Seems the same sorts of bad policies are causing out-of-control fires in both the western United States, California specifically, and also in Australia. In both places, it appears that the demands of so-called environmentalists are causing more harm than good, and bringing about more intense and widespread fires. Some articles on the subject:
Forest Fire burning in Butte County Ca as seen from Chico neighborhoods and new housing development
Getty
In the past two years, wildfires scorched 2.9 million acres in California, including five of the state’s 20 deadliest fires killing 131 people.
Former California Gov. Jerry Brown grimly warned that because of man-made climate change, these destructive wildfires are the “new abnormal” that threaten “our whole way of life.”
Newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rhetoric has been more balanced.
As with Brown before him, Newsom blames climate change for the fires, saying
during the campaign last September that, “The science is clear —
increased fire threat due to climate change is becoming a fact of life
in our state. Drier, longer summers combined with unpredictable wet
winters have created dangerous fire conditions.”
Claiming that climate change causes wildfires naturally leads to a
demand for action, with Newsom promising an aggressive progressive
pushback against the Trump Administration’s effort to cut red tape
regarding vehicle mileage standards, power plant carbon dioxide
emissions, and oil and gas extraction.
That’s politics. Governing often dictates practicality. Here Newsom
appears set to do more to combat wildfires than the tentative
half-measures signed into law by Brown. Newsom is calling for improved wildfire surveillance and warning systems, better urban planning, and helping property owners clear brush.
Regarding reducing the fuel load, in an interview
four months ago, Newsom said that there are “Hundreds of millions of
dead trees” in the state and that it cost his father $35,000 to clear “a
small little patch of dead trees” on his property.
Newsom didn’t admit it, but the outrageous cost to remove a few dead
trees from private land is a consequence of California’s Byzantine
environmental regulatory patchwork.
This is California’s big secret: it’s not climate change that’s
burning up the forests, killing people, and destroying hundreds of
homes; it’s decades of environmental mismanagement that has created a
tinderbox of unharvested timber, dead trees, and thick underbrush.
This dangerous situation attracted attention from President Donald
Trump who, during the height of California’s wildfires last year insisted
that “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest
fires in California except that forest management is so poor."
The irony is that forest management is so bad on public lands that a new report, ordered by the California legislature in 2010,
shows that the portion of California's National Forests protected from
timber harvesting is now a net contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide
due to fires and trees killed by insects and disease.
Every year about 3.8 billion board feet of new timber grows in the
Golden State, capturing almost one metric ton of CO2 per acre in the
productive timberland areas. Trees grow until they die, burn, or get
harvested. If harvesting declines, tree mortality and fires increase.
It’s the tyranny of math.
In the early 1990s, a series of restrictions were placed on logging
in the West to protect the Spotted Owl. As it turned out, nature was
more complicated than expected, with owl numbers continuing to
decline—even after the California timber harvest plummeted—due to
predation from other raptors.
In the meantime, the harvest fell below the growth rate in the 1990s,
to about 1.5 billion board feet per year over the past decade. The tree
harvest on federal lands is now one-tenth of what it was in 1988,
President Reagan’s last full year in office.
The California forest report draft
concludes by observing that the “Current flux [of CO2] may not be
sustainable without forest management!” while citing the challenge of
“Aging of forests on federal lands.”
Unlike much of the American South and East, California has a distinct
wet season, with Pacific storms rolling in by November or December and
wrapping up by March. In even the wettest years (2016-17 was the wettest
in 122 years) much of California is bone-dry by late fall. Thus, it
isn’t climate change that sets the conditions for fires—it’s
California’s natural weather pattern. Comparing acres burned in
wildfires to weather and tree harvest data, there appears to be little
link to climate—but a big connection to the growing forest fuel load,
especially on government land.
Which brings us back to policy. If federal and state environmental
policies continue to make it difficult and costly to harvest timber and
manage the fuel load, then the wildfires will continue and they will be
bigger and deadlier. This will, in due course, cause some politicians to
blame the fires on climate change.
In the meantime, the timber harvest infrastructure is less than
one-third of what it was 30 years ago, meaning that even if politicians
were sincere in wanting to manage the public forests, there few people
remaining to manage them.
To sum it up, the policies of refusing to allow the trees to be harvested, or areas to be cleared, means hotter, more dangerous fires, and everyone suffers. These policies aren't helping the animals they were supposedly going to help, either. The article ws written by Chuck DeVore, who also wrote this excellent piece:
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his political allies
claim climate change is driving California’s increasingly intense and
deadly wildfires.
That’s nearly true. Climate change assumptions drive the state’s
energy and environmental policies. This has resulted in people being
killed in terrible wildfires, electrical blackouts to millions of people
causing $5 billion so far in lost economic activity, all while
diverting limited resources to a fool’s errand.
