Posted on 01/11/2025 4:58:31 AM PST by MtnClimber
"'Climate Change' has been identified: it's a 28-YO man from Reseda in a black hoodie holding a lighter and some matches." — Peach Keenan.
“Life imitates art,” Oscar Wilde quipped, a most insightful glimpse into the human condition delivered as a wise-crack. Very Hollywood. Too bad there were no late-night talk shows in Oscar’s time. It took more than eighty years, but the apocalyptic burning of Los Angeles depicted at the climax of Nathanial West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust has finally come — the city of dreams turned into one big flaming nightmare. The adumbrations of this fiasco will darken our national life for years to come.
Who knew that the best way to convert Utopian Woke Democrats back into a reality-based thought system would be to burn their houses down? The wealthy showbiz folk occupying the moral high ground of the Pacific Palisades voted Democratic by 90-percent. They were fully on-board with the agenda of the Party of Chaos, especially Diversity-Equity-and-Inclusion (DEI) and the open border that allowed a deluge of mysterious strangers to flood the country.
Now, reports come across the “X” wires that these mystery folk are cruising the wreckage in the canyons on scooters and in cars to loot anything left of value. The police are shown on video capturing a mystery migrant with a blowtorch suspected of starting the latest outbreak named the Kenneth Fire on the edge of the San Fernando Valley. Loud-and-proud DEI firefighters were stymied in their work by neighborhood fire hydrants that were disappointingly not “full of water,” as they put it. Is that how it works? Each hydrant is supposed to get filled up on a regular schedule by water pixies?
You know by now that LA Mayor Karen Bass was unavailable for the early innings of the conflagration, having flown to the West African nation of Ghana for the inauguration of the new president John Dramani Mahama. But she managed to scramble back in time to mourn the smoldering ruins of Malibu. Governor Gavin Newsom dallied on a smoke-filled street with CNN’s disaster specialist, Anderson Cooper, pretending to manage the situation, which was, in fact, completely out of control. Among the things the governor has been criticized for is poor forest and brush management. Mr. Newsom has been lately working to pass a $25-million bill to fund measures for “Trump-proofing” California. For that same $25-million, he could have hired 500 workers at $50,000-a-year to cut brush around Los Angeles County. That is, if he didn’t avail himself of work-gangs from the California penitentiaries.
Even “Joe Biden” was in town, to announce the creation of a new national monument, the Chuckwalla National Monument, south of Joshua Tree National Park — 125 miles out in the Mojave Desert from LA. But he had helpful phone conversations with Governor Newsom. . . promises of federal funding to build Malibu back better. I wonder if the folks still camping out in tents back in the Mountains of Carolina heard about that. This same week “JB” also announced another $500-million aid package for Ukraine. Anybody wondering why “America First” helped get Mr. Trump elected?
You can’t overstate the amount and degree of family devastation to be endured in the months and years ahead. For one thing, many homeowners recently had their fire insurance cancelled. Decades of punitive bureaucracy made rate increases difficult in wildfire-prone areas, so companies like Allstate decided to quit doing business in the state. So, many of the thousands of lost houses will be total losses. A great many of these were multi-million-dollar houses, even modest ones built in the 1960s, due to the extreme desirability of neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, the Hollywood Hills, and Malibu Beach. Some middle-class people had their entire nest-eggs vested in these houses.
Comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla put out an insightful video rant about just how difficult it will be to rebuild, even if you had homeowner’s insurance — or happened to be a very wealthy Hollywood actor. He put a spotlight on the monumentally obstructive permitting process in Los Angeles County, including additional onerous environmental agency hurdles that anyone would meet attempting to construct a new building in California. Also consider: where are the thousands of competent building contractors going to come from to work on so many replacement houses in one locality at the same time? The bottom-line is that an awful lot of formerly middle-class and even well-off people will be homeless possibly for years ahead. You have not begun to hear about this.
You also have to wonder how this disaster will end up affecting the movie industry. Show business in LA had been on-the-ropes for quite a while preceding the big fire. Woked-up management putting out woked-up movies did enough damage on top of momentous changes in movie exhibition and distribution, writers and actors’ strikes...SNIP
All California needs now is an unprecedented earthquake.
