Polar Vortexing Second Time

I'm a conservative, former Boy Scout, hiker, writer, and amateur snapshot photographer. I'm also, I suspect, a narcissist because nobody else around here is worth obsessing over or talking about. I know this is a flaw, but people here aren't especially nice. Egotism is a natural disease for authors, btw. Every single one of them is an egotist. Even if you're really good at observing people, you can't write about anything unless you believe in yourself most of all, and vanity presses are so cheap these days it no longer costs money to publish through them so you don't have to be rich to be an egotistical author.

 

I think this is part of why I find Jeremy Clarkson so very entertaining. He's one of the hosts of the car review show Top Gear. They do many silly stunts involving cars to show of their designs and sometimes their flaws in ways you don't normally do in a car test drive with a dealer. They also do some hilarious things which piss off the Liberals, like buy used cars and drive them to show off their cheaper to keep running than the taxes and fuel from electric cars and hybrids, which still aren't there yet. All you have to know about hybrids is watch a current Season F1 race and see which cars just... stop. That isn't a normal thing for F1, before hybrid engine setups this year. Some champions have had their cars just die on them. Its been hilarious chaos having F1 insist on being green. When Bernie Ecclestone, current chairman of F1, steps down or dies underneath his latest conquest with a heart attack and a smile on his face, the new chairman should fix the formula back to cars with engines, no batteries, and probably a clutch pedal would be a good idea too. The cars back in the 1980's were faster. Keep the cameras, but lose the team radios. Let the drivers drive. Top Gear makes suggestions on car racing, and why rallysport is cheaper and more fun than golf. They even made a film about it.

See? Better than golf. And you'll end up learning a lot from your car, what makes it go, how to repair it, what equipment is essential and what is just weight that hurts performance. Around here, in the mountains, lots of people have specialized offroading trucks and jeeps, with roll bars and big knobby tires, some of them for the sport of riding dirt roads, but most I think because they have pot fields and that's the only way to get there.

 

Top Gear has also reviewed ATVs, which I appreciate, since they're the modern equivalent of the Willys Jeep that hasn't been made for years and was the sort of quality steel you'd find in a Lancia, most of which currently fits in a small bucket due to the rust.

ATVs do what little jeeps did but don't anymore due to modern car safety standards. Yes, modern cars are very safe, but they're also very heavy and unsuitable to offroading. Subarus are mostly AWD to help with slushy snow conditions, not actual offroad. They can deal with gravel, which is slightly slippery, and graded dirt roads, but nothing more severe than that. As graded dirt is one rainstorm away from rutted dirt or stream or mud bog, Subarus just don't cut it in real woods. They're good for snowy places like here and Tahoe, which is about an hour away over the crest, as we call it. Nobody has a lancia, and while there's plenty of Priuses around here, I don't see many moving when it snows. Mountains are special conditions. We don't get many 49cc Vespas either. It is mostly bigger bikes, and I see more Dual Sport bikes than scooters on the road here. More useful. Like a jeep, only you can hurt yourself a lot further away from help on one. Still, better than walking 20 miles.

 

The Polar Vortex is coming again, because we're having a double-dip El Nino. El Nino is not human caused. They've been happening for at least 100K years, predating coal burning, people as we are today, and even the most recent ice age. And they keep happening and I think most of the global warming hysteria is a mix of religious nihilism by masochists like Al Gore (or con men cashing in on the panic to make a lot of money and attend parties with breathy hippie chicks who don't wear bras or panties) is just more El Nino weather. There's tons of data on El Nino, how it works, what makes them and what ends them, and nobody confuses El Nino weather events with people because its ocean currents responsible. Way bigger than us. And going on longer than we've been us. You can't sell the idea because its ridiculous.

 

Polar Vortexes, before they got the silly name and eviscerated public support of Warming, costing the Greens this election and their control of public funding to their environmental causes, which is still about hippie chicks not fixing any part of the environment. Its a fund raising scam, and the funds are going into Freds Bank, which is his left front pocket, not the thing they're "saving". They never "save" anything. Its ALWAYS a scam. That's one of those truths. This is one of those fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives do the work. Liberals raise money they don't care to see where it goes because it always goes to a scammer they fool themselves into trusting. Idiots. The Polar Vortexes are going to slam global warming again this winter, and its going to make the Liberals look even stupider, and cost them more support and I'm going to laugh, even though this means more drought for California. We need the water. This years El Nino should be weaker than last, so we should probably get more rain and snow than last year, but still not normal levels of it. California hasn't had many Top Gear visits, and Clarkson has avoided the wine country and the Pacific Coast Highway north or south of San Francisco. I am not sure why, I'm sure there's a reason. Maybe he'd get bogged down racing on the curvy roads that he thought American's didn't know existed.

