This is because Newsom forgot — or likely never understood — what he is. He saw himself, not a servant of the people, but a king with the abiltiy to rule over the people as he pleases. You saw this from him quite a bit during the pandemic when he had rules for thee, but not for he. While you were locked down, he was having dinner at fancy restaurants.

I think it's funny that Newsom prioritized "Trump-proofing" his state enough to ignore the clear danger of out-of-control wildfires, because it's Trump that's actually demonstrating servitude.

Trump's goals are to reduce government waste, make it cheaper to operate, reduce the tax burden on the people, reduce their problems, and fix their economy. The man didn't have to do this. He was wealthy, well-loved, and didn't need the headache, but decided to take on the burden of fixing problems people like Newsom made because he is, at heart, a servant of the people. He doesn't look or sound like one, but he is. //

piscorman
4 hours ago
Another teachable moment may follow. These homes belonged to wealthy taxpayers who carry most of the burdens of Newscum's government. If they decide to leave rather than rebuild, California won't be able to pay its bills. It can't now but this compounds the problems.

piscorman 2020vision
3 hours ago
As you know, many didn't have insurance because Gov Hairdo's restrictions on rate increases caused State Farm to pull out of the state. Those who didn't have insurance likely owned the home outright, and will bear the full cost of the rebuild. My hunch is they will just leave rather than deal with California's dysfunctional government.

“The abnormally high fuel loads from two wet years are very likely playing an important role here,” Park Williams, bioclimatologist and professor at UCLA, told The Post Thursday.

“Then there’s the fact that the rainy season hasn’t yet begun, now 2-3 months late in arriving, and then the exceptional Santa Ana winds this week. Flip one of those 3 switches off and you don’t get the extraordinary fire activity this week,” he said.

Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist, called the phenomenon “hydroclimate whiplash” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

The governor, along with LA Mayor Karen Bass, have been accused of mismanagement over the horrific fires, which are continuing to burn largely unchecked across nearly 30,000 acres of the city.

One of the predominant complaints has been about fire hydrants running out of water as firefighters tried to douse the blazes — a problem Newsom passed off on “local folks” during a CNN interview Wednesday night.

“Look, the local folks are trying to figure that out,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, claiming the hydrants weren’t designed to handle mass fires.

“I mean those hydrants are typical for two or three fires — maybe one fire and you have something of this scale, but again that’s gonna be determined by the local,” he said.

Earlier in the day the president-elect accused Newsom of blocking a law he passed during his first term that diverted water runoff from northern California — with Trump saying Newsom was more focused on saving “worthless fish” than helping his people.

“Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is to blame for this.”

The story of the Hebrew Bible is, at least in some part, the story of God punishing the wicked.

Welcome to wildfire-beset Los Angeles, or as The Post so poetically put it, HELL.A.

I don’t mean to suggest that Angelenos somehow deserve the catastrophe that has befallen them; to do so would be not only misguided but unforgivably cruel.

But as we’re reeling from one of the greatest disasters ever to befall an American city, we must be brutally honest, especially if we want to prevent this kind of calamity from happening again.

And a brutally honest assessment points to one inconvenient truth: The devastation of Los Angeles occurred largely as a result of people in power adhering blindly and madly to a very bad religion.

It was the woke religion, which judges people by the color of their skin and not the content of their character, that propelled Karen Bass to the highest office in town.

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In January 2023, Pelosi unloaded more than $1.5 million worth of stock in Google’s holding company, Alphabet, just one month before the Justice Department announced an antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant. Just a coincidence? Sure, let's call it that. //

Speaking of members of Congress, Pelosi is far from the Lone Ranger with respect to her stellar 2024 portfolio performance. In fact, her results were surpassed by multiple other lawmakers. (Pelosi came in ninth.) As Unusual Whales noted earlier in January, U.S. politicians have outperformed the mark every year since 2020. //

Rufus McGee
5 hours ago
Buying call options is arguably the least consistently successful trading strategy for any long-term portfolio, akin to trying to get rich playing the lottery. No way it's legit.

California is the most centrally controlled and planned state in the union. No one can do anything there without the Democrats at the state level giving their blessing. For Newsom to deflect to local officials when pressed on what is a devastating infrastructure failure, when he controls the infrastructure, is his entire political career in a nutshell.

Don't get me wrong, the local officials, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, are also deeply responsible for the lack of preparedness and response to these fires. Newsom is not a bystander, though. The state that he has led for eight years (and was lieutenant governor of the eight years prior) has failed to build a new reservoir since 1979 despite multiple ballot propositions passed to fund those projects.

During Donald Trump's first term, he sued the federal government to stop water diversions that would have lessened the dry conditions that led to wildfires. Newsom has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars over the years on boondoggles like "high-speed rail" while bending the knee to environmentalists that have put California in grave danger.

In March 2023, Carlson aired never-before-seen surveillance footage from inside the Capitol during a weeknight segment. The footage, obtained after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-A.CA) granted him access to security tapes, painted a different picture of the events than the narrative portrayed to the American public.

Carlson declared on his program:

“‘Deadly insurrection.’ Everything about that phrase is a lie. Very little about Jan. 6 was organized or violent. Surveillance video from inside the Capitol shows mostly peaceful chaos.”

