An Ishmael fundraiser and stuffing mix recipes

12-9-2019

Michael Raffety

My mother, who died in 2015 developed an extensive doll collection starting with dolls she acquired in the 1940s. They have been in storage boxes the last four years. Now the Soroptimist Club of Placerville and the Mother Lode Lions Club will be selling the dolls Sunday, Dec. 15, from 11.am. to 3 p.m. The Soroptimists have been repackaging for the dolls into gift baskets. My wife has been working on the project daily for the past several weeks.

The Lions Club will be selling hamburgers and hotdogs for $10. The food sales and doll sales will all go to benefit the Deputy Ishmael family fund.

I’m writing this column in San Diego, where I am attending a conference of the Association of California Water Agencies. I was lucky to get here. United Airlines notified me our flight out of Sacramento would be delayed two hours. The problem with that was we were supposed to catch another flight in Los Angeles half an hour after our arrival there.

What did United do about that? They gave me a taxi voucher for a trip to San Francisco Airport. They also gave us $60 worth of food vouchers, since our flight from San Francisco to San Diego didn’t leave until 6:30 p.m. After getting our bags and catching a cab we got into our hotel room about 9 p.m.

The day before Thanksgiving is a mad cooking day for me. I start off with making cranberry sauce. After seeing recipes last year for alternative stuffing recipes in the Wall Street Journal I’ve added added a second stuffing mix to the traditional Raffety family recipe.

I wanted to try Sesame, Cranberry, and Chestnut stuffing mix. Chestnuts are not commonly sold in the grocery store, so when I found Italian chestnuts in Safeway last year I put them in the freezer for this year. The recipes I was following involved a whole lot of chopping, more chopping than for my mother’s recipe. I felt like I was chopping all day long. The worst was trying to chop the chestnuts, which had to be cooked in the oven first. I wound up using a hammer to pound the knife through the roasted and peeled chestnuts. That was tedious and discouraging. But once I cooked it all in the deep frying pan and then transferred it to a flat cooking pan to bake for half an hour Thanksgiving day the chestnuts softened up and the whole mix was tasty and proved popular at the long table at my daughter and son-in-law’s house full of relatives.

I’m not doing the chestnut stuffing mix next year. I’m going to make sausage brandy stuffing mix. I always assumed my mother’s stuffing mix that my grown children still ask for was a recipe handed down from her mother and maybe even her mother. That was until I noticed this year a note she added to the recipe that she got the recipe from a Seattle newspaper, presumably when my dad was there on assignment with the Army. I guess that’s not much different than using Wall Street Journal recipes. I just need to find the best and easiest one to make.

Three big projects near completion

11-25-2019

By Michael Raffety

El Dorado Irrigation District has three big projects going simultaneously, all of which I recently had an opportunity to visit and hike around.

The first one I visited was Flume 47C, a 150-foot-long $1.9 million project that is being done 90 percent by EID construction crews and some temporary hires. The canal had already been dug out. I arrived by a very roundabout and sometimes very bumpy route due to a county paving project on the new Sad Bridge. The EID construction crew was cutting out rebar sections and tying them together into sloped U sections that would be mounted in the canal as reinforcement as a shotcrete crew would come to line the canal bottom and sides.

Fabricating the rebar sections was a new challenge for the EID construction crews, according to Dan Gibson, Hydro Manager. They seemed to be working seamlessly.

Expectations are this flume project will be finished in December.

The bigger project is Flume 44. This is the second and final year for this $14.6 million project by contractor K.W. Emerson. Flume 44 is one of the most challenging wooden flume sections, one which I would call rickety. It is very tall and crosses a slide area.

The plan by EID engineers executed by K.W. Emerson during the annual canal outage changed most of this flume to a U-channel steel reinforced canal with a wide sidetrack for equipment. The last tallest section has been replaced by Ultra Blocks. Flume 44 is 476 feet long. Last year Emerson installed 1,800 feet of U-channel canal and a fairly wide bench for machinery. With the Ultra Blocks replacing Flume 44’s timber superstructure there is now a bench suitable for machinery and the U-channel canal is close to being connected to the wooden Flume 45.

