The media concentrates on the human tragedy of the here and now. The big,  obvious, unspoken fact  is permanent change. There can be no going back to  the past of only a few days prior, when LA residents  lived in stressed disharmony with nature. In LA, the hostility of the planet manifests in all four of the ancient elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Far below lie earthquake faults;  on the surface,  red shale cliffs formed of incompletely metamorphosed clay and vulnerable to water; above, wind and fire,  preceded by atmospheric rivers.

No one  is calling   this a hundred year event; it’s the new normal. Some migration will occur, slowed by the national shortage of housing stock.  Some rebuilding will be attempted, with houses constructed of nonflammable materials, such as concrete,cinder block, and steel or tile roofs. Homeowners will still have to evacuate.

This doesn’t answer the bigger  question: How can the core city be protected from mass conflagration exceeding the great urban fires of the 19th century? If the current event was juxtaposed with a major earthquake that disrupted the water supply, millions could die.

Los Angeles is the only city in the world — in the broad sense of Los Angeles County — divided by a mountain range, the Santa Monica Mountains.  Vegetation is required to hold the land in place, land where people have chosen to build.  Vegetation burns. Walking along the unpaved portion of Muholland Drive in early fall, one is struck at how simple a thing as a dropped match could cause a conflagration. In an environment  where vigilance is required of everyone, all the time, bad things happen. The Griffith Peak blaze was caused by a sleepy bum with a cigarette.

We can take a lesson from the Mound Builders of pre-Columbian   America.  Although most mounds appear to have been built for cultural reasons, some of the earliest seem to have been  artificial islands, refuges from Mississippi floods. Los Angeles needs islands of habitability,  walkable sub-cities, constructed of nonflammable materials, with carefully minimal vegetation.

The requisite size of these mini-Manhattans is determined by their function as fire breaks: broader than an ember can travel. They don’t have to be ugly. Embrace nature at the risk of your life, or distance, living safely in hopefully attractive artifice. One of these is manifestly disharmonious, the other tolerable.

If this sounds like an unpleasant dream, you won’t have to wait a hundred  years for a repetition. Fire season beckons. There will be a natural demand for fire-proof communities.

You can still experience  the striking natural beauty of LA. You just can’t nestle  in its embrace.

***Koyaanisqatsi***

 

 

 

 

(NBC) Rare explosive found in New Orleans attack. Quoting,

Federal investigators examining the ISIS-inspired terror attack that killed 14 in New Orleans report that Jabbar used a very rare explosive compound in the two functional IEDs placed prior to the vehicle-ramming attack…

Start here: Forensic analytical aspects of homemade explosives containing grocery powders and hydrogen peroxide.  Quoting,

Homemade explosives become a significant challenge for forensic scientists and investigators. In addition to well-known materials such as … perpetrators often produce more exotic and less recognized Homemade Explosives (HMEs). … Interestingly, similar explosive properties are found in mixtures of numerous solid materials with H2O2. Notably, powdered groceries, such as coffee, tea, grounded spices, and flour, are particularly interesting…

Coffee appears to be the most powerful. Start your day with a bang. How would the New Orleans bomber become familiar with the chemistry?  A secret cabal is unnecessary. Quoting,

Non-professional pyrotechnics and chemistry enthusiasts form a distinct group of HME producers. Modern technologies provide these individuals with unlimited access to diverse sources, such as scientific papers, books, manuals, patents, government reports, web tutorials, and discussion boards, contributing to the growing diversity and complexity of HMEs and IEDs.

Some readers may associate H202 (hydrogen peroxide) with the notoriously unstable TATP.  But it can also be used to produce relatively stable and powerful explosives from uncontrolled substances available at grocery stores.

I’ll take mine with cream.

Although these bombings might appear to incorporate elements of sophistication, they manifest deficiencies:

• Lack of technical expertise in manufacturing IEDs.

• Deficient planning skills.

• Limited resources of lone wolf operators.

