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.

Michael Avenatti, champion of the #MeToo movement, arrested for domestic abuse

The New Neo Posted on by

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

And the liberal media has been strangely reluctant to cover this much.

Here’s the story:

Michael Avenatti, the attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels and one of President Donald Trump’s chief antagonists, has been arrested on suspicion of felony domestic abuse, multiple senior law enforcement officials told NBC News on Wednesday.

Officers in West Los Angeles responded to an incident involving Avenatti, and he was detained in the process of taking an incident report, the sources said. He was booked into jail but released on $50,000 bond Wednesday evening.

The charges are, as they say, “credible.” But you know what? Unlike CNN and the others, I’m consistent. I have no idea whether Avenatti is guilty, and he deserves the same protections that all others accused deserve and yet often do not get—and that includes those who have been his clients’ targets in the past.

Maybe someday Florida will learn how to run an election—but I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till it does

The New Neo Posted on by

Then again, maybe the Florida powers-that-be are running it exactly the way they want to.

You may have noticed I’ve not run many posts about this, even though it’s a big story. Here’s what I’ve written so far. And for a sampler of recent articles by others, please see this, this,and this.

Last night I watched a little cable TV for a few minutes, something I rarely do these days. I saw an interview with Marco Rubio (on Hannity? I can’t recall) about Florida. Rubio’s been on this since the moment it happened, tweeting up a storm and raising the alarm before most people were paying attention.

Last night in the few minutes of his interview he was completely articulate and even quite eloquent about it, which reminded me that Rubio is very good a great deal of the time, although every now and then he’s really not. It seems like a long time ago that we were evaluating candidates in the lead-up to election 2016, and I remember thinking that Rubio would have good crossover appeal.

I still think that’s true, although there is no doubt in my mind that had he been elected, he would have made more compromises about conservatism than Trump has so far. There’s also no doubt in my mind that the MSM would have attacked Rubio (or any other Republican who might have won) vigorously on all fronts. But would the attacks have stuck to him as much as they do to Trump, in the minds of more moderate voters such as the ones who handed Democrats their victories earlier this month?

Yes, I know that Rubio’s much softer on immigration than Trump. And yes, I know that some on the right detest him for that. I’m not arguing otherwise; I’m saying something different, something that’s not primarily meant to be about Rubio. During 2016 I happen to have thought—and I still think—that many of the GOP candidates had a chance to beat Hillary handily, and that Rubio might have scored a bigger victory over her than Trump did. Many, if not most of you, probably disagree.

But my next point is that although the MSM would go after any of those people—including Rubio—mercilessly, I don’t think the charges would have gotten the same sort of traction among a certain type of in-between voter as the charges against Trump have. Trump has a core of very intense supporters, but like it or not, fairly or not, his style turns a lot of people off and makes them susceptible to MSM propaganda about him and about Republicans who support him. Staunch conservatives may be able to hold their noses and vote for him, or overlook his personal style to vote for him, but people with a shakier interest in what he has to offer politically (such as the appointment of very conservative judges, or putting up a good hard fight) are far more likely to hold their noses and vote for someone else.

I don’t have any polls that prove it. I don’t even know if what I say is factually true. But it’s something that occurred to me last night (and at other times as well), as I watched a politician explain a problem in a simple yet forceful and clear way.

It didn’t have to be Rubio doing this. This post isn’t really meant to be about Rubio at all, it’s about styles of communication and how they affect people. Reagan, for example, was a good blend of conservatism and the ability to talk about it clearly and agreeably and yet forcefully, without being too pugnacious. Reagan hit the sweet spot of pugnaciousness; he was just pugnacious enough and plenty charming enough. And people vote for candidates because of personalities as much as anything else.

None of this kept Reagan from vicious attacks from the press and others, including the repeated charge that he was a dunce. But he also was called the “teflon president” because his personality and style were such that the charges couldn’t gain much traction.

What will happen in Florida next? I’m not totally reassured by those who say not to worry. I’ve been plenty worried, because I’ve seen votes dwindle down before, and I’ve seen election results suddenly switch, nearly always to the Democratic side. I have zero trust in the integrity of the Broward County officials who are in charge of this, but I do have faith in their political creativity.

A change for the kilogram

The New Neo Posted on by

They’re planning to redefine the prototype kilogram:

During ceremonial weigh-ins that take place every few decades, when reference copies of the International Prototype Kilogram are flown in from around the world and compared to their distinguished forebear, the IPK has been found to have lost around 50 micrograms in mass, roughly equal to a single eyelash. Of course, because the IPK is the definition of the kilogram, it can’t technically lose or gain weight. Instead, it’s more accurate to say that the rest of the world has been getting slightly heavier.

Ah, that explains my inexplicable weight gain over the years.

Yeah, I know it doesn’t. But I’d love to be able to blame the kilogram. I never much cared for the metric system.

