Author: Kevin Drum

This is San Gorgonio Mountain, tallest peak in the Transverse Ranges at 11,503 feet. This picture was taken back in the olden days when it rained and snowed here in Southern California. Not anymore. Even the tall mountains are pretty dry these days.

With 2024 wrapped up, it's time to check in with the Washington Post to find out how many unarmed Black suspects were shot by police last year:

The good news is that only ten unarmed Black suspects were shot. That's a small number and an all-time low.

The bad news is that this number is higher than it is for unarmed Hispanic suspects (8) or unarmed white suspects (6) even though Blacks make up a smaller share of the population.¹

The good news, nonetheless, is that shootings have gone down 72% since 2015.

The bad news is that all of this decrease happened in 2015-19. Since then there's been virtually no progress. Apparently all the protests around George Floyd had no effect.

¹Adjusted for population, the rate of unarmed Black shootings in 2024 was 2x higher than Hispanics and 8x higher than whites.

After adjusting for inflation, retail sales were up 1% on an annualized basis in December, continuing a streak of increases in the second half of 2024:

CBP recorded 96,048 southwest border encounters in December, a slight increase over November:

Of these, 47,000 were people trying to cross the border illegally and 49,000 were asylum seekers who showed up at ports of entry.

What?

President Joe Biden’s administration is considering ways to keep TikTok available in the United States if a ban that’s scheduled to go into effect Sunday proceeds, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

....Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump is ready to intervene to preserve access to the Chinese-owned video app in the American marketplace.... The moves represent parallel efforts by the rival presidents to execute an end-run around Congress and the Supreme Court, which is teed up to rule on the ban at any time.

An end run around Congress? One of these presidents signed the ban and the other one supported it. They're doing end runs around their previous selves.

In related news, Sen. Ed Markey, who voted to ban TikTok last April, has introduced a bill to extend the deadline for TikTok's divestiture to an American owner.

This is comical. Now everyone suddenly wants to keep TikTok? A year ago both presidents and 80% of Congress were gung ho to boot their commie asses out of the country. What's going on?

The New York Times reported yesterday on that most tedious of topics: the fact that BMI isn't a perfect measure of obesity. And sure, it isn't. Nothing is. But I'm willing to bet it's a pretty good ballpark metric about 95% of the time.

In any case, an enormous team of specialists has spent years coming up with a new and far more complicated definition. Now, if your BMI is between 25 and 40 you have only pre-clinical obesity. In order to be considered obese, you need to also have one of these 18 conditions:

Are you kidding? There's hardly a middle-aged person in the country who doesn't have at least one of these conditions. Cholesterol and blood pressure alone account for roughly 50% of the population—probably more among people with BMIs above 30.

So what does all this extra complexity buy us? What percent of the population with a BMI over 30 will now be considered not obese? Is it enough to make this all worth it?

I have my doubts, though I'd like to see the relevant data. For my money, though, quit fighting it. Unless you're a bodybuilding stud, the odds are high that if your BMI is higher than 30 then you're overweight. If you don't feel like doing anything about it, fine. But there's no point in desperately looking for a loophole that will allow you to deny reality.

I've recovered from all the side effects of the Talvey trial in September—or so I thought. One of the odder side effects listed on the package insert was that it could wreck your fingernails. And it has. It was just an extremely delayed effect, presumably because fingernails grow slowly.

About a week ago I noticed a weird ridge on a couple of my fingernails. Eventually that spread to all of them. You can see it on the left.

A few days after the ridge appears, the top of the fingernail falls off. It doesn't hurt or anything, because there's already a new fingernail growing underneath. But it's pretty short and scraggly. That's the picture on the right.

Hopefully this only happens once and then my fingernails are back to normal. We'll see.

TMI?

I don't know what this is, but if it were a thousand times bigger it might be a sandworm from Dune. If sandworms had flowers growing out of themselves, that is.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced that permitting will be streamlined for anyone rebuilding a home after the LA fires. For some reason conservatives are taking a weird victory lap over this, which is kind of crazy. Have they ever paid attention to a natural disaster in California before? Permitting is always streamlined. And for homes near the coast, the enabling act for the Coastal Commission has always said no permission is needed as long as you rebuild to about the same size as the house that was destroyed.

So there's nothing to this. But I still need to be a spoilsport. There's no way we're going to stop people from rebuilding in fire prone areas, but there's something we can do: insist that new homes be hardened against fire.

Here's the thing: In fires like the ones in LA, most of the damage is caused by showers of burning embers that are blown into neighborhoods by strong winds and then spread from there. These embers can travel a mile or more, so clearing brush at the wildland-urban interface won't do much when winds are as heavy as they were last week. The only thing that works is hardening every house within a mile or two. This includes things like fire-retardant roofs and siding, automatic sprinkler systems, cleared zones around property lines, and so forth. And it has to be done universally for it to be effective.

So yes to streamlining rebuilding permits, but with one exception: every house has to be rebuilt to fire-hardening standards. This costs money and won't be popular, and for that reason it probably won't get done. But it's the only real answer. If we ignore it, this will happen all over again no matter how many airplanes we buy or how big our reservoirs are.

The LA Times ran a good piece about this a few days ago based on interviews with Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne, a pair of experts on urban fires. Here's an excerpt:

“The assumption is continually made that it’s the big flames” that cause widespread community destruction, [Cohen] said, “and yet the wildfire actually only initiates community ignitions largely with lofted burning embers.”

Experts attribute widespread devastation to wind-driven embers igniting spot fires two to three miles ahead of the established fire. Maps of the Eaton fire show seemingly random ignitions across Altadena.

“When you study the destruction in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, note what didn’t burn — unconsumed tree canopies adjacent to totally destroyed homes,” he said. “The sequence of destruction is commonly assumed to occur in some kind of organized spreading flame front — a tsunami of super-heated gases — but it doesn’t happen that way.”

“In high-density development, scattered burning homes spread to their neighbors and so on. Ignitions downwind and across streets are typically from showers of burning embers from burning structures.”

....The 1991 Tunnel fire in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills marked the start of the modern era of urban fires, destroying 2,843 homes. More recently, fires devastated Gatlinburg, Tenn., in 2016, the towns of Superior and Louisville in Colorado in 2021 and Lahaina, Hawaii, two years ago.

“It’s not just a California quirk,” Pyne said. “California, I think, gets there first in exaggerated forms, but this is a national issue. And, in fact, it’s becoming an international issue.”

....“We don’t necessarily need a trillion-dollar program and a fire czar to get control of the fire problem,” Pyne said. “What we need are a thousand things that tweak the environment in favorable ways such that we can prevent these eruptions.” For example, municipal and fire prevention agencies must give property owners advance — and continual — warnings to clear dead vegetation and to wet dry brush within 10 feet of the house with periodic, prolonged sprinklings.

Joe Biden finally has a ceasefire deal in Gaza, and of course Donald Trump is taking credit for it:

We have achieved so much without even being in the White House. Just imagine all of the wonderful things that will happen when I return to the White House.

Sure, whatever. My guess is that Hamas agreed to a deal because they've been thoroughly annihilated along with their compatriots in Iran and Hezbollah. And Netanyahu has agreed to a deal because there isn't a lot of annihilating left for him to do. But what do I know?