For obvious reasons, I will not elaborate. Even as failures relative to grand ambitions, these events provide inspiration to would-be terrorists, some of which will have more ability.

Since the advent of social media, we have seen the legitimization of violence in cryptic subcultures. The trend continues to expand into other cultures, now as an alternative to political process. Lone wolves will expand into cells.

The precedent is 19th century anarchism. Within the last month alone, we have seen three instances of propaganda of the deed.

The estimate is that, powered by social media, this trend will continue to escalate, gaining resources, frequency and effect.

(CNN) Why this bandage should be in your first aid kit.

The sole voice, narrator, and information source of this video is Brad Greer, CEO of DrySee.

No additions, commentary, enlargement, context, or critique are provided by any other source. Nice music, CNN.

It’s an infomercial!

In 2013, I joined “Forecasting World Events”, an intelligence  crowdsourcing  project of the U.S. intelligence community. FWE ran for just one year, killed off by budget sequestration, and perhaps the conclusion of the sponsors that the depths of the concept had been adequately plumbed. I began with anticipation  of a harmless game, which transitioned to a deeply introspective journey of self-examination, as I attempted to systematize the thought-process of prediction. I learned some things. Scroll past Spaceman. who, as ever, balances his existence between the cosmic consciousness and a black hole.

(click to enlarge)

One of the sins of the media is to promote reportage based on the claims of “experts”, viz. “Expert says crisis looms in __________”,  “Expert solution to the problem of _____________”,  or “Expert says we must do this to avoid that.”  And, of course, “Famous gut doctor begs you to stop eating chocolate mousse or tiramisu, do this immediately, it’s genius.” Like hell I will! This headline hyperbole is not harmless. 

Expertise exists. There really are expert surgeons, oncologists, epidemiologists, climatologists, environmentalists, plumbers, chefs, builders, planners, tinkers, tailors, soldiers, and spies. Despite the criticisms of Bird Flu, Part 2, public health remains, at least for a few more weeks, in the hands of genuine experts.

When applied to the larger problems of the world, which include government, political science, foreign policy,  criminology, and the general  unsuitability of man for the environment of the Anthropocene, expertise is a false god. All of these fall under the rubric of social sciences.

Actual  experts exist, but so rarely, we discount their existence in favor of criteria other than ability. Pseudo-experts compete frantically for validation  on a media stage incapable of discrimination. The nonexistence of recognized expertise in the above categories follows from several arguments.

If you randomly select “experts” with disregard for their political bias, the ensemble of their opinions will cancel out. To choose, you have to be the meta-expert. How do you choose between them? By how many books they have written? By how well they speak?   By what you would like to believe anyway? How do you feel about experts in tee-shirts and Bermuda shorts?

Provided an “expert” comports attractively, the mantle of expertise is often conveyed by the media according to rare, unrepeated success, such as timing the last recession. Post the Korean War, the U.S.  had every conceivable  economic advantage, now squandered. If “experts” had acquired reputations based on true expertise, would our economic history have been such a chronicle of lurching horrors? Surely, expertise, if it widely existed, would have mitigated this.

The defense,  which runs along the lines of “If you had only followed my advice…” is negated by the expertise marketplace, where you can shop for any opinion you want.  You have to think you’re smart enough to smoke out the real experts. History says you’re not.

The “experts” are legitimate subject matter  specialists, which dispenses with the implied assumption they can actually solve problems. A minority of them may have special, valuable insight, but they cannot be distinguished from the run-of-the-mill noisemaker who has written seven books. We choose expertise based on what we want to believe. We use this biased choice  of “experts” to validate governance. Pseudo-experts occupy a nether-space that lubricates the propagation of policy, by numbers and reputation frequently acquired by circular reference.

Since we choose experts according to what we want to believe, another unpleasant corollary, my own Occam’s Razor, raises its ugly head: The more universally something is believed, the less likely it is  to be true. Since time immemorial, this has been the source of narcissistic national mythology — and war.

