The Broad View

Startling photo from downtown Santa Barbara

I just came across this photo at CBS.com, taken from the plaza that fronts City Hall. It chillingly shows how close the "Tea" fire was, on Thursday night, to downtown Santa Barbara.

And that hillside, by the way, is quite densely populated.

The "Tea" fire: Saturday update

The "Tea" fire in Santa Barbara has been knocked off the front pages by the horrendous new fires now burning in the San Fernando Valley neighborhoods of Los Angeles. An entire mobile home park in Sylmar, some 600 units, has been destroyed. Vast numbers of people are being evacuated. Major highways are closed. There are rolling blackouts. And the winds continue to be vicious.

Here in Santa Barbara, the mid-day winds are calm, and officials tell us that the Tea fire is 40% contained. As long as the sundowners don't kick up again this evening the news will continue to be good. 

Our thoughts today are with those who have lost their homes, and for many, their security and their dreams.

The "Tea" fire: Friday update

Fire Status •2,000 – 2,500 acres burned •Approximately 100 homes damaged or destroyed •5,446 homes evacuated •More than 500 firefighters •10 injuries from smoke inhalation •3 burn injuries

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It would be easy, perhaps, to discount the destruction here because the fire has burned principally in what news outlets are terming "ritzy" or "tony" Montecito, and insist on describing the neighborhood by citing Oprah, Rob Lowe and Michael Douglas among other famous residents. Yes, it's true that $15 million homes have burned to the ground, and I can hear some of you thinking "Well, so what? They're rich. They can rebuild. It's not like New Orleans."

I can't think about it that way. To lose a home is devastating. A home isn't just a house, a shell. If you've lived well, you've invested yourself in every nook and cranny of your home. A home is made of memories. It holds the deepest part of you. It holds things you care about that, when they are gone, are gone forever. Of course it's true that people are more important than things. Things, they say, can be replaced. But not always.

Our house in Quoque, New York burned twelve years ago. The original house was a gem, lovingly built in the mid-60s. Robert and I had been involved in every detail with the architects and contractor. The rebuilding did not engage in the same way. The "new" house never quite came to life. How could it? The "old" house had known thirty years of family living. That could not be reproduced.

Losing a home can cause deep psychological, as well as physical, dislocation. This is true for people who've lost their home through fire, flood, a freakish tornado touchdown on the open plain — or foreclosure. It is, for people who go through it, something like a death.

So please, if you read that some of the houses destroyed in Montecito were pricey, don't be dismissive. People here today are suffering. The people who lived in those homes are real people, and their feelings are as real as yours or mine.

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Helicopter pilots dropping water on the fire today are saying that the estimate of "100 structures damaged or destroyed" is way too conservative.

Another big fire here — scary!

See KEYT

Not too far from where we used to live...Adam was over there a little while ago to pick up a prescription at our old pharmacy and called to tell me about it. He just got home and said it was getting bigger by the minute.

The winds in the hills are gusting at 60-70 mph. This is a very dangerous event.

Update: Millions of dollars' worth of property gone. Evacuees clogging the roads. The winds won't die down until tomorrow morning. It's very dramatic — and terribly sad, as these catastrophes always are.

The fire has spread to more than 300 acres in a scant two hours. We're not as close as we were the last time, but that doesn't make the fact of this terrible fire any less appalling — or threatening.

The local newscasters are very brave. They're in the thick of it. They report hearing "explosions," which are probably eucalyptus trees going up. Eucalyptus trees are a great feature of our landscape, but they are oil-soaked and thus terribly dangerous in these circumstances. 

Update: This fire, now named the "Tea," is a very different sort of fire from the "Gap" fire of last July. That one burned primarily in the wilderness high in the hills, and very few structures were involved. This one is in an area closer to town, and far more thickly populated. Local TV has been showing many houses engulfed in flame. There are lovely lovely houses in that part of town, and many mansions. 

Here's an annotated map. (You may have to click on "Madison" as well as "T Fire" in the left sidebar to see the annotations.) If you scroll over and look at the lefthand side, you'll see a marker for my house. The polygon is an approximation of the current mandatory evacuation area. It's just been extended down toward town. We have a number of friends who live within the perimeter. But cell phone communication is spotty, and there are power outages, so we don't have news. We may have to wait for morning.

There are fire crews from all over Southern California pouring in to help...from Glendale, Pasadena, Santa Monica, all the communities around Los Angeles. "Hotshot" crews from Vandenberg AFB. Ventura County strike teams. Staging them is sometimes difficult, because many roads are winding and narrow. How valiant they all are, and uncompromising in their commitment to duty.

