I don't like beets. I realized I also have the right to not like beets. I don't have beetphobia, because I'm not afraid of beets. I just don't like them. I know some say that they are good for you. I don't care, I still don't like them. And won't eat them. Ever.
@itsolelehmann This fits the Adam's theory of slow moving disasters. @ScottAdamsSays had the belief, correctly, that humans can solve any major problem that is moving slowly. He used the example of dams in a number of major cities, including NY and London.
🔥 THEY SAID IT NEVER HAPPENS… UNTIL IT DID RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR FACES 🔥
A CNN panel just exploded.
Bush White House spokesman Pete Seat is sitting THREE FEET from Obama’s own strategist David Axelrod…
And he drops the nuclear truth:
“Barack Obama got on the 2008 Indiana primary ballot because Democrats in St. Joseph County submitted FRAUDULENT petition signatures. People — including the county Democratic chair — went to JAIL over it. He shouldn’t have been on that ballot.”
Axelrod freezes.
“How did that get determined?”
Seat doesn’t flinch:
“It was exposed TWO YEARS later. Went through the courts. People went to jail. That’s the problem… nobody caught it before he was already on the ballot.”
FACT CHECK: 100% TRUE ✅
In 2013, four Indiana Democrats were CONVICTED for forging those signatures — literally copying names off old petitions. Even a former governor’s name was forged. County Democratic Chairman Butch Morgan went to PRISON for orchestrating it.
The thing they swore “never happens”…
HAPPENED.
And a party chairman did hard time for it.
Election fraud isn’t a “conspiracy theory.”
It’s a documented crime.
And they got away with it long enough to change history.
Share this before they try to memory-hole it.
I see this all the time:
Founder builds a prototype.
It looks great and sells the story.
And they think they have a sellable product.
But a sellable product requires a production system, that still needs to be built and optimized.
Founder knew how to build the prototype not the production system. That requires experts who have done this before.
None of it is sexy.
So, founder goes back to their comfort zone to polish their prototype.
And never ship anything.
@FedSupernova@ATI_ORG Wish I could attend. Prototyping is a permission to learn. Scaling production is the real exam. Most teams celebrate too early. I made that mistake a few times too.
@Tuviae The tiny details and failures are the soul of the product. Spec sheets and AI will never capture the fastener that only fails on unit 47. AI and designers can't replace real world testing. Yet.
@louiseivan The CM shortlist is where most guys in the garage lose valuable time. Price/cost is never the first filter. As someone smarter than me told me once: "Don't let the accountants into the room too soon!" Solution: Communication plus who owns the NRE when the tool revises it
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.
My family and I escaped execution in Lebanon because Islam wanted to kill us. My parents were kidnapped by Fatah and were severely mistreated. Our home in Beirut was stolen by Palestinian Muslims. My wife's family escaped Lebanon because Islam wanted to kill them. Her ancestors escaped the Armenian genocide because Islam wanted to kill them. My grandparents escaped Syria because Islam wanted to kill them. My brother-in-law's family escaped Alexandria (Egypt) because Islam wanted to kill them. My family and I are leaving Montreal because Islam wants to kill us (the number of threats that I've received forced me to take a two-year leave from my home university). I'm moving to @olemiss /@umdeclaration to defend American liberties and freedoms from ideological threats. @LibyaLiberty, a vile Islamist who despises Jews, is now "reporting" me to my new institution because I dare criticize Islam. Imagine the chutzpah. I will NEVER stop defending the West from the dangers that it faces. Long live the United States.
Scott Galloway is a perfect example of perhaps the most pernicious people in society: the stupid-smart person.
Educated beyond his intelligence. Smart enough vocabulary to justify his ego and smugness, but too stupid to understand basic realities of communists.
Smart people internalize history and make good decisions. They also know the dangers of hubris. Stupid people don't know enough to even opine on the issues in the first place, so their stupidity isn't a threat. But the stupid-smart person can teach at NYU, he can build a big successful business, he can even give a good TED Talk, but he's not smart enough to see the limits of his own capacities...so he asserts himself in society with an outsized level of confidence. Sadly, he's articulate enough to fool lots of people into elevating his stupid ideas...and that's the problem.
People listen to the stupid-smart guys, like him. Then they're genuinely baffled when there's a Kalashnikov pointed at their head as they're staring at a cinder block wall behind the politburo headquarters. In a functional society, this clown would be a pariah. I have precisely zero empathy for his plight in NYC. He endorsed it. Now he can eat it, good and hard.