The Basin Complex/Gallery fire that is threatening the small community of Big Sur has grown by 8,485 acres in the past 24 hours.NASA's Earth Observatory has images current as of yesterday.  My thanks to the folks at NASA for their imagery.

Last month, California gave its stamp of approval to same-sex marriage, becoming only the second state after Massachusetts to do so.  Fear of gay marriage has long been exploited by right-wingers as the ultimate homophobic weapon to scare up bigotry and votes. Predictably, a parade of anti-gay idiots came out of the woodwork, howling in protest.

But they're on the wrong side of history. And to fully understand recent events, it's important to remember a tragedy that happened thirty-five years ago, and how much things have changed for gay Americans since then.

On the last Sunday in June, 1973, a gay bar in New Orleans called the UpStairs Lounge was firebombed. The resulting blaze killed 32 people. The death toll was the worst in New Orleans history up to that time. It was almost assuredly the largest mass murder of gays and lesbians to ever occur in the United States.

More below the fold.

File this one under "WTF". The Dallas Morning News is reporting that a fire that destroyed the Texas Governors Mansion was the work of arson.

This is part of the ongoing to posts from FoundingFatherDAR,  FrugalGranny, and Moody Loner's diaries.  

As we have many Kossacks and their families in the area, it's good to keep the updates going.  

Basic info:

A wildfire in the Santa Cruz mountains has burned more than 3,000 acres, (as of 4pm pacific time) and has been declared "out of control."  Some structures have been destroyed.

High, erratic winds are driving the flames and making it difficult to get fire suppression aircraft into the area.   This is in an area with dense forestation.  Several local schools were closed.  One school first used as an evacuation site was subsequently evacuated. For those in the area, the Pajaro District is not closed. The kids are being kept inside out of the smoke and ash.

Smoke and ash are heaviest in the Watsonville area as of 4:30pm pdt.

Many people in the area have large livestock that need to be evacuated as well.

The fire started at about 5:30 a.m. Thursday off Summit Road near Loma Prieta Road in the Santa Cruz mountains.  In Google info this is called the Summit Fire. Governor Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency for the area.

I'm going to repost from FoundingFatherDAR's FrugalGranny's diary.  As we have Kossacks and their families in the area, it's good to keep the updates going.  

From her diary:

A wildfire in the Santa Cruz mountains has burned more than 1,000 acres, and has now been declared "out of control."  Some structures have been destroyed.
High, erratic winds are driving the flames and making it difficult to get fire suppression aircraft into the area.   This is in an area with dense forestation.  
Several local schools were closed.  One school first used as an evacuation site was subsequently evacuated.
Many people in the area have large livestock that need to be evacuated as well.

The fire started at about 5:30 a.m. Thursday off Summit Road near Loma Prieta Road in the Santa Cruz mountains.

NBC 11 Coverage

SF Chronicle

EVACUATION INFORMATION
Call any of these numbers:

831-335-5355

831-335-6717

831-335-6718

831-335-6719

I'm going to repost from FoundingFatherDAR's diary.  As we have Kossacks and their families in the area, it's good to keep the updates going.  

From his diary:

A wildfire in the Santa Cruz mountains has burned more than 1,000 acres, and has now been declared "out of control."  Some structures have been destroyed.
High, eratic winds are driving the flames and making it difficult to get fire suppression aircraft into the area.   This is in an area with dense forestation.  
Several local schools were closed.  One school first used as an evacuation site was subsequently evacuated.
Many people in the area have large livestock that need to be evacuated as well.

The fire started at about 5:30 a.m. Thursday off Summit Road near Loma Prieta Road in the Santa Cruz mountains.

NBC 11 Coverage

SF Chronicle

A wildfire in the Santa Cruz mountains has burned more than 1,000 acres, and has now been declared "out of control."  Some structures have been destroyed.
High, eratic winds are driving the flames and making it difficult to get fire suppression aircraft into the area.   This is in an area with dense forestation.  
Several local schools were closed.  One school first used as an evacuation site was subsequently evacuated.
Many people in the area have large livestock that need to be evacuated as well.

The fire started at about 5:30 a.m. Thursday off Summit Road near Loma Prieta Road in the Santa Cruz mountains.

 NBC11 coverage

The flames are being fanned by gusty winds out of the northwest that are predicted to hit 35 mph today. Aerial photos of the fire show the plume of smoke has spread south to Carmel.

 S.F. Chron

In this edition of Mad Scientist Project of the Week (MSPW here and onward), I will mostly be introducing the idea, but hope also to tell you about something interesting.

Believe it or not, I came up with this idea while preparing for bed while feverish, and I think my half-poisoned brain was coming up with ideas to amuse itself. What I'm going to do, therefore, is try to come up with some crazy project either in basic research or in R&D that sounds like something the mad scientists of comic books might be working on. Some of these projects may be real projects; some of them may be real projects funded by your tax money; some of them will be purely the inventions of my diseased brain. None of them will be particularly likely to work but may inspire chuckles.

