"If the Reagans' home in Palisades (Calif.) were burning," Brinkley says, "this would be one of the things Reagan would immediately drag out of the house. He carried them with him all over like a carpenter brings their tools. These were the tools for his trade."

»Bei Feuer sind die schwarzeingebundnen Exzerpten zuerst zu retten«, wies der Dichter Jean Paul seine Frau vor Antritt einer Reise im Jahr 1812 an.

What if something happened to your box? My house recently got robbed and I was so fucking terrified that someone took it, you have no idea. Thankfully they didn’t. I am actually thinking of using TaskRabbit to have someone create a digital backup. In the meantime, these boxes are what I’m running back into a fire for to pull out (in fact, I sometimes keep them in a fireproof safe).

Protect it at all costs. As the historian Douglas Brinkley said about Ronald Reagan’s collection of notecards: “If the Reagans’ home in Palisades were burning, this would be one of the things Reagan would immediately drag out of the house. He carried them with him all over like a carpenter brings their tools. These were the tools for his trade.”

My Commonplace Book (pictured above) is the first thing I'm taking out of my house in a fire.

“While we have other systems that demote content that might violate our specific policies, like hate speech or nudity, this intervention reduces all content with equal strength. Because it is so blunt, and reduces positive and completely benign speech alongside potentially inflammatory or violent rhetoric, we use it sparingly.”)

***Update as of 9/9/2020 @ 4:51 PM***Voluntary evacuations lifted for residents north of Foothill Blvd. and east of Santa Anita Ave.  The Bobcat Fire has generally progressed away from the City of Arcadia.  The current weather forecast suggests that Santa Ana winds will dissipate this evening and the Red Flag Warning will be removed after 8:00 p.m.Based on these factors, the City of Arcadia is removing the recommendation for residents to evacuate.  However, residents are advised to remain on alert for any changes to weather conditions that may affect the fire.  Evacuations may be necessary for your safety if conditions change.

Burn bosses in California can more easily be held liable than their peers in some other states if the wind comes up and their burn goes awry. At the same time, California burn bosses typically suffer no consequences for deciding not to light.

Much of the fire-suppression apparatus — the crews themselves, the infrastructure that supports them — is contracted out to private firms. “The Halliburton model from the Middle East is kind of in effect for all the infrastructure that comes into fire camps,” Beasley said, referencing the Iraq war. “The catering, the trucks that you can sleep in that are air-conditioned…”

“The median compensation package — including base pay, special pay, overtime and benefits — for full time Cal Fire firefighters of all categories is more than $148,000 a year.”

A six-word California fire ecology primer: The state is in the hole. A seventy-word primer: We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.

At least four people have been hospitalized with burns, TEMA said.