> Homer Simpson (yes, that’s where Matt Groening got the name)
For those who don't want to click on two links, Groening adds the following:
> My father’s name is Homer. My mother’s name is Margaret. I have a sister Lisa and another sister Maggie
The movie character was played by Donald Sutherland, who had a memorable guest spot as a museum curator in a 1996 episode, completing the circle.
---
Within the next four years Los Angeles will be hosting a Super Bowl, 8 World Cup games*, and the Olympics. It would be for the best if they could hold it together until then.
*Including two games featuring the United States plus a quarterfinal that will feature the United States if they win their group and make it that far
The way to keep Los Angeles County from burning down is to INTEND TO. It's the same as for eliminating homelessness. Our ancestors, who were less prosperous, didn't tolerate camping on public and private property without permission. They called it vagrancy and dealt with it as a criminal matter. (They also funded state hospitals for those incapable of living as functioning adults.) As a result, they could have, as Steve would say, "nice things."
Similarly, if asked to guide public policy now from Heaven, they would see that significant public resources were put to clearing brush, controlled burns, pre-positioned fire-fighting resources, and so on. Fewer resources for, well, you know - name the latest progressive obsessions.
California needs simple competence, which is, unfortunately, in short supply.
Absolutely. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Same goes for the rest of the country. But it will mean sweeping the leftists and globalists, hellbent respectively on destroying or enslaving the country, aside and regaining control of your institutions. Etc. A huge effort. Are you - collectively- willing and able to do it? I believe ultimately it could require a call to arms.
We need the same in Europe, the U.K. particularly. But the capture of the average Brit through the corrupt education system, reinforced by BBC and similar propagandists, has been so complete and, frankly, successful that we’re nothing but a nation of armchair-bound, braindead, boiled frogs, content to allowing ourselves to be slowly strangled, just as long as we’re seen as nice people. A dire and likely irrecoverable situation.
Hobo culture has always been around. And playing hot potato with the homeless does not solve the problem nor does using the county jail as a homeless shelter. And California has put more resources into fire fighting that any other state. See https://www.fire.ca.gov/
A good way to think about emergency management and emergency preparedness is one is not really having an emergency if one is following a procedure/checklist. A real emergency is when something has happened beyond the planning such as 100 mph winds from an uncommon direction.
"Hobo culture has always been around" makes my point. Our ancestors provided state hospitals for those who couldn't straighten up and fly right, and jail cells for those who could but didn't. Their approach allowed them to have nice things.
As for fire preparedness, like other Southern Californians who live near open brush land, I have not been as worried about fire as I should be. This attitude has flowed through to state policy, which always has competing priorities. We, the California electorate, have to tell our politicians to increase the priority of this issue.
First, anything that predates World War II needs to be seen in life expectancy numbers and in the causes of diseases. Anyone who was living at the margin could expect a much shorter life span and a death from a communicable disease. And once again, the county jail is a very expensive homeless shelter and means that criminals are not being held for other crimes if one keeps locking up vagrants.
The space in any county jail is finite. Thus, priority has to be given to who gets to stay and who gets let out early. If one wants to use the county jail as a homeless shelter/mental health facility, there will be less room for felons despite any level of snark.
My personal opinion is the earth is getting hotter and I would move, but that tends to make righties as angry as pointing out crime statistics does lefties. ;) I'm with Quillette on this one--both sides have their heads in the sand about different things.
Practically speaking, I'm not from LA but Steve's suggestions seem reasonable. I think you are ultimately fighting a losing battle against climate shifts (just tell yourself they're not anthropogenic), but actually putting competent people in charge and doing controlled burns, lining the roads with sprinklers, etc. sounds reasonable.
Long-term, though, Steve, as a longtime reader and Noticing Patrician Edition owner: I would not encourage your kids to own property in LA. Flip it to some fool or Man with Gold Chains and use the money to buy something somewhere a little cooler. I'm not sure I believe in signs from God, but I don't know what to call all of California lighting on fire every other year. Maybe we're just not meant to live there anymore. :(
If global warming melts the ice caps and raises the sea level, say, 70 feet, I suspect California will be hit less than most coastal places because the land tends to rise pretty abruptly out of the sea. You'd lose the Malibu Colony, Venice Beach, Marina del Rey, and the LA-Long Beach Harbor, without Dutch-style seawalls, and I can't see how the Harbor would continue to function even with them. But, much of the rest of SoCal is higher altitude.
