Featured Story:
A bushfire raged through Australia earlier this week, devastating towns north of Melbourne. The latest report puts the death toll at 181, and it's expected to rise. While the fires are suspected to have been set on purpose (All fires that cannot be tracked to a lightning strike are assumed to have been deliberately started), members of the Green Agenda practically leaped over one another to offer their take on the cause of the tragedy.
"The bushfires are the worst natural disaster in Australia in 110 years. The previous worst bushfire was the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 which killed 75 people.
"The blazes have increased pressure on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to take firm action on climate change as scientists blamed global warming for the conditions that fueled the disaster."
There's a word for this kind of brazen exploitation of the loss of life: "Shameless."
In America, we're familiar with scientists and politicians exploiting national tragedies to promote their own agendas. The same phenomenon occurred in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Scientists, the media, and even a certain politician railed on about how the deadly storm was caused by global warming. It practically became accepted knowledge that Hurricane Katrina was an storm of unprecedented power and the cause of that power was global warming. In reality, the deadly hurricane struck land as only a class 3 hurricane, the horrific death toll was caused not solely by the storm, but by poor maintenance of the levees that should have protected New Orleans from the storm surge and by inadequate preparation and response by the local, state, and federal governments. Not to mention the fact that scientists actually have no idea what effect global warming has on hurricanes, since at different times they have "linked" global warming to more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, weaker hurricanes, and none of the above.
But the Green Agenda in Australia is perhaps even more shameless. Why? Because the extent of the damage may be directly linked to a policy they worked to enact; a policy that may have cost dozens of Australians their homes, and a few their lives.
Angry residents last night accused local authorities of contributing to the bushfire toll by failing to let residents chop down trees and clear up bushland that posed a fire risk.
During question time at a packed community meeting in Arthurs Creek on Melbourne's northern fringe, Warwick Spooner -- whose mother Marilyn and brother Damien perished along with their home in the Strathewen blaze -- criticised the Nillumbik council for the limitations it placed on residents wanting the council's help or permission to clean up around their properties in preparation for the bushfire season. "We've lost two people in my family because you d*ckheads won't cut trees down," he said.
One family, however, refused to follow the draconian zoning regulations that prioritize the rights of trees over the safety of people (as the Green Agenda always seems to do). In 2002, Lian Sheahan and his family ignored the rules and bulldozed 250 trees surrounding their house. For this, they were called law breakers, forced to appear before a magistrate and fined $50,000. His family was "emotionally and financially drained."
Then the fires struck. The result? In his own words:
"We are the only house standing in a two-kilometer area."
I guess sometimes "criminals" do prosper.
This Week's Headlines:
New York Times Headline, May 15, 1932
A New Denier Emerges (And Pays the Price)
Most Egregious Claim of the Week:
Already a Nobel Prize Laureate and an Emmy and Oscar winner, Al Gore added another trophy to his ever increasing collection: The Grammy for best spoken word album for An Inconvenient Truth. That means the voters decided that of all the "spoken word albums" released this year, the absolute pinnacle was the audio book of the book of the film of the PowerPoint presentation that has long since been scientifically discredited on virtually every criteria.
Sounds pretty egregious to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment