Yes, I’ve been away for a few days here, but trying to at least answer followed posts. I’ve been dealing with the fallout of yet another battle with my mother. I’ve tried for years to get along with her, and when she gave me her wedding (ring) set, I’d hoped we’d truly rounded a corner in a lifetime long shitty relationship.
Image from depedkto12.blogspot.com
This time around, it was over my spinal problems and how I’m supposedly not doing anything to contribute to the household here. I’ve shown the woman my first MRI report from years back, tried to explain it over and over for almost a decade, and she refuses to accept any of it. At best, I should just got get surgery because I have insurance. As if it’s that simple.
After dropping hints repeatedly, trying to explain the problem and it’s side effects, etc… I finally had enough after our last phone call. I snapped and sent her a fairly strongly worded email saying I was sick of it, and if she spent not even half the time she did researching my grandfather’s alzheimers, she’d know what I’ve been going through. Also that I was sick of her efforts to bully me and destroy my self respect.
Her response was that “maybe we shouldn’t talk anymore since she always seems to piss me off”. Typical emotional manipulation and playing the victim card. If she’d listened the countless other times I tried to explain it all, it never would have hit the point it did.
I shouldn’t be surprised. She reacts poorly to any criticism. I’ve cut her out of my life for years at a time on two previous occasions too. This is the woman who ripped into me verbally if I brought home a B and had my first step dad beat me for Cs while I was in school. When I went to college, I was supposed to take double a full time load and work full time at a “real” job. I got crucified for any little mistake to the point I went from a major extrovert in elementary school to an isolationist level introvert from about the fourth grade on.
Oh yes, and I was told I was too much of a wimp to go take martial arts so I could learn to defend myself from all the bullies that I attracted. Belts in 6 styles later (Shou Shu Chi, Tae Kwon Do, American Sport Karate, Parker Kenpo, Tracy Kenpo and Wing Chun), I guess she can kiss my ass on that one.
Never got any credit for it either after I’d achieved it.
At this point, I want to just tell her “Fine, kiss off!”.
All the self doubt she beat into me over the years always seems to factor into situations like this though. *I* should be doing more, I should do something different, word things better, be more understanding.
She’ll quickly point out this verbal abuse goes back generations also and blame her behavior on that. It’s as close as she comes to taking responsibility. Otherwise she just blames me for not tolerating it.
I’ve worked hard to grow the last few years. Longer than that really, but it’s been a snowball; slowly picking up momentum and mass. Every time I start to do better, she seems to want to throw a boulder into my calm pond. I’m at a breaking point here, or rather the relationship is.
So, yeah… When is enough enough? Because where I’m sitting right now:
I reblogged a post a couple of days ago about Re-farmer‘s cat Ginger who broke a leg and is in need of surgery.
Picture of Ginger, ruthlessly bootlegged from Re-Farmer’s blog.
The MINIMUM it’s going to cost is $1300 Canadian. She’s trying to raise money to help cover the bill via Ko-Fi donation site. Thus far, she’s only raised 43% of the minimum cost. Canadian dollars are lower than U.S. dollars too, so even a single Dollar or Euro donated goes farther then it would at home. Yes, you can donate that little also, and with no service charge
Re-Farmer and her husband are on a fixed income, so this is a case of legitimate need, NOT somebody who wastes cash and wants others to clean up their mess. If she didn’t need it, she would not have asked.
If every reader donated just that single dollar, Ginger would be well on his way to having his surgery. We bloggers are a community, so I’m asking all of you to pull together and help, even if it is just $1.
The bias, cliques and general toxic nature of it all has made me walk away from it entirely years ago. I’m still not sure a blog counts as social media, but this is it for me. 🙂
The reality though is that all social media platforms are EASY to fix. Easy in the sense that the solution is straight forward, but it does require work. What’s the answer? Simple:
Ages ago, back when the closest thing to social media was .vbb (virtual bulletin board – similar in form to reddit, although a little more primitive) discussion sites, I helped moderate one of the biggest ones out there. The code of conduct there was pretty straight forward. The biggest rule that we used to define Trolling and abusive behavior was:
You can debate the idea, but DO NOT attack the person making the post.
Examples (of somewhat obvious concepts):
Debate the Idea: “Tax cuts for the rich doesn’t result in them creating more jobs via reinvestment, they just horde wealth.” Controversial enough to be an example here.
Attack the Post Maker: “What kind of idiot believes that tax cuts actually help the economy?”
Do I even have to point out how one keeps the debate more focused and civil, while the other degenerates it into ad hominid personal attacks and childish name calling?
Why isn’t it done? Simple. None of the owners of these sites want to pay for moderators, and bots aren’t sophisticated enough to differentiate yet. They also avoid dealing with tantrums claiming bias if a human moderator shuts down a troll and their followers.
Yes, there’s political and (mostly) economic bias guiding these decisions also. They don’t want to take what will inevitably be a very large hit to their user bases via this rule. Personal experience has taught me that this is fairly short term though. People LOVE having the spotlight. Take it away from them, and they’ll rant and pout, but then come back and play within the rules MOST of the time because they want their stage and audience back.