The Emerson company has a sophisticated articulated dump truck. In other words, the driver drives toward the loader at which point the whole tracked wheel dump truck spins in place without the tracks moving so the driver is facing a different direction and the dump container is facing the loader. It’s a very efficient way to move dirt out of the U-channel.

The district’s absolutely biggest project is the Forebay Dam safety project. When I visited Forebay Dam it was one foot from achieving its maximum height of 10 feet higher than its original height. That extra height will provide six days of water supply to Reservoir 1. Reservoir 1 in Camino serves water all the way to El Dorado Hills for a good portion of the year. The two key safety features of the dam are a buttress added to the dam to strengthen it and a special filter between the dam and the buttress that drains off any seepage. Two boxes collect any seepage and near the foot of the dam are channeled it to a pump house that returns the water to the reservoir.

The $25 million dam project is on its third and final year. The first year primarily included logging the area where the qualified buttressing material will come from. Additional benefits of the project include an emergency overflow area and a moveable gate for the penstock. EID crews inspected, cleaned and replaced some rivets and then encased in concrete the penstock coming from the dam as it connected to a penstock house.

Also executed by the contractor is a new concrete and riprap spillway that brings flume water into the reservoir. Riprap was also added to the inside of the dam to prevent erosion. Additionally, trees were logged around the perimeter to account for the higher dam and a trail has been roughed out.

The borrow pit has been largely reclaimed and includes erosion control.

One interesting sidelight was provided by an EID inspector on the job. He had noticed some blood down at the bottom of a hill. He put up a game camera and found a deer had been dragged down to a wooded area. Later two mountain lions came back to the carcass and then a bear finished it off.

Wow! It’s wild out there. That reminds of the time Krysten Kellum and I followed cougars tracks through the snow as we drudged off to see precast flume sections being glued together in a heated tent. We were very alert.

 

 

 

 

 

The end of time always delayed

10/16/2019

By Michael Raffety

Brooklyn Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says we have only 10 years left before global warming brings on the end of time. To prevent catastrophic flooding and heat, she says we must give up airplanes, farting cows and automobiles, but instead build transcontinental high speed trains. This in a nutshell is the “Green New Deal.” I assume it also means travel to Europe or Hawaii by ship only. Not sure why AOC doesn’t take the Acela train from New York to Washington D.C. It avoids taking a cab to La Guardia or JFK and going through TSA security, though as a member of Congress AOC probably gets to go through the same screening line as flight crews.

The last time we went to D.C. we took the train from New York. It’s a much pleasanter way to travel and you get to see what an economic disaster is the main part of Baltimore.

Actually, there is less time left before the global warming apocalypse.

In the Oct. 14 Wall Street Op Ed page was a small item titled Notable & Quotable, a regular column that appears from time to time. In this case it quoted the London Observer from Feb. 21, 2004.

“Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.

“A secret report, suppressed by U.S. defense chiefs and obtained by the Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.”

It concluded with an even shorter time period: “As early as next year [2005] widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheavals for millions.”

We are three months away from 2020 and so far England hasn’t turned into the new Siberia and Europe isn’t sinking. The last time we visited London it was experiencing a “drought,” meaning it had gone two weeks without rain.

Of course, the Dutch are largely below sea level and live on lot of land reclaimed courtesy of their dike system and windmills pumping out water seepage. Miami keeps complaining about rising seas, but they have built on sand right along the water edge. Bet their problem is they’re losing beaches because of the high-rise luxury condos.

Speaking of sand, there’s a reason that hotels in Palm Springs are limited to five stories. Everything there is built on sand. I watched equipment across the street from our hotel digging deep for a foundation for a building. There was nothing but sand at the bottom of that pit.

The Pentagon said in about 2004 we had 20 years left, which put the apocalypse at 2024, though the horrors of the pre-apocalypse would take place next year, 2020. Obviously that aint going to happen. So, AOC has reset the end of time for 10 years from now 2029.

