A Purposeful Life

President Barack Obama reminds us of what is important, in his eulogy of the Honorable Elijah Cummings.  "Kindness and compassion are not weak."

Blackout Preview

Update Sat. 6:30 p. Latest is: shutoff at 9 p. or later, and weather all-clear tomorrow afternoon, with restoration time uncertain but sounds like no later than Monday.  Though what changes, could change back.

Update Sat. 10/26 5 p.: The hour when the power is cut off has been pushed back to 8 p. Saturday.  The wind here has picked up but this coastal wind is minor compared to the gusts expected in higher elevations in southeast Humboldt, southern Trinity county and interior Mendicino, beginning at 10 p. tonight.  This is being called potentially an "historic" wind event.  This makes the fire potential especially dangerous.
The total number of California "customers" without power could eventually approach 3 million.

Meanwhile, fires already underway are still growing.

Right now the potential is that these winds remain a danger into Monday, though I've seen no estimate on when they are expected to diminish, nor how long it will take for PG&E to inspect lines and restore power.

My impressions yesterday remain today that (1) things seem better organized and (2) there is no sense of crisis and lots of events etc. are going on as scheduled.  But it still remains to be seen how things go on the second and third day (and night) of blackout.

late Friday:
This much seems certain: early Saturday afternoon, the power goes off, and Saturday night will be dark.  Because there is some relationship to ongoing weather not far to our southeast, power is unlikely to be restored before Monday.  The blackout may well extend longer than that.

The forecast is for the potential of major wind gusts, definitely Saturday evening, and probably into Sunday.  Those winds are forecast to move south by Monday.

Around Arcata on Friday there was little sense of an oncoming crisis. Ice sold out quickly, but people were calm, if not oblivious.  Either people are sanguine in the way that Minnesotans are about winter and snow, or they are more prepared this time, or they were lulled into a false sense of security by the relative ease of getting through 25 hours without electricity.

There's no sense inflating it.  Other Californians have it far worse.  We are hundreds of miles away from any ongoing fire, with little risk of fire getting very close even if one erupts in the danger zone.  Our weather is likely to be pleasant--we aren't even forecast to experience more than a little wind tomorrow.  The night temperatures going into the 30s is something of a challenge without heat, but not true hardship.

This time community resources seem to be better organized, and those in the media in position to inform us say they have learned to organize information better.  We'll see.

We may well see how different a blackout looks on the third or fourth day than it does on the first.  I don't take this as casually as some.

I am also due to be on a plane east on Wednesday morning, and that seems even more iffy than it did before (we always face the consequences of fog at the airport here--the foggiest in the country--or in San Francisco).  Planes flew in and out during the first blackout, but after several days, who knows?

So posting here will be rare, not only this weekend but probably for the next couple of weeks.  I'm giving fair warning because I wouldn't want my legions of readers to get too anxious.  But I've set several Poetry Monday posts to appear automatically, so thou thirst for verse may be assuaged.

Blackout Redux? Or Worse

Update: As of noontime Friday, PG&E informs us that we will lose power tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon, probably for "four days."  Apparently that's because high winds are predicted to continue into Monday. 

Once again the day (Thursday) began with news that the latest round of weather-related blackouts would not include us.  Then in the afternoon, PG&E announced that a small but very precise number of Humboldt customers--2,188 to be exact--might get their power shut off on Saturday evening, and it would last at least 48 hours.

The utility promised a map of affected areas.  When it came out (without explanation) in late afternoon,  the affected area turned out to be where nearly the entire population of Humboldt County is living.

 By evening we were getting the robocalls from Arcata Police (there will be a blackout) and PG&E (there may be a blackout, and including a comically long code to enter on some web page for further information.)  So it looks like the whole county is going to go to black, sometime on Saturday.  But no general information yet on when it may start and when it may end, though it seems likely it will not be a mere 25 hours as last time.

Reassembling pieces of several stories, I'm guessing what happened was this: there are two kinds of power lines involved: the big transmission lines that transmit the power to a big area, and the thinner distribution lines that direct the power to specific places.  Maybe distribution lines were involved in the first announced outage, enabling them to be so precise.  But now it seems to be transmission lines that will be "de-energized," a much blunter instrument.

