Fred and Grace

Tropics are beginning to get busy. Fred and Grace are up! 

The forecast for Fred looks fairly stable. Right now, Fred is highly disorganized, and passing along Cuba's axis, but the storm should start strengthening once it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. There will be heavy rain in the Keys, and the Florida coast near Naples. The forecast storm track has been shifted west, which will give some breathing room for Tampa when it passes by on Sunday. Tampa should be all right - some rain, but no flooding. Landfall of the storm should be near Pensacola. Alabama and Georgia will get impacts too. 

There is a new storm that should follow Fred's path along Cuba. The storm will likely be called Grace. It too will cross the Keys and reach the Gulf of Mexico, on Thursday next week, but right now it looks like it won't follow Fred's path, but instead head into the central Gulf of Mexico, perhaps heading to Texas.

Camp Fire Refugees

The people still trying to get their shattered lives back together, nearly 3 years later:

Inez Salinas, a single mother, is raising her 5-year-old daughter, River, in a 160-square-foot “tiny house” trailer. She owns her land but doesn’t have a permit to camp there. Even if she did, she’s on notice that she has to leave by the end of the year unless she installs a well and septic tank, and gets designs and applies for a permit for a permanent home. She figures to get to that point would cost her $40,000. She’s struggling just to keep gasoline in her generator to run two box fans on 95-degree days.

Salinas, 36, is racked with guilt for surviving a fire that killed 85 people. And she is terrified of being evicted. A neighbor has called code enforcement on her several times, but so far the officers have been sympathetic and let her off with a warning. She prays every day they don’t come back.

“I have off-the-charts anxiety,” Salinas said. “I feel like a failure as a mother that my daughter doesn’t have basic needs.”

The Camp fire most notoriously tore through the town of Paradise, but half the people who lost their homes were deeper in the woods, in poorer, more isolated places on the buttes, such as Concow, Jarbo Gap, Pulga and Yankee Hill. Many had no fire insurance. They often lived up dirt roads in houses that were built without proper permits. Some had no electricity or running water.

...The most vulnerable of them don’t fit well in the confines of flatland society. Many simply feel claustrophobic in the city.

“We’re hillbillies up here,” said Mike Nimz, 57, who has lived “on the mountain” for most of his life.

Nimz is a “bootstrap” general contractor with a wiry build, a grizzled beard and a fierce distrust of government that is a common sentiment up here. He’s been burned out twice before and landed on his feet just fine. But more than 2½ years after the Camp fire, he’s stuck, living on soon-to-expire permits in a 20-foot trailer with his wife and 15-month-old daughter.

When the state declared the entire burn zone a public health hazard, he had to wait two years for FEMA contractors to clean his three-acre property — including demolition of two concrete foundations, which he said was ridiculous. Until the crews were done, Nimz couldn’t move any debris on his property or live within 100 feet of it, meaning he had to park his trailer on a bald, sun-blasted spot next to Highway 70, where he remains today. 

He’s waited even longer for PG&E to put up a power pole for the permit he pulled to camp on his property, so he doesn’t have to spend $600 a month on gas running his generator. He says he was last promised it would be up this past March.

Case of the Stolen Ball Bearings

Lot of metals out there on military installations. I'm sorry to see Acme Iron & Metal in Albuquerque is involved, maybe as an innocent party. They have great graffiti murals there:

The U.S. Army is investigating a former high-ranking civilian official at White Sands Missile Range and an El Paso contractor for allegedly stealing $2 million worth of nickel ball bearings – that’s a whopping 230,000 pounds of them – used in explosives research at the range, according to a recently unsealed federal search warrant.

The U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Command earlier this month applied for and was granted the warrant, which states investigators have probable cause to believe that Randolph Brady, a former director at White Sands, and Mario Escobedo, the owner of EGL Construction, and possibly others conspired to steal government property. A search warrant return shows that federal authorities on Monday seized more than $1 million from a bank account held in the name of Escobedo’s business. No charges have been filed against either man.

