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Saturday, March 8, 2025

‘Massive’ wildfires erupt on Long Island, sparking state of emergency and evacuations

Four separate wildfires blanketed Long Island’s East End with heavy smoke Saturday, prompting evacuations and threatening homes in both middle class communities and the wealthy Hamptons.

The situation is “catastrophic,” one resident told The Post.

One fire reportedly started after a car accident on Sunrise Highway, in which a vehicle caught fire and the flames were spread by gusty winds.

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Flames and black smoke billowed over County Road 51 in Manorville, where the fire jumped across the highway shortly before 2 p.m. Additional fires were reported in the Pine Barrens and near Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton, shutting Sunrise Highway in both directions at Exit 58, authorities said. That’s the only access road toward the more exclusive parts of the Hamptons to the east.

Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine said in a press conference that one person was taken to hospital with second degree burns on the face, and two homes had burned.

“The biggest problem is the wind,” he said.

Aerial video shows large brush fire in Pine Barrens on Long Island

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Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency, and said the National Guard helicopters were providing support to Suffolk County, while multiple state agencies were on the ground.

“We are in close communication with local partners on Long Island to coordinate assistance and make sure they have the resources they need to protect their communities,” Gov. Hochul posted on X.

Lisa DiMiceli, of Manorville, owns a pet boarding business and said West Hampton residents told her they were being evacuated and asked her to take their dogs as they fled.

“It looked like a nuclear bomb. It’s not under control at all. It was very scary,” she said.

The fire reached “probably about 100 feet high, if not more, but the wind is what really took it off,” DiMicelli said, adding “Right now the helicopter is still going over our house with big canisters and whatnot of water to drop it on the fire. “

Brookhaven Town Supervisor Dan Panico posted video from a helicopter showing the scope of the blazes and the resulting smoke.

“Video from above of the massive wildfire in the pine barrens. Thank you to all of the firefighters and first responders fighting this blaze,” Panico wrote on Facebook.

Several fire departments were responding in a “large-scale coordinated countywide effort,” Southampton emergency management told Newsday.

For many residents the fire brought bad memories of another nightmare that happened three decades ago in the same area. The Sunrise Fire of 1995 scorched 4,500 acres of pine barrens and damaged about a dozen homes before it was put out by firefighters from across the state.

https://nypost.com/2025/03/08/us-news/brush-fires-erupt-on-long-island/

What Is This Recession Talk?

by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Just like clockwork, there is talk of recession in the air. The announcement will come soon and be confirmed by summer. The Atlanta Fed just revised its output forecast for the first quarter to expect a contraction at-2.8 percent. This is very sudden. Only a week earlier, the same tools (GDPNow) had forecast a 2 percent increase in output in the first quarter.

At this point, many people are probably dismissing all these forecasts and big numbers emanating from experts on the public payroll. They have been wrong about so much for so very long. And yet, Wall Street is moved by such data reports, even when the problems with them are so obvious. As they say, the numbers might be fake but they are all we have.

The basis on which this forecast is being made concerns construction spending, and it is truly hard to justify based on industry numbers showing no such thing.

My own thinking: this is a game of catch-up and blame placing. Analytics commissioned by Brownstone Institute—but which can also be intuited by any living adult over the last four years—documents a technical recession since 2022 based on a clearer reading of the best data. Even then, there was never a clear recovery from March 2020 when the global economy was deliberately plunged into a forced depression.

Since those days, not much has made sense in macroeconomic data as conventionally collected and distributed.

There are many problems. Conventional output data counts government spending, even when it is based on debt finance that is ultimately financed by money printing, as positively contributing to GDP. These very years have seen the largest increase in government spending, by any measure, that we have on record in the history of recorded time.

Obviously, this has distorted GDP numbers for years.

There is another problem: much of the “growth” over four years has consisted in gradual and iterative repair of the damage done by lockdowns and supply-chain freezes. Breaking things and fixing them does not count as overall progress but in the way that GDP is collected, it necessarily does.

That factor skewed output data for years.