For instance,
California’s large and heavily regulated public utilities—PG&E,
SDG&E, and SCE—prioritize wind and solar power, leaving little for
powerline maintenance and upgrades. Simply put, the utilities are doing
exactly what the regulators tell them to do. They make money for their
investors on wind and solar; they don’t on powerline maintenance.
Examining California’s determined push to decarbonize its economy shows a policy unsupported by logic, and shaky on fact.
Regulations Strangle Power Sources
First is the matter of leakage. California already has among the
highest electrical prices in the nation, its gasoline prices are often
the highest, and its regulatory burden, most of which is connected to
environmental concerns and related lawsuits, have all acted to push
energy-intensive manufacturing out of state.
Some of this activity has moved to Texas and other states. Some has
moved to China and other Asian nations. As a result, goods that used to
be made in California are made elsewhere, often generating more harmful
pollution. The majority of the increase in ozone levels on the Pacific
Coast traces its origins to Asia, mostly China, where coal-fired
powerplants emit nitrous oxides that, when combined with volatile
organic compounds and sunlight, create ground-level ozone that irritates
lungs and increases rates of asthma.
As for the state’s
main concern—greenhouse gas emissions—California’s policies aren’t
helping much in that department, either. California features one of the
most efficient economies in the world, with stringent air quality
standards. But as energy-intensive manufacturing moves out of the state
and California imports back those same goods, the net effect may be
greater emissions due to the shipping increases.
This can be seen in California’s oil production. The modern fracking
revolution has passed California by as politicians yearn to wean the
state from oil and gas. In 1986, California produced 59.5 percent of its oil needs, with only 5.7 percent of oil coming from foreign suppliers, the remainder being shipped down the Pacific Coast from Alaska.
Last year, California’s oil production dropped to half of what it had
been 32 years earlier. As a result, the state was forced to import 57.5
percent of its oil from foreign countries, mostly from Saudi Arabia.
Oil tanker traffic off of California’s coast has skyrocketed. Meanwhile,
Texas oil production has quadrupled in the last dozen years.
Then there’s the issue of relative scale. The People’s Republic of
China, where a well-placed bribe to a Communist Party apparatchik can
allow a factory to belch pollution, is the world’s biggest emitter of
carbon dioxide. If you can believe China’s economic growth numbers,
seven months’ worth of emission increases from China would wipe out all the gains made by eliminating California’s carbon emissions. All of them.
Poor Forest Management to Blame for Wildfires
I was in Los Angeles
last Friday for a panel discussion of the area’s Green New Deal plans.
Smoke from a wildfire greeted me on the flight into Burbank. At the
panel, a professor of sustainability from a California university made a
claim I’d heard before: California’s wildfires have doubled due to
climate change, per the National Climate Assessment (NCA).
The NCA made the wildfire claim based on a study
that concluded, “We demonstrate that human-caused climate change caused
over half of the documented increases in fuel aridity since the 1970s
and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984.”
But they added a caveat: “Additionally, we treat the impact of
(man-caused climate change) on fire as independent from the effects of
fire management (e.g., suppression and wildland fire use policies),
ignitions, land cover (e.g., exurban development), and vegetation… These
factors have likely added to the area burned… Such confounding
influences… contribute uncertainty to our empirical attribution of
regional burned area to (climate change).”
The main evidence the study’s authors offer is the relationship
between fuel aridity and total area burned, comparing the period 1984 to
1999 to 2000 to 2015.
The same data are presented differently here.
Something else happened in the early 1990s: environmentalists
concerned for the spotted owl prevailed upon the Clinton administration
to dramatically curtail the timber harvest in much of the western United
States. Logging activity plummeted, and employment in the forest
industry in California fell by half.
While correlation does not necessarily prove causation, it can be a
strong clue. Let’s look at that last chart again, but add the amount of
timber harvested in the West per the U.S. Forest Service.
We see that as the timber harvest plummeted, with a concurrent drop
in active forest management practices, the area burned by wildfire grew
as the fuel load increased.
Too Little Forest Attention, Too Late
With the retreat of the timber industry came an inevitable buildup of
uncleared brush as well as runaway tree density, with it becoming
common to have four times the number of trees per acre as is considered
healthy. During California’s frequent droughts—historical evidence suggests
they have been common since way before the industrial revolution—the
higher tree density leads to stressed trees that became vulnerable to
bark beetle infestations.
Between the drought and the bugs, millions of trees died—trees that
had to be left in place because regulators, environmentalists, and
politicians couldn’t muster the will to permit harvesting or clearing
before they became worthless and deadly matchsticks. In 2012, the Forest
Service estimated that 77 million acres, mostly in the West, was at risk due to insects and disease.
