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Fire Woes Grow, Markets Meander, National Summer Hours Proposed

First, we want to extend sincere wishes for the well-being of readers in the Lake Chelan, Washington area where the Chelan Hills fire (see map here) has really blown up.

Wildfires are just one of the modern convergences that come with industrialization.  It’s early in the fire season – which runs to October (and later, depending on your locale).  And they are popping up all over. Aspen Acres Fire in southern Colorado destroys more than 260 homes, sheriffs say, is just another example.

It occurred to me – looking at the fire maps this morning – on InciWeb – the Incident Information System – that we could be seeing conditions – a combination of natural and economic forces – that might some day lead to the end of home fire insurance outside of well-defended municipal zones.  Where we could see a national “fire zoning” plan evolve over time.

Not here – yet. But when economics and reality collide, there is only one winner.  We’ll just ponder the coffee and remember that well-worn marketing slogan.

“Just add water.”

News Compressor Scan

What changed overnight is Russian strikes on Kyiv and surrounding areas killed at least 28 people (reports vary 19-28+), with widespread damage from a major combined missile and drone barrage. This follows Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil infrastructure.

Ongoing heat, power strain from data centers, and scattered storms noted but no escalation to high-fatality thresholds. Markets saw oil prices firming near $68-70 WTI after Strait of Hormuz incidents amid Iran mourning period.

In other words, the high level view of the planet is “pseudo-normal.”

Looking Ahead from Here

Trump is on the road – which is always a concern: NATO summit begins today in Ankara (7-8 July) with focus on defense spending targets, arms production, and Ukraine support; Trump attendance and pressure on allies expected to dominate. Everybody has their hand out for your money.

Demoticks are blowing up in Maine as pressure mounts on candidate Graham Platner over sexual assault allegation; withdrawal deadline July 13.

Tectonics of Tech are getting interesting:

Rare earth restrictions are spreading from defense/EV talk into broader corporate filings. Japan is the test case for whether China’s mineral leverage becomes a standing economic weapon. Confidence: 40%.

AI-capex boom with labor trimming. Markets like chip news, but Microsoft’s 4,800 cuts show AI spending is also being paired with payroll discipline. Confidence: 40%.

Warm-up?

On the Financial High Board

For markets, do not over-read Monday’s rally. Reuters says chip optimism lifted indexes, but the same story notes Microsoft cutting 4,800 jobs and oil calm depending on Hormuz traffic.  Two points to remember: China still wants Taiwan – and Iran’s been acting like “after-the-revolution” AK-firing radicals with their Hormuz targeting – so far.  If they serious-up (or learn aiming skills) then we get energy market chaos.

Related, the monthly International Trade in Goods and Services is just out:

Oil watch: As mentioned WTI around $68-69 and Brent around $72 are “calm but conditional.” Any fresh ship damage, insurance pullback, or escort failure can reprice quickly.  Bitcoin was back under $63,000 briefly overnight and it’s a good time to watch squash and other local products you can eat now or can for later.

Actionable Intel

Cyber: BleepingComputer reports threat actors abusing Microsoft Teams voice calls to pose as IT support and install malware. Good small-business advice: no remote-access install from an unsolicited call.

Health: for food handlers, Cyclospora reports argue for extra produce washing/sanitizing discipline. Treat as kitchen ops, not fear copy. Main source of risk is raw, fresh produce:

  • Fresh Herbs: Basil, cilantro, and parsley.
  • Leafy Greens: Romaine lettuce, mesclun lettuce, and mixed salad greens.
  • Berries: Raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries.
  • Other Veggies: Snow peas and radishes.

One More health note – Measles: CDC shows 1,842 confirmed cases and 25 new outbreaks in 2026, with most cases outbreak-associated. That remains a slow-burn public-health signal.  Avoid children like the plague?

Around the Ranch: Daylight Summer Time

The trusty old Citizen EcoDrive will be going back on the wrist this morning.

Because with the gates of hell open, I have taken to literally doing outside work at “the crack of dawn.” Take today, for example:  Workable light was up at 6 AM.  So, referring to the watch, I was able to do some landscaping work (damn Johnson grass is trying to come up on the front patio).  Did a little fire break mowing, as well.