All GDP data has to be adjusted for inflation if it is to have any meaning. That much is commonly known. Less commonly known is that the same has to happen to retail spending, factory orders, and durable goods purchases. It makes no sense at all to count higher prices as meaningful increases in spending.

It matters which inflation measure you use against which the GDP is adjusted to generate real GDP. For years now, the CPI has been dramatically underestimated on whole classes of goods and the entire index as well. At this point, it is beyond dispute. How much it has been underestimated is a matter of debate. Conventional data show a 22 percent decline in purchasing power over four years but it could be closer to 30 percent or more, at points reaching much higher levels.

Even using a conservative measure of underestimating and mixing it with unadjusted GDP generates a macroeconomic environment in the red for three years—a technical recession.

When we published our study, I expected tremendous blowback from industry economists and others. What we saw instead was silence. This stunned me until I realized that most everyone knows that this is correct.

In other words, Trump has inherited an economic environment that has been called wonderful for years but in fact has been extremely weak and deeply damaged. It was a trap. Deny economic weakness for four years while it has been otherwise obvious, then once the new president comes to office, become transparent and truth-telling about how bad things are.

The trouble with U.S. culture is that there is a media overlay between economic conditions and whoever happens to be in office at the time. It is not at all a coincidence that the recession seems to be hitting exactly as Trump has taken power. It will be pinned on his policies: the tariffs, spending cuts, government disruptions, or just uncertainty in general.

This is akin to someone just noticing that the house is a mess once the cleaning crew arrives, and blaming the workers for all problems.

On the other hand, it is far too soon to declare that we are somehow out of the recessionary woods. There is a very long way to go, and Trump is right to urge patience and even suggest, as he did in his address to Congress, that there is going to be some pain along the way.

The soaring rhetoric about the dawn of a new Golden Age is thrilling but premature. The budget has to be fixed. The agencies have to be curbed and cut. The regulations must be repealed. The health agencies have to be defanged. All taxes need to be lowered or abolished.

On the tariffs, it is easy to follow the thinking here. Because it is cheaper to produce most things in most other countries than the United States, due mainly to the strength of the dollar, the deployment of tariffs is designed to even the score. It is an attempt to recreate the old-fashioned account settlement that we had before the end of the gold standard. The theory is that this proves some room for U.S. manufacturing to compete, possibly drawing in foreign capital for domestic investment.

This strikes me as a circuitous method of getting around a more fundamental problem that traces to a broken international monetary system. That said, there is no button to push to fix it, not one that I’ve seen, anyway. The most near-term effect of these tariffs, however, will simply be to increase costs for U.S. importers and U.S. consumers. They have many small businesses worried to the point of panic. In all, this is a risky gamble. I’m hardly alone in my concern that this hyper focus on tariffs long before we have reform in taxes and spending is strangely disproportionate, reflecting a personal idiosyncrasy of Trump rather than clear economic thinking.

The tariffs will also become a scapegoat. If a recession is suddenly announced, if the first quarter GDP really does come in as dramatically down, tariffs and therefore Trump will find itself targeted for blame. This should be a primary political concern for the Trump administration right now.

All that said, Trump is on the right track in pointing out that we have just lived through the worst inflation in 48 years and possibly in American history. He was fact-checked hard for that statement but it is entirely defensible. So too on all these economic indicators from inflation to the jobs market. The reality is far worse than the agencies have reported for many years now.

Just remember: there is strong reason to believe we’ve been in technical recession plus high inflation for years now. Admitting it now is simply a matter of political timing. The ticket surrounding economic data and messaging is getting ever more layered and complicated, and it requires real sophistication to see through it.

The hidden sufferings of the past four years have been largely untold and hence the suddenly announced tribulations of the present moment are likely exaggerated.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/what-recession-talk

The Upside Of A Terminal Illness

By Thomas Lifson

I doubt that anyone forgets the moment when a doctor tells them that they are never going to recover from the illness that brought them in and led to all those diagnostic tests. It’s terminal and it’s only a matter of time before you die. Add in the words “There’s no known cure, and we don’t even know what causes it” and the verdict seems absolute: you’re without hope.

