Happy birthday Sam - I like your hair shaved, it suits you! Good to see you're experiencing such good health still.

I have to counter some of your points about the fires though - as an Australian I feel I have particularly knowledge here across many years of seeing wildfires, some of which had particularly devastating loss of wildlife and humans.

It moved too fast to be natural and was evidently being helped along in some way, confirmed for me by locals who have experienced these fires countless times in the past.

We have seen a few fires that, due to a specific set of circumstances, had moved at awful speeds unexpectedly. Fires can move insanely fast - and if you've not seen that in living memory, rest assured it can happen, and does, in Australia. Having seen fires 'countless' times in the past doesn't mean that the next fire is going to behave in exactly the same way, and our short human lives and human memory doesn't mean that disasters will always follow the patterns we remember and expect.

Directly after the event i could see areas of green land where a fire had been started but did not successfully spread. Just isolated circles of destruction on the hillsides, nowhere near the main fire itself. Which obviously only makes sense if the fires are being started intentionally.

Obviously it doesn't - we have seen this a lot around here. Spot fires are the norm, as airborne embers can set fire to areas well ahead of the main front - some burn and extinguish, some catch fire, depending on various factors. It's pretty normal, so you'd need more proof than that to say this was a marker of the fires being lit intentionally.

The fire was very selective about which buildings or cars to engulf, often leaving one car or building intact next to another it destroyed, congruent with a directed energy weapon attack.

Oh no, this is sooo common here! Fires can leave one place in a whole street which seems crazy but it happens all the time! Patchy destruction is completely and ABSOLUTEY compatible with wildfire because all structures don't neatly ignite with a calm and straight wall of fire - you get windborne embers going into vents, under roofs etc and the radiant heat also can impact what catches fire and what doesn't. It can be amazing to see what survives and what doesn't.

Reports of dwellings exploding from inside before the fire had reached them also confirm the involvement of DEWs.

Actually, that doesn't confirm it at all - again, windborn embers can and do go under vents and eaves and through chimneys etc and set fire to things and explode gas canisters etc well before the obvious fire reaches the house.

France experiences wildfires every year yet it has a fleet of just 20 water bomber planes for the entire country which are 30 years old now, leaving on average only 10 planes airworthy at any given moment. Meaning that large wildfires like this one (without road access) will not be stopped quickly. On the first day of the fire three water bombers were deployed in our area, clearly visible from our village. But they were not filling up at our local lake right next to the fire.

WE're lucky to have a pretty good defence against fires, though STUPIDLY the government doesn't pay our volunteers who cop the worst when there is fire and have higher rates of cancer etc let alone PTSD and trauma. Still our firefighters are some of best in the world and have been sent to California etc to help train firies over there. Having old planes and bad training is definitely a poor strategy as wildfires increase. Choosing a less close lake sounds like incompetence to me rather than nefarious action.

Arsonists, however, are a completely different story - they should be hung drawn and quartered, as do idiots who leave fires or throw cigarette butts out the window. That happens here too, even in a place like Australia where we know how damaging fires can be. There's a lot of wilful blindness on the part of other players too, like forest industries that cut old growth forests to the ground and what comes up in their place is no where near as fire resilient.

Believe me, I've been part of many, many fire conversations over the years, and a lot of the 'patterns' you see as evidence for deliberate attacks don't seem unusual. I'd want more evidence for the weopons you speak of rather than these patterns of fire that seem very ordinary, even if they appear mysterious to you.

Thank goodness your beautiful place survived though - goodness, your garden looks absolutely incredible. The eclipse also must have been wild to see! What a summer it must have been. Hopefully the fire season is out of the way now and it's not a sign of things to come.