Today, more than 8,600 personnel remain assigned to 10 active large wildfires. To date, more than 2.4 million acres have burned statewide. Get the latest on these incidents at: https://fire.ca.gov/incidents CALFIRE @CAL_FIRE· Official Twitter Account of CAL FIRESacramento, CA

The day after our walk along the Truckee River, the smoke arrived at Tahoe and we departed for the cleaner air at home in Portola Valley. We decided to drive along the West Shore and cross the Sierras on Highway 50 at Echo Summit thinking we would ghoulishly see the fire damage from the still smoldering Caldor Fire. Driving down Highway 89 on the west side of the lake, we couldn’t see across the lake, not even from above Emerald Bay. But, the good news was that driving around south of the lake, it was hard to find fire damage.

Once we got over the pass, we started running into burnt out sections of forest. Then it was down into the Central Valley and home to clear skies.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough. Mary Mary Hunter Austin

Last week, Michele and I went over to the east side of the Sierras to preview the fall color. Well, really, to get out of the house, to have some input other than the television and the fall colors were the excuse. This year was hotter and drier than it used to be, so does that mean the trees will change into their fall finery earlier or later? Does it make any difference? My guess is earlier because the lack of water should trigger shedding leaves to cut down on transpiration, but that’s just a guess. Like almost any trip, we started in traffic on a freeway and the crowded highways turned into much emptier roads east of Groveland.

We had left home under clear blue skies and the PurpleAir sensors were telling us that it was clear in the greater Bishop-Lone Pine area, but, as we headed east the sky started getting hazy and then smoky. We passed The Rim Fire overlook and, even in this dry year, the land is recovering. Faster than I had expected. I had passed the Rim Fire overlook right after the fire, like right after in October of 2013, and the devastation rattled me but now I am starting to accept that this will be a normal part of the West’s biosphere.

To make a long nothing-happened story shorter, I’ll summarize it with we went over the Sierras just in time to catch the wind direction changing with the smoke from the Knp Complex fire that has been threatening the sequoias in the King’s Canyon-Sequoia National park area now drifting over the mountains into the Owen’s Valley. But Purple Air said Tahoe was clear, so we drove north, through Nevada, to Tahoe where it was Indian Summer warm and the air was sparkling clean…until the next day, when it wasn’t, so we drove home where the air was still soft and clear.

On our drive north through Nevada, we drove by Boundry Peak, the highest point in Nevada, where a hiker had been lost and had come close to dying a couple of days earlier. Looking at Boundry Peak, it seems that it would be impossible to get lost, but the West is immense, the spaces way bigger than they seem, and the humans on the land invisibly small. I know, I spent a good part of a day trying to be seen by a helicopter.

In my early twenties, I was involved in rescuing a badly hurt climber who had fallen on the steep side of Mt. Banner. Three of us were camped at Thousand Island Lake waiting for a fourth, coming in a different way, to climb Ritter. It was a warm afternoon and we were basking in the sun by the side of the lake when a guy came running up saying that his buddy had fallen on the south side of Banner the day before. Two of us packed our equipment and some warm clothing and started up the mountain. As it got dark, we stalled out trying to get onto the glacier above Catherine lake and spent the night in a boulder field. We got up early – even in one’s early twenties, sleeping sitting up on rock promotes getting up early – got on the glacier, and hiked to the top. Once we got there, we were a little like the dog that caught the bus, now that we were on the saddle at the top of the glacier, we really weren’t sure what to do next.

Luckily and almost magically two more climbers showed up right after us. Both of them were doctors and way more experienced climbers than us. They had heard about the fallen climber and had climbed up from Lake Ediza to offer help. The doctors took over and we helped, eventually finding the injured climber who had fallen about twenty feet before being stopped by a ledge. By now, the climber had been on the mountain, exposed, at about 12,500 feet, for three days and two nights. He was a mess with severe gangrene on two fingers and a swollen foot peeking out of his crushed boot. He was hallucinating, calling for his mother, which was disturbing, but we could hear the distant sound of a rescue helicopter and we all felt that it would find us soon.

But it didn’t. We 3/4s carried and 1/4 dragged the injured guy to the saddle between Banner and Ritter where we were more visible. There, we tried to attract the helicopter’s attention. Picture four of us, standing on white granite in the middle of a saddle above a glacier, jumping up and down and waving two large orange panels, and for hours a helicopter, not knowing exactly where we were, was flying around looking for us but didn’t see us, couldn’t find us. We could see it but it always seemed to start towards us and then turn the wrong way. Finally, as the shadows got longer and the air colder, the helicopter flew away, leaving us in the fading sun and empty silence.

