So far I'm counting exactly ONE climate change protester

And here he is, everyone: Lee Camp, with his report on the California fires:

Never speaking the words “climate change” while whole towns literally go up in flames is like covering the drowning death of someone and never mentioning he was being waterboarded at the time. The real cause of these fires is at least half the story, if not more.

So there's a target of your protests: the mass media. They suck. Let's nationalize their butts, so the US can have its own BBC and its BBC can tell the truth.

If anyone here is asking about the seriousness of it all, here's the updated Vox report: "Northern California still has dangerous air quality due to wildfire smoke." See that red area? People are hurting there. The rich ones are trying to escape; everyone else just suffers. And this crap has been going on for more than a week now. I saw three days of it in Berkeley; as I drove south trying to get out of it, I wondered if California were not a total loss. Currently I am in southern California, where I don't want to be, and I'm waiting the air to get better up North. Hopefully Santa Cruz will be nicer by Friday, after a couple of days' rain; Berkeley by Saturday I hope. Gah.

If you want to see body-count-type drama, check out this piece. Paradise, California, the most prominent of the towns in the fire's path, was this nice little real estate boondoggle where they sold a bunch of homes in a tinderbox to retired people and failed to provide an adequate escape route should the whole thing burn down. And, sure enough, the whole thing did burn down. Oh and if worse comes to worse the nice capitalists in power are assuring the stockholders that PG & E, the entity probably responsible for the Camp Fire, will not go bankrupt. Save the corporations and let the human beings die, again. When do the huddled masses yearning to breathe free (and yeah emphasis upon "breathe" here) get tired of this? Meanwhile among the survivors we've got little acts of triage at the Chico, CA WalMart parking lot.

Oh yeah, and there's that other tinderbox out toward Malibu. More later.

Which brings me to the ultimate cause of our misery: capitalism. We now have a society which desperately needs an alternative to capitalist social organization but in which the alternative to capitalism is proclaimed as "revolution" by a few sectarians loyal to Bob Avakian or whomever. If anything we can have more imagination about what comes after capitalism, rather than just waiting for the big one. Isn't that what that John Lennon song, "Imagine," was supposed to be about? Imagine all the people, sharing all the world? Or at least imagine everyone up in arms while PG & E gets away with murder?

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The winds, I believe, are now blowing west to east like they're supposed to, instead of east to west which blew the smoke right into San Francisco and Oakland. Tomorrow we get rain and clean air again. As far as Pacific Gouge and Extortion (PG & E) goes, it's time to revitilize a movement here that was called EG and P, Electricity and Gas for the People.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

divineorder's picture

@Timmethy2.0

it's time to revitilize a movement here that was called EG and P, Electricity and Gas for the People.

That, and so much more to be done, can see why Cassiodorus wrote:

as I drove south trying to get out of it, I wondered if California were not a total loss.

Multiple concurrent catastrophes are us. Maybe the Dims in CA will, nah, scratch that.

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@divineorder I'm sure that impeaching Trump will fix this somehow. Except wait...we're not actually going to do that, right? Impeachment is off the table, or something.

In this case, I'm not convinced impeachment was even warranted--you can't impeach somebody for being a crappy person--but we already know that, if it were, they wouldn't do it anyway.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Hawkfish's picture

@divineorder

Only works if you keep an eye on the oligarchs afterwards. We have a public electric utility (Seattle City Light) and every time something goes slightly wrong someone suggests privatization.

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

snoopydawg's picture

@Timmethy2.0

I went to Park City in the am and when I got down out of the canyon to Ogden I could not believe how bad the air was. The western mountains were hidden by it and the northern one was very hazy.

Ticked me off to no end when Brown hurried to pass legislation last year to protect PG&E after the Carr fire which was devastating enough, but with close to 100 people dead because PG&E didn't want their profits affected should bring manslaughter charges against it. IMO, of course.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

divineorder's picture

Not to detract from your essay would share that sadly, the BBC, like our public media, has been co-opted in recent years. It used to be the gold standard, but no longer.

Corbyn recently proposed changes:

https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/jere...

Jeremy Corbyn calls for BBC directors to face election as he targets 'failing media'
Written by:
Emilio Casalicchio Posted On: 23rd August 2018

BBC directors should be elected by viewers in a bid to stamp out “political influence” by the Government, Jeremy Corbyn is set to declare.

