Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Not all heroes wear capes.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Fight them, without becoming them!

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Elections aren’t won by handwringing, cowering, and/or bashing your own candidates.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

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Fire Fiction

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Fire Noise

When confronted with fires that reflect the impact of climate change, there’s sure plenty of political incentive to blame it on anything but that.  One of the claims floating around is that LA cut the Fire Department budget.  Nope:

Bass also took heat from far-left activists online, who accused the mayor of cutting the fire department’s budget in order to pay for a costly new contract with the city’s police. Also weighing in against her was Patrick Soon-Shiong, the politically idiosyncratic owner of the Los Angeles Times, who echoed the attack, posting on X that “the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M.”

That assertion is wrong. The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle, according to Blumenfield’s office, although overall concerns about the department’s staffing level have persisted for a number of years.

Politico frames it as far-left vs Bass, but it’s really both left and right, since the right is looking for anything to distract from the global warming explanation.  Steve M makes a good point about this:

But this is how the mainstream media operates. Because right-wingers have been attacking mainstream news organizations as liberal for sixty years or so, they reflexively assume that any criticism of a liberal is justified, while assuming that there must be a valid reason for nearly everything conservatives do, even when they’re proposing batshit crazy ideas like annexing Greenland.

As a rule, Democratic officeholders spend the majority of their terms on the back foot because when they’re viciously attacked by the right, the mainstream press inevitably piles on. The right is attacking Bass for reducing fire department funding […]

Steve also notes that the Police Department budget was increased, which is what right-wingers want, but zero credit to Bass for that, of course, because she’s a Democrat.

The fire, of course, is a terrible thing for LA.  From the perspective of Bass herself, there’s a bunch of  extra bad political luck piled on top of the fundamental bad luck of the fire.  First, she was in Ghana for some kind of conference and had to fly back as quickly as possible. So, of course all of her critics have to pretend that modern communication doesn’t exist and that Bass’ physical presence would have somehow made the Santa Ana winds stop blowing.  Second, the explanation for why the Fire Department budget was lower this year is a “well actually it’s complicated” one, which means the media won’t report it correctly even if she explains it at a press conference.  I saw a post on Bluesky indicating that the question about the Fire Department budget caught her unaware at a press conference, but obviously she has bigger fish to fry.  Finally, she’s black, so the right will pile on the DEI nonsense as high as it will go.

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, it’s worth asking if the police budget in LA is bigger than it should be in comparison to the LAFD budget, given that these kinds of fire events are going to be far more common in the future, due to climate change.  And it’s certainly worth asking what changes need to be made to the way we build, and insure, communities at risk for these kinds of fires that will only become worse, due to climate change.  But in order to ask those questions, we need to acknowledge that climate change exists.  The right won’t do it, so instead the distractions will be piled higher than the rubble in places that burn to the ground.

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    62Comments

    1. 1.

      Baud

      Politico frames it as far-left vs Bass, but it’s really both left and right,

      Good to be accurate, but that doesn’t make it better.

      Reply
    4. 4.

      Ryan

      There was a time we’d unify around a national crisis like LA burning.  It’s tragic that doesn’t exist anymore.  But the broader point is that the sooner we address climate change, the fewer of these “once in a lifetime” events we’ll experience.

      Reply
    6. 6.

      Trollhattan

      I understand the fires’ fatality total will be more than the five currently known, but wish to compare-and-contrast emergency response with the 2018 Camp Fire, California’s deadliest.

      In an hour-twenty after first spotted, fire reached Paradise and by four hours-twenty five, had consumed the town and exploded to 20,000 acres. Most of those 85 were already dead.

      LA could have been much, much worse and they are to be applauded and supported for their work to date.

      A more like-for-like comparison is the Oakland Hills Firestorm, which killed 25 in about thirty minutes.

      Reply
    7. 7.

      KatKapCC

      Apparently Bass is supposed to be psychic and have known the fires were about to start and stayed in town to, I don’t know, spit on them to put them out?

      Also, literally within minutes of the first one breaking out, people were screaming at Newsom WHY AREN’T YOU DOWN THERE HELPING and then he immediately goes down to LA and the screaming changed to IT’S JUST A PHOTO OP GO AWAY.

      I hate people.

      Reply
    8. 8.

