Tag Archives: Wildfire

Will Act of God close Drake coal plant?

Posted on by
Reply

Colorado Springs Drake Power Plant
[FULL TEXT OF LETTER SUBMITTED TO CS INDEPENDENT MAY 14] Two years ago Colorado Springs lost 346 homes to the Waldo Canyon fire which precipitated floods expected to haunt the westside and Manitou for years to come.

The next year saw a wildfire in Black Forest that took an unprecedented 500 homes. That’s unprecedented for Colorado, although with global warming it’s certainly a portent of cataclysms to follow.

You’d think two fires in a row might have motivated city leaders to seize the chance to act on climate change, and not just symbolically. By coincidence Colorado Springs Utilities had been equivocating about whether to reinvest in an aging coal-fired power plant located in the center of town.

Imagine how we might have redeemed our city’s national reputation if Colorado Springs had announced a decision to close the Drake coal plant, prompted by wild fires to reduce the burning of fossil fuels! Instead the utilities board laid out only long term options, most to sustain Drake, and only one which included a token investment in renewable energy.

This year saw another coincidence. This is of course conjecture on my part. Seeing his two previous acts unheeded, local favorite God surprised everyone with a third fire where Colorado Springs backward thinkers would be sure to get the point. Last week the Drake coal plant itself caught fire, certainly the least expected and most poetic of global warming victims.

We’re told it’s going to take over a billion dollars to bring Drake back online. I’ve got an idea and I’m not even religious. LET’S CLOSE IT! Let’s spend that billion on a solar array or a wind farm! Naysayers should be ashamed to pretend we don’t have a plentitude of both.

It’s too late to convince the world we’re brilliant, let’s show we’re not idiots. The collective decision to act on climate change begins at home if you have a publicly owned coal-fired power plant. Communities across the world have stopped burning coal, are we with them or against them?

The Drake coal plant didn’t just spew carbon, its emissions included lots of toxins we were forced to breath. Heart disease and asthma were two measurable harms which any doctor could attribute to Drake, scrubbers or no scrubbers. The coal ash accumulating south of town is another threat altogether, of which the recent ash spill in North Carolina serves as a heartbreaking warning.

Even if we reinvest a billion in Drake, we have several months of clean air and cleaner consciences to think more clearly about it. This summer America the Beautiful Park will be the healthiest it’s been in fifty years, when the old “cloud-maker” got its start.

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be a shame not put every next penny into renewable, sustainable, healthy energy, starting with this first billion?

I’d like to think people can decide to save the environment for their own health and for their children, but if it takes an Act of God to close Drake, so be it.

Waldo Canyon concert fundraiser feted Colo. Springs self-interest & ignorance

Posted on by
2

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.- All night local speakers proclaimed: “Colorado Springs knows how to look after its own.” And doesn’t it! But I’m almost positive that it used to be, if only everywhere else, the virtue was looking out for others, not just your own.
 
The Waldo Canyon fundraiser for fire victims was titled “a community rising” and was explained as a coming together, without regard for religious or political differences, I would also add, minus humility and what would be common sense if the denominator wasn’t so debased. This was so embarrassing it hurt.

So we experienced a wildfire, part of the natural cycle of western forests, which burned a neighborhood probably built too far into a canyon, made worse, and ubiquitous right now across the Southwest, by an unnatural heatwave that portends climate change. Was any of that mentioned? NOPE.

Instead victims vowed to rebuild, as they fetishized firefighter vigilance over that ever threatening beast in the hills. Headliner Michael Martin Murphy, apparently the perpetual flame of wildfire vigil keeping, owing to his “Wildfire” hit but it was about a horse, sang a lament which listed the West’s many epic fires, appending mention of “Waldo Canyon” like a latest mining disaster. We’re supposed to prevent the fires apparently, like buying pink things to fight cancer. Wildfires aren’t tragedies except to logging interests. When Smokey the Bear cried, it was over timber that didn’t get logged. Of course national park visitors have to be reminded to exercise caution, because, the US Forestry Service jobs depend on the trees. We thought it was about Bambi’s mom, but those wildlives are managed too, with bullets, lest their populations threaten the trees.

Should people who who want to live in the forest be let to deny its nature like they shrug off global warming? And much as we gush over firemen, it’s a job. More clerks are shot at 7-11s than there are fallen heros listed on the multiple “national” monuments to firefighters.

The Waldo Canyon Fire destruction was the wrath of nature, whether owed to arson or deficient firefighting, the calamitous fire season throughout the state confirms that climate change created the perfect storm, but Jesus Springs is probably not prepared to consider the flaming villainy was an Act of God.