What about somebody with a homemade meth lab in the boonies?
Those can easily cause fires.
If you listen to the interviews on local news coverage it looks like most people who lived both Pacific Palisades and Altadena had lived there for many years—or had homes passed down from one generation to another.
Proposition 13 gave major incentives for folks to keep homes “in the family” and/or stay where you are.
Otherwise homeowners would be looking at severe property tax increases.
That is one way that the middle class copes with CA insanely high housing prices.
I see young dyke couples in their 20s living in those cracke boxes by the sea. What gives?
Fixed it.
I am guessing most of those homes (or at least the land itself) were passed down from relatives—with legal games played to keep within the rules of Proposition 13.
In addition many of the ocean front properties are rented so those who live there may not be the owners.
One reason I left CA many decades ago was that I was renting—nice places btw—but could never afford to buy anywhere I wanted to live.
The rent/buy ratio was and in still is way out of whack—since CA folks think real estate will go up and up forever.
So far they have been correct in most cases.
An insurance company not renewing your policy is not “cancelling” your insurance.
Maybe this is the big break for Boxabl houses?
Methinks after we count the dead and homeless we come to realize LA never had the number of voters to match the “ballots” cast for democrats....
“Life imitates art,”
Don’t flatter yourself
Sometimes it just burns it
Back when WHITE MEN ran California, their approach to fires was to assume that they would ALWAYS start, usually due to man, sometimes by accident (a gust of wind at a BBQ), or by arson. Either way, they did not care how they started, but they ALWAYS assumed that they would start and developed approaches to either put them out early or at least keep them away from heavily populated areas.
Now California is basically run like South Africa, where the DEIs were given an EXCELLENT infrastructure to deal with fires, but through a combination of hiring inept people and corruption, simply cannot (or, even worse, will not) operate and maintain that infrastructure properly.
Enabling DEI is one of the PRIME REASONS that I blast conservatives here who claim that ‘there’s no difference between the parties’ so why does voting in November even matter? The bottom line was that through the 1980s the state was essentially run by Republicans (or at least Democrats who knew to keep qualified people running critical services, and NOTHING like this fire ever happened).
Or more likely most of them will flee California. I have mixed feelings about this. I'm a refugee from Illinois myself, but insofar as many of them created their own mess, one doesn't want them to spread their politics and dysfunction elsewhere. I'm leaning more and more towards the idea that voting (at least for local positions) should be restricted to permanent residents of a community who have been there for some time, and thus best know the local issues and candidates.
And those with prop 13 homes in the family, most are dying off or will be. Eventually everyone in California will be paying sky high taxes
CA will become like rent-controlled Manhattan—lots of dead people without death certificates buried out of state in the middle of the night.
Bonus—the family keeps cashing those social security checks.
“The permitting process will take years.“
True. Right now they aren’t letting fire trucks from m other states thru until they’ve been DOT inspected. Pure insanity.
bump
“Someone forgot to fill up the fire hydrants.”
This all is beginning to make me think of a the great old Jethro Tull classic, Locomotive Breath
In the shuffling madness
Of the locomotive breath
Runs the all-time loser
Headlong to his death
He feels the piston scraping
Steam breaking on his brow
Old Charlie stole the handle and
The train it won’t stop going
No way to slow down
He sees his children jumping off
At the stations one by one
His woman and his best friend
In bed and having fun
He’s crawling down the corridor
On his hands and knees
Old Charlie stole the handle and
The train it won’t stop going
No way to slow down
He hears the silence howling
Catches angels as they fall
And the all-time winner
Has got him by the balls
He picks up Gideons’ Bible
Open at page one
God - He stole the handle and
The train it won’t stop going
No way to slow down
JOE BIDEN’S TRIP==
A LARGE NO FLY ZONE THAT PREVENTED HELOS & PLANES FROM DROPPING WATER
“YOU CAN DEPEND ON JOE TO “F THINGS UP”
SAME FOR THOSE FROM NEVADA
IF I WERE EITHER OF THOSE GOVERNORS——
I WOULD MAKE DAMNED SURE THE WHOLE WORLD KNEW THIS.
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