California’s politicians, including Newsom, are waking up to the
connection between forest management and wildfires, although it is too
little, too late. Newsom signed 22 wildfire-related bills in the closing days of this year’s legislative session, admitting
during his campaign for office that California had “Hundreds of
millions of dead trees” while noting that it cost his father $35,000 to
clear “a small little patch of dead trees” on his property.
The year before, outgoing four-term Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown
flipped on his longtime opposition to active forest management when he signed two bills into law.
Data Linking Wildfires, Climate Is Heavily Compromised
On an even more fundamental level, what if the temperature data the climate change-wildfire connection study used was inaccurate?
A study of the U.S. surface temperature record presented at the 2015
Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union indicated that the
30-year temperature trend was about two-thirds as strong as the official
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration record, due to massive
urban encroachment on weather station sites. Only 410 of 1,218 weather
stations in the continental U.S. were unperturbed by, for example, an
asphalt parking lot built next to what was once a weather station out in
a grass field.
Largely because of the urban heat island effect, weather stations in
California and Nevada were particularly affected. In California and
Nevada, the temperature increase per decade from 1979 to 2008 was 0.04
degrees centigrade when using unperturbed sites, versus the official
record increase of 0.24 degrees, a six-fold difference.
Back to the blackouts. To deflect blame from his administration,
Newsom continues to point to climate change—along with capitalism, saying last Friday,
“It’s more than just climate change. It’s about the failure of
capitalism to address climate change.” Vox’s Ezra Klein picked up on
this theme, tweeting in a pre-apocalyptic funk about the smoke and blackouts:
This is what it will be like every year, from now on. I
keep thinking of something @dwallacewells wrote in the Uninhabitable
Earth: ‘Especially those who have imbibed several centuries of Western
triumphalism tend to see the story of human civilization as an
inevitable conquest of the earth, rather than the saga of an insecure
culture, like mold, growing haphazardly and unsurely upon it.’ ‘That
fragility, which pervades now everything humans might do on this planet,
is the great existential insight of global warming.’
Meanwhile, PG&E is struggling to find the qualified crews
to do the dangerous work of clearing trees from almost 2,500 miles of
powerlines across the vast northern reaches of the state. That isn’t
surprising, given that California and federal regulators armed with
anti-logging policies put most of those people in the unemployment line,
and they’ve moved on to other jobs or even states.
Klein is right that “This is what it will be like every year, from
now on.” But it’s not because “Western triumphalism” led to an effort to
conquer the earth. Even California’s Native Americans constantly burned
its forests to foster their food supplies. No, it’s because
California’s leaders, comfortable in the civilization bequeathed to them
by their forebears, forgot that untamed nature is deadly.
Chuck DeVore is vice president of national
initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and served in the
California State Assembly from 2004 to 2010.
Yet Democrats want to force everyone to accept their ideas on climate change? No, thanks!
In Australia, seems we have a similar issue. The Aborigine people had solid methods for controlling fires, which are going to happen in arid areas, but apparently those methods aren't being used enough, and the results are devastating:
On a hot, dry day in March 2018, 20 separate wildfires ignited across the Bega Valley in New South Wales.
One
fire that began at Reedy Swamp north of the town of Bega tore through
close to 1,000 hectares before reaching the beachside township of
Tathra.
Six months on, a forest of bare, blackened trees frames the town, where more than 100 homes were destroyed or damaged.
But on a small patch of bushland on the south-western edge of Tathra, a patch of green shows where the fire came to a halt.
The land is part of 71 hectares owned by the Bega Local Aboriginal Land Council (LALC) at Tathra West.
The
title to the land was transferred in 2016, 17 years after it was
granted to the Bega LALC under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act process.
In 2017, the Bega LALC began a cultural burning program as part of the management strategy for their landholdings.
With
training and support from the Far South Coast Rural Fire Service (RFS)
and local RFS volunteers, the cultural burn crew prepared and burnt 3.5
hectares of land at Tathra West using methods informed by traditional
knowledge.
Six months on from the 2018 wildfire, the land where
cultural burns were undertaken in 2017 is sprouting with native grasses,
in stark contrast to the scorched trees and dense bracken that mark the
surrounding landscape.
"The old
people wouldn't have allowed big bushfires destroying the landscape,
that's like burning their house down," said Indigenous fire practitioner
Victor Steffensen.
"The land is their food, their livelihood, their country, their home.
"If they'd allowed wildfires to burn the country to a cinder, they wouldn't have survived for so many thousands of years."
Mr
Steffensen is a Cape York man who shares his traditional knowledge with
Indigenous fire crews around Australia. He first visited the Bega LALC
crew in February 2018.
"Helping these young fellas to rebuild
their knowledge of their country and applying fire starts to bring out
their identity again.