And where does anyone need reassurance that Colorado Springs doesn’t look after its own? We’re the no-holds-barred world street-fighting champions of supporting our workforce, standing up for our war criminal enabling ways. We’re a Support the Troops, Climate Denying, Drill Baby Drill, Charter-Schooling, God Hates Fags, No Thanks We’re Racists, God Damn apologists for Ayn Rand lowbrow cultural ignorance, and flag-waving PROUD OF IT. We don’t give a damn about burning other people’s houses, the people in them included. But when it happens to us, prayers and calls for prayers spam the internets.

We look after our own, if by our own, we mean our neighbors with homes. Colorado Springs stopped pretending to care about the homeless, it’s still piling on ordinances to criminalize poverty. If you’re homeless in Colorado Springs, you get as much compassion as people who lose their houses to our fires.

What’s happy about the Fourth of July?

Posted on by
Reply

AYFKM? Even “have a nice day” has more credibility, or have a holiday that’s happy. Should our national day of flag waving, specifically OUR celebration of patriotism as citizens of an ever broadening, ever more savage repressive empire, remind us to be happy? How about, don’t cry? Over the past week, as neighbors stood curbside to thank the firefighters returning from the Waldo Canyon Fire, they waved flags and wore red white and blue, because, it’s the only thing Americans know to wave I guess. What does it mean, thanking firefighters with American flags? Competence and bravery are American qualities? Heroism is patriotic? We kick wildfire ass? Did we? Because we didn’t, as President Obama’s disaster zone visit confirmed. Much the reverse. And we’re reaping the same cataclysm with our imperial flag planting everywhere.

KOAA thanks Waldo Canyon firefighters but doesn’t think their dangerous work merits healthcare benefits, apparently

Posted on by
2

Monday July 2 community thank-you to Waldo Canyon firefighters held in Pleasant Valley neighborhood of Colorado Springs
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.- Funny story. KOAA was covering the community thank you given to the firefighters returning from the Waldo Canyon Fire last night. Members of Occupy Colorado Springs joined the crowd with signs calling attention to the fact that many of the firefighters don’t have healthcare benefits. The Channel 5 reporter instructed his cameraman to avoid filming those signs, including one which read “WE SUPPORT THE FIREFIGHTER’S UNION” which incidentally, got a lot of thumbs up from the passing fire crews. Local TV crews will extend adulation for the wildfire-fighting heroes, but their conservatism has limits. Don’t you think the rigors of firefighting, and exposure to unknowably toxic smoke, merits health coverage? It’s alright to show adulating communities thanking the heroic fire crews but not caring about them.

Waldo Canyon Wildfire gives Colorado Springs a front range seat to war zone movie set, says Governor Hickenlooper

Posted on by
Reply


COLORADO SPRINGS- Governor Hickenlooper made the remark after touring the Waldo Canyon Fire by helicopter. After touching down on the grounds of Coronado High School, cleared mid-press-conference because it fell in the freshly designated evacuation area, the governor said the wildfire resembled the movie set of a military invasion. Predictably the media clipped his observation to just “movie set”, adding the fire chief’s “epic” and “historic”. President Obama is expected to visit the disaster zone on Friday. I wonder if he’ll match our governor’s candor. He is certainly in the position to say whether our present horror is any match for the devastation unleashed by our invasions. Perhaps he can tell us the fire’s equivalency in drone strikes. Is 100 homes a week’s worth? If President Obama wanted to be partisan about it (pretending his Democratic Party was the antiwar party) he might suggest that conservative war-mongering, race-baiting, climate-denying Colorado Springs had this front range seat coming. Unless sentimentally doused in prayer-sharing reverence, our local disaster, with Governor Hickenlooper’s unedited comment, could be an empathy-learning moment.