      Ten Bears

      I dislike with an intensity bordering upon irrationally emotional to go all cliche` but ‘some people just want to see the world burn.’ Something about their precious lord and master floating down out of the sky on a flying floating rainbow unicorn with thousands of angelic young male helpers on flying floating rainbow unicorns to carry them all away to paradise

      I don’t pretend to understand it, call someplace Paradise, kiss it goodbye …

      Reply
    9. 9.

      TBone

      Leah Stokes:

      Cannot stop thinking about how Octavia Butler wrote a book in 1993 about climate change. It opens with deadly fires in LA in 2025. In the story, a fascist President has just won office with the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” She was a modern day Nostradamus. If only we’d listened.

      Greg Greene:

      What’s even more uncanny: Octavia Butler lived — and is buried — in Altadena, the location most devastated by the Eaton fire.

      https://bsky.app/profile/greene.haus/post/3lfdmxrjprk2f

      Reply
    10. 10.

      Dan B

      The usual right wing screamers are blam8ng DEI because LA’s new fire chief is lesbian and Newsome for tearing down dams in far northern California to appease Indian tribes.  They seem to believe that fixing blame is far more important than helping people in trouble.  It helps distract from science as well.

      Reply
    13. 13.

      TBone

      @Baud: what the why the who the fuck let that guy out in public?

      Oh SHIT

      The judge overseeing his case at the time was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was then a district judge in Washington, D.C.

      Reply
    14. 14.

      Martin

      So, a few points:

      1. There isn’t a city in the US, and probably the world, that has enough water infrastructure to open a hydrant for every fire truck that can arrive in that location within an hour.
      2. We know how to prevent these events, or a least limit the extent considerably, but those requirements almost never get grandfathered. When they rebuild Pacific Palisades (because the city is effectively nonexistent now) those building codes will kick in. California passed a law requiring power lines be burned in the 60s, and maybe ¼ of them are.
      3. Climate change won’t be fixed by collective action – I think that’s been made clear. It’ll be fixed by underwriters. There isn’t a straight line between the current insurance crisis and cutting down your flammable shade trees, replacing your nice wooden veranda with an aluminum one, and so on but that’s what we’re going to have to do, and if we don’t, it’ll get done for us.
      4. The last two notable urban interface fires before this were in Hawaii and London, England – two very notably not dry places. If you think this is a problem limited to desert California – you’re wrong. At one point or another we’re going to see this everywhere. A lot of the local reporting was noting how poorly many of these communities had prepared for fire, despite being in notably very fire prone areas.
      Reply
    15. 15.

      KatKapCC

      @Baud: LOL the link told me I’d reach my free article limit and couldn’t keep reading. I have never visited that site in my life.

      Reply
    17. 17.

      Baud

      @TBone:

      The judge overseeing his case at the time was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was then a district judge in Washington, D.C. Brown Jackson also ordered Welch to three years of supervised release, to receive a mental health assessment, and to stay away from the restaurant. He was also ordered to pay $5,744 in restitution for property damage he caused at the restaurant.

      Reply
    19. 19.

      Geminid

      @Ryan: We will experience these events for decades. The target given by the UN’s climate panel in 2018 is to achieve a net carbon-neutral global economy by 2050, and at the current rate that target will not be met. Greenhouse gas levels will continue to rise until 2050 at least.

      I’m not trying to be gloomy here; the stories I read on the clean energy transition leave me feeling optimistic. But it will be a long haul and besides efforts to transition from the fossil fuel economy, governments will have to contend with the effects of global warming well past 2050.

      Reply
    21. 21.

      scav

      @Martin: Sorry, but “California passed a law requiring power lines be burned in the 60s, and maybe ¼ of them are.” as a typo really got an inappropriate laugh out of me.

      Reply
    24. 24.

      Melancholy Jaques

      Because right-wingers have been attacking mainstream news organizations as liberal for sixty years or so, they reflexively assume that any criticism of a liberal is justified, while assuming that there must be a valid reason for nearly everything conservatives do

      Our side suffers from a shortage of howler monkeys.

      Reply
    25. 25.

      Sister Golden Bear

      @Martin:

      There isn’t a city in the US, and probably the world, that has enough water infrastructure to open a hydrant for every fire truck that can arrive in that location within an hour.