I don’t know why she bothered and why every Democrat candidate says global warming is an “existential threat.” I thought Barack Obama already said he had calmed the seas and ended their rise as he stood in front of a Greek columned façade.

What’s happening with the real weather? Last month I recorded 1.35 inches of rain, compared to the 146-year average of 0.53 inch. The highest September rainfall was 4.19 inches in 1918.The average high in September was 83.6 compared to the 18-year average of 86.6. The average low last month was 58.6 compared to the 18-year average of 57.9. There is no discernible trend in average temperatures. Some years in September they are in the 90s and some years they are in the low 80s.

Our generator has been running since Wednesday after my electrician Jim Young showed up in the morning to replace a dead battery and found a wire had come loose that was key to keeping the battery recharged. Today, Thursday our phone service is kaput. I called AT&T. After speaking to an actual representative I found that AT&T was depending on generators to keep its lines operating and one of its generators had run out of gas. Golly willigers, the El Dorado Irrigation District is making sure its generators are gassed up. They don’t want to run out of water or halt sewer plant operations. Near Safeway and Save Mart on Missouri Flat Road I saw a huge Veerkamp Construction Vactor truck obviously sucking out sewage from a sewage booster pump serving those areas. That’s the EID staff working every angle to make sure service continues with the aid of a lot of generators authorized long before other districts began to panic. Still the continued service depends on all customers conserving.

Since the phone company can’t maintain its landline service I am copying this column to a disk and bringing it into the Mountain Democrat since my modem is connected to the dead landline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Baker City, Ore. and a tale of three families

9/30/2019

By Michael Raffety

My maternal grandparents lived in Baker, Ore., a town that has since been renamed Baker City, which was its original name. Perhaps it was to distinguish it from Baker, Nev. My cousin Kathy McColloch and I visited Baker just about every summer. We both developed friends in town we looked forward to getting together with again. Sometimes I spent Christmas in Baker. It was a magical place then. But I remember most the Fourth of July in Baker. No ban on fireworks there. I got sparklers, caps for a cap pistol and assorted other minor fireworks that didn’t include firecrackers.

In June of 2017 I wrote about an art show at the de Young in San Francisco that featured paintings of women in hats and actual hats from the early 20^th century mostly. Along with that I talked about someone my grandmother referred to as Aunt Rosie. Rosa Krann, learned hat making in Austria. She set up her own millinery shop in Baker City.

Someone responded to that column and wrote me that she had a number of Rosa’s hats, which she had donated to the Baker City Museum. I forwarded the email on to my cousin Kathy, who sent me a copy of the Baker City Herald story on Rasa Krann’s 52 years in business, how she raised her deceased sister’s five children and how the merchants helped her to financially afford that.

Then this past year I learned Kathy was writing a book about Baker City and how woven into the fabric of that town was the McColloch family.

Kathy started sending me chapters. Cherie and I were hanging on every word, waiting with anticipation for the next chapter or chapters.

Kathy’s book is now published. The name of the book is Baker City Testament, which can be found on Amazon. The story begins with the birth of Charles Henry McColloch in 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War. He would always be known as C.H. His father Zachary McClloch participated in a battle on the Confederate side but lost interest in the war after losing his son Jeremy in that same battle. Zachary returned to the farm in Arkansas to care for his wife and two remaining sons.

Their relatively isolated farm had two root cellars, one of which was too dry to maintain what would normally be kept in a root cellar. They worked the farm by day and descended into the hidden root cellar by the barn by night.

Law had broken down in Arkansas. Martial law was declared and bands of “partisan rangers’ were created to execute deserters, stage raids on Union forces and burn crops the Union could appropriate. These “rangers” were actually armed bandits raping, pillaging, murdering farmers and their wives and burning down houses.

The McCollochs survived this reign of terror and C.H. was hired at age 13 to work at the Hotel Arlington in Hot Springs, Ark.

Kurt Krann left his father’s brick business in Vienna, Austria, and came to America to check on the family’s gold mine. When he got off the ship he expected to meet someone to help him. Instead he met some con men who robbed him.