He likes to say American cars flip over at the least sign of a corner, and he's not completely wrong. I saw lots of 1970's musclecars in ditches when I was a kid. Live rear axel meets bumpy pavement requiring all independent suspension? Duh. When my Dad bought an AWD SUV for mountain roads in the snow because he had friends on gravel roads and holiday dinners are socially mandatory here, he couldn't find an American one without a live rear axle so went to the Japanese who understood them newfangled Wishbone thangs. This gives you all independent suspension and prevents many kinds of crashes, provided you do your part. When people who are fans of SUVs and Trucks insist the live rear axle is "good enough" this just tells me they live on very straight roads or lack imagination or perhaps haven't heard that other options exist.

 

Someday events like the Polar Vortex are going to be called "winter" again like they were back in the 1980s and those kinds of blizzards happened weekly during the long Eastern Winters, and the Midwest didn't fuss about Chicago being closed down by snow because this happened every year. The brief period of slightly warmer and drier winters we've had in the 1990's and 00's has returned to more normal patterns. This is new to the 20 somethings, but old hat to me. And justifies the taxes and crap economy here in California, though that will change as normal winters will prompt more old boomers in the Midwest to sell out at market price and move here to warm up their joints and reduce that winter arthritis pain. There are lots more areas in California where we can build houses, provided we build water pumps to supply their lawns, sewers and swimming pools. I could easily see Cloverdale, Willits, Ukiah and such getting huge retirement communities, hospitals and jobs, with RV maintenance, storage and sales for those hot summer months when the locals get out to the coast and enjoy seeing America and not being in the 115'F heat. Lots of California has much better weather than the Midwest in the winter. You don't have to spend a fortune buying in Palm Springs to take advantage of it. Polar Vortexes should kickstart the next housing boom here, and that will mean jobs and development.

 

As for the Midwest? Getting normal cold winters again supports splitting cords of firewood, having a wood stove and a blower run by a couple of deep cycle marine batteries. That will heat your house. It means putting up the storm windows, and probably winter curtains too, and those silica absorbers at the base so moisture doesn't ruin your floors and walls when its really cold out. Serious winters justify serious preparations and a deep pantry and probably a generator. We used to get those, back in the 80's. The weather is returning to normal. Calling it a Polar Vortex is just more media politics, more bias. More propaganda. More reason to get your news elsewhere. And the public voted and slammed the entire agenda. Bring on the snow. Snowmobiles are fun. Skis are great exercise. Cuddling up to your spouse makes more babies, perhaps ones that won't be conned into warming nonsense when they play in the snow every winter. This is normal weather, not "extreme". Extreme was the mild warm winters of 20 years past. That's over. Back to normal.

Beautiful Day

I've had a couple weeks now, driving my car with the new transmission and axels. It works great. As good as new. I'm very happy with it.

The sky is blue, crystal clear, and on my walk this morning I could clearly see the Sierra Buttes up at the Sierra Crest (top) and the Sutter Buttes (extinct volcano north of Sacramento) and the Coast Range mountains beyond, which are tall enough to get consistent snow on them in the winter time and generate their own weather, and have a banana belt (warm dry air) on this side of them, which looks like a grassy desert most of the year. John Muir wanted to build a Grand Staircase park there from one side of the mountain to the other, since it shows of some biomes which interests botanists but largely nobody else.

I would like to live up on those mountains. Maybe with a trailer I could move around for the best views. Weather being what it is, the colder the night, the better the view the next day. And it was 50'F last night. I could feel it with my window cracked open a couple inches. Up there? It probably froze last night, and from the mountaintop I should be able to see Mount Lassen, Mount Shasta, Mount Diablo, San Francisco, and the Pacific Ocean, complete with fog banks and the various storms that roll in across Northern California, producing the usual hundred twenty inches of rain that area gets, but generally misses us down here. Despite the earthquakes, that area really deserves development, with retirement homes and proper full service hospitals with cardiac and cancer treatment so old people will move there and spend their money. Eureka has some of that, but the real hospital still ends up sending its patients to Santa Rosa, my home town, rather than the local clinic, which kills patients, apparently, with anything more serious than a broken bone. I don't know that as fact, only that their reputation, even today, is terrible. Perhaps if there were a medical school at Humboldt State this wouldn't happen anymore. The NW part of California is avoided by tourists who spend weeks cruising the Oregon Coast, largely because NW California is nasty and unfriendly, while Oregon Coast loves tourists and welcomes them. What will it take to make the California Coast friendly? Probably better roads, paying jobs, and a future worth having. Tricky when all the money in California gets spent in LA and San Francisco. This is exactly why Jefferson has so much traction. They want to develop the North, long ignored by LA and Sacramento, and make something of the resources through tourism and retirement communities. If you can have fantastic gardens in Portland and Bellevue, which are colder and wetter, why not Eureka? That whole area should be rose gardens and flowers and fantastic houses where the rainfall becomes beautiful. It really should. This is sane and far more useful than building in deserts like Patterson.

