Ugly Ugly Ugly

Last night I had the extreme displeasure of watching the first half of the debate between Biden and Trump.  I had to leave after an hour, it was all I could take.

The main takeaway is how ugly a man Trump is and how decent a man Biden is. 

Each did what they needed to do, I guess.  I suppose Trump pleased his adoring Trumpster base by being so ugly, because I guess that is what they like.  He pointedly refused to disavow the white supremacists and gave a shout out to the violent Proud Boys.  So, I guess he thought he had to nail down his white supremacist base.  Pretty discouraging. Trump is the ugliest American personality since Joseph McCarthy, but is much more dangerous given his job.

Biden showed up just fine.  He was clearly mentally capable and articulate, a stutter from time to time, but so what.  The main takeaway was his dignity and honor.

I see no reason for any more debates. They both expressed what needs to be expressed - Biden's decency and Trump's psychosis.

Fires - excess fuel - desertification

California is having a second major heat wave, and a fire has already broken out.  This is terrible.  

I have written during the first record setting flock of firestorms in California and the West in August that over a century of mismanaging forests by refusing to do adequate controlled burns has built up an astonishing and tragic excess fuel in California's forests, the results of which are too evident today as climate change assaults California with deadly heat waves.

Now I am thinking there is another and perhaps even more serious problem - the huge agribusiness methods of farming. I highly recommend a new documentary movie - "Kiss the Ground" on Netflix that teaches about this.

The issue is that the soil has been tilled, broken, for millennia in order to plant crops.  This releases enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which causes Climate Change.  The soil, which in nature is rich and alive and holds the carbon that plants put into it through their roots, releases the carbon and becomes dried out and dead. So, since the soil becomes dead agribusiness has to soak crops in artificial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, furthering the destruction and death of the soil, which continues to release CO2 into the atmosphere which continues to cause Climate Change. This process is called desertification.

The movie is actually quite hopeful in that it proposes an easy (hard politically because of the agribusiness dollars with vested interest in the status quo) solution.  Change from killing the soil to keeping the soil alive - regenerative farming.  One of the main spokesmen in the movie called himself a Regenerative Rancher.  

Currently, most of the farming is to grow grain to feed cattle, which are fed in feed lots.  So the feed lots are deserts, the crop lands become deserts, carbon is released from the earth into the atmosphere and desertification and Climate Change are the results.

Regenerative ranching raises cattle on natural land that is planted with a variety of crops and vegetation.  The result is grass fed cattle, land with actual live soil rather than dead dirt, and CO2 is pulled down into the vegetation and put back into the live soil.

So, this is actually a system that will reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere.  We are trying to find ways to put less CO2 into the atmosphere by reducing coal plants and gas mileage on vehicles, and good for us.  But that approach leaves the CO2 in the atmosphere for centuries.  Regenerative agriculture pulls that CO2 out and reduces it.  

Time for the earth to come back into balance.  Regenerative Agriculture can be a big part of that.  I am hopeful.

Is Trump a tyrant? A simple test

A simple question - is Trump a tyrant? an Authoritarian? a fascist?  There is a simple test.  

Who does he surround himself with?

A leader knows he or she needs the smartest people supporting him, so they try to get people smarter than themselves to work for them.  Does Trump do this?  Are you kidding?  Michael Bloomburg shared that Trump called him after the election:

"Bloomberg was reflecting on a phone call between the two after Trump's election in 2016.

"We had a pleasant conversation," Bloomberg said. "He asked what he should do. I said, 'hire people smarter than you,' and he said, 'there aren't any.'"

Bloomberg added that he tried telling the president-elect that he needed people who had knowledge of areas like defense and finance, and "all of these things that he knows nothing about."

"And he said, well, he did know something about it. But I said if you could get good people and delegate to them, then you can have a decent administration. And he said, 'Well, thank you very much,' he couldn't have been more polite as I remember. He did give me his private cell phone number, which I didn't bother to write down and I've never talked to him since," Bloomberg said."

Do we have an example of a tyrant that felt threatened by powerful, smart people under him?  Yes.  Stalin.  Stalin famously purged his military of all the smart, powerful generals under him because he was afraid they would overthrow him.  The result?  When Hitler broke his promise to Stalin in WWII and invaded Russia, Russia lost 25 million people.

Trump has gotten rid of any semblance of smart experienced people, experts like Mattis and Kelly, and puts in people whose only qualification is blind loyalty to himself.

