Beware the Santa Ana Windbag

Bill Burr, like so many wealthy people who often have cameras pointed at them, has become an expert on everything. It must be wonderful to become omniscient as a result of receiving Hollywood paychecks, for doing a job that requires no training. It reminds me of that time when Whoopi Goldberg started manifesting a British accent while airing her pontifications. When you put fame and money together and give them to a mediocre person, they become a powerful psychedelic drug.

He’s making fun of people who criticize California’s failed fire mitigation policies and efforts. He calls them idiots who sit at home “on the Internet,” second-guessing the geniuses on whose watch L.A. has experienced the worst fires in its history. He made these remarks in a conversation with Jimmy Kimmel, another paragon of sensitivity. The guy who thinks it’s funny to tell kids their Halloween candy is gone and film them crying.

What’s wrong with the people laughing at this? How can anyone take pleasure in tormenting children?

1. When did Bill Burr become a fire expert? What, exactly, makes him different from the “idiots”? Do they teach fire management in comedian school? Wikipedia says he has a degree in “radio.” What? You have to pay college tuition in order to learn how to sit in front of a microphone? Really? Four years, it took him to learn that? What did that cost?

How many years did it take Joe Rogan?

Has Burr’s dissertation been published in any academic journals?

2. Where did he get the idea that information and opinions that appear on the Internet are absurd and invalid? He has a podcast, and that means he’s on the Internet, so isn’t he an idiot, too? Do I have to sit here and make a list of all the times Internet commentary has proven to be right? Do I have to list all the times non-MSM people shamed the MSM with superior analysis and information-gathering? The job is too big for one person. An Army couldn’t compile that list.

If opinions shared on the Internet are stupid, aren’t opinions lightly-educated comedians share with Jimmy Kimmel an order of magnitude more stupid?

Bill Burr has something in common with Donald Trump. He voices the frustrations of a lot of angry men. But unlike Donald Trump, he’s a comedian. He isn’t held accountable when he says stupid things, because journalists don’t fact-check entertainers. It would be like fact-checking a Bugs Bunny cartoon or a dancing monkey at a circus. Burr says things that may or may not be right, as long as they make people laugh. Things he may or may not believe. His purpose in life is to amuse, not to inform. No one ever learned anything from Bill Burr. He’s not the Khan Academy. He can’t help your kids with their homework.

I don’t think he knows that.

For millennia, human beings have worked to prevent and fight fires. Fire codes are ancient. Brush management is ancient. The practice of storing and using water and other materials to extinguish fire is ancient. Now a professional buffoon has decided it was all a waste of time, because fire is invincible.

Leftists are telling us these fires are inevitable, and they happen every year.

Fires like this do not happen every year, as far-left Scientific American admits. Scientific American says these fires, which started at the pinnacle of L.A.’s DEI/earth-worship/sanctuary city insanity, are the worst in the city’s history.

Given that fires will start every year, does that mean they have to be colossal fires? Do we have to have huge, deadly, costly fires? No. Of course not. Managing brush, creating smart building codes, and maintaining reservoirs and other firefighting tools reduce the frequency, size, and intensity of fires. This is common sense. You don’t have have a Ph.D. in wildfire science to know this.

Leftists want us to think those who criticize California’s useless politicians are claiming, unrealistically, that California can prevent all fires. No. Everyone knows we can’t prevent all fires, just as we can’t prevent every case of the flu or syphilis. But we can certainly minimize the fire problem, just as we have minimized the impact of countless infectious diseases. The ones not created in labs, I mean.

I brought up the Getty Museum a while back. Let’s take another look.

Tile roofs, to prevent airborne embers from setting fire to asphalt tiles made from crude oil. Managed brush. Carefully-chosen trees and plants that resist wildfires. A huge on-site reservoir. The Getty is still standing. When the management, which is certainly on the extreme left, decided to spend millions on fire mitigation, were they just drinking the MAGA Kool-Aid?