Yet my experience over the five and a half years since these words were spoken to me has not felt tragic; to the contrary, I have discovered a surprising upside to the de facto death sentence.

I suppose that it is a blessing that we go through life not knowing when or how we are going to die. One of the first steps toward exiting childhood and becoming an adult is the realization that you, too, are going to die. But, at least for me, that inevitability was always suppressed in my conscious mind, and I operated as if death were not only uncertain as to date and manner, but somehow so unthinkable that it might not even happen. Or at least so far off that there’s no point in thinking about it.

That abruptly changed with the diagnosis, of course. But after the initial shock wore off a day or two later, I began to be astounded at the ways my life changed for the better.

When I got the terminal diagnosis, I was told that the average interval between diagnosis and death was two and a half years, and counseled that there was a lot of variation from the average. But roughly 36 months was a very concrete remaining lifespan to contemplate, and suddenly every single day became more precious. When we forget the incredible gift that life is, we become less human, less worthy of that gift; we squander the present that God bestowed upon us, and we live life less fully than we are capable of. It’s a voluntary surrender of something very precious.

I’d like to pretend that this philosophical position was the first positive thought that occurred to me about my fate. But in fact, it was something much more mundane; in fact, crassly materialistic. I no longer had to scrimp and save to protect myself from the imagined fate of subsisting on dog food when my savings ran out in my nineties.

I am so old (77) that my parents were badly scarred by the Depression, and I grew up with the sense that poverty and physical deprivation was a real threat. The only armor was to save (and eventually invest—I started buying stock in my teens, which required some legal maneuvering for a minor to do) like a demon.

I started working after-school jobs and saving 90% of what I earned in high school, did disagreeable factory work two summers in college, and ever after was a tightwad. The specter of poverty in my Golden Years was always with me, quite unrealistically, given that, when I began working full time, I saved 20-30% of what I earned.

(When I first went to Japan at age 19, to study at Waseda University, I was deeply impressed at how the Japanese on average saved about 30% of what they earned, even though Japan had average incomes well below the poverty level of America in 1967. If they could do it, I could, too, I reasoned. This attitude served me well learning the Japanese language, especially the kanji Chinese characters.)

Suddenly, when I knew that reaching age 80 was extremely unlikely, I realized that I could relax my reflexive poverty-consciousness and spend money more freely. Not that I suddenly booked high roller weekends in Vegas or started lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills.

Part of what I incorporated into my personal values courtesy of Japanese culture was a love of simplicity and economy. Wasted resources (muda in Japanese) disgust me. My splurges are simple and practical. Eating more sushi and flying business class for overseas travel are the principal sorts of indulgences I allow myself. The important point is not what I spend money on; it’s that for the first time in my life, I feel good about enjoying luxuries that I formerly denied myself.

I realize that this sounds silly, but this internal permission makes a huge difference to my happiness. Maybe I was consumed with a variety of self-hatred before, denying myself many purchases for pleasurable ends out of masochism? I don’t really know if it was psychologically dysfunctional, but once the unreasonable fear of old-age poverty receded, life became a lot more fun. I’m not quite a voluptuary, but I am allowing happiness, not fear of future loss, to motivate my expenditures and inform my moods.

One other psychological buoy comes from the kindness that strangers often show me in my current state. I am visibly handicapped by my illness and carry a portable oxygen concentrator all the time when shopping, dining out, and carrying out other activities in public. Just walking takes a lot of energy, so I move slowly and must rest often.

People hold doors open for me and otherwise are very accommodating. Costco and other big stores offer a hybrid between a golf cart and a shopping cart to cover the distances a hundred thousand square feet of retail space create. Many people offer to pick items off the shelf for me or simply smile and act helpful when I maneuver around them. It nourishes the soul when so many people are so kind.

Then, there is the Handicapped Parking placard the California Department of Motor Vehicles gave me. A lot of times, I feel like a member of the nomenklatura in the old Soviet Union. Special parking spots for me, right near the entrance! Miraculously, in California, at least, parking meters do not have to be fed money; meter maids do not enforce them on the Handicapped Driver nomenklatura.

