All of these leftist initiatives – the BLM, the “green turn”, the gender idiocy, etc – end up hurting and even killing people. They aren’t simply illogical and stupid. They are deadly. They exist to serve the vanity of humans who want to believe they are in complete control of reality. We are paying a heavy, tragic price for their insane hubris.
Deadly Initiatives
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m also seeing this guy blamed:
https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/08/a-state-official-refused-to-release-water-for-west-maui-fires-until-it-was-too-late/
…though I wouldn’t jump to the “woke” conclusion, when there have been developers salivating over the real estate forever. It’s easy to imagine some palms have been pretty heavily greased.
Over 100 dead.
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It’s a terrible tragedy. And I’m afraid there won’t be a real investigation of what happened and why.
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I wonder about the framing that post. Did Hawaiian Electric actually shift money from one initiate to the other?
All sorts of agencies and utilities and businesses in the US are terrible at doing preventative maintenance type work. It is entirely possible that they could have spent nothing on green initiatives and still would have done nothing to clear fire prone areas near their poles.
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I tend to agree with Tom W. I haven’t read the article because it’s behind a paywall but it seems disingenuous to blame lack of maintenance on exploring renewable energy, as if the two are somehow mutually exclusive. Plenty of fires have begun because of poor maintenance, without this “excuse”.
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This is a very superficial take on the situation. The deeper question is why is it that the land is so freaking dry that simple sparks are generating massive deadly fires. This did not used to happen this frequently; fire smoke from California and Canada did not used to blanked the Easter Seaboard like it’s happening frequently nowadays.
50% of the largest US wildfires in history have occurred within the past 10 years:
https://wfca.com/articles/biggest-wildfires-in-us-history/
Why the need to jump through so many hoops and mental gymnastics when the numbers speak for themselves? This should not be about politics at all.
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Here’s the problem. The “it’s the global warming” explanation means that nobody has to clear the brush, invest into the power lines, update the infrastructure. It’s like “structural racism”, a big, unbeatable, vague threat that excuses budget cuts, austerity, and ultimately, more catastrophes.
Which is precisely why it’s being repeated with such regularity. Nobody can do anything about the land being dry. Nobody is planning to do anything. But this electrical company could be made to do the right thing. Just like our black students could be helped if we left all that “structural” stuff alone.
The endless incantations of “global warming” have had zero effect. It would make sense at this point to stop making them. Even if they are 100% true, they haven’t worked. They are like that 273 sign. Empty words that block action from happening.
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You’re conflating social cultural BS afflicting the US and parts of the West with real world wide scientific consensus backed up by facts and data. So I repeat, this is not about politics this is about VERY real things that we can all literally see, feel, smell, and record with our instruments.
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“scientific consensus backed up by facts and data” lol
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That guy seems to be willfully misinterpreting the data. There is a good reason he stopped at 2014 for his graphic. Take a look yourself:
https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires
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Thanks for the info!
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Here, I was bored so I plotted the ENTIRE data from 1983 to 2022 unlike that Twitter hack you posted who only plotted since 2013. See a pattern?:
https://ibb.co/KDgsV1V
here is the COMPLETE bar chart:
https://ibb.co/PQXMDJs
Data here, check it yourself:
https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires
PS: The hack you posted is not even a scientist. Look him up.
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Thank you for posting the full data, Ed. It blows my mind that someone would quote a random person on Twitter as a way of denying/laughing at scientific consensus backed up by facts and data. It’s also eye-roll inducing that “The Honest Broker” touts himself as being against cherry-picking.
Not mention that the random Twitter person includes 2023 in his data. The 2023 fire season is only just starting in California. Mid August through the end of October are the worst months for fire here, when everything is dry and the seasonal Santa Ana winds fan the flames. So I have my fingers crossed that 2023 stays lower than the trend, but we simply won’t know until much later in the year.
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had some very predictable wildfires a couple years back, which burned many thousands of acres. Which sounds bad, and in fact a few houses on the edge of town were also burned– not good. But nobody died, we didn’t have fire devouring whole neighborhoods, nothing like that.