"We're
not just dropping a match, we're reading country. Fire is a management
tool to get the country healthy again, and that opens the door to
cultural knowledge."
"There's a lot more care taken with a
cultural burn than with a hazard reduction burn," said George Aldridge, a
cultural burn crew member with the Bega LALC.
"We're making sure
we're not burning habitat trees and logs [and we're] keeping the fire
cool so we don't bake all the seeds and nutrients that are in the soil.
"Over time, we're going to get less leaf litter and bracken, and more grasses and bush foods and medicines come up."
Four
months after the Tathra bushfire, the Bega LALC returned to the burnt
out bushland to conduct cultural burns to help promote healthy regrowth.
"The
principle of burning these areas so early after a fire is to try to
create a bit more diversity of plants coming back," said Dan Morgan, an
Aboriginal community support officer with Local Land Services.
"When
the soil is disturbed through hot fires or land clearing, you get
invasive natives like bracken coming back that choke out the area.
"Where we've burnt after the fire, we're seeing less bracken and more native grasses, little herbs and shrubs coming through."
As
part of their ongoing land management, the LALC crew conduct flora and
fauna surveys to evaluate biodiversity outcomes from the cultural burns.
"From
the test burns that we've done in these areas, we're documenting what
has grown back that we didn't see beforehand," said cultural burn crew
member Bronwyn Luff.
"It's nice to see the regrowth of new seedlings.
"A
lot of my friends I grew up with live around Tathra. I just feel really
good that we have done this work, it makes us feel like we're helping
our surrounding community."
"The hazard reduction methods we've been
using for well over a century clearly aren't working," said Don McPhee, a
land management consultant for the Bega LALC cultural burning program.
"Whether
it's wildfire or conventional hazard reduction burns, we've got this
repeating cycle of hot fires and plants coming back that like really hot
fires, leading to extreme fuel loads building up again."
The
Bega Valley Rural Fire Service's district officer for fire mitigation,
Garry Cooper, has been directly involved with the Bega LALC cultural
burning program from the beginning.
When the program began, the
RFS delivered basic fire training and conducted the first burns with
support from the Bega LALC crew.
Now, the Bega LALC crew do their own preparation and burning on country without RFS support.
"Cultural burning is very labour intensive,
and that's challenging when you're trying to achieve a fuel reduction
objective at the same time," Mr Cooper said.
"But there's a lot of
knowledge here that we need to be looking at. It's a win for the
community, getting that fuel reduction work done, as well as bringing
life back to the land."
The cultural burning program was
primarily funded by the Aboriginal Community Support Program from South
East Local Land Services.
Additional funds were raised by the
Tathra Mountain Bike Club at its 2017 Enduro event to support future
Bega LALC cultural burning operations on the Tathra West property.
"The current funding we have allows for about
15 days of field work, which includes preparation as well as burning,"
said Glenn Willcox, CEO of the Bega LALC.
"We're looking to secure
long-term funding to allow us to do more planning and give the crew
members more certainty about our ability to keep doing this work.
"We have evidence that the work that we did in Tathra last year had a significant impact on the effect of the wildfire in March.
"If
we can keep doing this work on the Bega Land Council land that forms
the interface with townships in Merimbula, Tura Beach, Mirador, as well
as Tathra, we can reduce the risk of a repeat of what happened in Tathra
in 2018."
"What Indigenous fire represents is thousands of years of getting to know the landscape," Mr Steffensen said.
"It means connecting to the landscape, looking after the landscape and becoming part of that country again.
"When
we look at the damage caused by bushfires, tens of billions of dollars
of damage, why can't we put good money into looking after the land, and
evolving this culture to be closer to the landscape in the future?"
"It's
very homing, knowing that this cultural knowledge isn't going to be
forgotten," said cultural burn crew member Peter Dixon.
"It's sort of a calming feeling. It's our cultural obligation to do these sorts of things, has been for thousands of years."
The NSW Deputy Premier admits the government “don’t do enough hazard reduction” but is blaming the Greens for it.
As more than 140 fires continue to burn across the state, questions are being raised about why they’re so severe.
The left of politics says it’s climate change but the right says it’s down to massive fuel loads which haven’t been burnt off.
Deputy Premier John Barilaro claims it’s a result of Greens ideology.
“I think all governments have been guilty of pampering to the Greens for the last two decades.
“We’ve allowed them to stop us from hazard reduction, from burning
the fuel of the forest floors… and we haven’t done it. We just haven’t
done it.
“We’ve got to do better and I know that we don’t do enough hazard
reduction… because of the ideological position from the Greens.”
When it's not bad policies causing these issues, should we then blame global warning/climate change? Nope. Remember the devastating fires in the Southeast a fe years ago? Much of that was arson:
Many of
the fires are the result of arson, officials say, and three people have
been arrested thus far, according to the Associated Press.