With some aid and some emergency funds sewed into his suit Kurt Krann boarded an immigrant train bound for Oregon and met a large and strong German speaking man named August Meyer, a Union Army veteran. August Meyer’s mastery of English stayed secret as the duo spoke in German, which kept them safe from the machinations of neer-do-wells traveling on the same train. The duo of Kurt and August went on to have many adventures, make lots of money and wound up associated by marriage in the town of Baker City, with mining operations in the town of Sumpter, which was 20 miles from Baker City.

Meanwhile, C.H. McColloch and his new bride Mary drove wagons north until they boarded the train for Oregon. After having two boys – Claude and Frank — C.H. ran a butcher shop in Portland but eventually passed the Bar exam. He became an expert at mining law and wound up in Sumpter, Ore., eventually being elected mayor of Sumpter.

Later C.H. spent 20 years as city attorney for Baker City. In talking with Kathy I learned that as city attorney, C.H. bought some land that became a city park. That tidbit of information cut the legs out of someone who claimed they owned the land the city park was built on.

The Krann family and McColloch family became joined in Baker City when Frank McColloch married Betty Meyer the daughter of Marie and August Meyer. A photo of Marie McColloch bears a striking resemblance to my cousin Kathy McColloch. Betty gave birth to the Charles K. McColloch, who would grow up to marry Beverly Nordean, the middle daughter of my grandparents in Baker City. Frank spent World War I as a captain with the 91^st Wild West Division, which participated in the offensive of the Meuse-Argonne. He survived the second deadliest battle of WWI.

Frank was admitted to the bar in 1919 and practiced law in Baker City until 1935, serving as city attorney and circuit court judge for some neighboring counties. He and Betty moved to Portland when Frank was appointed public utility commissioner for the state. Frank also joined a law firm in Portland.

Frank’s son Charles K. McColloch represented Baker City in the Oregon Legislature, later serving at the Oregon Tax Commission, practiced corporate law in Portland for two decades and then served as Oregon’s Real Estate Commissioner.

From Austria, from lawless Arkansas to Baker City the Kranns and McCollochs have an exciting story well told by C.K.’s oldest child, Kathy, who spent 35 years as a high school teacher helping her students learn how to write.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weather, hurricanes and climate

9-16-2019

By Michael Raffety

No measurable rain in August, though a passing cloud briefly sent a few raindrops, only enough to dirty our vehicles’ windshields. Same thing happened overnight earlier this month, again with the dirty windshield.

Temperatures for August averaged 93.5 during the day and 66 degrees overnight. That resulted in an 18-year average of 92.5 daytime and 62 degrees overnight. August is within the general band of expectations for the month.

The outlook for September is cooler. The 17-year average is for a high of 86.7 and a low of 57.9. September began with six days in the mid-to-high 90s, but it has been steadily cooling down.

. . .

Hurricanes are not indicative of global warming. They actually start in Africa with hot dry air from the Sahara Desert.

“The role the Sahara Desert plays in hurricane development is related to the easterly winds (coming from the east) generated from the differences between the hot, dry desert in north Africa and the cooler, wetter, and forested coastal environment directly south and surrounding the Gulf of Guinea in west Africa,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

An easterly jet stream carries this air toward the Gulf of Mexico, but in late summer and early fall the easterly jet breaks down and moist air off Africa’s Cape Verde rises and tropical cyclones can form and move across the Atlantic. Not all tropical storms become hurricanes and not all hurricanes make landfall in the U.S. What really give hurricanes strength are the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s a case of thermodynamics on an atmospheric level. The Sahara Desert is 10 percent of the African Continent. That’s a lot. With an average of 3 inches of rain it is the second largest desert, the biggest being Antarctica.

. . .

Local temperature and rainfall measurements only produce an historical record. The historical record produces averages over an extended period of time that allow someone to make a guess about the month ahead in temperatures but rainfall predictions are a total roulette wheel. One has to rely on scientists measuring ocean temperatures and general wind directions across the Pacific Ocean to come up with an El Nino and La Nina predictions, which may or may not produce a lot of rain. La Ninas tend to be fickle but El Ninos are generally prodigious rainmakers.