And here’s the interesting thing: The whole reason for “daylight time” is overlooked right now. Because kids should be going to school – butts in chairs – by 7 AM.  Just think how much energy (and specifically cooling costs!) could be saved.

Don’t get me wrong – I think that resetting the clock is a fiasco we don’t need – but that’s what clocks do.  I’m more a partisan in the “Work as soon as you can, as hard as you can, and quit when done” camp.  You never need a watch (or government claiming power over what time it is) to know when a job is done, right, and finished.

We would have hoped – with some of the tech mania – that someone (besides us) could see the genius of CVT Continuously Variable Time.  Because that way, the sun would always come around a certain time every day.  The astronomical term is sidereal time.

Sure, too complicated to distill into a wrist machine, but with networks and AI…come on, how tough can it be?

There’s a Health Angle to Time

Now, listen up as I walk up to the whiteboard and make notes:

Waking at the same time every day is one of the simplest ways to reduce biological noise.

  • The body is not a loose pile of parts; it is a timed system. Cortisol, melatonin, blood pressure, insulin response, immune signaling, gut motility, and even gene expression run on clocks.
  • When wake time jumps around, the organism has to keep re-solving the morning: “Are we hunting, repairing, digesting, fighting infection, or sleeping?”
  • Regularity lowers that ambiguity.
  • In a large UK Biobank study, sleep regularity was associated with materially lower all-cause, cancer, and cardiometabolic mortality risk, and was a stronger predictor than sleep duration alone PubMed.

The sidereal wrinkle is more speculative, but only because the (dumbshitz who are silo-dwellers didn’t think of it first…) but interesting and actually doable.

A sidereal day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes, so waking at the same sidereal time means the clock wake-up would drift about four minutes earlier each solar day. If there is anything to the idea, it would not be because “stars cure disease,” but because the body may benefit from an extremely stable phase relationship to larger environmental cycles: light, geomagnetic background, gravitational orientation, and the daily turning of the planet under the sky. That is woo-adjacent, but not completely insane; biology evolved under layered rhythms, and modern life has done a fine job of smashing most of them flat.

The practical takeaway is safer: disease risk appears to fall when the body gets reliable timing cues. Same wake time, same first light exposure, same meal window, same movement window, same sleep approach. Whether the best anchor is civil clock time, solar dawn, or sidereal phase remains unproven. But the underlying principle is strong: life runs better when the orchestra knows when the downbeat arrives.

A technical note: If you want the sun to come up at the same “watch time,” that is closer to solar time, not sidereal time. Sidereal time tracks the stars and drifts about 4 minutes earlier against the sun each day. But with the roll of planets and astrophysiology still in the investigative stage (where it has been stuck 500+ years) we could just pick one and go with it.

One of the reasons Elaine and I are doing a good bit above average for our age is this: We are regular hours people.

It’s so ingrained in my core that if I forget to set an alarm for 4 AM, I will generally wake within five minutes of that even without the dinger or Alexa going off.

We still have the afternoon wine at 4 PM…but the attraction of CVT would be having it when all the work around here is done – which is generally before noon on hot days.

One or the Road: Boeing Day

7/07 – right?

Write when you wake up,

George@Ure.net

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27 thoughts on “Fire Woes Grow, Markets Meander, National Summer Hours Proposed”

Comments are reviewed by a human because the web is crawling with spammers. Submissions after 4 PM Central usually appear the following morning. After you click Post Comment, you’ll jump back to the top of this article, but your comment is queued up here. We’ve got a robust community and your participation is invited. Some commenters are brilliant. Read a few and judge for yourself. Imagine. You could be one.

  1. Holy Shit G-Pops,

    Eric is back ! to conquer USAUSAUSAUSA..

    Well USA conquered themselves, so The VIKING will just have to conquer the whole dam field,-RAD! -https://youtu.be/xHE_OxWIa60?