Also, I want to say thank you to Grocery Outlet for your low prices. Shopping there means rubbing elbows with the welfare coupon crowd and the pot growers, but at least they can afford soap and toilet paper, despite being off-brand. Also, they have decent prices for things like eggs and crackers and wines. A great wine selection. So many Lodi Zinfandels, and a fair number of Napa ones too. Their lunch meats are a reasonable price, so you can afford to make a proper sandwich. Just don't expect the brand you buy today to be there tomorrow. Stuff comes and goes. Its not dented cans either, btw. Those are illegal to sell. These are just stuff that doesn't sell well at major grocery chains so it gets auctioned off and arrives there. When you're a good cook like me, you can make something of it.

Anyway, back to my novel editing project. If I can really polish it up properly, back into a sparkling gem, it will be ready to Publish for Money, very important detail, the money.

Weather Turns

So the official start of Fall was 4 days ago. And its Fall. The temperature dropped down from 90'F days to barely 70'F. Leaves are falling. And it has rained. The King Fire is nearly out. It is snowing near Lake Tahoe, up high above 9000 feet but along there, there's plenty of mountains that tall around the Lake. Mount Rose got snow today. It is now officially too cool for summer blankets. I had to switch over to winter comforter and heavy sheets. It was cold enough this morning to reach the lower 50's, and open windows, even cracked, drafted in a distinct chill. The afternoons are warm enough for shirt sleeves, but the evenings get chilly as the sun goes down. Isn't that something? There's threat of rain tonight and tomorrow. The blobs of it on radar aren't here, and don't seem very large, but perhaps a shower. Or maybe something substantial will come in off the coast. Radar only sees so far, and mountains are what makes the rain fall, thanks to the orogenic effect. I expect we'll have extra visitors to the library tomorrow so I'll be extra busy shelving. Good times.

Meanwhile, first season of Lois and Clark, a show from the 1990's that I enjoyed, with Teri Hatcher at her physical peak playing cynical "modern woman" before the entire idea took a sour turn of disappointment for millions attempting the feat. Turns out you CAN'T have it all. Pick one: career or children. If you try both, you fail at both.

On my walk today, in the brisk Fall breeze, under shimmery mares tails clouds and intense white clouds scudding out of the river valleys, I pondered how a house situated to take in this view properly would be a fantastic place to live, provided you've got power and internet streaming. And possibly natural gas supply. Power and natural gas are both VERY expensive to bring to a remote location, which is why even delivering propane is expensive and rural folk have BIG tanks to avoid the $200 delivery surcharge. Considering I like the truly rural locations where there's actual peace and quiet, I've need to likely spend tens of thousands drilling a well, then depending on that water supply, irrigate a vineyard to occupy my time and make wine every Fall, while the weather is so wonderful. On a mountainside, you can see so very far, and my childhood had fantastic vistas out the front window. It is something I miss here, and requires a walk to see my state, though the walk shows me a fair bit of it from the hillside. All the way north to Lassen Volcano, and east to Sierra Buttes, and from a different location on the same hill, a couple hundred yards away, the Sutter Buttes and the distant peaks of the Coast Range north of Williams. Imagine dragging an Airstream trailer up there and parking it beside the water tank and hooking up a septic field, once you find the right site, with the best view. Post a lightning rod and call it good. Might go weeks or even months without talking to anyone else. The wonders it would do for concentration and peace of mind. Sigh. Pity. Who can afford that sort of luxury anymore?

UPDATE: It rained after all, last night. It is snowing more around Lake Tahoe this morning. It is cold enough we have the heat on this morning. It is a beautiful morning. The falling snow will almost certainly change the colors of the aspens/alders in the high country. Hopefully we can visit tomorrow, if only to drive through. Depends on whether it is snowing or not. WeatherUnderground is still the best weather radar site, and the map loads way faster than In-accu-weather, which is often wrong.