How do humans know what’s edible? Nature or nuture? Pink Slime vs GMOs

Posted on by
Reply

Is fellatio by nature homoerotic?SO I am going to brave the hypothesis that you can write about Twinkies without having to eat one. Actually I discovered Twinkie image aversion easily overcomes Twinkie the concept, and I don’t just mean examples like the phallic Strangelove Slim Pickens hat tip at right, excuse me? Even to look at the dubiously baked confections is unappetizing, so why do we think they’re edible? This might be a recurring quandary of mine to which short term memory blinds me. Why don’t we try to eat dirt? (Easy for a well fed person to ask.) Where do we get a hunger for breakfast cereals, but not processed pet food? Why do humans stop consuming a fruit at the seed or rind, yet question why those discards fail to interest animal life too? Taste? We grasp that fire consumes nutrients, a toaster sometimes terminally, but how do industrial processes blur how we discern between live food and dead? Is it box art? Which grocery aisle? Sugar and butter are both edible and inedible, with flour it’s the reverse –never mind, that’s not what I meant to write about, I wanted to address the sudden Soylent Greening of PINK SLIME.
I know that vegetarians deride animal flesh for being inhumanely unsavory, but since when have “food activists” been motivated by what’s “gross”? Exactly. Gross has yet to stop sausage makers, and obviously the “Pink Slime” assault on ground beef production is food industry astrotruf. It’s a PR back-burn against the real public outcry, the wildfire of resistance to Genetically Modified GMO Frankenfoods.

Ft Carson is Burnt Acres not Green Acres

Posted on by
1

Ft Carson fire of 2008For several years now Colorado Springs has watched in incredulous dismay as the Pentagon has tried to represent its local terrorism training center, Fort Carson, as being some sort of Green Acres to Coloradans. Incredibly, the local group of Democrats at the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission have done their part in playing part of the game with the military in this regard, as they held joint meetings with the military and even printed up some of their propaganda about being ‘Green’ in their quarterly newsletter.

But what’s the real story about this supposedly lean, green, terrorist cell near by? Are they out to save Mother Earth through the military-industrial complex as they claim? If you are a True Believer in this Pentagon propaganda offensive, then take a look at this news item then… Fort Carson fire consumes 6,500 acres

It turns out, not surprisingly, that the military dropping bombs during heir ‘exercises’ is what started this fire out. These boy toys are noted for being just like that, but burning money off through weaponry is the American economy and so this Blood Red group must expand! Nothing green about it except for the American dollars being consumed so stupidly. It’s simply time to stop this bombs away, burn Mother Earth away machine. If you care about ecology, get out and show your concern by protesting the continuous and constant US military presence here in Colorado Springs.

It takes a lot of nerve to try to pass the pentagon off as Green, humane, and Earth loving, doesn’t it? But these Pentagon lairs get a humongous propaganda budget from American taxpayers to do just that. If your military backed job depends on it,t hen you might be the type of dunce to buy into this hogwash? If not, it’s just another reason to be sick of what the total militarization of America is doing to us.

*** Note that the fire pictured was a wildfire from last year at Fort Carson and not this year’s fire.

I want more change in the White House than just skin color!

Posted on by
Reply

Barack Obama is proving himself to be little more than Joe Lieberman in blackface. Oy gevalt. Cowardly Dems in the Senate (Led by Obama the Coward) passed FISA, out of fear that big meanie Bush might say something bad about them if they didn’t. As if he won’t, anyway. Duh! [detail]

As much as I dislike Hillary Clinton, at least she had the decency to vote against it.

John W. McCain didn’t even bother to show up for the vote…

The ACLU has announced it will fight the unconstitutional law in court.

Civil Liberties? WHAT civil liberties??? Bush kills Civil Liberties Board.

Time to put on your jack boots and Seig Hiel! US military to monitor internet to quell dissent.

Standing up for the truth. SC state employee quits rather than lower flag for toxic Senator Jesse Helms.

Ted Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer, surprised the Senate by showing up to vote on the Medicaid bill yesterday.

The screwing of America. Food manufactures quietly shrinking product sizes, while keeping same packaging and prices.

Marriage equality. MA Senate to consider repealing law that prevents gays from other states from marrying there.

Phil Graham has a mental slowdown, and calls USA a nation of whiners for caring that the GOP has destroyed the economy. If only we’d just focus on how much better off the filthy-rich are, and forget about everyone else.

Life imitates art. Paradise, CA — subject of the Eagles song The LastResort, and inspiration for the Showtime series Weeds — evacuated for wildfire. “Somebody laid the mountains low, while the town got high.”

Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s notes July 10, thomasmc.com.

PCMS wildfire initiates Army PHASE 1B

Posted on by
Reply

Bridger Fire initiates US Army scorched earth policy
PINON CANYON MANEUVER SITE, Colo- The US Army refused assistance in fighting the PCMS Bridger Fire, and now it’s jumped the Pergatoire River and is leading the aquisition of PARCELS 1B and 2A, a year ahead of the Army’s until now thwarted expansion schedule.

Pictured above is an enhanced diagram of a leaked Army map, revealing the expansion planned to create the USA Joint Combat Training Center which will occupy the full Southeastern corner of Colorado. A legend is posted below.