...According to the warrant, Escobedo hired Mountain States Crane, an Albuquerque business, and Maddy Freight Service, a Horizon City, Texas, company, to remove and transport on March 19 and 20 the four tanks, which each contained about 58,000 pounds of ball bearings. So the entire load combined to weigh about 232,000 pounds, which is comparable to the weight of an average blue whale.

The ball bearings were taken to Acme Iron & Metal, a recycling plant in Albuquerque’s North Valley.

...The court documents said that in an interview with an Army investigator, Escobedo confirmed that Brady directed the removal of the ball bearings and that Acme Iron & Metal sent him wire transfers for $1 million after the tanks were delivered. 

No contracts were ever solicited or awarded for removing nickel ball bearings from the range, according to the search warrant affidavit.

The Academic Arsonist

Da fuck?

A college professor suspected in a series of arson fires in remote forested areas of Northern California near the massive Dixie Fire has been charged in connection with one of the blazes in Lassen County and was ordered ordered Wednesday at the Sacramento County Main Jail.

Gary Stephen Maynard, 47, is believed to have worked at a number of colleges in California, including Santa Clara University and Sonoma State University, where a Dr. Gary Maynard was listed as a lecturer in criminal justice studies specializing in criminal justice, cults and deviant behavior. 

...Maynard was arrested Saturday following an investigation that began July 20 and included a U.S. Forest Service agent placing a tracking device under his car after he had been stopped briefly by Susanville police on Aug. 3.

...“Over the course of the last several weeks, Maynard has set a series of fires in the vicinity of the Lassen National Forest and Shasta Trinity National Forest...,” Anderson wrote in a detention memo. “The area in which Maynard chose to set his fires is near the ongoing Dixie fire, a fire which is still not contained despite the deployment and efforts of over 5,000 personnel.

...According to court filings, Maynard first came to the attention of authorities after the Cascade Fire was reported at 9:45 a.m. on July 20 on the western slopes of Mount Shasta.

Mountain bikers who reported the fire and tried to help put it out helped keep the blaze to about 100 to 200 square feet in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, court papers say. 

U.S. Forest Service investigator Brian Murphy responded to the scene and found a man later identified as Maynard underneath a black Kia Soul that had its front wheels stuck in a ditch and its undercarriage centered on a boulder, court papers say.

...During the encounter, the man said he was a professor and Forest Service investigators subsequently found online profiles for Maynard “at various universities in California,” court papers say. 

...A second fire erupted the next day at 2:50 a.m. on Mount Shasta near the Everitt Memorial Highway, and investigators later found tire tracks similar to those made by the Kia, court papers say.

...Authorities then began tracking Maynard’s movements ... [I]nvestigators tracked his movements for hundreds of miles, including to the area where the Ranch Fire and Conard Fire erupted Saturday in the Lassen National Forest, court papers say.

“It appeared that Maynard was in the midst of an arson-setting spree,” court papers say.

Maynard was arrested that day inside the emergency closure area forced by the Dixie Fire, court papers say.

“He entered the evacuation zone and began setting fires behind the first responders fighting the Dixie Fire,” Anderson wrote in his detention memo. “In addition to the danger of enlarging the Dixie fire and threatening more lives and property, this increased the danger to the first responders.”

My Second Tik Tok Video

My first video appears to annoy Larry Elder fans, so I prepared a second video:

@marcvaldez946

#recall #californiarecall #GovernorWatts #california #politics

♬ Peaceful - Arnaud Gauthier

Navajos Welcome a Californian in a Bear Suit

A significant sighting:

A 33-year-old California man in a giant teddy bear suit of his own creation is walking through Diné Bikéyah.

...To raise money – on GoFundMe – for multiple causes such as autism, cancer and the environment, Larios is walking from Los Angeles to Times Square in New York City.

Larios on July 29 arrived in Kinłání-Dook’o’oosłííd, where he visited the Museum of Northern Arizona. He dressed as a bear he named “Bearsun,” which has a padded head, round red cheeks, and a bobble tail.

