When you see a lot of ‘convenient’ news the ‘inconvenient truth’ is sometimes that someone is behind the news using it to shape debates. I am surprised at the spread of this year’s fires across the country from CA to FL and now to NJ:

A massive forest fire is burning across two counties in southern New Jersey, and thousands have been evacuated.

By 7:00 a.m. Wednesday, the blaze had already consumed over 13,500 acres, and officials warn that only 10 percent of the fire has been contained.

About 2,500 homes along the border between Ocean and Burlington Counties, including portions of several retirement communities, had been evacuated and several mobile homes were damaged, said Jim Petrini, an assistant state fire warden with the forest fire service.

…

Plante told CBS 2 that the blaze, which tore through Ocean and Burlington counties, was one of the largest he’d ever witnessed. Plante wasn’t sure how the fire started, but said he believed it began on the Warren Grove Firing Range south of the village of Warren Grove in Burlington County.

“We haven’t really had time to look at the origin of the fire and what might have caused it, that will be the first thing on the agenda as soon as we stop the fire and contain it,” Plante said.

I am not laying blame here or do I have any evidence, but it seems a plausible explanation is that people who do things like this are capable of anything:

Environmental activists are building a replica of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat—where the biblical vessel is said to have landed after the great flood—in an appeal for action on global warming, Greenpeace said Wednesday.
Turkish and German volunteer carpenters are making the wooden ship on the mountain in eastern Turkey, bordering Iran. The ark will be revealed in a ceremony on May 31, a day after Greenpeace activists climb the mountain and call on world leaders to take action to tackle climate change, Greenpeace said.

“Climate change is real, it’s happening now and unless world leaders take urgent, decisive and far-reaching action, the next decades will see human misery on a scale not experienced in modern times,” said Greenpeace activist Hilal Atici. “Those leaders have a mandate from the people … to massively cut greenhouse gas emissions and to do it now.”

If you think the world is coming to an end, if you believe in apocolyptic futures, then one might rationalize all sorts of actions within the fantasy it is all self defense.

Addendum: Recent reports have tentatively identified the source as an F-16 on a training mission which dropped a flare. Of course the leftward fringe deserves to have there actual behavior noted when we look at bizarre events. But it seems this time the fire was may not have been set by environmentalists (who have lit blazes before!).