What has been most pronounced to me as Los Angeles has burned is that when the local officials are giving a statement, they don’t actually say anything.
Sure, they tell us they’re sad.
They tell us they are consulting with everyone.
They tell us that everything is being done.
What they don’t tell us is what they are doing. There’s no plan. No effort to map out a strategy.
This all follows along with the fact that they cut $17 million from the LAFD budget and sent LA firefighting equipment to Ukraine. What it tells us is that those in charge haven’t the foggiest notion of what to do. They are failing and they don’t really understand they are failing…after all, they are sad, consulting and “doing everything”! What more is there to do?
For them, nothing. I guarantee you that Bass will believe for the rest of her life that she did nothing wrong…scratch that: not only did she do nothing wrong, she was downright heroic and showed what a WOC can do! Take that, MAGAts!
The truth of the matter is that running large, modern city is more difficult than any other task in the world. Even being President isn’t as taxing. You are responsible for everything – trash, water, fire, earthquakes, roads, public transport, health care, zoning…on and on and on and every issue has a host of interests often not just competing but diametrically opposed and through this minefield you have to get it running so that when disaster happens – and it always will – the damage is at least minimized and people have confidence that the authorities know what they’re doing.
What is Karen Bass’ experience? Well, she started out in life involved in a Cuban Communist front organization. From there, it appears she never looked back. She did get an education when standards were higher so we know she isn’t stupid – but that just makes it worse. If she were a merely incompetent boob it probably would have worked out better…such often will make a decision even if the wrong one. Bass doesn’t make a decision because she feels she doesn’t have to – she’s a college-educated WOC, dammit…and you racist crackers out there should just sit down and shut up!
The danger we have right now is all up and down our system are people like Karen Bass and worse – people who are dead certain they are heroic geniuses but who aren’t fit to run a lemonade stand. They’re blaming climate change not because they really think that climate change caused a $17 million cut to LAFD but because climate change is our fault, not theirs. It is perfect…gets them off the hook, places the blame on us and the cure is to give them more money and power. The people running the show by and large hate us, hate the USA and have no expertise beyond knowing how to work the system to obtain more money and power.
The perfect contrast right now is with Florida – as hurricanes bore down on Florida, DeSantis has 50,000 people ready to go after it passed to get power back up…knowing that power restoration was the key to all other relief efforts. It worked flawlessly and power was mostly restored quickly. Police were ready so there was no looting. Evacuations happened in a timely manner. There was no lack…because there was a plan and an Executive willing to order it and kick some rears if anyone started slacking. That is how it used to be – even the most corrupt political systems in our past still managed to do the things necessary…today we still have the corruption but absolutely no competence.
And aside from property damage, people die. I’m confident that the death toll will go above the official number of (I believe) 5 at the moment. The fire was moving so fast at first that I’m sure some poor people just didn’t have time (if you’ve never experienced a wild fire, let me tell you: treat them with respect. They can move extremely fast and that after it seems like it stalled at some point). Thing is, everyone knows that it has been bone dry in Southern California for nearly a year (bone dry here in Vegas, as well; indeed, most of the southwest has been bone dry due to the weather patterns). The Santa Ana winds never sneak up on you…they develop like hurricanes in the Atlantic. You know you’re going to get them days before they arrive. In other words, everyone in LA knew the perfect storm for massive fires was coming together…there should have been lots of prep, just like DeSantis did in Florida. Reservoirs filled, plans made to bring in outside firefighters, evacuation routes established, stockpiling of equipment at strategic points…and an overall plan of how to attack a fire where ever it started.
The Mayor of Los Angeles went to Ghana, instead.
How much did that cost the taxpayers of Los Angeles? I do know that a military plane was sent to fetch her home…and just who authorized that? How is it justified to use federal assets to move a city official because it looks bad on TV that she’s not home as her city burns? But don’t worry…I’m sure her budget for next year will include plenty of money for DEI…which is basically just payoffs to her particular cronies.
We’re all for federalism here on the Right but we do have to think about things…because a lot of the tax dollars that will rebuild LA will be federal…and that means all of us have a vested interest in how LA is run. Also, is it a republican form of government if one party gets total control of all institutions public and private in a State and then rigs the system so they can never lose? The Constitution commands the federal government to ensure a republican form of government in the several States…we need to consider if there is a genuine republican government in California. We certainly can’t just let things burn.
Blogs For Victory 
It may not be respectful to find glee in a funeral service, but Jimmy Carter’s was a hoot. One commenter said whoever did the seating chart deserves a medal. Putting Hillary next to George Bush was pretty good, but putting Jill and Kamala next to each other was genius. They could have done Jill/Joe/Kamala/Doug or Joe/Jill/Doug/Kamala, but where’s the fun in that?