We were deep in the Ansel Adams Wilderness but were only twelve to fifteen miles away from civilization at Mammoth and that is where the helicopter went to find the guy who had told us about his fallen buddy. About half an hour later, the helicopter showed up again. Now, with a guide, they knew exactly – well, within a football field size space – where we were. Now they could see us.

As an aside, the helicopter had burned up almost all of its fuel and only had time enough to winch up the injured guy, drop us a one-man survival pack including an insulated field coat – the kind with fur around the hood – and fly back to the trailhead to refuel. We had to spend a second night on the mountain, huddling together in the cold, sharing the pseudo food in the survival pack four ways. End aside.

But that was almost sixty years ago and, on this latest trip, we were comfortably cruising north in the climate-controlled cocoon of a Hyundai Tucson. About forty miles north of Boundry Peak and eighty miles northwest of Banner is Hawthorn Nevada, a small town in a large valley. The valley has been denuded to build storage facilities for various munitions. Normally, I don’t think that civilization sits very well in the desert, too much of the normally hidden rubble and detritus is exposed, but in Hawthorn, everything has been swept clean and it looks almost like a giant art project. An art project illustrating the banality of the weapons of war and death.

The last time I was here was in July of 2011 with Ed Dieden and we stopped at the local museum called the Hawthorne Ordnance Museum but, really, a museum dedicated to a variety of increasingly effective ways of killing people. Happily, we skipped it this time, cruising by Walker Lake on the way to Squaw Valley where, the next day, we walked along the paved trail overlooking the Truckee River which was almost empty but still almost impossible to get lost on.

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I just said, “I don’t give a fuck” at a faculty meeting. How’s your day going? Jennifer Taub @jentaub Law Professor and author of the new book BIG DIRTY MONEY (Viking 2020). Penguin paperback edition comes out September 28, 2021. Northampton, MA

I feel like I’ve been stuck since last spring. I still have no idea why I ended up anemic and in the hospital. In one way, I should be relieved because I seem to be on the mend, but it bothers me that nobody seems to know the source of the problem. It feels like a strangely familiar throwback to when I owned, over the years, several old – mostly 50s-60s – cars. I’d be pulling away from a stoplight and the car would hiccup, maybe the lights would go out, maybe the engine stalled, but just for a moment, then it went away, or came back, whatever is the direction of Whew, what was that? and everything would seem just fine. And everything would be fine but, in the back of my mind, I knew that the hiccup wouldn’t be a one-time hiccup. Still, what to do? It is very hard to find, let alone fix, an intermittent problem when the problem is away, so I’d just keep drivin’. And pretty soon it would just seem like my imagination. And that is pretty much what I’m doing now.

I am still stuck at the Met Gala; thinking about what this Met Gala means, and wondering if it is a reflection of a world that seems to be undergoing a titanic change. Well, maybe not a changing world, but a changing United States, anyway. I keep reading that the Met Gala is the biggest and most influential fashion event – get together? party? – of the year, and it probably is but, this year, it is also staggeringly not the traditional White male patriarchy. That surprised me. The guests at the Met Gala are not the same influential people that are at the Opara or the Symphony, the people at this gala are way more diverse, culturally, and racially (although not, seemingly, financially).

Fashion is strange, it is a multibillion-dollar business and it is also an art. At least the people in the business at the high-end, consider themselves artists. Artists who want to make money, artists who want to become famous and end up at the Met Gala, and this year, at least, a large number of them, maybe a preponderance, are people of color. Having people of color at the table where decisions are made, that, I think, represents real change.

Another change is the use of the word fuck. The word has always been with us but it used to signify that the user was crude and disreputable, at best. In a movie, any character that said fuck more than once was sure to be a bad guy. Now, fuck has joined ain’t as a signifier that the speaker -especially if the speaker is a woman -is sophisticated, refined even, but edgy.

Another thing, even after it became legal, that carried a more than slightly disreputable vibe is marijuana. A year and a half ago, just before we all quarantined, Michele and I were in LA and ran across a cannabis store on a fashionable shopping street. It was named gen!us and the whole front wall was glass showing the entire, well-lite store and any buyers buying cannabis. I was shocked that it was so undark-allyish. About a week or so ago, there was an front-page article about the ten best upscale cannabis stores in Southern California and I was surprised, once again, that gen!us didn’t even make the list.

As an aside, I had remembered the article but couldn’t find it when I Googled Best cannabis Stores in LA. I finally did find it but it didn’t show originally because it was called The 10 best SoCal pot shops worth seeing in person right now. Calling them pot shops and saying worth seeing in person, now that’s a change. End aside.