. . .

In a 2015 (updated in 2019) Huntsville Real-Time News interview of Professor of Meteorology, John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, he said the following: “Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When you put more of it in the atmosphere, the radiation budget will respond appropriately. It’s just that what we found with the real data is that the way the earth responds is to shed a lot of that heat, not keep it in, which climate models do. So I’d rather base policy on observations than on climate models.”

John Christy and Roy Spencer have been doing satellite measurements of temperatures since 1979.

“The real world is not going along with rapid warming. The models need to go back to the drawing board,” Christy said in 2016.

“Carbon dioxide makes things grow. The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food. CO2 is not the problem .… There is absolutely no question that carbon energy provides with longer and better lives. There is no question about that,” Christy said on 2015.

 

Wind, solar, hydro, coal, heavy oil, nuclear expensive

9-2-2019

By Michael Raffety

In 2011 an earthquake and resulting tidal wave resulted in a meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in northern Japan. We had booked a walking or of Japanese gardens after seeing an ad for it by the publishers of a magazine on Japanese gardening and other aspects such as traditional Japanese building styles.

We looked at the map and figured out the distance from Fukushima was like the distance from San Francisco to San Diego. Radiation didn’t appear to be an issue at that distance.

The tour group was small because of the fear of Fukushima. The small group of 13 made it rather enjoyable. The gardens and visits with artists were just wonderful. The guides even arranged an Ikebana demonstration, which was a special request of my wife.

Ordinarily these walking tour groups are large, but the fear of Fukushima kept it small in 2011.

Fear of Fukushima also led to an adverse reaction by Germany’s leader, Angela Merkel. Germany was heavily dependent on nuclear power. Merkel quickly phased out nuclear power plants in favor of wind and solar. Germany will get a 5.6 – 6.0 earthquake every 200 years in the Rhine Valley. No tsunamis in Germany. There are some seismic zones surrounding Germany, but it’s nothing like Japan, which is on the Pacific Rim of Fire. The one town on Japan’s Pacific Coast that survived the tsunami was where a public official stubbornly convinced everyone to pay for a tsunami gate.

The result of Chancellor Merkel’s overreaction is that now Germany (along with Denmark) have the highest electricity rates in Europe. In 2017 the average electricity charge in those two countries was 30.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The sun does shine in Germany in the summer, though my wife and I have been chilled to the bone in October waiting outside for a train in Germany and we’ve been on a train for 10 hours as it was winding its way around flooded tracks from what the Germans termed a “hurricane” in Berlin. That was a trip that should have take two hours.

Germany in the winter tends to be overcast, blocking the sun from solar panels and often there is not enough wind to run the windmills. What does Germany do? It uses heavy oil and coal to generate electricity. They should have stuck with nuclear power.

The cost of solar and wind has made German electricity so expensive it amounts to one fourth of household expenditures in Germany. Some companies are setting up their own generators to avoid paying the high cost of commercial rates.

Compare 30.5 cents per kWh in Germany to California, where the average rates is listed at 15.34 cents per kWh. Though PG&E’s Website listed an April average total rate of 23.298 cents per kWh. My bill for July 17 through Aug. 15 showed a Tier 1 allowance of 22.376 cents per kWh and a Tier 2 rate of 28.159 cents per kWh. Add in 26 cents for the Energy Commission, a bureaucracy that should be abolished for inconspicuous consumption.

California energy rates are 29 percent higher than the national average of 11.88 cents per kWh.

California’s requirement of 20 percent renewable energy is what is driving up energy costs, though a faulty energy deregulation scheme led to wholesale price increases and caused PG&E’s first bankruptcy. Our state Legislature has called for upping the percentage of renewables to 60 percent by 2030. That’s 11 years from now. The law calls for 100 percent by 2045.

Democrat Socialist candidate Bernie Sanders wants all energy to be 100 percent renewables and have the government take over all electrical generation. Put aside Bernie’s plan for a socialist takeover of energy generation all over America.  An Aug. 6 column in the Wall Street Journal notes that building one windmill requires 900 tons of steel, 25,00 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic.