The Labour leader will float a series of ideas to shake up the media world - including allowing licence-fee payers to elect board members of the national broadcaster.

He will also say Labour could hit tech giants like Google and Facebook with windfall tax to fund public interest journalism and supplement the BBC licence fee to reduce the cost for poorer households.

And he will argue the BBC should publish staff equalities data including the class make up of their workforce creating BBC content.

Mr Corbyn will argue journalists and media workers must be “set free to do their best work, not held back by media bosses, billionaires or the state”.

That said, we absolutely should do as you propose:

So there's a target of your protests: the mass media. They suck. Let's nationalize their butts, so the US can have its own BBC and its BBC can tell the truth.

It is extremely interesting for me to read your saga. We camp in Big Sur, Monterey, and Mendocino areas just about every spring, and visit relatives in Berkeley during that time as well. Even realizing the current catastrophe will not be over anytime soon, we went ahead and bought our flight over the weekend, but understand we may have to cancel. I have respiratory challenges and do not do well with smoke. One relative has similar challenges but is in Hawaii house sitting just now. The other one does not have any particular challenges but no one in the area can stay around and not be affected.

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

WoodsDweller's picture

Half a lifetime ago I lived in the Bay area for a few months. My conclusion about California was that it was a great place to live, 500 years ago. Since then, not so much. A hundred thousand people living in what today is California with the Holocene climate of a couple of centuries ago could make a pretty good life for themselves.

LA is a great big freeway. Put a hundred down and buy a car. In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star.

Does anyone remember towns burning up before the Oakland fire of 1991? There was a debate at the time about whether modern (as opposed to medieval) cities could burn. Of course there was the Chicago fire in 1871 but that wasn't really a modern city. With paved streets and sidewalks acting as fire breaks, modern building codes, business with built in sprinklers, fire hydrants, fire departments nearby, how could it happen?
Then it did.
Now we're counting how many towns burn every year.

Dreams turn into dust and blow away
And there you are without a friend
You pack your car and ride away

I don't know if it was the Paradise fire or the Malibu fire, but an official said it jumped an eight lane highway. Fire breaks are the main way to control wild fire, and it jumped 180 feet. You can't build breaks that wide in time.
The man child who has never left the city tells us all you need to do is rake the forest.

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

@WoodsDweller @WoodsDweller @WoodsDweller

A hundred thousand people living in what today is California with the Holocene climate of a couple of centuries ago could make a pretty good life for themselves.

For ten thousand years 3000 - 20,000 years they had great weather, plenty of food growing and running wild around the bay, and lots of fish inside the bay. Then about 150 years ago the Ohlone's paradise was taken away and eventually paved over.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

Cassiodorus's picture

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

magiamma's picture

Air Quality in California: Devastating Fires Lead to a New Danger https://nyti.ms/2Do9798?smid=nytcore-ios-share

The precise biological mechanics of how people develop chronic lung problems, while not fully flushed out, lie at the intersection of two seemingly disparate scientific areas, immunology and environmental study.

Immune cells that respond to foreign particles douse the particles with toxins, among other tactics, to destroy them. But an intense event like extremely poor air quality can prompt such a strong immune response that it can throw the body’s delicate network out of balance, particularly in people predisposed to asthma or allergy.

A vicious cycle can begin where each time a person experiences even small, related stress — like smoke — the body overreacts, leading to constricted air flow and intensifying the risk of heart attack and stroke for some people.

Researchers say that climate change leads to this kind of ill health through wildfire, but also through prolonged pollen seasons, dust storms and other events that affect air quality.

“We’re setting up a tipping point in the immune system that leads to more inflammation and disease,” said Dr. Sharon Chinthrajah, a pulmonologist and allergist at Stanford, speaking of the way climate change has put increased pressure on human defenses.

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Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation

Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook

pswaterspirit's picture

A fire can jump just about anything. Two years ago it jumped the Columbia River where the river is about a quarter mile wide. The fire was hot from all the standing dead trees. The wind is a constant thing. Things were very dry. The federal government has been poor stewards of the land. These fires are hotter and bigger because of it. Climate change is bringing us more fires and dry conditions. Lack of forest management is giving us hotter faster moving fires. One side wants to deny climate change the other side wants to deny our forests being full of kindling and standing dead trees is a problem. Somewhere in the middle lies the truth.

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mhagle's picture

@#0

Sometimes our slow internet will do that too . . . you click too many times trying to make it work.

Yikes!

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo