Park Fire viewed from the Millville Plains 40 miles away on Friday, July 26.
As I write this on Monday afternoon, July 29, the northern edge of the Park Fire is 20 miles due south from our home. At 370,236 acres, about 500 square miles, it is a red rash the size of Los Angeles spreading north up the Sacramento Valley.
I live in Whitmore nestled in the parched forested foothills 30 miles east of Redding. Ignited near Chico on Thursday by an arsonist who is now in custody, the Park Fire made a frightening run north its first two days, propelled by southerly winds and extremely dry fuel loads in the upper Sacramento Valley.
On Saturday, thanks to a dramatic 20-degree drop in the 100+ degree temperatures that have baked Northern California for nearly a month, a fortuitous change in wind direction and the tremendous effort made by CAL FIRE crews—including a massive air attack comprised of helicopters, planes and air tankers—the Park Fire’s progress northward was halted near Payne’s Creek, just short of Manton.
If the fire had kept burning north, it could have destroyed Manton, Shingletown, Whitmore, Oak Run, Round Mountain and perhaps even Millville and Palo Cedro if its footprint fanned out.
If the weather changes it still might.
We’ve got our go-bags packed and the cats are corralled inside, ready to spring into action should CAL Fire warn us to evacuate. We don’t intend to wait for the mandated order.
Vice President Kamala Harris
The Park Fire comes right on the heels of the largest national election shakeup in recent memory, President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor.
I was relieved Biden dropped out, but I won’t deny I was skeptical of Harris before the decision was made. I advocated bypassing her for my preferred replacement candidate, Gov. Gavin Newsom. But then, after the torch was passed to Harris, the strangest thing happened to me and countless other skeptics.
Harris not only proved us all wrong but immediately persuaded many of us she was the right candidate to take on former president Donald Trump.
After three-and-a-half years as vice president Harris has honed her persuasive skills. Republicans make fun of her perpetual smile and propensity to laugh out loud, not realizing they are two of her greatest strengths.
She’s the happy environmental warrior versus the climate change denier. The tireless reproductive rights advocate versus Trump, the adjudicated rapist who killed Roe v. Wade. The prosecutor versus the most felonious presidential candidate of all time. Of course she’s the right candidate! A child could have figured it out.
This sudden support for Harris is widespread enough to call it a phenomenon. I don’t have a lot of faith in polls, but Harris has pulled past Trump in many polls taken since she took over from Biden, even in swing states. The tide may have turned. Trump fever may have been broken.
It appears “woke” has awakened and not a moment too soon.
Satellite map shows wildfires across western Canada and the United State
The Park Fire is a case in point. I’ve lived in Northern California for 40 years and Shasta County for the past 10 and there’s simply no question that the summers have been gradually getting hotter and the fire seasons have been gradually getting longer.
That’s not just me talking, that’s what the climatologists who study it say. They almost universally attribute these increases to anthropomorphic climate change.
This summer’s record-setting streak of 26 days-in-a-row over 100 degrees was horrifyingly depressing. The air shimmers like kerosene fumes. A single spark off an improperly installed trailer-chain can set the entire county ablaze, not to mention pushing a flaming car into a gully, as the alleged Park Fire arsonist did.
It’s heat like this that makes me fear we’re not going to solve the climate crisis. You see a lot of Teslas driving around Shasta County, but that doesn’t mean society at large has bought into the idea that the electrification of everything can reduce our use of the fossil fuels pumping our atmosphere full of carbon.
The idea is we’ll gradually wean ourselves off coal, oil and natural gas as we transition to electricity generated by solar and wind power. In theory it pencils out, but in practice it falls short.
No one wants a windfarm in their backyard. Our conservative state representatives fight regulations limiting emissions on diesel trucks, chainsaws and weedwhackers. They totally oppose any mandated transition to electric cars, trucks and appliances.
Nationally, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, an ultraconservative blueprint to dismantle the administrative state and install evangelical Christianity as the national religion of the United States, would cut funding for climate research and replace environmental agency heads with Trump cronies.
Meanwhile, on the left, few are willing to support the increased use of nuclear power to help generate the enormous amount of base line electricity required to charge the electrical grids of the future on a global scale.
I don’t think we’re going to make it.
Despite my fears, NASA scientists say it’s not too late yet.
“Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still,” the agency claims. “However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years.”