      San Francisco might, but we have a unique in the world fire protection system built after the 1906 quake.

      That said, my understanding is that Pali water shortages were more due to the extreme load for an unprecedented number of hours. Once the three massive hilltop water reservoirs (which had been completely filled behondhand) were drained, the demand at low elevations was so high that there just wasn’t enough water left to generate the water pressure needed to push water up to higher elevations where the shortages occurred.

      Reply
    27. 27.

      Sister Golden Bear

      And of course like clockwork, Fox is just asking questions about whether immigrants intentionally set the fires, and other reichwing blowhards are screaming that LA shouldn’t  receive any federal help until the LAFD fires its lesbian fire chief (and also mocking two other lesbian fire officials in the department).

      My good fucking evil sir, do you not realize that in an emergency, a butch lesbian with a clipboard is your best and only hope.

      Reply
    28. 28.

      No One of Consequence

      @Ten Bears: I concur. I have a quote from an Author Steven Erikson, from one of the Malazan Empire books, but I am attempting to memorize this, because it so perfectly represents, encapsulates, and crystalizes my thoughts on the matter. As an admittedly atheist-leaning agnostic — one cannot prove a negative after all — I submit the following for consideration:

      There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, to the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one’s own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage along a foul, tortured path — made foul and tortured by our own indifference — is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come. I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us — each of us, my friends — to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrendered the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing — all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.
      The Apocryphal
      Teachings of Tanno Spiritwalker Kimloc
      The Decade in Ehrlitan

      Your mileage, will of course, vary.

      Peace,
      -NOoC

      Reply
    31. 31.

      Geminid

      @Geminid:

       

      @Ryan: A 2019 article in the Bulletin of the Atomics Scientist provides a good overview of the urgency and challenges of reducing  greenhouse gas emissions. The author is British climate Myles Allen and the title is “The Green New Deal: One Climate Scientists Ciew From Across The Atlantic.”

      Myles Allen was one of the authors of the October, 2018 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which advocated the goal of achieving a net carbon-neutral economy by 2050. In his article, Allen says that goal is a realistic one but that it will not be easily achieved.

      Reply
    32. 32.

      Kay

       

      Climate change is going to be hugely disruptive for everyone. People have to stop thinking they’re going to be able to prepare around it or insure against it. People won’t be able to afford insurance and either will governments.

      Reply
    34. 34.

      Martin

      @Sister Golden Bear: Yeah, I mean, every infrastructure project, of every type, is sized to a particular need and ‘what if the entire city was on fire at once’ is never part of the constraint that the system is built to, mainly because everyone would lose their shit if they saw their water bill to pay for that. In some cases it’s water storage, in some cases it’s capacity to move that water, and usually it’s both.

      To contextualize it, the baseline water usage in my city is 50 gal per resident per day – Pacific Palisades has a population of about 25K people – so about 1.2 million gallons per day (excluding commercial usage which is probably minimal in a city with effectively no industry). A fire hose discharges up to 1500 gal per minute, so a single engine could discharge the entire city’s normal residential usage in a day. 24 engines could discharge the city’s normal supply in an hour. Even with a 500% margin of safety, as soon as mutual aid companies arrived they probably exceeded the systems design.

      The problem is ‘what if everything was on fire at once’ is simply a contingency you don’t plan for. We don’t engineer for 8.3 earthquakes either, for the same reason, even though one is feasible here. The cost to design to that goal is roughly equal to the cost to rebuild everything (when you factor in loss of economic opportunity when you front-load the costs).

      Reply
    35. 35.

      Geminid

      @Sister Golden Bear: One analysis I read was that water pressure was impaired as the pipes in hundreds of homes were ruptured by the fire. A possible futue fix: requiring “burst pipe” cutoff valves in areas at risk.

      Reply
    36. 36.

      Dangerman

      @Sister Golden Bear: Ronald Reagan could be reincarnated (which, ya gotta admit, would be good for the National Enquirer) but no one is stopping those fires. Once the aerial attack was grounded (it may have been grounded from the jump), LA was fucked. As evidence, I watched the Sunset fire last night and LA threw everything but Trump’s fat ass on it and no loss of property or life (I think).

      Reply
    37. 37.