I'm going to try to go to sleep now, but will be hard.

Almost as good as a "Mister Fusion"

One of my favorite scenes from "Back to the Future" is the one where Christopher Lloyd, as Doc Brown, is frantically stuffing random items of garbage into a gizmo mounted on the back of his De Lorean time machine. It's a "Mister Fusion" powering the car's flux capacitor. It's a clever and funny notion that optimistically makes today's Holy Grail of cheap, non-polluting energy into an everyday appliance of the not-too-distant future.

I wonder if the future has arrived. Take a look at what the Japanese have unveiled [H/T to Ken Admas on Altercation]:

Could this little car truly go into mass production soon? Does it perform as described? Would American drivers be willing to trade in their gas guzzling behemoths for a petite car that goes 80km/hr for an hour on a liter of water? Or do we prefer $5 gas by July 4 and the sky's the limit?

The concept is the opposite of the hydrogen fuel-cell cars we've been promised but never seem to get because the cells weigh a ton, don't get very much mileage and have no infrastructure to support refueling. While the hydrogen fuel-cell engines take hydrogen and produce electrons and water vapor, the Genepax car takes the water to produce electrons and, I suppose, hydrogen and oxygen. If this technology can be ramped up to production levels, we're looking at the first real contender to take on petroleum-based transportation.

My final question: Why wasn't this developed in the United States? Well, thirty years of Republicans pushing laissez-faire capitalism, of shrinking R&D budgets unless it's defense-related, of offshoring, of the triumph of finance over actually making things -- all that will finally hollow out even the most robust and innovative economy.

Unnatural Male Enhancement

While researching links for the previous post, I stumbled across this AP item which must be immediately broadcast far and wide:

Toad aphrodisiac kills man, NY issues warning

NEW YORK - Health officials are warning New Yorkers to stay away from an illegal aphrodisiac made from toad venom after the product apparently killed a man.

The city's poison control center issued the warning Friday after receiving a hospital report that a 35-year-old man who ingested the hard, brown substance died earlier this month.

The product is sold under names including Piedra, Love Stone, Jamaican Stone, Black Stone and Chinese Rock at sex shops and neighborhood stores. It is banned by the Food and Drug Administration. [...]

Health officials said the hardened resin, made with venom from toads of the Bufo genus, contains chemicals that can disrupt heart rhythms.

The aphrodisiac was supposed to have been applied to the skin, not eaten, but authorities said even that use can be harmful.

Will someone please explain why men are so obsessed with their penises that they will do anything, ingest anything to get a woody. Gullible men will kill any animal, preferably exotic and endangered, to obtain bizarre body parts that might somehow magically impart the dead animal's puissance to their flaccid members. It's just pathetic. No wonder every day brings an avalanche of spam touting penis enlargers and bogus aphrodisiacs. No surprise that we're inundated with ads and commercials pushing Big Pharma's favorite cash cows, Cialis and Viagra. (What is it with those idiotic Cialis commercials ending with the happy couple outside somewhere in a pair of bathtubs? Is that some kind of symbolism I'm missing?) And who could forget to mention Smilin' Bob and his Enzyte habit? Natural male enhancement, indeed. Ha!

Of course, women who inject themselves with Botulinum toxin can hardly wag their fingers at a little toad venom.

311 Days

I wouldn't think George Bush would be a fan of "The West Wing," but lately I am reminded of the sixth season episode, "365 Days" and Leo's challenge to his White House colleagues:

"...Busy day around here today.... Problem is we're running out of them." Leo looks at the board and then goes and erases the '5' of '365' and replaces it with a '4' and adds the word 'days' and circles it and says, "That's how much time we have left. We have the ability to effect more change in a day in the White House than we will have in a lifetime once we walk out these doors. What do you want to do with them?"

As the days, hours and minutes count down until noon on January 20, 2009, Bush seems more determined than ever to "effect more change in a day," change that will last a lifetime, before he walks out those doors. He has stepped up the pace of imperial decrees, the latest of which guarantee to foul our air for at least a decade. As reported in the Washington Post:

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

EPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA's scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

"It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA's expert scientific judgment," said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The president's order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone. [...]

Under the Clean Air Act, the federal government must reexamine every five years whether its ozone standards are adequate, and the rules that the EPA issued Wednesday will help determine the nation's air quality for at least a decade. [...]

The documents, which were released by the EPA late Wednesday night, provided insight into how White House officials helped shape the new air-quality rules that, by law, are supposed to be decided by the EPA administrator.

