Greece arrests dozens for arson fires, WaPo doesn't mention it

 Greece struggles to contain Europe's largest wildfire on record...

CNN story reporting dozens arrested for arson fires in Greece says fires were caused by climate change

 

Greek police arrest dozens for arson as EU’s largest-ever wildfires rage

CNN NewsourceAugust 29, 2023

Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters
Destroyed corral where eighteen bodies were found following a wildfire near the village of Avantas.

By Eleni Giokos, Xiaofei Xu and Niamh Kennedy, CNN

(CNN) — Greek authorities have arrested dozens of people on arson-related charges as deadly wildfires – the largest ever recorded in the European Union – rage across the country. 

Wildfires in Mount Parnitha, north of the Greek capital Athens, are still out of control Friday, with more forest destroyed overnight.

The biggest fire front line in Greece remains near the northeastern town of Alexandroupolis, in the Evros region.

The burned body of a man was found on a rural road near Dadia national park, near the border with Turkey, state media AMNA reported Friday.

Earlier this week, 18 people were found dead near a village in northern Greece. The fire brigade said Tuesday they may have been migrants. Another person was killed in a fire northwest of the capital Athens on Monday.

Greek police have made 79 arson related arrests, Greek government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis told public broadcaster EPT Friday. 

“What is happening is not just impermissible, but obscene and criminal,” Greek Climate Crisis Minister Vassilis Kikilias said in a statement.

“You are committing a crime against the country. You will not be spared. We will find you and you will be held accountable in Justice,” Kikilas added. 

With more than 73,000 hectares burned, the fires in Alexandroupolis are officially the largest wildfires ever recorded in the European Union, according to EU Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarčič. 

Wildfires have intensified around the globe, providing a stark reminder of how the climate crisis is upending lives and inflicting billions of dollars a year in damage.

While wildfires are often ignited by lightning strikes or human activity, they are becoming more frequent because of human-caused climate change. Scientists found, for instance, that climate change made the extreme weather conditions that fueled the 2019-2020 destructive fire seasons in Australia 30% more likely to occur.

More.

Not long enough

 How Long Will Canada Burn?

 

LOL, Democrat named Wackerman, $400 donor to Lincoln Project, arrested for setting July 2022 "Oak Fire" in Yosemite National Park which Democrats blamed on global warming

 The so-called Oak Fire destroyed 127 homes and 66 outbuildings. Roughly 6,000 people were forced to evacuate as the inferno torched 30 square miles of land and smoke from the fire drifted more than 200 miles into parts of Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area.     

More.

Bob and Doug BBQ goes slightly amiss, Canada wildfires consume the equivalent of Maryland and more

 

If California won't do anything to clean up the fuel for wildfires, the insurers will do it for them

 

State Farm to stop accepting homeowners insurance applications in California due to wildfires, construction costs

Fire threatens California sequoias because Governors Moonbeam and Gavin Newsom didn't bother to clean up the fuel on the ground since 2013

 

The blaze in Yosemite National Park was measured at 2,044 acres by evening. It had no containment, and it was likely to continue to grow amid light winds and hot conditions, U.S. Forest Service officials said Sunday. ...

The summer temperatures were abetted by abundant fuel, officials said. Garrett Dickman, a Yosemite National Park biologist, explained the problem in simple terms: “There’s a lot of wood on the ground, and that wood is going up in smoke.”

Wood on the ground includes dead trees and branches from a 2013-15 die-off.

More.

Former California lecturer in "criminal justice" who specialized in "deviant behavior" accused of setting the Cascade, Everitt, Ranch, and Conard Fires in July and August

Can't make it up.

I guess those wildfires weren't exactly wild.

This guy is the exception to the rule that those who can, do, and those who can't, teach.