Good point about the altitude--I wasn't thinking water as much as fire in this case. We've seen a lot of fires in the past decades, just as we've seen a lot more hurricanes on the East Coast. Seems like a trend. Anyway, do what you must. Thanks for all the great writing.
Warming periods are historically wetter (more humid) for fairly obvious reasons, so it's pretty unlikely you would see an increase in wildfires due to a warming trend or event. The geologic record shows that the really savage continent scale wildfires almost exclusively happen during glacial maxima. So, you don't really have to worry about that at least.
CA is what happens when cities are founded quickly and spring up overnight. Its fascinating to know that many cities originally were naturally very similar to SF and LA, with high hills right near the waterfronts. However, since most are developed over time, hills are gradually leveled off by city fathers to fill in rivers, ponds, and sometimes create new landfill land.
For example, both Boston and New York were cities with hills right near the water. Boston's state capital building is actually on one of these hills (Beacon Hill), and wealthy WASPs like John Kerry own prime real estate on the backside of the hill. However, most of the hills were levelled---the swanky neighborhood of Back Bay in Boston was, quite literally, the back bay of Boston, but land from leveling off nearby hills was used to fill it in and give the city more real estate. Thus Boston today, outside of Beacon Hill, is pretty flat.
Ditto for NYC: Harlem was a big lake (the name comes from the Dutch for lake), and downtown Five Points (from Gangs of New York) was a swamp but both were filled in by leveling off of Manhattan's bigger hills. Today, only Coogan's Bluff (in far north Manhattan) and the slight rise in altitude on the Upper East Side are witness to the city's former hilliness.
But San Francisco went from backwater to metropolis over night when gold was found in CA, making it impossible to level off the hills, as most people were living on them. And LA's booming film industry largely did the same to the south.
LA can surely rebuild the destroyed or damaged neighborhoods in a more fire-resistant fashion. That will happen…but how quickly?
Will the current exodus from California be increased by the fires? The likely disruption in insurance premiums may drive people to less volatile locales.
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
by Longreads
December 4, 2018
“Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”
A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
“Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”
I don't know much about fire management but I have read that the reason we have more and more large fires is because we fought small fires for so long. I wonder if California should let the insurance companies charge what they want. Those guys are experts at pricing risk and would make it obvious that some places are too risky/expensive to build a home. The state and the voters could decide if it was worth it to do fire suppression in a given area based on cost/benefit
Not doomed as in wiped off the map, but obviously the high cost of living and and population growth has made it a steadily less livable place and that will likely continue, leading to increased out-migration by people that are higher than average contributors to society but not so highly compensated that remaining makes sense. LA/CA is just the Dem coalition writ large - a high/low economic coalition with the highest income-adjusted poverty rate in the nation and a hugely disproportionate share of the population on Medicaid and other social welfare programs coupled with some of the most expensive housing in the country.
Broadly speaking, I expect the federal government's debt to require some kind of re-writing of the social contract within a generation that means substantially less federal subsidies to individuals as well as state and local units of government. That's going to be a tough pill for high public expenditure places like CA and NY to swallow as they are going to have to tax their wealthiest even more than they already do, and obviously those people can easily move or domicile themselves elsewhere, so other regressive taxes will be raised, etc, etc. The state overall will probably get more Latino, with all that entails in terms of productivity and socio-economic outcomes.
I suspect there will be a lot of stories like my brother-in-law's: grandparents moved from Brooklyn to LA in the 30s because it offered a better middle class life, parents grew up middle class but that also meant they had to stay in their first home they could afford because it was too expensive to try and trade up, and about half of their kids move out of state in early adulthood for some job and never come back because they couldn't afford even the modest house they grew up in and parents sold it to finance retirement. Basically partial reversal of the waves of people originally from the East Coast and Midwest in just over a century's time.
There is no will to keep Los Angeles from burning down. So, when the memory of this event has passed in 5 years or less, it will happen again somewhere else in California.
