Dwarkesh Patel interviews Sarah Paine again, this time on how Mao conquered China:
Sarah Paine on How Mao Conquered China
Friday, January 31st, 2025Napoleon got his money, and Barings and Hopes made nearly $3 million from the deal
Thursday, January 30th, 2025At the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he decided to ignore:
On the same day that Whitworth called for his passports in Paris, across the Atlantic President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an acre.
[…]
‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’ Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.
[…]
The financing was arranged via the Anglo-Dutch merchant banks Barings Brothers and Hopes, which in effect bought Louisiana from France and sold it on to the United States for $11.25 million of 6 per cent American bonds, meaning that the American government did not have to provide the capital immediately. As a result, Barings were paying Napoleon 2 million francs a month even when Britain was at war with France. When the prime minister, Henry Addington, asked the bank to cease the remittances Barings agreed, but Hopes, based on the continent, continued to pay and were backed by Barings – so Napoleon got his money and Barings and Hopes made nearly $3 million from the deal.
Therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) replaces a patient’s plasma with saline and purified albumin
Wednesday, January 29th, 2025The deregulation of the immune system with age eventually leads to chronic inflammation, or inflammaging, but blood sharing between young and old mice has shown rapid and robust pro-geronic and rejuvenative influences:
Interestingly, the procedure of small animal plasma exchange to dilute the circulating factors in plasma effectively reset the age-elevated systemic proteome and restored youthful healthy maintenance and repair of muscle, liver, and brain, without any added young blood, young plasma, or young factors.
For people, plasma dilution is known as plasmapheresis or therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE); it replaces a patient’s plasma with saline and purified albumin. The blood cells are returned to the patient so that while the cell profile does not change, the circulating blood proteins are diluted, including cytokines, autoreactive antibodies or toxins, and such pathogenic determinants of specific disorders.
Although its full therapeutic benefits are still being discovered, TPE is one of the treatments for autoimmune and neurological diseases such as myasthenia gravis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Guillain–Barre syndrome.
Moreover, TPE has the capacity to relieve the symptoms of long-haul COVID-19, including prevention of pneumonia, reduction of “brain fog,” and attenuation of the cytokine storm and hyper-inflammation.
This came up when eccentric life-extension fanatic Bryan Johnson (“Don’t die!”) shared the news — accompanied by a delightful photo — that he;s no longer injecting his son’s blood:
I am no longer injecting my son’s blood.
I’ve upgraded to something else: total plasma exchange.
Steps:
1. Take out all blood from body
2. Separate plasma from blood
3. Replace plasma with 5% albumin & IVIGHere’s my bag of plasma. Who wants it?
???? pic.twitter.com/rUScTIDea6— Bryan Johnson /dd (@bryan_johnson) January 28, 2025
Pilot studies of TPE involving mice and three human patients look promising:
The results demonstrate significant and lasting rejuvenation of both humoral and cellular blood compartments in people who underwent repeated plasmapheresis. The rejuvenative changes are not limited to a reduction of inflammaging but encompass diminished circulatory protein markers of neurodegeneration and cancer, as well as reduced senescence, lower DNA damage, and improved myeloid/lymphoid homeostasis. Mechanistically, these and previously reported positive effects of TPE become better understood through longitudinal comparative proteomics of the blood plasma, demonstrating a youthful recalibration of the canonical signaling pathways, broadly regulating tissue health, and interacting through the node of TPR-4. Lastly, a novel application of Levene’s test to profile the noise of the systemic proteome uncovered several proteins: new biomarkers that collectively quantify a person’s biological age, removing a need for predictions.
Marc Andreessen on Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Tuesday, January 28th, 2025Lex Fridman interviews Marc Andreessen on “Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America”:
Ukraine’s all-drone, multi-domain attack could be a ‘seminal’ moment in warfare
Monday, January 27th, 2025Ukraine successfully pulled off an all-drone, multi-domain attack on Russian positions near Kharkiv in December:
UGVs conducted the full spectrum of mission sets including surveillance, mine clearance and direct fire, supported by uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), the official stated before explaining how the “tactical air-land operation” represented the first instance of an “uncrewed battle fought by one side” in the ongoing war.
Reflecting on the attack, which appeared at the time as merely a “footnote in daily reporting,” the official went on to describe it as a “seminal moment in the changing character of conflict.”