And watching Kamala’s reaction to Obama and Trump chatting away and laughing and acting like buds was the high point not just of the funeral (where you don’t usually expect to find a “high point”) but of the whole election cycle.
Wouldn’t you liked to have been a fly on the wall and listened in on the conversation between Obama and Trump?
The expressions on their faces indicate that they were both engaged and enjoying the conversation It might also have been fun to hear what Kammie had to say to Doug in the car on the way home.
This has got to be at the top of today’s YCMTSU list. I know the Left loves to blame the victims, but this is ridiculous. And insane.
But wait, there’s a contender for the title!
Disgraced NYC COVID Czar: ‘I Shouldn’t Have Been Shamed for My Pandemic Sex Parties‘ His comments are not only quite graphic, he outs himself as what we can expect when Dems are in charge
Just astonishing that they let this video be made…that nowhere in the (probably expensive) production process nobody said, “hey, maybe we shouldn’t have the clearly out of shape lady say she won’t help a guy in a fire”.
Keep in mind that we have female cops, firefighters and soldiers because all physical standards were lowered. By a lot. They tried to pretend they weren’t doing it but they needed the girls to get in…so they did it, and now they say it doesn’t matter. But then this comes out – “yep, I was DEI’d into this position, I’m making a bucket of money and I can’t do the job!”.
I’m a woman who has sometimes had to fight to try to get a job in a man’s world when I knew I could do the work, like driving a water truck on a construction site, and being given credit for work I was already doing. I still remember my vet coming to my ranch and saying, smugly, when I got off my big backhoe to greet him, “I see you’re playing with (husband’s) tractor”. Yeah, but no. I made it clear that it was MY tractor, that I was not “playing” with it but was building a driveway, and that some day I might teach my husband how to operate it. When I completely rebuilt a huge farmyard using my road grader and tractors, my brothers still thought I might have hired someone to come in and do it, though I explained how I did it, where I dug out the gravel, how I hauled it and spread it, etc. So I am not someone who thinks women just can’t do a lot of “man’s work”. I have woman friends who are ranchers and veterinarians and truck drivers and had a friend who was a very competent cop. I remember working with a woman vet who was about 5’2″ tall and very competent, castrating a full-grown horse who started to come out of the sedatives before the job was done. While the two women managed to hold him down and get the job finished, it was touch and go and at that time, as competent as my vet was, I kind of missed my former big muscular male vet while we were being tossed around by a very unhappy horse.
Having said that, if I am in a fire waiting at an upper level window for someone to come help me, the last person I want to see coming up the ladder is a woman. Sorry, ladies, but there are some jobs that women just are not equipped to do, and people can die when people put women in jobs they can’t handle. And that is just gender-related. Factor in other “qualifications” like race and sexual orientation, which have nothing to do with ability or qualifications or merit, and there is a whole list of people I don’t think should be given some jobs.
I can’t imagine being injured (as I was last April) and telling the EMTs that I would rather wait for cisgendered white female help, please, to increase my “comfort level”. How silly. How petty. How utterly stupid.
Yep – and, hey, if its a lady climbing that ladder to get me out and she met the physical standards, then all is well.
I saw this video of a female soldier the other day where she was just completing a 13 mile march with full field pack. Everyone was oooh/aaaah over the fact that she crossed the finish line to much applause. To be fair, I couldn’t do that today. I wouldn’t even get a mile with a full field pack. That lady was in vastly better shape than I am.
But the soldier who completes the 13 mile march in full field pack has to arrive ready to engage in battle. That’s why you go on the march – not just for laughs, but so that you can get there and fight. The lady in question was done in – probably would need a full day’s rest to get back up and running. And no shame on her! No shame on her effort! But a combat infantryman has a certain job and must be able to do certain things…this isn’t a contest to see who can make it…it is a life and death struggle for victory in battle. People die if one of the troops can’t get there in time and in condition to fight.
We probably can’t go back to the way it was before…but we must have standards and they must be high for anything where lives are at stake. That young lady has my admiration and I really do want her to be the soldier she clearly wants to be (if she didn’t want it she never would have gutted it out like that). But I just can’t see her in an infantry battalion rowing across the Waal under fire to take a bridge (this is my standard for combat fitness – actually happened in Operation Market-Garden in 1944; 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment rowed across the river in canvas boats in the teeth of German fire…if you read a description of it, the sense you get is that the Germans got scared and ran away…terrified of these men who simply wouldn’t stop coming). Maybe she can do something else – vital tasks that don’t require high physical strength. But DEI means death; it needs to be terminated.
LOL! Adam Carolla: “We can’t have 9 angry lesbians controlling everything that goes on in Malibu, Palisades, and Santa Monica.”
I’m just spitballin’ here, but I’d bet that there are not going to be many of the homes near the beach that are going to be rebuilt in my lifetime, maybe ever.