PCMS (blue) Existing Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site
PHASE 1 (green) years 1&2, Wildlife Buffer
PHASE 1a (purple) year 3
PHASE 1b (maroon) year 3
PHASE 2a (yellow) year 4
PHASE 2b (lavender) years 5-10
PHASE 3a (dark grey) year 11
PHASE 3b (grey) year 12
PARCEL 2 (orange) years 13-16
PARCEL 5 (light grey) years 17-18
JCTC (rose) expansion to Oklahoma and Kansas borders

Some “Inflammatory” rhetoric…

Posted on by
Reply

About the Labor Day Fire on Pike’s Peak last year… And the Fascist editor at Westside Pioneer.

You can tell whose pockets the El Paso County Fire Control District are in.

The wealthiest of course.

Y’all remember the fire, right?

Wasn’t a red-hot week later the self-serving rag Westside Pioneer was reporting that it was a homeless person who started the fire.

Somebody was seen leaving the scene, nobody knows who, (I personally have been in a couple of wildfires, and let the Voice of Experience speak, I got the hell as far away from those fires as fast as I possibly could…)

The Fire Marshall or whatever the sell-out bastard’s title is pronounced that the fire MIGHT have been started by a carelessly tossed Cigarette, or MIGHT have been started in a campfire. It was mid morning, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, nobody had no damn campfire going.

And, the clincher of their messed up argument, it was in a “disheveled” homeless campsite.

The editor of the Pioneer, sounds kind of to the Right of Mussolini, arrogantly assumes that it WAS a homeless “Bum” (to use his phrase) who started the fire.

And proceeded to blame the homeless for every ill befalling society today.

    Now, here’s MY theory, and it’s a doozy.

That the camp was all torn up and littered up, that sounds like what happens when Socially Retarded Animated Sphincter Rich-Bitches teach their kids that “bums” are less than human, and that it’s ok to break into their camps (Not while they’re in camp, of course, no no, COWARDS don’t like to risk being confronted by the PEOPLE they’re assaulting)

They steal anything that might be worth money and then break or tear apart everything else. …

    … and in many cases, They Light The Place On Fire…

Occasionally, if there’s a chance that somebody in the camp would defend himself, and they might get more than their Piggy Pride hurt… they’ll call the cops, who are so bootlicking subservient that they’ll take care of the problem, “of course you’re right sir, the poor are causing all the problems of the world and no, sir, you should be insulated from seeing the suffering of your fellow humans, and we’ll take care of the “Bum”, sir”.

Now, I don’t have proof that some out-of-control Rich Bitch Punk Cowards, such as those who infest the multi-million dollar houses on Stolen Land along Gold Camp and Bear Creek roads, are the ones who actually started the fire.

Then again, my evidence is more substantial than theirs, AND, the aforementioned PIGS refuse to even consider such a possibility.

In their PIGGY minds, it has to be the fault of “Bums”, no questions need be asked.

Now, here’s a neat little Teach The Punks A Lesson thought:

Get a cheap tent, right, a cheap sleeping bag, some clothes books and such…
Set it up in an area Known To Be Infested with the “camp raider heroes”

Boil up a mess of poison ivy. Cook it just like collard greens (only without the hamhocks) and pour the “tea” all over the tent and clothes, let it dry, (or not, it wouldn’t make any difference, they would just assume it was soaked in a rainstorm, happens often enough.)

And then let their ChickenShit nature take its course…

Friendly-fire loss in Malibu

Posted on by
2

Castle Kashan owned by Lilly Lawrence
Two Malibu outcrops stood out like sore thumbs in the fabled community not lauded for its architecture (or history). Not counting Rockford’s trailer park in Paradise Cove.

The Hughes Aircraft offices sit incredibly in the midst of Malibu’s most expensive estates. Howard Hughes installed his company in Malibu Canyon back when the Malibu Movie Colony stretched only along the beach.

The other standout was a kind of a castle, ramparts, arches and all, built in the 70s and unmatched in garishness, its large faux stones aerated by picture windows to present a visual oxymoron akin to a whiffle ball made of lead. But like a real castle it looked down on everyone, and obviously all had to look up at it.

Lord of the castle was Lilly Lawrence, daughter of an ex-Iranian oil minister and self-proclaimed “international beauty,” who instead of buying an English title at auction, went right for Princess Di’s. From beneficiary of Shah cronyism, Lawrence went to “people’s princess” of Castle Kashan.

If you’ve lived in Malibu, you might wonder why I refer to the castle in the past tense. Although the fire still rages, threatening Sweetwater Canyon from its origin in the Knolls, its first victim is now being described as a “landmark.”

