It’s Big (another one)

Smoke from the Butte Fire down in Mokelumne Hill is blanketing the (my) area, including Ebbetts Pass, which had been virtually smoke free this morning, is now covered with smoke… The fire shown is only a mile from the homes on the high ridge above the Mokelumne River Drainage, and the road closure on Hwy 26 is being moved down closer to the Cal Fire station on Hwy 26 toward Railroad Flat… Air tankers are dumping retardant again and again all along the roadway.
That’s about thirty-two miles from here, to the ridge they’re talking about, and from Mokelumne Hill to Ebbetts Pass is 75 miles.

They aren’t sure what they are going to do to stop it at this time. The Butte Fire command is short units.
The Butte Fire was being managed by the Amador County Cal Fire District. It jumped the Calaveras River and started a bee-line for Mokelumne Hill, where it is now. Homes have already gone up in flames at Montgomery Road and Candy Circle. Additional resources have been requested from other areas to try and stop this fire.
Open gate to save cows
September 10, 2015 at 4 PM: A man who is being evacuated on Hwy 26 in the Moke Hill area has left his gate open, per CHP, so his cows won’t burn.
If you drive through that area, please be extra cautious so you don’t hit any animals that may be loose.

UPDATE: After a night’s sleep as the sun rose the main cloud was gone. Maybe that is related to the rising sun’s direction and rays lighting up the sky, we’ll see later today. The news from the Sierra Sentinel news-service is mixed:

Warning: If you live in Mountain Ranch area of Butte Fire….
UPDATE at 4:35 AM: Per PG&E, all power lines are now de-energized east of Calaveritas Road…
UPDATE September 11, 2015 at 5 AM: A road block has been set up on Mountain Ranch Road. The Butte Fire is now very near the roadway. Crews are trying to keep it from crossing Mountain Ranch Road…
UPDATE September 11, 2015 at 6 AM: For now, Cal Fire seems to be holding the Butte fire at Mountain Ranch Road.
They are battling constant reports of spot fires in the area, especially on Michel Road. Morning briefings are now being held.

Or not so good:

Butte Fire doubles again
September 11, 2015 at 7:30 AM: The Butte Fire has been remapped and is now listed as 32,000 acres.

The fire is only 10% contained and continues to grow without sufficient assistance. More evacuations are taking place in Mountain Ranch and the Sheep Ranch area.

I hate Hippie Spiders

I realize that in Nature (red in tooth and claw), all things find their balance and there is a hierarchy of who eats what and who is eaten by whom. The previous owners had a relaxed and laissez-faire attitude towards much of the outdoors and its’ creepy and feathery inhabitants. Too bad they adopted the Hippie, spider-friendly ethic – or maybe they were overwhelmed by the volume indicated. Maybe they didn’t recognize the terminal threat to their own children that existed with the “peaceful co-existence” and co-habitation with Spiders.
Out there in the thick prairie, in the Moeibus Loop of Life, there are mites feeding off bugs feeding off katydids feeding off…our eventually decaying corpses. And it happens whether we are shipped to a burning Ghat or a more efficient crematorium, or (especially) just wrapped in a cloth and laid six-feet under.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your scalp,
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,
They eat the jelly between your toes.
A big green worm with rolling eyes
Crawls in your stomach and out your sides.

But in my admittedly vastly negative experience, there is no place in a HOME where I LIVE for an infestation of any kind of spiders. My extreme prejudiced for spiders is based n experience, and is akin to how I would respond to a thief creeping around in the house in the dark at night with a .357 magnum – with extreme prejudice.
Spiders are not the benign victims of anti-spider Media-frenzy, illegal-spider immigration, or a raaacist anti-Spiderphobia. Spiders in the wild are like rattlesnakes in the wild. You do with them as you please, and I’ll do with them as I please – Bang!
In this ranch-house on the primeval-vegetal Prairie, I have notice a few here and there, and some also inside. I’ve sprayed the house perimeter with the stuff that comes in a white jug from Homie-Despot or Costloco.
I have sprayed the thick nests and webs in the garage – and removed them physically. I chased a big fat hairy one from those nests as it darted quickly back and forth and tried to dodge the insatiable sucking maw of the ShopVac. And I missed. I stepped on one outside and saw a dozen teeny-tiny ones run in every direction. I think the host (Mom) was dead and they were feeding on/off it.
This may become a frequent war-effort, as I will NOT be bitten by a Brown Recluse again.
And tonight I was cleaning-up crumbs under the corner-cabinetry toe-kick, down on the3 floor by the sink, when the back of my hairy hand brushed a thick cobweb. So I proceeded to spray inside. The result will be as with a thief in the night, like the game of Clue – Mr. Spider/Thief was “stopped” in the Kitchen, by Mr. Sig Nitron-P220, in .45 – with the laser and hollow-points.
But I fear this is not yet game over.

