It is Called The “Camp Fire”…
Unfortunately, the death toll is over 80 people now…
Opinion by “Deplorable” Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen
My wife Jan, and I, have been married 53 years as of last October 23, 2018. Right from the beginning we took to “Camping” as our weekend, holiday, or vacation activity. Starting out with a few blankets, a tarp, some rope, and an aluminum coffee pot we headed into the California mountain woods in the summer, the desert-under-the-stars in the winter. We graduated to a tent, a camp stove, a Coleman lantern, sleeping bags, and those blankety-blank air mattresses. It didn’t matter that we had only a little money for we had each other, and we kept each other warm in the high country.
Then, luxury of luxuries, we acquired a Tent Trailer – and the California mountains became ours to explore in sheer comfort. We had that first Tent Trailer for twenty-five years, and maybe a million miles.
Somewhere in there Jennifer came along, and we bundled her up and headed for the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, around to Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, and Canyonlands. Campers we are. Marvels we’ve seen. Clean air we breathe. Food for the soul.
But, California mountain forests were our staple.
We covered every backway and byway from Yosemite south more than once, turning another corner on a lonely mountain road to come upon another stunning view. We made a summer home out of Kings Canyon, swimming in the ice cold Kings river, sometimes rafting, sometimes just laying in the high mountain sun.
We had a secret camp spot where we could see 50 miles over the mountain canyons, with a trillion stars lighting up the ice cold night.
We know the California mountains…
Then, someone began the process of destroying them…
It started slowly. For whatever reasons, unknown to us, everything began to deteriorate. The magic was beginning to disappear. Over the last ten years we began to fear the mountains, because it was painfully obvious how dry they were, and there was only one road in and out – We could be trapped in a raging fire with no escape. The forests were so dry you imagine 100 foot flames. Our favorite places became scary – and we mourned the loss, not knowing what was going on.
Ask Yourself – Why Would Anyone Want to Destroy The Forests?
If you think about it only the most demented, hateful, screwloose, monsters on the Planet would embrace the willful destruction of the Planet’s forests. Worse, they do this action claiming to be “environmentalists,” massively destroying America’s future for some “magical thinking” idea.
The current “Environmentalist” movement in the US has NOTHING to do with the ecosystem, and EVERYTHING to do with cultural Marxism. It is ONLY about destroying America as we know it.
For years we have watched self-styled “environmentalist,” groups lap up federal money with one social scheme after another designed to provide funding for leftist causes. In many cases they just want a bigger corporate airplane to fly to Europe for their Paris conferences.
Under the machinations of the Evil Obama-Nation Networks…
…so-called “environmentalists,” built a whole “destroy capitalism” plan and got it funded by federal money – in two ways: (1) Sue a “friendly” government agency and settle, getting their MASSIVE attorney fees paid, and (2) Obama’s “climate change” public-private partnerships.
The lawsuits had a many-faceted purpose…
Lawsuits are hard to do right? Wrong. Not if it is a “friendly” lawsuit designed to get a pre-determined outcome.
An article in “The Federalist” explains the situation carefully:
How the EPA Helps Environmental Groups Sue the EPA
“The disclosures are already causing controversy, with claims that EPA and environmentalist groups collaborated to ensure that new EPA regulations involving carbon capture and storage would effectively kill coal projects.
But the symbiotic relationship between EPA and environmentalist has been going on for quite some time. Every major federal environmental law, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, contains provisions allowing private organizations to sue the EPA if they believe it is not going far enough in protecting air quality. Environmentalist groups do this frequently. And yet, all too often, when the EPA is sued by environmentalist groups, it folds without putting up much of a fight. As former EPA official Jeffrey Holmstead has explained matters, “often the suits involve things the EPA wants to do anyway. By inviting a lawsuit and then signing a consent decree, the agency gets legal cover from the political heat.”
It gets worse. The same article says..
“According to a 2013 report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, sue and settle has become a common practice: “EPA chose at some point not to defend itself in lawsuits brought by special interest advocacy groups at least 60 times between 2009 and 2012. In each case, it agreed to settlements on terms favorable to those groups. These settlements directly resulted in EPA agreeing to publish more than 100 new regulations, many of which impose compliance costs in the tens of millions and even billions of dollars.”
One BIG America-Destroying Gift Bag…
“Suing the EPA can be a lucrative business. The Equal Access to Justice Act, as well as other cost shifting provisions in the Clean Air Act, allow activist groups to collect their attorneys’ fees in these suits if they can show that the EPA’s position was not “substantially justified.”
According to a 2011 GAO report, between 1998 and 2010 the Department of Justice spent $43 million defending against suits brought by environmentalist groups, some of which have raked in millions in attorneys’ fees. Often, fees are awarded even in cases where the EPA merely missed a statutory deadline or made some other procedural error, rather than being substantively wrong.”
