Kevin Drum

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?

Today's CPI report has good news and bad news. The bad news is that headline CPI spiked up to 4.8% in December. The good news is that this was due largely to gasoline and fuel oil. Core CPI dropped to 2.7%.

On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline CPI came in at 2.9% and core CPI was 3.2%.

This is from a US senator:

None of this is true. Kennedy is talking about Diego Garcia, formerly a part of the British colony of Maritius. In 1965 it was split off¹ and in 1968 the rest of Mauritius gained independence. In 1973 the UK and US built a military base on Diego Garcia, which has been expanded several times since.

A few years ago the UN declared that the severance of Diego Garcia had been illegal and the island should be returned to Mauritius. Britain formally took the position that the ruling was non-binding but nonetheless entered into negotiations with Mauritius. This began in 2022 under Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and was eventually completed in 2024 by Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer. However, an election in Mauritius brought a change in government and a reopening of negotiations, which are ongoing.

At no time has anyone asked for, or been offered, control of the military base. Negotiations are mostly over arcane issues of native resettlement, fishing rights, and so forth. A 99-year sovereign lease of the military base has always been part of the deal, and the only dispute on that score is how much Britain will pay for it.

So nobody is rushing and nobody is giving anything away. On the contrary, it's always been understood by every political party of both countries that continued British/US control of the military facility is completely nonnegotiable.

Maybe the Brits are making a bad deal. I wouldn't know. But neither Britain nor the US really cares about anything but the base.² As long as that's free and clear, the rest hardly matters. What's the point of lying about it?

¹Technically, the entire Chagos Archipelago was split off. Diego Garcia is  by far the largest part of the archipelago.

²There is supposedly some fear that Mauritian control of the Chagos might lead to Chinese interference in the area, but that's a considerable stretch.

A couple of months I was talking with a friend about just how crazy Donald Trump's cabinet appointments might get. I argued that there was an outer boundary, especially in roles that Republicans really care about. "For example," I said, "plenty of Republicans on the Armed Services Committee are serious about the military. There's a limit to who they'll put in charge of the Pentagon."

This hasn't aged well. Today Pete Hegseth had his confirmation hearing and it was a dog's breakfast. Democrats attacked Hegseth as a drunken philanderer while Republicans praised him as the second coming of George Patton. There was nothing approaching seriousness in the entire five hours.

But here's what really gets me. Put aside his history of heavy drinking. He says he's put that behind him. Put aside the accusations of sexual assault. They're unproven. Even put aside the fact that he's a TV talking head whose only management experience is running a couple of nonprofits into the ground. The Secretary of Defense isn't truly a management role, after all. It's mostly a policy and leadership role.

But even if you put that all aside, you'd still want to know his views on important defense issues. What does Hegseth think of NATO? How critical is the Columbia class submarine program? Should we still be building new supercarriers in an era of massive drone fleets and cheap cruise missiles? Are we putting enough effort into our own drone programs? Do we still need manned fighter jets? Can we defend Taiwan if it comes to that? Should military troops be used for policing jobs in the US? Are there specific areas of military procurement he wants to reform? Are we putting enough money and effort into AI development? Nuclear modernization? The F-35? Critical raw materials? Recruiting? Cybersecurity? Readiness?

I didn't watch the hearings, but based on news reports I gather that none of these issues were raised. Not one. The only thing we really know is that Hegseth doesn't much like trans people and plans to root out DEI and wokeness in the military. That's it.

Wasn't there a time when senators cared about the substantive views of a nominee for defense secretary? There was, and it spanned the entire postwar era through Lloyd Austin's confirmation four years ago. But now that Donald Trump is about to take office for a second time, it's over. No one even pretends to care anymore about serious military issues. What does that say about the upcoming administration?

Donald Trump is blabbering about tariffs again:

Fine. Call it anything you want. But I wonder if Trump really believes he's creating something new. Does he know that we already have an agency that collects tariffs? It's the C in CBP, Customs and Border Protection. Speaking of which, here's what they have to say about who pays customs duties:

A foreigner can't pay tariffs even for a birthday gift. You, the recipient, have to pay it. How? By writing a check payable to "U.S. Customs and Border Protection."

It hardly seems possible that even the MAGA sycophants surrounding Trump haven't told him this, but he keeps claiming that other countries pay US tariffs anyway. And, sure, it's Trump. Who knows what happens in that chunk of gray matter he uses for a brain? But it's still weird as hell.

I took my sister to the hospital yesterday to get her broken arm patched up, and naturally we had to check in at 5:30 am because reasons. After she was settled in I had a few hours to kill, so I drove down to Seal Beach to take pictures of the moonset and sunrise.

When I got home I set up the telescope in our backyard in order to catch the occultation of Mars. Sadly, I got busy editing pictures and forgot all about it. I'm not sure it would have worked anyway, since it was pretty early in the evening and possibly not dark enough for the focusing and north pole finding to work.

So no occultation pictures for you. Instead, here's a picture of moonset over Ocean Boulevard in Seal Beach. As the moon was going down the sun was coming up, which gave the moon a lovely yellow cast.