Lahaina leveled

 The city of Lahaina on Maui has burned down. I've seen the photos and it looks like something from WWII. Leveled. 

Houses, stores, hotels, bars, the big banyan tree (banyans are juicy sort of trees and it's hard to imagine one burning but here we are) boats, yes even boats moored offshore were catching fire and burning. People had to jump into the ocean to escape the flames and the Coast Guard rescued at least most of them. 

It's easy to say it must be arsonists or those dirty rotten homeless people and while homeless people are dirty and rotten indeed, this was just wind from the hurricane a few hundred miles away and dryness. 

Something like 7000 people are displaced, and the only good thing if it can be called so is that the weather in Hawaii doesn't try to actively kill you so they can probably get away with living in tents for a while. 

What's really bad though is not only all the history (Lahaina was a big whaling town) but there went all the older housing, 100 years old and more, that's grandfathered in and tended to be affordable housing for the working class. I was able to rent a room for $150 a month or so on Oahu in the 80s because it was all older places, one actually built as the owners' residence upstairs and a rooming house downstairs. If Lahaina is rebuilt, it will be upscale condos or something and the working-class there will have to live in their cars, commute insane distances, live 4 to a room, etc. in the way they survive here in the Bay Area. 

But getting closer to home, I'm just going to paste the link for the whole discussion here:  https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/15mguq8/lessons_from_the_syrian_civil_war/ it's worth reading all the comments. It's also one of many, many, many clarion calls for non-Fascist Americans to get the hell out if they can. Take what's "valuable and light" and get the hell out. 

And if like myself, you can't get the hell out (only the most wealthy and elite Americans can do so) then at least try to find some hidey hole. I believe it was Elie Wiesel who mentioned in the updated edition of his book that not far from where he'd started out, there was another schtetl, or village, that was so far back in the boonies that the Holocaust passed it by. If he'd only been one village more remote....

As an example of something like this, on the US mainland in WWII, close to all the Japanese-Americans were put into camps, including people with as little as 1/16th Japanese ancestry. Meanwhile in Hawaii, 2,000 were interned but this was out of huge population of them. No place was safe, but some were safer. 

In the same vain, if you were a Jew in Lithuania or Poland, your number was probably up. If you were in Italy or Portugal, you stood a much better chance. No place safe; some places safer. 

I'm finding it very useful to have the backpack I plan to use, on hand. I spent some time last night working out how I'm going to carry my flutes (3) and shakuhachi (2) and out of the three flute cases  I have, I think I'm going to keep the one nice one and scrap the other two. Two flutes can go into shakuhachi sleeves of which I have two, and the shakuhachi I have, being Yuu's and nearly indestructible, can travel in plastic sleeves. 

I also practiced last night, taking my time but the practice stretching out well over an hour.