Police
in eastern Kentucky say they have arrested a man described as a
"wannabe meteorologist" who deliberately set a wildfire in an attempt to
garner a larger Facebook following. Johnny Mullins, 21 of Jenkins,
Kentucky, faces a charge of second-degree arson for a blaze in Letcher
County, Jenkins Police Chief James Stephens told the AP.
A view of the Party Rock fire in North Carolina, near the town of Bat Cave.
(John Cayton/Facebook)
"(Mullins)
likes to do Facebook videos and have people follow him on his 'weather
forecast,'" Jenkins Police Chief James Stephens told the AP. "So that's
pretty much why he did what he did. He enjoyed the attention he got from
the Facebook stuff."
According to Stephens, Mullins posted selfie
videos on Facebook that were recorded in front of various fires. He
called them "Weather Outlook" segments and received 2,900 views on his
final video, which he posted Nov. 6.
Another unidentified teen was
also arrested on suspicion of arson in Harlan, Kentucky, and a man was
charged in Tennessee with setting fires and vandalism that caused more
than $250,000 in damage outside Chattanooga.
According to the Courier-Journal, at least 150 of 210 wildfires — or 76 percent — that have broken out since October in Kentucky are arson-related, the Kentucky Energy and Environmental Cabinet reported.
More to that article, but that's the key information. I've long wondered about that, why so many fires were arson, in a key election year. It's clear, though, that these are not being caused by "climate change", as the environazis define it.
Sorry, folks, but this isn't a standard blog. Instead, this is to respond to some folks from other threads, because those were closed, and thus the conversations just ended. Frustrating when that happens! So, that's all this is, but be patient, a real blog is coming soon!
A hiker in Alaska buried upside down in an avalanche for more than an hour was dug out alive on Saturday after another hiker spotted his legs sticking out of the snow.
The
avalanche occurred on Flattop Mountain around 1 p.m. a slab of frozen
debris 2 to 3 feet thick got dislodged and fell down the slope amid
strong winds, the Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center
reported in a news release.
Alex
Kuprienko, of Anchorage, said he was hiking the mountain trail around
2:30 p.m. when he noticed two feet kicking out from the fresh avalanche
debris.
The avalanche occurred around 1 p.m. on Alaska's Flattop Mountain.
(Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center)
"Honestly, at first I thought it was a kid playing around in the snow, didn't think much of it," Kuprienko told KTUU-TV,
adding that because no other people were there, he decided to look
closer. "I went up, and sure enough, there was a guy buried in the snow
with his legs sticking up. So, he was on his back, face-up, but
obviously head-down into the snow."
The avalanche had pinned the
hiker under the large blocks of debris, making it impossible to free
himself. Kuprienko said he wasted no time, foregoing gloves, and started
to dig through the snow with his bare hands. He was able to free the
man in about five minutes, he said.
The hiker was fully buried, but had been able to kick his feet out from the snow.
(Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center)
The trapped hiker, who was not named, showed signs of hypothermia but
was conscious, the avalanche center announced. Kuprienko said he called
911 and helped the man to the parking lot below the trail, where medics
were waiting.
"Obviously, this is a miracle that he was able to breathe for that long," Kuprienko told the Anchorage Daily News of the hiker being trapped for over an hour.
The
avalanche reportedly fell in large blocks, which allowed air pockets to
form within the debris. The victim’s head was 2 to 3 inches below the
ice and snow, rescuers said, and he likely was able to breathe because
he was near a pocket of air.
"It's unbelievably lucky," Wendy Wagner, director of the avalanche center, told the paper.
"It's really rare that someone has a positive outcome after being trapped under the snow for over an hour."
Truly amazing!! God said it was not that man's tie to go!
Well, this is interesting. The story posted a good five hours ago, and updated within fifteen minutes of my reading the article. Yet, though with a "lone gunman", especially if he's white, we have a life history within thirty minutes to an hour, somehow, we still don't know why this shootout occurred? I call BS. I think they know exactly what happened, and it doesn't fit the narrative. There is a lot of seriously stupid activity surrounding this case as well. Here's the article:
JERSEY CITY, N.J. – Six people, including a New Jersey police officer, were killed in an hourslong standoff and shootout that brought a Jersey City neighborhood to a standstill Tuesday, investigators said.
The shootings unfolded in a cemetery and a convenience store near the Sacred Heart School.
Of
the six people who died, one was Detective Joseph Seals, 40, who was
married with five kids. The others killed included two of the three
suspects in the case, as well as three civilians.
A second officer was struck in the shoulder by gunfire, and two others were hit by shrapnel, Mayor Steven Fulop said.