But, isn't Trump really smart?  After all, hasn't he taken over the Republican Party? Doesn't he dominate conservatives?  How can he do that if he isn't really smart?  Uh, no.  

You need to be smart to run a country.  It is complicated.  It takes focus, planning, delegation, staying on top of things, study, reading, brains.  But Trump is not running a country.  All he is doing is destroying things.  Whatever the black president did before him he is destroying.  It doesn't take brains to destroy things, it just takes heartless cruelty and hostility.

Wasn't Hitler smart?  Didn't he almost conquer the world?  He was a nitwit.  The fool was conquering Europe and he opened a second front and attacked Russia, and then he declared war on the United States for no reason other than Japan's attack on Pear Harbor.  Stupid. 

So, it is easy to see whether Trump is a tyrant - since he surrounds himself with only sycophatic toadies, he is a tyrant.  And since he only destroys rather than builds, he is a tyrant.  

I hope my conservative friends see this clearly, and are as repulsed as I am.

 

Michael Cohen’s warning that there never will be a peaceful transfer of power by Trump

I finished the Michael Cohen book, and it is like emerging from a cesspool of Trump’s loathsome corruption abetted and implemented by a man, greedy and unprincipled himself, caught in the frightening downward spiral into repeating ever more egregious falsehoods on Trump’s behalf, saying only those things that were the Trump message – a message completely divorced from any reality other than the reality that Trump wanted his cult to believe. We see today Cohen’s parade of replacements debasing themselves on TV nightly spouting transparent nonsense.

Here are Cohen’s final warnings to America and the world:

”Please remember what I testified to Congress, the second time: There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition. When he jokes about running again in 2024 and gets a crowd of thousands to chant “Trump 2024,” he’s not joking. Trump never jokes. You now have all the information you need to decide for yourself in November…..

The reason the President wanted a new head prosecutor in the Southern District, I knew better than anyone, was so that while in office, he could arrange to be federally indicted. In the event he loses the election in November, he could then pardon himself, as he’s long claimed to be his right. The reason behind that unprecedented and serpentine thinking was that Trump knows perfectly well that he is guilty of the same crimes that resulted in my conviction and incarceration. He also knows that I would be a star witness in that case, and my book a fundamental piece of evidence for his guilt.

Without the immunity from prosecution granted to the president, Trump will also almost certainly face New York State criminal charges. He would likely be convicted on both the Federal and State charges and face serious prison time. That is Donald Trump’s greatest fear in life, believe me, and if he fails to get reelected, that will be his fate—and he knows it—so silencing me was an essential part of his overall plan to evade the law and avoid that outcome.”

We need to remember that Trump is pathologically narcissistic, which means that he has only one concern – himself.  We have seen that catastrophically already as at least 100,000  of the 200,000 people have died of COVID-19 that could have been avoided if he had told the truth about the seriousness of the pandemic rather than diminishing it for the sake of avoiding negative headlines that would hurt his ratings and the stock market on any given day.

This man will do anything to stay in power.  Biden knows it as well as I do, and I expect him to be ready.

Cohen, Michael. Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (p. 345). Skyhorse. Kindle Edition.

Thank you, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died today at 87. All I can say is thank you to one of the great Supreme Court Justices of all time. A woman of great intellect and heart, she has been a major part of the rise of women in America.  Job well done, and a life of inspiration that was well lived. 

Thank you. 

Why loging to control firestorms backfires

The Sea Ranch, CA, has for about 50 years lived adjacent to and in Redwood forest, and has dedicated itself to living in harmony with the land. It practices forest management, following the science.  Here is an excerpt of scientists addressing the issue of forest fuel:

The TSR Task Force decided to follow forest science to arrive at its conclusions about how TSR should properly manage its forest. For example, on the issue of forest biomass, the Task Force listened to, among others, Dr. Chad Hanson (B.S., UCLA, J.D., University of Oregon, Ph.D. UC Davis,) who is the director and principal ecologist at the John Muir Project. Dr. Hanson outlined the current scientific thinking on forests which does not parallel President Trump’s thinking. The following Chad Hanson comments are edited for space and clarity. 

[MODERATOR]:  So, some people to say we need to log more. That seems like the response, like Chad, we really, really need to log more, or you know, if we want to stop this crazy high intensity fire, we need to log more. Is that kind of what's happening?

DR. CHAD HANSON: That's certainly a political message that the [President!] and the logging industry has promoted and some other allies in Congress and elsewhere. The number of studies have looked at that, and what the science is telling us is very much the opposite. In fact, if logging happens ostensibly to try to curb fire, to try to pull trees out of the forest, under the guise of reducing fuels, what actually happens is a [number] of things.

First of all, in most cases increased logging is associated with increased fire intensity. So, in other words, the more trees that are pulled out of the forest, the fires don't tend to burn less intensely. The most heavily logged areas usually burn more intensely.

[Second,]  Logging reduces the cooling shade of the forest canopy. By removing a lot of trees, you have more sunlight reaching the forest floor, and what that does is it creates hotter and drier conditions and that means everything on the forest floor gets more dried out, more potentially combustible, and logging also spreads invasive grasses, which are very, very flammable.

[Third,] This is a little bit more technical, but basically when you have a lot more trees, it cuts down on the wind speeds that drive fires. It has a buffering effect in a sense. And when a lot of the trees are removed, that buffering effect is reduced or eliminated and fire spread through those forests faster.

[In] the forest areas where we've had tragic loss of homes and lives, these are mostly areas where we've had intensive logging, and it's as I mentioned earlier, you know, more logging is typically associated with more intense fire at a faster rate of spread. And we saw that tragically in the fire that burned most of the houses in the town of Paradise in northern California and where dozens of lives were lost. The area that it spread through before it burned down most of Paradise had been heavily logged on national forest lands and on private lands in the years prior to the campfire. And, so, this is a perfect example of what Donald Trump is trying to promote, is that kind of logging all across our forests.

Dr, Hanson also demolished Trump’s intuitive and incorrect assumptions about dead trees and dead leaves and forest floors. Our turning our forest floors into Donald Trump’s vision of clean swept parks increases fire risks and promotes more intense fires. 

DR. CHAD HANSON: [S]o many of the assumptions that drive fire and forest management policies seemed so obvious that no one bothered to test them scientifically for decades. I was a coauthor of the very first scientific study to look at [the issue of dead trees]  anywhere in the country. We actually had, you know, data on how many dead trees were in the forest.  Other researchers started doing more comprehensive analysis looking at more and more years after the trees die. Most of the data now, and this is not theoretical modeling, this is actual empirical data from real forest real fires. And what they're finding, is that with every year after the trees die, including after the dead trees fall, that went wild land fires come through, they tend to burn less intensely than in forests would have fewer dead trees or logs on the ground.  I mean, really what it comes down to is physics. In reality, dead fallen trees do not present much to drive flames or carry flames. And interestingly, when they fall, more than acting like fuel, they act in many ways like giant sponges because what they do is they soak up and they retain massive amounts of soil moisture and they keep the forest floor more moist.

We should not be surprised that a President who cares little about science does not know any modern forest science. We also should not be surprised that when seven intelligent TSR FTF members examined our forests with experts’ advice, they reached thoughtful, scientific recommendations which a unanimous TSR Board adopted.

Follow the science.

Trumpsters - wanting the power to crush their enemies and rule the world

I’m reading Michael Cohen’s book, “Disloyal” because nobody knows more about Trump’s dealings than his personal lawyer and vicious attack dog sent out to swindle and destroy on his behalf – Michael Cohen.  He went to jail for lying on behalf of Trump.  He has things to say.

The book is certainly about the depravity of Trump, but it is also a book about his own depravity and how he came to be Trump’s slave.  He asks and tries to answer the question – how did he end up stooping so low as to do the terrible things that Trump demanded.  His best answer is the one that I think tells us why the millions of Trump cultists are Trump’s cult.  After he explained his behavior with a list of more acceptable, policy driven reasons, he came upon the humiliating truth:

“But here’s the ugly truth—a motive I share with deep and abiding regret and shame, and one only unearthed after much soul searching and reflection as I painted the walls in prison and stared at the ceiling from my bunk. The real real truth about why I wanted Trump to be president was because I wanted the power that he would bring to me. I wanted to be able to crush my enemies and rule the world.”

That seems like hyperbole but I don’t think it is.  Someone else recently wrote the reason the Trump cult adores Trump is because he hates the same people they do.  And they want him to crush them on their behalf.

Here are a few other of his descriptions of his descent into Trump hell. 

His first meeting, Trump congratulated Cohen for getting such a good deal on the apartments he bought in Trump Tower.  The truth was that Cohen didn’t get a deal, he just paid the asking price.

“But there it was: within the first few seconds of our meeting, Donald Trump had lied to me, directly, demonstrably and without doubt. What was I supposed to do, if I had possessed the wherewithal to gather my wits and take on the implications? Call Trump on it? The lie seemed silly, harmless, and childish, the kind of fib that was pointless to contest; it occurred to me that Trump might actually believe it, too. In a matter of a couple of sentences, with no conscious thought or understanding of what was actually happening, I had given my unspoken consent to start to play along in a charade that I would come to learn was all-devouring and deadly serious”….