Los Angeles isn't going to just fold its tent. There's just too much money invested in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. I can see Los Angeles County reducing its population from 10 million to perhaps 9 million by 2050 but I don't see Detroit or Baltimore population reductions on the horizon.
Cities getting walloped is a popular topic for movies. E.g. The Last Days of Pompeii, The Avengers. I recall in 1996 when Independence Day showed NYC and DC being blown to smithereens by the aliens' Sky Beam many people in the audiences were cheering/laughing. (This was pre-9/11).
Add in for Los Angeles being the second-largest U.S. city, geographically photogenic, and a center of cinema filming, and it easily plays into the mindset of "what would happen if X disaster happened there", especially in the minds of unemployed screenwriters living in LA.
Jealousy, of course, factors in, with LA being glamorous and sunny and warm and full of pretty, vacuous people. People want the pretty popular cheerleader to trip and break her nose.
Hatred of Hollywood communism also plays in. Those evil commie propagandists who control The Messaging of The Message need to be taken down a peg---or a million pegs.
Finally, add in the fact that Los Angeles sits on a major fault line that is due for the Big One, as everyone has promised for years. Most of the world are terrified of earthquakes and cannot fathom that people in LA deliberately moved there or stay there, especially since every earthquake expert believes it is overdue for the Biggest Earthquake Eva. That fact is on everyone's mind whenever LA is mentioned, a fact probably not many in California realize.
N.B. What is it with Hollywood and Sky Beams in action movies? It's a cliche at this point, special effects wise. Heck, even The Avengers movie (2012) had a Sky Beam that opened the portal to the invading alien army.
Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass should be arrested for arson. They deliberately caused this. They both created the situation for a perfect huge fire and conveniently Bass was out of town when it happened.
Watch which of their donors end up buy the burned land and getting no-bid contracts to fix/control/manage.
I sincerely hope Trump appoints a federal prosecutor to indict Newsom and Bass. This is deliberate, not accidental mismanagement.
The California politicians most likely to have failed in their responsibilities are of course urging us not to “play the blame game.” There are elements of this disaster that can’t be blamed on them but others that can.
I don’t think it matters that Mayor Bass was in Ghana when the fire started. Obviously, it hurts her politically, but I don’t think her leadership, such as it is, was required at that moment. However, the LA fire department is understaffed and 100 fire engines were sidelined for repair. She may be to blame for withholding necessary resources from the fire department.
Gavin Newsom tried to slough off responsibility by saying these were local matters. As the governor, isn’t he supposed to have some interest in his major city? Also, who is responsible for the lack of forest maintenance if not Newsom? The Santa Ynez Reservoir, which supplied water to hydrants in the Palisades, was empty, closed for repair for nearly a year. Who bears responsibility for that?
I don’t think it matters that the fire chief is a lesbian. She seems fully qualified. She lost her job for criticizing the mayor, which looks like reflexive ass-covering on the mayor’s part.
For the first time, due to the high winds the fire crossed the Pacific Coast Highway, which normally serves as a fire break. This makes me wonder if more fire breaks would have made any difference.
Steve wonders why the destruction of Los Angeles is such a common fictional occurrence.
There is no immediately obvious reason why there should be a city the size of LA where LA is at all: no natural harbour, strategic vantage point, river crossing, fall line, mountain corridor or field of mineral resources. I suggest that it is "destroyed" so often because it is very easy to imagine an alternative map without it.
I am glad to hear about the fraction of one percent real destruction. It is hard to judge the scale of a disaster from television.
LA is simply a bad idea that went too far; there’s no water and the place burns. Perhaps the most curious aspect of all chatter about the current fires is watching people that supposedly despise the place up in arms that LA can’t pillage resources from the rest of California.
> Homer Simpson (yes, that’s where Matt Groening got the name)
For those who don't want to click on two links, Groening adds the following:
> My father’s name is Homer. My mother’s name is Margaret. I have a sister Lisa and another sister Maggie
The movie character was played by Donald Sutherland, who had a memorable guest spot as a museum curator in a 1996 episode, completing the circle.
---
Within the next four years Los Angeles will be hosting a Super Bowl, 8 World Cup games*, and the Olympics. It would be for the best if they could hold it together until then.