“When electricity comes from wind or solar machines, every mile traveled, requires far more materials and land than fossil fuels,” wrote Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “’The New Energy Economy’: An Exercise in Magical Thinking.”

Mills also referred to a Dutch study that found its clean energy plans would consume a major share of the global minerals.

The price of politically correct energy is very high.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sagebrush rain storm a memorable one

8-5-2019

By Michael Raffety

We drove to Reno Friday, July 26, to attend my wife’s Soroptimist convention. We stopped in Carson City to scout out the Nevada State Museum as a neat place to bring the two older grandsons for a day trip.

On our way into the museum we felt a few raindrops.  By the time we had taken the elevator down from the stuffed birds exhibit it was just pouring rain outside.

We perused the gift shop in hopes that we could kill enough time for the rain to stop. I tried on all the hats until I found a floppy green one with vents near the crown that fit my head.

The gift shop lady said the forecast was only for a 10 percent chance of rain.

We sat on a bench and watched the rain until its intensity level lowered somewhat. I put on my floppy green new hat, with my glasses folded up in the small plastic bag that contained the tags and hat receipt and went out in the rain to get the car and drive it around to the back parking lot near the exit door. By the time my wife got in the car the rain had ceased and all that remained were little streams along the edges of the streets.

Little did we know that was merely a rainfall appetizer.

We stopped a Lowe’s to pick up a few items we were looking for and then headed for the new six-lane new freeway that now runs from the Highway 50-Highway 395 junction to Reno.

As we were traveling along the low part with a lake on our right and green farmlands on our left a few drops of rain fell. Later as the freeway moved up next to the mountains it began raining in earnest until it became an absolute cloudburst.

I’ve been in heavy rain on Highway 50 in the Shingle Springs and Placerville areas and have had to reduce my speed to 50 mph. This rain we encountered on the way to Reno was like no other rain I have experienced. I had to slow down to 40 mph or less, even with great tire tread and all-wheel drive. With the wipers going full speed my visibility of the road ahead was 100 feet but felt more like 50 feet.

There was no thunder, but it was an incredible downpour like I’ve never experienced before.

You never know what kind of weather you’re going to find in the mountains. One July we drove to Tahoe and ran into snow and hail. It was cold enough that when we got to the Beacon Restaurant mist was rising from the lake near the shore because the water was warmer than the air temperature. I was sorry I didn’t bring my camera. At that time all I had was a flip phone, which made pathetic photos.

. . .

Despite two back-to-back days of 100-degree temperatures July will still come in below average for daytime highs. With the last two days of July expected to be in the 80s with lows in the 60s that’s going to keep the average for this July a couple of degrees below the 18-year average but a couple of degrees warmer for the overnight lows.

 

 

 

Solar savings and the Long Beach aquarium

7-22-2019

By Michael Raffety

In 2006 the El Dorado Irrigation District, with a subsidy from Shell Oil, installed a solar field on the east side of a small a storage reservoir at the El Dorado Hill Waste Water Treatment Plant. That field covered 50 percent of the electrical cost of running the sewer plant.

EID will be adding to that field enough solar panels to bring the total electrical bill coverage to 70 percent of the cost of running that sewer plant.

That’s a pretty good deal. The board EID had until the 2018 election was unanimous in its support of adding solar power. The post 2018 board also appears unanimous. The California Environmental Quality Act document was approved June 24. Construction will be later this summer with activation in 2020.

At the same meeting a CEQA document was approved for an 8.5-acre solar field at the Deer Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant. That solar array will offset 74 percent of the electricity required to run the Deer Creek plant. That’s terrific.

. . .

The final dinner at my wife’s conference in San Diego was at the Aquarium of the Pacific. The original building had a look of concrete waves breaking over its main entrance. But recently the aquarium added a $53 million rounded and somewhat amorphous structure composed of blue glass panels that have been slightly frosted to prevent birds crashing into the building. It’s a big addition it the ground floor that accommodated dinner tables, a bar and buffet for all the attendees. Included in the new structure are a large gift shop, a movie theater and more aquarium displays upstairs.