      Kay

      Media screaming that government failed is just them remaining in childish denial. It has been explained to them over and over that fires driven by 100mph winds cannot be stopped before there is massive property damage. I know they dont want this to be true but it is.

      They can whine and cry that a mayor or governor or president should be able to stop this in its tracks but that’s a fantasy.

      Reply
    38. 38.

      Trollhattan

      @MobiusKlein:

      Did NOT know that. I’m-a have to look my next trip there.

      One thing you can’t replicate in many places [looks out window at billiard-table topography] is the head provided putting those things on the hills. Flow with zero pumps!

      We live a couple blocks from a big Art Deco city water tower, which makes me happy. They have a generator on site, too.

      Reply
    40. 40.

      Elizabelle

      Philip Bump in the Bezos WaPost also called out the rightwing lying — he did not try to slide it by as leftwing online activism.  This article went up at 10:15 this morning.  GIFT LINK:

      Falsehoods around the L.A. fires are proliferating on the right
      Anything to keep the realities of climate change from spreading.

      …. any declaration that the various examples of climate-change-linked disasters as being climate-change-linked is seen as a left-wing talking point. So the right, across its mouthpiece television channels and social media bubble, lines up for partisan warfare.

      It’s a gift link; he does a great job of giving examples by The Felon, his eldest son, Elon Musk, James Woods — and knocking them down.  All the tropes are there — incompetent liberals, $$ sent to Ukraine, DEI hires and icky girls in charge (most of the LA Fire Department’s leadership is male, surprise surprise).

      If WaPost demands an email to read it, just go with OrangeFelon at gmail or something like that.

      Philip Bump does excellent work.

      Reply
    42. 42.

      Leto

      @Kay: They demand it to be stopped without paying for it; ofc it’s fantasy land. “I want all this shit, but don’t you dare increase my taxes!”

      Reply
    43. 43.

      Elizabelle

      I resubscribed to the Soon-Shiong LA Times yesterday (at half the price I was paying before cancelling) because have family in harm’s way.

      Anyhoo:  in an otherwise pretty straight article, the reporter described a Truth Social-screed from The Felon as

      lively public political rivalry.

      Isn’t that civil?  We should keep a list somewhere of some of these euphemisms.

      Here’s her paragraph:

      President-elect Donald Trump — who also attended Carter’s funeral — continued a lively public political rivalry with Newsom, posting earlier Thursday on Truth Social, “Fire is spreading rapidly for 3 days — ZERO CONTAINMENT. Nobody has ever seen such failed numbers before! Gross incompetence by Gavin Newscum and [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass….And Biden’s FEMA has no money — all wasted on the Green New Scam! L.A. is a total wipeout!!!”

      Reply
    44. 44.

      Martin

      @Trollhattan: I think they’re pretty close to nonexistent. That said, as we know, once the winds get strong enough, they can’t fly anyway.

      But these urban interface fires don’t benefit much from them anyway – they move so quickly from ignition to ripping through neighborhoods that you’d need your air resources to be on SAC-like standby.

      And, when you have these events, mutual aid is at it’s lowest because if there had been a car fire on the toll road north of my house, my city would be going through this as well, so anyone in the wind field can’t really afford to send too many resources. And we had high winds across nearly the entire state. What we’ve learned is part of the solution to these events is to get crews on the fire immediately and in force, and you can’t do that if you sent half of them 2 counties over. You need oversupply, which means you have to pay for that all the time it’s not being used, which means it immediately looks like wasteful spending.

      You could make an argument that nobody should be living in these areas, and well, yeah – but there’s almost nothing that can stop the public from building right up to public land.

      Reply
    47. 47.

      Trollhattan

      @Martin:

      CalFire keeps part of their fleet at a base about 5 miles from my office but I do not know what their staffing protocols are, especially in winter when a lot of stations are closed for the season (but, not in drought years). I assume whenever there’s a Weather Service red flag warning, some crew are put on standby.

      A good number of aerial resources are private and I really don’t know how they operate. The DC10s are something else.

      Once had a sideline soccer dad conversation with a guy whose house survived the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa. Mentioned it was Oakland FD who were on duty in his neighborhood.

      Reply
    48. 48.

      Elizabelle

      @AWOL:  Thank you for that reminder.  I used archive to find the text of a WSJ article yesterday.