President Biden has reversed some of the damage Trump’s administration did to the U.S. climate change effort during his 2017-2021 term. Trump and Project 2025 plan to undo all of Biden’s work and turn over public lands to the fossil fuels industry.
Harris will continue and improve upon Biden’s work. With her we just might have a chance to flatten the curve for future generations.
Let’s go for woke!
Tesla, SpaceX and X CEO Elon Musk.
Speaking of Tesla, CEO Elon Musk announced he was moving Twitter and SpaceX headquarters from California to Texas after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1955, the forced outing bill, into law earlier this month. The new law prohibits administrators, teachers and staff from revealing a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity without the student’s permission. It also prohibits school districts from implementing policies requiring staff to out students against their will.
In coming out so forcibly against AB 1955 Musk revealed himself to be exactly the kind of parent for which the forced outing statute was written. In a cringe inducing interview with transphobic grifter Jordan Peterson, Musk refused to acknowledge his 20-year-old transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson and told Peterson his son Xavier (Vivian’s ‘deadname’) had literally been killed by the woke mind virus. The narcissist who claims he’s always the smartest guy in the room alleged he’d been tricked into approving her transition in 2020.
That’s when the world’s richest man declared war on the woke mind virus, which eventually led to his purchase of Twitter, now X, where he posts increasingly fascist broadsides daily to his 192 million followers.
A lot of times in stories like this, you never hear from an actual transgender person. But this time Musk went too far and Vivian broke her silence.
“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Wilson told NBC News. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”
Wilson began exhibiting feminine traits at an early age and says Musk continually attempted to correct the unwanted (by him!) behavior.
“He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there,” she said. “And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”
It’s bad parenting such as Musk’s that AB 1955 seeks to address. It’s not just about trans kids, it’s about the entire LGBTQ student population. Nowadays, more parents are comfortable affirming their child’s LGBTQ status, but there remains a significant few who will verbally and physically abuse the child who dares to come out. The forced outing bill seeks to protect those children from harm.
Musk appears to not understand that his war on woke is partially a war on the very companies he oversees, a war on himself.
For example, it’s a war on climate science, which gave birth to Tesla. Project 2025 kills incentives for EVs—Tesla remains for now the leader in EV sales in the U.S.—and promotes increased drilling for oil and natural gas. Musk himself continually rails about government subsidies even as Tesla and SpaceX have received billions in government funding.
Today Musk retweeted a modified Harris campaign video in which an AI voiceover that sounds like Harris claims she’s proud to be the DEI candidate. While there may be issues with the way some diversity, equity and inclusion programs are written and implemented, the ranting about DEI by the war on woke crowd reveals them to be anti-women, anti-black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, anti-LGBTQ and essentially anti-human.
It also shows the Trumpublican Party doesn’t have an answer to Harris yet. MAGA is panicking, grasping for straws. How else to explain the hysterical overreaction to a depiction of the Feast of Dionysus during the opening ceremonies for the Summer Olympics in Paris last Thursday?
Feast of Dionysus segment in Olympics opening ceremony.
Dionysus is of course the Greek god of wine, music and ecstasy, as all close Nietzsche readers are aware. Note that the other Greek gods are present for the celebration. Recall also the athletic competition known as the Olympics hails from ancient Greece some 3000 years ago, long before the Nazarene was allegedly kicking around Palestine.
Unfortunately our Christian Nationalists missed those history lessons and mistakenly confused the Feast of Dionysus with the Last Supper in their ethnocentrism. The fact that drag performers were included in the dance routine convinced MAGA world this was the work of Satan and an affront to all Christians. Musk joined in and amplified the hysteria to his 192 million followers on X.
Elon Musk doesn’t know his classics.
“Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish” said the all-knowing apparently recent convert.
How long Musk’s conversion will last is anyone’s guess. After he endorsed Trump and news leaked that he planned on donating $45 million per month to the convicted felon, Musk immediately denied he’d done any such thing.
At any rate, I’ve got a megafire to watch. We’ve been incredibly fortunate the last three days, the Park Fire has made little progress compared to its rapid beginning. But it could change with the wind and we’re ready to bug out.
I’ll leave you with this. It’s OK to go for woke; it’s OK to believe in progress. The MAGA movement’s war on woke is a war on everything and everybody. It doesn’t believe in anything.