 

 

Academic lunatics, but I repeat myself, are separately accused of setting both the Fawn Fire and the Dixie Fire in California

The second US academic in two months, Alexandra Souverneva, has been arrested and accused of serial arson in California. Last month California Professor Gary Maynard was arrested in a separate incident, and accused of being a serial arsonist. Neither of the accused to my knowledge has been convicted of arson crimes.

More.

But for all you know GLOBAL WARMING DID IT.

In their defense, fires are pretty easy to set when your governors chronically refuse to remove the dead undergrowth in the name of the biodiversity also preached by academia.

Things noteworthy from my reading October 17-24

 US wildfires may have burned approaching 8 million acres by now in 2020 but tens of millions of acres used to burn in this country annually before World War II, especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s when it was much warmer in the US.

Jim Lee, a pollster with Susquehanna Polling and Research, said "There are a lot of voters out there that don't want to admit they are voting for a guy that has been called a racist, that submerged Trump factor is very real. I don't see this a blue wave. I don't see Biden winning in the states Trump carried in 2016."

Joe Biden, who said he is the Democrat Party now, said after the debate “No one is going to build another oil or gas-fired electric plant." Which is complete lunacy. California has power shut-offs during the wildfires because of its war on oil and natural gas generating capacity. It is dependent on power imported from other states. Renewables can't meet demand when temperatures are too hot, when the wind dies, and when the sun goes down. Biden will turn all of America into California. Who are we going to buy it from then? Mexico?!

Sen. Murkowski of Alaska will vote FOR Judge Barrett.

BLM rioters blocked traffic in San Bernardino CA and keyed cars trying to get through. Left is, in the final analysis, lack of respect for property, including intellectual property, the notional property shared by the citizens and represented e.g. in statuary. By tearing down statues everywhere they declare that they are our enemies. We should treat them as such.

Twitter locked the account of The New York Post on Oct 14 in response to tweets revealing Hunter Biden's emails which Twitter didn't like. Democracy dies in darkness, eh WaPo? One of Hunter's alleged emails said "Hunter to hold 10% of the equity for The Big Guy." A Hunter Biden business associate surfaced who contradicted The Big Guy by claiming he discussed a lot of the business with him.

Internal polling by Hillary Scholten (D) and Peter Meijer (R) in Michigan District 03 agreed that Hunter Biden's Big Guy is ahead by 2 points in this heavily Republican district. Quite the thing that. Of course, they disagree about which of the two of them, Scholten or Meijer, is going to win Justin Amash's seat. Fear of a blue wave in Michigan is not misplaced. I'm hearing lowly Republican county office holders campaign on radio. Can't say I've EVER heard that before. Smells like fear to me.

A liberal pastor in Michigan who has been trying since 2015 to steer his conservative parishioners away from Trump has thrown in the towel and resigned, exasperated that they won't listen.

In Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly is trying to unseat Republican Martha McSally in the US Senate race. Someone floated a yearbook photo of someone dressed as a Nazi, claiming it is Kelly. Kelly campaign denies it. AZ Central found a guy named Ed who claimed to be in the photo and to know that the Nazi was definitely not Kelly. Ed must know who the Nazi is, but dang, AZ Central didn't go there.

Meanwhile, same thing at CNN. Ms. Amanpour informed a GOP official it's not CNN's job to investigate the Hunter Biden laptop affair. No kidding. She said that's the GOP's job, and CNN is not going to help them. CNN is an arm of the Democrat Party.

Trump mentioned in the debate that wind turbines kill a lot of birds and are bad for that reason. The New York Times responded that wasn't true because house cats kill far more birds than turbines do.

I think I've detected a pattern from AZ Central to CNN to NYT.

Trump in his first term isn't going to come anywhere close to appointing as many judges as the King, Jimmy Carter, did.

Speaking of Carter, who helped Israel and Egypt make peace, Trump has now presided over the normalization of relations with Israel by Sudan, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates. Quite the feather in his cap.

