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California An Ideological Dumpster Fire
Ain’t diversity grand! Just ask California Governor Gavin Newsom. Just ask L.A. Mayor Karen Bass (recently back from Africa). Just ask L.A. LGBTQ fire chief Kristin Crowley. Just ask virtually anyone in a position of power in that once great state, now literally burning and coming apart at the seams. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion! Shout it to the heavens!
And run for your lives.
As apocalyptic flames engulf what was once one of the world’s great cities, we are witnessing the full fruition of the very real consequences of allowing not one but two insane ideologies to replace competency and even any consideration for reality itself. Those two insane ideologies are the insane ideology of anthropogenic (man-caused) climate change and the insane ideology of the inherent goodness of diversity for its own sake.
The insane ideology of climate change tells us that any extreme weather, no matter how common it is and always has been, is caused by ongoing climate change, directly caused by humans as a result of their voracious greed, which is enabled by capitalism. So, that’s what is causing the current fires in L.A., we’re told. And if you try to tell climate fundamentalists about the innumerable fires that have occurred across the eons, before anthropogenic climate change was even possible, you’ll be stared at like a deer in the headlights. Or accusatorily called a “denier.”
But this isn’t the first time Pacific Palisades has been largely ruined by fire. Just ask Mary Astor, W.C. Fields or the widow of Will Rogers. Oh, that’s right, they’re all long dead. Because that fire was in 1938, before there was any blather about climate change. A couple of years before that, fires were seen as the greatest threat to future prosperity in California, again, before anthropogenic climate change was even a twinkle in some mad scientist’s eye.
As for the other insane ideology, it’s almost as if diversity has taken L.A. back to a pristine time when fire was first discovered by man, but long before he learned how to use or control it. Not that fires can ever be fully controlled, but not that long ago, Californicus Homo sapiens had learned how to mitigate the destruction they caused through wise forestry practices and water management. But that appears to be over. Nobody’s clearing brush, there are no new reservoirs to hold water—trillions of gallons just flow to the sea, and all the L.A. fire chief can say is, “We need more lesbians!”
If your criteria for hiring the people who are supposed to be responsible for your physical safety is anything other than their competency . . . If it has anything to do with their color . . . If it has anything to do with the rainbow . . . If it has anything to do with their biological sex . . . If it has anything to do with some irrelevant feature of their identity . . .
Then don’t be surprised when you look out your window and see flames everywhere. Or you see riots. Or an endless invasion from south of the border. Or hordes of bedraggled homeless. Or open-air drug markets. Or a parade of depraved deviants dancing on floats.
Our modern technological society, which brings prosperity and comfort, is extremely fragile and relies heavily on competency, not to mention ordinary common sense. If either of those are seriously tainted by ideological foolishness, it could all come crashing down, and California seems to be teetering on the brink.
If this doesn’t wake up the voters of the once-great state of California, then nothing can, and it will just go the way of other fallen civilizations onto the ash heap of history. While we have sympathy for our fellow human beings and what they’re going through right now, at some point, people simply have to pay a price for self-destructive foolishness and/or apathetic cluelessness.
We should all pray for the victims of the fires, as well as for the enlightenment of the voters as they choose their leaders in the future.
Published in General
Just saw this, and had to laugh.
Just saw a commercial starring the black assistant fire chief, when asked if she could carry a man out of a burning building, say basically it was HIS fault he was in the wrong place, where he needed to be carried out. DOUBLE FACE PALM!! I wonder if she’d say that if the man were black?
Former L.A. LGBTQ fire chief Kristen Crowley, as of this afternoon.
That’s one lesbian down, two to go.
Next one has to be trans. Them’s the rules.
That’s hilarious, fired by the equally useless mayor. Will she be replaced by another alphabet person? I wouldn’t bet against it.
If the assistant chief gets promoted into the job, it’s already set.
That’s really fine leadership, firing the chief for speaking truth in the middle of an unprecedented fire disaster. It’s Ms Bass who should go.
Ms Crowley did nothing but speak truth. Would the previous level of funding have made any difference? It could be that all that would have happened is that the LAFD would have run out of water faster. But it certainly didn’t help in any way.
At least there’s an outside chance that a trans woman could carry someone out of a burning building, if “she”were burly enough. You gotta look on the positive side. 😉
Just watched coverage for an extended time. There was an extended “flame retardant” line the fire seems to have jumped with no problem in one small area (so far). That is the line trying to hold everything away from Encino. Meanwhile, the helicopters focus their attention on saving Brentwood while the fire creeps downhill toward what appear to be more modest homes in Mandeville Canyon. Fire truck companies were visible in Brentwood and deploying in Mandeville Canyon just moments ago as they cut to Karen Bass starting a press conference. She had a beaming smile for the room.