Now, don’t let me give you the impression that I prefer this illness. It has closed a lot of doors for me and limits me in many ways. I’d much rather be healthy. But I can’t—or at least prefer not to—ignore the upsides. In fact, I dwell on the upsides with the certainty that the secret to happiness is gratitude. And you don’t have to be stricken with a terminal illness for that insight to help you.

Thomas Lifson retired from American Thinker last year for health reasons but has recently started a Substack. You can read his first post here.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/the_upside_of_a_terminal_illness.html

At Twitter, a single point of failure for freedom

By D. Parker

It’s been generally accepted that Elon Musk is a genuine patriot for purchasing Twitter and trying to set it on a course to be a bastion of free speech. Unfortunately, there are hidden pitfalls in the system that are censoring people on both sides of the political spectrum, to the point that the Trump administration’s Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into the issue.

A Single Point of Failure for Freedom

In engineering any kind of system, you always endeavor to avoid what is colloquially called a Single Point of Failure (SPOF), such as a single critical sensor, a single bolt connecting the wing of an aircraft to the fuselage, or a single pin holding the main rotor to the mast of certain rotorcraft. As the name implies, the failure of this part will lead to catastrophic results.

We’re in historic times, with a disintegrating Un-Democratic Party, propaganda media, and left in general in full retreat, all thanks to the efforts of Elon Musk. However, one of the linchpins undergirding this success of freedom could easily be undermined by a growing threat within X (Twitter). This is a single point of failure for freedom and a hidden danger to X (Twitter).

It wouldn’t be as dire of a situation if the load (in engineering terms) were spread among multiple social media platforms, such that were there a fault in one system, the others would shoulder the load defending freedom. But that isn’t the case. There are other microblogging systems, but these aren’t as pervasive, so a failure in X could be devastating. Hence the reasons we’ve been forced by circumstances into raising the alarm.

Arbitrary shadowbanning.

The term “shadowban” is defined as “to cause (a user or their content) to be hidden from some or all other users usually without the user’s knowledge.”

This is nothing but censorship covered in some Orwellian sparkle. In the case of X, the threat to free speech appears to be arbitrary and random, no matter what you do on the platform. This can be easily verified by a search for the term “temporary label” to find the latest victims of this arbitrary designation. Research into the issue has shown that this has been a threat for quite some time.

It was more than two years ago that Elon Musk @elonmusk announced on X that

Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal

2:32 AM · Dec 9, 2022

Despite this, as of last March, the situation had not been resolved. Tech Crunch noted that “X users are still complaining about arbitrary shadowbanning.”

Users of Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) continue complaining the platform is engaging in shadowbanning — aka restricting the visibility of posts by applying a “temporary” label to accounts that can limit the reach/visibility of content — without providing clarity over why it’s imposed the sanctions.
Running a search on X for the phrase “temporary label” shows multiple instances of users complaining about being told they’ve been flagged by the platform; and, per an automated notification, that the reach of their content “may” be affected. Many users can be seen expressing confusion as to why they’re being penalized — apparently not having been given a meaningful explanation as to why the platform has imposed restrictions on their content.

This continued into last July: “X has long been accused of arbitrary shadowbanning — a particular egregious charge for a platform that claims to champion free speech.”

But now the situation has reached a boiling point. Research shows that people are getting these notices right and left with no recourse in appealing these arbitrary actions — not to mention the fact that account suspensions have tripled on X since Musk took over.

If you start up an account, adhere to the instructions from X in selecting accounts to follow, and by chance do this too quickly or select too many, your account will be locked. If you dare to use a word repeatedly in a post, your account will be locked. Or if you just use the system in a way the algorithms consider “unusual,” such as liking a tweet, your account will be locked.

Even worse, when you succeed in restoring your account, the system will often zero out your following count and then later restore it to what it was, causing it to trigger another lockout. All of these actions can earn you the dreaded Temporary Notice, after which it can shadowban your account at any time. I have witnessed all of these take place on my account and searches on the subject in X.

The Federal Trade Commission, led by President Trump’s newly appointed chairman Andrew Ferguson, will conduct an inquiry into these practices.

