Oh, Noz!

If there is any such thing as a merciful god, then this will not happen.

Fire Lookout on Lyons Peak?

According to this article in the SDUT, it's a possibility:

There is hope, Harris said, that a lookout on Lyons Peak in the south central part of the county near Jamul and Lyons Valley will be the next to be refurbished. That may be difficult, Harris said, because the road to the lookout tower crosses onto private land, and the owner is resistant to it being used.

Do any of my readers know who this property owner is? I'd like to do some personal lobbying.

The restrictions on accessing Lyons Peak affect another service many of us consider vital: the HPWREN cameras on Lyons Peak that were our main source of timely information during the Harris Fire. The operators of these cameras have told me several times that the only way they can get to the cameras is by helicopter. This is, of course, expensive and hard to arrange – and it means that sometimes needed maintenance is postponed. Right now, for example, the glass covering the camera lenses needs cleaning – but that's going to have to wait until some more pressing need can justify the helicopter.

Mexico is at War...

Mexico is at war, with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of fatalities every month – far worse than Iraq right now. Even here in San Diego, just across the border from Tijuana, very few Americans seem to know about this. Or care. From this morning's news:

TIJUANA, Mexico — The bodies of nine decapitated men were found in a vacant lot in Tijuana Sunday, part of a wave of violence that claimed at least 23 lives over the weekend in this border city plagued by warring traffickers, authorities said.

The heads were discovered in plastic bags near the bodies in a poor neighborhood of Tijuana, across from San Diego, Baja California state police said in a statement. Three police identification cards were also found at the site.

The statement gave no motive for the killings, but they came as Mexico's drug cartels wage a bloody fight for smuggling routes and against government forces, dumping beheaded bodies onto streets, carrying out massacres and even tossing grenades into a crowd of Independence Day revelers — an attack that killed eight people in September.

More than 4,000 people have died so far this year in drug-related violence in Mexico.

Across Tijuana on Sunday, attacks by gunmen killed five people in addition to the nine beheaded bodies.

I'm not sure that Iran will be America's next big threat – it may well be the open warfare in Mexico. What's to stop that violence from spilling over into the U.S.?

Lt. Jason Redman, SEAL...

Secretary of Defence Bob Gates is uplifted by the courage of our wounded soldiers. Recently he cited an example: Lt. Jason Redman, a SEAL who was shot in the face and arms by a machine gun last year in Iraq. Lt. Redman, now recovering in the Bethesda Medical Center, posted a bright orange sign on his door with these words:

Attention to all who enter here.

If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery.

What is full? That is the absolute utmost physically my body has the ability to recover. Then I will push that about 20 percent further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you are about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid regrowth.

If you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that our magnificent soldiers come from the same stock as the rest of us. How many people do you know who would – could – respond to a horrible would with such pluck?

Bollywood Speaks Out about Mumbai...

Do you remember, right after 9/11, the parade of Hollywood “stars” speaking out about that awful attack? There were a few who responded in ways that we can respect, but the majority of that collection of cuckoos responded with disgusting displays of blame-Americanism and even admiration or support for the terrorists.

It was just awful, and to this day there are certain “stars” whom I refuse to watch because of this.

Contrast this with the reaction of the stars of Bollywood (India's equivalent of Hollywood). They sound to me like normal, patriotic folks – outraged by the attack on their country, and 100% behind their country.

I may have to try watching a couple of Indian movies...

Glaciers Growing?

I first started reading reports of growing glaciers a few months ago, in Alaska. Now reports are coming in from all over the world: for the first time in over 250 years, glaciers in Alaska, Canada, New Zealand, Greenland, and now Norway are growing. From the latest report:

After years of decline, glaciers in Norway are again growing, reports the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE). The actual magnitude of the growth, which appears to have begun over the last two years, has not yet been quantified, says NVE Senior Engineer Hallgeir Elvehøy.

The flow rate of many glaciers has also declined. Glacier flow ultimately acts to reduce accumulation, as the ice moves to lower, warmer elevations.

I wonder why the warmies aren't reporting on this latest exciting development? Why isn't the Goreacle all atwitter with indignation? And Jim Hansen – shouldn't he be agitating for global action to warm up the environment?

Oh, that's right, now I remember – according to their “models” we're right in the midst of a calamitous warming trend!

Just like this news about glaciers, you probably also haven't read about the latest events in the world of science. One of them: a petition, signed by 30,000 scientists, calling for an end to the dogmatic advocacy of global warming and a return to normal, skeptical science. Increasing evidence for the non-existence of global warming was one of the primary motivations for this petition – after, of course, the shame and misgivings most professional scientists experience upon examining the “science” of global warming. Dr. Freeman Dyson is an eloquent spokesman for these scientists...

Oh, My...

One hardly knows what to say.

Repressing the gag reflex is my challenge of the moment.

This is apparently not a joke – the ad is all over the airwaves and the Internet. The site is here, but I warn you: an automatic video ad will play – you can't stop it, and it is nauseating.

Pardon me while I go clean up a bit...

Thanksgiving Day...

Our friends and neighbors, Jim and Michelle, invited us to join them and some family members for Thanksgiving dinner – tempting us with tales of table-bending quantities of traditional Thanksgiving fare. And so it was! From memory, there was a grand roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet corn, string beans, homemade cranberry sauce, pasta salad, macaroni-and-cheese, and a lovely butternut squash soup. Oh, and unlimited quantities of a very nice local cabernet.

After an appropriate period of stomach-resting and pleasant conversation, then there was dessert. The traditional pumpkin pie was there, along with an apple pie, a sweet potato pie, and a delectable concoction of chocolate and caramel whose name I don't know. The sweet potato pie (with real, homemade, unsweetened whipped cream) was my hands-down favorite – the cloves and cinnamon that permeated it tickled my fancy.

Today we are promised a fine turkey soup, to be ready around noon. Even our weather is perfect for such a feast: it's misty, cool, crisp, and partly cloudy. A perfect turkey soup day!

Mumbai Attacks Are Something Different...

Bill Roggio is one of the finest analysts reporting on the war on terror; his work shows up in numerous online and print outlets. Whenever I see his byline, I take a little extra time to read and understand it – he's been right far more often than not.

So this morning when I visited the Long War Journal (an online publication that Mr. Roggio both edits and contributes to), I paid special attention to this article on the Mumbai attacks. In it, Bill paints a vivid picture of the attacks, full of information I've read nowhere else. It's clear the Mumbai attacks represent a ratcheting up of the enemy's capabilities, a sobering thought indeed. The attackers apparently arrived in the area of Mumbai on ocean-going ships, then disembarked and landed using inflatable (Zodiak-style) boats. Here's an excerpt from the middle of Bill's piece:

While the exact size of the assault force and the support cells is still not known, police estimate about 25 gunmen were involved in the attack. The number of members of the supporting cells that provide financing, training, transportation, and other services could be two to four times this number. Operational security for such a large unit, or grouping of cells, is difficult to maintain and requires organization and discipline.

To pull off an attack of this magnitude, it requires months of training, planning, and on-site reconnaissance. Indian officials have stated that the terrorists set up "advance control rooms" at the Taj Mahal and Trident (Oberoi) hotels, and conducted a significant amount of reconnaissance prior to executing the attack. If the news about the "control rooms" is accurate, these rooms may also have served as weapons and ammunition caches for the assault teams to replenish after conducting the first half of the operation.

The planners of the Mumbai attack appear to have chosen able military-aged males. Witnesses have described the men as young and fit. Some of the gunmen appear to have been well trained; some have been credited with having good marksmanship and other military skills.

A witness who saw one of the teams land by sea adescribed the gunmen as "in their 20s, fair-skinned and tall, clad in jeans and jackets." He saw "eight young men stepping out of the raft, two at a time. They jumped into the waters, and picked up a haversack. They bent down again, and came up carrying two more haversacks, one in each hand."

Now go read the whole thing.

Baptizing the Bear...

From my cousin Mike:

Baptizing the Bear

A priest, a Pentecostal preacher and a Rabbi all served as chaplains to the students of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa . They would get together two or three times a week for coffee and to talk shop. One day, someone made the comment that preaching to people isn't really all that hard. A real challenge would be to preach to a bear. One thing led to another and they decided to do an experiment. They would all go up to the Smokies, find a bear, preach to it, and attempt to convert it.

Seven days later, they're all together to discuss the experience.

Father Flannery, who has his arm in a sling, is on crutches, and has various bandages on his body and limbs, went first. 'Well,' he said, 'I went into the woods to find me a bear. And when I found him I began to read to him from the Catechism. Well, that bear wanted nothing to do with me and began to slap me around. So, I quickly grabbed my holy water, sprinkled him and, Holy Mary Mother of God, he became as gentle as a lamb. The bishop is coming out next week to give him first communion and confirmation.'