...“Until he started entering Arizona, that’s when (Bearsun) really caught my eye,” said Laughter, who learned of Bearsun about three weeks ago. “When he got to Seligman and Williams, I said, ‘Oh my god! He’s pretty close!’

...Since then, Bearsun has stopped in several places, including Oatman, Kingman, Peach Springs, Seligman, Ash Fork and Williams, sharing photos of himself in the foreground of the famed Steam Engine No. 3759 at the Locomotive Park, walking down Route 66, on the Grand Canyon Skywalk at Eagle Point, visiting Bearizona and petting donkeys.

In Flagstaff, Bearsun learned about the tribes of the Colorado Plateau and posed next to the Hopi R2D2, a droid from the museum’s art exhibit “The Force is With Our People,” which reflects Star Wars themes such as endurance and rebellion. 

The museum staff also presented him with a Zuni shash fetish, which Larios said he accepted but didn’t know what to say about receiving an “awesome” Native gift of a “bear with a backpack,” meaning the medicine bundle tightly bound with sinew which symbolizes strength and healing. 

“And I have a backpack!” Bearsun exclaimed.

My First Tik Tok Video!

Support Daniel Watts on Part 2 of the Gubernatorial Recall ballot on September 14th!

@marcvaldez946

#californiarecall #recall #GovernorWatts #politics #California

♬ Calm - Happy Piano Music Instrumental Collective

Charlie the Unicorn

I feel like Charlie the Unicorn when modern children show me what they like on the modern Internet.

 

Traffic Calming on Second Avenue

Apparently there is a traffic calming effort underway on my street. It seems to cover just a short segment of the street. Hopefully it will make the area safer for traffic.

"Sacramento city officials are permanently closing to vehicles a stretch of Second Avenue in Oak Park to reduce traffic collisions and make the area more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly. 

Construction started Monday on the roadway between 34th Street and Broadway and is expected to take a week to complete. Once finished, the stretch of road will no longer be open to vehicles, officials said."

Miniature Dioramas

My sister Marra passes on this amazing link.

Applied Surrealism in "Breaking Bad"

There seems to be an unconscious Surrealistic dream side to “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” that can suddenly express itself like lightning. 

For example, the Surrealist artist (and advertising man) René Magritte, who is best known for his bowler-wearing everyman posters, is also well-known for his painting of a pipe, called “La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)” (1929), or “This is not a Pipe.” The philosopher Michel Foucault (whose ideas also appear throughout the shows) wrote an essay about it. 

From the link

: According to Foucault, what renders Magritte’s figure “strange” is not the contradiction between the image (the pipe) and the text (“This is not a pipe”) because a contradiction can exist only between two statements. … [T]here is only one statement and one simple demonstration but, through our own habits of reading, we assume a “natural” connecting of text and drawing. … Rather than reading the painting as a sign with its label, Foucault asserted that Magritte’s painting was a calligram, “secretly constructed and carefully unraveled.”

So, where does “Breaking Bad” talk about what something isn’t? Oh yeah!

 

Tuco: “So let me get this straight, I steal your dope, I beat the piss out of your mule boy, and you bring me more meth? That’s brilliant!” 

Walt: “You got one part of that wrong. This is not meth.”

Think Twice These Days Before Visiting Dixie!

Here's a Covid-19 pestilence-status chart for the last month, including a lot of the countries that the U.S. warns travelers against visiting because of Covid-19. 

Currently, Botswana leads the world's countries (965 daily new confirmed Covid-19 cases per million people). Iran is second, at 434. 

The U.S. as a whole is at 328, almost as high as France (341). 

It's important to note that the American South has some real problems: the highest rates in the world, and the situation is rapidly getting worse. Louisiana is at 1,160 - higher than Botswana. Florida is at 900, just under Botswana. Mississippi (790), Arkansas (750), Alabama (670), South Carolina (550), Georgia (520), Oklahoma (510), Tennessee (480), Missouri (470), Texas (470), and Kentucky (450) are all higher than Iran. 

Think twice these days before visiting Dixie!