6.1 Earthquake Hits Napa County in Bay Area

There was a 6.1 earthquake in Napa County in the upper SF bay area.  It struck at 3:21 in the morning, when deaths would not be as great because people would not be out and about.  This earthquake was the most major one in the Bay Area since the Loma-Preata earthquake in October 1989.  And it lasted fifteen to twenty seconds.  The soil is wine country so it’s soft and unstable, like the soil we have around here.  I’ve heard both sides of the argument as to whether softer soil or bedrock is worse for the transmission of earthquakes.  There were major fissures in roads, leaving major horizontal as well as vertical displacement.  I would imagine the quake was felt strongly in places like Berkley and Richmond, but they didn’t say.  It was felt as far away as Sacramento.  There were neighborhoods where almost every chimney toppled- - and they said there were thirty water line breaks (?) and massive gas line breaks, and the calls of that were only increasing the later into this Sunday morning it got.  I thought injuries were minor but then they said ninety people went to the hospital for injuries.  Coverage of the quake continued to past nine thirty.  I changed stations from “This Week” to coverage at eight minutes to nine.

 I watched the Mc Laughlin Group and thankfully they are staying away from the top two topics we are all sick of.  I had the wrong slip of paper.   The Mc Laughlin group has a poll that says 43% of the people would prefer a Republican Senate and a Republican House,  and 41% of the people would prefer a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.  My one solace from these numbers is that the Republicans’ lead is narrow in both cases.   But all five commentators agreed that the Republicans would take the US Senate and add a few seats to the already Republican house.  I’m not ready to be that pessimistic yet and would remind you this still August with two and a half months to go.  Of course the break-down on the Ferguson shooting is by race with a majority of White people favoring what the cop[ did, and the majority of Blacks against it.  Someone had a poll that when President Obama wanted to go into Syria last summer, and announced that- - more democrats supported that decision than republicans.  But the Republicans refused to approve those funds.  And now the Republicans are saying it’s all the president’s fault for not “Stopping” ISIS while they were still in Syria.  There is no pleasing them.   Some of these grammatical Word suggestions can be comical.  Never send a computer to do a man’s work.  Then we move on to the death penalty.  Both Mc Laughlin and Mort Zuckerman believe the death penalty will be done away with within ten years.  Even the conservative brunette they have on from time to time- - seemed a little dovish on this issue.  Pat Buchannon said “So a guy squirms a little bit before dying - -it’s no big thing”.  That’s where his head is at.   They moved on from there to the meatier topic of automatically piloted cars.  Even now you don’t “do as much as you think you do” because there are all of these safety overrides and warnings that even now influence your driving.  But “People may be unwilling to give up control entirely.  People like to think they are the ones in control”.   California and Nevada are two states where these drone cars are already legal to have on the roads.  There are things fiendish people could do if they wanted to hack the computer system.  But as Pat reminded us “If you sabotage the braking system so that the people in the car get killed, it’s still murder; it makes no difference whether it’s a computer hacking job, or you do it the old fashioned way”.   Good point.   But there are things creative people could do to cause a lot of mischief that you could not do before by long distance.  I guess the next step is having these solar and LED panels on the roads, like was promo’d on the internet last spring.  I think even Mort is admitting that his years long dream of a bear market and an economic “double dip” are vanishing before his eyes, and he’s finally getting with the program.  The Republicans have exagurated the extent of the minor downturn we just experienced.

Of course "This Week" led with the ISIS story.  Secretary Hagal says it's the most serious foreign terrorist threat we've faced, and there was speculation about whether they'd be over here within the next year or so.   As I say further down - - my Cosmic friends don't seem to be concerned about that aspect of things.  They see it as a localizd threat to just that part of the Mideast.  And at this point it doesn't hurt any democratic causes to blow up the crisis to as big as proportions as possible, in other words "pull a Judy", who is famous on a micro level of pronouncing a perticular development "a crisis" when it is nowhere near.  There are sick, depraved acts going on in the world every day and the news usually doesn't cover them.  I imagine if you talk to feminists organizations they would tell you there is not only a "war on women" here, but it's all over the world, and it's getting worse, and the media is not giving it enough attention.  Channel four had Napa earthquake coverage we’ll get to in a minute.  I thought maybe NBC was canceling “Meet the Press” now that David Gregory was fired and nobody else wanted to do it.  “This Week” is OK but there are two far right people on.  There is that gray headed man, and this lady, who speaks in this “intoned- - serious voice” like some kind of a preacher who’s suffering from constipation.   It gets to be a little much when you hear that same tone of voice no matter what topic she’s on.   But that was last week, and there is a whole other week coming up for us to be bowled over by new stories.

I had Breakfast with the Beatles on, sometimes openly competing with the TV. The one highlight of this show was this guy with a heavy British accent who went along with the Beatles in concert in 1964 and 1965. There really isn’t much to tell we didn’t already know. This guy went with the Beatles when he went to visit Elvis at his Perugia Way house in August of 1965. He relates the same familiar story of how they sat around awkwardly for about twenty minutes and Elvis was getting bored but suggested jamming and the Beatles’ faces light up. It would seem in general that George is the Beatle most likely to be cantankerous or abrasive. He spoke of John of having a very bright, but warped sense of humor. Paul of course is the diplomat. Everybody knows this about him. But Ringo is probably the most popular with the girls. But the screaming of the girls was so loud and constant, the Beatles could not even hear themselves at these concert and the Beatles frequently criticized the poor sound systems of these stadiums. He said “Mal Evans and Neil Asphanol” were the only two men in charge. I have a LOT of trouble believing there wasn’t a whole enterage of ten or fifteen people. But he also said that personal security was virtually non existant. He also confirmed that “Long Tall Sally” was always their last song, and I had hear before that they almost always played the exact same set. Other groups played for 45 minutes (including the Rightious Brothers, who probably sounded a whole lot better in the pre Phil Specter days) but the Beatles only played a half hour- - and still had this thing about “making an escape” because “they would be torn apart by the crowds”.

I do have a little cosmic something for you people today. I heard a day or two ago a warning. Or in the words of a blog post three years ago in 2011 “A level one psychic dimension report”. This level consists among other things, of brief imparitives. Here is one for you. In this whole thing with ISIS there is a warning “Don’t cross the Syrian border. Don’t extend the conflict into Syria”. To me “in the natural” so to speak, this warning doesn’t make sense because there really IS no line- - but it’s all one solid land-mass occupied by ISIS. But the warning was insistent that if we deemed to cross the line into Syria that dire consequences would follow. And we have new news on that “40 second tape” Ringo was listening to. Mal Evans now admits he’s wrong. He checked. The Neir Reigelians had always denied the recording was theirs. And it turns out the tape is actually Federation in origen, in fact it’s Dardanian. He tracked it down. I had thought perhaps it might have been North Romulan because Brian Epstein, Tony Sheridan and Pete Best are all North Romulan. But they were asked about the tape but never got back to us. If you are wondering Mal Evans to me anyhow almost never talked about his days as a roadie with the Beatles. Also learned just today was that the Rout 66 Theme and the Peter Gun Theme, contrary to what I had been told, ARE actually “Tornio” songs, but a different variety of Torino, kind of like distinguishing a Shiite Muslem from an Allawhite such as Al Assad. But they both occupy the same home planet. The only other news regarding that “Demented Again” compilation, me, John Lennon, and Stu - - agreed on the original version and all three of us wanted that Will Horton-esque “exposé” tape on the militaristic but shady history of Israel - - on that album. But management made other executive decisions at the last minute, but a few pressings of the original line up were done and probably all gobbled up by collectors who’ll now charge a premium for them.