Fire in Potrero Area...

Update (8:10 PM):

I captured the photos at right (click for a larger view) just a few minutes ago from the Lyons Peak cameras. The top photo is looking due south, and shows the fire stretched out over a considerable distance from east to west. My best estimate of the location of the larger fire fronts (on the right side of the photo) is somewhere near Cottonwood Creek Road and Bee Canyon Road, south of 94. Please don't take that as gospel, or even well-informed – it's just my guess, based on the photos, satellite information, and wind.

The bottom photo is looking due north from Lyons Peak, and the fire visible their is the “Witch Fire”, which started at roughly the same time as the Harris Fire, but 25 miles or so north of us, just west of Santa Ysabel (home of Dudley's Bakery). That fire is burning WSW, straight toward Ramona, which is a few miles from the fire front.

Update (3:35 PM):

We know a little more now... The CDF has designated this the “Harris Fire”. The map at right (click for a larger view) shows some MODIS thermal-imaging satellite data (the overlapping red circles toward the bottom) showing the actively burning areas on the satellite's last pass (which I believe was at about 3 PM). The red area in the upper right corner, with an orange tint, is from an old fire put out some time ago. The green area in the upper left is where we live. There is a purple tinted arrow moving down and leftwards that shows the apparent direction of the fire's burning, from its starting point in the eastern end of Hauser Canyon south and south west through Potrero and the north side of Tecate.

The photo at right is the current view south from Lyons Peak; the smoke plume from this fire is quite large and ugly.

We have not heard any specific reports of structures burned, though we have monitored many reports of structures endangered on the scanner. I'm not certain how, when, or if the CDF reports burned structures on the radio, so I don't know what the absence of those reports indicates. I sure hope it's good news for the folks down that way, though...

Update (11:38 AM):

We heard a CDF man on the scanner call for evacuations along Emery Road down to Humphries Road, and in Tecate. These roads are just north of Tecate. The CDF must not believe they can hold the fire at Emery Road, which is not surprising given the high winds...

Original Post (11:15 AM):

As we were driving home from breakfast in Descanso this morning, we saw exactly what we didn't want to see &ndash: a smoke plume, big and growing. We can see from the Lyons Peak cameras that it is ESE of us. Monitoring the scanner, we hear lots of activity out towards Potrero. From the USGS fire planning site, we see two small fires in Hauser Canyon, just north of Potrero. Given the strong (Santa Ana) winds we have right now from the NE, and putting all these other clues together, it sounds like we have a fast-moving fire that started in Hauser Canyon (almost certainly an illegal's campfire) and is moving southwest through Potrero towards Tecate, Mexico.

We'll keep you posted on anything we learn. Any readers in the Potrero/Campo area, if you know more, please let us know...

The Real War on Children...

Mark Steyn has an excellent column out today, talking about the failed SCHIP bill (the Democrats were unable to override President Bush's veto). In it, he describes the SCHIP bill as an example of creeping Euro-style nanny-statism – the model that Europe is now lurching away from because of its manifest failures and (especially) it's economic madness. Mr. Steyn describes these welfare states well:

So what is the best thing America could do "for the children"? Well, it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a system of unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. Most of us understand, for example, that Social Security needs to be "fixed" – or we'll have to raise taxes, or the retirement age, or cut benefits, etc. But, just to get the entitlements debate in perspective, projected public pensions liabilities in the United States are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of our gross domestic product. In Greece, the equivalent figure is 25 percent – that's not a matter of raising taxes or tweaking retirement age; that's total societal collapse.

So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I paid my taxes, I want my benefits.

Giant Ponzi schemes…yup, that's it exactly. And our currently underfunded, underearning, laughing-stock of a retirement fund is a big first step in creating just such a Giant Ponzi Scheme here – and one could legitimately argue that we already have one in place.

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when the Democrats trotted out a 12 year old boy as their spokesman for SCHIP? Here's Mr. Steyn on that:

A couple of weeks ago, the Democrats put up a 12-year-old SCHIP beneficiary from Baltimore, Graeme Frost, to deliver their official response to the President's Saturday-morning radio address. And immediately afterwards Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin and I jumped the sick kid in a dark alley and beat him to a pulp. Or so you'd have thought from the press coverage: The Washington Post called us "meanies." Well, no doubt it's true we hard-hearted conservatives can't muster the civilized level of discourse of Pete Stark. But we were trying to make a point – not about the kid, but about the family, and their relevance as a poster child for expanded government health care. Mr. and Mrs. Frost say their income's about $45,000 a year – she works "part-time" as a medical receptionist, and he works "intermittently" as a self-employed woodworker. They have a 3,000-square-foot home plus a second commercial property with a combined value of over $400,000, and three vehicles – a new Chevy Suburban, a Volvo SUV, and a Ford F-250 pickup.

How they make that arithmetic add up is between them and their accountant. But here's the point: The Frosts are not emblematic of the health care needs of America so much as they are of the delusion of the broader Western world. They expect to be able to work "part-time" and "intermittently" but own two properties and three premium vehicles and have the state pick up health care costs. Who do you stick with the bill? Four-car owners? Much of France already lives that way: A healthy, wealthy, well-educated populace works a mandatory maximum 35-hour week with six weeks of paid vacation and retirement at 55 and with the government funding all the core responsibilities of adult life.

This is the fundamental delusion of the welfare state participants: the notion that somehow all these lovely benefits will appear out of thin air. For about the past five years, Europe has ever-so-slowly been coming to grips with the inevitable results: the flight of the wealthy (who for some reason don't want to see their earning disappear into the maw of the welfare machine), the flight of capital (entrepreneurs know a losing proposition when they see one), and – as France has seen in abundance this past year – widespread unrest amongst the young with no hope of gainful employment. As Mr. Steyn so ably points out, the very human response to the existence of a welfare state is selfishness: “Gimme my benefits!” – and how those benefits get paid for is someone else's problem.

Here in the U.S., the Democratic party is the standard-bearer for our drift toward a welfare state. Mr. Steyn is right: the SCHIP bill was a great example (and thank goodness it didn't go anywhere!). Most of the actual elected officials in the Democratic party are, I believe, essentially political animals: they support certain positions at any given moment not from some deeply held core belief, but because they believe that holding that position will gain them votes. On the one hand I am disgusted by them, for their frank political corruption; on the other hand they are at least “useful idiots” in the sense that if public opinion changes, they will move with it.

More dangerous in the long run are those few socialist-leaning Democratic politicians genuinely motivated by ideology. They're hard to identify with certainty, because they often employ political tactics indistinguishable from their corrupt brethren in order to attain power – and only after they are in power do their true colors emerge. Hillary Clinton, I am nearly certain, is one of these camouflaged ideologues. John Edwards I am certain is not. Barak Obama I simply have no idea about, though just on statistical grounds it is far more likely he's an ordinarily corrupt Democrat.

Hence my motto for the 2008 election: “Anybody But Hillary!”