*Including two games featuring the United States plus a quarterfinal that will feature the United States if they win their group and make it that far
Public hangings of arsonists in front of the homeless camps are a good place to start, but without the 20 years of appeals and 3 hots and a cot.
The way to keep Los Angeles County from burning down is to INTEND TO. It's the same as for eliminating homelessness. Our ancestors, who were less prosperous, didn't tolerate camping on public and private property without permission. They called it vagrancy and dealt with it as a criminal matter. (They also funded state hospitals for those incapable of living as functioning adults.) As a result, they could have, as Steve would say, "nice things."
Similarly, if asked to guide public policy now from Heaven, they would see that significant public resources were put to clearing brush, controlled burns, pre-positioned fire-fighting resources, and so on. Fewer resources for, well, you know - name the latest progressive obsessions.
California needs simple competence, which is, unfortunately, in short supply.
Ken
Absolutely. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Same goes for the rest of the country. But it will mean sweeping the leftists and globalists, hellbent respectively on destroying or enslaving the country, aside and regaining control of your institutions. Etc. A huge effort. Are you - collectively- willing and able to do it? I believe ultimately it could require a call to arms.
We need the same in Europe, the U.K. particularly. But the capture of the average Brit through the corrupt education system, reinforced by BBC and similar propagandists, has been so complete and, frankly, successful that we’re nothing but a nation of armchair-bound, braindead, boiled frogs, content to allowing ourselves to be slowly strangled, just as long as we’re seen as nice people. A dire and likely irrecoverable situation.
We are spectators to the Suicide of the West.
Hobo culture has always been around. And playing hot potato with the homeless does not solve the problem nor does using the county jail as a homeless shelter. And California has put more resources into fire fighting that any other state. See https://www.fire.ca.gov/
A good way to think about emergency management and emergency preparedness is one is not really having an emergency if one is following a procedure/checklist. A real emergency is when something has happened beyond the planning such as 100 mph winds from an uncommon direction.
"Hobo culture has always been around" makes my point. Our ancestors provided state hospitals for those who couldn't straighten up and fly right, and jail cells for those who could but didn't. Their approach allowed them to have nice things.
As for fire preparedness, like other Southern Californians who live near open brush land, I have not been as worried about fire as I should be. This attitude has flowed through to state policy, which always has competing priorities. We, the California electorate, have to tell our politicians to increase the priority of this issue.
Ken
First, anything that predates World War II needs to be seen in life expectancy numbers and in the causes of diseases. Anyone who was living at the margin could expect a much shorter life span and a death from a communicable disease. And once again, the county jail is a very expensive homeless shelter and means that criminals are not being held for other crimes if one keeps locking up vagrants.
"criminals are not being held for other crimes if one keeps locking up vagrants."
It works when they're the same people.
The space in any county jail is finite. Thus, priority has to be given to who gets to stay and who gets let out early. If one wants to use the county jail as a homeless shelter/mental health facility, there will be less room for felons despite any level of snark.
My personal opinion is the earth is getting hotter and I would move, but that tends to make righties as angry as pointing out crime statistics does lefties. ;) I'm with Quillette on this one--both sides have their heads in the sand about different things.
https://quillette.com/2025/01/12/three-hard-truths-about-californias-fire-crisis-2/
Practically speaking, I'm not from LA but Steve's suggestions seem reasonable. I think you are ultimately fighting a losing battle against climate shifts (just tell yourself they're not anthropogenic), but actually putting competent people in charge and doing controlled burns, lining the roads with sprinklers, etc. sounds reasonable.
Long-term, though, Steve, as a longtime reader and Noticing Patrician Edition owner: I would not encourage your kids to own property in LA. Flip it to some fool or Man with Gold Chains and use the money to buy something somewhere a little cooler. I'm not sure I believe in signs from God, but I don't know what to call all of California lighting on fire every other year. Maybe we're just not meant to live there anymore. :(
If global warming melts the ice caps and raises the sea level, say, 70 feet, I suspect California will be hit less than most coastal places because the land tends to rise pretty abruptly out of the sea. You'd lose the Malibu Colony, Venice Beach, Marina del Rey, and the LA-Long Beach Harbor, without Dutch-style seawalls, and I can't see how the Harbor would continue to function even with them. But, much of the rest of SoCal is higher altitude.