The habitual rule breakers and one who will try to skirt the rules constantly… They’ll always be there, and will act even worse without that kind of rule in place.
Of course, there’s the other issue that has to be dealt with, and that takes a cultural shift: Back then, the common sense belief was that free speech and the ability to freely debate ideas was paramount.
Nowadays everybody wants to live in an echo chamber:
The biggest step to straightening out the internet and social media specifically is that the other side has a right to speak.
I’ll be blunt, if you have to resort to silencing dissenting voices via name calling, applying labels, trolling, attempting to get people banned or blocked, etc… In short, if your ideas can’t stand the light of open honest discussion, chances are you don’t understand them yourself.
Change that and implement the above rule along with a few other common sense ones (ie no advocating violence), and social media would change fairly quickly.
Famous SNL skit turned into meme fodder on the internet
I’m back after sorting out several things that may or may not get blog posts of their own. Right now however, I want to revisit the idea of conspiracy theories. I lost at least one (apparently unhinged) reader when I refused to embrace the idea that the Nashville Christmas bombing was actually a government missile attack… or a government space based particle beam weapon if you’re REALLY REALLY out there.
Christmas morning picture of the bombing aftermath in Nashville
I had some FUN with that attack in the post linked to above, but it was only fun. These people seriously believe that the government used a cruise missile to damage an AT&T facility because said facility was supposedly investigating the voting machines and election fraud. This based on an out of focus picture from a different angle than the original pictures and video. Said picture supposedly shows a fragment of a vapor trail “from a missile”:
Yes, it apparently started out as it was “an NSA spy hub” that was hardened, but still somehow damaged by a missile that couldn’t even completely destroy the cars on the right hand side of the street (first pic). Yes, this is the start of applying Occam’s Razor to this idiocy.
So let’s go back to the blatantly obvious based on the two pictures above:
A) That blurry line could be almost anything. If it’s a vapor trail from a missile, where is the rest of the trail? Why did nobody report seeing a missile?
B) Even the most basic amateur forensics would show that’s NOT a missile hit. There’s no crater. How did it destroy a “hardened spy facility” undreground and not even leave a crater? The blast radius wasn’t even sufficient to completely destroy the cars on the left hand side of the street. The debris pattern doesn’t even indicate a center of the street hit like many whackadoos are insisting.
On top of all that, there’s just the reality of how the government works. Trump also for that matter. ANY investigation into electronic tampering with the voting machines would have been done publicly for the sake of transparency. Trump also would have been screaming from the rooftops that the proof was coming. His whole election rigging theory hinged on it. Even after the fact, he said nothing.
The government doesn’t need an AT&T switching center in Nashville to do such investigations either. The internet was started as a US Government construct named ARPANET. The government still has it’s hands all over the internet with back door access to backbone routing systems at the heart of the internet. Any person who has spent any real length of time in the IT field knows this. Things like Operation Able Danger barely scratched the surface of what the government could do if it wanted to.
Even setting aside the cloak and dagger stuff, the FBI Cyber Division is one of the best cyber forensics teams around. They would have likely been leading any investigation into tampering with the voting machines from their headquarters. Trump had already cleaned out anybody who had opposed him at the FBI also, so one can’t simply claim bias as an excuse here.
So, NO, there was NO INVESTIGATION and NO CRUISE MISSILE ATTACK to stop it and ‘save’ Trump’s presidency.
Let’s take Occam’s Razor a bit further however…
Why would the government spend $850,000 dollars (the cost of a tomahawk cruise missile) to launch a blatant and highly messy attack when so many easier options are available IF there was something going on that needed to be covered up?
For starters, they could just “spike” the target area with a virus or malware of some sort that would take out any software based evidence and potentially damage hardware as well. Any PEOPLE that present a danger can have Clinton administration style accidents & suicides (ie Vince Foster shooting himself in the head and THEN throwing his own body in a dumpster), OR simply discredited as conspiracy nuts and Alex Jones fans.
If I wanted to put together a far more plausible conspiracy theory around the bombing, it’d be something to this effect:
The RV carried a black ops team that went in and neutralized the troublesome area. They went in unseen via a trap door in the bottom of the RV and went into the sewers before breaching the AT&T building. The gunshots heard at 4:30 and 5:30 were the team taking out security or witnesses. After the job was done, they detonated the RV to cover their tracks, escaped via the sewers to an unmarked delivery van, and drove off. Other people in the NSA immediately put out the story of this rogue AT&T contractor obsessed with 5G and coronavirus, and the public has a cover story. The broadcasted warnings from the RV about a bomb were more about drawing attention away from the black ops team’s escape than actually keeping innocents safe.
The difference between THAT and the missile strike theory? TONS of money and much more surgical level control over the operation and it’s outcome. It’s still about as likely as my Die Hard theory in the post linked above though, LOL.