Warning “Ukraine faces today what [NATO] could face tomorrow,” the speaker went onto describe how Ukraine’s military continues to place a premium on attritable technologies to create combat mass,” before adding: “Ukraine has made the most of turning industrial disadvantage into a furnace of innovation.”
Former CIA director William Burns had told analysts that they needed to take a position on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that he was agnostic on potential theories
Sunday, January 26th, 2025The Central Intelligence Agency said Saturday that it’s more likely a lab leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic than an infected animal that spread the virus to people, changing the agency’s yearslong stance that it couldn’t conclude with certainty where the pandemic started:
The agency made its new assessment public two days after former Republican lawmaker John Ratcliffe was sworn in as its new leader.
“We have low confidence in this judgement and will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA’s assessment,” an unnamed CIA spokesperson wrote in an email sent to reporters Saturday.
The statement didn’t include any additional details about what led the agency to change its assessment and whether it had intelligence that would add weight to the theory that the virus had leaked from a research lab in Wuhan, China.
A U.S. official granted anonymity to share private details about the assessment said former CIA director William Burns had told analysts that they needed to take a position on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that he was agnostic on potential theories.
A new CIA analysis of the intelligence it had on the virus’ origin was completed and published internally before Ratcliffe’s arrival, the U.S. official said. Ratcliffe authorized its public release, the official added.
Sarah Paine on Why Japan Lost
Saturday, January 25th, 2025Dwarkesh Patel interviews Sarah Paine again, this time about why Japan lost:
Vengeance Most Fowl
Friday, January 24th, 2025I recently watched Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (on Netflix), which features the return of the villainous penguin Feathers McGraw (from The Wrong Trousers). Like Blofeld, he is one of cinema’s great villains.
At one point, Feathers McGraw plays J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the organ, a clear reference to Captain Nemo‘s playing in the 1954 movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea — which I realized I’d never seen. (I had read the book.)
When I went to watch it, I immediately thought, wait, when did the first nuclear submarine get christened Nautilus?
On 12 December 1951, the US Department of the Navy announced that the submarine would be called Nautilus, the fourth U.S. Navy vessel officially so named.
[…]
Nautilus‘s keel was laid at General Dynamics’ Electric Boat Division in Groton, Connecticut, by Harry S. Truman on 14 June 1952. She was christened on 21 January 1954 and launched into the Thames River, sponsored by Mamie Eisenhower. Nautilus was commissioned on 30 September 1954, under the command of Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson, USN.
The fictional Nautilus of the movie is apparently nuclear almost a century ahead of our timeline’s nuclear Nautilus, but the fictional Nautilus of the book is not:
Electricity provided by sodium/mercury batteries (with the sodium provided by extraction from seawater) is the craft’s primary power source for propulsion and other services. The energy needed to extract the sodium is provided by coal mined from the sea floor.
Also, the book’s submarine has a less ornate, more practical hull design:
It’s a very long cylinder with conical ends. It noticeably takes the shape of a cigar, a shape already adopted in London for several projects of the same kind. The length of this cylinder from end to end is exactly seventy meters, and its maximum breadth of beam is eight meters. So it isn’t quite built on the ten–to–one ratio of your high–speed steamers; but its lines are sufficiently long, and their tapering gradual enough, so that the displaced water easily slips past and poses no obstacle to the ship’s movements.
For the first time in 160 years, an American vessel had been seized by a foreign nation
Thursday, January 23rd, 2025On the foggy morning of January 23, 1968, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the U.S. Navy ship USS Pueblo sailed into icy waters off the coast of North Korea and dropped anchor:
The Pueblo’s cover story was that it was conducting scientific research; really, it was on an espionage mission, a joint NSA-Navy operation with the goal of gathering signals intelligence, or SIGINT. In addition to the regular crew, there were twenty-eight signals intelligence specialists working behind locked doors in a separate and restricted part of the vessel. Parked 15.8 miles off North Korea’s Ung-do Island, technically the Pueblo was floating in international waters.
