Skipped A Day

     I skipped posting yesterday.  The attempt to get across the scale of the mess in Los Angeles is depressing.  And people who think the dueling boasts and threats of politicians somehow outweigh FEMA's guidelines and limits for aid annoy me beyond measure.

     Nothing stops fires pushed down dry mountains and hills by winds in excess of sixty miles an hour.  Nothing much prevents them starting; southern California is a tinderbox in the dry season and LA county is vast, a megacity bigger than Delaware or Rhode Island, containing more people than the individual populations of all but ten U. S. States.*  Sparks are inevitable.

     The people who lose their homes will get the same help as the people who lost their homes to natural disaster in the Southeast: FEMA covers their hotel bill or rental and a few other things.  The Federal agency doesn't play favors because it cannot; it's not a rich man's whim or a politician's pork handout but a fairly hidebound Federal agency, one in which (for example) it took a determined band of worried bureaucrats over a decade to make minor reforms in the way the national-level EAS system functions.  Congress can (and may) come up with extra funding; the Executive Branch can tinker a little with what goes where, but the stuff that makes an actual difference to J. Average Citizen is cut and dried, and involves filling out forms.

     Anyone claiming the LA Fire Chief is a "DEI hire" can go look up her record, including written and physical tests.  She's been fighting fires for a long, long time, mostly in jobs where the inability to fight fires or to lead groups doing the work would result in termination for cause.  If you're still worried about some chick running a 3000-plus person fire department, step up and shake hands with Anthony C. Marrone, Fire Chief of the 3000-plus member LA County Fire Department, working side-by-side with the city (and every helper they can get from within the U.S., Mexico and Canada).  There is no shortage of competent bosses, and the only limitation on front-line firefighters is logistics.

     It's a fire (well, several fires).  Just like storms, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes, it hasn't got any politics, and no decent person checks the party membership of the victims before deciding if they'll help.
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* How does Greater LA compare to Indianapolis/Marion County?  The population density is about the same, between 2400 and 2500 people per square mile -- but the 400 square miles of Indianapolis is a tenth of LA County's 4000 square miles.  We lose some land area to lakes and rivers; LA loses a lot more to slopes too steep to build on.

Snow

     Indianapolis had another 2.7 inches of snow yesterday.  I'm measuring at least ten inches accumulation on the back yard picnic table here.

     It's not fun.  I'm long past snowball fight age.  Driving home Friday night was a little scary.  But the city copes; they keep the major streets pretty well plowed and so far, my Lexus all-wheel drive kinda-SUV has done well with the alleys and side streets.  January in Indianapolis -- we do get snow.

Footnote

     If you're one of the people chortling how the "lib'ruls" of LA voted wrong and now face fires, two bits of information:

     -Post hoc ergo propter hoc is still a logical fallacy.

     -In the 2024 Presidental election, more people voted for Donald Trump in Los Angeles than voted for him in Arkansas or Oklahoma.  This nonsense about "red America" vs. "blue America" ignores the reality that we all live in purple America, a bit redder in some places and bluer in others, and when bad luck falls on Texas or New York, Oregon or Florida, it falls on millions of people who voted the same way you did and hold similar values, no matter how you voted or what policies you favor.  We're all in the same box. 

     But neither voting patterns, election results or efforts to attracts a more diverse pool of firefighters caused the recent and current fires in and around LA.  They had a fairly wet year or two recently, then things got dry (as is normal in that part of our country) and then--  Then the dice came up snake eyes (or double sixes) for the Santa Ana winds, roaring with an intensity rarely seen.  People being people, anyone with a yard has stuff growing in it, and it was all pretty much tinder.  Add strong winds and all you need is a spark.

     Strong winds kept firefighting aircraft on the ground (and still are, at their worst), leaving the greater Los Angeles area with exactly the same resources as any other big city: a hydrant system and trucks and personnel adequate to battle normal fires, a building or three at a time.

