Stay safe, Café denizens in FL and the Carolinas. But oh, those island folks will be feeling the hell of Irma for certain.
Meanwhile, in Montana and Idaho, fires continue to grow. The western wildfires have contributed to a large increase in overall burned land. Over 7 million acres of land throughout the United States have burned this year compared to last year, when just over 4 million acres burned. The fires are creating smoke that is traveling from Montana southeast all the way through to Colorado.
I just found ‘Intensified Forest Fires: The New Western Travesty’ Joshua Frank, Sept. 6, 2017 at Counterpunch
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
those are about some of the coolest images ever.
the ISS images of the storm reminded me of this:
Tuonela is like the Styx. The cor anglais “represents” the swan gliding serenely on the river surrounding the underworld. think the people in the ISS get worried about storms hitting Houston? & why do we need to track these storms any how? if it be not now, it’ll come. all this satellite foreknowledge just creates useless anxiety & unnecessary traffic jams among people who, as Barbara Bush noted, “never had it better” anyway. yeah, we can send an airplane into the eye of Irma, but what to do about the Hep A outbreak in San Diego? nobody knows. it’s a mystery. part of nature’s, you know, cycle.
later taters. be safe. it’s a hazy, foggy, boggy, muggy, soggy, itchy, squitchy smokey kind of not too unpleasant so far day. forest fires to the left…hurricanes to the right…here I am, stuck in the meth lab w/you. I mean, muddle, yeah muddle.
Why should I waste my beautiful mind thinking about hurricanes? It’s those poor people who brought it on themselves. Why couldn’t they summer in Kennebunkport like normal people?
Gotta feel sorry for Aleister Crowley. Spends his whole lifetime casting a Satanic spell and what does he have to show for it? Barbara Bush as his illegitimate daughter?
Oh wait…
whooosh, that was a lovely way to greet the day, i’m a little meth head. tuonela is a finnish concept, both the good and the bad end up inhabiting the river, i discovered.
the folks in irma’s path really had no way to prepare for her effectively, but sure, its their fault for ‘electing’ corrupt leaders, allowing bondholders to privatize everything, then privatize anew. but they were just useless eaters, in any event, prolly over-procreated as well. live strong or die…
on edit: we’ve had the montana/idahohoho smoke here, too. your jest about mixing up the hurricane wetness and the drought-fires made me think of those who believe in geo-engineering by chemtrails as a destabilization plot or some such.
@ seeker: nice one. richard branson of course, will just circle the planet in his air conveyance and wait it out™.
Looking like late Sunday or Monday for us. Either Charleston-Charlotte, putting us on the east side and getting what’s left of the winds after 250 miles overland winds. Or coming up through Wilmington, head-on and 125 miles. In 1996, Fran dropped from 130 mph on Frying Pan Shoals SE of Wilmington to 75 mph when it hit us.
thanks for the report, tarheeldem; batten down the hatches. my stars, the force, and josé and the katia waiting in the wings.
wsws tells the story of the islands hit, and the economic/ecological pillage and ruination of puerto rico; hard to read it is.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/07/irma-s07.html
here’s hoping it’s the truth:
One model shows landfall at Savannah, a track up the Savannah River toward Knoxville and into Kentucky. The NC, GA, TN mountains will take a lot of energy out after it does in eastern GA and western SC.
“the thing we really gotta worry about is tsunamis. but hey, that’s climate change for you.” parting comment in a brief chat this a.m. about the hurricanes & wildfires. just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water…that Sibelius piece made me think about being a spectator, to look w/placid, transfixed awe on the storm from space in the ISS or the travel into the eye on the plane, and then see the devastation on the ground. macroscopic beauty & “microscopic” (not to the victims of course). hard to grasp.
i do get your meaning, but i’d like to add that as far as nasa flying into the eye of hurricanes, or close, of hurricanes…the planes are equipped with information-gathering equipment (various sensors?) all of which add to prediction and behaviors. peek into the second tweet i’d added a bit ago, for instance.
and haiti is in irma’s way. it’s truly hard to get our minds around such devastation, for instance, 90% of the dwellings on barbuda…simply gone. on the ground, harvey devastation will never recover. but on with the astros game! wooof! yeppers, some real astronauts they do be.
just a quickie:
https://twitter.com/MorganT_CA/status/905907601556295681
End Times Alert!!!