North Korea’s Communist regime did not see it that way. The ship was close enough to be eavesdropping on Wonson harbor, which made it an open target for the North Korean People’s Army, the KPA. After one of the Pueblo’s crew members picked up on radar that a KPA ship was approaching fast, Pueblo’s captain, Lloyd M. Bucher, went up to the bridge to have a look around. Through his binoculars, Bucher saw not just a military ship but one with its rocket launchers aimed directly at the Pueblo. Bucher ordered certain flags to be raised, ones that indicated the USS Pueblo was on a surveying mission, something the North Koreans obviously already did not buy. Within minutes, Chief Warrant Officer Gene Lacy spotted several small vessels on the horizon: torpedo boats coming from Wonson. Next, two MiG-21 fighter jets appeared on the scene.
Captain Bucher now had a national security nightmare on his hands. His boat was filled with thousands of classified papers, cryptographic manuals, and encryption machines. Most significantly, the Pueblo carried a KW-7 cipher machine, which was the veritable Rosetta stone of naval encryption. The captain considered sinking his ship, which would take forty-seven minutes, but later explained that he knew if he had done so a gun battle was certain to ensue. Most of the Pueblo’s life rafts would be shot at and destroyed. Without life rafts, the men would die in the icy waters in a matter of minutes, Bucher was certain. He made the decision to flee.
The North Korean ship raised a flag that signaled “Heave to or I will open fire on you.” Captain Bucher raised a signal flag in response: “Thank you for your consideration. I am departing the area.” But the North Koreans opened fire. Bucher himself was hit, taking shrapnel in his foot and backside. As the Pueblo took off, the North Koreans continued to fire, killing a U.S. sailor named Duane Hodges. Meanwhile, behind the secret door, SIGINT specialists smashed cipher equipment with axes and shoved documents into a small incinerator there. Despite the speed at which the analysts worked to burn the secret papers, 90 percent of the documents survived. Sixty-one minutes after being shot, Captain Bucher was no longer in control of his ship. The North Korean People’s Army stormed the Pueblo and took the captain and his eighty-two crew members hostage. For the first time in 160 years, an American vessel had been seized by a foreign nation. The timing could not have been worse. America was already losing one war.
President Johnson was outraged. Within hours of the Pueblo’s capture, the Pentagon began secretly preparing for war against North Korea. The following day, McNamara summoned the war council to lay out plans for a ground attack. “Our primary objective is to get the men of the Pueblo back,” McNamara said, emphasizing just how secret his plan was to remain: “No word of the discussion in this meeting should go beyond this room.” A stunning air attack over North Korea was laid out. An estimated fifteen thousand tons of bombs would be dropped from the air to complement the ground assault. Given the huge numbers of soldiers and airmen fighting in Vietnam, the war with North Korea would require a call-up of the reserves. A massive U.S. strategic airlift was set in motion, designated Operation Combat Fox. That the North Vietnamese were just six days from launching the sneak attack called the Tet Offensive was not yet known. A war with North Korea over the USS Pueblo would have been a war America could ill afford.
Richard Helms suggested an Oxcart be dispatched from nearby Kadena to photograph North Korea’s coast and try to locate the USS Pueblo before anyone even considered making a next move. As it stood, immediately after the Pueblo’s capture, there was no intelligence indicating exactly where the sailors were or where the ship was being held. Richard Helms counseled the president that if the goal was to get the eighty-two American sailors back, a ground attack or air attack couldn’t possibly achieve that end if no one knew where the USS Pueblo was. A reconnaissance mission would also enable the Pentagon to see if Pyongyang was mobilizing its troops for war over the event. Most important of all, it would give the crisis a necessary diplomatic pause.
Three days after the Pueblo’s capture, on January 26, Oxcart pilot Jack Weeks was dispatched on a sortie from Kadena to locate the missing ship. From the photographs Weeks took on that overflight, the United States pinpointed the Pueblo’s exact location as it floated in the dark-watered harbor in Changjahwan Bay. Before completing his mission but after taking the necessary photographs, Jack Weeks experienced aircraft problems. When he got back to base, he told his fellow pilots about the problems he’d had on the flight but not about his photographic success; detailed information regarding the USS Pueblo was so highly classified, very few individuals had any idea that Weeks’s mission had delivered photographs that had prevented war with North Korea.
