And there will be a fire next time, and another after that. Und so wieter. Because that is how it is, the peculiar mild Mediterranean climate with the gusty, hot and dry winds which usually come blasting down the mountains from the desert beyond. Winds which mostly arrive in the fall, but this time in mid-winter. My late father, the professional research biologist who gave the best nature walks ever, told us over and over how the native ecosystem was engineered by nature to burn every twenty-five to thirty years; to burn fast, clearing away and revitalizing dead grass and overgrown chaparral. We lived in near-constant awareness of the danger posed by those fires in that brush which covered the hills where my parents preferred to live – especially in the fall, when the high winds roared over the mountains, straight off the baking-hot desert. A couple of acres at the end of a dirt road was absolute heaven to Mom and Dad. Hell to them was tightly packed suburbia, elbow to elbow with the neighbors.
Current Events
People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump
On May 30, 2024, Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsified business records that allegedly abetted crime(s) unstated in the March 30, 2023 indictment. The jury was instructed to choose between three candidates for the other crime; their choices were not disclosed in the conviction. During the course of the trial, legal experts have struggled to deduce the nature of the underlying crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg played his cards close to the vest; as CNN analyst and Bragg’s former colleague Elie Honig stated:
Inexcusably, the DA refused to specify what those unlawful means actually were — and the judge declined to force them to pony up — until right before closing arguments. So much for the constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the accusations against him in advance of trial. (This, folks, is what indictments are for.)
Pieces to this puzzle are scattered about the Internet address in bits and pieces. This is my attempt to pull those sources together to adequately outline the main issues of the case.
The LA Fires and the CA Coastal Commission
January 10, 2025
Over 20 years ago, my family rented a house in Bodega Bay, about 70 miles north of San Francisco. It is most famous for those outside No CA for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic, The Birds. I strolled through the burg and went by a realtor’s office, with the various homes and properties displayed in the window.
There were 2 hilltop adjacent lots, both with the same view of Bodega Bay and both the same size.
One was priced at $50,000 (this was over 20 years ago), while the other was $450,000.
And over the years I have occasionally asked people “why the discrepancy?” They are both the same size, next to each other and both with the same view.
Nobody could answer, even Californians.
At Long Last…
… and probably too late for the largest portion of the British ruling cadre (such as it is, and to include their national establishment media, political and intellectual class) to emerge with any honor and credit – now that the industrial-scope sexual trafficking and abuse of mostly white lower-class British girls at the hands of Moslem and Pakistani men has blown up into an international concern. Abuse which was enabled and hastily buried away from attention because .. well, musn’t hurt the delicate feewings of a favored minority class by pointing out rampant lawlessness on their part. One mussent point anything so infra dig, don’tcha know, because they are an essential and obedient voting bloc for the Ruling Cadre … and the segment of the population that they prey upon are so … (shudder) deplorable. I mean, one just doesn’t! It would be so raaacist…
The Lie At the Heart
There was a time when most of us neither knew nor cared about matters to do with transgender, save in the nature of not quite being able to look away from the blessedly infrequent spectacle of someone in the public eye deciding to medically readjust their body to the appearance of the opposite sex and to change their name to conform. Christine Jorgenson was, as I recall as a teenager, seen as a freakish anomaly – an entertaining one, to be sure, but pretty much a one-off. Travel writer Jan Morris (formerly James) and musician Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos came along a decade or two later. Their transition to a sex other than the one they had been born with at a point where both were mature adults was viewed as kind of a private eccentricity, not affecting much beyond their families and personal circle. Curious, but … whatever floats your boat. I also suspect that there was a scattering of other individuals who made such a transition, and chose to live quietly and modestly in their new identity; happy enough to live and be accepted in the identity that they felt was truly a reflection of who they were. Constantly blaring out the specifics of their previous life and their new one was most definitely not a means to achieving privacy.