Don's Tuesday Column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   8/03/2021

“Evergreen” thoughts—worthy reruns

Imagine an “off the grid” vacation: no phone (dumb or smart), Internet, social media, streaming content— no TV—with only a distant AM radio station that comes and goes as the wind allows. We’re there.

Will anything shake your world if you don’t know and obsess over it? Even the Surfside condo disaster would be a brief summary of a multistory collapse, a hundred unfortunates dead (no one you know, though), someone (not you, of course) needs to know why, and idiot politicos trying to take partisan advantage.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) Wuhan Flu death toll has become a minor statistic; over recent months, America’s Coronavirus deaths have become almost a rounding error in the 7-8,000 daily deaths from all causes. A graph showed America’s monthly actual deaths, the 5-year-average, and “excess deaths.”  Assuming “excess” accounted for the Wuhan Flu deaths, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans died “from” it (or “with” it, since PCR tests overstate COVID, and Medicare pays more for Wuhan flu deaths).

The deaths in recent months are now declining below that 5-year average, as happened after the Spanish Flu. That proves that many (overwhelmingly elderly) who died would have reached “life’s reward” within the next year or so anyway. Now that’s a loss of the “enjoyment” of their company by their relatives; however, it’s statistically relevant as it informs open-minded, impartial people that we’ve been vastly oversold on the danger to children, young adults and the healthy middle-aged of all races.

So, why does the political/ruling/media/medical elite only have the same response to a continuing-but-greatly-declining flu? According to worldometers.info, it’s currently producing about 1-2 “serious, critical” cases out of every 1,000 “currently infected.” “To a someone with a hammer, everything is a nail.” Their only response is the proven-ineffective “lockdowns” (Australia) and “mask mandates” (Gov. Newsom, Biden’s threat).

Could it be that, having tasted the intoxicating power of rule-by-whim (Constitution-be-damned), our “leaders” saw that a controlled population is a compliant population, sheepishly accepting today’s pronouncements and disregarding (“fuhgetaboutem”) prior ones?

Without the Wuhan Flu “panic porn” and daily death counts, could governors, election officials and judges have usurped the state legislatures and mandated open-ended, unlimited “mail-in” ballots? That produced the ensuing fraud (er, “irregularities”), without which there’s no Slow-Joe-Biden, just more OrangeManBad. Yes. The reasons Biden’s DOJ is threatening states to keep the ‘rona rules and mail-in voting is simple: more fraud, perpetual rule.

“Evergreen” thoughts can apply anytime, which includes the current (and regularly predictable) wildland fires. My last Internet access to the Daily News “Opinion” page had analysis on that topic; my laptop allowed me to review last September’s columns. Here are some quotes:

“Do not succumb to the blathering about “climate change” causing fires when your own eyes and mind can tell you that anti-logging, anti-thinning, anti-clearing of dead trees—are the true conditions that turn routine forest fires, part of California’s climate for centuries, into raging monsters.

“We have driven along some Central Oregon highways and seen, on one side, a forest cleared of undergrowth with spaced trees, resistant to ‘crown fires’—and on the other side a thicket of bushes and trees providing a continuous layer of flammable material up to the tree crowns. It’s obvious what’s to blame: naïve, bad forest practices, not so-called ‘climate change.’ Climate alarmists’ predictions have failed—they’ve no credibility.” (Sept. 15, 2020, “Ethereal, ephemeral beauty, horror”) Please look up “Climate prediction swings and misses: A decade of alarmist strike outs, 2010-2019” (Heartland.org).

From Sept. 22, 2020: “There’s only been about 0.4-degree Centigrade warming in 40 years—that’s one-tenth of a degree per decade averaged over 4 decades (1979-2021, per satellites and weather balloons, not subject to human ‘adjustments’). That extrapolates to 1 degree in 100 years, well below the “target” 1.5 degrees. It’s barely perceptible over an hour, let alone over a year or 4 decades. The ‘margin of error’ in the computer model projections is invariably greater than the warming they’ve predicted; it’s anything but ‘scientifically proven.’ (Fact: deaths from weather and climate have declined 95 percent in a century.)

“Predictions based on computers are no better than the data, logarithms, and (to state the obvious) the biases and fallibility of those doing the programming. That’s the reason that around 95 percent of the temperature projections over decades have been wildly off—meaning they predicted more warming than has actually occurred (See: ‘drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/,’ ‘UAH Satellite-Based Temperature of the Global Lower Atmosphere—Version 6.0’).”

I also mentioned Bill Clinton’s “Roadless Rule,” pushed by environmental scientists, that “restricted the use of existing roads and construction of new roads on 49 million acres of National Forest, making it difficult for officials to scan the land for the kind of kindling that fuels massive conflagrations.” See: “Wildfires Will Get Worse Under Decades-Old Liberal Policies, Veteran Forester Says,” by Chris White, 9/14, citing Bob Zybach, experienced forester with a Ph.D. in environmental science.

“Zybach cited warnings he made years ago, telling officials that warding off prescribed burns in Oregon and California creates kindling that fuels fires. Such rules make it more difficult to deploy prescribed burns…designed to cull all of the underbrush in forests to lessen the chance of massive fires.”

I also cited a NYTimes article, “California Today: 100 million Dead Trees Prompt Fears of Giant Wildfires” (1/2018); “Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California.” Between 1982 and 1998, state land managers burned about 30,000 acres per year, dropping to about 13,000 per year from 1999 to 2017. NASA’s Earth Observatory graph showed a decline in “Global Burned Area” from 2003 to 2015. Fanatical environmental policies underly devastating forest fires.