It was unclear what happened to the third suspect, described as a 6-foot-tall black male wearing all black clothing.
The
circumstances of the shootout also remained uncertain and the situation
forced every public school in Jersey City into lockdown mode.
The FBI was assisting Jersey City police.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the men and women of the Jersey City
Police Department, especially with the officers shot during this
standoff, and with the residents and schoolchildren currently under
lockdown," Gov. Phil Murphy said in a statement. "I have every
confidence in our law enforcement professionals to ensure the safety of
the community and resolve this situation."
All students and staff are safe however a number of schools are currently on locked down due to pollution activity.
Loud volleys of gunfire could be heard at regular intervals but
subsided around 2 p.m. in the city, which is just across the Hudson
River from Manhattan.
Dozens of bystanders pressed against the
police barrier to film the action on cellphones, some whooping when
gunfire bursts filled the air.
Andy Patel, who works at a liquor
store about three blocks away from the site of the shooting site, said
there had been consistent gunfire fire about an hour Tuesday afternoon.
"I
can hear the gunshots. It's like firecrackers going off. They were
shooting like crazy about an hour ago. Then it stopped for like 20 or 30
minutes. The cops were clearing everyone off the streets," said Patel.
President
Trump tweeted: "Just received a briefing on the horrific shootout that
took place in Jersey City, NJ. Our thoughts & prayers are w/ the
victims & their families during this very difficult & tragic
time. We will continue to monitor the situation as we assist local &
state officials on the ground."
Just received a briefing on the horrific shootout that took place in Jersey City, NJ. Our thoughts & prayers are w/ the victims & their families during this very difficult & tragic time. We will continue to monitor the situation as we assist local & state officials on the ground.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said it was
responding. The New York Police Department sent emergency services
personnel, and the forces counterterrorism unit was monitoring the
situation.
Several schools in the area were placed on lockdown
while the situation is ongoing, officials said. Jersey City Public
Schools tweeted "all students and staff are safe."
So, this is what I am seeing. We have three suspects, two now deceased, and the third is the only one for whom we have a description, which is black male. We have a location at a convenience store, and a presumably nearby cemetery, making the most likely scenario that these guys, probably all black males, were robbing the place, and police showed up, a gunfight ensued, spilling into the cemetery as they tried to flee. Bystanders were shot as well because, gee, they were trying to record the action, instead of being concerned about their own safety. A cop, with a family, was sadly shot and killed as well. But they can't see a motive, or a reason? Add in the fact that even though this was an isolated event, thy locked down all schools in that town. Anything to push the anti-gun narrative, right? Can't blame white guys, so claim no reason known, and hope we all forget about it? Yet this is exactly the sort of case that comprises most of the gun violence in this country - criminals and gangs using guns in the commission of their crimes. Not "lone shooters", not "angry white nationalists", but usually non-white criminals. Why can't the media report the truth, already?
This time, a shooter, in a "gun free zone", on a military installation. If the military folks could carry, would he have been able to do as much damage?
The gunman who opened fire at Naval Air
Station Pensacola, killing three, is reportedly a foreign national from a
Middle Eastern country.
The gunman opened fire Friday morning, killing three innocents and causing numerous others to be transported to the hospital for injuries.
The Associated Press reports that the Pensacola gunman was an aviation student from Saudi Arabia.
NBC News reports that the gunman’s name was Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani.
On December 6, 2019, Breitbart News reported
that Naval Air Station Pensacola is a gun-free zone. The station’s
firearm policy, as described by Commander, Navy Region Mid-Atlantic, notes:
While federal and state laws differ widely on the
subject, regulations pertaining to the registration, transportation, and
storage of firearms on Naval Installations in the Mid-Atlantic area of
responsibility are clear. According to the instruction, all hands share
responsibility for adhering to regulations pertaining to the
registration, transportation, and storage of firearms in the AOR.
The policy also points out that “state issued ‘concealed weapons permits’ are not recognized on any Navy installation.”
The firearm policy allows guns to be brought on base after obtaining
approval from a commanding officer but notes that such firearms “may
only be stored in the installation’s armory.” Moreover, during transport
onto the installation, all firearms are to be “unloaded and secured
with a trigger lock and ammunition must be carried in the farthest most
possible location away from the firearm.”
Three people are dead after a gunman opened fire at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola on Friday morning, according to Pensacola News Journal.
Escambia Sheriff’s spokeswoman Amber Southard said the shooter is also dead.
Baptist Hospital
confirmed it is treating five patients related to the shooting, while
six were transported to Ascension Sacred Heart.
“There’s probably been 100 or so various law enforcement vehicles zooming down the wrong side on Navy Boulevard,” said
Escambia County Commissioner Jeff Bergosh. “There’s been ambulances,
fire trucks. It’s my understanding there’s multiple causalities. I
haven’t heard of any fatalities yet.”