There are ways to build that make houses nearly fireproof. A few years ago a huge fire swept through Oakland and there was an iconic photo on the cover of Time (I think) of a hillside dotted with ashes and nothing but the standing chimneys of destroyed houses, and in the middle of all this destruction was a beautiful two story house, completely untouched. It turns out that the house was built of concrete poured into styrofoam forms, then coated with stucco, and roofed with metal. The owners said all they had to do was hose off the house to get rid of the ash and soot.
I am a big fan of ICF building—that is, Insulated Concrete Forms, or rigid foam walls filled with poured concrete. They go up fast, can be dried in in a week or so, are hugely energy efficient, block noise and wind, and the system is very flexible. These houses can look like anything—side them with wood-look cementitious siding like that made by James Hardy, use stucco, even log siding. That cementitious siding is amazing. I used some on a small building at 9500 feet in altitude, facing south, with brutal UV and wind effects, and after 20 years it looks like it was just painted, while the wood window frames needed to be repainted every couple of years.
A firefighter once told me of a demonstration in his firehouse of a fire defense system. It is containers of inert granular stuff that, when a garden hose is hooked to the container, comes out in a foam that can be sprayed on houses and even vegetation. He said that a window covered with this foam had a blowtorch held to the foam side and on the glass side he could barely feel the heat. This foam blocks fire and insulates against the heat that can cause spontaneous combustion in a house, and rinses off. And it is biodegradable.
So there is an opportunity to rebuild in a way that provides protection against fires.
I have friends who lived in that Colorado Springs neighborhood that was essentially wiped out in a big fire back in 2012 and theirs was one of three houses that survived. The fire chief told them that when they saw a new Class A roof on the house they decided they could defend it, and the house next door was stucco, so that is where they set up their defensive line. The neighboring house that also survived just benefited by being close to the other two, though its deck was burned off.
But I can’t imagine rebuilding in California using any kind of material as long as the state is so grievously mismanaged.
Back to the “9 angry lesbians” comment: I had to essentially rebuild part of a house in Denver. It had gone through a series of incompetent contractors, and I got a referral to a designer—-not decorator—-with a degree in architecture, who really impressed me with her knowledge. She said she was so tired of being called in to fix what contractors had screwed up that she was in the process of getting licensed as a general contractor, so hers would be a design/build company. That sounded ideal.
It didn’t bother me that she was gay. She was so smart and easy to work with, and we went into great detail about the house, the structural issues, the design, the finishes, etc. Then I noticed that when I went to the house every worker was evidently from the LGBetc “community”. That’s fine—-there are no doubt excellent carpenters, electricians, etc. who are also gay.
The problem was that these people were idiots. The house, by the time I got rid of her, truly seemed to have been purposely screwed up. I had a kitchen with no overhead lighting, a dining room you couldn’t eat in because of the size of the cabinets along one wall, a closet you couldn’t hang clothes in except for shirts and pants, showers where the floors sloped away from the drains, light fixtures in the wrong places, light switches on a wall around the corner from the room, a book case that wouldn’t hold books—–it would have been laughable, if it were not so tragic. I loved that house, my husband and I had been very happy there and I was looking forward to moving back in, and it was a complete and total disaster. Literally, if anything could be done wrong, it was.
I was in the house late one November day with a couple of young men I had hired to do some “undoing” of some egregious mistakes, not turning on any lights as it started to get dark, when a man walked in from the street. He asked if the owner was going to sell the house. I said yes, once the problems were fixed, and he said “Don’t do a thing. My daughter wants the house, we have a construction company and we’ll just undo anything you do anyway”. We closed in two weeks, and I felt like I had just gotten out of jail. The project was a nightmare. And I blame it on the tribalism of the “gay community” where sexual identity was the sole defining factor.
In other words, I was the victim of DEI and it cost me, big time. On the other hand, it ended up getting me out of Denver as it started to pick up velocity in its death spiral, and the proceeds from the house bought my house here in Florida, so there is a happy ending, though not until I went through a lot of emotional and financial stress.
Housing contractors are very much hit and miss these days – and more often miss than hit. We had flooring put into the master bedroom, picked on product because we knew from friends that it was nice and durable…but it does have to be installed properly and the contractor did it wrong. Came out and fixed it. Fixed it wrong. When called again…out of business. Don’t even ask me about the dunces who tried to fix the ceiling in the living room.
We’re just not making the people who can do it. And I’m sorry but some guy from Chiapas doesn’t know how to build a house…he might be a hard worker and as an illegal he works cheap, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I contrast with the young man who’s my go-to for small appliance repair and other such things…but he’s dedicated and has learned how to do things; a rarity among the young these days.
Just getting permitting through the Coastal Commission and the South Coast Air Quality Management District is going to take a long time. I bet the middle class people there just sell out…they’ll still get a pretty good amount of money for the land but their coastal life style is over. The super rich will rebuild. Corporate real estate developers will rebuild. But the charming, 100+ year old communities are gone for good.