     Information about LAFD funding is muddled; they were in the process of negotiating fire department pay (and apparently other terms) during the overall budget process.  LAFD's portion was left for another bill, later, and their funding went up, not down (as has been claimed elsewhere), but reports on how much and what it was for vary.  All I can tell for sure is that it went up some tens of millions -- not much less than 20, nor more than 50 million over what it had been.  Call it a couple week's income for Elon Musk, or more than you or I would see in ten lifetimes.  They've got the money.  They're not worse off for staff than fire departments generally -- and, faced with a wall of flame pushed by katabatic winds exceeding 60 miles an hour, blowing embers ahead of it into paper-dry shrubs, grass, trees and wooden houses, all they can do is fight for time, no matter who they are.  Against a calamity this enormous, all people are the same size, and it's too damn small.  Additional help is pouring in, from as far away as Canada.

     It's probably ironic that the best tool against this kind of disaster is slow and about as nannying as it gets: building codes and zoning.  Requiring more fire-resistant construction and materials for homes and commercial buildings, mandating largely vegetation-free "clear zones" around them, incorporating firebreaks into neighborhood design -- all of those things would help mitigate the kinds of harm we're seeing happen.  Towns and cities in Southern California have made efforts to create such rules -- and it has been decried as liberal interference in personal freedom to do as people wish on their own property.  Like most things in politics, like most things involved in living with neighbors nearby, it's a matter of compromise and sometimes it works out badly.  It's a part of life -- and only a ghoul revels in the bad outcomes.

DEI Didn't Do It

     Elon Musk and others on the Right have decided to blame "DEI" for the California wildfires getting so out of control, or possibly for happening at all.

     That part of California has fires every winter.  They've got native plants that produce seeds that won't even germinate unless they're been through a fire, so you can't claim it's not normal.  And every so often, there's a winter there in which the Santa Ana winds aren't the usual 25 to 35 mph, but much higher.

     If there's any kind of white guy special knowledge and skill, or secret science, or for that matter magic, voodoo, prayers, incantations or handwavium that can counter fires being pushed through dry vegetation by winds of 80 mph and up, in a region of scarce water, I'm pretty sure California firefighters would like to hear about it.  But there is, in fact, no level of training, staffing or demographic adjustment that amounts to a hill of beans against what firefighters there are facing.  What they need is water, far more of it than any fire-hydrant system can deliver, and the way they usually get it is from airplanes and helicopters.  You can't fly 'em in 80+ mph winds; you can't scoop up water in winds that high and you can't drop it with any accuracy in winds that high.  Wind speeds have fallen a little and they are now dumping as much water on the fires as they can, as quickly as they can, and nobody is downchecking pilots for being too pale, too dark, too butch or too femme.  It's tricky flying and they'll take anyone who can do it.

     So some fire departments in LA County spent their downtime looking at demographics and trying to recruit firefighters from groups presently under-represented in the firefighting staff?  So what.  If they ended up with a few more who spoke the various languages spoken in their districts, or more familiar with the neighborhoods, great.  Fighting fires is hard work, and it doesn't pay all that well for the amount of risk and effort it involves.  If you're worried some nice white Christian boy is missing out on those sweet, sweet fireman jobs 'cos a dark-skinned pagan lesbian from across the sea edged him out, you're nuts.

Snow Business

     There's over half a foot of snow on the ground per the official count.  Around Roseholme Cottage, it falls short of a foot deep, but not by much.

     I'd love to hang around and talk about it, but I've got to creep my way to work.

Night Visitor

     I woke up about four this morning to a calling owl: "Who who who-who?  Who who who-who?" Over and over, with undertones of the sound of someone blowing air across the open top of a big ceramic jug, questioning and slightly spooky.  The sounds were deep enough to be a Great Horned Owl, but the pattern is more like the Barred Owl.

     We've had a family of owls in the neighborhood for several years.  In the spring and summer, they make an assortment of sounds that remind me of tropical birds, and I have seen them holding flying lessons for young owls in our alley, swooping from one power pole to the next.

     It's a gift to have these raptors in our neighborhood.  When I was young, any kind of owl or hawk was a rare sight.  Little screech owls would occasionally use the patio of my parents' house to stride around and raise a ruckus, but it was uncommon.  They've come back and now I often see red-tailed hawks at the North Campus and a half-dozen big, black vultures that soar over the intersection of Kessler and College Avenues in the evenings.

Merry Christmas Holidays!

