SpankyMcFarland

Water bomber pilots are special people, not quite as out there as the wing suit crowd but not far off either. Hazards abound: smoke, lightning, mountains, sea, drones, other aircraft. This is also an example of a point I’ve made before. Canada will be increasingly important to the US in fighting fires across North America.

Various levels of government seem to have dropped the ball here but are Americans really prepared to give the state the power and resources it needs to minimize (not eliminate) wildfires? That will mean more taxes and the favouring of the public interest over individual rights. Insurance in areas increasingly imperilled by climate change is going to be a hot potato too. If you let the market decide on those rates they are going to become ever more difficult to afford for many homeowners.

Anybody quoting the Times of India for a non-Indian story needs their head examined. I’d trust their cricket reports and that’s about it.

Looking at the big picture, Americans seem to be getting the message. Net migration to the Sun Belt is declining and may soon reverse. It already has among the best educated, some seniors and young people. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/climate-change-is-ending-the-sun-belt-boom-162819401.html

Long after Newsom has left the political stage California will suffer with ever worse fires. That’s my prediction.

No. Trump did not start a pandemic.

Antisemitism has been an ecumenical affliction. In later life, Luther was obsessed with the Jews. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism I presume you know that Catholics were persecuted as well?

Have you been to Notre Dame? Or the great cathedrals of Italy? They are among the most extraordinary artistic achievements of Western civilization. To see the works of Renaissance masters in their original settings is still possible in many Italian churches. One doesn’t have to be religious to be moved by such beauty. I was particularly taken by this Bellini painting on a recent visit to Vicenza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_of_Christ_(Bellini)

Something that irks me - the use on news shows of acres or hectares to describe the size of major fires. How many urban Americans know what a thousand acres looks like, let alone 35,000, other than that it’s kinda large? Very approximately, how long would it take a car travelling at 40 miles an hour to travel around it if it were a square (rough answer, I think, 40 minutes?). Far better to express the square mile size and then convert it to a rectangle - so in the 35,000 acre example, divide by 1000 and add 50% to get the square mile size, 52 square miles (really 54.6), or a rectangle 7 miles x 7.5 miles. Or divide by 1000 and multiply by 4 to get the square km size (really 141.6), approx 12 x 12 km. That’s much easier for non-farmers to understand and to properly appreciate the scale of this particular disaster so far. I think the math is correct here - please correct if not. In any case my point remains. Most of us know how big a square with 2 mile sides is far better than 2560 acres.

By all means fire every politician and bureaucrat who screwed up here but that won’t change the underlying problem of an increasingly fire-prone world. Mother Nature has spoken loud and clear.

It amazes me that people are still actually moving to the likes of Phoenix and Las Vegas. These cities will become unbearable in the summer soon. They’re hard to tolerate now.

Unfortunately, you are wrong about that and there’s no room for debate any more. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. Man-made climate change is a grim reality and it’s only going to get much worse. Anybody living in the likes of LA or Southern Florida would be well advised to get out now if they can.

Governments make mistakes but anybody who thinks another government could have prevented all these fires is living in a dream world. Nature is telling us that certain parts of the globe, eg, Southern California and Southern Florida, are not meant for the vast numbers of people currently there and will become much more hostile in the coming decades.

Listening to two of my least favourite people for two hours? I might do it but only to save others the pain. Jordan Peterson is not an easy listen for some of us. He does tend to go on and on, being rather too fond of the sound of his own voice. While he may condemn academe these days his speaking style still bears its leaden stamp.

A hundred minutes? Give me the Reader’s Digest version. Let’s hope PP is more PC than PPC when PM. I’m all for balanced federal budgets. Home ownership is a much tougher nut to crack - so many different factors to sort out. The nimbys will obstruct reform while denying they are doing precisely that.

No president in living memory would have spoken in public like this about Canada. It’s deeply insulting to a loyal ally of the US and any politician worth their salt would know that. Poilievre was correct to reject it immediately and in the clearest terms possible. He needs to be seen as in no way subservient to an attempt to undermine the credibility of our state.

Please. Like Saddam Hussein and the Assads, père et fils, he was a murderous tyrant. It’s scant consolation to the families he tore apart that he was a secular thug rather than a theocratic one and slaughtered fewer of his subjects than the mullahs. There is an effort to sanitize this wicked man’s legacy but most of those yearning for freedom in Iran have no desire for an absolute monarchy either. https://www.newsweek.com/if-iranians-are-nostalgic-it-isnt-shahs-brutality-opinion-1816492 Here is the email of the author of that piece. Take it up with him: https://imadvocates.org/hamid-yazdan-panah-immigrant-defense-advocates/

Do you even admit that climate change exists?

The Shah was a tyrant. Nobody forced him to murder and torture his citizens, laying the groundwork for the fanatical Islamic state that followed. It’s time for people in the ME to grow up instead of blaming some well-meaning foreigner from 40 years ago. Most of the problems there are of their own making.

For wildfires in that part of the world there are immediate causes like downed power lines, lightning strikes and arson, and underlying ones like abundant dried vegetation and unusually strong Santa Ana winds. Obviously, it’s hard to exclude the role climate change is playing here which makes for more vegetation, drier vegetation and stronger winds.

The countries of the Middle East have to take most of the responsibility for how the region turned out.

I hope everybody can agree he did great work fighting tropical diseases, especially Guinea worm. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/jimmy-carter-wanted-guinea-worm-eliminated-close-rcna185782

The future is all of us being fed the ‘news’ that stokes our anger and prejudices by social media algorithms, hardly a recipe for rational debate or healthy politics.

Could you elaborate on that? The power lines to the Churchill River are already in place via both Quebec and Nova Scotia.

To my mind, it confirms that the biggest single party can no longer hope to win anything like a majority of the votes cast and frequently not even the seats won either. When Trudeau sought to change our voting system he was met with a wall of apathy and quickly gave up. The truth is we are stuck with FPTP whether we like it or not. Within this archaic system, one way to increase the support a government has is to form coalitions. It’s a better way to go than minority government, more credible and stable.