Storm winds are inevitable in Florida. I knew that, so I paid thousands of dollars to cut big oaks that were too close to my buildings. Now it is nearly impossible for me to have hurricane damage. If I do, it will be because I left a few trees close enough so their very tops could hit something. I could get rid of those, too. The risk can be managed. Fire works the same way. So do earthquakes. California is full of buildings that can withstand earthquakes. We’ve built countless dams to put an end to recurring floods. We build tornado shelters.

We put people on the moon, which is an extremely hostile environment. Even more hostile than The View when an intelligent guest shows up. We bring people back through the earth’s atmosphere, and their vehicles withstand temperatures that melt metal. But we have to let thousands of California houses burn whenever the wind blows the wrong way? Come on.

The leftist policy of crying about imaginary helplessness in order to manipulate other people is very destructive. Black people are helpless because they can’t stop committing crime, and they can’t figure out how to get ID cards to present at polls. Women are helpless because they can’t prevent pregnancy, and they can’t survive if they carry unwanted children to term. Foreign kids are helpless because they will die illiterate unless we pay teachers to teach in their languages. Crime victims are helpless because owning guns just makes them more likely to die. Confused boys are helpless, so we have to castrate them to prevent them from killing themselves. We’re all helpless, so every one of us who isn’t white or male needs a social program to help us cope.

The politics of feigned futility. It’s all nonsense.

Fires–especially fires of a type that recurs predictably–can be prevented and reduced. Buildings can be protected so very few are damaged. Power lines from 1921 can be replaced so they don’t fall into dry bushes. Things can be done. Californians decided not to do what they should have.

It’s a little weird that a comedian would appear on a talk show and make stupid, uninformed remarks, trying to make people laugh and boost his career, while homes are burning and dead bodies are waiting to be found. I wonder if Burr thought about that. Well, I don’t wonder. He didn’t. Boston’s answer to Leibniz didn’t apply the high-powered intellect that got him B’s in radio-ology.

California leftists are arguing from the position of people who didn’t do what they themselves had a policy of doing. They didn’t replace power lines. They didn’t manage brush. They didn’t maintain their reservoirs. They had policies of getting those things done, which is odd, if they wouldn’t have helped. Were they blinded by MAGA propaganda when they established those policies?

Now they want to say it wouldn’t have mattered. When they didn’t try.

They’re telling us flying embers make it impossible to prevent houses from burning, because the embers set fire to shingles. That’s amazing. Asphalt shingles are supposed to be fire-resistant, but they’re not. Not by any realistic standard.

“Fire-resistant” is a term that covers a spectrum, from shingles that burn easily to shingles that resist for a while and then go up like piles of old tires. The most fire-resistant grade of asphalt shingle burns like crazy. And California permits their use. What?

I used to live in Coral Gables (spit), named for its many red roofs. They’re red because they’re made of clay tiles. How long does it take a flying cinder to set fire to clay pottery? Bill Burr needs to build a lab and find out.

We’ve seen video of Californians using garden hoses to put out embers on their shingle roofs. Celebrities have done it, with poor results. If you can afford a $10-million gated cliff home as part of your house collection, why can’t you afford a $30,000 tile roof?

Metal roofs are also better than crude oil roofs.

Except in Burr World. Maybe I should wait for the roof-testing results from the Burr Institute of Advanced Radio-ology.

I don’t know why so many conservatives looked up to this guy. He’s an entertainer, like Tiny Tim or the guys from Jackass. He’s exactly like the funniest loudmouth at your corner bar, but he got lucky and got paid for it.

He’s got a bad case of Whoopi Syndrome. He’s like Rosie O’Donnell, who famously said a backyard experiment proved burning jet fuel couldn’t bring down a skyscraper.

I guess California should abandon all efforts to mitigate wildfires, now that Professor Burr and the rest of the crew of Tinseltown Nobel candidates have informed us they don’t work. All those tax dollars can now go to important things, like double mastectomies for girls in junior high.