Re: Will Late Night Roast Newsom And Bass For Fires? Don’tHold Your Breath.

On Jan 13, 2025 at 9:24:37 AM PST, "moviePig" <nobody@nowhere.com> wrote:
 

On 1/13/2025 12:05 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

  On Jan 13, 2025 at 1:30:45 AM PST, "Ubiquitous" <weberm@polaris.net> wrote:
 

  We know L.A. Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.6 million from the city's fire
  department budget. The progressive mayor wasn't even in L.A. when the fires
  broke out. She was in Ghana on a political junket.

    She might have been forgiven for being out of town if it had been just a bad
  coincidence, but the National Weather Service had been issuing warnings of
  "extreme fire danger" to city officials for several days *prior* to her
  departure and she decided to leave anyway. Absolute dereliction of duty. If
  there's a legal mechanism in California for the governor to remove a mayor,
  Newsom should absolutely do so, but he won't because he has too much himself
  to answer for in this mess.
 

  The optics couldn't get much worse. Remember how SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and
  late-night comedians mocked Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas when he was out of state
  in Cancun during a deadly cold weather front in 2021?  It's hard to forget
  given the nonstop jokes on the subject.

    But notice neither the media nor the late-night jokesters had anything to
say
  when, in the middle of a winter weather emergency in California, with
  thousands of citizens trapped in their homes under 10+ feet of snow (that he
  and his bald-headed lunatic of a predecessor assured us would never be seen
  again due to 'climate change'), Newsom suddenly vanished. He could not be
  located anywhere.
    But never fear. It turns out he was just in Baja California, Mexico. Newsom
  was frolicking on the beach in Cabo San Lucas while hundreds of people were
  snowed in with no food or power in the mountains during a winter snow
  emergency.
    Other than the choice of Mexican resort destination, it's exactly the same
  thing that Cruz did. But with Newsom it was actually worse. As a matter of
  executive function, it happens to be worse to abandon your constituents in
the
  middle of a weather crisis when you are the governor as opposed to a senator
  who-- unlike a governor-- has no authority or ability to direct personnel
and
  manage resources.
    So Cruz couldn't have actually done anything to help had he stayed but
Newsom
  very much could have. Yet Cruz is the one who is vilified by the media while
  Newsom's failure was all but ignored.
 

  Another possible source of comedy? HBO's REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER. The
  long-running host has shown a knack for truth-telling regardless of party
  affiliation. He's been a thorn in the Left's side for several years, mocking
  progressives for their extreme culture war positions and woke overreach.
>
  He's based in L.A. and might skewer pols who have made the problem
  exponentially worse. He's also a Climate Change alarmist and might focus on
  that angle, even if there's no evidence climate change played a role in the
  catastrophe.

    Of course it didn't. There's only so many ways these fires get started.
Either
  nature starts them-- almost always via lightning strikes-- or humans start
  them. Sometimes it's because humans don't maintain the power lines and they
  fall over during high winds and spark fires, or they're caused by human
  negligence (a tossed cigarette butt) or arson.
    There was no lightning when these fires started and they've ruled out downed
  power lines. That leaves only one option left: someone started the fires,
  either accidentally or on purpose. It was not fucking 'climate change'.

>
Afaik, 'climate change' doesn't start fires, it continues them.

