I’m not saying “ding dong the witch is dead” wasn’t a perfect capture of the sentiment, but it’s also really hard to improve on “Lizzie’s in a box” for the sheer ability to send the most insufferable people on the planet into a frothing rage.

I’m so glad I left completely (minus the random search result with no other leads, but no browsing) when the API fuckery started, corporate social media sounds like an absolute hellscape now.

Reddit has streaks now??

I already don’t eat meat, but it’s something important to know for people who do.

If you don’t have a food thermometer, get one now. Salmonella can be easily killed by cooking at the proper temperature.

Living in a place where a tornado hit doesn’t actually reveal how you, personally, voted.

Have we backslid so far that people forgot that collective punishment is supposed to be bad?

You also don’t have to gerrymander when you’re aggressively weeding out who can vote, both by fucking with voter rolls through purges and by overpolicing (felons can’t vote in Arkansas without meeting specific conditions).

All of which is besides the main point: celebrating natural disasters hitting people is deranged.

I want to preface that I’m not trying to be argumentative about it, I just have a lot of thoughts about it after spending a month hoping rain would wash the goddamned ash away soon. The measures you’re talking about absolutely help, in normal circumstances. The fires we had were extremely abnormal. We have fire season here, we’re used to the threat of fires and anyone who lives in an interface zone and isn’t a fool will add fire hardening measures to their home. But these weren’t just homes on and in the hills that caught on fire.

Look at Altadena, so many of the homes there were nowhere near a wildland-urban interface zone. When places a mile away from the hills are are getting torched, that’s not what went wrong. The hills were dried to a crisp after 8 months of nearly no rain; climate change caused the lack of rain, and climate change caused the Santa Ana winds to blow at hurricane force. What could anyone have done to stop a spark from happening anywhere? Once a spark happened, that was it. That’s why we had something like 6 fires burning at once in LA county during that, it might have been more.

Part of the problem is that homes outside what is considered the interface zone, whose owners had no reason to believe it was urgent to take those measures, were getting showered with cinders from a mile or more away while subjected to high winds. They were basically living in the middle of town, not on the hillside.

I want to emphasize that fire hardening is absolutely something everyone should do, but that was considered kind of paranoid re: wildfires until now.

Every building could have been surrounded by concrete (and some were!) without significantly impacting the spread, which was primarily wind driven. Seriously, listen to what the firefighters and other experts have said about this.

Once the houses caught on fire they became the fuel, not dry grass. Combined with the water pressure dropping from 10,000 houses going up in flames practically simultaneously, it was impossible to control. The planes they normally fly in to drop retardant couldn’t even fly in the wind, because the water they dropped would just fucking float in the air before getting scattered. Nobody can stop that until the winds die down.

Which is getting somewhat off topic, but my overall point is that these climate disasters can happen anywhere. Blue states and red states are both going to suffer, and it’s deranged to pump your fist when people in a red state get hit just because they might have voted Trump. It’s not less deranged than it is when MAGAs celebrate the fires in California.

I’m sorry but whoever told you that dry plants around houses caused it was either misinformed or a liar. Hurricane force winds carried cinders for miles to start new fires, and every fire truck in the state lining up to fight it wouldn’t have stopped it.

This is kind of a sore subject for me since I spent a week breathing in the smoke from these fires.

So maybe we can not do the same, since climate disasters don’t pick and choose who to hit.

There are also climate disasters in blue states; LA just had historic urban fires fueled by climate change. We can’t fall into the trap of thinking that weather and climate change is some kind of demonstration of the will of God, because your backyard is next. They weren’t kidding when they put the “global” in “global warming.”

Unfortunately natural disasters don’t selectively target Trump voters.

You want them to do what instead? They are a school, not a military. They use the toolset they have available.

Excuse me while I go crumble into dust and blow away.

Also, holy shit, at least where I was the late 90s were peak “low fat” (high sugar) product times, there was SO much sweet garbage to buy. If anything more than there is now, because now there’s the mindset among most people that we should probably cut back on sweets.

Per the FDA, there is no known safe amount of lead exposure. If it’s in something you want to minimize your exposure to it.

That’s basically what Angels Flight in Los Angeles is. Locals got sick of walking up the fuck off steep hill and built a 300 foot rail to go up and down it.

“This event is tragic in more ways than you people in the audience could ever fathom from a law enforcement perspective,” McNeil said.

Every time I think my opinion of cops is at rock bottom, they find a new way to piss me off. This shooting is special and bad because one of our people might get in trouble for it!!

100% anecdotal, but I’d say the spam callers aren’t even waiting. I’ve had more in the last 2 months than the previous year.

In all sincerity, please, the doomerism is unproductive. Especially in direct response to someone trying to help fund a public institution that’s losing funding. If you’re feeling despair from the horrors (which, understandable) it’s important to do what you can to get support from your friends and community. Trying to convince other people to not resist by saying it’s worthless is the worst thing to do right now.

This is probably area dependent, but it’s fairly common for food pantries to give you a bag of random food. They usually try to group things that make sense and that people use and want, but they can only give out what’s been donated and what you get is what you get. Letting people actually pick and choose what they want both reduces waste and gives a sense of normalcy.