Reverend Billy Bob spoke next. He was in a wheelchair, with an arm and both legs in casts, and an IV drip. In his best fire and brimstone oratory he claimed, 'WELL brothers, you KNOW that WE don't sprinkle! I went out and I FOUND me a bear. And then I began to read to my bear from God's HOLY WORD! But that bear wanted nothing to do with me. So I took HOLD of him and we began to wrestle. We wrestled down one hill, UP another and DOWN another until we came to a creek. So right quick-like, I DUNKED him and BAPTIZED his hairy soul. And just like you said, he became as gentle as a lamb. We spent the rest of the day praising Jesus.'

They both looked down at the rabbi, who was lying in a hospital bed. He was in a body cast and traction with IV's and monitors running in and out of him. He was in bad shape. The rabbi looks up and says, 'Looking back on it, circumcision may not have been the best way to start.'

Housing Bubble...

I've been looking for this data for months, and finally found a good source: the Bubble Meter blog, whose author also created and publishes this graph on his web site.

The red line (inflation-adjusted home prices) is the one to pay attention to. That line clearly shows the onset of the housing bubble around 2001. This happens to be exactly when the financial industry (urged by Congress) figured out how to package dog turds (the high-risk home loans to unqualified buyers) as gold-plated AA-rated securities. These securities were then purchased by normally-sane investors, who were for some reason willing to believe the computer models rather than their own sense of smell.

Kinda like the anthropomorphic global warming folks. Hmmm...

Anyway, there are a couple of things I take away from this chart. First one: here in San Diego County, we wish those were the averag home prices! Ours are roughly double what this chart shows. Second, the long-term inflation-adjusted home price seems to waver right around $150,000 with a slight increasing trend. If you imagine the housing bubble never happened, and you extrapolate that trend, then home prices right now “should” be around $175,000, plus or minus $25,000 or so. This suggests there's still some more price decline to go.

Oh, and one more thing: if you bought your home more than about 10 years ago, your home's value still has gained more than the historical average. Even if you purchased as recently as 5 years ago, most likely you're still breaking even. The sky hasn't fallen just yet...

Storm Total: 1.4 Inches...

The rainfall yesterday was one inch, and we got four tenths of an inch today. It's not raining now, but it's still stormy looking outside. The forecast calls for slight chance of rain through 1 PM today, then clear for at least five days.

I took a little “inspection tour” of our yard this morning – the wet soil goes down at least six inches even in the hard-packed areas, and over a foot where it's softer.

No more fires, it's delightfully cool, and the dust will be greatly reduced for a while.

I love this time of year!

Rain, Oh Lovely Rain!

Have you ever seen anything as cheerful looking as that graph? Almost an inch of rain so far in this storm...

The fire season is over!

Cross Your Fingers...

The forecast calls for rain tonight – beautiful, abundant rain. Perhaps as much as three inches.

It could mean the end of our fire season.

Cross those fingers!

Translation of a post by a French soldier serving in Afghanistan (via Serindipitous altruism):

“We have shared our daily life with two US units for quite a while - they are the first and fourth companies of a prestigious infantry battalion whose name I will withhold for the sake of military secrecy. To the common man it is a unit just like any other. But we live with them and got to know them, and we henceforth know that we have the honor to live with one of the most renowned units of the US Army - one that the movies brought to the public as series showing “ordinary soldiers thrust into extraordinary events”. Who are they, those soldiers from abroad, how is their daily life, and what support do they bring to the men of our OMLT every day ? Few of them belong to the Easy Company, the one the TV series focuses on. This one nowadays is named Echo Company, and it has become the support company.

They have a terribly strong American accent - from our point of view the language they speak is not even English. How many times did I have to write down what I wanted to say rather than waste precious minutes trying various pronunciations of a seemingly common word? Whatever state they are from, no two accents are alike and they even admit that in some crisis situations they have difficulties understanding each other.

Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine - they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them - we are wimps, even the strongest of us - and because of that they often mistake us for Afghans.

Here we discover America as it is often depicted : their values are taken to their paroxysm, often amplified by promiscuity lack of privacy and the loneliness of this outpost in the middle of that Afghan valley. Honor, motherland - everything here reminds of that : the American flag floating in the wind above the outpost, just like the one on the post parcels. Even if recruits often originate from the hearth of American cities and gang territory, no one here has any goal other than to hold high and proud the star spangled banner. Each man knows he can count on the support of a whole people who provides them through the mail all that an American could miss in such a remote front-line location : books, chewing gums, razorblades, Gatorade, toothpaste etc. in such way that every man is aware of how much the American people backs him in his difficult mission. And that is a first shock to our preconceptions : the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team are the focus of all his attention.