Histories of mankind have various perspectives: politics, culture, technology,  and conflict.  But one slant of human history is so concisely describable, and so negative, it has been neglected by historians as the driver of so much: “Destruction of life and wealth in the service of mythology.” It was addressed tangentially by Vilfredo Pareto. The current exemplar is the bloody dream of Russian nationalists,  promoted by Russian “experts”. We could hope this carnage will deter others, at least for the memory of a generation or two. But, as the saying goes, history marches on.

So we have a prediction for the new year. History will continue. There will be bright spots and sieges.  Bloody world leaders will continue slaughter in the service of their misbegotten dreams. They won’t be reasonable with us. We can’t be reasonable with them.

Now, because I am an expert, I am going to tell you how I’m going to deal with this  evening. I have a whole chocolate mousse pie in the fridge. I’m thin anyway, so I’m going to nibble at it.  If it streams, I might watch some of Anderson Cooper as he plays straight man to Andy Cohen. Or I might sleep through the ball drop.

Some of the jollity might be forced, drowning sorrows with merriment. We might wish there were some way to stop the ball from dropping, so we could live in the sunshine of the eternal present.

But, as they say, history marches on.

(Portrait of a Spaceman. 36×24″, oil on canvas.)

 

 

 

Mediocre at practical politics, his superlatives were unbending moral imperatives, practically applied.  Some presidents receive a boost with the cards. Fate dealt Carter a difficult hand, Oil and Iran. His presidency was marked by the first appearance of limits to the American dream of unlimited growth. It fell to Carter to deliver this message while we waited in the gas lines of the 1979 oil crisis.

As well, the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis underlined limits to American power.  Americans felt demeaned by helpless unpreparedness. Invisibly, the Carter administration, under the supervision of national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, initiated the long term development of special ops capability, something which simply did not exist at the time.

A significant part of the electorate tends to grade a presidency on the prompt delivery of entitlements such as prosperity and respect among nations. To these voters, unwilling or unable to understand that this fulmination of events would require years of effort in response, the Carter presidency was poorly regarded.

The political naivete of the “Plains Mafia” reinforced the above, resulting in a one-term presidency. I never shared this view. Historians continue to  revise his score upwards, with the delayed realization that he was the right man for the jam we were in.

Regardless of what you think of Carter’s presidency, he doesn’t need our charity. He made his own.

 

 

(CNN) More than 170 killed after South Korean jet crash-lands at airport. Here’s what we know. 

The crash is reported to be subsequent to a bird strike. In advance of technical details, there is an explanation with some plausibility. In what follows, supposition is stated as fact:

Ground-to-air photography shows the thrust reversal door open on the right engine. This is not the result of pilot action to a engage thrust reverser. The open door is the result of uncontained engine failure. Consequent to the bird strike, the engine containment structure failed, due to the high centrifugal acceleration of rapidly rotating engine components.

The right engine ejected shards of metal which impacted the right wing, severing hydraulic lines of multiple  redundant systems. These lines incorporate hydraulic fuses. When a hydraulic line ruptures, a fuse acts to isolate the ruptured section. Failure of a hydraulic fuse to perform this function may have contributed to severity.

The ejected metal also severed the manual cable backup for lowering the right landing gear. To avoid asymmetric friction on the runway, this left the pilot with no choice but to leave the left wing and nose landing gear retracted.

The above also explain the failure to  extend the flaps, which resulted in high approach speed, with touchdown further down the runway than would result from a normal glide path. Despite these difficulties, the pilots managed to control the plane to what could have been a successful belly landing.

As remarked by 737 pilot Denys in  (YouTube) Pilot Blog | Airline Pilot about Crash of Jeju B737 at Muan | No gear | Bird Skrike | Concrete wall, the ultimate cause of the tragedy was the decision of airport administration to place a completely unnecessary concrete wall at the end of the runway.