Why?  I'm guessing it has something to do with the Kincade Fire in Sonoma, which exploded Thursday, after a live transmission line--a jumper from a transmission tower--broke.  They'd shut down the distribution lines, but transmission lines were supposed to be thick enough to withstand the winds that had been forecast for that area.  PG&E may once again be liable for a huge fire, and to prevent further liability, they are cutting off all our power up here.

I don't mean to deny the danger.  Southern California and the central coast are dry and hot, and now very windy.  Winds are forecast for far northern California, and though we've had rain recently, there's none in the forecast.  A lot of people in this state are without power or going to be, and thousands are being evacuated, including whole towns.

So there are fires, and there is fire danger, though (thankfully) not for us.  In a sense we will be sacrificing in order to lessen the danger for others.  That is uncomfortable but acceptable in a decent society--but of course that's not all that this represents.

We're paying for a company's greed in the recent past, and it is leaving us with a chaotic situation involving one of the essentials of civilized life: electric power.  I don't see how PG& E survives this, but what's the alternative?

Meanwhile, a longer blackout than last time will test the vulnerabilities it suggested, and reveal suspected and unsuspected new ones.  Once again, it appears that it will be a massive blackout, so resources will again be stretched thin until they are nonexistent.

And we've got a whole day to think about this, do what we can to prepare, and await the latest "information."

Return of Duluwat

   Cheryl Seidner, former Wiyot Tribal Chair who began the effort to reclaim     Tuluwat, at today's ceremonies.  Lost Coast Outpost photo.

The ancestral island of the Wiyot tribe, the center of the Wiyot world where the annual World Renewal Ceremony was held for untold centuries, was today returned legally to the Wiyot by the City of Eureka.

By some accounts, the ceremonial site and one of the Wiyot village sites on the island is called Tuluwat, while the island as a whole is Duluwat Island.  It has been known as Indian Island since 1860, when some of Eureka's leading citizens massacred women and children on the island during the ceremonies, as part of a coordinated attack on Wiyot wherever they were, that devastated the small tribe.  I wrote about this incident and the Wiyot activities to commemorate the dead and to buy back the land in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004.

Last vigil held in February 2008.  BK photo.

Since 1992, tribal chair Cheryl Seidner had organized vigils open to all on the anniversary of the massacre, and spearheaded a fund raising campaign to buy back 1.5 acres so that the World Renewal Ceremony could once again be performed there.  She and her sister Leona are direct descendants of an infant survivor of the massacre.

Shortly after the article appeared, the Eureka City Council donated 40 acres of the land on the island it owned.  Today's ceremony marked the official transfer of the remaining 200 acres to the Wiyot tribe.  Both the initial gift and this final return appear to be unprecedented and unique.

But as worthy as these gestures are, the Tribe has basically been left to pay for and accomplish the clean-up of debris and toxic waste that pollutes the island, all left there by now defunct industries.  It took a decade of clean-up and construction--until 2014--until it was safe to hold a single World Renewal Ceremony.  That work continues.  Current tribal chair Ted Hernandez hopes to hold another World Renewal Ceremony in 2020.

Cheryl at the last vigil.  In foreground the candle in a paper cup
that many participants held.  I still have mine from this last vigil.
BK photo.

From the beginning, Cheryl Seidner insisted that commemorating the massacre was the healing of "two communities"--Native and non-Native.  Beginning with a few non-Native participants, the candlelight vigils grew to become a community event, and it was this emphasis on a common humanity that probably made today's event possible.  Congratulations to all.

Your Daily Lear

words and image by
Edward Lear

"Woodhenge" in Wiltshire UK

What It's All About

Impeachment seems all but certain now.  But for all the juiced headlines and heavy bylines, the question remains: does it matter?

Impeachment in and of itself as a constitutional process the equivalent of capital punishment was ruined by the partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton.  It was sound and fury that ended up signifying nothing but that there would be no limits to party politics.