     I'd like to take this Christmas Eve to wish each and every one of my readers -- yes, even the ones who send me angry and/or snarky comments -- the happiest of winter holidays, whichever one(s) they celebrate.  Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Joyful Kwanzaa, best solstice wishes* and so on: Happy holidays!
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* The solstice has been and gone on the 21st, but it's the thought that counts.  The fact that the solstice falls so close to these winter holidays is no accident: the turning of the year has been important to humans for as long as we've been humans and we are darned well going to mark it.  It's an open feast: more holiday for the other guy doesn't mean any less for you.  Get out the good dinnerware and dig in!

Grist For The Mill

     I'm not alone in suspecting the extinct megafauna of North America were delicious -- and that humans may have played a part in making them extinct.  There's new evidence that tends to support the notion that big critters were what's for dinner.

     Woolly mammoth, giant sloth -- you get just one of those, and you've fed the whole tribe, and probably gained enough leather to clothe half of them or make a new tent.  Lots of useful bone and sinew, too.  Those hunts may have been our first team sport and maybe that's why spending a weekend afternoon watching the Big Game is so appealing to so many people.  Almost as good as a big hunt with all your pals, and the feast afterward.  Go team mammoth-hunter!

Sandhill Cranes

     Of course, the cranes I heard Sunday were the Sandhill Cranes that pass through every Fall.  They stop for several weeks at the Jasper-Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area before continuing on from Wisconsin (etc.) to Florida.

     The Wildlife Area is up north of Lafayette, so the ones we see in Indianapolis have probably started the next leg of their migration.  From the posted DNR numbers, they haven't reached this year's peak population yet, so if you live around here, listen for their song when you're outdoors -- and look up!

Brunch Again

     Today was Brunch With Siblings day, and I'm pleased to report they are both as sibilant as ever.  We went to Good Morning Mama's, which for my money has better coffee and better service than where we'd been going, and a more interesting menu -- but I'm biased in favor of a place that serves home made corned beef hash.

     On the way home, I kept hearing what I'm pretty sure were cranes, a high-pitched, fluting, musical call, and could not spot them  Finally saw them in multiple vees and strings high, high overhead, so far up they were little more than dots.  But their song carries for miles, a marvel of the late Fall.

We Invented Our Way Out Of It

     Humans are clever primates.  Faced with a problem, we invent our way out.  As hunter-gatherers, we lived in small bands, with everyone a general specialist.  When we learned more things, we started figuring out some people were better at chipping flint, others at hunting, collecting edible plants, building shelter, cooking or guarding our homes through the long night.

     We befriended dogs and they befriended us.  We invented cities and agriculture not quite side-by side: many hands make light work.  Cats showed up, hunting the mice in our granaries.  We learned to preserve leather, spin thread, to knit and weave.  We developed pottery.  We started working metal: copper for tools and utensils, humble and dangerous lead, rare silver and gold,* useful bronze, brass and iron.

     And we learned about plumbing and sewers -- not once, but over and over again.  We learned about illness and epidemics, too: a bug that would wipe out a mostly-isolated hunter-gatherer band and stop, stymied by a lack of hosts, could smolder and flare in our cities, sweeping through like a wildfire.  We invented isolation, harsh and fairly effective.  We learned about cross-contamination the hard way (yet again!) and the lesson didn't stick.

     Eventually, we invented vaccines.  Vaccines are how you stuff a few hundred thousand, or a million, or millions of clever primates in a tight-packed city and avoid -- or at least control -- epidemics.  Ever since the first smallpox immunizations, some people have been skeptical.  It was gross, they cried; or it smacked of magic; or who knew what else might happen...?

     We know.  We've been running the experiment at scale, over and over, since the 19th Century.  We know what happens with communicable diseases we don't have vaccines for (epidemics), we know what happens when a sizeable segment of the population doesn't get vaccinated (outbreaks), we know the side-effects of vaccines, and they are evaluated and re-evaluated for safety and effectiveness.  Don't take my word for it, and don't follow internet memes and rumors, either -- you can go look this stuff up on Wikipedia, in the abstracts (summaries) of articles in reputable scientific journals or full articles in mass-market science magazines.  This is not a matter of debate except out at the weirdo fringe: vaccines work.  They're safe.

     Putting a "vaccine skeptic" in charge of this country's Federal health infrastructure is insane.
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* Speaking of humble and dangerous, and of gold: the ancient Egyptians apparently worked out the use of mercury and fire in refining gold, a job with such grave consequences for the people doing it that it was usually assigned to slaves taken in war.  "Mad as a hatter" (also the result of working with mercury) had nothing on an Egyptian gold-smelter.  Eventually we invented our way around that, too.