Elsewhere:

“I confess I never really did understand why pleasing Trump meant so much to me, and others. To this day I don’t have the full answer. In a matter of a couple of months, I had started falling under the spell of Donald Trump. The question no longer was what I would do for Trump—the question was what I wouldn’t do….

Like a confidence artist, Trump was showing me that he inhabited a different type of reality, one that he would share with me alone, a world that was filled with wonder and excitement and power and intrigue and adulation. All I had to do was do what I was told, without question or a second thought. I didn’t just accept this invitation; I leapt at it. I wasn’t Trump’s mark as much as I was his acolyte, a willing participant in a fantasy that heightened my senses and my sense of self…. “Stay close, my man,” Trump whispered to me in the lobby. “These are Trump people. Isn’t this something?”

Elsewhere Cohen said that Trump was a master at spotting those who would be subservient to him.  Look at the news.  You see these people lying for Trump every day.  They have sold their integrity, honor, and souls to a soulless and bottomless pit of greed, hostility, and grandiose ego.

Cohen, Michael. Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump  Skyhorse. Kindle Edition.

The War on Fire plus Climate Change are creating unprecedented firestorms

Why have the last four years had mega-firestorms in California?  Certainly we are experiencing increasingly toxic climate change, from extended droughts to record heat waves.  And these climate changes have created conditions that create fires and the fires have become catastrophic.

But, why else? The science to keep this from happening has been known and advocate for decades.  The problem is a culture in the state and in the state government that won't follow the science. Scientists have warned that the California management of the forests has long created conditions that would eventually lead to catastrophe, and the catastrophe has arrived. Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica has an excellent article  that explores this (“They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?”).

Around 1905 the State of California adopted a "War-on-Fire" approach to California fires.  From her article:

“The overarching reason is culture. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was created with a military mindset…The war-on-fire mentality found especially fertile ground in California, a state that had emerged from the genocide and cultural destruction of tribes who understood fire and relied on its benefits to tend their land. That state then repopulated itself in the Gold Rush with extraction enthusiasts, and a little more than half a century later, it suffered a truly devastating fire. Three-thousand people died, and hundreds of thousands were left homeless, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and attendant fires. The overwhelming majority of the destruction came from the flames, not the quake. Small wonder California’s fire ethos has much more in common with a field surgeon wielding a bone saw than a preventive medicine specialist with a tray full of vaccines.

How do you wage war on fire?  What that means is that if there is a fire, CalFire goes and puts it out.  That sounds like a good approach, right?  I always thought so.  But, woe is us, it has terrible consequences.

The science says that we need to let fuel burn.  If we don't, the fuel builds up and builds up and builds up.  And then Climate Change enters the picture and we get record heat and winds and a spark from lightening or a campfire or some stupid fireworks display sets off a fire that turns into a conflagration that ends up creating its own weather and roars to unprecedented extremes.

From her article:

"A seventy-word primer: We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not." 

So, forest mismanagement has been going on for 100 years, and climate change just keeps getting worse.  How much excess fuel needs to burn? 20 million acres.  How much are we burning? About 40,000 acres per year.  The rest will burn itself.  Nature will do what our War of Fire won’t do.

What other factors are at cause?  Money.

It turns out that CalFire is a giant financial enterprise that gets paid to wage war on fires, to put out fires.  And it turns out that doing controlled burns is a financial and career risk for "burn bosses" because if they do a controlled burn and it gets out of hand their career suffers.  And, environmental laws have strict limits on air quality that prevent some controlled burns because of other air quality issues at the time of the scheduled burn.  So it just becomes a bureaucratic obstacle course to do controlled burns. So, not there is actually a financial incentive to have a War on Fire.  By the way, apparently in the Southeast U.S. a stronger policy of controlled burns are practiced and accepted.

The governor and the U.S. Forest Service agreed to allow more controlled burns.  Nice, except it is woefully inadequate.  We need to burn a million acres a year, and we’re increasing from about 20,000 to 40,000.  Whoopee.

The firefighters are stretched too thin and are wearing out.  And we haven’t even entered the traditional fire season of October November.  From the article:

“As Ingalsbee said, “You won’t find any climate deniers on the fire line.”