@TheLeftIsRacist “The birth pangs are getting stronger & stronger. Just like in the days of Noah. #Earthquake #HurricaneIrma #Violence https://lifehopeandtruth.com
as far as i can tell, haiti wasn’t hit as hard as was expected, unless the news hasn’t come to the twittersphere yet..
Given that this thread concerns both wildfire, houston epic rains, harvey, and the disasters that will last…forever, and Irma, christy rodgers’ sept. 5 ‘Fire and Rain’ is exquisitely apropos. i wish i could have written it; when i read it last night, it not only suited my pensive and dark mood, but i found her prose, including her sarcastic blows against capital, and long-remembered poems, moved me almost to tears. her essay may have been partially responsible for my jarring and quasi-cataclysmic nightmares, but they may have been due to my imagined aftershocks of the magnitude 8.2 earthquake in mexico.
nevertheless, id like to bring few bits in hopes that you might be encouraged to read it all. today, she’s my favorite essayist in the blogosphere. ;-) i wasn’t able to find the source of the first piece of poetry; perhaps it was her own?
‘Run to the trees
Trees will be burning
Run to the sea
Sea will boiling
All on that day’
“Whether we can see it or not, the inanimate (to us) forests have been set alight by the lineaments of our gratified desire: cars, roads, houses, electronic devices, cosmetic surgery, food from everywhere. Thanks, capital! Thanks, science! No more hands and backs into the hard labor of pulling sustenance from the soil or forging steel or tending gigantic machines – our livelihoods are gained now by our dancing fingertips alone! Who will be the first bourgeois to blow up that bargain? Who will be the first of the expendable classes not to seek it? And at least we are compensated by the quality of the sunsets – what beauty there is in annihilation really! It’s as if we told ourselves, well, all those tiki torches sure did make for a pretty procession!” [large snip]
“Yes, we humans may lurch onward through alternately drenched and smoke-filled landscapes, billions of the poor in constant forced migration from war or famine or genocide, the bourgeoisie melding themselves with machines, killing off any remnants of the mythological in their mechanized psyches because in that was contained what they would otherwise have to understand as self-fulfilling prophecy: the lost Golden Age, the lost Eden. Which we were once taught was a poetic reference to a mythical past, but was actually our civilization’s symbolic road map to its own future. Will their pseudo-intelligent implanted daemons save those future elites from realizing what some long-since exterminated peoples had conceived ages before: that what we experience as time is neither a one-dimensional line in a four-dimensional block, nor a closed loop of eternal return, but more like an infinite manifold of zero dimensions in which all times equally exist? And thus began their mythic stories with: “Once upon a time, in the future…”
“Meanwhile, summer is changing, the skies are filling with fire and rain. Our long national 1950s is disintegrating before our eyes. Our empire that never dared to speak its name is in lock step with all previous empires that did, as they crumbled. We can keep turning away from the firestorm and the flood, but they will be with us now, close as our own shadows, as will all the other ways we are failing to thrive, whether we turn to face them or not.”
bless her heart. https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/fire-and-rain/
i have a diary trying to percolate through my mind, heart, and soul, and a hundred details to sort through here, so i’ll offer my pre-apologies if i never get back to the many good comments and interesting links on the ken burns eats worms diary. y’all rawk.
the poetry is from Peter Tosh…
ah, thank you. lemoyne. mystery solved. ;-) and here this place is called ‘café babylon’ in honor of rasta-speak for the empire. but boy, howdy, did i ♥ her essay.
