January 14, 2025

ABOLISH FEMA:

Posted at 7:04 pm by Glenn Reynolds

EARTHQUAKE! John Lucas writes: “We just had a small one just outside of Richmond. The temperature got up to the 30’s today, so I blame it on global warming.”

Posted at 7:02 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“BUT THEY STILL STOP THE SPREAD OF VIRUSES, RIGHT?”

I’m so old, I remember when that was dangerous misinformation.

Posted at 6:11 pm by Stephen Green

JEWS AND POWER? ‘Jews and Power’ Course at Oberlin College Ignites Controversy.

Toni is covering the anti-semitism beat pretty thoroughly. I don’t quite know what to make of this course. On the one hand “Jews and Power” sounds only about a half-step back from “the Rothschilds control the world.” On the other hand, in general professors ought to be able to teach what the want. On the gripping hand, Oberlin.

Have a look and see what you think.

Posted at 5:51 pm by Charlie Martin

BIDEN’S PARTING GIFTS:

Stop naming carriers after presidents, particularly living presidents.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

HEGSETH HEARINGS ROUNDUP:

I love the image of Hegseth surrounded by shrieking Democratic harridans. Operation Enduring Karen, indeed.

Plus:

Posted at 4:28 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BLUE GOVERNANCE:

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DOG BITES MAN: Lefties Mourn End To Facebook Censorship. “I don’t necessarily trust Zuckerberg’s assertions that Facebook’s original intentions were pure as the driven snow when he started putting fact checkers in place (and that’s one reason I’m not editing out things like ‘um,’ ‘like,’ and ‘you knows,’ as these may be verbal tells when he’s glossing over or eliding information rather than just verbal throat clearing), but I think his depiction of how government pressure for censorship came down is probably accurate.”

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE:

I already wrote about the role of Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom in this entire mess, and I commend that piece to all those who want to watch me pour accelerant on two careers already on fire. For now, however, I would like to recommend this lengthy and thoughtful piece by Claire Lehmann at Quillette: “Three Hard Truths about California’s Fire Crisis.” Lehmann is Australian and thus writes about the lessons of Los Angeles through the lens of her experience with the catastrophic fires that wracked her hometown of Adelaide in 2020. Readers will find much to agree with, I suspect, but much that also reads like a counsel of despair: Governments need to have the courage to step in, she writes, and privilege the realities of climate change over mere property rights. It reads uncomfortably like the excuse-making for bad government that she denounces elsewhere. I stopped short where Lehmann writes:

The challenge of implementing controlled burns shows how politics fails us regardless of ideology. It doesn’t matter if it is a left-wing or right-wing government, almost all governments fail to provide enough controlled burns.

And this is where she loses me as well as anyone who has paid attention to how American governments operate on the state level. It is a question of competence, yes, but when Lehmann compares Australia to California she is comparing two essentially left-wing governments — like and like — which is no doubt why she throws her hands up in resignation. That is needless defeatism, as the record shows. The proper comparison, rather, would be between California’s fire management and that of its inverse, the red-state bête noir that is Ron DeSantis’s Florida.

The simple truth, as even NPR admitted with disbelief, is that Florida and other southern, Republican-run states — with every bit the same level of dangerous seasonal fire exposure — are light-years ahead of sclerotic California when it comes to fire mitigation. And it is very much a matter of governance, not resignation to fate. Florida and other southern states prove, with their smartly and lightly regulated regimes of controlled burns of brush and deadwood, that you can prevent massive fires with intelligent policy. As Lehmann’s firefighter friend aptly points out in her piece, “politicians never want to admit that nothing we can do will stop the really bad fires once they’re going.” Which is why politicians in more practical (read: Republican) states have figured out that the best way to avoid that situation is to prevent the really bad fires from getting going in the first place. California forgot this, but it can remember it again.

Los Angeles is indubitably fire-prone. But force majeure is not the same as fate. Even my city once rather infamously burned to the ground — mostly because it was made out of wood at the time. Our response was to rebuild it out of less flammable materials such as concrete and steel — now we have no problems whatsoever; Chicago is a metropolis of model governance. Heck, Moscow has burned down so many times throughout its history — most notably in 1812, when it razed itself in response to a flood of obnoxious and unwanted French tourism — that one almost begins to understand why Russians are the way they are. But our American experience has shown us that blaming “climate change” or “acts of God” is a cheap response, an act of avoiding responsibility. If Florida and Georgia can figure this out, then the only thing preventing California from doing so is Californians.

So they never will, in other words: There Is No Bottom for Blue California.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

EXCELLENT OBSERVATION:

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME:

Related: LA’s lowlifes: The ‘looters, burglars and drug addicts’ arrested during Palisades Fire all share common trait. “Cops charged more than 40 detainees with various offenses including burglary and drug possession since the fires broke out on January 7. Remarkably, none of those arrested were actually living in the evacuation zone and seemingly travelled with the intention of taking advantage of the devastation.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

ANALYSIS: TRUE. To Stop Wildfires, Burn Wokeism. “Wildfires are inevitable. The apocalyptic devastation seen in Los Angeles isn’t.”

Posted at 2:16 pm by Stephen Green

OF COURSE THEY DO. THAT’S WHY STUDENTS’ DESIRES OR EXPECTATIONS SHOULDN’T SET STANDARDS: Students want A’s for trying hard, B’s for (mostly) showing up. “Students want to be rewarded for effort, even if it doesn’t lead to achievement, writes psychologist Adam Grant in a New York Times op-ed. ‘Two-thirds of college students say that ‘trying hard’ should be a factor in their grades, and a third think they should get at least a B just for showing up at (most) classes,’ he writes.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green