Gordon

Carney walked out of U.S. trade talks at one minute to midnight and called it a war. It isn’t about tariffs. It’s a midterm operation, and Scott Bessent is fighting the war Carney doesn’t want you to notice.

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Gkbro59 retweeted

30 days ago

The Dirty Little Secret of Wildfire How America Traded Logging Jobs for a Perpetual Firefighting Economy For much of the 20th century, the forests of the Pacific Northwest were managed as working landscapes. Private timber companies and federal land managers cut, planted, thinned, and tended the land with the understanding that the trees were an asset to be sustained across generations. Clearcuts functioned as firebreaks. Small crews routinely extinguished ignitions before they became news. The result was a regional economy built on living-wage jobs, steady tax revenue for schools and public safety, and forests that, for the most part, stayed green. Occasional fires occurred. What did not occur were the annual, multi-hundred-thousand-acre, smoke-choked seasons that have become the new normal. That changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The northern spotted owl was elevated into the most consequential bird in modern American policy. Scientists and environmental organizations argued that the species required large tracts of old-growth habitat. Petitions, lawsuits, and court orders followed. In June 1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the owl as threatened. Federal Judge William Dwyer’s rulings and the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan locked up roughly 24 million acres of federal forest across Oregon, Washington, and northern California. Federal timber harvests collapsed—often by 80 to 90 percent from 1980s levels in the key regions. Mills closed by the dozens. Supporting businesses disappeared. Unemployment surged. Some communities never fully recovered. Private industrial landowners continued managing their own ground because they still had direct financial skin in the game. Federal and state lands largely stopped being managed for timber production or for systematic fuel reduction at anything approaching the previous scale. The forests kept growing. Fuels kept accumulating. An ignition that once would have been contained by a small crew with shovels and a radio now found denser, more continuous fuel beds. Large fires (5,000 acres and up) went from relatively rare events in the 1970s to routine occurrences in the 2000s and 2010s. In multiple recent seasons, more timber has burned than the industry harvested in its heyday. The irony is difficult to miss: forests “saved” from chainsaws have been delivered to ash in far greater volume. Meanwhile, the northern spotted owl’s population has continued to decline across much of its range. Logging was never the primary driver. Competition from the invasive barred owl has proven far more significant, and habitat loss from high-severity fire now ranks high among the threats. The original crisis was urgent enough to trigger listing and sweeping land-use restrictions. The promised recovery under the Northwest Forest Plan has been, at best, incomplete. The economic and ecological bill arrived in the form of unmanaged fuels and repeated megafires. And that is where the dirty little secret begins. Once the timber economy on public land was kneecapped, a new industry rose to replace it. Wildland firefighting—suppression, logistics, aviation, camps, contracts, and the supporting apparatus—became a multi-billion-dollar annual enterprise. Agencies and contractors employ thousands. Budgets are large and sticky. In government, “use it or lose it” is not a slogan; it is an operating principle. A quiet fire season is a budgeting risk. Early, aggressive attack on every ignition that could still be handled by a small crew is expensive in the short term and reduces the later need for the full apparatus. Allowing fires to grow until they justify emergency declarations, large incident management teams, and federal cost-share arrangements is, from a certain bureaucratic perspective, rational and financially advantageous. Local structural firefighters and many ground-level wildland crews do not share this incentive structure. They want the fire out. Once a fire reaches a certain size or complexity, however, control shifts upward to state and federal incident management teams whose metrics, funding streams, and political realities are different. Neither major political party has shown a strong appetite for fixing the underlying problem. One side treats any expansion of active management or commercial thinning as an assault on old growth and the owl. The other side speaks frequently about forest health but rarely forces the structural changes in litigation risk, planning timelines, and budget incentives that would actually move the needle at scale. Campaign contributions and jobs flow from the existing system. Admitting that the original policy overcorrected and produced a more dangerous landscape remains politically costly. Climate change and longer fire seasons are real factors. Drier fuels and hotter summers make everything worse. But denser, less-managed forests on the public estate are the accelerant that policy deliberately chose. Private industrial lands are managed more intensively and still burn, yet the severity is generally lower. Young plantations and certain silvicultural choices create their own risks, but private owners retain a direct financial reason to keep fuels in check and respond quickly. Public lands under the post-owl regime largely do not. Oregon and the broader region now hold more trees than they did in the 1920s, largely because private landowners continued to replant. They also experience more catastrophic fire. The government did not “save” the forest. It changed who controlled the management decisions and, in the process, swapped a productive industry for a perpetual emergency-response industry. The owl was the symbol. The lasting result is a landscape that burns bigger, rural economies that never fully healed, and a political class with limited incentive to alter the arrangement. Instead of market-driven capital allocation, the new system runs on taxpayer subsidies. Households and businesses understand that money spent inefficiently is money gone. Government tends to treat the same dollars as an everlasting well. Until the incentives change—until early detection, aggressive initial attack, mechanical thinning where appropriate, and genuine long-term forest management are rewarded more than the sheer size of the suppression effort—the same pattern will continue every summer: more smoke, more lost timber, more money spent, and the same speeches about how hard everyone is fighting the fires that policy helped create.