Eleven percent containment was the last figure I heard. This is far from over.
Update: Homes in Mandeville Canyon are now burning.
Later update: Sorry, what I saw were efforts to save West Ridge (Westridge?). The fire is still headed toward Brentwood and has now crossed Mandeville Canyon Road in places, at least according to the superimposed road map I saw. The accuracy is questionable.
You have to admire the effort at fighting it.
Special note: local news is unable to locate any FEMA presence in the area.
They’re both “DEI hires” but the fire chief can’t fire the mayor.
Fox News anchor Arthel Neville moments ago on Fox News:
“…and still so many people are Climate Change deniers…”
Please someone educate her. It’s time to put an end to this religious zealotry about “Climate Change”. The fires in Los Angeles have absolutely nothing to do with Climate Change (which is the most current euphemism for man-made global warming)…but this news anchor (like her MSNBC, CNN, ABC, BBC, CBS colleagues) only gives the incompetent leaders in California an excuse to mask their ineptitude.
I saw that too.
The planet has at least one billion destitute poor that don’t care. We aren’t doing anything to help them without burning fossil fuel, and they don’t care.
She was not actually fired, though no one can say why because she met with the mayor specifically to be dismissed.
Honestly, a $17.6m cut from a more than half-billion dollar budget? Yeah, it hit at a bad time because of inflation, but that’s not a one-person-is-to-blame scenario. More stations? $17.6m might get you one. Crowley sounds a bit more competent than Bass, but neither is anything more than government material.
Bass asked for a +$23m cut. The L.A. City Council reinstated about $6m. If you’re to the left of that clown college, you need to have your med levels checked.
This is what has to happen. They need to bury all the electric lines. I don’t see why they haven’t been doing this since the 50s. I just saw a video that said that you can’t afford the infrastructure to constantly have water pressure to fight this type of fire. Fox News had a guy on that saved multiple houses just by having a pump, hose, and a sprinkler working with his pool and his neighbor’s pools. Everybody has to have that. I just heard that when fire dangers were really high one of the prior administrations constantly had planes full of water in the air at all times. It makes sense to me. Obviously, they need big fire breaks and cleaning of the underbrush constantly. It’s absolutely nuts that they don’t do that. This is probably too much to ask, but I know that the Sierra Nevada can have 5 to 9 more dams, feeding Southern and Northern California plus the electricity.
City Journal has an article on the real reason the City ended up cutting the budget of the LAFD. Basically, the present administration negotiated give away contracts with the unions, including LAFD, and it ended up decimating their total budget. So they cut employees, including LAFD employees.
As for the LGBTQ management of the department, I am not seeing anything specific on how they are running the operations against the fire that indicates they are doing it incompetently. If you run out of water, you run out of water.
As someone who volunteered in a rural fire department whose area of coverage had no hydrants, I know what that’s like.
Where the state of California failed is in the hills, referred to as the Santa Monica mountains, where a mixture of state and national parks reside. Without reading anything specific to the area, my understanding was were no forest management policies that allowed logging to remove dead and near dead trees.
And in a urban area like Los Angeles, there were probably no controlled burns allowed either. In urban areas, in other states, there are controlled burns during less hazardous times of the season, and in really isolated areas like vast areas of Alaska, whole forests are just allowed to burn, despite the smoke it produces. The healthy trees mostly survive.
If you aren’t going to allow forests to naturally burn, you have to take other measures to mitigate the risks to what has happened in Los Angeles.
On the LGBTQ administration of the LAFD, most firefighters are not that. It’s clear that promotion to those positions are being blocked to most firefighters who, let’s face it are primarily white males. In the long term, that makes for resentment by the people who are doing the labor, and it probably extends down to first level promotions to lieutenant/captain, which is functionally a blue collar foreman.
But as I said above, it has nothing to do with how the fire is being managed.
Well, they did tout their dedication to diversity over other things.
A quick Google says that the average cost per mile for overhead power lines is $285K. The average cost of buried power lines per mile is $1.5M.
Buried lines are less likely to break in most situations, though in an earthquake prone area, maybe not. But if they do break, it’s harder to repair.
On the other hand, buried lines are much LESS likely to start fires. Or to be damaged in fires.
Yes, yes, but Trump is a bad person because he is politicizing the issue instead of helping people. I know that because I read it on Twitter.