What hasn’t changed is that I’m still getting emails from the former guy that read like scams, Steve, I just spoke with my father and I have an important update to share with you. Given how critical of a role you’ve played in our efforts to SAVE AMERICA, he could really use you on our team as an Official Trump Cardholder. Trump Cardholders will go down in history as the Patriots who SAVED AMERICA from Joe Biden and the radical Left, and we really want YOU to be a part of it. If you join today, we’ll even send you your very own PERSONALIZED Trump Card.

One last thing that hasn’t changed is that Sir Lewis Hamilton is still winning, today he became the first driver to win one hundred Grand Prix (only three other drivers have won 50 races). Congratulation to Lewis the GOAT.

342/350 cases in the Duke outbreak were vaccinated. We absolutely have to shift messaging away from “vaccines mean you won’t get COVID” to “vaccines mean you won’t die alone in an ICU bed.” Tweet by KSV @KSVesqI help companies comply with employment laws. Mom to two fantastic girls (and one pug). Color commentary for @steve_vladeck. Co-host @inlocoparentsAustin, TX

“They want to convey not just authority, but intimidating authority,” said Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington,

I’ve been in a bad mood for the last couple of weeks, bouncing back and forth between anger and depression over the state of our environment, although, I’m learning that turning the news off does help. When I was in my late twenties, the slogan “Don’t trust anybody over thirty” became popular, popular, at least, with people far enough under thirty to feel safe in saying it. Now those same people seem to be saying, “Don’t trust the new young activists, they are too radical.” I think that they were right in the first place; “Don’t trust anybody over thirty, we talk a good game but we know we won’t be around when the check for our splurging off the failing environment comes due.”

In the meanwhile, the twenty-year anniversary of 9-11 came and went. I’m surprised at how little I’m emotionally affected by 9-11, Michele and I were in Italy and we both feel like we missed one of the seminal events of the last fifty years. Yeah, we saw it on TV – over and over and over again, ad nauseam – like everybody else but we were watching from Italy, in a different emotional world.

Google tells me that it was California’s Senator Hiram Johnson who first said, “The first causality of war is the truth.” Johnson was a Republican and an isolationist and I guess I am an isolationist also. I’m reluctant to say that because isolationists had such a bad name during my formative years, growing up in the aftermath of World War II. But I am an isolationist; I think that our almost constant state of war is destroying our country and has perverted our government. The mainstream media likes war and has promoted it from, at least, the time Hearst and Pulitzer used their papers to push us into war with Spain over the fabricated charge that Spain sunk the battleship, USS Maine.

Now, everything we hear or read or are shown about the Taliban for the last twenty years screams that the Taliban are irrationally evil, especially in their relationship with women. All of that may be true but they won an essentially bloodless war. Heavily outgunned, the Taliban just strolled into power, so they must be doing something right. As the Taliban strolled in, thousands of Afghanis, the ones that had bet on the wrong side, ran the other way, trying to get out of the country.

Looking at all the pictures of those refugee families coming into the US, my first thought is what a culture shock it must be. But, thinking about it, these are people, for whom the new Afghanistan was working and most of them are probably better educated and way richer than the average refugee. The United States, – alone, not counting other countries and NGOs – poured $145 billion into Afghanistan, much of it in easy to lose cash. Afghanistan’s government was corrupt even before that money was thrown at what we considered Afghanistan’s problems, willy nilly, and the $145 billion didn’t all go into road repair and building schools, much of it went into people’s pockets. Accordingly, most of these refugees are rich, educated abroad, and more worldly than I had been giving them credit for and I suspect that they will do well in the so-called first world.

I’m vaccinated and I’m trying to get a booster to be more vaccinated, but I am also starting to come to the realization that the Covid vaccines which we thought were so magical are actually making the pandemic worse. The Covid vaccine might prevent you from getting Covid in some cases – maybe even most cases – but the biggest advantage seems to be that it increases our odds of not becoming seriously ill or ending up on a ventilator. ABC did a poll of 50 hospitals in 17 states and came up with 94% of the people in ICU wards were unvaccinated because unvaccinated people get sicker than vaccinated people. The vaccine minimizes the effects of Covid, but it doesn’t always prevent people who are exposed to Covid from getting it and then spreading the COVID-19 virus to others. In the meanwhile, we vaccinated people, thinking we are safe, get together inside with other vaccinated people some of who may or may not be infected. That’s the problem, if one of us is infected, it is less likely that we will know we are infected if we are vaccinated and, it seems to me, that will make us more likely to spread the disease.