The prophets only warn of the obvious.
Miracle-mindedness seeks only to correct.
i’m not sure what this means, but it sounds like wisdom. ;-)
Brief note: Current projection is that Irma will have dropped to less than tropical storm by the time the eye gets to Macon GA and just gusts by the time it gets to Huntsville AL.
Irma and Florida will do each other in. Best of fortune to those in Florida.
It could be worse if Irma has another chance to go over the Gulf Stream and strengthen up.
Looks like Jose is going east of Bermuda.
And Katia is making landfall at the border of Veracruz and Tamaulipas. Away from the big cities, but still.
thanks, thd; great news for y’all. hurricanes don’t Like Land. down-graded to cat 3, some are saying. and yes to: ‘but still’.
13 hrs ago, bruce territory?
c seeker had said that he’s in north-central fla:
I grew up in Huntspatch. I remember 74 when it rained for a week and the hillside we lived on sprung a leak: siphon-drained a chunk of the hill through our yard and left a separate, spooky little karst action sinkhole. It was small with two limestone sides and two clay sides in the verge of the oak/hickory covered hillside… a tiny chasm.
Big Spring in Huntsville used to produce 100k to 250k gallons per day draining a chunk of the Cumberland Plateau at its verge. Before it gathered ‘paperclips’ and became Rocket City, Huntsville was the Watercress Capital. The first canal in AL was from that spring towards the Tennesee River.
Just sayin’… Inches of rain across that area and it will be coming up out of the ground in spots and certainly flooding others. I wonder if the TVA was ready for Irma…
well, merde:
Irma is restored to category 5 strength as it pummels Cuba and prompts orders for a quarter of Florida’s population to leave
• Hurricane Jose close to category 5 as it approaches Barbuda
• Irma’s destruction: island by island
• Where is Irma heading? Mapping the path
via the guardian
well, Planet X, aka Nibiru or something, is most definitely probably going to hit and/or come near Earth on Sept 23. so only two more weeks of shopping left people! there are lots of bargains out there.
meh. if planet x hits and/or comes near us, maybe we can finally get some peace & quiet around here.
“Proverbs, proverbs, they’re so true, proverbs tell us what to do; proverbs help us all to *bee*—better—Mouse-ke-teers.” Rabbit, Run. Sometimes I feel like the old asthmatic shut in in The Plague who all day all he does is move peas singly from one bowl to another. when the rats start dying off, he claps his hands and cackles w/glee, “it’s beginning!” Lord, can you please send a hurricane or earthquake against Amazon, esp. the new 50k strong slave factory to be built somewhere in the US? if you do so, I promise to build several chapels in your honor. on Jeff Bezos’ grave.
foxxcon in (southern?) wisconsin, taxpayer subsidized to the tune of 1200 amerikan dollars per household, but oy: such a deal! but amazon and google would work for me, j son of joad.
funny how you’re cravin’ peace and quiet, that’s all i have, save for the constant fooking radio static in my head. hope things are going okay for you on your journey to look for amerikka. as in: on the street, i reckon you have found the true face of the nation. the music is almost too poignant for me today.
Hurricanes are rain as much as wind, especially one with as large a rain shield that has been over the ocean as long as Irma. The current path of Tampa-Pensacola-Americus GA, Columbus GA, Birmingham AL, Tupelo MS, and grazing the eastern side of Memphis TN will still bring a lot of rain even if the hills of Georgia-Alabama start sapping its wind energy as soon as it crosses the Florida line.
The hills mean that there will be flash stream flooding interrupting transportation by flooding bridges, but not as much property damage except in the river and stream bottom communities. Maybe some tornado action as long as it is tropical storm strength.
Not Caribbean catastrophic, but rough nonetheless as it passes over the black majority counties of GA-AL.
If there are infrastructure failures, they might be the impoundments that supposedly prevent massive flooding–some Corps of Engineers and some state and local-government construction.