Read that last carefully: The air-quality rules are, by law, supposed to be decided by the EPA administrator according to expert scientific judgment. Will Speaker Pelosi please explain again to our country why "impeachment is off the table"?

Bush doesn't care about appearances or fig leaves anymore. After all, he can't justify flouting this particular law on the basis of his role as commander-in-chief or keeping your children safe at night. He knows he won't be impeached and thus feels perfectly free to subvert any branch of government, pervert any traditional checks on the executive and ignore any law that he deems an obstacle to the flourishing of his true constituency: the individual and corporate haves and have-mores.

The EPA is one of Bush's favorite playgrounds. TPM Muckraker has the details on another instance of White House interfering in the agency's compliance with legal obligations:

Last week, we noted that [EPA Administrator Stephen] Johnson seemed to be ignoring a decision by the Supreme Court. The Court said the EPA could no longer avoid deciding whether greenhouse gases were pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. But almost one year later, Johnson still hasn't released an official determination.

But as [Rep. Henry] Waxman has found out -- and as he detailed in a letter to Johnson yesterday -- the EPA has already done all the necessary work. EPA employees told his staff in interviews that a team of 60 to 70 hashed it out last year and actually sent it to the White House in December (the EPA, of course, found that greenhouse gases did endanger public welfare). They also produced new regulations to reduce CO2 emissions from cars and trucks and sent that off to the Department of Transportation. But since then, nothing has been heard.

So many political favors, so little time...

Bush has been a busy boy, but he did manage to find time for a little daydreaming:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush got an earful on Thursday about problems and progress in Afghanistan where a war has dragged on for more than six years but been largely eclipsed by Iraq.

In a videoconference, Bush heard from U.S. military and civilian personnel about the challenges ranging from fighting local government and police corruption to persuading farmers to abandon a lucrative poppy drug trade for other crops. [...]

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

Well, come January 20th, he'll be free to seek romance in Afghanistan. I'm sure he can drive a truck or something.

European Parliament thinking creatively about auto emissions

This proposal would be a great boon to consumers:

The European Parliament yesterday approved legislation that would require car manufacturers to devote 20 percent of broadcast, print and internet advertising to warnings about the fuel consumption and carbon footprint of the car.

It makes perfect sense. It is in keeping with, say, nutrition and ingredient informatiion on food packages.

Of course it's being opposed by the usual suspects. (Yes, the usual suspects exist abroad as well as in America!)

It is yet another draconian restriction on advertising, which would hamper creative advertising and unnecessarily restrict commercial freedom," says a spokesperson for the Advertising Association in Britain.

Yada yada yada.

(Hat tip to Buzzflash)

Things are getting weird

Is it my imagination, or has the news been particularly weird lately? In just the past few weeks, these items have caught my eye:

Dengue Fever Surges in Latin America

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Dengue fever is spreading across Latin America and the Caribbean in one of the worst outbreaks in decades, causing agonizing joint pain for hundreds of thousands of people and killing nearly 200 so far this year.

The mosquitoes that carry dengue are thriving in expanded urban slums scattered with water-collecting trash and old tires. Experts say dengue is approaching record levels this year as many countries enter their wettest months.

Can you say you've ever heard of dengue fever outside of a National Geographic special? Suddenly, it's rampant from Puerto Rico to Brazil, with over 630,000 cases reported so far this year! And it just gets better:

Officials say the virus is likely to grow deadlier in part because tourism and migration are circulating four different strains across the region. A person exposed to one strain may develop immunity to that strain -- but subsequent exposure to another strain makes it more likely the person will develop the hemorrhagic form.

Mexico is reporting that the once-rare hemorrhagic dengue now accounts for one in four cases. Something is awry when a medieval mosquito disease stages a spectacular comeback.

But that's not all! Brace yourself for The Attack of the Brain-Eating Amoeba: It Came From the Ooze ...

Yes, that's right. This is worse than a Fifties horror movie -- mainly because it's real.

6 Die from Brain-Eating Amoeba in Lakes

PHOENIX (AP) — It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.

Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future. [...]

Though infections tend to be found in southern states, Naegleria lives almost everywhere in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.

Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose — say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep water — the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve.

The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up into the brain, where it continues the damage, "basically feeding on the brain cells," Beach said.

No more carefree cannonballs into the ol' swimmin' holes of our imagination. Get a snoot full of these critters and you'll be dead in less than two weeks. "Once infected, most people have little chance of survival."

What could be causing this relative surge in encounters with something so bizarre? (One also wonders what the things live on in the absence of human hosts.) Could it possibly be the, shall we say, warmer weather we've been having lately?