Republican voter registrations have outpaced Democrat in Pennsylvania over Trump's term as average unemployment in PA fell one full point from 5.4% in 2016 to 4.4% in 2019. In 2018 the average was even lower: 4.3%. COVID wreaked havoc on this record, but will voters blame Trump?

President in waiting, Kamala Harris, said 220 million in the US have died of coronavirus, which should mean fewer votes to count, for sure. In June The Big Guy had said 120 million had already died, but he moved that up to 210 million by early October. cc: TalkingPointsMemo.

The Big Guy predicted only 200,000 more deaths by the end of the year, which comes as quite the relief. The worst is behind us.

Except that the CDC released data showing excess deaths to Oct 3 are running about 90k higher than accounted for by COVID-19 deaths reported so far. In other words, The Big Guy is half way there already!

Young twitter users this week were utterly befuddled in droves by the idea that illegal kids were coming across the southern border on coyotes. One such tweeter is an investment advisor, corporate attorney, and chief deputy whip of the Georgia House Democrats. She said, "How the hell does a coyote bring a whole human across the border?".

Somebody claimed this week that Democrats and Republicans polled about equally reluctant to express openly their political views. Clearly the coyote-perplexed people voting for the Democrat COVID death misoverestimators weren't part of THAT poll.

Santa cancelled his appearance at Macy's for the first time in 160 years because . . . 2020.

But wait, it gets worse than 2020. The Big Guy said in the debate he'd get to zero emissions by 2025. Everyone on Twitter caught it. Democrats excused it saying he meant 2035. But even that is horrifying lunacy. It isn't achievable because most people are like me.

I have a natural gas fireplace, a gas furnace, a gas stove and oven, a gas dryer, a gas water heater, and a gas back-up generator, not to mention 2 pretty old gasoline powered cars. And don't get me started on the power equipment. There's the riding mower, two walk behinds, an edger, a weed whacker, and two snow-blowers, one for light and one for heavy duty. Oh yeah, and a chain saw. All of it is old but works and is well maintained.

The Big Guy wants a buy-back program for AR-15s, which will be cheap compared to a buy-back of all my carbon-emitting equipment. Ain't gonna happen.

Natural gas is cheap and clean, but The Big Guy hates it. The Big Guy has a dagger aimed at all of it, 2025 or 2035 doesn't really matter. America runs on cheap energy, and he aims to make it more expensive. Which will mean only one thing.

America won't run. The only thing keeping industrial production above the water line in this country is the energy sector. Take that away and down the toilet we go.

50 years ago this month guns that the black communist Angela Davis bought were used in the execution of Judge Harold Haley. Davis is a forerunner of today's violent communist Black Lives Matter:"She was acquitted in '72 despite her proven ownership of the murder weapons & a cache of letters she wrote to Jackson in prison expressing her unambivalent solidarity with his commitment to political violence". Davis is also a prominent originator of the idea of systemic racism, a system rigged vs. blacks. "With her blanket dismissal of evidence as irrelevant in trials of (automatically innocent) minority defendants, Ms. Davis indicts the entire American legal system as a rigged farce." It's rigged alright . . . in her favor.

Democrat Kamala Harris argued that people can't afford their health insurance under Democrat Obamacare which was rammed down the people's throats by Democrats and that something must be done about it by electing Democrats again.

And if you don't like that, she'll lock you out like Twitter locked out The New York Post.

The person who died in the Oxford coronavirus vaccine trial got the placebo, not the vaccine.

The Big Guy also echoed Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York this week, who once said "America was never that great".

The Big Guy tweeted: "America was an idea. We've never lived up to it . . .."

The Big Guy also took the endorsement of the Boilermakers Union Local 154 in Pennsylvania, which promptly informed him that they had already endorsed Donald Trump. "Don't try me, pal" was heard in response from the Big Guy according to two clearly disgruntled anonymous sources, one of which sounded Hungarian and the other Polish, who obviously were making this up out of their rancor over The Big Guy calling NATO allies Poland and Hungary "totalitarian" states.