To leave with some good news, although good news may not be the right way to put it, news that made me smile is probably better. Yesterday, I started seeing pictures on Twitter of celebrities dressed like they were going to a costume ball, and it soon became obvious that this was the evening of the Met Gala, a major fashion event in New York. This is not something I would normally be familiar with, but I am because Lewis Hamilton goes every year, posting pictures on his Twitter feed, and, you know, he’s Lewis Hamilton. The Gala is all about fashion, one of Lewis’s passions (along with driving very fast cars very fast). If you don’t know what the Met Gala is, think about the Academy Awards Red Carpet without the Academy Awards. This year Lewis bought a table and invited seven young Black designers. At a cost of $30,000 per ticket, that’s a lot of money; talk about putting your money where your mouth is, this is it.

Surprisingly, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was also there, sitting at the head table. She and her partner were specifically invited by the Met and their tickets, I read, were comped. I’m very happy to say that AOC had the cajones to stay on message but I’m not surprised. AOC is one of the bravest, if not the bravest, politicians I’ve ever seen, always willing to talk truth to power. Willing to walk into a room of extraordinarily rich people and tell them they should pay taxes.

While Anna Wintour is the main poobah of the Gala, there were four co-hosts, poet Amanda Gorman, Timothée Chalamet who plays Paul Atreides in  Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune movie, Grammy-winning singer Billie Eilish – who wore an Oscar de la Renta gown on the condition that the designer would no longer use real fur – and tennis champion Naomi Osaka. They are all under thirty which may be why AOC was invited. To circle back, fashion seems to be an industry that is willing to trust people under thirty. I hope the trust people under thirty sentiment catches on. We need to listen to young people to save the world, it is becoming obvious that we, the older, supposedly more mature generations, are not going to do it.

Finally, Happy Wednesday and Congratulation to Governor Gavin Newsom for surviving the truly stupid, wasteful, recall.  

I

Public reason requires that the moral or political rules that regulate our common life be, in some sense, justifiable or acceptable to all those persons over whom the rules purport to have authority. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 24, 2017 

True story: I’ve been throwing a lot of birdseed on the ground lately. One of the nasty side effects of any drought is that less foliage, especially grasses, means less seed. With less seed available in the wild, more birds come to our yard looking for food. The birds are going through the seed in the birdfeeder more quickly and, as soon as I toss a large tumbler of birdseed on the ground, all kinds of ground feeders show up; their hunger making them braver. The Juncos are always the first to show up and then the local Steller’s Jays. Recently, they have been joined by several gentle Mourning Doves, and, then tentatively, a couple of families of quail, the little downy puffballs of spring now as big as their parents.

But the biggest eaters, by far, are two squirrels – neither Michele nor I are any good at identifying squirrels so there may be more than two but there are only two at a time, and they are slightly different – who Michele has named Hoover and Lux. A couple of days ago I threw some seeds out, and Michele laughed at Hoover who was immediately there, sucking up seed. She said something like, “Hoover, you are a pig, hoovering everything up.” Michele’s phone said, “Why isn’t the narcissist hoovering me?” We were both shocked, where did that come from? And what the hell is hoovering, anyway? If you’ll Google hoovering, it will tell you hoovering is a manipulation tactic that someone might use to suck you back into a potentially toxic relationship. Michele said, “Holy shit, that’s me and Veronica!” It was almost instantly obvious to both of us, it exactly describes what she had been talking about for the last two or three weeks.

Several years ago, Michele was asked over to a woman’s house in a nearby town and that evening, over dinner, she told me how isolated this unhappy woman was. Over the next couple of years, Michele visited the woman probably about once a month, even taking her to the hospital for a minor procedure when there was nobody else, but, increasingly, Michele has come home feeling used and slightly put down. Recently, Michele has drifted away because the relationship seemed increasingly toxic, and Veronica would call and ask Michele to come over for some reason, the last couple of times it was to get some vegetables which Veronica had a surplus of. Then Michele got mauled by a couple of dogs and, when she told Veronica she was hurt and couldn’t come over, the calls stopped. It was hurtful and Michele wondered out loud why Veronica didn’t call anymore. Now we know.

Another true story: a week or two ago, I got an email suggesting a book from a little-known – to me, at least – publisher, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. My first reaction was, Yes! I want that book, right now and that sort of took me back. I rarely have that sort of reaction, that joyously extreme. I asked Michele if she could guess what the book was about and, and then realized that couldn’t have possibly guessed and either could I have. This book is so perfect and so far out of left field. I bought it immediately.

As an aside, my first thought was that this must be a scam and I didn’t want to answer an email I hadn’t solicited or know the sender, so I didn’t click through the email. I googled the publisher and bought the book that way. End aside.