WheelerRipWA's tweet photo. The Dirty Little Secret of Wildfire

How America Traded Logging Jobs for a Perpetual Firefighting Economy

For much of the 20th century, the forests of the Pacific Northwest were managed as working landscapes. Private timber companies and federal land managers cut, planted, thinned, and tended the land with the understanding that the trees were an asset to be sustained across generations. Clearcuts functioned as firebreaks. Small crews routinely extinguished ignitions before they became news. The result was a regional economy built on living-wage jobs, steady tax revenue for schools and public safety, and forests that, for the most part, stayed green.

Occasional fires occurred. What did not occur were the annual, multi-hundred-thousand-acre, smoke-choked seasons that have become the new normal.

That changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The northern spotted owl was elevated into the most consequential bird in modern American policy. Scientists and environmental organizations argued that the species required large tracts of old-growth habitat. Petitions, lawsuits, and court orders followed. In June 1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the owl as threatened. Federal Judge William Dwyer’s rulings and the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan locked up roughly 24 million acres of federal forest across Oregon, Washington, and northern California.

Federal timber harvests collapsed—often by 80 to 90 percent from 1980s levels in the key regions. Mills closed by the dozens. Supporting businesses disappeared. Unemployment surged. Some communities never fully recovered. Private industrial landowners continued managing their own ground because they still had direct financial skin in the game. Federal and state lands largely stopped being managed for timber production or for systematic fuel reduction at anything approaching the previous scale.

The forests kept growing. Fuels kept accumulating. An ignition that once would have been contained by a small crew with shovels and a radio now found denser, more continuous fuel beds. Large fires (5,000 acres and up) went from relatively rare events in the 1970s to routine occurrences in the 2000s and 2010s. In multiple recent seasons, more timber has burned than the industry harvested in its heyday. The irony is difficult to miss: forests “saved” from chainsaws have been delivered to ash in far greater volume.

Meanwhile, the northern spotted owl’s population has continued to decline across much of its range. Logging was never the primary driver. Competition from the invasive barred owl has proven far more significant, and habitat loss from high-severity fire now ranks high among the threats. The original crisis was urgent enough to trigger listing and sweeping land-use restrictions. The promised recovery under the Northwest Forest Plan has been, at best, incomplete.
The economic and ecological bill arrived in the form of unmanaged fuels and repeated megafires. And that is where the dirty little secret begins.

Once the timber economy on public land was kneecapped, a new industry rose to replace it. Wildland firefighting—suppression, logistics, aviation, camps, contracts, and the supporting apparatus—became a multi-billion-dollar annual enterprise. Agencies and contractors employ thousands. Budgets are large and sticky. In government, “use it or lose it” is not a slogan; it is an operating principle. A quiet fire season is a budgeting risk. Early, aggressive attack on every ignition that could still be handled by a small crew is expensive in the short term and reduces the later need for the full apparatus. Allowing fires to grow until they justify emergency declarations, large incident management teams, and federal cost-share arrangements is, from a certain bureaucratic perspective, rational and financially advantageous.