Warmer Cult Insists Superdrought: Result Heavy Rains

In continued failure by the Warming Cultists, it is raining in the Sierras today. Have a look at this beautiful radar map. http://wxug.us/1kql5 It is from www.wunderground.com not to be confused with a terrorist with ties to our president, of course.

Antarctic Sea Ice To Reach South America By 2036

The warmers got it wrong. Really wrong.

This is the latest image of Antarctic Sea Ice. In 2011, Al Gore shamefully proclaimed that the Arctic would have no sea ice in the summers by 2013, a point which disgraced him in the entire (qualified) scientific community, but his zealots continue to support because that's all zealots can do (other than kill people). He also suggested that the Antarctic melting would cause sea levels to rise and most of the seal ice on the shores would be lost by 2013. As you can see, its the largest EVER RECORDED. Admittedly, we've only had satellite technology to record this for the last 3 decades so this isn't as astonishing as it could be, but the growth of the sea ice over the Antarctic winter, where they were recently fund raising for penguins presumably wiped out because they didn't have as far to walk to get fish... well, now they have to walk a lot farther. Much farther. Perhaps they'll move their nesting site?

 

The rough math on the ice growth, per this tongue-in-check article reminiscent of the Warmer's threats of impending doom and fund raising tactic is hilarious.  Kinda wish it was funnier, actually. Should make up some BS stats and make appeals over "the planet". And how this must be dealt with immediately. Emotional appeals are not science. When you see all the Warmers accusing those who want further information about accuracy get defensive and attack those questioning? Well, that's what Con Men do, and Warming is just the latest Snake Oil scam. Here in the Gold Country, we know about Snake Oil. Laudnum was a great business, and modern super-pot is the same kind of patent medicine of those people, hurting others just like their grand pappy did. Those claiming its harmless aren't seeing my economy and how damaged it is by the dopers wandering around, lost and stinking. Its NOT harmless. Same as giving money to Warmers who attack our way of life, and indirectly fund terrorism.

 

King Fire Smoke Pollution

Ever since a mad arsonist lit the King Fire a couple weeks ago, we've had smoke trundle in around midnight and stick around until midmorning or noon, but sometimes all day, like Yesterday. When we got rain here last week, it did NOT rain on the fire but the winds stirred up the fire even worse. The Lake Tahoe Ironman race was cancelled this morning because the smoke is so thick it would have put racers into distress. Thin air and mountains to climb in the raise are considered enough challenge. Adding smoke is a bit much. The racers said they were going to get a beer and figure out what race to do next. Good for them. A healthy response. I think they have an Iron Man at Lake Sonoma, and there's one at Lake Berryessa too. Neither is currently on fire. Both have great mountains to ride bikes over. Maybe those will be available?

Meanwhile I get to spend lots of time indoors with the windows shut, and when the wind does clear the smoke out I can open the house, change the air, cool it down again. And when the smoke comes back, close it again. This is the situation. There was a big thunderstorm out of the Southwest, which is Southeast of here of course, and dropped rain and lightning strikes right up to the edge of the fire but never quite onto it. This also means it missed us. Once it reached Hwy 50, the wind shifted and blew it straight west, of all things, into the Bay Area, which is a very abnormal pattern for a storm. Since this is now the first day of Fall and the Autumnal Equinox, fire season will continue until we get actual rains. Not showers, but drenching rains that soak the ground and make everything too wet to burn. This is California. Normally there's no rains in the summer, though technically they do get them in the Sierras as thunderstorms. If normal patterns were followed and the underbrush was allowed to burn every couple years, there would be no crown fires, which are the big ones that burn entire trees. Normally, a lightning fire ONLY burns the tree it hits, and then the underbrush burns but since its underbrush it never gets big enough to carry the flames into the tree tops so only the ground burns. The trees survive many fires, if things were balanced. The Indians used to help this along by noticing how the fires worked, and noticing that after the fires, there's a lot of grass growth which the deer like and so a couple years after a fire, there's meadows and deer to hunt. Deer taste awful, but its food and a lot better than acorns and buckeye mush which even their best soakings still cause upset stomach thanks to all the tannins and alkaloids. Still, its something to eat. The Indians cut down the brush, burned it, spread the ashes which helped the grass grow and when they moved camp to the last place they'd cleared, they got the advantages of plentiful game. The forestry department duplicated this effort and did serious clearing of understory brush so fires can't burn the trees. They continue this task along Highway 20, which is east of me. Its controversial. Fussy home owners think it is unfair to be charged money to clear land when they're already paying for fire planes to drop retardant to put out the fires. CalFire points out they wouldn't be dealing with all these fires if the brush was cleared, as nature intended and the Indians used to do before. There is lots of bull-headed stupidity responsible. The old way was the best because it duplicated the random lightning strikes. Everywhere these big fires have come will have severe erosion in the next rains, and that silt will flow into streams and from there to rivers and from rivers into reservoirs, where the slowed water will lose the carrying capacity, dropping it into the bottom of the reservoir. Eventually they fill. Englebright Reservoir, damming the Yuba River, is filling up with rocks and sand. Same with Lake Mead. California can only have agriculture, its big money maker, because of these reservoirs. If nothing is done, the water will be lost, and the flood control value in storms is lost and before you know it, before the end of this century, those dams will be little more than waterfalls with meadows and winter storms will flood the plains, making them into swamps of mosquitos, bass, and birds. Genocide Greens will love it. They love anything that kills humans. Unfortunately, for most normal people who just want to make a living and have a beer after work, it will become somewhat inhospitable. Odds are rather good we'll suffer some disasters after these fires. For now its huge clouds of smoke. In a month it will be landslides and road closures.