 

EDIT: Nothing of what follows should be interpreted as anti-vaccine. I am pro-vaccine. I receive annual or biannual flu and covid shots. The politicization of  science is a tragedy beyond measure.

We continue from Bird Flu, Part 1.  (CDC) H5 Bird Flu: Current Situation displays

• Mammals: Sporadic infections
•  Person-to-person spread: None
• Current public health risk: Low

Dr. Deborah Birx thinks this is an underestimation of the threat: (CNN) Why America could fail again: Dr. Birx’s stark pandemic warning. There are two sides to this. One is the tendency of bureaucracies to prognosticate continuation of the status quo. The other is faith in vigilance –widespread testing — and effective intervention. Both are logical fallacies. Pure logic rarely helps us navigate messy real-life situations. This is one of those rare opportunities.

We assume, with good reason, that the current H5N1 bird flu will acquire the mutations required for efficient human-to-human transfer. Prevailing opinion is that this will occur in a single individual, a real Patient Zero, who is simultaneously infected by bird flu and a human-adapted strain. The details remain unsettled.

With many  viruses, evolution is dominated by the process of homologous recombination — mixing of the genomes of both viruses during replication in a cell.  Influenza viruses are negative-sense replicators, in which this is thought to be absent or rare. For pro/con, see Homologous recombination evidence in human and swine influenza A viruses  and Homologous Recombination Is Very Rare or Absent in Human Influenza A Virus 

The dominant process with flu is swapping entire segments of RNA,  known as reassortment.  Since flu viruses lack proof-reading after replication, the above is supplemented by a high frequency of random, single point mutations.

So how does Patient Zero arise? Does a rare event of homologous recombination transfer a human-adapted mutation  into the avian virus? Or does it occur, per prevailing opinion, by spontaneous point mutation in Patient Zero, with subsequent reassortment ? Does it occur in the chicken or the human? The deepest, most arduous  and thorough study is based on a single human case, a veterinarian who died in the Netherlands  in 2003. See Emergence of the Virulence-Associated PB2 E627K Substitution in a Fatal Human Case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus A(H7N7) Infection as Determined by Illumina Ultra-Deep Sequencing. The conclusion, with good confidence, is that it happened in the human. Human adaptation markers, PB2 E627K and HA K416R, were found in the patient, but not the chickens. Quoting,

Human adaptation markers including PB2 E627K as well as HA K416R substitutions were absent in the A(H7N7) viruses obtained from both the source and control farms.

and

Herfst et al. demonstrated that PB2 E627K was a prerequisite for the development of airborne A(H5N1) virus in ferrets (7). The accumulation of other human adaptation markers than PB2 E627K observed in avian influenza viruses from poultry and the wild bird population suggests that the introduction of this particular mutation in avian influenza viruses dramatically increases the virus pandemic potential and public health risk.

Quoting (CDC, 12/26/2024) Genetic Sequences of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A(H5N1) Viruses Identified in a Person in Louisiana,

The genetic sequences of the A(H5N1) viruses from the patient in Louisiana did not have the PB2 E627K change or other changes in polymerase genes associated with adaptation to mammals and no evidence of low frequency changes at critical positions.

As with the 2003 Netherlands case,

Of note, virus sequences from poultry sampled on the patient’s property were nearly identical to the virus sequences from the patient but did not have the mixed nucleotides identified in the patient’s clinical sample, strongly suggesting that the changes emerged during infection as virus replicated in the patient.

The is the primary basis of  the CDC assertion of low risk. It also explains the phlegmatic attitude towards testing. Testing animals is not likely to find a mutation that occurs first in Patient Zero. And it’s very hard to do:

Initial attempts to sequence the virus from the patient’s clinical respiratory specimens using standard RNA extraction and multisegment-RTPCR (M-RTPCR)1 techniques yielded only partial genomic data and virus isolation was not successful…

This is not something you can pick up with a  home kit. The elaborate techniques of CDC cannot be widely applied: we could have 50,000 bird flu test-strip positives, all unadapted  for human transmission. When point mutation, or debatable recombination result in a suite that includes PB2 E627K and other virulences, Nature will outflank us, if not with the  first Patient Zero,  then by successors.