Good point about the altitude--I wasn't thinking water as much as fire in this case. We've seen a lot of fires in the past decades, just as we've seen a lot more hurricanes on the East Coast. Seems like a trend. Anyway, do what you must. Thanks for all the great writing.
Warming periods are historically wetter (more humid) for fairly obvious reasons, so it's pretty unlikely you would see an increase in wildfires due to a warming trend or event. The geologic record shows that the really savage continent scale wildfires almost exclusively happen during glacial maxima. So, you don't really have to worry about that at least.
CA is what happens when cities are founded quickly and spring up overnight. Its fascinating to know that many cities originally were naturally very similar to SF and LA, with high hills right near the waterfronts. However, since most are developed over time, hills are gradually leveled off by city fathers to fill in rivers, ponds, and sometimes create new landfill land.
For example, both Boston and New York were cities with hills right near the water. Boston's state capital building is actually on one of these hills (Beacon Hill), and wealthy WASPs like John Kerry own prime real estate on the backside of the hill. However, most of the hills were levelled---the swanky neighborhood of Back Bay in Boston was, quite literally, the back bay of Boston, but land from leveling off nearby hills was used to fill it in and give the city more real estate. Thus Boston today, outside of Beacon Hill, is pretty flat.
Ditto for NYC: Harlem was a big lake (the name comes from the Dutch for lake), and downtown Five Points (from Gangs of New York) was a swamp but both were filled in by leveling off of Manhattan's bigger hills. Today, only Coogan's Bluff (in far north Manhattan) and the slight rise in altitude on the Upper East Side are witness to the city's former hilliness.
But San Francisco went from backwater to metropolis over night when gold was found in CA, making it impossible to level off the hills, as most people were living on them. And LA's booming film industry largely did the same to the south.
Agree about the climate. It’s hard to pin any one fire on it, but the trend is there.
LA can surely rebuild the destroyed or damaged neighborhoods in a more fire-resistant fashion. That will happen…but how quickly?
Will the current exodus from California be increased by the fires? The likely disruption in insurance premiums may drive people to less volatile locales.
The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
by Longreads
December 4, 2018
“Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”
A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
“Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”
I don't know much about fire management but I have read that the reason we have more and more large fires is because we fought small fires for so long. I wonder if California should let the insurance companies charge what they want. Those guys are experts at pricing risk and would make it obvious that some places are too risky/expensive to build a home. The state and the voters could decide if it was worth it to do fire suppression in a given area based on cost/benefit
“Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire.”
And that’s what LA had plenty of after two rainy years, then dried by an eight month drought.
Not doomed as in wiped off the map, but obviously the high cost of living and and population growth has made it a steadily less livable place and that will likely continue, leading to increased out-migration by people that are higher than average contributors to society but not so highly compensated that remaining makes sense. LA/CA is just the Dem coalition writ large - a high/low economic coalition with the highest income-adjusted poverty rate in the nation and a hugely disproportionate share of the population on Medicaid and other social welfare programs coupled with some of the most expensive housing in the country.
Broadly speaking, I expect the federal government's debt to require some kind of re-writing of the social contract within a generation that means substantially less federal subsidies to individuals as well as state and local units of government. That's going to be a tough pill for high public expenditure places like CA and NY to swallow as they are going to have to tax their wealthiest even more than they already do, and obviously those people can easily move or domicile themselves elsewhere, so other regressive taxes will be raised, etc, etc. The state overall will probably get more Latino, with all that entails in terms of productivity and socio-economic outcomes.
I suspect there will be a lot of stories like my brother-in-law's: grandparents moved from Brooklyn to LA in the 30s because it offered a better middle class life, parents grew up middle class but that also meant they had to stay in their first home they could afford because it was too expensive to try and trade up, and about half of their kids move out of state in early adulthood for some job and never come back because they couldn't afford even the modest house they grew up in and parents sold it to finance retirement. Basically partial reversal of the waves of people originally from the East Coast and Midwest in just over a century's time.
There is no will to keep Los Angeles from burning down. So, when the memory of this event has passed in 5 years or less, it will happen again somewhere else in California.