5G and COVID
While we’re at it, let’s BRIEFLY tackle this one also. Let’s start with 2 seconds of background.
The whole conspiracy took flight when a holistic medicine doctor named Thomas Cowen (a few unverified sources say he was barred from practicing “real” medicine), posted a YouTube video about how 5G and the “electrification” of the Earth’s atmosphere was causing coronavirus. All it took after that was a couple of celebritards tweeting about it and BANG; the theory went wildfire level viral.
The trouble here is that none of the above people have any sort of background in radiology. For the record, I don’t either. While I *do* believe that all the radiowaves put into the air may be having some sort of negative effects, I also know something else:
Radiation (and all types of electromagnetic energy are broadly classified as radiation) exposure doesn’t cause or mimic the symptoms of contagious diseases. The effects are completely different. On one extreme, you have cancer as an effect. THAT takes strong radiation. Much further down the line, we have the vertigo and impaired thinking / brain fog and moodiness caused by directed microwave attacks on US personnel at the Cuban embassy.
So, while I’d be more accepting of the modest possibility that 5G is responsible for all the mentally addled people on the far left and right who only want to fight with others and see threats everywhere, it’s NOT responsible for COVID-19. If anything is, it’s the Wuhan Institute of Virology(which another reader has argued doesn’t exist, because their media told them so, never mind the website and ability to find it on Google Maps).
Conclusion:
My point with the last (Wuhan) remark and the Clinton one earlier is that there’s enough legitimately shady stuff going on in the world without having to invent wild, unsupportable shit to explain every little thing that goes bad. That’s actually my biggest gripe with conspiracy theorists and theories:
They draw attention away from legitimate wrong-doing and are used to discredit anyone who wants to hold government and big business responsible for those legitimate wrong acts.
The fact of the matter is the missile attack nuts and other fringe theories out there actually discredited any legitimate effort to look into voter fraud. And the voter fraud was definitely real. Trump didn’t gain a single vote after the polls closed and lost substantial leads in 8 states. I kept track of the numbers over that time, and what happened is a mathematical and statistical impossibility. It would mean every area left uncounted at midnight on election night voted 100% Democrat.
I don’t miss Trump one bit. He was a toxic, narcissistic bully. The areas remaining to be counted after election night all normally leaned Democrat also, so it’s possible Biden might have won regardless. I’m only concerned about making sure the process stays untainted.
OK, enough of that, I said I was done with politics. That above situation is a perfect example of how conspiracy nuts actually HURT the cause they’re trying to promote though. THAT is why I brought it up, and to point out that one can see something fishy without going to extremes to rationalize it.
Before anyone on the Left posts a comment about all the right wing idiots out there, keep in mind that the COVID thing is a universal idiocy not limited to the far right. Likewise there’s the conspiracies spun by leftists that all cops are out to murder black people and that the military is full of terrorists ready to repeat the storming of the capital and completely overthrow the government. Glass houses & stones and all that…
All y’all crazy people need to get your heads straight. And I’m done venting, LOL.
What am I talking about?? How California is willfully negligent in it’s fire management, and how all these fires would be preventable if Governor Gavin Newsome and the rest of the state “leadership” would just pull it’s head out of it’s collective rear.
ProPublica reporter Elizabeth Weil ran a story a couple of days ago that just got featured on Pocket. Since PorPublica has a Creative Commons license policy with it’s stories, I’m just going to link to and copy it here. It can speak for itself.
This is a story about frustration, about watching the West burn when you fully understand why it’s burning — and understand why it did not need to be this bad.
What a week. Rough for all Californians. Exhausting for the firefighters on the front lines. Heart-shattering for those who lost homes and loved ones. But a special “Truman Show” kind of hell for the cadre of men and women who’ve not just watched California burn, fire ax in hand, for the past two or three or five decades, but who’ve also fully understood the fire policy that created the landscape that is now up in flames.
“What’s it like?” Tim Ingalsbee repeated back to me, wearily, when I asked him what it was like to watch California this past week. In 1980, Ingalsbee started working as a wildland firefighter. In 1995, he earned a doctorate in environmental sociology. And in 2005, frustrated by the huge gap between what he was learning about fire management and seeing on the fire line, he started Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. Since then FUSEE has been lobbying Congress, and trying to educate anybody who will listen, about the misguided fire policy that is leading to the megafires we are seeing today.
So what’s it like? “It’s just … well … it’s horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from Cassandra syndrome,” Ingalsbee said. “Every year I warn people: Disaster’s coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.”
The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.
Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.
Mike Beasley, deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park from 2001 to 2009 and retired interagency fire chief for the Inyo National Forest and the Bureau of Land Management’s Bishop Field Office, was in a better mood than Ingalsbee when I reached him, but only because as a part-time Arkansan, part-time Californian and Oregonian, Beasley seems to find life more absurd. How does California look this week? He let out a throaty laugh. “It looks complicated,” he said. “And I think you know what I mean by that.”
Beasley earned what he called his “red card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to keep it clean that way.”