We need change.  Fires are indigenous to California and the dry west.  We need to stop the War-on-Fire and learn to live in balance with fire.  We need to learn to live with fire, manage fire, control fire, live in dominion with fire not try to dominate fire – fire will win that war.

We need to do both - properly manage the forests in California and stop and reverse climate change nationally and internationally.  The world is becoming uninhabitable.  It is all different now.

The Clausius-Clapeyron relationship creating explosive firestorms

For the fourth consecutive year California is ablaze with catastrophic firestorms.  We had a record setting heat wave the last few days and a new set of firestorms are on us again.  The Clausius-Clapeyron relationship explains these catastrophic firestorms.

“You may have heard of the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship.” he said to a reporter, hopefully.

The reporter had not.

“It’s an exponential function that describes moisture as a function of temperature.”

For every one-degree increase (Celsius) in temperature, he explained, the amount of water vapor that could be in the air increases by 7% — “like compounding interest.”

What does that have to do with wildfire risk?

As the amount of water vapor that could be in the air goes up, the amount that is actually in the air can’t keep up. That gap creates a vacuum that sucks moisture out of trees and plants. It makes them drier, more parched, more flammable.

It resulted, during those infamous August lightning storms, in an exceptionally high ignition rate: between 4% and 6% of each strike resulting in a fire, Swain estimated, due to the dryness of the vegetation.

The fires spawned by that lightning moved with a speed that surprised Swain. “We’ve seen some of these crazy fires in the past, moving very fast, taking out neighborhoods and killing people,” he said. “But almost all of those have been wind-driven events” — conflagrations abetted by offshore winds coming from the east and north.

The blazes that blackened over a million acres in Northern California over the past three weeks did so without help from the kinds of offshore winds that accelerated the Tubbs and Kincade fires.

The winds whipping these latest blazes were generated, in large part, by the fires themselves. “That’s part of the story,” Swain said, “when you have drier fuel that burns hotter, more intensely.“

The fires themselves are creating their own wind.  Terrifying.

I know I have some conservative friends who want to say it is mismanagement of forests is the cause of these firestorms, and the failure to clear out debris on the forest floors certainly doesn't help. And we have a nitwit president that says it's California's fault for not "raking the forests".  But the explosion of these formerly unprecedented firestorm seasons is new, and is because of climate change.  I myself, back in my conservative days, thought that the climate change people were just trying to find a way to attack productive industry.  I finally had to relent and admit that climate change is real, way too real.  By all means, do better forest management , but the issue is climate change.   It's really obvious.

Climate change is creating extreme weather conditions around the world, and we are approaching a time when some parts of the world may become uninhabitable.

I am not about to abandon my beloved California but I know many who are giving it serious consideration.

It is not even that we have a new normal.  A new normal hasn't been reached.  We have ever growing effects of climate change, and we don't know where it is going to end up.

Left wing violenced is re-electing Donald Trump

BLM protests are mostly peaceful, and persistent, and effective.  I welcome them and agree with them wholeheartedly, but they are being overshadowed by left wing crazies who are just wanting violence and destruction.  They are doing their best to re-elect Donald Trump.  They must stop. 

Indeed, right wing crazies are showing up with weapons wanting to cause as much violence as possible.  They know burning and violence at night shown on TV helps their hero in the White House.  And some of the mayhem attributed to the left comes from the right who are posing as part of the Antifa and others on the left.

But, the point is that the Antifa, or any others on the left who want to affect this election must go home after the curfew is in place.  They need to stop the looting, stop the burning, stop the violence.

Trump has nothing to run on.  His record in office is an abomination of incompetence, corruption, and greed.  So, he desperately needs an issue - and the violence by left wing crazies becomes his whole campaign.

Please stop!

The RINO in the White House

I know that some of my conservative friends are thinking of voting for Trump because they always vote for the Republican.  But is Trump a Republican?

Of course not!  There is nothing about this childish bully that is Republican.  The real Republicans are denouncing him, the Lincoln Project of conservatives is a good example.  There are hundreds of former Republican politicians and Administration officials strongly opposing him.

Trump is a RINO (Republican In Name Only). He terrifies elected Republicans who are afraid that his attacks will cost them their seats.  And very, very sadly Republican voters have devolved into some strange kind of Trump Cult, ready to drink whatever Kool Aid Trump tells them to.

If real Republicans don’t vote against him this year the real Republican Party will forever disappear. The start of the killing of the GOP was the Tea Party.  Trump is just the next step of its total annihilation. 

My plea to my conservative friends is to vote against this man that you know that you disdain.