Besides the new building several things set this aquarium apart, including outdoor displays, such as 10,000-square-foot tanks of sharks, sting rays and a 3,200-square-foot display of rainbow lorikeets. Unique exhibits include shorebirds, puffins and Magellenic penguins.

The tanks inside include tropical Pacific, Northern Pacific, including sea otters, Southern California, including Catalina Island and kelp, and both sides of the Baja Peninsula.

My favorite exhibit was the big spotted sea bass.

. . .

So far July is shaping up to be not as hot as the Mountain Democrat 18-year average. As of July 16 has been 5.4 degrees lower than the average daytime high for this month. Overnight lows are only 0.3 degree below average.

The forecast for the remainder of the month appears to project a slightly cooler than average July.

Looking ahead, August is actually almost 2 degrees lower than July and each month trends lower, though August and September can have 100-degree days. If it gets 100 degrees in San Francisco, usually in September, that city will be enveloped in a blue haze and Sacramento and the foothills will be even hotter.

 

 

 

 

108 days of daily interrogation in a Japanese jail

4-1-2019

By Michael Raffety

The latest national outrage is the Chicago state’s attorney who not only let Jussie Smollett off when she dropped the charges against him but “expunged” his record. That means he can honestly say he was never arrested and never indicted. He still perpetrated a hoax on the country.

This all followed a call from the office of Michele Obama and two days of light volunteer work at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition headquarters, resulting in a nice letter of recommendation from Jesse Jackson himself.

My wife and I once rode an airplane out of Chicago with Jesse Jackson. In the waiting room a white gal asked for his autograph. His rainbow Coalition makes enough money off of corporate donors that Jackson flies in the first class seats. We flew in the economy section.

One has to be an actor from Chicago to benefit from a corrupt justice system. This same state’s attorney lets a lot of owners of illegal guns off on easy bail terms. Either the state’s attorney isn’t fully charging these criminals or the judges sentence them too lightly. Surer justice and longer prison terms would help drive down the Chicago murder rate.

The Democrats may still be talking about Trump-Russia collusion-obstruction even though Robert Mueller’s report completely exonerated him. The rest of the country doesn’t seem to be talking about that. They’re mostly talking about the movie stars, lawyers and financiers who cheated to get their kids into elite colleges. One of those movie star’s kids is dumber than rocks as evidenced by a social media video she posted. Besides being arrested most of these people have lost their jobs and ruined their acting careers.

None of these people have paid a price like Carlos Ghosn has. The former chairman of Nissan and Renault was arrested Nov. 19 by the Japanese police after the Nissan chief executive lured him to Japan. He was arrested the moment his corporate jet landed at the airport.

He spent Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s in Jail, a total of 108 days before he won release on $9 million bail.  That was the second bail request and second Japanese lawyer. He finally found a good lawyer. That seems like an excessively high bail for what Nissan alleged is the financial crime of under reporting his income and some deal with a Saudi businessman who has the Nissan franchise in Saudi Arabia.

Ghosn wasn’t just jailed, but Japanese investigators interrogated him every day, wouldn’t let his family visit and limited the amount of time he could talk to his lawyer. The Japanese expect a person in their jail to confess in order to be released.

The Japanese justice system is not much better than the Chinese system. It’s definitely Third World. I can’t believe Gen. McArthur didn’t set up a better justice system when he remade Japanese governance and its constitution.

Pretrial proceedings will take place May 23 and a trial will take place in the fall. Ghosn expects to prove his innocence in court.

Renault owns 43.4 percent of Nissan and Nissan owns 15 percent of Renault. Ghosn was chairman of both automotive companies plus Mitsubishi, which was recently acquired. Ghosn saved Nissan from near bankruptcy and now Nissan is bigger than Renault. Nissan wanted to cater to the Japanese market, a highly competitive and difficult market, where all the taxicabs are Toyotas. Ghosn considered Japan a market that is shrinking as the customers are increasingly older, while America has better demographics and is a bigger market. Nissan also had some major recalls because of faulty inspections.