"This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better," Beach said. "In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."

Not all the bugs are microscopic and/or lethal. The next strange news item is from Texas:

Got Arachnophobia? Here's Your Worst Nightmare

WILLS POINT, Tex., Aug. 29 — Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.

Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.

The gossamer strands, slowly overtaking a lakefront peninsula, emit a fetid odor, perhaps from the dead insects entwined in the silk. The web whines with the sound of countless mosquitoes and flies trapped in its folds. [...]

The web may be a combined effort of social cobweb spiders. But their large communal webs generally take years to build, experts say, and this web was formed in just a few months.

Or it could be a striking example of what is known as ballooning, in which lightweight spiders throw out silk filaments to ride the air currents. Five years ago, in just that way, a mass dispersal of millions of tiny spiders covered 60 acres of clover field in British Columbia with thick webbing.

When Texas spiders start to act tropical, could weather be a causative factor?

Record-breaking rains that flooded Texas earlier this summer inspired outbreaks of crickets and “webworms,” the caterpillar larvae of the white moth. Mr. Quinn said the rains might have something to do with the web, too.

“You’d have to get a lot of spiders together and feed them a whole lot of food to make a web that big,” he said.

Happily, I like spiders, especially if they're named Charlotte.

My final item isn't so much weird as it is woeful:

Arctic Ice Melt Opens Northwest Passage

By Jamey Keaten – Sep 16, 2007
PARIS (AP) — Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.

The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978.

The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal. The seasonal ebb and flow of ice levels has already opened up a slim summer window for ships.

Leif Toudal Pedersen, of the Danish National Space Center, said that Arctic ice has shrunk to some 1 million square miles. The previous low was 1.5 million square miles, in 2005.

What I consider a calamity has some of these guys all excited. Yes, there's a silver lining -- or an oil field -- even in a thundercloud of these proportions.

That's why we have the Russians racing to plant flags on the ocean floor in an ugly attempt to claim what used to be owned by the planet. One man's disaster is another man's opportunity.

The rest of us will have to contemplate the prospect of living in a world with no permanent Arctic Polar Icecap, only seasonal at best, and the real possibility of the once-mighty polar bears going extinct in the wild. Would any Bushie wingnuts like to explain how global warming is a hoax to one of those bears?

That's the end of my report from the weird side. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming -- the zillionth 2008 presidential debate in which the candidates will discuss the perfidy of MoveOn, second only to that of Iran.

Living in Paradise can often bring Hell

or, how a raging wildfire can become a moment of Zen.

I've lived here in Santa Barbara for decades, with a few stray "run-away" moments in San Francisco, Sacramento, Pismo Beach and La Crescenta. I've seen many things go...and new things come to take their place. One thing, however, always remains a constant. The threat of fires.

Santa Barbara has certainly seen it's share of monster wildfires that wipe out 200, 300, 400 homes in a session. It gets to be, in a certain way, "old hat." You accept the fact that your life quite possibly could change in a single moment. Your "things" could be dust in a matter of minutes. You enjoy the beauty of the vibrant red/orange sunsets, but you know in your heart it more than likely means "disaster" fairly close by. But isn't that like life, anyhow? Enjoy the beauty while you can but understand there is a dark side to that beauty; there's a price somewhere that needs to be paid for it. Wildfires are our price for living here in "Paradise." And, often, we don't know when the payment has come due.

Well. We've been given notice with this Zaca Fire raging up in the valley, threatening to creep up and sweep down the glorious mountains, possibly taking with it our area's power supply. Residents of the City have been warned about a worse case scenario of the flames roaring down upon the City, and, with fewer hands to fight the fire, thanks to this Administration having sent the National Guard to Iraq to fight a useless and non-winable war, it quite possibly could destroy a good portion of the City and it's surrounding areas.

You start taking mental notes. Water? Check. Flashlight? Check. Radio with batteries, or in my case one of those "wind up" varietals....check. ID. Check. Extra cash. Check. Gas tank more than 3/4 full? Check.
Extra clothing? Check. But what then...which photos can you take? What favorite books can you pack? Do you really need to take the teddy bear? How about the mask from New Zealand that was handed down by a lost loved one? The paintings or lithos on the wall...can you manage to squeeze them in the car? And, don't get me started on my All Clad cookware. You know you can only take the very basics, because the simplicity of your baggage could mean life or death.

Simplicity. That's the key to survival in the threat of disaster. Simplicity. That's the key to surviving life.

Now...back to my filling up my water bottles.