Is The Fonz right about an L.A. arsonist?

Should Henry Winkler be canceled for not mentioning climate change?

From the Daily Mail:

LA Fire Department responds to Henry Winkler's shock claim about cause of blazes

By EVE BUCKLAND FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

Published: 15:55 EST, 9 January 2025

The LA fire Department has responded after Henry Winkler made a shock claim about the cause of the California blazes.

Amid the destruction sparked by the Pacific Palisades fire, the Happy Days icon, 79, took to X with an an incendiary message blaming foul play.

He wrote: 'THERE IS an ARSONIST here in LA . May you be beaten you unrecognizable !!! The pain you have caused !!!'

His claims swiftly went viral with some fans pledging their support to him and others lambasting him for spreading panic.

An LA Fire Department official has responded to the claim via TMZ, saying 'there's no way to know at this moment exactly where and how the series of fires started, but an investigation is underway.'

The LA Fire team investigating each fire is the arson squad, but that is matter of course for every major fire, and does not confirm arson, the official said.

Shortly after The Fonz posted on Thursday, the Kenneth Fire broke out in Hidden Hills at the west end of the San Fernando Valley. This quickly spread to over a square mile engulfed, but, with modest wind velocities, aerial assault and ground-based firemen quickly knocked it down.

But not before a howling alert went out at about 4 pm to the cell phones of 10 million Southern Californians telling them to evacuate NOW. From NBC News:

Evacuation alert sent in error to phones of nearly 10 million L.A.-area residents

A second alert followed the first, explaining that it was meant only for people near the Kenneth Fire, a new brush fire that ignited Thursday afternoon.

Upon hearing the alert, I looked out the window, saw that the wind was barely blowing, then turned on the TV and saw they were talking about a new fire 15 miles west of me, and calmed down.

On the other hand, it’s not a totally bad idea to encourage residents to have a Go Bag packed. Still, this false alarm propagated to 10 million people probably got a few killed from heart attacks and car crashes.

The cops arrested a dark-looking homeless man in his 30s after a mob of good-hearted people grabbed him while he was trying to start more fires.

From Newsweek:

Renata Grinshpun, who witnessed the suspect being detained, told KTLA: "We were sitting in the backyard and suddenly, we hear a car come to a screeching halt and the guy is running out saying, 'Stop! Drop what you're holding! Neighbors, he's trying to start a fire! Call 911!"

The man had what appeared to be a large "propane tank or a flamethrower" and a neighbor saw him trying to light an object on fire behind a vehicle, she said.

She added: "We really banded together as a group. A few gentlemen surrounded him and got him on his knees. They got some zip ties, a rope and we were able to do a citizens' arrest."

This doesn’t mean that arsonists are responsible for all the current Los Angeles fires, just that it would hardly be surprising if the firebugs weren’t excited by the initial fires and piled on.

Paywall here:

As I mentioned yesterday, there can be multiple levels of causality of wildfires, such as climate change and arson, all of which can be relevant. For political reasons, different people get fixated on different explanations and thus get angry at people suggesting a different cause

Southern California has traditionally almost zero thunder storms, so almost all of its fires have the immediate, direct cause for the initial spark of humans doing something they shouldn’t have done.

Some of these fires are pure accident. For instance, Northern California’s horrific Ranch fire in 2019 was unintentionally ignited by a rancher innocently trying to pound a metal stake into the ground with a hammer as part of a totally reasonable ranch task.

Others are due to negligence. For example, a fire was reported in pretty much the same spot that the apocalyptic Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades broke out at 10:23 AM on January 7th; at 12:17 AM on New Year’s Day 2025; firemen knocked it down after it spread to 8 acres; locals assumed teenage boys shooting off fireworks at midnight were to blame; now, some theorize that the apocalyptic Palisades Fire was due to smoldering embers from the January 1 fire being revitalized by the howling winds of January 7.

Likewise, the homeless, which Los Angeles has no shortage of, set a lot of fires through negligence.

And more than a few fires are due to malice (arson). The firebug urge is not ultra-rare among humans. Fire, after all, is pretty fascinating.

One theory is that quite a few excellent firemen used to be boys obsessed with fire who have (mostly) sublimated their destructive childish urge into a constructive mature profession.

Joseph Wambaugh wrote a true crime book, The Fire Lover, about an exception, a fellow cop, a Glendale police department arson investigator, who routinely started the fires he investigated. He’d wanted to be a fireman, but the fire departments he applied to seem to have found him mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and suggested he try being a cop instead: police departments have lower sanity requirements.

In some places, political radicals have used arson to wage their wars. From The Guardian:

Indigenous Chileans defend their land against loggers with radical tactics

Chile’s Mapuche people are resorting to increasingly extreme tactics to reclaim their ancestral land from exploitive industries

Mat Youkee in Temuco

Thu 14 Jun 2018 03.01 EDT

It is late autumn in southern Chile, and in the region of Araucanía, the leaves have turned copper and gold. But on the road to the mist-shrouded town of Lumaco, the hills are covered with rows of charred pines.

“We burned these forests as an act of legitimate resistance against the extractive industries that have oppressed the Mapuche people,” says Hector Llaitul. “If we make their business unprofitable they move on, allowing us to recover our devastated lands and rebuild our world.”

This year has already turned out to have been a particularly combustible one in a decade of rising attacks by indigenous Mapuche activists against the Chilean state and big business. Over several few days in April, crops were burned, roads were blocked and 16 forestry vehicles were set ablaze outside of the regional capital, Temuco.

Such actions have become more and more common. According to statistics published by a local business association, there were 43 attacks in the region in 2017, mainly arson attacks against logging firms.

On the other hand, arson isn’t traditionally a political weapon in the United States.

Nor is there much evidence that the Los Angeles fires are the work of organized foreign enemies. Los Angeles is full of natives of the People’s Republic of China, Iran, and Russia, but the current fires seem lowbrow in distribution to the work of professional saboteurs.