It Didn't Take Long

Well, it didn't take long for Westboro Baptist to fix blame for the Oklahoma tornado.  Yes, folks, it's the fault of Jason Collins, the first openly gay basketball player in the NBA.  I do hope Jason catches on with another team next season just to piss of WB.  Of course, Westboro may not get the chance to stew over the career of Jason Collins.  Sad fact, Jason Collins is nearing the end of his playing days.  He spent this season sitting on the bench, and at his age, that usually means  unemployment is on the horizon.  Of course, it's only a matter of time until there is an openly gay, 25 year old starter with a good decade of  playing time in his future.

Meanwhile, CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer did the whole, don't you just thank god you've survived this terrible cataclysm thing with a woman he was interviewing.  "Actually, I'm an atheist." she replied.  Get used to it folks.  Latest polling is that 20% of us do not believe in a deity,  and among those under thirty, it's more like 30% with no religious affiliation.  Of course, that may mean they're free thinkers.  For those unfamiliar with the term, free thinker refers to a nineteenth century movement of atheists, agnostics, and those who believed, but rejected the idea of organised religion.  Abraham Lincoln, as an example, was a believer who never joined a church.  And let's not forget the openly atheistic, Robert Ingersoll.

Which brings me to all those survivors of the tornado who thank god for sparing their lives.  I've always wondered why such people don't make the obvious connection.  If god chose to spare their lives, doesn't that mean he chose to kill others.  Just asking.

Tom the Oakie

Well, I've got to hand it to Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn.  In past natural disasters, he has insisted that any aid be tied to offseting budget cuts.  Needless to say, people in states like Florida, New York, and New Jersey, all of which have seen some pretty severe hurricanes in the past few years were not happy to have disaster aid challenged by Oklahoma Tom.  But, he is consistent.  Good old Tom is making the same demand now that his own state has been hit hard.  I'm amazed that Oklahoma doesn't require tornado shelters at their public schools.

Oklahoma

At the risk of being seen as insensitive, I've got to ask a couple of obvious questions about today's mega tornado in Oklahoma.

1.  Conservatives are constantly going on about how human caused climate change is a hoax.  There are a lot of very conservative people in Oklahoma.  What are they saying now?  Climate scientists have been warning about more, large, super storms on the great plains, and those predictions are coming true.

2.  Many conservative, evangelical Christians have made a connection between Hurricane Sandy and gays in New York.  Their strange reasoning is that God  let loose his wrath on the sinful metropolis.  There are a lot of conservative, evangelical Christians in Oklahoma.  Do they think that God is punishing Oklahoma, and if so, why?

3.  And speaking of Hurricane Sandy, Oklahoma senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn worked to slash disaster relief to New York and New Jersey.  When FEMA was running out of money, both senators opposed adding more money to the FEMA budget.  Will they oppose disaster relief for Moore, Oklahoma?

I'm just asking.

Fire!

How many times do I have to make this point?  The Santa Monica Mountains burn.  There are major fires in the mountains every few years, and Los Angeles and Ventura counties have to spend millions of dollars defending the homes of the wealthy.  It does not make any sense to allow development in the Santa Monicas.  It's time to preserve them as open space, preferably as California's tenth national park.

The Nuclear Renaissance

From the front page of yesterday's Los Angles Times, "Japan Crisis May Derail Nuclear Renaissance." What nuclear renaissance? Conservatives love to blather on about how evil environmentalists destroyed the nuclear industry in the United States, and as an environmentalist I'd love to take credit, but that's not what happened. For those too young to remember, we stopped building nuke plants because they were prohibitively expensive to build. After they were built, it was still far cheaper, per kilowatt hour, to generate electricity by burning coal. (Also true of hydroelectricity, solar , and wind.) But the big reason the nuclear industry died in the United States, after Three Mile Island, the insurance industry realized that they could be on the hook to replace Philadelphia. Now that's a high risk policy.
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The nuclear industry was crippled by the conservative holy grail, the free market. I suspect Obama talks about new nuke plants to shut up the cons, knowing that there won't be new nuclear plants as long as the free market rules.

Again and Again

I keep wondering about the stupidity of the average foothill dweller in Los Angeles. Year after year, there are fires, and then if we have a wet winter, the fires are followed by mudslides. In the past couple of weeks, we've seen rain storms, mud, and destroyed homes. And then the people who have lost their homes are interviewed on TV and they assure their fellow Angelenos that, yes, they do intend to rebuild, and that they will not be defeated by this bit of adversity. And then some talking head on the evening news will say, "Aren't they courageous."
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Courageous isn't the word I would use. I'd say stupid. Like it or not, there are places where people should not live. If it was just those who loose their homes that insist on building in fire and flood zones, I wouldn't care overly much. But, we spend millions of dollars defending homes from fire and mudslide and then spend even more millions trying to engineer mountain and canyon sides in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable. It would be far cheaper and far more sensible to just buy these people out and turn the mountain sides into open space. It isn't viable to remove the entire city of Los Angeles as a defense against earth quakes, but it does make sense to buy out a few hundred or even a few thousand homes.

It Never Fails

It never fails. Every year the fires come to the mountains of Los Angeles, and when the winter rains come, the denuded hillsides become rivers of mud, sliding down to the houses that we have foolishly allowed to be built in areas prone to fire and mudslide. What is new this year, is that some of the people who have lost homes are demanding to be reimbursed by the federal government because it's federal mud.
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Wow. Not too long ago I had a conversation with a young, twenty something, lady who cursed the greed and short sightedness of the baby boom generation. It was her theory that boomers were so incapable of denying themselves anything they wanted, that they had pretty much destroyed the world around them. As a boomer myself, my first inclination was to defend myself, or at the very least point to that most self mythologizing generation in American history, the sixties generation. But, I gave her complaints some thought, and then reluctantly agreed with her. For all our yammering about how much the boomer generation changed the world, we are, as a group, unable to accept that we might have been more destructive than not.
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So what does this have to do with the natural cycle of fire and avalanche in southern California? It's pretty simple really. The development of the mountains and canyons ramped up to unprecedented levels in the past 40 years so that boomers could live in pretty places with nice views. No thought was given to the environmental damage so long as some artificial sense of living with nature could be indulged. No, the federal government doesn't have a responsibility to recompense people because they made very bad decisions on where they wanted to live. We already spend disproportionate sums of the public treasury to defend homes from the inevitable wild fires and to put up barriers in a futile attempt to save home owners from mud slides. And we should. Once the zoning boards give permission to build in dangerous, though beautiful places, those homes become a joint responsibility for us all. My point is that our own stupidity is at the heart of these problems. An unwillingness to think beyond our own immediate desires.
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Santa Monica Mountains National Park. See my post of 12/23/09. Tejon Ranch National Park, an idea whose time has come.