(Cal Fire, which admittedly is a little busy this week, did not respond to requests to comment before this story published.)
Carl Skinner (Courtesy Carl Skinner)
So it’s been a week. Carl Skinner, another Cassandra, who started firefighting in Lassen County in 1968 and who retired in 2014 after 42 years managing and researching fire for the U.S. Forest Service, sounded profoundly, existentially tired. “We’ve been talking about how this is where we were headed for decades.”
“It’s painful,” said Craig Thomas, director of the Fire Restoration Group. He, too, has been having the fire Cassandra conversation for 30 years. He’s not that hopeful, unless there’s a power change. “Until different people own the calculator or say how the buttons get pushed, it’s going to stay that way.”
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.
Megafires, like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so far), will continue to erupt until we’ve flared off our stockpiled fuels. No way around that.
When I reached Malcolm North, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who is based in Mammoth, California, and asked if there was any meaningful scientific dissent to the idea that we need to do more controlled burning, he said, “None that I know of.”
How did we get here? Culture, greed, liability laws and good intentions gone awry. There are just so many reasons not to pick up the drip torch and start a prescribed burn even though it’s the safe, smart thing to do.
The overarching reason is culture. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was created with a military mindset. Not long after, renowned American philosopher William James wrote in his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” that Americans should redirect their combative impulses away from their fellow humans and onto “Nature.” The war-on-fire mentality found especially fertile ground in California, a state that had emerged from the genocide and cultural destruction of tribes who understood fire and relied on its benefits to tend their land. That state then repopulated itself in the Gold Rush with extraction enthusiasts, and a little more than half a century later, it suffered a truly devastating fire. Three-thousand people died, and hundreds of thousands were left homeless, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and attendant fires. The overwhelming majority of the destruction came from the flames, not the quake. Small wonder California’s fire ethos has much more in common with a field surgeon wielding a bone saw than a preventive medicine specialist with a tray full of vaccines.
More quantitatively — and related — fire suppression in California is big business, with impressive year-over-year growth. Before 1999, Cal Fire never spent more than $100 million a year. In 2007-08, it spent $524 million. In 2017-18, $773 million. Could this be Cal Fire’s first $1 billion season? Too early to tell, but don’t count it out. On top of all the state money, federal disaster funds flow down from “the big bank in the sky,” said Ingalsbee. Studies have shown that over a quarter of U.S. Forest Service fire suppression spending goes to aviation — planes and helicopters used to put out fire. A lot of the “air show,” as he calls it, happens not on small fires in the morning, when retardant drops from planes are most effective, but on large fires in the afternoon. But nevermind. You can now call in a 747 to drop 19,200 gallons of retardant. Or a purpose-designed Lockheed Martin FireHerc, a cousin of the C-130. How cool is that? Still only 30% of retardant is dropped within 2,000 yards of a neighborhood, meaning that it stands little chance of saving a life or home. Instead the airdrop serves, at great expense, to save trees in the wilderness, where burning, not suppression, might well do more good.
This whole system is exacerbated by the fact that it’s not just contracts for privately owned aircraft. 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…”
Cal Fire pays firefighters well, very well. (And perversely well compared with the thousands of California Department of Corrections inmates who serve on fire crews, which is very much a different story.) As the California Policy Center reported in 2017, “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.”
The paydays can turn incentives upside down. “Every five, 10, 15 years, we’ll see an event where a firefighter who wants [to earn] overtime starts a fire,” said Crystal Kolden, a self-described “pyrogeographer” and assistant professor of fire science in the Management of Complex Systems Department at the University of California, Merced. (She first picked up a drip torch in 1999 when working for the U.S. Forest Service and got hooked.) “And it sort of gets painted as, ‘Well, this person is just completely nuts.’ And, you know, they maybe are.” But the financial incentives are real. “It’s very lucrative for a certain population of contractors.”
By comparison, planning a prescribed burn is cumbersome. A wildfire is categorized as an emergency, meaning firefighters pull down hazard pay and can drive a bulldozer into a protected wilderness area where regulations typically prohibit mountain bikes. Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.
“One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational plan to live with smoke. Historical accounts of California summers describe months of smoky skies, but as a feature of the landscape, not a bug. Beasley and others argue we need to rethink our ideas of what a healthy California looks like. “We’re used to seeing a thick wall of even-aged trees,” he told me, “and those forests are just as much a relic of fire exclusion as our clear skies.”
Mike Beasley (Courtesy Mike Beasley)
In the Southeast which burns more than twice as many acres as California each year — fire is defined as a public good. 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. No promotion will be missed, no red flags rise. “There’s always extra political risk to a fire going bad,” Beasley said. “So whenever anything comes up, people say, OK, that’s it. We’re gonna put all the fires out.” For over a month this spring, the U.S. Forest Service canceled all prescribed burns in California, and training for burn bosses, because of COVID-19.
I asked Beasley why he ignited his burns anyway when he was Yosemite fire chief. “I’m single! I’m not married! I have no kids. Probably a submarine captain is the best person for the job.” Then he stopped joking. “I was a risk taker to some degree. But I also was a believer in science.”