Local structural firefighters and many ground-level wildland crews do not share this incentive structure. They want the fire out. Once a fire reaches a certain size or complexity, however, control shifts upward to state and federal incident management teams whose metrics, funding streams, and political realities are different.

Neither major political party has shown a strong appetite for fixing the underlying problem. One side treats any expansion of active management or commercial thinning as an assault on old growth and the owl. The other side speaks frequently about forest health but rarely forces the structural changes in litigation risk, planning timelines, and budget incentives that would actually move the needle at scale. Campaign contributions and jobs flow from the existing system. Admitting that the original policy overcorrected and produced a more dangerous landscape remains politically costly.

Climate change and longer fire seasons are real factors. Drier fuels and hotter summers make everything worse. But denser, less-managed forests on the public estate are the accelerant that policy deliberately chose. Private industrial lands are managed more intensively and still burn, yet the severity is generally lower. Young plantations and certain silvicultural choices create their own risks, but private owners retain a direct financial reason to keep fuels in check and respond quickly. Public lands under the post-owl regime largely do not.

Oregon and the broader region now hold more trees than they did in the 1920s, largely because private landowners continued to replant. They also experience more catastrophic fire. The government did not “save” the forest. It changed who controlled the management decisions and, in the process, swapped a productive industry for a perpetual emergency-response industry. The owl was the symbol. The lasting result is a landscape that burns bigger, rural economies that never fully healed, and a political class with limited incentive to alter the arrangement. Instead of market-driven capital allocation, the new system runs on taxpayer subsidies.

Households and businesses understand that money spent inefficiently is money gone. Government tends to treat the same dollars as an everlasting well. Until the incentives change—until early detection, aggressive initial attack, mechanical thinning where appropriate, and genuine long-term forest management are rewarded more than the sheer size of the suppression effort—the same pattern will continue every summer: more smoke, more lost timber, more money spent, and the same speeches about how hard everyone is fighting the fires that policy helped create.

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Gordon @Gkbro59

about 1 month ago

@GuntherEagleman As the great Yogi Berra would say. It’s Déjà vu all over again.

Gordon @Gkbro59

about 1 month ago

@Hot_Pepper76 2 all beef patties pickles onions on a sesame seed bun. Big Mac.