 California has been known for massive wildfires since long before the white
man ever came to North America. The native tribes have stories of wildfires
spanning what is now the entire West Coast, backed up by scientific data--
tree rings and the like.
 They make the wildfires we have now look like campfires in comparison but
Governor HairGel wants you to believe they're some new phenomenon due to
'climate change' because that gives him an excuse to control your life and
take your money.
 The L.A. Basin is an arid semi-desert environment. Dry tinder and underbrush,
especially in the fall and winter, is the *normal* state of things here. Just
like years-long droughts are normal here. Wildfires have occurred with
regularity going back to before European settlers ever arrived. Yes, they're
more frequent now, but that has nothing to do with 'climate change'. It's
because there are now 14 million people living in the area instead of just a
hundred or so. Back then, the fires were started by lightning strikes, not
people. Now they're caused by stupid people doing stupid shit like smoking in
the hills or the government allowing vagrants whacked out on drugs to cook
their food and meth with open flames in the middle of a powder keg or power
companies negligently failing to maintain their infrastructure. None of which
has jack-all to do with 'climate change'. If you have millions of people
living in an area with a lot of them doing stupid things, you're going to get
a lot of fires.
 Anyone who thinks that if we'd all just install more solar panels and ride our
bikes to work, that the state wouldn't be on fire every winter is completely
delusional. And these idiotic media reporters and politicians who keep saying
that the amount of acreage burned in California (e.g., 2.2 million acres in
2020) is 'record-breaking' and 'unprecedented' are bald-faced liars. It's
factually completely untrue. Before the 1800s, California would see anywhere
from 5 to 14 million acres burn EVERY YEAR. That's 12% of the state burning
every year. Before there were any SUVs or 'climate change'. Just as there were
massive droughts in California long before the era of 'climate change'.
California had a 500-year drought between 800 and 1300 AD. These are
documented scientific facts, but that undermines the Agenda, so we get
flat-out lies from politicians claiming this is 'unprecedented', which goes
completely unchallenged by their media lackeys.
 Excess timber comes out of a forest in only one of two ways. It's either
carried out or it burns up. We used to carry it out. It was called logging. We
had healthy forests and a thriving timber economy. Then in the 70s, we began
imposing a shit-ton of environmental laws-- both at the state and federal
level-- that have made it all but impossible and wildly unprofitable to carry
out that timber and what we've seen over those decades is increasingly severe
forest fires.
 We've had an 80% decline in timber harvested out of California forests since
1980 and we've had 85% increase in acres destroyed by fire over that same
period. The mismanagement has gotten to the point where you can tell the
boundary between private forestland that is not affected by these laws and the
public lands that are. The burn scars follow the property lines almost exactly
in many cases.
 The climate sure is clever to only change over the public lands and burn them
while leaving the private lands alone, amirite?
 An untended forest will grow and grow until it chokes itself off. When there
are too many trees for the land to support, they start dying off, and that
dead timber becomes thousands of square miles of fuel, just waiting to be set
ablaze. California currently has four times the timber density that the land
can support. Even the reliably leftist L.A. Times, which never misses an
opportunity to blame something bad on 'climate change', noted that there are
currently more than 150 million dead trees in the Sierra Nevada, just waiting
to be ignited and that situation is unique to our modern era and the result of
enviro laws that won't even allow the harvesting of dead timber let alone live
timber. Nature manages a forest by fire and if we don't want half the state on
fire, we have to do something other than nature's way.
 That's why we started the Forest Service to begin with-- to scientifically
manage the forests so that they're both preserved for people's use and to keep
them healthy and reduce fires to a minimum. And we had healthy forests for
decades. But then the environmental crowd came along and said "You're
interfering with nature! Stop it!" and got all sorts of laws passed requiring
a hands-off approach to forestry and now here we are, with the entire West
Coast ablaze.
 The Native American tribes understood this and would routinely both clear away
dead trees and brush and conduct controlled burns to reduce the possibility of
large out-of-control fires. Then came the environmental activists, who
dismissed the practices of those they considered ignorant savages, and decided
they knew better how to do things. Well, we're seeing how well that worked
out, huh?
 And here we are, still having to deal with idiots like Occasional-Cortex and
HairGel Newsom who insist that this problem can be solved with carbon caps and
solar panels and windmills, when the truth is that if the U.S. literally shut
down all emissions COMPLETELY-- cars, gone; industry, gone; cattle farming,
gone; airplanes, gone; all of it, gone-- and we lived that way for the next 80
years, it would only reduce the global mean temperature by 0.3 degrees. That's
from the U.N. IPCC model itself. You can go run the numbers yourself if you
don't believe it.
 The wildfires are not a 'climate change' problem. They're a forest management
problem. Period.
 Another thing the media has been pushing lately: "These fires are more
destructive than fires in the past." Implying that 'climate change' has
somehow amped them up or something.
 Well, duh. The fires are more damaging because now there's a lot more to
damage. Before Europeans settled here, there weren't hundreds of thousands of
multi-million dollar homes in the path of the wildfires so when one burned
through, nothing was damaged but the forest and that kind of damage is
actually beneficial to the forest's continued growth. So yeah, the fires are
more damaging now because now there's a lot of stuff to damage that wasn't
there before.
 And as for water scarcity, despite all the talk of drought and the
'existential emergency of climate change', L.A. County was soaked by around 18
trillion gallons of rain earlier this year. The snowpack in the Sierras was
over 230 inches, a level never seen before in modern times. And for the last
40 years, there's been no effort by the Democrat-run government to expand
California's water storage capacity. Tens of millions of acre-feet of runoff
were once again allowed to cascade out to sea (and are now being sorely missed
as the hills burn).
 The California drought also actually contradicts all those climate change
models the progs are always so het up about. According to the models, Cali is
supposed to get wetter as 'climate change' increases, not drier. The reason we
get so little rain and we can build our homes right on the beach with no
worries we'll be swept away by hurricanes and tropical storms is because the
ocean is so cold here there's no fuel for those storms. Those storms are
driven by warm water, so as the water heats up as the 'climate change' models
predict, California will start to experience more and more frequent rainfall--
thus alleviating the drought, which will also alleviate the wildfire threat.
According to the models-- which can't be argued with, the science is settled,
remember?--'climate change' will actually be a good thing for California.