The article closes with:
“The prospect that the EPA may be using activist lawsuits as a pretext for increasing regulation has disturbing implications for the integrity of the legal process. The American legal system is based on the notion that two opposing parties, each making the best case they can for their own position, is the best road to discovering the truth. But when the “adversaries” in a case are really both on the same side, the process is corrupted. Reining in abuse of environmental citizen’s suits is one small way to restore the EPA’s accountability to the American people.”
Suing the Forest Service to Stop Logging and Shut Down American Industry…
“The Federalist” is a very good source for the reality of fire issues. In a November 2018 article:
How Misguided Environmentalism Is To Blame For California’s Wildfires
The saddest part about these fires in California is that they are self inflicted. Californians should not allow such mismanagement to continue.
Trump is right. Mismanagement and overregulation deserve most of the blame, but he should keep in mind that the federal government owns 57 percent of California forest land. This mismanagement is also not a result of a lack of care. Believe me, Californians care.
Growing up, we spend almost as much time talking about fire safety as we do hiding under our desks practicing for earthquakes. We see just as much of Smokey the Bear as we do of Mickey Mouse. California and federal agencies have mismanaged forests, not because they don’t care, but because they chose the agenda of environmentalists over commonsense forest management. The result has been deadly.
For decades, environmental protection schemes have usurped common sense. For example, most fire ecologists say that the surest way of preventing massive forest fires is to use prescribed burns. The California Environmental Protection Agency states that “prescribed burning is the intentional use of fire to reduce wildfire hazards, clear downed trees, control plant diseases, improve rangeland and wildlife habitats, and restore natural ecosystems.”
Prescribed burns keep forests healthy by burning up the underbrush that accumulates on the forest floor and by thinning trees. Yet for decades the Forest Service has suppressed most fires. According to a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection executive summary: “Land and fire management have in many cases increased fire hazard. In some shrub types, fire suppression appears to have shifted the fire regime away from more, smaller fires toward fewer, larger fire.”
The Problems Are Well-Known…
“The laws of the past 45 years have not only failed to protect the forest environment, they have done immeasurable harm to our forests,” said Republican Rep. Tom McClintock, who represents a northeastern district in California, in a congressional hearing. “Time and again, we see vivid boundaries between the young, healthy, growing forests managed by state, local, and private landholders, and the choked, dying, or burned federal forests.”
“There’s an old adage that excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other. It’s either carried out, or it burns out,” McClintock said in a speech supporting The Resilient Federal Forest Act, a bill that stops the practice of taking fire prevention funds to pay for fire suppression. It also streamlines environmental reviews so that forest managers don’t have to fill out hundreds of pages of documents just to cut down rotting and diseased trees. As of November 2017, this bill was still under consideration in the Senate.
When trees are too close together, they fight for resources. Many of the trees are weakened and become more susceptible to disease and insect infestation. These conditions turn entire forests into tinder boxes. A 2017 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) states that 129 million trees have died in California’s forests since 2010. The USDA report agrees with Trump — California’s forests suffer from neglect and mismanagement.
In Eight Years the Obama-Nation Killed 164 Million Trees in California…
The “drought” in California was deliberate – eight years of spraying the California skies with whatever crud the liberal Democrats could load into unmarked airplanes crisscrossing California’s skies.
They created the daily chemical haze that, itself, created “high pressure areas” for the express purpose of STOPPING California’s normal rainy seasons.
California WAS America’s largest producer of food. The Democrats tried to stop that – bringing in heavily chem-sprayed junk produce from third-world countries instead.
The Insane “Globalists,” Claiming “Environmentalism,” Wanted to Shut Down California’s Economy…
Watch the three-minute US Forest Service video, just below, to see how much horrific damage the liberal Democrats did to California’s Forest, creating “fake climate change.”
The mountains in California, predominantly National Parks and Forests, are the State’s PRIMARY water source. By stopping the rain, by creating constant “high pressure areas” the Obama “fake climate change” came VERY close to CREATING a situation where the entire 1,200 mile long State could burn…
America is Waking Up…
Stay tuned…
Opinion by “Deplorable” Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen
57% of california’s forests are federal? and somewhere in those missing DOD trillions is the ‘fake climate’ weaponization being used against California… and somehow this is california’s fault?
So who has the best chance at the contract to do the highspeed rail ? and who was going to be stuck with that unremediated nuke lab accident way back in 59 whenever… That might answer your question on who’d want to burn THOSE forests..
I believe that looking at how government agencies like the EPA operate within their regulatory structure and gain support from private industry to do the right thing is not the issue here. Truth is, every major government agency does the same thing – for example, the Navy contracts to rebuild ships at cost-plus and when the job is done the contractor must sue the Navy to recover their actual cost – something they photograph and document heavily because they know that they will have to wage a lawsuit to collect their full fees. The Navy expects this to happen otherwise their contractors will bankrupt. Again, this is common practice among government agencies and the private sector and not indicative of fraud or ethical violations – just how the system has to operate to create the proper outcome. It would be nice if things didn’t have to work that way, but if you try to dismantle it, you’d better have another method available to allow the agency to get their job done.