Cleaning Car Paint

I live in the mountains. There are trees in the mountains. There was gold here, but there's still plenty of iron. There's so much iron that tree roots carry the iron into their bark and leaves and even sap. On a hot day, sap sprays in a fine mist out of the trees thanks to evapotranspiration. This mist of red iron impregnated sap drifts down in the breeze to fall on objects below. The concrete is stained red by the sap, worse when a wet leaf is allowed to settle onto the pavement. What looks neat to a passerby is actually obnoxious to the person whose job it is to remove, such as the homeowner or broom operator. In this case, me. The sap also falls on other objects. In this case, my beautiful shining white Honda. It gets freckles on the paint when the sap lands. For years I've struggled with removing iron ore stains. Redwood tree sap does this too, in case you wondered.

I've tried washing it off with soap. Nope. Not entirely water soluble except in heavy sustained rains. Any traces left leak out into spreading blood stains. Looks horrible. Paint polish removes that, along with some of the paint. And requires a lot of elbow grease. I recently discovered that a polishing rag with a bit of compound in it, damp with water, works best at removing the sap, especially if its had hours to be damp, such as in the morning dew. I managed to remove the sap from my car this morning after a couple hours of effort instead of the usual 2-3 days by straight hand polishing. With this much effort invested, you can imagine I prefer not to do this very often. I think the last time I did this, there was a sudden and vicious blizzard afterwards which made the state news. The wax helped the inches of snow slide off so I could see. Alas, my tires were useless in the snow and left me repeatedly stuck. I was rescued half a dozen times by passerby and other motorists trapped behind me. This town is better than it thinks it is when it really matters.

I am now waiting for the temperature to warm up enough that the wax will actually stick to the paint so I can finish the job. With any luck, my efforts will result in rain, as that's what normally happens when I wash the car. As this is a desert in the summer, you can imagine its pretty surprising for that to happen out of the blue, but the Pacific ocean is only 5 hours away by passing cloud so things can surge from there to here with shockingly little warning.

NBC-Owned The Weather Channel Losing Viewers Over Fake Weather Reporting

Turns out that wasting viewers time with fantasy global warming broadcasts from 2050 makes them change the channel and increasing numbers of subscriber cable companies ban it for offensive programming and lack of interest. Funny how that is.

 

The Pause in warming, which is now nearly twenty years, and early snowfalls in the Northeast and Denver, as well as the current record levels of ice around Antarctica, and normal levels of ice in the Arctic since 2007 make all the frantic cultist threats look really stupid. Also, it should be noted that there's been no sea level rise either. I keep waiting for signs of the ice age is beginning again, since that's how those work.

 

Generally speaking, it is best to stay away from cultists and tinfoil hat types. I like a good scifi story as much as the next guy, and the idea of them makes for fun ways to daydream or inspirational art, but in the end? Its just fantasy to pass the time. I really wish the Global Warming cultists would get back on their meds and stop bothering the rest of us, stop insisting their pot-fuelled daydream is actually real and then taking our money to try and find proof. They are still being allowed funds from our taxes, and that's just wrong. No religion deserves access to taxes.

 

A just and fair govt would go after them for fraud and put them in debtors prison, seize their houses and cars, and put them in jail, and into chain gangs cutting weeds along roads in the South, during the long hot summers. That's what they deserve, those con men and frauds. Stealing money is theft, and that is still a crime.

I do hope it rains properly this fall, but California is famous for its good weather, and we've had droughts like this before. The nights are cooling off nicely and the days are not so hot now that it is September. I'll be polishing and waxing my car for winter and put rainx on the glass, because when it does rain it will likely be a surprise.