Weather Coming

Right upon the heels of the Big California Drought Announcement we are expecting a bit of actual weather, and the week(s) of pre-Summer has turned sharply cold. Off in the distance The Valley is shrouded in a bank of gray-blue cement-colored haze and you can feel the cold creeping up. Actually it’s some low-pressure stuff spinning down from the Gulf of Alaska and snow will be hitting the higher elevations tomorrow, with rain for us on the flanks of the lower sub-Sierra.
The rain-barrels developed a thick layer of yellow pollen, washed off the roof from the exploding pines that coated the interior and had begun to stink, so I washed them out and scrubbed them down in preparation for a fresh filling. The Drought is entirely man-made, and responsibility can be directly placed at the gollum-clay feet of the uber-affluent Utopian rule-making Enviroweenies and their sustainably-harvested low-brow henchlings. Whatever.
A house out in Somerset at around 2400-feet on ten level acres across from a winery inspired a visit. Nicely regular at about 300-feet on the short sides and about 1,000 feet long, the parcel had a few trees and a small pond and a lot goign for it but would require also a lot of work, and the house was practically an afterthought with even more work required, though well sited at the greatest distance from the road – and no sunset views… So we carry on Easter Sunday and will look at a bit of semi mid-century vibe up in Camino – with a pool!

Property is Theft

“Property is Theft!” So-say the Socialists who expect other people to work hard toward the so-called “Greater Good” that they want for themselves and will kill to achieve.
And this this being the Old Gold Country, where life was cheap and the towns called “Hangtown” were so-too numerous to mention that the US Postal Office demanded it (this one anyhow) be called “Dry-Diggin’s,” instead or as opposed to Mud Diggin’s — and so finally “Placerville” instead, because of the method of placer mining. Whatever. Go enroll in the Colorado School of Mines and figure it out.
Here there were at one time VERY many independent “social equalizers” and “economic levelers” and “share-the-wealth’ers” – among whom we can count the educated and fastidious Black Bart himself (UPDATE: We know Charles E. Bowles could read and write poetry anyhow) – and many-many more other lesser non-famous types who plied the same trade of self-indulgent, semi-equalization, freelance-socialism and general spread-the-wealthism – (UPDATE: robbery) so much that the main local watering-hole was called (and still is) The Hangman’s Tree. Because the tree was there, and: Location, Location, Location. Keep your powder dry.
So lets go snag some land! Steal it as best we can. Yank it from the softly sleeping drunks and shepherds. Find a few acres. Maybe there’s still some gold up in there… It’s another kind of prospecting, and I’m bring my Sig. (UPDATE: or my .44-40 six-gun)

Back to the Basement

We painted the raw construction-grade 3/4″ ply floors before we took off for the Bay so they would cure and dry while we were away. Upon our return we assembled the stacking shelves, moved bins of material goods, and also moved the garage shelf-unit down to The Understory. And more junk. Today we removed more sagging excess 2×4 shelving and cleaned it all up, assembling a small work-bench for the drip-line PVC stuff from half the old shelf-unit. Organization is taking place.

I hope it’s all for the good and a Shiny Bright Future because the King Fire* took another blow-up and has turned towards Swansborough (among other directions), where some 600-residents were evacuated earlier today. We looked at a couple of homes there on the plateau that rises up out of the canyon. It’s only about ten miles from Hangtown so things are a bit edgy. The thick gray-brown smoke pillar that rises up into the turgid sky and is capped with pyro-cumulus lid is dramatic and ominous. 11,000 acres have been consumed and there’s only 5% containment.

UPDATE: Fire updates move to fire post.

When it rains…

…you get flash-floods. Feast or famine. Hope you guys way up in Sierraville and also down in the Southland are OK. Maybe one day this state will have a water policy that’s intelligent rather than political,, but ever since the FIRST days of Olde-Californy when the “ditch-tenders” sold water to the get-rich wealthy miners, farmers couldn’t afford it and agriculture had to wait – the supply and demand situation has always been about mo’ money.

Priorities

The total-tilt bogosity meter is at redline: John Kerry: Protecting Oceans from Climate Change a ‘Vital Security Issue’, “one that requires addressing before he works to remedy the situation in Iraq.” – Remedy, really, srsly?? HIM??? HAHAHAHA! So, even beginning to protect Iraq (and soon, Afghanistan) from well-armed (in some cases by US) insanely murderous fanatics and self-documented be-headers is ah…uh…er…not as important a “Security Issue” as fleecing a captive semi-somnambulant population through increased pseudo-science fakery and energy-killing carbon-taxes that support his and Al Gore’s wealthy and Climate-Change Inducing carbon-rich lifestyle — one that others need to pay-for before he addresses real-world life-and-death issues. Assclown.