Oh, and I'm going to try to do this once a week. Fitting it in between preparing for academic exams, the GRE, and looking for work. Right.

Anyway, for the first issue of MSPW, I would like to introduce the idea that spawned all the subsequent madness: genetic engineering. And not any genetic engineering: genetic engineering of skunks, to produce skunks that spray fire.

Every good sea story starts with an alarm and ends with a message.  Risk of death, personal heroics, etc. are also necessary.  I can't give credit by name where it's due, because the story isn't finished, but let's get started.  

This story takes place on the PACIFIC GLACIER, a 276' factory trawler...  

Some news items from MSNBC on this Wednesday.

This has been posted on the front page, but it's worth repeating for anyone who might have missed it.  A database has been created that catalogs nearly 1,000 of the lies that led to war in Iraq.  Not "intelligence failures", not "misstatements", but LIES: deliberately false statements made with intent to deceive.  Most of us on the left have long known that the Bush-Cheney regime was lying its collective ass off to get us mired in Iraq.  We also know that a complicit and lazy corporate media helped promote those deceptions.  A number of people have made fortunes off of exposing those lies, but their impact upon the public consciousness has been limited.  Now there's a convenient database.

A student expelled by Valdosta State University, T. Hayden Barnes, has filed a lawsuit against the university, its president, the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, and other school administrators after being expelled for publicly protesting the school’s decision to construct two new parking garages on campus.

Yesterday we were told a controlled burn was out of control but there was no danger.

Back in 1968, when I first heard a talk about global warming while visiting the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, almost everyone thought that serious problems were several centuries in the future. That's because no one realized how ravenous the world's appetite for coal and oil would become during a mere 40 years. They also thought that problems would develop slowly. Wrong again.

I tuned into abrupt climate change about 1984, when the Greenland ice cores showed big jumps in temperature and snowfall, stepping up and down in a mere decade but lasting centuries. I worried about global warming setting off another flip but I still didn't revise my notions about a slow time scale for the present greenhouse warming.

Greenland changed my mind. About 2004, the speedup of the Greenland glaciers made a lot of climate scientists revise their notions about how fast things were changing. When the summer earthquakes associated with glacial movement doubled and then redoubled in a mere ten years, it made me feel as if I was standing on shaky ground, that bigger things could happen at any time.

Crossposted at The Hemp Report and Booman Tribune.

This morning I got up to go to work like every weekday morning. I work an early AM shift, but I still check my email before I leave. This morning there was an email with this stunning subject line in my Vote Hemp and HIA Board in boxes "Fwd: White Plume home burned down today."

Alex White Plume on his back steps
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation - Manderson, SD
AP Photo/Chet Brokaw

The email was from Tom Cook and he writes:

A fire in the Vice Presidential Ceremonial office was reported to be under control. While initial reports attributed the blaze to electrical or communications equipment, unnamed insiders told a different story.

"The Vice President and his advisors were in the office, planning the next 5 years of the Bush Presidency, when Satan showed up to collect the Vice President's soul.", said the source. "Satan produced a document that clearly showed that the VP had signed over his soul in exchange for 5 draft deferments, survival through a number of heart attacks, a shredding of the Bill of Rights, and ascension to being the behind the scenes de facto President of the United States. The VP muttered something about 'A deal being a deal' and ushered the Devil over to the historic view of Washington through the show window of the office. He then cold cocked the the fallen angel and strangled him with a Presidential Medal of Freedom that happened to be handy. The VP then dragged the body into a utility closet, doused it with some white lightning that he knew the President kept stashed there, and burned the evidence."

"I don't know why he had to do that.", said the aide, "It's not like he was going to miss his soul anyway."

Calling the White House comment line today I was met with an unusually unprofessional response.

Seems that more than a few have called the White House to comment on the fire in Cheney's offices - relating the event to destruction of evidence.........

"You're hardly the first person today....." <click>

But how sad is it when there are SO MANY people reacting in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY, when one's first reaction is that "Cheney's destroying MORE evidence?

How sad is it when you EXPECT the President and members of his Administration to do WHATEVER IS NECESSARY to cover their own tails - to the exclusion of obeying the law and all else?

This afternoon, the White House confirmed that a quickly contained blaze isolated to a storage room utility closet on the third floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office building destroyed the following records:

Thick black smoke billowed from a fire Wednesday on the White House compound in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

The blaze appeared to be located in Vice President Dick Cheney's suite of ceremonial offices on the second floor of the building.

Here are the top ten probable causes of the fire.

Most of these are from wadenelson1 at the Huffington Post, but I edited and added a few.