The result will be a cluster of human cases. According to proponents of vigilance,  CDC could contain the cluster, stopping the outbreak.

This neglects the root cause of flu pandemics:   a world population, antigenically naive to a new strain of flu, that without forewarning, manifests in a series of Patient Zeros, a series without limit, a game of Whac-A-Mole. Sooner or later, vigilance would fail, or be circumvented by Patient Zeros elsewhere  in the world. The event, failure of containment, will be described by CDC and others as a rapid, almost discontinuous rise in threat risk.

Suppose vigilance identifies and isolates the first Patient Zero and cluster. Is there a response that could prevent the series without limit? One option would be to produce a vaccine that would be effective against future Patient Zeros of H5N1 recombination. But this is an expensive proposition for a vaccine that might not work. Flu vaccines are  generally lousy. In a bad year, with a strain mismatch, effectiveness against a strain that is already circulating can approach zero.  What are the chances of a vaccine against a virus that has not yet developed in a future Patient Zero?

The public has been entertained, almost romantically, by sequencing of numerous genomes, the “genetic code of life.”   In organisms with stable genomes, this knowledge accretes. Exact knowledge of the genome has been successfully exploited  with human genetic diseases. In single strand reverse-sense RNA viruses such as influenza, the genome is constantly changing, by several processes:

• Spontaneous mutations at a single point, common in the flu virus  because it has no error checking mechanism on duplicated strands. The slow change in the genome resulting from point mutation is referred to as antigenic drift.
• Reassortment, responsible for the run-of-the-mill flu debacle.
• A remainder, to be classified as mystery,  genetic recombination between disparate genomes, by mechanisms that have never been seen,  except by the result.

In contrast with higher organisms with relatively stable genomes, the main focus of flu virus research is mutation. Yet the rate of mutation is elusive, stymied by the shape of this strand versus that, the tendency of mutations to be nonviable,  the lack of sufficiently detailed dynamical models, and a lack of clever solutions. Perhaps neural networks will help us out of this jam. Until then a  napkin calculation, “What is the chance of bird flu outbreak this winter?” cannot have a  bottom up approach.

There are other ways. Primitive, but worth a napkin.

 

 

 

 

 

(click to enlarge)

“Digital Candy.” for your tree.  Rebelle paint software..

(Fox) NJ mayor says there’s radioactive material missing amid mysterious drone sightings.

EDIT 12/19/2024 to add This Is What Happened At White House Briefing On Mysterious Drones: New Jersey Mayor Michael Melham.

This is not something I want to be out in front of. Whoever is out in front is responsible for public order. I’ll leave it to public officials, such as Belleville Mayor Michael Melham. Listen carefully to every word of his interviews.

The missing/stolen nuclear material, specified as a germanium-68 pin source, is very weak; by itself, it has no potential for mass casualties. The apparent theft could be indicative of an attempt to assemble material for a dirty bomb. Melham remarks on a separate issue that is more concerning, the port of Newark.

Social media cite reports of elevated Geiger counter readings in two public parks in the NJ/NY area. These are not official readings taken  with instruments certified as calibrated. The cited website receives uploaded readings submitted by individuals whose identities have not been verified. In the absence of corroboration, these claims should be discounted.

If you have an interest in digging, these facts may be helpful:

• A uranium explosive device is so weakly radioactive, it tends to defy detection by purely passive means. There are alternatives, which I will not describe.
• A plutonium explosive device is somewhat more radioactive, still stretching the technology of detection. The lower the quality of the plutonium, the more radioactive it is.
• A dirty bomb is intensely radioactive, with a sizeable detection radius. An individual who attempts to assemble one could die before completing the project.

Now Melham is responsible for public order. I hope he is vetting his sources very carefully.