Los Angeles isn't going to just fold its tent. There's just too much money invested in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. I can see Los Angeles County reducing its population from 10 million to perhaps 9 million by 2050 but I don't see Detroit or Baltimore population reductions on the horizon.
Right.
After all, where are the Dodgers and the Lakers going to play? Brooklyn and Minneapolis?
Thanks Steve. I really hope CA will get its act together on a whole bunch of things because it is really important to the US.
I hope people can stop casting blame until all the facts are known. Kind of like Steve does.
Cities getting walloped is a popular topic for movies. E.g. The Last Days of Pompeii, The Avengers. I recall in 1996 when Independence Day showed NYC and DC being blown to smithereens by the aliens' Sky Beam many people in the audiences were cheering/laughing. (This was pre-9/11).
Add in for Los Angeles being the second-largest U.S. city, geographically photogenic, and a center of cinema filming, and it easily plays into the mindset of "what would happen if X disaster happened there", especially in the minds of unemployed screenwriters living in LA.
Jealousy, of course, factors in, with LA being glamorous and sunny and warm and full of pretty, vacuous people. People want the pretty popular cheerleader to trip and break her nose.
Hatred of Hollywood communism also plays in. Those evil commie propagandists who control The Messaging of The Message need to be taken down a peg---or a million pegs.
Finally, add in the fact that Los Angeles sits on a major fault line that is due for the Big One, as everyone has promised for years. Most of the world are terrified of earthquakes and cannot fathom that people in LA deliberately moved there or stay there, especially since every earthquake expert believes it is overdue for the Biggest Earthquake Eva. That fact is on everyone's mind whenever LA is mentioned, a fact probably not many in California realize.
N.B. What is it with Hollywood and Sky Beams in action movies? It's a cliche at this point, special effects wise. Heck, even The Avengers movie (2012) had a Sky Beam that opened the portal to the invading alien army.
Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass should be arrested for arson. They deliberately caused this. They both created the situation for a perfect huge fire and conveniently Bass was out of town when it happened.
Watch which of their donors end up buy the burned land and getting no-bid contracts to fix/control/manage.
I sincerely hope Trump appoints a federal prosecutor to indict Newsom and Bass. This is deliberate, not accidental mismanagement.
The California politicians most likely to have failed in their responsibilities are of course urging us not to “play the blame game.” There are elements of this disaster that can’t be blamed on them but others that can.
I don’t think it matters that Mayor Bass was in Ghana when the fire started. Obviously, it hurts her politically, but I don’t think her leadership, such as it is, was required at that moment. However, the LA fire department is understaffed and 100 fire engines were sidelined for repair. She may be to blame for withholding necessary resources from the fire department.
Gavin Newsom tried to slough off responsibility by saying these were local matters. As the governor, isn’t he supposed to have some interest in his major city? Also, who is responsible for the lack of forest maintenance if not Newsom? The Santa Ynez Reservoir, which supplied water to hydrants in the Palisades, was empty, closed for repair for nearly a year. Who bears responsibility for that?
I don’t think it matters that the fire chief is a lesbian. She seems fully qualified. She lost her job for criticizing the mayor, which looks like reflexive ass-covering on the mayor’s part.
For the first time, due to the high winds the fire crossed the Pacific Coast Highway, which normally serves as a fire break. This makes me wonder if more fire breaks would have made any difference.
I quit reading Taki when they quit publishing Jim Goad.
The drunken LA advice columnist in Waugh’s “The Loved One” seems almost entirely lifted from West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts”.
West didn't sell much during his lifetime, but he had a lot of influence on other writers.
Steve wonders why the destruction of Los Angeles is such a common fictional occurrence.
There is no immediately obvious reason why there should be a city the size of LA where LA is at all: no natural harbour, strategic vantage point, river crossing, fall line, mountain corridor or field of mineral resources. I suggest that it is "destroyed" so often because it is very easy to imagine an alternative map without it.
I am glad to hear about the fraction of one percent real destruction. It is hard to judge the scale of a disaster from television.
LA is simply a bad idea that went too far; there’s no water and the place burns. Perhaps the most curious aspect of all chatter about the current fires is watching people that supposedly despise the place up in arms that LA can’t pillage resources from the rest of California.