And they are impressive warriors ! We have not come across bad ones, as strange at it may seem to you when you know how critical French people can be. Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how. Beyond the wearing of a combat kit that never seem to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.) the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to annoy them in the slightest. On the one square meter wooden tower above the perimeter wall they stand the five consecutive hours in full battle rattle and night vision goggles on top, their sight unmoving in the directions of likely danger. No distractions, no pauses, they are like statues nights and days. At night, all movements are performed in the dark - only a handful of subdued red lights indicate the occasional presence of a soldier on the move. Same with the vehicles whose lights are covered - everything happens in pitch dark even filling the fuel tanks with the Japy pump.

And combat ? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all - always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks : they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the ennemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting : they just charge ! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later - which cuts any pussyfooting short.

We seldom hear any harsh word, and from 5 AM onwards the camp chores are performed in beautiful order and always with excellent spirit. A passing American helicopter stops near a stranded vehicle just to check that everything is alright; an American combat team will rush to support ours before even knowing how dangerous the mission is - from what we have been given to witness, the American soldier is a beautiful and worthy heir to those who liberated France and Europe.

To those who bestow us with the honor of sharing their combat outposts and who everyday give proof of their military excellence, to those who pay the daily tribute of America’s army’s deployment on Afghan soil, to those we owned this article, ourselves hoping that we will always remain worthy of them and to always continue hearing them say that we are all the same band of brothers”.

I've read a lot about the general ineffectiveness of the French and German NATO contingents in Afghanistan, for many reasons. The main surprise for me in this post is the honest and clear-headed appraisal by the French soldier – it must be quite sobering for he and his comrades to fight alongside the American units...

Here's hoping that Obama shares my pride in these men, and my belief in the need for their mission...

Poetical...

A little post-election poetry, courtesy of reader Simi L.:

The election day is over,
The talking is done.
My party lost, your party won.
So let us be friends,
Let arguments pass.
I'll hug my elephant,
You kiss your ass.

Heh!

Jumbo Mizzenmasts...

Iowahawk has a scoop: an article from our future, about the automobiles we're all going to be driving if the Democrat's agenda is implemented. Here's how it starts:

It's in the way you dress. The way you boogie down. The way you sign your unemployment check. You're a man who likes to do things your own way. And on those special odd-numbered Saturdays when driving is permitted, you want it in your car. It's that special feeling of a zero-emissions wind at your back and a road ahead meandering with possibilities. The kind of feeling you get behind the wheel of the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition from Congressional Motors.

All new for 2012, the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition is the mandatory American car so advanced it took $100 billion and an entire Congress to design it. We started with same reliable 7-way hybrid ethanol-biodeisel-electric-clean coal-wind-solar-pedal power plant behind the base model Pelosi, but packed it with extra oomph and the sassy styling pizazz that tells the world that 1974 Detroit is back again -- with a vengeance.

We've subsidized the features you want and taxed away the rest. With its advanced Al Gore-designed V-3 under the hood pumping out 22.5 thumping, carbon-neutral ponies of Detroit muscle, you'll never be late for the Disco or the Day Labor Shelter. Engage the pedal drive or strap on the optional jumbo mizzenmast, and the GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition easily exceeds 2016 CAFE mileage standards. At an estimated 268 MPG, that's a savings of nearly $1800 per week in fuel cost over the 2011 Pelosi.

Now go read the whole thing!

Friday Morning Global Warming Smile...

Rachel and the Traffic Delay...

If you don't visit Rachael Lucas' place frequently, you're missing out on some good stuff. From a post she wrote today about a traffic problem she encountered:

And lo, what was the cause? The author of this trouble? The root/source/wellspring of this most infuriating pickle?

Why, of course. It was a young man “driving” along in a nondescript sedan while wearing his baseball cap backward on his head and…wait for it…TEXT MESSAGING ON HIS CELL PHONE.

I pulled up alongside him and glanced over to observe his complete and total tool-ness, and I will admit to the entire internet that I had hateful, violent thoughts of inflicting pain and suffering upon this jackass. For a brief moment, I fantasized about jerking my steering wheel to the left to run him off the road so that I could then get out of my car and kill him with my bare hands. Then I realized how much that scene would suck for me, what with the jail and the wrecked car and all.

Instead, I “calmly” motored past him, yelled the dirtiest curse words I know, and consoled myself with the thought of writing about this assplow on my blog.

The girl can rant, can't she?

Good word, “assplow”...

Email from My Mother...

Just received:

WARNING

ALIENS ARE COMING TO EARTH ON FRIDAY AND THEIR MISSION IS TO ABDUCT ALL GOOD LOOKING AND SEXY PEOPLE.

YOU WILL BE SAFE,
BUT I'M JUST EMAILING YOU TO SAY GOODBYE

My own mother. Sniff.

<smile>