The 80s called. They want their foreign policy back. 

Jeffrey Toobin's one-eyed trouser snake got loose while he was in a Zoom meeting, now known as an erection simulation, and all the ladies saw him stroking the creature, trying to pacify the wayward beast. Toobin apologized to his wife for not including her in the special moment.

Peter Strzok of FBI Trump-Russia Russia Russia! fame is now an adjunct professor at Georgetown. He'll probably find some young chicks there to replace the adulation, and other things, he used to get from Lisa Page. Parents, you have been warned. 

Some asshole pointed out that Trump's point four of America First in 2016 was to "end sanctuary cities".

What a jerk!

Pro-tip for Australia's Nero: Say Muslims lit the fires

Hey Hey, Ho Ho, private homeownership has got to go, says anti-American Commie UCLA professor in The Nation

California’s Fires Prove the American Dream Is Flammable

If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership:

[W]e need to do more than upgrade the powerlines or stage a public takeover of the utility companies. We need to rethink the ideologies that govern how we plan and build our homes. ... The valorizing of homeownership and property rights results not only in increased exposure to climate-change-fueled fires, but also in our inadequate responses to them. ... This is the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, transmuted through the urban, petrochemical century. Cheap energy—both the monetary price of subsidized gasoline and the hidden costs of fossil fuels—and the idealization of individual homeownership have created the scorching landscapes we face today. Cheap energy is untenable in the face of climate emergency. And individual homeownership should be seriously questioned. ... Even with the threats of climate change and rampant fire looming, the ideals of the American dream that have been instilled for more than 150 years will be difficult to dispel. ... We need another kind of escape route—away from our ideologies of ownership and property, and toward more collective, healthy, and just cities.

'Camp Fire' incinerates Paradise, the "most destructive wildfire since record-keeping began" in California

Reported here:

Not a single resident of Paradise, California, can be seen anywhere in town after most of them fled the Northern California community that may be lost forever. Most of the town's buildings are in ruin. Entire neighborhoods are leveled. The business district is destroyed.

In a single day, the Sierra Nevada foothill town of 27,000 was largely incinerated by flames that moved so fast there was nothing firefighters could do. Only a day after the "Camp Fire" began, the blaze had grown on Friday to nearly 140 square miles and destroyed more than 6,700 structures, almost all of them homes -- making it California's most destructive wildfire since record-keeping began.

Authorities said at least nine people were killed by the "Camp Fire," which as of early Saturday morning was 5 percent contained.

It is one of three major blazes that firefighters are battling across the state.

In Southern California, the 35,000 acre "Woolsey Fire" was 0 percent contained early Saturday. It has forced over 200,000 evacuations. The "Hill Fire" was holding at 6,000 acres.

The New Yorker ignores how wildfires contribute gargantuan quantities of emissions compared with power plants

A Summer of Megafires and Trump’s Non-Rules on Climate Change:

Compared with the Clean Power Plan, [the EPA's new Affordable Clean Energy rules] could, over the next few decades, allow hundreds of millions of tons of additional carbon emissions.

Hundreds of millions of tons over decades, eh?

How about gigatons from wildfires in just one year?

Forest fires may produce as much CO2 as half of all fossil fuels burned:

In 1997, a fire consumed 8,000 square kilometers of mostly peatland in Borneo. Researchers estimated 0.2 Gt of carbon were released in this one area that year, and that carbon emissions from fires across Indonesia in 1997 emitted between 0.8 and 2.5 Gt — or “13 to 40%” of the size of global human fossil fuel emissions. ... 

Other researchers, der Werf et al 2004, looked at fires around the world during the El Nino year and estimated that 2.1 Gt of carbon was released — which explained 66% ± 24% of the extra CO2 emitted globally that year. Bowman et al estimate fires produced emissions around 50% of the size of human emissions. ...