Winning in California

Braking news that arrived yesterday or before.
NRA Lawsuit Sets Legal Precedents for Defending Hunter’s Rights
by C.D. Michel

Although the case is still pending and a final ruling is yet to be issued, NRA’s intervention on behalf of its members in the case Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Bureau of Land Management, et al., has already resulted in several legal victories.

CBD’s lawsuit, filed on January 27, 2009, alleges that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) are illegally mismanaging federal lands in Arizona. CBD contends California condors in Arizona and elsewhere are becoming ill or dying as a result of scavenging game that was shot by hunters using lead shot or bullets. NRA has collected thousands of documents via public records act requests over the last year. Many of these documents raise doubts about the veracity of that calim. In fact, many documents obtained by NRA indicate that claim is based on faulty science, and plainly show that California condors were reintroduced to Arizona based in large part on express promises by FWS and other agencies that the “reintroduction” would not impact hunting.
…
The publication of the decision followed an earlier NRA partial victory in this case; NRA’s legal arguments caused the CBD to abandon and dismiss its California condor related Endangered Species Act (ESA) claims rather than litigate them against NRA. CBD’s ESA claims were based in part on an incorrect belief that “any take of [California] condors from the use of lead ammunition would be a per se violation of the ESA.” CBD’s revised its lawsuit and dropped the ESA claims that CBD was primarily using as part of an attempt to obtain a ban on the use of lead ammunition for hunting on these federal lands at issue.

Screw the Center for Biological Diversitude.  They are neither Central nor Diverse – but you can smell their Biology a mile away.

More Green Fascism

Enviroshitbags can’t resist their totalitarian impulses to kill people who disagree with them. Like Islamists they depend on terrorizing people to bend them to their small-minded, narrow-focus, death-oriented, zero-sum worldview.

H/T Rick – The creeps at something called 10:10 are mostly funded by some asinine Governmental boobs who steal taxes, but in addition have a couple real sponsors, namely O2, Sony and Kyocera, who ought to find that their commercial interests among living breathing and exhaling people are not furthered by funding murderous Eco-Nazi will-fulfillment propaganda:

• Sony Corporate
• O2 contact
• Kyocera

Ramshackle Saint Wooden Poodle

I’m looking forward to Waterworld. Go south young Horatio Alger, there’s Oil out in them thar’ swells! But for Gubb’mint intervention it would be %97 clean – but they kept the little Dutch boy from putting his finger in the dike and continued to enforced a stupid Law that is easily relaxed and restored as necessity requires but was politically inconvenient…

But this Algore meltdown – I can’t hope for this to put a nail in the coffin of globAl Warmisting. Showing clear evidence of the High Priest’s durable, second-Chakra insanity is not enough. Plenty of pseudo-Saints reveal themselves initially as crazed crackpots and sex-fiends (LRon Hubski)- but also the standard of religious persecution has been raised by the Left’s demonization of Catholic Priests and with that the tarring all Catholicism itself – not to mention the financial shakedown and demands for redistribution of wealth, so for the moment anything less is insufficient.  But Fearless Leader is hustling a BP shakedown as taught by the Chicago School, so at least the trend continues.
Just because the patron Saint has feet of clay, only makes his wooden puppet more adorable to the True Believers. It’s a favorite meme among the self-Righteous who mock real religion but ape its standard dynamics – they also believe suffering is necessary and will continue to believe in Globular Warmering one way or another – and especially as long as the Media and the JournoList 400 feeds them the Host Narrative of Greenery and sustains the teetering relic. It’s a Religion with them, those who generally despise and disparage all religions.  No Blood for Seawater!

Fortunately we have the McDonald decision with Justice Thomas’ excellent originalism in support of the 14th Amendment and his concurrence, (as Sebastian says, …Stare decisis should not stand when it’s in clear conflict with the text and meaning of the Constitution, and Justice Scalia’s Concurrence that demolishes with Van Helsing like agility and firmness the departing Justice Stevens’ near-senile dissent. (descent?)

In other words, a right, such as the right to keep and bear arms, that has long been recognized but on which the States are considering restrictions, apparently deserves less protection, while a privilege the political branches (instruments of the democratic process) have withheld entirely and continue to withhold, deserves more. That topsy-turvy approach conveniently accom­plishes the objective of ensuring that the rights this Court held protected in Casey, Lawrence, and other such cases fit the theory—but at the cost of insulting rather than respecting the democratic process … JUSTICE STEVENS begins with the odd assertion that “firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty,” since sometimes they are used to cause (or sometimes accidentally produce) injury to others. The source of the rule that only nonambivalent liber­ties deserve Due Process protection is never explained — proof that judges applying JUSTICE STEVENS’ approach can add new elements to the test as they see fit.

Thank God he’s out of there now, but he has a maniac replacement in the wings.