Hot, Autocracy on Order and Roofing

Oh Lordy it's hot.  It was hot yesterday.  Tomorrow will be slightly less hot.  This is why.

A contorted jet stream — with a massive bulge of high pressure in the West and a downstream dip, or trough, in the East that resembles tall ocean waves — is cleaving the United States into two seasons. This weather pattern is leading to record heat in the West and Southwest, including Arizona, California, Nevada and New Mexico, while record cold descends upon the Midwest, Ohio Valley, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast as a result of a lobe of the polar vortex.

It's possible we'll see bombogenesis forming in the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy.  In May!  It's probably just one more sign that we're in the end times.  

AZ Governor Ducey gave a press conference April 29, in which he extended the stay at home order and said that re-opening would be guided by data.  Then he did this:

Hours after Doug Ducey, the Republican governor of Arizona, accelerated plans to reopen businesses, saying the state was “headed in the right direction,” his administration halted the work of a team of experts projecting it was on a different — and much grimmer — course. On Monday night, the eve of President Trump’s visit to the state, Ducey’s health department shut down the work of academic experts predicting the peak of the state’s coronavirus outbreak was still about two weeks away.

“We’ve been asked by Department leadership to ‘pause’ all current work on projections and modeling,” Steven Bailey, the bureau chief for public health statistics at the Arizona Department of Health Services, wrote to the modeling team, composed of professionals from Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, according to email correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post.

The translation of this is that the universities' modeling suggests that the number of cases will spike after a re-open.  Don't like the numbers? Get some different ones. We haven't peaked yet, so clearly we have not had two weeks of declining cases.  What the hell, we're all warriors in this fight, and totally expendable.

In other news, the Barr lead DOJ is dropping the case against Michael Flynn.  Sure he pleaded guilty twice, sure he told the judge that he did not feel that he had been a victim of entrapment, but so what?  The DOJ has such a bunch of lousy lawyers that Barr doesn't think they could get a conviction even after two guilty pleas.  This is starting to feel more like an autocracy every day.

Lawfareblog.com has a piece up detailing the absolute wrongness of everything about dropping this case.  You can read it here.

The orange man's valet has tested positive for Covid-19.  So Pence and the orange man are now being tested daily.  The machine they're relying on has a 15% false negative rate.  I did not know until today that Navy personnel are used to bring the president food and drinks, lay out their clothes and do stuff like that.  I disapprove of this a lot.  Why can't they just hire people instead of using the military?  Anyway, the orange man has said testing is over rated and not necessary, unless it's for him.

Today feels very sinister to me.  First there was DOJ dropping charges against Flynn.  Then the orange man telephoned Putin, talked about the Russian hoax, and then said big things would be happening soon.  He then called President Obama "human scum" during a press conference.  I think he's the first president to refer to a predecessor in those terms.  All of this is in the middle of a pandemic that is not even close to being over and yet the president has moved on.  He's bored with it.

Tomorrow work starts on the parapets.  We have a Santa Fe style roof.  There is a wall on the top of the house around the flat roof which is called a parapet. It's a style thing.  Anyway, from 1995 to 2004 the local builders were buying wire mesh from China, thinking it was galvanized.  Nope - shiny paint.  So the mesh is rusting and disintegrating.  The mesh makes the curved shape that is characteristic of this house style.  Several houses have had theirs redone lately, and we're having it done now.  Hopefully it's not all 3,500 feet of parapet, that will be expensive.

It has also been discovered in the neighborhood that some of the mission tile roofs were improperly installed.  The builder is supposed to lay roofing felt over the wood base, and then furring strips are nailed to the wood, and then the mission tiles are nailed to the furring strips.  Well, some builders nailed the tiles to the roof directly and they're coming adrift.  So, all the tiles have to be removed, any damage to the underlayment repaired, furring strips installed, and then the tiles are put back.

All of these things could have been avoided had people done their jobs correctly the first time.  But no.

I finally connected with the IRS, they have my bank account number and I'm just certain I'll be receiving money any day now.  Hah!