CONDUCT UNBECOMING

     I am sure that there are some that get very upset when I point out things that many leave unsaid.  Does this bother me?  NO WAY.  If you avoid the truth or discourse in a positive way I am sure you are not even reading my blogs and if you are you are just aggravating yourself.
    I hate political correctness, politics in general, and unprofessional conduct in any area.  I have been a long critic of how the US Government including the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Homeland Security handle our resources and our emergency capabilities.
     This will also include the person who will not lift a finger to be self sufficient when there is a collapse in the normal way that things are done.  We are in a critical period where more people expect things provided for them by the government and are willing to give up their freedoms for conveinience.  The disaster in the East is an example.  With one million without electricity there is true hardship.  It is July and that means summer and summer temps.  People will die and suffer.
     Those who prepare for this become laughing stocks and subject to ridicule when things are going good.  They are also the ones that get along better than their neighbors when things go wrong.  There are those who take it to extremes but this is human nature.  Now there is TV shows to showcase the extremes.
     For a hundred years we have followed the sayings of Smokey the Bear and let Disney influence our perceptions of reality.  Our kids and even the parents think that animals have human characteristics and we are amazed when they turn on us and harm us.  We are allowing the wholesale destruction of our grazing lands for the sake of over populating horse and burro's.  Abuse and suffering of equine animals is at an all time high because the whole system has been disrupted by activists who perport to be humane.
     Lets talk about fire suppression.  The air tanker fleet that is a part of our battle for wildfire control is seriously aging, undersized, and partly grounded.  A large part of our fire units are private.  Such as the Prineville Hotshots.  The part that is so damaging, is that even when technology is developed there is a politcal process that it has to go thru.
     My sore spot is the Evergreen Aviation 747 air tanker that is absent from our fire resources.  Because of politics.  We have been fighting fire from the air with technology that has not changed in 75 years.  Evergreen has changed that.  But they are a large company and the government wants to do business with small companies.
     In the meantime we have lost 3 people from aircrews, one a National Guardsmen,  a very experience pilot but until the cause of the crash is determined the Air Guard units are grounded.
     The Evergreen 747 replaces up to 12 of the smaller airtankers.  This means that the effectivness is way up and the percentage risk is lessened.  One aircrew instead of 12. 
     The professionalism of the ground units and fire managers is unquestioned.  The efforts to support from all sectors is amazing, yet the politics overturns professionalism and inovation.  The result is more lives, forests, and property lost.  When are the politicians going to adopt a professional standard to do the right thing and not look at the electability or the grab for power by those with agendas?
     Until each elected official is held to a higher standard and we hold ourselves to a higher standard we are assured that the decline into mediocrity will continue and the greatest nation on earth will fall.