It really was a hundred-year situation. We had a cat 5 hurricane, in an area where the primary commercial crop had been pulp pine (what’s used to make paper). For two years, everybody knew the millions (billions?)of downed trees were going to be a major major fire hazard, and any time the weather permitted, our crews were out in the woods doing controlled burns wherever they could safely do it– everybody griped about how the air was always smoky, but it was necessary work. The amount of dry fuel out there was mind-boggling and extremely dangerous. The military base did what the rest of us couldn’t: all their buildings were destroyed in the storm ,and they’re on a narrow peninsula, so right after the storm, before they brought their guys back, and before they rebuilt anything, they just lit the whole place on fire. First time I’ve ever seen a pyrocumulus cloud– it was very impressive. I think they found most of their unexploded ordnance in less than 24 hours too– you could hear it all the way back in town.
Anyway, our crews burned as much of it as they could while the burning was safe, and successfully reduced the fuel load where it mattered most– near where people lived. And then we had a dry spell. Our infrastructure is great, and I have never heard of a fire, locally, starting because of poorly maintained powerlines. That just doesn’t happen. Most of our wildfires are started by unattended grills and people burning yard waste when the weather’s not safe for it. Once it got going (and when things are dry, and the fuel load in the woods is that gigantic, something is going to start the fire. Doesn’t even matter what), it burned for days, made everybody really nervous, and a couple rural neighborhoods had to be evacuated. Burned tens of thousands of acres. But you probably didn’t hear about it on the news, because most of those acres were trackless swamp. The county had done probably the best job humanly possible, to minimize the fire damage to inhabited areas, when (not if) the fires finally happened, and it worked pretty well. Immediately after the hurricane, we knew this was going to be a problem, and we started trying to mitigate it. And it worked.
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Ah, I remember the wonderful moment when a scheduled controlled burn in our area was cancelled twice “because of COVID.” Nobody explained how it related but everybody nodded sagely. This still doesn’t beat the story of my colleague who refused my offer to teach an online course because he was afraid of catching COVID but still. I wonder if anybody has a story that can beat this one, actually.
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Well, we all know that fires spread COVID like mad…. (I can’t roll my eyes any harder or they’ll fall out)
I think the difference is, my neck of the woods votes deep red. Climate change and COVID don’t sell very well here. Back when they were trying to ban people from the beach during lockdowns? Yeah that lasted maybe two weeks. We’re all coast. You can’t tell people not to go to the beach. Some of the more-blue cities tried, but really… that doesn’t fly (or swim) here.
And… despite the sometimes-unavoidable background level of smalltown corruption, nepotism, embezzlement, etc… even the most heavily compromised county elected official knows that his sweet access to govt $$$ to pass out to his friends and relatives depends on not screwing things up too badly. Plus, with the timber being a whole regional industry, our forestry offices, both public and private, are competently and adequately staffed, and they work together with everybody else. Every one of those fires had every available entity working on it– state forestry, local fire departments, county sheriffs, and the Deseret ranchers (private company, but one of the biggest landowners in the state), sending in men and heavy equipment (bulldozers and fire plows), and cooperating extraordinarily well, to keep things contained. This was across three counties, and the area’s nothing like as rich as the places burned out in CA and HI. Management is everything.
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I have a colleague who didn’t show up to work today because somebody he knows tested positive. He himself tested negative but he asked me to be understand of his illness. I’m not sure which illness he means, given that he tested negative but I’m understanding because what choice do I have.
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It’s the mental illness. Here’s hoping he recovers quickly!
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I just spent my evening tracking news on a big fire in British Columbia…
Every municipality, all around the world, that is at risk of fire, and even those who think they are a few hundred kilometers from any kind of fire risk, needs to study how fire can enter their district, and “fireproof” against it as much as possible.
Presumably fire departments and city councils and urban planners do this anyway, but all kinds of weather thresholds are being crossed, and so they need to be ready for events that would normally be regarded as a once-in-a-century occurrence.
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