In October 2017 Nissan recalled for re-inspection 1.2 million vehicles sold in Japan. The stock took a hit. If the CEO hadn’t been playing Inspector Clouseau around the world, inspecting Ghosn’s houses and art he might have figured out unauthorized technicians were conducting vehicles inspections for which they were not qualified.

Hiroto Saikawa who took over as Nissan CEO from Ghosn a year ago and once he concocted the “evidence” against Ghosn, he had him jailed and then voted him out as chairman of Nissan-Mitsubishi.

After 108 days in jail and facing a year in total in the Japanese “justice” system Renault had to come up with a new CEO and chairman also.

 

 

March weather stats and state water politics

4-15-2019

By Michael Raffety

March rainfall was nothing to brag about but it was reasonable. With a total of 5.9 inches of rain, March’s total came within 92 percent of the 144-year average of 6.44 inches.

But that put the season total to date of 35.35 inches at 128 percent of the cumulative season average through March.

The average daytime temperature in March was 58.3 degrees compared to the 17-year average of 63.6 degrees. Overnight temperatures were slightly warmer than average at 44.4 degrees Fahrenheit compared to the 17-year average of 41.9 degrees.

What can we expect from April? The 144-year average rainfall in April is 3.47 inches. Already 1 inch has been recorded for April and two or three days of rain are due as this column is being written April 5.

The most April rain was 17.52 inches in 1880. The least was zero precipitation in 1946. Cumulative rainfall through April should total 37.18 inches to hit the 144-year average.

The real story of this winter has been the snow, with 3 to 4 feet of snow hitting Pollock Pines twice. Most of that is gone but it is deep in the high country, with Squaw Valley ski resort staying open through July 7 and Heavenly staying open weekends in May, according to a Tahoe Tribune story in the April 5 Mountain Democrat.

Dawn Hodson’s story in that same issue reports the snow and water content at Phillips Station add up to 200 percent of normal.

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March 15 the Mountain Counties Water Resources Association sponsored a workshop at El Dorado Irrigation District headquarters. The sole presenter was Peter Brostrom of the California Department of Water Resources. He leads the Water Use and Efficiency Branch of that department.

Before joining DWR he managed a grain farm in Sutter County. By “grain,” I am guessing it was rice, which is the predominant crop in Sutter County. Rice cakes are manufactured in Sutter County. He also conducted cropping systems research for the University of California at Davis. With a BS and in Plant Science and an MS in Soil Science he must have been a real benefit to Burkina Faso when he served there in the Peace Corps.

He also has owned a cabin at Echo Lake for 25 years.

As a speaker he was ideal. He would talk awhile and take questions in the middle of his presentation. He generated a lot of information for the group of more than a couple dozen who came from throughout the Mountain Counties area.

His reference point was the conservation legislation that calls for 55 gallons per capita per day of indoor use. That consumption will be measured by the amount of water a district’s water treatment plant puts out annually. It won’t be measured by each person’s meter, though individually we’ll all have a stake in trying meet that goal.

Brostrom said, “It’s not about limiting water use but limiting overuse.”

His department will be conducting water use studies, including variances such as evaporative coolers, horses and livestock, seasonal peaks, high salinity areas, soil compaction and dust control, sustaining wildlife, fire protection and ag use.

Three pilot studies will take place in South Lake Tahoe, Folsom and Calaveras County.

“If a district can show 90-95 percent of the customers are under budget (that’s close enough),” he said.

The key takeaway is water efficiency formula, which is the sum of all four of the following:

Indoor Residential Use

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Outdoor Residential Use

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Commercial/Industrial Dedicated Irrigation Account

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Distribution System Water Loss

Districts will begin submitting water supply and demand assessments in 2022 to DWR, which will submit a report to the State Water Resources Control Board.

‘We didn’t have that information across the state from 400 suppliers. This will avoid a broad brush against all. Specific legislation directs the state board to follow (the assessments). This provision allows greater local control,” Brostrom said.