These article certainly do a good job of presenting the evidence that Trump was at least in part right although perhaps not taking 57% of the blame he’s handing out.
BTW – the “chem-sprayed junk” turns out to be Aluminum nano particles – Dane Wigington has done a good investigative job of running down the sources of this powder – the manufacturers turning out millions of tons that have no other use besides airborne spraying. And it’s interesting to follow the logic of what these particles can do – (1) they can reflect sunlight and UV in particular to cool down the area below (2) they can be used to control and influence cloud formations and weather (3) they can be used in conjunction with certain electromagnetic transmissions to influence weather (4) they can be used to poison crops and ground water, wild life, and the general population – aluminum nano-particles in conjunction with injected aluminum from vaccinations, mercury from fish and vaccinations, and Glyphosate kill the gut bacteria in humans causing obesity, diabetes, heart disease, auto-immune disorder, Alzheimers, Parkinson’s, MS, and many more chronic and neurological diseases and a market for roughly 2 trillion in pharmaceuticals that mask but don’t treat the underlying cause.
Seems like spraying aluminum goes way beyond killing forests – it wreaks of death and destruction for an entire population whose pastime is saving the trees.
On the reasons some ‘genius’ would spray nano-aluminum it just boggles the mind even just on the weather pieces of (1), (2) and (3) which all diminish the solar of those gazillions of PV paneled roofs, which then requires that we ramp up the coal burning generators, which then supposedly undoes any good that the reduction of heat inducing sunlight.. don’t we want to see the math that they conjured to justify the only ‘out’ in that insanity, namely that the detriment to PV power of (1)-(3) is less than the surviving extra coal… does anyone really believe that they know what they are doing… just running up more trillions, some missing even and dismissed as ‘expected’ like the DOD… Easter island anyone?
Coming back to earth, so to speak, you only need look at Australia for fire-management.
Before we invaded, the Aborignes used “Prescribed burning” to control fuel load and therefore subsequent lightning-caused bushfires. Lacking your 747 and DC10 water bombers, this was a brilliant use of resources.
But lately, our use of ‘fuel load suppression’ has been put at risk by bleating environmentalists and other do-gooders, the uncomfortable and inevitable hazes from these fires is deemed too much of a burden… and they forget the Very Big smoke haze when a whole town is burnt to the ground.- Literally.
I don’t know for sure how the Original Custodians dealt with those kind of objections, but I suspect it was visceral, effective, and certainly NOT “politically correct”
To make matters worse, around the time of the Californian Gold Rushes, large numbers of Australian Eucalypts were planted, – and there is no more dangerous tree in a fire and the best method of fighting these fires is …. burning off the ground rubbish during the cooler calmer days.
Oops !
Im with Michael here, I think that Dane Wiggington has the situation described pretty accurately. And Ms Love, this is interesting info about the eucalyptus trees.
Having seen how long it took for the anti- dangerous vaccine groups to emerge and evolve, i think we had better start getting more organized and get information out to the public.
I wonder who can say today how to “manage” a forest that no longer has the same weather pattern that it enjoyed for thousands of years.
Think Agenda 30 (successor to Agenda 21) and how burning-out the millionaires of Malibu will result in replacing mansions with now-chic “tiny houses” and lead to celebrity verification of Agenda 30 restrictions for the Millennial Generation.
Tim, you are mistaken. The majority portion of these fires are caused by poor maintenance by SoCal Gas, Pacific Gas & Electric and this has been publicly acknowledged. Couple this with drought and fires are started.
If you go to other areas of the country you will immediately notice how every tree near lines is carved out in a large U. There is no maintenance performed by these greedy fossil fuel companies. Lines and danger areas are never cleared away from trees and growth in California. This is very hard to understand why they are not forced to do their jobs.
To KChristensen, well if the problem was the trees being fire hazards then why precisely did the trees NOT BURN just the houses, and even cars…? and even more curiously, why did the destruction of the houses, whole neighborhoods [trees intact, including likely the pines?] look so total, they were demolished, no standing scorched beams, no sign of marble countertops, all just rubble… Do they make houses of cardboard in california… not that i’ve heard of.
The story of the showers of embers does nothing to explain the difference between houses, cars and trees, right? and does ABSOLUTELY nothing to explain some of the straight line edges of the ‘burns’ seen on bridges, and even straight through houses.
We are aware of directed energy weapons being developed by the USA knowably, and their characteristic pattern of destruction would better fit SOME of the scenes. It could also have had a role in the unexplained destruction of the nuke lab ’59 disaster [never cleaned up] that did cause a contribution to the fire starting in its own area. Who would have benefited ‘economically’ from that? No one doubts the lack of genuine decent forest management was a major factor in the fires but such a disaster would make excellent ‘cover’ for unethical testing of weapons and the ‘cover’ would ‘save’ the expense and rigamarole of open testing. Anyone here think that holy scientists would never dream of such an ‘opportunity’?