently Jared Kushner’s baby. Here are a few of the details:

Proponents have sought changes for years, arguing that mandatory sentencing, including for repeat offenders, has led to excessively long imprisonment for relatively minor crimes. And they note those sentences tend to disproportionately fall on African-Americans.

The legislation also would place federal prisoners closer to home, allow more home confinement for lower-level offenders and expand prison employment programs.

Trump announced his support at a White House event where he was flanked by lawmakers and joined by Kushner, who has made criminal justice reform a centerpiece of his portfolio. Members of both parties have long predicted criminal justice reform had the potential to win bipartisan support, but it has taken years for the legislation to materialize.

“Did I hear that word ‘bipartisan’? Did I hear that word? That’s a nice word,” Trump said.

I have always been against mandatory sentencing in most situations. Allowing judges leeway has its own problems, to be sure, but the problems engendered by taking that latitude away are actually worse.