There is so much wrong with this popular notion that wildfires are caused/worsened by using fossil fuels and that they are destined to get worse unless we abandon using them.
▪️First, wildfires aren’t becoming worse or more numerous, either in Canada or globally. I’ll post a few charts in the comments showing this. However, more people and property are near wildfires today, and we see it more with social media.
▪️Most people are ignorant of the history of wildfires, as they are with all history. Wildfires were always horrific and burned unchecked prior to industrialization, frequently wiping out entire towns and killing thousands at a time.
▪️Here’s a brief history of Canadian fires in the 1800s and early 1900s. In 1825, the Great Miramichi fire destroyed 1/5 of New Brunswick in 2 days, burning 3M acres! Many other fires wreaked havoc, Ottawa would have burned to the ground if not for opening a dam and flooding the streets.
https://theconversation.com/despite-its-long-history-of-wildfires-canada-still-doesnt-know-how-to-live-with-them-190213
▪️The history of US wildfires is similar, this essay recounts in the 1800s “Fire was nearly everywhere, some places more vigorously than others. The amount of burning was, by today's standards, staggering.”
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nattrans/ntuseland/essays/fire.htm
▪️Prior to European settlers, it’s estimated over 4M acres burned annually in CA, far more than even the worst years today. In the 17-1800s there were many accounts of smoke drifting East with apocalyptic sights, people sometimes thought judgement day was upon them.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/09/10/why-environmental-alarmism-makes-forest-fires-worse/?sh=2aadad813712
▪️This recent Twitter post shows a photo of a baseball game at Fenway Park in 1950 that had to turn on their lights for an afternoon game because of thick smoke from a Canadian wildfire.
https://twitter.com/otbaseballphoto/status/1666577623856697344?s=61&t=wYS_HEkyKg4NfAC06jGdAg
▪️Today, most wildfires are caused by humans, not “climate.” Studies show that 84% of wildfires in the US are human ignited, and 97% of all those that threaten homes.
https://www.science.org/content/article/human-sparked-wildfires-are-more-destructive-those-caused-nature
▪️Of all the threats climate change poses, wildfires are one of the easiest to solve. For centuries, even primitive societies had ways to manage forests to control burns. With modern machinery and knowledge (powered by fossil fuels) we are more capable than ever to mitigate fire risk.
▪️However, this involves impacting nature, which environmentalists vigorously oppose. Which is why many areas in CA and Canada aren’t managed properly and are ripe for destructive fires, as they’ve let too much fuel build up.
▪️Thus, when fires inevitably happen, they blame climate change and fossil fuels, do nothing to actually prevent and manage future fires, but pretend that building more windmills and electric cars are the solution. It really is madness.
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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▪️I was playing around with the new Grokipedia and it already seems much better than Wikipedia (which admittedly isn’t saying much). I was looking for a topic that is politically polarizing that I also knew a lot about, so used “Kenosha unrest shooting” to compare the two.
▪️A key component to the shooting was understanding the broader context behind the Kenosha riots and who Kyle Rittenhouse ended up shooting. Wikipedia simply says that Jacob Blake was shot by police and was paralyzed, thus unrest. Grokipedia gives a much more in-depth account so the reader can see that Blake was a serial criminal with a warrant who had a knife and was resisting arrest while fleeing with children in his car.
▪️When it comes to those who were shot, Wikipedia just gives the names and ages. Grokipedia goes in-depth on each person and about their violent criminal history and mental instability that night.
▪️Part of the left wing mythology over Rittenhouse was removing the context and ...