But impeachment is a process, and if the case is made carefully and dramatically in public hearings, everything could change.

As of now, however, it is part of a larger picture, not a result in itself.  What it's still all about is the 2020 election.

There's the theory that he is self-impeaching, that he's bored with being president.  But while that may be true on some level, it's not the operational one: he desperately needs to remain president as long as possible, because once he leaves, he'll be making headlines only for the many crimes he'll be charged with.

Once again he is said to be out of control, which also may be true on some level, but not the operational one:  he is doing what has worked for him, which is to manufacture attention on himself every day, and create very clear confrontations that allows him to identify very clear enemies.

He is doing this with exactly one aim in mind: to be reelected.  It's all about the election of 2020.

He may or may not fear impeachment, but he is confident that he will not be convicted by the Senate and removed from office, so while he bullies GOPers to keep them in line (and is likely to succeed, despite the headlines made by a few dissenters), he pursues his main strategy of creating an absolute and extreme us vs. them dynamic.

His instincts are to be a blustering bully, and that serves him in these endeavors.  He will keep the pressure on Republican Senators to be totally loyal, and at least as long as he seems to influence elections, he will likely continue to intimidate them.  He will bully them, and everyone and everything else, including the Constitution.  He bullied his way into office by being outrageous, and he's betting it will work again.

Though he moans and complains, that's why he doesn't really much care that he's alienated the entire Washington establishment with his caving to Turkey's dictator, betrayal of the Kurds and help to Putin in Syria.  He needs Putin to repeat Russian help in 2020, and his voters don't much care about foreign affairs anymore, but they love to see him stick it to Washington.  It touches that aimless anger, and what frightens some people entertains others.  A wannabe dictator supported by nihilists is not that surprising. What we may also be seeing is an authoritarian supported by anarchists.

His stance is called nationalism, which has too many meanings and resonances to be all that useful as a description.  But what translates to his voters is anti-globalism.  They identify globalist economics as the cause of their economic problems, and they aren't entirely wrong.  The chattering classes still don't understand the damage done economically, culturally and psychologically when America stopped making things, especially the things that Americans buy. Maybe our crap was just as bad--overall I don't think it was--but at the modest price range, it's pretty much all crap now, produced by foreign slave labor.

 And people resent it, and are hurt by it.  It is in all those categories--making a living, culture, self-worth--feeding the feelings of helplessness.   Yes, there are racist and xenophobic aspects to it, but it is the visible source of "income inequality," that is the enriching of a few at the expense of the many.

He is pursuing the same strategy that got him just enough votes in the right places to win in 2016--by basically thumbing his nose at all established media including debates (he won't participate) and TV ads, and concentrating on the one-line zinger messaging of social media, helped not only by visible echo chambers like Fox News but the thousands of local phony sites that his Russian friends will put up--faster than they can be taken down.

The only difference is that he'll have a lot more money to do it.  See this New York Times story, as one example.  The polls say he will lose.  But the polls said the same thing in 2016.  The NYT gave him a 90% chance of losing, on election night.  There were many things that made the difference--but the Internet was likely the biggest factor.

Remember that the crimes of Nixon were all about getting him reelected in 1972, after a very close election in 1968.  It's the same today.  He's all about 2020.

Poetry Monday: Morris Graves's Blind Bird

"Blind Bird" by Morris Graves 1940

Morris Graves’s Blind Bird

This is the only way we can understand each other now
this is the only way I can listen to you
with our feet tangled in the white yarn bushes
known as the world

this is the way the holders of the blinding pins
came to be unable ever to hear
Hardy told me he had seen an ancestor of yours
long ago when I was in the dark before I was born here

and I learned later that those with the pins
became unable to hear you when you kept singing
to yourself and your clear voice kept rising
out of the chords and the great chorus of your ancestors

now as I listen to you I hear in your voice
the forgotten freedom leaping over the rocks
and flying again and the rocks are singing
under you out of the unending silence
where the world goes on beginning

W.S. Merwin
 Garden Time