Today, the Federal Trade Commission launched a public inquiry to better understand how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.
Censorship by technology platforms is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal. Tech firms can employ confusing or unpredictable internal procedures that cut users off, sometimes with no ability appeal the decision.

News reports and actions from the Trump administration indicate that this is a growing concern. If you’ve been shadowbanned, the FTC will want to hear from you. You have until May 21, 2025 to submit a comment.

D Parker is an engineer, inventor, wordsmith, and student of history, former director of communications for a civil rights organization, and a long-time contributor to conservative websites. Find him on Substack.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/at_twitter_a_single_point_of_failure_for_freedom.html

So-called ‘Gender affirming’ surgery is bad for people’s happiness

By Andrea Widburg

When my kids were growing up, I knew a young man who was charming, funny, sociable, and quite obviously going to be gay. Exactly no one was surprised when, at 13, he came out of the closet. All would have been well if COVID hadn’t hit when he was in college. Isolated and depressed, he signed up for therapy, ending with a therapist who informed him that he was actually a woman. (I’m sure social media algorithms, such as Chinese-run TikTok’s, helped steer him in that direction.)

This young man has now had hormones and two surgeries. He’s stacked up top and empty down below. The big question is whether he will find happiness.

Sadly for my young friend, the odds are against him, at least according to a massive study done in Houston and published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, an outlet of Oxford Academic, which is, in turn, part of Oxford University Press. In other words, a big study published on a reputable forum. According to that study, once the surgery is over, and once the euphoria associated with realizing a dream has passed, the post-surgical patients are deeply depressed.

The study examined information from 107,583 patients, using the TriNetX database. (Electronic medical records are very helpful for looking at large population segments.) The study examined people over age 18 with gender dysphoria, and broke them into six useful categories for data analysis.

WPATH, the largest organization pushing “transgender” ideology on doctors and hospitals, along with the usual collection of activists, would undoubtedly predict that the study showed increased levels of happiness among post-surgical people. They surely would argue that so-called “transgender” people who had surgery would magically be less depressed, less inclined to substance abuse, and less likely to commit suicide.

In fact, the opposite was true, and not just a little true, but very true. Those who had surgery were markedly less happy than their so-called “transgender” peers who stopped short of slicing and dicing their bodies:

From 107 583 patients, matched cohorts demonstrated that those undergoing surgery were at significantly higher risk for depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance use disorders than those without surgery. Males with surgery showed a higher prevalence of depression (25.4% vs. 11.5%, RR 2.203, P < 0.0001) and anxiety (12.8% vs. 2.6%, RR 4.882, P < 0.0001). Females exhibited similar trends, with elevated depression (22.9% vs. 14.6%, RR 1.563, P < 0.0001) and anxiety (10.5% vs. 7.1%, RR 1.478, P < 0.0001). Feminizing individuals demonstrated particularly high risk for depression (RR 1.783, P = 0.0298) and substance use disorders (RR 1.284, P < 0.0001).

Sadly, the study pulls back from stating the obvious conclusion, which is that so-called transgenderism is a mental condition, not a physical one. Mutilating one’s body, even if that mutilation is deeply desired and ostensibly conforms to a perceived “better body,” does not address the underlying problems of gender dysphoria.

Or as the old saying goes, “wherever you go, there you are.” You cannot outrun yourself with surgery. Surgeries are good for fixing distinct medical conditions (e.g., a broken hip or clogged heart), or even making little cosmetic tweaks (e.g., a nose job), but they will not fix a broken psyche.

But again, the study will not or cannot acknowledge that. Instead, it believes the post-surgical problems arise, in part, from “stigma and lack of gender affirmation.” That cannot be right, because the stigma and lack of gender affirmation logically exist before the mutilating surgery as well as after. Ignoring logic, the study recommends “ongoing, gender-sensitive mental health support for transgender individuals’ post-surgery.” The same logic says this won’t help either.

Again, wherever you go, there you are. Cutting off your breasts or castrating yourself will not change that, no matter how much you sign up for “mental health support” from ideologues who, like the therapist my young friend saw, are effectively hammers who believe everything is a transgender nail.