“The [Oxcart] quickly located the captured Pueblo at anchor in Wonson harbor,” President Johnson’s national security adviser Walt Rostow revealed in 1994. “So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower. All that would accomplish would be to kill a lot of people including our own. But the [Oxcart’s] photo take provided proof that our ship and our men were being held. The Koreans couldn’t lie about that.” The Pentagon’s secret war plan against North Korea was called off. Instead, negotiations for the sailors’ return began. But the ever-suspicious administration, now deeply embroiled in political fallout from the Tet Offensive, worried the Pueblo incident could very well be another Communist double cross. What if North Korea was secretly mobilizing its troops for war? Three and a half weeks later, on February 19, 1968, Frank Murray was assigned to fly Oxcart’s second mission over North Korea. Murray’s photographs indicated that North Korea’s army was still not mobilizing for battle. But by then, the Pueblo was on its way to Pyongyang, where it remains today—the only American naval vessel held in captivity by a foreign power. Captain Bucher and his men were prisoners of North Korea for eleven months, tortured, put through mock executions, and made to confess espionage before finally being released. In 2008, a U.S. federal judge determined that North Korea should pay sixty-five million dollars in damages to several of the Pueblo’s crew, but North Korea has yet to respond.
Napoleon had read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in translation in 1802
Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025The Peace of Amiens gave Napoleon a breathing space to pursue plans to stimulate economic growth through state intervention and protectionism, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), a policy originally pioneered by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert:
Napoleon had read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in translation in 1802, but considered Britain’s Industrial Revolution too advanced for France to be able to compete against her in open markets. Instead he put his faith in government subsidies in strategic industries, technical training schools, prizes for inventions, visits to British factories (that is, industrial espionage), technology fairs, the improvement of the Jacquard silk-weaving process, an industrial exhibition in Paris (at which the cotton-spinning business of Richard Lenoir took 400,000 francs’ worth of orders) and the setting up of twenty-two chambers of commerce across France in December 1802. Yet by the end of his reign, France had reached only the level of industrialization that Britain had enjoyed in 1780, an indictment of revolutionary, Directory and Napoleonic economic policy and the Colbertism they all followed.
[…]
The Colbertian use of tariffs furthermore skewed trade so that high customs barriers in Italy meant that raw silk from Piedmont which used to go to Lombardy was instead sent to Lyons; Dutch producers had to pay duties on goods sold in France, but not vice versa, and so on.
[…]
Napoleon had managed greatly to increase confidence in France’s finances and in her ability to honour her government’s bonds, but even so they never managed to match Britain’s in this period. At his best, he was forced to borrow at higher rates than Britain at its worst.
It’s similar to chainmail in that it cannot easily rip, because each of the mechanical bonds has a bit of freedom to slide around
Tuesday, January 21st, 2025For decades, chemists have known how to interlock individual molecular rings, or small groups of them, but a reliable way to interlock large groups of these rings into strings and sheets had so far eluded them:
Researchers led by William Dichtel, a chemist at Northwestern University, have now done just that. They started by coaxing myriad copies of X-shaped molecules to settle into a crystal, so that they lined up in two interpenetrating sheets: In one direction the tips of each molecular X nearly touched those adjacent to it, like XXXXXXX. The same pattern repeated in a perpendicular direction, creating an interlocking fishnet. But these links were held together by weak hydrogen bonds, which meant the meshed material could easily come apart. So, Dichtel and his colleagues added a silicon-based compound that inserted itself at the tips of each pair of Xs, strengthening these attachment points with tougher, more durable covalent bonds and producing a polymer composed of interlocking rings, each of which serves as “mechanical” bond further strengthening the material.
The result, Dichtel and his colleagues report, is strong sheets of interlocking rings. “It’s similar to chainmail in that it cannot easily rip because each of the mechanical bonds has a bit of freedom to slide around,” he says. “If you pull it, it can dissipate the applied force in multiple directions. And if you want to rip it apart, you have to break it in many, many different places.”
When a team of collaborators led by Matthew Becker at Duke University wove just 2.5% of this new material into Ultem—a material made of high-strength fibers in the same family as Kevlar, the resulting fabric’s stiffness increased by nearly 50%. It’s still early days, but “almost every property we have measured has been exceptional in some way,” Dichtel says.
Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings is an oddly inconsistent movie
Monday, January 20th, 2025I recently watched Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings for the first time in ages, and it is an oddly inconsistent movie:
Bakshi’s LOTR adaptation has a unique look, employing an animation style barely used in modern times — Rotoscoping. This was a technique used extensively in the early days of animation, with artists tracing over live-action footage. It worked wonderfully for this film, giving the characters dynamic energy and a sense of perpetual motion, but Bakshi went one step further. To keep the budget down, the team used live-action special effects rather than animating them by hand, giving many scenes an ethereal look. He also implemented a technique known as solarization, which essentially flipped the light and dark areas on film so they’re reversed, resulting in a stark high-contrast image.