On Aug. 12, 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the U.S. Forest Service chief and others signed a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, that the state needs to burn more. “The health and wellbeing of California communities and ecosystems depend on urgent and effective forest and rangeland stewardship to restore resilient and diverse ecosystems,” the MOU states. The document includes a mea culpa: “California’s forests naturally adapted to low-intensity fire, nature’s preferred management tool, but Gold Rush-era clearcutting followed by a wholesale policy of fire suppression resulted in the overly dense, ailing forests that dominate the landscape today.”
Ingalsbee looks at the MOU and thinks, That’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. Likewise Nick Goulette, executive director of the Watershed Research and Training Center, has seen too little movement for too long to believe anything but utter calamity can get us back on track. In 2014, Goulette participated in a planning exercise known as the Quadrennial Fire Review, or QFR, that asked the grim question: What is the disaster scenario that finally causes us to alter in a meaningful way our relationship and response to fire? The answer: something along the lines of a megafire taking out San Diego. In the wake of it, Goulette and others imagined one scenario in which the U.S. Forest Service morphed into an even more militaristic firefighting agency that “overwhelmingly emphasizes full suppression” and is “extremely risk averse.” But they also envisioned a scenario that spawned a new kind of fire force, one focused on “monitoring firesheds” and dedicated to changing the dominant philosophy away “from the war on fire to living with fire.”
This exercise took place three years before the devastating 2017 Napa and Sonoma fires, and four years before the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise in 2018. Goulette thought those events would have prompted more change. The tragedies did lead to some new legislation and some more productive conversations with Cal Fire. But there’s just so much ground we need to make up.
When asked how we were doing on closing the gap between what we need to burn in California and what we actually light, Goulette fell into the familiar fire Cassandra stutter. “Oh gosh. … I don’t know. …” The QFR acknowledged there was no way prescribed burns and other kinds of forest thinning could make a dent in the risk imposed by the backlog of fuels in the next 10 or even 20 years. “We’re at 20,000 acres a year. We need to get to a million. What’s the reasonable path toward a million acres?” Maybe we could get to 40,000 acres, in five years. But that number made Goulette stop speaking again. “Forty thousand acres? Is that meaningful?” That answer, obviously, is no.
The only real path toward meaningful change looks politically impossible. Goulette said we need to scrap the system and rethink what we could do with Cal Fire’s annual budget: Is this really the best thing we could do with several billion dollars to be more resistant to wildfire? Goulette knows this suggestion is so laughably distasteful and naive to those in power that uttering it as the director of a nonprofit like the Watershed Research and Training Center gets you kicked out of the room.
Lenya Quinn-Davidson at September Burn in Bear River. (Thomas Stratton)
Some fire Cassandras are more optimistic than others. Lenya Quinn-Davidson, area fire adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension and director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council, remains hopeful. She knows the history. She understands that the new MOU is nonbinding. Still she’s working on forming burn cooperatives and designing burner certificate programs to bring healthy fire practices back into communities. She’d like to get Californians back closer to the fire culture in the Southeast where, she said, “Your average person goes out back with Grandpa, and they burn 10 acres on the back 40 you know, on a Sunday.” Fire is not just for professionals, not just for government employees and their contractors. Intentional fire, as she sees it, is “a tool and anyone who’s managing land is going to have prescribed fire in their toolbox.” That is not the world we’ve been inhabiting in the West. “That’s been the hard part in California,” Quinn-Davidson said. “In trying to increase the pace and scale of prescribed fire, we’re actually fighting some really, some really deep cultural attitudes around who gets to use it and where it belongs in society.”
A PG&E employee received a $4.5 million Bay Area home from a vendor, and sold it right back a month later, records show. Later, the utility accused the vendor of bribery for unspecified actions.
All Cassandras believe California’s wildfires will get worse, much worse, before they get better. Right now, said Crystal Kolden, the state’s fuel management plan, such as it is, is for Cal Fire to try to do prescribed burns in shoulder season. But given that the fires are starting earlier in the year and lasting later (we are not even this year’s traditional fire season yet), the shoulder doesn’t really exist. “So where is the end?” she asks. “It’s not in sight, and we don’t know when it will be.” The week before this past round of fires saw the hottest temperatures ever recorded in California, the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on earth: 130 degrees, more than half the boiling point of water, and just 10 degrees below what scientist consider to be the absolute upper limit of what the human body can endure for 10 minutes in humidity.
“Meanwhile, our firefighters are completely at the breaking point,” said Kolden, and there’s little they can do to stop a megafire once one starts. “And after a while you start to see breakdowns and interruptions in other critical pieces, like our food systems, our transportation systems.” It doesn’t need to be this way. We didn’t need to get here. We are not suffering from a lack of knowledge. “We can produce all the science in the world, and we largely understand why fires are the way they are,” said Eric Knapp, a U.S. Forest Service research ecologist based in Redding, California. “It’s just that other social political realities get in the way of doing a lot of what we need to do.”