      It’s just a month to month subscription.  I had subscribed to the LA Times for years and years, even before and after I lived there.  Really missed its content, as much as I deplore its PharmaBro owner/publisher.

      Kind of happy to have the sub back, but will be watching for when and whether to cancel again.

      Reply
    49. 49.

      Elizabelle

      @KatKapCC:  Wondering if it was some editor that came up with that concoction.

      Of course, the article did not include any trash talking by Newsom. Because you could not fairly categorize his responses as that.

      Will be looking for more creative use of language at the Soon-Shiong LA Times.

      Reply
    50. 50.

      Captain C

      @Kay:

      Media screaming that government failed is just them remaining in childish denial.

      Including their own complicity in whitewashing climate change on behalf of their masters.

      Reply
    52. 52.

      Sister Golden Bear

      @Martin:

      Yeah, I mean, every infrastructure project, of every type, is sized to a particular need and ‘what if the entire city was on fire at once’ is never part of the constraint that the system is built to, mainly because everyone would lose their shit if they saw their water bill to pay for that.

      Of course. San Francisco’s Auxiliary Water Supply System is the single worldwide exception, but given the trauma of the 1906 quake….

      FWIW, the cisterns are only a tiny part of the AWSS. There’s entire parallel seismically reinforced high-pressure water system just for special emergency fire hydrants, which are color coded differently (red, blue and black-topped) than the normal white-topped hydrants. The system is entirely gravity-fed from twin reservoirs (draining independently of each other for redundancy) on Twin Peaks. Can’t remember off-hand if the Twin Peaks reservoirs are gravity fed, but since SF gets its water from the gravity-fed Hetch Hetchy water supply, it’s quite likely. There’s additional reservoirs and pump stations that can draw from the domestic water system. Two additional pump stations and the city’s fireboats can also pump salt water into the system. There’s also multiple redundancies within the system. The 172 cisterns are a final water supply of last resort, and completely independent of all other water supply systems. It’s absolutely, ridiculously, beyond-over-engineered — a major reason no other city has ever replicated anything like it — but they were not fucking around when they built it.

      That said, various planned expansions into the western and southern parts of the city were never built. Cost being the usual reason. It’ll be interesting to see to if those plans get dusted on in light of LA.

      Reply
    55. 55.

      Sister Golden Bear

      @Elizabelle: Fairly extensive article about the AWSS if you want to nerd out. During the 1989 quake the system mostly worked but failed in the Marina District due to liquidation that caused five major breaks. (Basically the ground turned to Jello during the quake because the 1800s-era fill that extended the land wasn’t done solidly enough.) Due to technology limits at the time, they weren’t able to close valves before the water drained from the 750,000-gallon tank suppling the area. So the cisterns and fireboats were used instead to fight the fires there.

      Reply
    59. 59.

      Sister Golden Bear

      @Elizabelle: Yeah, the news coverage of the Loma Prieta quake made it look far worse than it actually was because so much it focused on the most dramatic damage like the Marina District, the 880 collapse, and the Bay Bridge partial collapse. Which isn’t to say there wasn’t horrible stuff that happened. But you didn’t see all the vast majority of the Bay that escaped with minor-to-somewhat moderate damage.

      Reply
    60. 60.

      Sister Golden Bear

      @Starfish (she/her): Thinking of plants and fire….

      The LA Times had a story about how The Getty Villa survived the fire, which included this moment:

      bushes directly above the outdoor classical theater caught fire. This was probably Fleming’s biggest moment of panic during the whole ordeal, she said, adding that it was “a total red herring.”

      The fire came from a plant bed filled with rosemary.

      “And lo and behold, just like if you sprinkle a bunch of rosemary on a pizza and put it under the broiler and it crackles and sparkles, and then very rapidly goes out,” Fleming said. “That happens … and for someone like me, who doesn’t know a lot about how fires work, it looked really bright and fiery for a few moments.”

      Provided me a much needed chuckled. Who knew?

      Reply
    62. 62.

      MobiusKlein

      I just gotta hate how Right Wing Disinformation has permeated EVERYTHING.

      Science

      Music

      Beer

      Culture

      Statistics

      Medicine

      History

      I bet there is even Right Wing Math.

       

      Whatever else we do, I gotta pledge to truth as a value over fantasy, when dealing with the real world

      Reply

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