If I were Trump I just wouldn’t let that happen – I’d simply tell the California government that I’m stepping in, eliminating all regulations except building to code and just let them all sue while the houses get built.
I just read the transcript of a long conversation, probably a podcast, between Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn. I’ve seen Walter on Gutfeld! and he’s a smart guy who has done well in Hollywood as a script writer in spite of being conservative.
Two parts of their conversation about the Los Angeles fires stood out enough for me to copy here.
And:
They also talk about how so many of the people in charge are simply incompetent. This reminded me of a fascinating book called, if I remember correctly, “Nobody Would Listen”. It is written by what is called a “quant”, someone with an instinctive talent for understanding numbers and investment, who is a trader on Wall Street, about the Bernie Madoff saga. He writes that many in the business knew that Madoff’s numbers were simply impossible, and there were many MANY appeals to the SEC to step in, but the problem was that the SEC is manned by people fresh out of college, with their newly minted degrees and zero experience. They put in a couple of years at the SEC and then move on into the industry where they can make real money, so the agency is staffed by people with very limited experience and ability. They were simply not capable of understanding what they were being told, so Madoff continued, till he racked up billions of dollars in fraud and destroyed lives. People with comfortable retirement incomes lost every penny to his frauds.
I kept remembering this while reading this transcript, as Tiabbi and Kirn talk about the inability of those in charge to understand, much less address, the problems of managing a huge and complex state like California.
I got the distinct sense as 2024 came in that people were getting frustrated at nothing working quite right any longer. It was why I switched over from a Lean-D to a Lean-R prediction. It really does seem like it, doesn’t it? You and I are old enough to remember when…stuff just worked. Not miraculous but it just worked.
We didn’t have billion dollar production model planes that crashed because of design flaws.
We didn’t have a bridge struck by a ship – and then find out it would take years to repair the bridge.
Never imagined that there could be a fire hydrant that didn’t have water…I mean, that’s the whole point of a hydrant.
On and on and on things are just falling apart…the center is not holding. And we look around at the incompetent dolts who are running things and go, “anything has to be better than this”.
a hydrant that s a hydrain’t?
what is the point of a fascistic government can’t even make the trains run on time?
Pretty much
6 Planets to Align in a Rare ‘Planetary Parade,’ Four Visible to the Naked Eye.
This is supposedly happening 1-2 days after President Trump’s inauguration depending on where you view from. Does this qualify as a sign from heaven?
The meme and video creators are gonna have a fun next four years.
Good article linked below. This is a catastrophic failure of government and should be the end of one party rule in CA and of course DEI, the most destructive political construct in history.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/01/what-did-75000-year-deliver-los-angeles/
In the last 4 years, America has lost two of its most beautiful cities … Lahaina, Maui and Malibu, CA. This is completely unacceptable and THANK GOD Trump won. America would never survive another 4 years of this Democrat shit show.
This one sentence from your linked article tells you pretty much everything you need to know about California:
Yup … it’s Orwellian. We HAVE to start judging people again, there is nothing wrong with that. The old adage “you can’t judge a book by its cover” is not always true. In fact, most times, you can judge the book, and should. The first time I looked at Tim Walz, I knew he was a weak man. When he opened his mouth, it was confirmed. Same can be said for the fire lesbians in CA. One look tells you they are not qualified and in over their head, so why in the hell do we validate them and play along with their mental delusions?
If America does not return to a meritocracy, we are f**ked.
Maybe what we’re witnessing is all part of God’s plan to rid the world of woke Leftists.
Major radio stations here in Los Angeles are publicly calling for Mayor Karen Bass to be REMOVED ……So the people of Los Angeles can vote for another Democrat to be mayor
If this doesn’t end Democrat rule in CA then I give up. Yesterday, I watched a press conference with the various departments of LA county … glaringly absent was the Mayor and the Governor. They should not be allowed to resign. They should be removed.
The only way to end Democrat rule in California is to take advantage of this crisis to push through some major reformations of the entire system there, including its “jungle primary” which pretty much guarantees that no Republican will even get on the ticket in an election. That, and a whole new narrative that replaces Identity Politics (including blaming the individuals involved) with understanding of the underlying political structures hiding behind the identities.
Not to say that national ridicule of California voters for their abject stupidity won’t help………….
I’m of the school that says we still won’t win CA for a while, but this is clearly the golden opportunity…to use this abject failure to start seriously chipping away at Democrat power.
use this abject failure to start seriously chipping away at Democrat power.…..Yes, but this won’t work if this means going after PEOPLE instead of POLICIES. And I am sure that the GOP response is going to be “Look how bad Newsom, Bass, et al, are…we need to replace THEM”…
The biggest problem to turning California around is that the people who might vote to do so are probably going to leave instead.
That’s a good point.