The fire and climate science before us is not comforting. It would be great to call in a 747, dump 19,200 gallons of retardant on reality and make the terrifying facts fade away. But ignoring the tinderbox that is our state and our planet invites more madness, not just for the Cassandras but for us all.
As Ingalsbee said, “You won’t find any climate deniers on the fire line.”
The only point I might argue is the idea of preventive burning as a way to clear areas. It’s more cost effective than going in with crews and some heavy equipment to clear areas, but preventive fires have started full blown fires upon occasion, and manual labor allows for more selective clearing… leaving some vegetation and clearing out the excess growth. Both options should be on the table…
I’m going to put a more positive spin on the Tuesday social commentary stuff this time.
On the heels of my “Be the Change” post, I want to talk about what the mega-rich, power elite political and business leaders (and their media puppets) are utterly terrified of… YOU! Not just you actually, but Us… seeing through how we’re being set against each other to the point of needless, senseless violence so that we don’t see how they’re robbing us, keeping us down and and outright working against us.
I’m going to use a couple of short clips from Rise of Skywalker to make the point, since something like this IS their worst nightmare:
Perhaps it’s more appropriate to say it’s HOPE that they’re afraid of. Because when hope rises at a dark moment like today, THIS is what happens:
Note the shock and contempt in the officer’s voice also when he says “It’s not a fleet sir, it’s just… people.”
For the record, I’m NOT talking about violence either. I’m talking about all of us standing up and saying “NO MORE” in one loud, unified voice.
No more corrupt government that thinks we exist to serve it instead of it serving us.
No more divide and conquer, spreading hate.
No more false solutions that only make matters worse.
No more politicians becoming filthy rich at taxpayer expense.
NO MORE putting giant financial institutions and mega-corporations ahead of people, the environment and smaller businesses.
No more pretending too big to fail doesn’t actually mean they MUST be dismantled.
The day we FINALLY stand united and say “ENOUGH!” is when the world changes.
Right now, it feels about like 25 seconds into that clip, where even Poe has given up hope. As that fleet’s arrival shows though, everything can change in an instant. We just have to want it bad enough.
That’s right, I’m going out on a MAJOR limb here and I’m going to talk about how to TRULY change the world, specifically with regards to race relations here in the U.S. as they currently stand. You’re either going to be offended or love this. It’s a long one, but worth it. 10 to 15 minutes of reading for the chance to understand other people and start to change the world.
First a “Why?”
Skip this if you just want the meat of the discussion. Those of you following my blog know I swore off social issues just under a week ago. I was tired of the venom, and how it all made me feel. I hate failing and quitting though. I’m also a firm believer that you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. Ergo, I had to take a hard look at the situation and ask myself how much of my failure was on my end. Looking back at my previous posts, I think the tone was too negative. You can be right as rain, but if you bludgeon people with it, you’re only going to alienate them.
Proverbs 15.1 – “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”
Notice there it does NOT make exceptions for how correct somebody THINKS they are. So, I want to try this again, at least one more time… See if I can reach people via speaking plainly but kindly, and no longer holding back some of my religious and spiritual beliefs for fear of alienating people. Being genuine and authentic matter. On with the show!
The Actual Post:
I’m going to primarily be tackling the subject of race in America, and what I think folks on both sides need to do to come together. The general theme of “Be the Change You Want to See” is true for how to fix all the world’s problems though.
I’m likely going to offend a few white folks, and a few black folks. My only goal though is to challenge you all to look at the problem through each other’s eyes and develop a greater understanding of things.
If you want to say I have no right to speak here, you’re wrong. This country was founded on the idea that EVERYONE should have a voice. That’s why the First Amendment exists, so that you and I both always have the ability to peacefully make our opinion known.
For what it’s worth, I’ve also lived all over. Everywhere from “The Hood” to nicer middle-class areas. I’ve had friends of all races and also seen firsthand the worst that all people have to offer.
I’m going to start with white folks. We’re the largest ethnic group in the country and have the most ability to effect change.
What White Folks Should Know:
First, I get it. If you’re like me, you’re probably a decent person who genuinely wants all people to be safe, happy and have the equal opportunity to work for success in this country. You’re probably also sick of being lumped in with Klan members, told you have no right to speak, told you’re automatically a racist by virtue of your skin color, etc… It’s frustrating and hurtful.
If you genuinely are a racist or Klan member, I’ll be unduly nice and simply say “repent”. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus say hate people of other races. Quite the contrary. We’re ALL God’s children. Enough said.
The rest of you, I’d simply ask that open your mind and try to understand the frustration on the other side. Up till 1964, Black folks were still dealing with segregation. That’s just 56 years ago, and almost 100 years after the end of slavery and The Civil War. Millennial black people and their children still have parents and grandparents old enough to tell them what it was like to go into a diner and see a bucket full of axe handles and bats near the door or counter in case they “Needed to be put in their place”. Things didn’t truly get better till the mid 1970s.