Every time Malibu would suffer a wildfire, residents would lament their neighbor’s losses, particularly the scorched backdrop, but we’d always crane our heads hopeful that this time the flames might reach the castle. Really. You’d curse the fire that caused you to have to pack all your valuables into the car, haul the furniture out to the green lawn where fire would likely never reach it, and leave your home a mess of soot and soggy mud prints from the emergency housemoving. Invariably the fire never consumed the castle, and we would genuinely curse that.

The CDC report on MRSA severely understates the problem

Posted on by
4

‘The antibiotic-resistant infections, commonly called MRSA, were once confined to a few hospitals, but a new study by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2005 they made an estimated 94,000 Americans seriously ill and killed almost 19,000, compared with 17,000 who died of AIDS.’

This CDC report reported on heavily in the news today, goes on to mention that MRSA is killing more people in the US than AIDS does, so it sounds like this is a true picture of how dangerous this problem of MRSA is becoming. But….. notice the wording of the report, that it mentions that ‘94,000 Americans become seriously ill’ .

Here is the thing though. MRSA does not always make one ‘seriously ill’. It is a disease that usually never even gets diagnosed. The CDC does not mention these millions of people that are coming down with MRSA that are not ‘seriously ill’, and gives the impression that MRSA is only a problem for less than 100,000 each year in the US! The CDC is deliberately misstating how bad this problem really is.

Why is this so? It is so simply because the CDC does not have any real plan to deal with this problem. I mean other than telling people to wash their hands, etc. So it understates how widespread MRSA actually is, and keeps the spotlight off themselves and the US Medical Establishment for not even diagnosing this condition in most people who have had bouts of MRSA.

MRSA is not diagnosed much because people with MRSA sores seemingly just have extremely difficult and painful lesions that refuse to heal well. Many deal with this without seeking medical help, or while being denied medical help for the condition. Most people just plain don’t recognize a MRSA sore when it develops on them.

I myself have had MRSA sores develop at pressure points about 5-6 different times, and never have been treated for this. A few of these sores left scars even. They hurt like the devil, but i was not ‘seriously ill’ to use the vocabulary of the CDC.

MRSA is just one part of the epidemics of new infectious diseases spreading like wildfires around the globe. Yesterday I wrote about C-Diff killing off larger and larger numbers, and the day before I wrote about resistant TB. The world is seeing capitalist for-profit medicine disintegrate before our very eyes, and the business world has no plan to fight the epidemics.

We need an entirely different set up to deliver medical and nursing care to those who need it. And we need a world guaranteed income for all the world’s people, otherwise poverty will continue to add gasoline to the fire, so to speak. We are all going to be in deep, deep trouble with infectious diseases continuing to not be dealt with wisely by the for-profit health systems we are currently stuck with. Many are going to die unless something much different is done real fast.

If people only knew how bad the breakdown of corporate medicine is getting

Posted on by
7

Most Americans don’t fully realize how bad the corporate model world medical system is actually doing. Here is Democracy Now in reportage about a man held in Arizona in solitary confinement within a hospital for almost a year, appropriately titled ‘Is Sickness a Crime?‘

The victim of a new strain of TB resistant to treatment is being held without any rights in a jail inside a hospital in Phoenix. As these new antibiotic resistant infectious diseases begin to spread, we can expect to see the public panic to spread like wildfire. And rightly so.

If we don’t stop the corporate world from further destroying the environment and putting much of the world in unhygienic living conditions full of disease and poverty, then all of us are in immediate danger ourselves. There is no gated community that will protect you no matter how many Border Walls get built.

Responding to these diseases must be done in a much more thoughtful way than in mere use of a nutty police mindset ‘Homeland Security’ model. Just yesterday, I was in a Colorado Springs community center where the ‘alert warning’ for terrorism was YELLOW. The public is being treated as if they were residents of a state institution for the mentally retarded, which is where they the Bush Klan seems to have gotten their 3 color scheme from!

We live in a world that needs much more effort than this US corproate governmental nonsense to address the real problems we all face. And yet I have not heard of one elected politician that has had the courage to call for the abolition of this nut case branch of the US government called the Department of Homeland Security.

Yes, we need ‘homeland security’, but with the corporate misleadership now running the country we’re not going to get it. Your average businessman at the upper levels is basically a corrupt buffoon. Most of them themselves need to be in jail unlike this young man now being held in a hospital in Atrizona. Speak out against this sort of abuse all you can. Before too long, you just might find yourself in the same sort of predicament.