No Leaf Work Today

     We were busy with other things and, I have to admit, I have felt pretty yucky.  Better once the sun came out, but that was late in the afternoon.

     I did housework instead.  It is, after all, the work that is always there to do.

Autumn Time, Autumn Time...

     The leaves are falling and so is the rain.  Tam and I missed our chance to mow up the dried leaves last weekend, so it looks like we'll be mowing up wet ones this weekend.  It's no fun, and the bags can't be more than about half full without getting too heavy for the city's crews to lift.  (We only have to do a dozen or so; they'll be doing thousands -- if they don't tear up their backs.)

     The good news is, dry leaves are a lot dustier, and I don't get along well with it.  So I'm going to call it a win -- an icky, slimy, heavy win.

Hurricanophoon

     By the time the remnants of tropical storm Helene get to Indiana - and we're getting the fringes already -- it will be high winds and lots of rain.  A mess for us, but nothing compared to the trouble the people in Florida where the thing hit with as a hurricane with Category 4 winds.

     I'm not looking forward to it, but if we avoid heavy downpours and the winds don't get too crazy, it should help out my tomato crop in the back yard.

Resilient Wheat -- Chickens And Eggs

     The weather's highly variable these days.  Few people dispute that, however much they disagree over causes.  Weather becoming more variable is a problem for farmers -- and when farmers start to have problems, the rest of us has better worry: nobody's growing corn or cattle in a factory, at least not yet.*

     One problem is that cereal grains are nearly monocultures,  There's not a lot of diversity within each type.  Specific varieties of corn, wheat and so on are bred to be disease, insect and whatevericide resistant, to grow to a uniform height, and to grow under specific conditions.  (The late "Farmer Frank" James waged a long fight with commercial seed companies, since he grew his own stuff from his own seeds gathered the previous year and they were sure he was cheating; he wasn't.  What he was, was stubborn.  As farmers often are.)

     It wasn't always that way.  Prior to (highly) mechanized farming,† there was a lot of genetic variation even within the broad varieties of grain.  It gave the plants as a whole better odds of getting through droughts or prolonged wet weather, cold spells or baking heat.  But that variety wasn't so great for harvesting equipment, nor for maximizing yield for a given situation.

     But we're human beings.  Our species lives in the space between chaos and order, bouncing from one to the other.  When enough of us face a challenge, we'll try all the possibilities.  Up in the Pacific Northwest, small-scale "artisanal" farmers and bakers and a university lab full of bread enthusiasts are trying things -- like greater variety.  Like whole wheat.‡

     And these days, you can grow that more-varied stuff with commercial equipment.  Farming machines are better, smarter, more able to deal with randomness.  --At a price.

     Greater variety means greater resilience.  But it also make it more likely farmers will need new machinery.  It means seed companies are going to have to look for a broad spectrum of resistances and introduce new and more internally-varied lines of crops, and they do so love their matched-up seeds, weedkillers and pesticides that work together as smoothly as a key in a lock -- and are locked into tight genomes that will fall in lockstep unison if a new bug or plant virus emerges, or if growing conditions change too much. 

     As a culture, we can get there from here, moving from vulnerability to resilience.  And if the past is any guide, we probably will.  But it may not be especially easy, and it sure won't be cheap.  And there's the chicken-and-egg: it's not going to happen out of the blue.  Events drive changes; changes drive events.
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* They are growing chicken, at least on a small scale.  State governments have not reacted well to Chicken Of The Beaker, and if you were hoping to try a platter of chicken nuggets that never clucked, don't be in a hurry.
 
† Let's not kid ourselves: farming has always been about mechanization.  Rows replaced random planting; Sharp sticks replaced poking holes in the dirt with a finger, plows replaced sharp sticks and underwent continuous improvement.  Oxen replaced people; horses replaced oxen -- but only after a proper horse collar was invented; horses gave way to steam, steam to internal combustion, and some bright guy has already shingled the house and barns with solar cells to keep his electric tractor charged up while laughing at diesel prices.  In dim prehistory, it was apparently sufficient for early farmers to see a wheeled wagon from afar to spur them making their own versions.  Humans have been cheating Malthusan limits for centuries by getting better and better at growing food though better technology.
 