California, Nevada and Colorado could impact climate far more deeply, cheaply and effectively RIGHT NOW by preventing and containing the wildfires which are making moot the comparatively puny plans of the EPA.

Carr Fire victims in California had no car, may not have known of evacuation order

The Sacramento Bee reports here:

Also believed to have died are a 70-year-old woman and her two great-grandchildren.

According to relative Donald Kewley, James Roberts, 4, and Emily Roberts, 5, went missing with their great grandmother, Melody Bledsoe, 70, Thursday night. Kewley told The Sacramento Bee that the three were last seen at their home near Keswick Dam Road and Quartz Hill Road – a home that was destroyed in the blaze – before evacuations were ordered.

Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko confirmed that three bodies were found inside the family home, but that no formal identification has been made yet.

“They are overwhelmingly sure that there are decedents at the scene,” the sheriff said. “And they have communicated that with family members. However, no bodies have been recovered. 

Separately reported here:

“There was no evacuation notice,” said Kewley, who lives about two miles away. “Our evacuation was a mile-wide column of smoke rotating toward us.”

Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko Saturday said evacuation notices had been given in multiple formats in the area, including reverse-911 robocalls, calls to cell phones of those who had signed up for such emergency alerts and notifications via TV and the federal Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, which broadcasts warnings during emergencies.

Bosenko could not say if authorities had gone door-to-door in the Bledsoes’ area, as they have in other evacuation sites.

He said Thursday night, as the fire unexpectedly and rapidly came into the city, streets were “bumper-to-bumper” with people trying to escape. At one point, Bosenko said, a civilian purposefully hit a sheriff’s vehicle trying to get through an intersection.

“It was very chaotic and people who had waited to the last minute were panicking,” Bosenko said.

In that frenzy of smoke and confusion, Melody, James and Emily sought help.

Greece can't get a break: First financial meltdown, then overrun by refugees, now swept by wildfires

Greeks describe harrowing escapes from deadly fires:

"A pair of wildfires have [sic] left at least 79 people dead, and CBS News correspondent Seth Doane reports dozens are still believed to be missing. In some places around the Greek capital the fires were still burning. Elsewhere people began returning to neighborhoods left unrecognizable."

Illegal alien (?) Jesus Fabian Gonzales arrested in Sonoma county on suspicion of arson in wild fires

From the story here:

The arson suspect is Jesus Fabian Gonzales, 29, Sgt. Spencer Crum, a spokesman for the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office told CNBC. Crum described him as "a transient out of Sonoma" and said the suspect was "arrested for setting a small fire in a park in Sonoma on Sunday."

Speaking at the Tuesday afternoon press conference, Giordano said the arson suspect was seen "walking away from a small fire" and stopped by deputies. Also, the suspect allegedly had "a fire extinguisher and a lighter with him," said the sheriff.

Giordano said the suspect was asked whether he started the fire and responded that "he started the fire to warm himself up — something to that effect."

Why Won't Obama Use This Super Tanker To Fight Colorado Fires?

Read the story, here, about why this Boeing 747 supertanker just sits on the ground in Arizona while Colorado goes up in smoke.

Obama Sent Planes to Mexico to Fight Fires, But Wouldn't Help Texas

Military C-130s were sent to stop Mexico's fires in April, as reported here, but Texans didn't get a federal declaration of disaster for their recent fires, as reported here. 

Obviously, Mexico provides Obama with more votes than Texas.

Showing no favor to worthy people: one of the marks of a tyranny. And another is like it, from Aristotle: "The guards of a tyrant are foreigners."

The Petty Tyrant Stiffs The Free Republic of Texas, Twice

No space shuttle, no fire disaster aid.

Story here.


"A tyrant also should show no favour to a man of worth or a freeman; for he should think, that no one deserved to be thought these but himself; for he who supports his dignity, and is a friend to freedom, encroaches upon the superiority and the despotism of the tyrant: such men, therefore, they naturally hate, as destructive to their government."


-- Aristotle, Politics