Gkbro59 retweeted

Rod D. Martin

@RodDMartin

about 1 month ago

Some of you are telling me the Gaza deal can't last. You're not seeing the whole board. There are two default assumptions at work here. The first is that Islamist radicals can just spontaneously produce missiles, guns, and money from thin air. They can't. The second is just general black pilling, which is frankly stupid. So you're demoralized: big whoop. You'd have been more demoralized in the summer of 1940, or for that matter of 1942. And you'd have been just as wrong. Get over yourself. Look at the facts. First, Israel beat the crap out of Hamas, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups on Earth. They are as murderous with their own people as with the Israelis, and have been for decades. It is no accident that since Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinians in 2006, the Christian Arab population there has been "reduced" by 2/3. And that's not a lot different from the West Bank Palestinians, who upon gaining control of Bethlehem "reduced" its Christian population from 80% to about 10%, or the PLO and Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Christian population was about 54% before the Civil War and is now about 37%. The people pretending that it's the Jews who are killing Christians are willfully blind, and intentionally blinding you. No matter what you think of Israel, Hamas is evil. They went too far in 2023, as they were always going to do, and Israel has defeated them. They can no longer field an effective military force. They cannot resupply. They're done. Can individual or small groups of militants kill people? Sure. But there's no longer any sanctuary, and the days of your tax money being funneled through the PA to pay for suicide bombers are long over (although if you live in Tim Walz's Minnesota, that is not true of Somalia). The black pill types told us nine months ago that the peace would not last a week and that Trump could never pull off the deal agreed to yesterday. Yet here we are, nine months later, and he has. "Oh, it won't last," you say, but you said that last October, and the peace has held. Why? Israel cut off Hamas's ability to fight, while Trump cut off its ability to resupply. It's that simple. Second, the reason that's simple is that Hamas's three chief patrons were Iran, which now can't get ships in or out of its own ports, along with Turkey and Qatar. Trump has reduced Qatar to a U.S. protectorate. He's dealmaking with the Turks on F-35s and the disposition of Syria, including new oil pipelines (to be built and owned by U.S. oil companies). Turkey suddenly needs peace to achieve its own ends; Qatar simply has nowhere to go. And Hamas has no one to ship them weapons or pay their bills. They could have made Gaza into the Riviera. Instead they dug up the water and sewer pipes to make missiles they fired for two decades at schools. So now the Board of Peace will build what they did not. Third, they'll do that because no one hates Hamas as much as the Arabs. Every country the Palestinians have entered in any numbers, they've immediately plunged into civil war. No one wants them anywhere near anything important. Egypt's wall along its border with Gaza makes a maximum security prison look like a sand castle. It has no such wall along its Israeli border. There's a reason. Trump has carefully cultivated enormous business and investment deals with every regional power. He's gone out of his way to give them things they need and want, from the Saudi nuclear power deal to the Turks' favorite installed in Damascus. Their interests are interlocked with ours, and tightening by the day. Everyone now profits from peace. The Palestinians are in their way. Fourth, a massive generational shift is underway. The old timers wanted a Palestinian state, so long as it was safely contained somewhere else, and they used it to show they were "tough" against Israel when in war after war they'd been shown to be impotent. it was low cost and (moderately) higher reward for them. Their children, exemplified by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), are sick of it. They WANT peace with Israel. They want to make money in Israel, and they want the Israelis to bring tech and investment to them. Even more so, they want military and intelligence cooperation, which all of them badly need. They have none of their parents' sentimental attachment to long-dead Palestinian leaders or decades-old lost wars. And Trump is daily incentivizing them to double down. Fifth, why? Because Trump knows three things the black pill guys do not: A. Trump knows that prosperous countries rarely attack one another. B. Trump knows Americans can make fortunes in the Middle East if peace is the rule rather than the exception, and that will never be achieved through a Bush-style occupation. He also knows that we can save fortunes if we don't have to worry about the Middle East anymore. C. Trump knows that without money, you're done. And he knows how to cut off the cash. No one funds Hamas now. No one funds Hezbollah now. A Lebanese peace requires a stable, functioning Lebanese government and the dismantling of Iran's proxy army on Israel's northern border -- the one that has also occupied and terrorized Lebanon for half a century. So Trump let Israel annihilate Hamas, which has now unconditionally surrendered. He also let it beat Hezbollah into submission. On the ground, these were the two biggest obstacles to regional peace, now each shattered. And now we have a way to give everyone what they want in both countries: a Palestinian state under new management, military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, Israeli energy exports to Egypt and Jordan (and Syria and Lebanon soon enough), and the restoration of Lebanon as "the Paris of the Middle East" as it was before the civil war. Sixth, most people watching see these as disconnected issues. They aren't. They never were. But neither is Syria, under new management and (despite its sordid past) desperate