‡ I grew up in a household where there was always whole wheat bread -- usually Roman Meal -- next to the white bread, and most of us preferred it.  It'll hold up to a proper sandwich better than store-bought white bread, and it tasted better, too.  One driver of this was that Mom would occasionally bake white bread from scratch, and that'll ruin you for the store stuff; commercial whole wheat is much closer in taste and texture to scratch versions.

I Don't Care....

     You can call it climate or you can call it weather.  Either way, it's too darned hot.  95°F* or more yesterday and the day before, and today?  More of the same, with thunderstorms.  Thursday, the meteorologists are calling for a cold snap, probably no more than 85°F at the worst.  I'd better break out my winter coat.
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* That's like, what, 355° Centigrade or 356° Celsius (old style), right?

Got Morality?

     An interesting essay -- it's a chapter from a book -- on the basic elements of morality, shared across our cultures.  The piece presents itself as addressing the need for religion as a basis of morals (or at least of moral behavior), but I'm not sure that's something that lends itself to rational debate.

     While moral behavior as the article defines it is shown to be its own reward, people are strongly motivated by punishment/reward structures.  Assuming you believe the religion you practice -- and surely you do -- the idea of some kind of cosmic scorekeeping and reckoning-up is a very strong impetus to do right.

     While I will happily argue that it's not the only source or foundation for moral behavior, no religion that I know of is inherently immoral, at least towards co-religionists and most often towards other people as well.  I'll join with the Founders and Framers in believing religious faith in general to be of public utility, while refraining from singling any out.  I don't happen to practice one (and I like to believe my behavior is nevertheless moral) but I'd sure hate to live someplace where religions were banned.

We Had A Storm This Morning

     It came through this morning  a couple of hours before sunrise: a late-summer morning storm.

     First thunder like distant kettledrums, booming, looming, a far-off sizzle of lighting; then closer, elephants on the march, thumping, pounding, broken by zaps as the bolts found targets.  Rain next, a few drops hurled against the window like sand, the screen rattling, more rain rushing like surf and spraying the window, hissing like eager cobras hunting a way in, and behind it the thunder and searchlight-blinks of lightning.  Wave after wave of rain, walls of pure noise above the thunder's hammered anvil, finally fading.  The storm went stalking away, thunder muted, the rain less and less and then near silence; just the downspouts, ringing faintly with the last drops of water seeking the earth, and an occasional distant by-the-way thud of thunder from the backside of the front.

     It was worth losing an hour of sleep.  I had time for a quick nap before the sun started hauling itself over the far edge of the planet and the cats demanded breakfast.

     The early light was an electric silver-blue, barely enough to pick out water beaded on every twig, tree limb and wire, along all the gutters and fences.

Dipping A Toe In

     The headline was interesting, combining two facts: more than forty percent of the U. S. population lives in coastal counties, and sea level rise is accelerating.

     People have differing opinions about climate change.  That's normal for our species -- in an age of space travel, people have differing opinions about the Earth being a sphere or flat, after all.  But while only twenty-four people have ever been far enough into space to get a really clear look at the big blue marble we live on, well more than a third of Americans can ride a bicycle to the sea shore and have a look for themselves, year after year.  Far fewer will find themselves under water in the near term -- in many places, the land rises quite steeply from the shore, after all.  Storm surges will be more of a problem, from the southernmost tip of Texas all the way around to New York City once in a great while, depending on the whims of hurricanes, themselves getting stronger and more frequent.

     Call it climate; call it weather.  Either way, the graph of water level over time says it's coming.  Does the name matter when your beaches become scuba sites or you're sloshing around the ground floor of your house in gumboots, salvaging what you can from the storm?

     It's certainly going to have an effect on the discussion.

     Of course, we said that when men went to the Moon, and we're not out of flat-Earthers yet.  Still, it's a lot harder to breathe water than to pretend geosynchronous communications satellites or the GPS and Starlink constellations are fake.

Propositioned

     One evening a few days ago, I went out the back door and nearly ran into a firefly hovering at face  level.  He turned toward me -- and flashed his little light!

     I won't kid you, it was flattering.  At my age, you take positive attention where you can find it.  But it wasn't to be.  I told him he was kind, and gently wafted him away from the back stoop and sidewalk so he'd hover over the grass and have better odds of finding his match.