    So there I was late last night perusing an intel report of sorts, when what do my wandering eyes see but a recommendation for ham radio General Class License.
    Something about it will be needed for future communications in USA. So they advised GLAARG.Org as place to go to get this done.
    Paper went on to explain ; “regular people are making leaps and bounds with MESH Net Technology (what gives G=Pops?), where you can send encrypted peer to peer voice over Mesh, text and mapping GPS using ATAK on $25 radio that connects to Ure smartphone without any licensing requirements.”

    Well how about dem Apples, Wilbur ?

    Still working on Ure 2 Cambells Soup Cans Antenna ?

    • Hawaii has more than 380 mesh nodes across 250 miles of four islands. From my eastern tip of Hawaii island I can text ‘Howzit?’ to the party crowd on Waikiki Beach, 250 miles away. And we’re all solar powered!

      https://meshtastic.org/

  3. I’m writing before I wake up, because last night’s thunderstorm disrupted my sleep. In the process of getting 3.78″ of rain accompanied by lots of thunder and lightning, our electricity went off. Not an uncommon event in stormy weather, but sleeping without a fan in the summertime just doesn’t go well. Especially with a panting dog complaining that HER fan quit running.

    Anyway, my wife’s portable rechargeable fan was brought to the rescue, and we all got back to sleep eventually. The electricity came back on a couple of hours later, and then all was right with the world (and dog) again.

      • After the 1980 derecho storm that left western Wisconsin without power for five days, one city lineman working the neighborhoods was famous for yelling from the top of his pole: “Power to the People!” as he connected the fuse and lit up the neighborhood. You could hear cheers from the houses for several blocks.

  4. As Freewheeling Frank used to say, “Dope will get you thru times of no money better than money will get you thru times of no dope”. Same for food. You had to live thru the “60’s” to get it. ( They didn’t have grow rooms then. No a year round supply of weed.)

  5. Hello Good People (and the rest of you too)! Man is it quiet here. In another day or two we will have things mostly sorted. Rather a lot might be abandoned as projects this season. Mom’s Rule is in force : no work until Labor Day ~ unless fun work.

    My race season may have ended without attending the line. Being a recycle-r of trophies I’m not aiming for new ones. That does not mean I don’t intend to win every time (a pipe dream if ever) so engineer missing out on enough days to “qualify” for season. It’s great to come storming out on July 4 and win a bunch. I will at least try to remove the bend in my mast. It will have memory but? A crimp in the luff groove is terminal. Duh : I have a spare mast hanging in our barn. Please stand by.

    Miss walking down the pier holding E3’s hand. Good times.
    Off to measure up a new pontoon canopy.
    We look Flying Dutchman.

    Egor ~ _==__ ~~

    ps – we all have unique dynamic climates with attending dangers. Dry? Fires? If wind driven and jumping roads, fire-breaks? Disaster. Retain water. Soak a low spot hidey hole. Wet doesn’t burn (for a while). Scuba is clunky but “spare air” temp breathers are highly reliable. Run away. Come join folks like Ray and me in the HeartLand? Stay well

  6. Hope water/rain falls where needed in the PNW!

    re: …”On the Road” Again
    feat: Man in Black

    “Ukrainska Pravda” has noted the apprehension in Kyiv of last week’s alleged Monaco bomber. No word is given regarding services. Apparently the investigation is being “personally overseen” by the head of Ukrainian military intelligence.

    Separately the President of the Ukraine has posted a video clip of his blue carpet arrival at Ankara for the NATO Summit. For some reason the guests received their greetings from the left side by dignitaries. Left-handed welcomes are understood to have been introduced into Western diplomatic protocols by Boy Scout founder Lt. Gen. Baron Robert Baden-Powell subsequent to his 1895 colonial adventures in the Gold Coast now known as Ghana.

    • re: “42nd Street”, 1933
      feat: support sags; kryptonite suspected?

      Paging Clark Kent to the Daily News Building! Having previously waxed lyrical, let us venture to 220 East 42nd Street, N.Y. known to “Superman” fans as home of the “Daily Planet”. Looking across the street, even vertigo immune people would blanche at images of buckling support columns and shifting floors. Fortuitously former anchor tenant Pfizer pulled off a move to a Hudson Yards’ Spiral new build a couple of years ago. The tower of babel left behind apparently consisted of a 1960’s addon to an original 1910 era cast iron-framed structure. Perhaps despite glossy developer literature marketing the wisdom of adding another 10 or 20 stories, this surprise plot twist climax seems to have gravity calling the shots. Is Mayor Mamdani looking for an innoculant to the developing construction conundrum?

      Stay tuned – same bat channel, same bat time!

  7. I lived in Wenatchee and Cashmere Washington, and had visited it periodically after moving to the Midwest. Beautiful country and Indiana doesn’t compare, if you’re a mountain loving soul as I am. Chelan burning isn’t a surprise as that side is super dry in summer, despite a lake to the left of it. Also, from what I remember from my last visit there, the demographic didn’t have much of a desire to preserve the natural beauty. Town had gotten trashed, so was the burned area problematic with detritus? I don’t know. Memories of the place make me sad to know it’s on fire.

  8. (“want to extend sincere wishes for the well-being of readers in the Lake Chelan, Washington area where the Chelan Hills fire”)

    phew..I hear ya..my sister her husband kids and grandkids all live there.. the settled after my brother in law retired from the rangers..so far everyone’s safe..but wow..

    • The increased wildfires are not the fault of the Republicans. It’s the Green Weenies that won’t allow underbrush to be cleared out that get that award.

      • amen olfart : look, we can kid ourselves but some industries (ex: logging, mining, etc.) created back roads which give outland access to fire crews and … are possible firebreaks in process. Those who timber often helped the forests. Man in the ancient SW USA was smarter then? They removed the underbrush. Sigh, E

      • Patience…

        He is learning how to troll, but isn’t very good at it yet. He HAS picked up on the “truth optional” part though, but I can’t tell whether that’s blind luck or actual intent.

  11. What if? Pre 2010 timeframe required balanced budgets (give or take). Return on investment was interest some bonds. Separate fed treasury balance power, stocks slow growth.

    2020. Combined treasury fed. Fed spending bigger. Allotments large wars large. King
    Stocks crack up boom hindenbergs many

    Overseas. 2010. Treaties hold
    2026 whatever you get away with

    Diplomacy follows money

  12. all hands on deck can kickers . to the pumps !!! pumpaneee !!! capo , boyz , da gang at the temple of sin

  14. ” …that might some day lead to the end of home fire insurance outside of well-defended municipal zones. Where we could see a national “fire zoning” plan evolve over time.
    Not here – yet. But when economics and reality collide, there is only one winner. ”

    Ahem… Here already. Try getting fire insurance with an active volcano zip code! I’m ‘Lava Zone 2’. Long fire extinguishers. Another home down the road burned to the ground two weeks ago. Second one in the subdivision this year. Total loss for the owners, and they just abandon the charcoal pile.

  15. Today was a good day. I had piled up a literal truckload of things I no longer need or want in the backyard. I hired a junk truck to haul it off. It took two loads to remove all of it. The trash man was a big stout fellow. but some items were so heavy I had to pick them up and load them for him with the front end loader. Best money I’ve spent recently. Still need to work on the shed some more. The garage is ready for some reorganization.

  16. John Rubino: Most of us who are no longer young would love to go back to physiological 30 and stay there. Which is why supplements and nutrition books are such big sellers.

    So far, alas, nothing has added noticeably to our allotted “threescore years and ten”. But that might be about to change. The work coming out of labs these days is compelling enough to raise the possibility of “factory resets” for both worn-out organs and entire bodies.

    One example is Life Biosciences’ ER-100 treatment, which restores the organs of animal test subjects to their original, healthy, fully functional state with no serious side effects. Recently, in one of the milestones this post’s title promises, it was FDA-approved for stage 1 human trials.

    According to David Sinclair, Ph.D., Co?founder of Life Biosciences and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, “Our research has suggested that aging is driven in large part by the loss of epigenetic information, not irreversible damage. This clinical study represents the first opportunity to test whether restoring that information can ameliorate human disease.”

    Here’s a video that provides some detail:

    https://www.howestreet.com/2026/07/health-prepping-major-longevity-milestones-but-be-careful/

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