This is most notable in any of the Fellowship’s clashes against the orcs or the Balrog fight in the caves of Moria, and especially in the finale, the Battle of Helm’s Deep. When paired with the bold graphical look and flat colors of these monsters, the ominous effect changes the entire mood, giving it an eerie feeling with a painterly quality. If the backgrounds of this LOTR movie are dreams, then these sections are nightmares! It’s one-part pop art, and one-part grainy classic film, but these visuals stick with you to add gravitas of the large-scale skirmishes that otherwise would take months to draw by hand.
That description is generous. Dan Olson goes into exhausting detail about how Bakshi progressed from Fritz the Cat to Lord of the Rings. You might want to skip ahead 22 minutes, to when he discusses the actual Lord of the Rings, or 29 minutes, to where he discusses pseudo-solarization and the odd mix of animation styles:
The rotoscoped art, traced over live-action footage, looks remarkably different from the pseudo-solarized art, which resembles a bad photocopy that’s been colored:
The final story from Heavy Metal, where Taarna rides her pteranodon over the desert landscape, was actually animated using a similar technique, with a physical model of the landscape painted with lines along its edges, so they could fly the movie camera over the terrain and then produce high-contrast photocopies of the film, which could then be painted for the final animation:
Bakshi can get pretty defensive about The Lord of the Rings. He was certainly bitter that they dropped the “Part One” from the title. His earlier Wizards isn’t good, but it is oddly compelling. His later Fire and Ice isn’t a good film, either, but it does feature some amazing rotoscoped action sequences atop beautifully lush background paintings.
Fully enlightened means fully disenchanted
Sunday, January 19th, 2025David Marchese of the New York Times asks Curtis Yarvin, why is democracy so bad?
Let me answer that in a way that would be relatively accessible to readers of The New York Times. You’ve probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
[…]
I do a speech sometimes where I’ll just read the last 10 paragraphs of F.D.R.’s first inaugural address, in which he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway. So did F.D.R. actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did.
[…]
It’s an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who is F.D.R.’s secretary of the interior, describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. What happens in this cabinet meeting is that Frances Perkins, who’s the secretary of labor, is like, Here, I have a list of the projects that we’re going to do. F.D.R. personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York and is like, This is crap. Then at the end of the thing, everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is F.D.R. acting like a C.E.O. So, was F.D.R. a dictator? I don’t know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes basically revere F.D.R., and F.D.R. ran the New Deal like a start-up.
[…]
You’ll talk to people about the Articles of Confederation, and you’re just like, Name one thing that happened in America under the Articles of Confederation, and they can’t unless they’re a professional historian. Next you have the first constitutional period under George Washington. If you look at the administration of Washington, what is established looks a lot like a start-up. It looks so much like a start-up that this guy Alexander Hamilton, who was recognizably a start-up bro, is running the whole government — he is basically the Larry Page of this republic.
[…]
I’m doing a Putin. I’ll speed this up.
[…]
It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of “Is democracy good or bad?” is, I think, a secondary question to “Is it what we actually have?” When you say to a New York Times reader, “Democracy is bad,” they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, “Politics is bad” or even “Populism is bad,” they’re like, Of course, these are horrible things. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.
[…]
I’m an outsider, man. I’m an intellectual. The actual ways my ideas get into circulation is mostly through the staffers who swim in this very online soup. What’s happening now in D.C. is there’s definitely an attempt to revive the White House as an executive organization which governs the executive branch. And the difficulty with that is if you say to anyone who’s professionally involved in the business of Washington that Washington would work just fine or even better if there was no White House, they’ll basically be like, Yeah, of course. The executive branch works for Congress. So you have these poor voters out there who elected, as they think, a revolution.
[…]
The thing that I admire about Vance and that’s really remarkable about him as a leader is that he contains within him all kinds of Americans. His ability to connect with flyover Americans in the world that he came from is great, but the other thing that’s neat about him is that he went to Yale Law School, and so he is a fluent speaker of the language of The New York Times, which you cannot say about Donald Trump. And one of the things that I believe really strongly that I haven’t touched on is that it’s utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy to be the president of all Americans. The new administration can do a much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans and not demonizing them and saying: “Hey, you want to make this country a better place? I feel like you’ve been misinformed in some ways. You’re not a bad person.” This is, like, 10 to 20 percent of Americans. This is a lot of people, the NPR class. They are not evil people. They’re human beings. We’re all human beings, and human beings can support bad regimes.
