Don's Tuesday Column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/11/2019

    Modern utility: no power for you

Many rural residents, victims of PG&E equipment failures, damage and maintenance shutdowns, use backup generators for 110-volt power, or hard wire their home’s system. Our motorhome generator has kept refrigerators, flat screens and computers going for hours; the days-long outages have not repeated.

Unless a home generating system has an automatic starter, a power outage for a home vacated due to travel, etc. has potentially dire consequences: An outage beyond several hours may cause cold or frozen food to go bad, outdoor plants to die, security and other internet-connected systems to go down and not restart properly. Burglars may take advantage. A present home owner can at least make adjustments and protect his or her assets. An owner who’s out-of-state is sunk.

Who can forget the wind-damaged towers that fell in the foothills and the frustration of seeing lights going on in an adjacent area while still sitting for days in darkness, carrying buckets of water from town for flushing the commode? Those trying events may be unavoidable aberrations. It strikes this power user as nearly incomprehensible that, in this advanced civilization, California’s major utility, PG&E (Plunder, Gouge and Extort as a local talk host has cynically said) now threatens and plans power shutoffs to avoid equipment-caused wild fires.

That is an extreme non-solution to a situation humanly-caused and humanly-fixable—through urgent, meticulous maintenance and repair of equipment together with immediate clearing of flammable growth under and near power lines. Even then, since lightning strikes regardless of those measures, we will still have communities and towns vulnerable to fires while the tug-of-war goes on to radically reduce fuel around them. Throw up your hands, shrug and resign yourself to being a victim of system-wide failures to take common sense prevention seriously.

In “Green Policies Turned California A Charred Black,” J. Frank Bullitt (Issues & Insights) and Richard Epstein (Hoover Institution) present a sad, aggravating analysis of our Golden/Blackened State’s catastrophic relationship with forest fires. “More than half of California’s roughly 105 million acres are owned by federal and state governments. It is on these sprawling parcels that the wildfires tend to rage before devouring private land, homes and businesses.

“Public lands ‘have proved far more vulnerable to forest fires than properties owned by private groups. Private lands are managed with the goals of conservation and production. The management of public lands has been buffeted by legislative schemes driven by strong ideological commitments.’ (Epstein)

 “The loudest voices assign blame for the fires to man-made climate change. But the human activity primarily responsible for the destructive spread of wildfires is public policy favoring burned timber over harvested timber. While well-intended, laws inspired by the 1970s environmentalist movement, which is determined to make sure saw blades and trees never meet, have stoked the furnaces.” Rep. Tom McClintock: “Excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other. It is either carried out, or it burns out.”

While decades of obsession with tailpipe emissions have ensued, wildfires produce unhealthy, smoke-filled air beyond anything cars could ever create. The number of fires has not increased, only the massively increased acreage that fires consume, and the homes burned by thick overgrown nearby forests.

“Policy changes are desperately needed, but as long as policymakers are able to get away with blaming the problem on climate change, and focus their thinking on what to do after lives and property have been destroyed, California will continue to be consumed by fire.” Don’t fret; you can surely eat your cold or frozen food before it rots due to the arbitrary PG&E shutdowns, right?

Trump Derangement Syndrome (T.D.S.) continues unabated.

It doesn’t hurt my feelings to have a local T.D.S.-inspired critic take their best shots, wielding (what they seem convinced are) irrefutable assertions of President Trump’s Russia-related perfidy. I have yet to see one fact from my columns proven wrong (I mistakenly wrote Mueller’s report is “480 pages” instead of “448 pages”). Mueller’s team of Democrat lawyers couldn’t cite acts of criminal “collusion” by Trump et al with Russia. No crime; not guilty.

Now tell me how Hillary Clinton and Obama’s people didn’t “collude” with Russia by paying for and using British spy C. Steele’s “Dossier” full of unverified, phony tales of dirty dealings by Trump and others—stories admittedly provided by Russian sources.

Why Trump supporters think little of Mueller’s report: 1) One of the “obstructive” events was a phone call between Trump’s lawyer, J. Dowd and Gen. Flynn’s lawyer, R. Kelner. Mueller edited and deleted parts of the call that undermined his assertion of obstruction. Judge Sullivan ordered the full transcript released; it clearly shows that a supposedly suspicious call was nothing other than routine communications between lawyers in a common defense. Mueller’s busted.

2) Similarly, in “Key figure that Mueller report linked to Russia was a State Department intel source,” by John Solomon, Thehill.com, we find another disingenuous manipulation to make Trump look conspiratorial. “In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence.”

In reality, Kilimnik was a spy, so to speak, but he was a good spy, working for our State Department for years, providing valuable intel on Ukrainian gov’t leaders, to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. The FBI was told of “Alan Purcell, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017,” and a highly valued asset. His work for Manafort, far from being sinister, was innocent; the FBI knew it, but Mueller’s people still prominently included it to cast suspicion on Trump and Manafort. The Mueller/Dem political hit job has failed. There may be indictments, fines and jail time in store for some, who even now are turning on each other. Jumping rats, knives, plea deals coming.