Transgender madness will pass, as all societal delusions must. However, it will leave so many broken lives in its wake.

Currently, my young friend is living a narcissist’s dream, taking endless photos of his feminized self to affirm that, yes, he really is a girl. Eventually, though, those photos won’t help. I fear that this once brilliant, funny, sociable young man will fall into an abyss as he looks down at his eunuch’s body and realizes there is no going back.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/so_called_gender_affirming_surgery_is_bad_for_people_s_happiness.html

SSA Confirms Over $7.5 Billion In Retroactive Social Security Payments

by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) announced the payment of billions of dollars to more than a million Americans after two provisions that reduced or eliminated benefits for certain individuals were recently repealed.

Last week, the agency said that it will start paying retroactive payments to people whose benefits have been affected by the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO). Through March 4, “SSA has already paid 1,127,723 people more than $7.5 billion in retroactive payments,” the agency said in a March 4 statement. “The average retroactive payment so far is $6,710.”

The WEP and GPO provisions “reduced or eliminated the Social Security benefits for over 3.2 million people who receive a pension based on work that was not covered by Social Security (a non-covered pension).”

In January, former President Joe Biden signed the Social Security Fairness Act (SSFA) which ended both GPO and WEP. Since the provisions no longer applied as of January 2024, millions of Social Security beneficiaries became eligible for retroactive payments.

“President Trump made it very clear he wanted the Social Security Fairness Act to be implemented as quickly as possible,” said Lee Dudek, Acting Commissioner of Social Security. “We met that challenge head-on and are proudly delivering for the American people.”

SSA said it continues to pay the remaining retroactive payments.

Furthermore, the elimination of WEP and GPO makes many beneficiaries eligible for higher monthly benefits starting in April. The exact increase in payment will depend on factors such as the type of Social Security benefit they receive and the amount of pension received.

Teachers, police officers, firefighters, federal workers covered by the Civil Service Retirement System, and employees whose work is covered by a foreign social security system stand to gain under the new changes.

Beneficiaries set to receive retroactive benefits or see an adjustment in monthly benefits will receive a mail notice from the Social Security Administration explaining the matter.

Most people receiving retroactive payments may get their notice two to three weeks after receiving payments since “the President understands how important it is to pay people what they are due right away,” SSA said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) welcomed the SSA announcement of retroactive payments, according to a Feb. 27 statement. Earlier last month, she joined other lawmakers in sending a letter to the Acting Commissioner of the SSA, calling for quickly implementing the Social Security Fairness Act.

Murkowski said the WEP provision reduced Social Security benefits for people getting government pensions, while the GPO cut down benefits for widows, spouses, and widowers whose spouses received government pensions.

“I applaud the Social Security Administration for moving quickly to ensure Alaska’s public servants are able to access the benefits they are entitled to,” she said.

“I have been working on the Social Security Fairness Act for 22 years—and Alaskans have been waiting even longer for their benefits. I’m grateful to the administration for promptly implementing this law so that Alaskans will not have to wait any longer for the benefits they’ve earned.”

Advocacy group The Concord Coalition criticized the Social Security Fairness Act in December, arguing that it ignored “the real injustice.”

The group said most government employees receive both social security and public pensions because they contributed to the two plans while employed.

Less than 30 percent of workers employed at state and local governments do not participate in social security. “These non-covered workers are not being denied Social Security because of their public service careers.” Instead, “they do not receive Social Security benefits because they do not pay Social Security payroll taxes.”

“Non-covered workers are not being singled out for unfair treatment. Indeed, repealing the GPO and WEP would result in more favorable treatment. They would get more and pay less than everyone else. That would be an unearned windfall.”

Meanwhile, the jump in monthly benefits for certain Social Security beneficiaries beginning in April is above the cost-of-living adjustment made this year, which is applicable to all recipients.

SSA raised benefits by 2.5 percent this year for more than 72.5 million beneficiaries, which amounted to an average increase of $50 per month.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ssa-confirms-over-75-billion-retroactive-social-security-payments

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