[…]
But when you look at the way to treat those institutions, treat it like a company that goes out of business, but sort of more so, because these people having had power have to actually be treated even more delicately and with even more respect. Winning means these are your people now. When you understand the perspective of the new regime with respect to the American aristocracy, their perspective can’t be this anti-aristocratic thing of, We’re going to bayonet all of the professors and throw them in ditches or whatever. Their perspective has to be that you were a normal person serving a regime that did this really weird and crazy stuff.
[…]
Fully enlightened for me means fully disenchanted. When a person who lives within the progressive bubble of the current year looks at the right or even the new right, what’s hardest to see is that what’s really shared is not a positive belief but an absence of belief. We don’t worship these same gods. We do not see The New York Times and Harvard as divinely inspired in any sense, or we do not see their procedures as ones that always lead to truth and wisdom. We do not think the U.S. government works well.
[…]
I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people’s lives. When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You’re looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy.
[…]
Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it. I’m sorry, I’m here in this building, and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust The New York Times more than any other source in the world, and how is The New York Times managed? It is a fifth-generation hereditary absolute monarchy. And this was very much the vision of the early progressives, by the way.
All of them are opinionated as to the cause and responsibility for these fires, and none of them will point a finger inward
Saturday, January 18th, 2025Casey Handmer suggests that the Los Angeles wildfires are self-inflicted:
Caveats aside, my family and I are safe, we evacuated for several days, and due to heroic efforts by professional firefighters and psychotically brave neighbors, my house and most of my neighborhood escaped destruction. We were the lucky ones — by far. In 2019, as my wife and I were house hunting, we inspected multiple homes in the Pasadena area. Every house we looked at in Altadena burned to the ground last week.
[…]
Fire is a self-propagating reaction, in which fuels (typically wood, which is made of many copies of CH2O) react with oxygen to form CO2 and H2O, releasing heat. The rate of the reaction determines the size and speed of the fire. Chemical reaction rates are limited by available surface area, which is why twigs and kindling burn really quickly, while enormous tree trunks burn very slowly.
[…]
A ground fire burns sticks and leaves that have fallen to the ground. A surface fire burns low-lying shrubs and smaller trees, separate from but still close to the ground. In extreme conditions and with the help of bridging fuel, a fire can jump from mostly dead leaf litter to the living crown of the forest – lots of tiny twigs surrounded by plenty of oxygen for combustion.
Remember, the living part of the tree, the cambium layer, is a thin surface between the bark and the core. In extreme heat, the water in the cambium boils, blowing the fire-protectant bark off the tree, creating even more fuel.
When I was a young child in Australia, a crown fire near my home on the New South Wales central coast was so severe running up one hill it not only burned the leaves (many Australian trees can survive this by sprouting more leaves called epicormic shoots) but also the trunk and root system, leaving only smoking holes in the ground.
[…]
Every year, more fuel is added. After a year or two, the seed bed has sprouted and plants are growing. After five years, shrubs are dense enough that walking requires effort and evasion. After 20 years, fallen litter and growth can be so dense that lost hikers may require a helicopter to extract.
The biomass accumulation rate is something like 0.5 mm/year (1/64th of an inch), which doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that 20 years of accumulation is equivalent to coating the entire forest in a layer of gasoline ¼” thick. This is not hyperbole, drought resistant trees including eucalypts and creosote secrete volatile oils to help retain moisture, contributing to their combustibility.
[…]
Let’s take some advice from founding father Benjamin Franklin.
In the February 4, 1735 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin wrote that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Mr Franklin was not referring to medicine when he penned the now-famous line. He instead was referring to the importance of fire safety and the need for the city of Philadelphia to be better prepared to prevent and react to fires. In his article, he noted the importance of tending to how hot coals were being transferred in shovels (primary prevention), how chimneys should be cleaned regularly (primary prevention), and how a “club or society of active men” (firefighters) should be formed who can efficiently extinguish fires (tertiary prevention).
[…]
To take just one example, the Black Saturday fires of February 7, 2009 killed 173 people and destroyed thousands of structures, including substantially entire towns.
In an ongoing process of regulatory adjustment and reform, the New South Wales fire service most recently adopted rule 10/50, which gives homeowners the right to clear trees within 10 meters of a home and non-tree vegetation within 50 meters of a home, without approvals. No friction!
In contrast, in the US, well-intended but poorly considered rule changes frequently make it harder to comply with regulations and increase friction, reducing the ability to do the obviously correct thing.
For federal- and state-funded fire prevention efforts, laws like NEPA and CEQA are often weaponized by special interest advocacy groups, resulting in ludicrous outcomes such as the US Forest Service spending 40% of its budget (!) on permitting-related activities.
NEPA, a law passed in 1970, was intended to help protect the environment. Subsequent regulatory interpretation (now in doubt due to Chevron being overturned) has expanded the law from just five pages of text to an overwhelming blizzard of rules that have brought our ability to build things to a grinding halt.
[…]
Remember, after 5 years even dry chaparral scrub has accumulated enough biomass to burn well — and it literally takes longer than that to complete an Environmental Impact Statement review.
[…]
In this analysis, it is quite clearly the law that hazard reduction burns are illegal, since despite their utility being extremely high and their cost almost trivially low (recall that indigenous societies that lack writing and money seem to be able to allocate the necessary resources for their successful execution) they do not occur at anything like the rate necessary to provide actual protection to people and property.
Who, then, governs us? Who is actually making law?
The answer is a handful of unelected specialists in bureaucracy. The key decision makers within the US Forest Service, CALFIRE, the BLM, the CCC, and their symbiotes at the Sierra Club, The John Muir Project, the Center for Biological Diversity and so on could fit quite easily onto a single Greyhound bus. You don’t know their names. They never appear on TV. They are unelected. Their position is often based on seniority rather than merit. They are effectively unfireable and thus unaccountable to anyone, not even the duly elected Governor. Generally speaking their salaries are far from exceptional, particularly in the public service and non-profit space. They’re not doing it for yacht money and it’s a fair assumption that for most of them (as well as most of us), a career in the upper echelons of business or private industry would be unattainable. Generally they are well-intentioned first order thinkers whose local ideological gradient and surrounding incentive landscape dictates their actions with eerie predictability. All of them are opinionated as to the cause and responsibility for these fires, and none of them will point a finger inward.
[…]
Since 1988 under Prop 103, the Californian insurance industry has been heavily regulated. In practice, this means that insurers can calculate risk premiums but, like regulated utilities, need government permission to raise rates. Raising rates is politically unpopular, so insurers tend to cancel policies they can no longer justify, many of them in the areas that just burned. Insurers are in a bind, because their risk is driven up by government inaction on risk reduction, and their ability to recover costs is crushed by that same government. They leave the market. The CA state government’s response is to form a publicly funded insurer, which recently was barely solvent with about $200m in reserves, or about $20,000 per lost structure. This is not going to cover losses, to put it mildly.
[…]
Mayor Bass zoomed back from her trip to Ghana to attend a series of agonizingly embarrassing press conferences, her city anxious to hear how she would lead them beyond this crisis. Her response: price controls on rentals and construction.
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Not to be outdone, Governor Newsom dropped an EO on “predatory real estate sales”. This is just weird. In a situation where tens of thousands of people are still evacuated, and thousands more are now homeless, fires are still burning, and the incandescently stupid regulations that led directly to dozens of destructive fires including these ones still stand, apparently the problem worthy of a press conference is people offering to buy ruined houses – in a state where rebuilding will probably take years. Any landowner can always say “no”.
Speculation has swirled as to whether this is an attempt to make wrecked neighborhoods harder to depopulate, since both Pacific Palisades and Altadena are relatively high income communities full of the sorts of taxpayers who have been fleeing California in recent years.
Or perhaps the land changing hands without approved new construction would lock in lower Prop 13 land tax revenue than the state was counting on.
[…]
As for Los Angeles, we can easily predict future fires in areas that haven’t burned.
Sarah Paine on The War For India
Friday, January 17th, 2025Dwarkesh Patel interviews Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College:
In this first episode, Prof Paine talks about key decisions by Khrushchev, Mao, Nehru, Bhutto, & Lyndon Johnson that shaped the whole dynamic of South Asia today.