to balance Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and U.S. power so it can have the breathing room to avoid becoming Ankara's colony. Suddenly it has an intense interest in peace as well; just as suddenly, it is no longer an essential Russian outpost or a colony of Tehran. And also neither is Iraq, where pro-Iranian militias have wreaked havoc for 20 years. Those days are over. Iraq's new President is disarming the militias and arresting their leaders. The militias spent the early part of this year reinforcing the IRGC in its massacre and crackdown on the Iranian people. They're also the final obstacle to a durable peace -- and economic development, and pipeline construction, and prosperity -- in Iraq itself. Seventh, all these roads lead one place: Iran. The Islamic regime is the primary source of funding, armament, and direction for the bad guys in every armed conflict in the region: literally all of them. Tehran used all these proxies to build a de facto Persian Empire from Baghdad to Beirut and from Abadan to Aden. That's gone now. It won't be coming back. Eighth, the Iran war has shown the Gulf Arab states that the Iranian really is a clear and present danger, not a convenient idiocracy that keeps its country from becoming a rich regional power. Months of Iranian bombardment of Arab hotels, water plants, airports, and shipping have been more persuasive than decades of American leaders. Now Saudi Arabia carries out joint attacks on Iran with the U.S.; so do Kuwait and the UAE. And with a host of currency swap lines, nuclear power deals, and direct military support, Trump is drawing all of them closer to the U.S. by the day. Ninth, all that works because of what doesn't. China is a nonfactor. Supposedly Iran's ally (much like it was supposedly Russia's "ally without limits" while it pushed Putin into his Ukrainian quagmire), China hasn't lifted a finger. Rumors of shoulder-fired missile shipments are just that: rumors. But if true, they're the exception that proves the rule. China is NOT sending advanced fighter jets, not at any price. China is NOT sending troops. China is NOT sending its Navy. If anything, it's sparring with the U.S. over the pending Taiwan arms sale...but only very, very gently. No one in the Middle East is stupid enough not to understand what China calls "the Malacca Dilemma". 80% of its oil has to flow through the Strait of Malacca. The U.S. already had de facto control of the chokepoint; it has turned that into control into a chokehold with its new defense pact with the heretofore "Non-Aligned" Indonesia. It's also flipped India, which not only signed an "impossible" February trade deal with Trump (or so said the black pillers) but immediately began capturing illegal Russian Shadow Fleet oil tankers. Iran has to use that Shadow Fleet too: 90% of its exports are to China. But China hasn't lifted a finger, and India doesn't care. That was even before Trump sealed Iran's ports tight. Tenth, all of this has required complex negotiations with at least a dozen countries that mostly don't like each other, and all of that takes time. If you see Trump call a cease fire to "negotiate" with Iran, don't be dumb: he's actually using that time to negotiate with Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and Oman, and Qatar, and Bahrain, and Kuwait, and Iraq, and Syria, and Lebanon, and Turkey, and Israel. Iran is a threat to every one of them, and in many cases has been their murderous oppressor. They're skittish, they're gunshy, they know their militaries are strong on paper but weak in fact, and like all people, inertia has kept them in the long status quo. But Trump has destroyed that status quo: it is never coming back. And slowly, every country in the region is getting the point and getting on board. How Iran finishes is almost irrelevant. Oh, you're not going to believe our expanded target package over the next few weeks. The prospect of a successful Iranian revolution and a free Iran is very, very real. A free Iran would be the greatest investment opportunity of the 2030s, and everyone would benefit, no matter how much change is tough. But at this point it wouldn't matter. Iran spent trillions of its people's money on underground complexes in which to build nuclear weapons and the ICBMs to load them on. It has literally nothing left to show for it. And every day it threatens Hormuz or the Bab al-Mandab is other day that it's well-armed, wealthy neighbors become more determined that it can never be allowed to rise again. If the U.S. doesn't finish Iran, the Arabs will. Trump plays the part of a chaos agent. He does this to keep all his enemies off balance. He's been telling you this on video and in print since at least 1987. If you can't see the play, that's on you. But no one ever does the homework. So it keeps on working for him. He's remaking the Middle East no matter what happens in Iran, and our grandchildren will thank him, not just for peace but for the prosperity that comes from it. What they won't remember is your black pill foolishness, your temporary gas price inconvenience, or your inability to see the world being transformed before your eyes. Which is good. You want your grandchildren to respect you, after all.

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Gkbro59 retweeted

John

@MagaGrunt1

about 1 month ago

🇺🇸Absolutely ridiculous being taxed on something you own.🇺🇸

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Gordon @Gkbro59

about 1 month ago

@BuzzPatterson Why do they want to leave Morocco so bad?

Gordon @Gkbro59

about 1 month ago

@Humanerrorsaved

Gordon @Gkbro59

about 1 month ago

@SpoonForIdaho Living in Idaho every year the smoke from Ca and or Oregon when then temps are above 90 make it miserable.

Gordon @Gkbro59

about 1 month ago

@BuzzPatterson @RogueLou18 Couldn’t agree more Buzz. 57 years I loved Ca but, same as you, felt I had to take my family and leave. It is a beautiful place but the one party politics, homelessness and cost sadly made it a place to leave.