Yeah, I know… YOU didn’t do that. I understand that. I believe most black folks understand it also. What I am asking you to understand is that the wound runs deep. There is a small percentage of us that are determined to keep that wound open also. Black folks don’t know if you’re a good person when they first see you any more than you know if that young black man is really into hip hop culture and rap, or a thug.
The first part of bringing about change is realizing that we’re all human beings and just want to get by and be safe in our corner of the world.
When you hear somebody arguing that it’s “Black Lives Matter” instead of “All Lives Matter”, they still believe your life matters also, it’s just that they feel so incredibly threatened by what’s happening that they believe extra attention has to be put on the black lives being lost.
When you get upset over kneeling during the national anthem, understand that it has nothing to do with disrespecting the flag, etc… It’s about waiting 100 years even after freedom from slavery and still not feeling truly equal in society. How far would YOU go to draw attention to the issue of your rights if the situation were reversed?
It’s easy to sit back and say that everybody has the same opportunity in America. Yes, black folks do have more opportunity than some of them have been led to believe also. HOWEVER, equal opportunity depends on an equal education for starters. If schools have poor teachers and no equipment, how good an education is ANY child going to get? Financial education is also important if somebody is to stay out of poverty once they start to get ahead.
It’s also a different world when you live or work in a poor neighborhood. There is a higher percentage of desperate people there, so the police ARE more inclined to view everybody with suspicion. I’ve lived it. I’ve almost had a cop draw on me during a traffic stop, and I got politely (which is more than many get) questioned by a cop when stopping at a 7 Eleven store at 2am also. Some black folks live this every day of their life. When people are distrustful of you, it’s natural to start wondering about their intentions as well. YES, there ARE legitimately racist cops out there also. It’s a small percentage, but they’re still out there, as this video shows:
That poor guy’s only “crime” was Jaywalking on a completely dead RESIDENTIAL street. Something everybody does. Despite the police claim that he “threw down his jacket and challenged them to fight”, the video only shows him taking it off and putting it down. Note that when the cop grabs him by the collar, his hands are still at his side too.
I was in Sacramento when that happened. There was NO hidden stuff you didn’t see, no ‘he looked like a suspect’ even. That’s why he ended up with a huge settlement from the city. I’ve seen similar situations elsewhere a few times. THIS is exactly why black people say they’re afraid of “walking while black”. So, I ask you to understand, if you’ve only had good experiences with cops, that’s not everybody’s luck. We have to do all we can to support good cops, but also make sure cops like this are fired and never allowed to carry a badge again.
That applies to the cops in the George Floyd case also. Yes, he resisted arrest prior to ending up on the ground. He may have had some hidden health issues also. NONE of that should be an excuse for pinning him for roughly three minutes instead of cuffing him. If proper procedure was followed, George Floyd wouldn’t have had those secondary issues kick in and / or died of asphyxiation.
The whole situation is more complex than most of us think. What we as a people need to do is show genuine empathy and compassion. Be willing to listen and try to understand where what you’re hearing is coming from. Ask questions like “I truly want to understand where you’re coming from, so please tell me about what led to you believing that?”
You’ll learn a lot more than you would assuming that the other person is only motivated by hate and / or laziness.
You may not be able to change the world on your own, but just by doing your own little part to be more understanding and consider the other side… just treating everybody the way you’d want to be treated, the world will take one step closer to being a better place. Enough people do it and we’ve brought an incredible amount of light into the world. I’ve used Bayside Church’s Christmas service candle lighting as a perfect example here:
This IS all it takes too. Laws (new or old) can’t change a person’s heart, and a person with a good heart doesn’t need a law to tell them what’s moral and just.
A Note For Both Sides Regarding the Media & Politicians:
I’ve ranted time and again here about the media (left and right) twisting the truth. There are plenty of posts with examples here. No need to repeat it all. I imagine some of them even think they’re doing good and forcing society in a ‘better’ direction. I honestly believe most are just exploiting all of you for the sake of better ratings. You’re being fed a constant stream of half truths to promote conflict. Anger, suffering and violence are good for ratings.
Politicans… They will LIE to your face and say ANYTHING to keep or gain power, and do NOTHING to effect real change. They’re ALL the same. Enough said.
My point being is that too many of us depend on these two groups for facts and to guide us to proper conclusions. Question everything, and actively seek the whole truth. It will likely be something you do NOT want to hear, BUT acknowledging the whole truth is the ONLY way to begin to make real change. I come from a law enforcement family. I hate acknowledging dirty cops exist. Purging them from the system is the only way to protect and honor the good cops though.
What Black Folks Should Know:
Yep, I had my run at white folks, now I’d like to talk to you. PLEASE read the first part for white folks also. It will help you understand where the average, decent white person who wants to support you is coming from.
First and foremost… Realize that the vast majority of white folks absolutely DO care about you, think your lives do matter, and want you to have the same opportunities as everyone else.