To metrologists these fluctuations are no more than an embarrassing gaffe. They don’t seriously undermine the legitimacy of the international metric order, but they do spoil the ambience of infallible metrical precision. With the redefinition on Friday, the age of physical artifacts — and its attendant imperfections — will be left for good. “We will transcend this messiness,” says Schlamminger. “We will be basing units on the fabric of the universe: on the heavens, so to speak.”

The article goes on to explain how this will be accomplished.

The fast-warming ocean—oh, wait a minute

The New Neo Posted on by

The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.’

Recently there was a big climate change article published in the prestigious journal Nature that got a lot of publicity, because it found that, alarmingly, the ocean temperatures have grown hotter more quickly than was previously thought to be occurring.

Now we learn that mistakes—some of them rather obvious, apparently—were made in the researchers’ calculations [emphasis mine]:

The findings of the Resplandy et al paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media. Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results. Just a few hours of analysis and calculations, based only on published information, was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations.

That was published in a piece by Nic Lewis at Judith Curry’s blog, a site I’ve recommended several times before as being one of the best, and fairest and most well-balanced, on the entire issue of climate change.

The author of that quote says the errors were “surely inadvertent.” No doubt some of you may disagree, but I don’t. If someone was going to fudge results, the errors wouldn’t be so blatant that someone could find them so easily, on a quick perusal of the first page. My guess is that that wouldn’t be the way to go about a purposeful deception.

So, what happened? I think that set and expectations probably did play some role, but an unconscious one, in the researchers’ initial error. It’s not really all that surprising, although it’s something researchers must assiduously guard against. But to me the more interesting question is: what about the peer-reviewers who approved the article? They are the ones you might think ought to be more clear-sighted, more eager to spot errors, more objective about they were reading.

But they were not. And that was probably because they did not want to see them and therefore they got sloppy, a function of confirmation bias. People are less likely to question something that accords with their already-existing worldview. I don’t think they knowingly passed on an article full of obvious errors, because they would have known that opponents of their point of view would be combing the article for mistakes and would almost undoubtedly find them if it had been poorly done.

And perhaps they also knew that the state of human-caused climate-change science is such that all findings of its opponents are labeled unscientific hogwash put out by propagandist “skeptics.” However, at least the authors of the study have admitted their error, which just shows you how egregious it must have been.

The split tickets and the votes for governor

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter Mike K asks:

I am still interested in why Ducey, in his race for governor got 1,241,028 votes and McSally got 1, 059, 124 votes. That’s almost 200,000 votes more for the GOP governor than for the GOP Senator. Some may well be crossover Democrat votes but I wonder how many Republicans voted for Ducey but not McSally ?

And Kyndyll G posits what is essentially the same question, although it’s phrased as a statement:

Sinema is a known far left nutjob who ran on “pre-existing conditions” and “look, some normal people don’t hate me so now I must be a moderate.”

Why anyone who doesn’t vote Democrat straight tickets voted for her is a mystery.

It’s a mystery I’d love to clear up, but I don’t have the definitive answer. However, I’ve long noticed the phenomenon, and not just in Arizona.

For example, in the state of New Hampshire in this past election, the Democrats won in Congress but the Republican governor was re-elected handily, about 53 to 46. For the 1st district in the US House, the Democrat won by about the same margin, and in the 2nd district the Democrat’s margin was even greater. Why the split? And again, this is something you see in many states, not just Arizona and New Hampshire. Even Massachusetts, the bluest of the blue, sometimes has a Republican governor (it does at the moment, and he was re-elected, although—or probably because—he’s no conservative, and in fact has many liberal aspects).

Charlie Baker, the current governor of Massachusetts, is very popular in the state: “As of October 10, 2018, Baker had a job approval rating of 70%, the highest approval rating of any governor in the United States.” Described as a social liberal and fiscal conservative, even the ultra-liberal Boston Globe endorsed him in 2014, saying this:

One needn’t agree with every last one of Baker’s views to conclude that, at this time, the Republican nominee would provide the best counterpoint to the instincts of an overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature

Some polls have his approval rating so high that he’s the most popular governor in the United States. I don’t have the answer as to why, although I do know that Massachusetts periodically elects Republican governors to rein in the fiscal spending when things seem to get out of hand (Romney, for example, was elected mostly to take on that task). But Baker is more wildly popular than most of them have been.

Perhaps people generally want their governors to be somewhat fiscally conservative and yet want the feds to give them lots of perks and “free” stuff. Maybe it’s just as simple as that. But I also think that a great many elections—more than we realize—turn on personalities. If someone is just the kind of person people like, and his or her opponent is more off-putting on the personal level, people will vote for the former over the latter.

Plus, promises go a long way. Leftists promise to be moderate, for example, and certain electorates seem to fall for it every time, a la Charlie Brown and Lucy and the football.