The White House said President Donald Trump has received a briefing on the shooting.
NAS Pensacola
employs more than 16,000 military and 7,400 civilian personnel,
according to its website. One of the Navy’s most historic and storied
bases, it sprawls along the waterfront southwest of downtown Pensacola.
The base dominates the economy of the surrounding area and includes the
National Naval Aviation Museum, a popular regional tourist attraction.
Not a lot of details thus far, but how did a foreigner manage to get a gun onto the base, when American military personnel aren't even allowed to carry there? You'd think commons sense would mean always searching such peope before allowing their entry. Then again, common sense would ean allowing military people, who can be armed in other nations, the ability to defend their home base.
Please share any links and updates you find, and remember to pray for those affected.
Well, it's about time. In states that have passed such laws, not only does welfare participation decrease, but so do poverty rates. Be sure to check the video I will add at the end, to fully understand why we need this new rule.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is
set to finalize a proposal to reform the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (SNAP) by encouraging those receiving benefits to
work.
The final rule proposes
that those who are able-bodied working adults without dependents
between the ages of 18-49 who receive food stamps for more than three
months in a 36-month period must work, go to school, receive job
training, or volunteer to receive benefits.
The rule does not apply to those who are over 50 years old, disabled, pregnant, or caretakers for children.
The law allows states to waive out of this time limit requirement due
to poor economic conditions, but before the rule was put into place,
areas with unemployment as low as 2.5 percent were eligible for waivers,
according to the USDA.
According to the USDA, the reason the rule was put into place was
because of record unemployment, decreasing the need for people to be on
food stamps. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor show that the unemployment rate is 3.6 percent and there are a record seven million job openings.
“We need to encourage people by giving them a helping hand but not
allowing it to become an indefinitely giving hand,” Agriculture
Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement. “Now, in the midst of the
strongest economy in a generation, we need everyone who can work, to
work. This rule lays the groundwork for the expectation that able-bodied
Americans re-enter the workforce where there are currently more job
openings than people to fill them.”
The USDA estimates that approximately 755,000 people would
discontinue participating in the nation’s food stamp program under the
work requirements rule, and the rule would reduce federal spending by
$7.9 billion over five years.
State agencies would also play a special role in putting those on food stamps back to work.
Under the 2018 Farm Bill, state agencies would have the ability to
administer employment and training programs to help food stamp
recipients “gain the skills, training, or work experience they need to
enter, reenter, or remain in the workforce,” according to a USDA letter on SNAP Employment and Training Resources Available to States.
These programs provide everything from job training to necessary work
items such as work boots, uniforms, and subsidized transportation.
The USDA’s rule is taking
what many states have done on an individual level since 2013 and is
taking it nationwide. Since those reforms have been put into place, food
stamp enrollment has been declining nationwide.
There are currently 36,401,408 individuals and 18,462,672 households
enrolled in SNAP. But USDA officials say those numbers are “preliminary”
due to the 2018 government shutdown, which affected food stamp
distribution at the start of 2019.
When Trump took office, 42,297,791 individuals and 20,937,903 households were enrolled in food stamps.
Although food stamp participation went up slightly for July and August in the short term, a longer-term look at the data among the states shows that there is a decline in the number of people on food stamps.
Of the states that reported data, 46 out of 50 states reported a
percent decrease in the number of people on food stamps over the past
year. North Carolina was excluded from the count because it is missing
data reports from February 2018 to the present.
Now, as for why we need such laws, just listen to this young woman:
The House Intelligence Committee report released
by chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Tuesday cites no constitutionally
permissible grounds for impeachment against President Donald Trump —
other than tweets.
Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution provides that
impeachment shall be for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and
Misdemeanors.” Notably, the Framers of the Constitution ruled out
“maladministration” as a reason.
In Schiff’s 300-page report, Democrats failed to cite any specific grounds for impeaching the president.
Notably, though Schiff and others attempted to argue that the
president had possibly committed “bribery” by allegedly asking the
president of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden in
exchange for U.S. aid, there is no discussion of bribery whatsoever in
the report — other than references to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s
claims that Biden might be guilty of bribery because his son was on the payroll of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma.
The only references to any “crimes” allegedly committed by the president is a discussion of “witness intimidation.”
Schiff and his Democrat majority attempt to argue that President
Trump committed that crime by tweeting criticism of several witnesses
against him, including calling them “Never Trumpers” and drawing
attention to their testimony.
The report also cites Trump’s tweets criticizing former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch during
her testimony, which clearly did not obstruct her testimony and which
she would not have known about had Schiff not read them — partially — to
her in the middle of the hearing. (Among Trump’s criticisms was that
“the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second
phone call with him,” which Yovanovitch could not explain.)
Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.
The report also cites, as an example of witness intimidation, Trump re-tweeting
a reference to testimony by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, confirmed that
Ukraine offered him the post of defense minister on three occasions.
The report also cites, in a general sense, the crimes of “obstructing
Congress,” “concealing material facts,” and “retaliating against
employees who provide information to Congress.” Democrats provide no
real evidence to support the latter two charges. They merely claim that
Trump threatened retaliation by tweeting a quote from Rush Limbaugh
about “dismissing everybody involved from the Obama holdover days,”
which Trump never did.
“My support for Donald Trump has never been greater than it is right now. It is paramountly obvious watching this, these people have to go. You elected Donald Trump to drain the Swamp, well, dismissing people like Yovanovitch is what that looks like. Dismissing people like Kent..
As for “obstructing Congress,” Democrats did not wait for the courts
to adjudicate balance-of-power disputes between the executive branch and
the legislative branch over the requested information and witnesses:
the rush to conclude the impeachment inquiry in a hurry, even without
key witnesses, was their decision and theirs alone.
The Trump administration has also maintained that the House
impeachment inquiry is not legitimate on procedural grounds. It began
without any formal authorization; it was conducted largely in secret, by
the Intelligence Committee and not the Judiciary Committee; and it
departed from precedent by refusing to grant the president due process
rights, such as representation by counsel in hearings. That is why the
White House has not complied.
Moreover, as liberal law professor and former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein argued in 2017, “obstructing Congress” is not sufficient grounds for impeachment if the inquiry itself is not legitimate.
He wrote: “Presidents should cooperate with legitimate
investigations, but it is not a high crime or misdemeanor to refuse to
cooperate with a congressional investigation into an offense that is not
independently impeachable. Congress cannot gin up an impeachable
offense by investigating an offense that is not impeachable, and then
encountering presidential resistance.” Democrats have offered no
independently impeachable offense — at all.
Shifts report never explicitly accuses Trump of “abuse of power.” But
even that is not impeachable — firstly because Republicans have argued
that Trump was not seeking a political favor from Ukraine, but
exercising a constitutional duty to fight corruption and election
interference; and secondly because it is not an impeachable offense.
As Sunstein wrote: “Almost every American president has, on more than
one occasion, passed the bounds of his power, in the sense that his
administration has done something that it is not lawfully entitled to
do.”
So instead of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and
Misdemeanors,” Democrats are trying to impeach the president on the
basis of tweets he posted in his own defense against their own, arguably
partisan, inquisition.
In other words, they have nothing, and everyone knows it. You can't accuse someone of a crime, then claim it's a crime to protest the false accusation. You can't run a kangaroo court and claim someone who refuses to participate in the farce is a criminal.
No innocents were harmed as a good guy with a gun shot an armed student Monday morning at Wisconsin’s Waukesha High School.
Fox News reports the school where the incident unfolded is located just west of Milwaukee.
Shortly after 10 a.m. a resource officer entered a classroom where a
17-year-old reportedly had a gun. The officer tried to “deescalate” the
situation, ordering the student to show his hands, but the student
allegedly responded by keeping them in his pockets.
The student then allegedly “removed the handgun from his waistband” and pointed it at the officer, who then shot the student.
Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed in the Parkland High
School attack, responded to the actions of the good guy with a gun by
tweeting:
The only thing that can stop a school shooter is a good guy with a gun.
Dozens of kids could have been murdered. But not one was.
Don't listen to Democrats - every school in America needs armed guards! https://t.co/EXt8LQp5HQ
A similar scenario unfolded Tuesday at Oshkosh West High School.
The Oshkosh Police Department used a Facebook post to explain:
"There has been an officer involved shooting at Oshkosh West high school.
The school is currently locked down and parents can be reunited with
their children at Perry Tipler Middle school. A student was armed with a
weapon and confronted a school resource officer. The student and
officer were both injured and transported to local hospitals."
News 8000 reports that the armed student at Oshkosh West High School “reportedly confronted a school resource officer,” and was shot thereafter.
So, two would-be shooters stopped by good guys with guns, and no innocent people hurt, let Leftists want to rmove all guns from the schools? How many would have been killed had there been no one armed to stop those two? Seems that's what the Left actually wants.
Thank God those schools had armed guards to protect the students and staff, and thank God those guards were willing to do their jobs, and not hide outside.
Forest Fire burning in Butte County Ca as seen from Chico neighborhoods and new housing developmentGettyIn the past two years, wildfires scorched 2.9 million acres in California, including five of the state’s 20 deadliest fires killing 131 people.Former California Gov. Jerry Brown grimly warned that because of man-made climate change, these destructive wildfires are the “new abnormal” that threaten “our whole way of life.”
