How California's Government Plans to Make Wildfires Even Worse

Not every square inch of the planet earth is suitable for a housing development. Flood plains are not great places to build homes. A grove of trees adjacent to a tinder-dry national forest is not ideal for a dream home. And California's chaparral ecosystems are risky places for neighborhoods.

This is nothing new. While people many Americans who live back East may imagine that something must be deeply wrong when they hear about fires out West, the fact is things are different in North America west of the hundredth meridian. The West is more prone to extreme temperatures, hundred-year droughts, and fires in the wilderness. Many of these ecosystems evolved with this fire risk.

Efforts to blame them primarily on climate change ignore the long standing reality. The Sacramento Bee notes, for example:

It’s also not enough to blame the growing devastation of recent wildfires solely on climate change, researchers said. While drier, warmer conditions have lengthened the fire season and likely increased the severity of the blazes, wildfires are only destroying more homes today than decades before because of rapid growth in rural areas.

It's not that fires are more devastating in the natural sense. The problem is that human beings insist on putting their property in places where fires have long destroyed the landscape, over and over again.

The Bee continues:

[T]he fires aren’t getting closer to us — we’re getting closer to the fires. “We’re seeing wildfires that have always been a part of the landscape that are now interacting more and more with us…"

Strader studied wildfire history in the western United States going back three decades, then mapped population growth in areas where fire activity had ranged from medium to very high. His research determined there were 600,000 homes in fire prone areas in the West in 1940. Today, that number is around 7 million.

So, why do people keep building homes in these places? Part of it is natural populations growth, of course. But the manner and rapidity with which this development expands out into the fringes of metro areas is also partly due to government policy and infrastructure.

In an unhampered market, it would be very expensive to extend a new neighborhood out into ever-further-out regions near metro areas. In order to reach these places, housing developers would need to find a way to finance both the new housing construction and the roads that give access to them. Certainly, developers often provide part of the funding through development fees demanded by governments. But these roads are often also subsidized by state and local governments, especially in the form of ongoing maintenance. Once a road to a new semi-rural community is built, governments will often maintain it, while spreading the cost across all the jurisdiction's taxpayers.

This system of subsidy allows more rapid and more dispersed development. Unsubsidized roads would tend to force more close-in and more dense development.

https://mises.org/wire/how-californias-government-plans-make-wildfires-even-worse

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Giuliani Will Make Report on Ukraine to Attorney General and Congress, Trump Says

President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, will make a report to Congress and the attorney general on the findings from his recent meetings with former Ukrainian officials, according to the president.

“Well, I just know he came back from someplace, and he’s going to make a report—I think—to the Attorney General and to Congress,” Trump said outside the White House on Dec. 7 in response to a question about Giuliani’s trip to Europe. “He says he has a lot of good information. I have not spoken to him about that information.”

Giuliani traveled to Kiev, Ukraine, and Brussels, Belgium, early this month and met and interviewed several former Ukrainian officials, including former Prosecutors-General Yuriy Lutsenko and Viktor Shokin, and Ukrainian political consultant Andrii Telizhenko. Shokin, Lutsenko, and Telizhenko have previously alleged misconduct by Obama-administration officials, including former Vice President Joe Biden and former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

Giuliani alleged on Twitter on Dec. 6 that $5.3 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine was misused, with much of the money going to non-governmental organizations favored by the U.S. embassy. According to Giuliani, the U.S. embassy, which at the time was led by Yovanovitch, directed Ukrainian officials not to pursue an investigation of the misuse.

That State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

“Much of the $5.3B in US Aid Ukraine reported as misused was given to the embassy’s favored NGO’s. At the time Yovanovitch, witness for the Witchunt, was the Amb. That embassy directed the police not to investigate,” Giuliani said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/giuliani-will-make-report-on-ukraine-to-attorney-general-and-congress-trump-says_3168393.html

LGBT Crowd Turns on Hillary Clinton After the Way She Denied Being a Lesbian

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emphatic declaration of her lack of interest in dating other women has cost her some points with the LGBT community.

The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee appeared Wednesday on Howard Stern’s show.

Clinton was on the show to promote “The Book of Gutsy Women,” which she co-authored with her daughter, Chelsea.

As is par for the course with Stern, the talk turned to sex.

“Contrary to what you may hear, I actually like men,” Clinton said after talking about a former boyfriend.

That opened the door for Stern to take the conversation to a lower level.

“Raise your right hand. You’ve never had a lesbian affair?” Stern asked.

“Never, never, never!” Clinton said emphatically. “Never even been tempted, thank you very much,” she added.

Robin Quivers, who rides shotgun on the show with Stern, noted that women who have “strong relationships” with other females often “cause suspicion.”

“Everything we do can cause suspicion, apparently,” Clinton said.

Trish Bendix, a reporter on LGBT issues, said she was “disappointed” by Clinton’s comments.

“It’s so frustrating when public figures like Hillary feel the need to dispel lesbian rumors in a way that equates lesbianism or queerness with salaciousness, and that’s ultimately what I dislike about the way she phrased it,” Bendix told NBC News.

One word bothered her the most.

“Specifically the word ‘tempted.’ I think there’s a way to refute untrue ideas about one’s own identity without saying something damaging to others,” she said. Media Research Center writer Gabriel Hays chortled in an Op-Ed that Clinton is “not woke enough.”

“Tsk tsk, Hillary. The former presidential candidate is taking heat for her response to old rumors about her being a lesbian,” Hays wrote.

“Madame Clinton’s firm denial that she has ‘never’ been tempted to dabble in homosexuality angered a member of the LGBTQ community for making the lifestyle out to be something ‘salacious.'”

“Yep, Clinton’s from that old school where the current LGBTQ apparatus would’ve been uninmaginable even for a radical lefty at the time. We would feel sorry for her, but then again, it’s Hillary,” Hays added.

https://www.westernjournal.com/lgbt-crowd-turns-hillary-clinton-way-denied-lesbian/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons

https://twitter.com/Leanintothelig1/status/1203783486466859008