You know how it makes you so mad your skin crawls when some gang banger kills his baby mama, or does a drive by on a kid’s birthday party, and you hear some idiot say “See, they’re all like that?”…
Well, that’s how we feel when we’re told that we are all like that (racists), or that we have no right to talk about our relationships with you or other races.
It simply comes down to two wrongs not making anything right, ever. If you justify bad behavior by pointing at other bad behavior, all you’re REALLY doing is lowering yourself to the same level as those bad people.
I really do get that you have decades of frustration over everything. It sucks having to be the one to take the high ground when you’re the victim also. It takes strength to lead by example, the same strength that you’ve displayed by making it as far as you already have.
Something else to consider; there’s an old martial arts proverb that “action beats reaction”. So, in any situation the person doing the acting is more in control than the one who is reacting to what the first person or group is doing.
Now, as far as this whole silencing others thing goes… two quick counterpoints beyond what I said at the beginning of this post:
Have you EVER listened to anyone that told you to shut up and do as your told? Outside of parents or a drill instructor, I bet not. 🙂 Nobody’s mind is changed by being lectured and brow beaten, no matter how much they deserve it.
No matter how ignorant a person’s beliefs may be, you can never change them if you don’t understand what’s behind those beliefs, and develop some sort of rapport with the other person. If you try to relate to them they’ll try to relate to you. This is the same thing I was telling white folks that we need to do with you.
History is full of stories of wars and great generals, but who are the people that are truly remembered and honored? It’s the people like Jesus, Ghandi, Mother Teresa, and Dr. King and similar leaders that have had some of the greatest impact on the world, and without ever resorting to violence. Remember that when you get out there and protest. Protest you should too, but do it peacefully.
On that note, I know it’s usually somebody else that’s starting the looting. It’s usually Antifa and occasionally even a really bad cop setting things up. Just realize despite what the media is telling you, that white supremacists have very little if anything to do with it, neither does Russia, China and Iran. This is what I meant earlier by they’re playing ALL of us for the sake of ratings.
Run the looters out of your protests, call the cops on them or just avoid them if they’re too dangerous. Do NOT let them drag your righteous cause down with them. Antifa ain’t your friend either. All they care about is causing destruction.
I’ve got to touch on a couple of sensitive areas now. Please hang with me and hear me out.
One of the areas where you lose support from people of other races is when you support cases where it wasn’t the cops’ fault. A good example is the Stephon Clark case in Sacramento. Part of the problem with cases like this is the media reporting only half the story. Stephon was a victim of a broken system though, not the cops. He was seriously depressed, had relationship problems, and was on drugs the night he was shot. He ran from cops into a VERY dark location and they couldn’t see what he’d suddenly pulled out of his pocket. I was in Sacramento, so I heard more of the story than most of the nation. The shooting was a tragedy. That Stephon ended up in that situation was a CLEAR failure of the system to have some sort of a safety net where he could get help or counseling. A case can be made that better lights for the police might have helped too, among other things. The media outright reported this tragedy as an execution though, and exploited you simply for the sake of ratings from protests and grief.
Those times when it IS a case like that, be willing to admit it and work peacefully to improve police procedure and social services, or whatever may be needed to prevent future occurrences. It will improve your relationship with the cops if they feel you’re trying to understand their end also. Most cops are legitimately good people too.
OK, last point and it’s a TOUGH one. I’ve lived in the hood and seen it though. I went to a high school that was nicknamed “Blood Bank” because it was overrun with members of the Bloods too. There is a SMALL percentage of the black community that trashes kids who want to learn and get ahead as “trying to be white”, label people like Ben Carson or Herman Cain who do get ahead as an Uncle Tom or Coon, and that consider gang banging as “black culture”.
I reject all of that, and you should also. Education is the key to a better life. Saying learning is “acting white” is really saying black people can’t learn. That’s complete crap. Dr Ben Carson is one of the best brain surgeons in the world (if not THE best), came up from the hood, and is proof positive some of you are smarter than any dang white person. Anybody that tells you not to learn is trying to keep you ignorant so they can play you. It’s that simple. I believe most of you accept all of this already. It’s a small. loud minority of folks pushing that. Don’t let them. Black folks are every bit as smart as any other race.
Same goes with crime. I’m not going to say much here. We both know the vast majority of black folks are NOT gang bangers and thugs. Do your best to minimize those voices, for the benefit of your entire community.
Ladies, YOU have the power here also. The person a black man is most likely to respect and listen to is a strong black woman. I’ve seen young black women take control of their fellow students and settle a class down. I’ve heard stories of mothers pulling their sons out of gangs, etc… Its up to you to stand up, lead the way and help heal your community and the country.
Wrapping It Up:
I try to look fairly at every side of any given situation. What I see today is two groups of good people that are having an increasingly hard time talking to each other. We’re all victims of a past we had little to do with.
We both need to change some.
We both need to be willing to talk more and actually try to understand each other.
We ALL need to come together as a united and equal people and prevent a corrupt media and leadership from trying to get us to destroy each other while they screw all of us.
Silk Chatters 