Carlson aired previously unreleased footage of one of January 6's most recognizable defendants, Jacob Chansley, also known as the "QAnon Shaman." The segment showed footage of Chansley being escorted through the Capitol by police officers, walking calmly through hallways, and appearing to interact peacefully.

All of Manley’s 70 plus firearms were unerringly compliant with federal law and the strict firearms laws of Maryland.

When all was said and done, no arrests were made and no firearms or ammunition were seized. The only item taken was Manley’s cell phone.

The family’s home, however, was left in a shambles: front and rear doors shattered, windows broken, floors ruined from flashbang grenades, and dog excrement the family was left to clean up themselves.

Manley told Williams they had only lived in the house for three months when the raid occurred.

To date, the ATF has not issued an explanation for why the raid was conducted, much less publicly apologized for terrorizing the family. Mrs. Manley said the search warrant indicated her husband was a felon in possession of firearms. Manley, however, said he does not have a felony record, he does not sell guns, he does not have any machine guns, and he is still in the dark as to why he was targeted. “To this day we just don’t know,” he told Williams.

If, however, the government truly believed Manley was a felon (hardly a difficult matter for a federal law enforcement agency to investigate and substantiate), he presumably would have been arrested the moment he disclosed his possession of firearms to the agents. That obviously did not happen.

Did the government conduct its due diligence before conducting the raid? What evidence supposedly substantiated the sworn application for the raid? So far, ATF officials have had nothing to say on their own behalf.

The ATF’s actions extracted a heavy toll on the Manley family, who have been left with home repairs, legal bills, and the cost of therapy for their traumatized kids.

The human toll, which will continue to grow in the days and weeks, is heartbreaking. The property loss and personal effects consumed in the fires are just the beginning for a new batch of Angelino refugees. In the days, weeks, months, and years ahead, there will be ongoing concerns about shelter, and whether they can and will try to rebuild their lives in what once was among the most premium places to live in the world. //

The incompetence of Democratic leadership, from the very top at the national level with Joe Biden's addled administration, down to L.A. County and city governance, has failed Angelinos, and the cost of that failure won't be fully realized for a long time to come. //

In 2014, Californians passed a bond measure to finally do something about capturing rain and snowpack run-off before it blends into the Pacific Ocean, becoming useless as both drinking water and fire defense. Proposition 1 passed overwhelmingly, and voters paid $7.5 billion dollars, at least theoretically, to make it happen. Gavin Newsom has been the governor of California for the past six of those 10 years. Would you like to take a stab at how many of these new reservoir or water capture systems have been completed? You're absolutely right. Zero. Quadrillions of gallons of fresh water has been lost, or worse, intentionally pumped to the ocean.

Remember that California just turned in a performance that took 39 days in order to count ballots in the November election. It should be no surprise that the same level of competence didn't exactly get itself ready for fire season.

If there is one thing Newsom is competent at, it's playing the blame game. There's truly no one finer. It's always someone else's fault, or it's climate change's fault - any number of outlets for passing the buck when disaster strikes. When Donald Trump, who has been remarkably consistent on California's need to get their act together and finally get serious about their water issue, which is eminently solvable, and fire prevention programs such as brush abatement near dwellings and housing tracts, reminded people Wednesday of how poorly performing California's leadership has been, Gavin was beside himself. //

If anything good can come out of this man-made catastrophe, it would be that L.A. County would recognize the failure of their Democratic leaders and change course. Neither party can win a state race without the majority vote of L.A. County, so maybe this systemic failure could be the tipping point in future elections.

Fires happen here. It's one of California's unofficial seasons, alon with floods, earthquakes, and riots. and always will be so. But the destruction caused by wildfires doesn't have to be this bad. It didn't have to be as bad this time. It's incompetence and mismanagement that is as predictable as it is tragic. On behalf of the rest of us in the Golden State, Angelinos, please learn the lesson this week is trying to teach before Democrats finish killing us all. //

Elegy
2 hours ago edited
"We have no idea who started all these fires, but social media is full of timelines of people who when the winds began to blow, spotted homeless people starting fires. If you hear no reportage in the next few weeks about what or who started the fires, trust me. It was sparked by the homeless, and that fact will be deep-sixed by a regime media committed to the leftist narrative that would be forever destroyed if that detail leaked out. "

I'm certain this is an accurate assessment. However, there are valid reasons to wonder if there's more to it.

Thousands of illegal aliens from state sponsored terrorist nations have entered the US during Biden's presidency.

We have no way of knowing who they are, where they are, or why they're here.

Are we certain this wasn't originated, as in the setting of the first fires, by state sponsored terrorists perhaps working in the guise of homeless people?

Well-known academic and go-to source for U.S. intelligence and military agencies, Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University, insists that nothing bad was happening during the "five centuries of peaceful coexistence" between Muslims and Christians prior to the First Crusade, which was launched by cynical and evil Europeans, forever turning Islam against the West.

Is that true? My answer follows:
https://youtu.be/hgrrMhxAaog

Blaming these fires on "climate change" when there's little to no fire mitigation (clearing brush, trimming undergrowth, managing forests) and allowing millions of acre-feet of water to be washed out to sea are also really dumb ideas. Maybe these dumb ideas are what they mean by "man-made" climate change.

It's hard to ignore the record.

Fire officials say that homeless camp wildfires doubled from 2020 to 2023 to 13,909. There were 24 "homeless related" fires in LA County responded to every day of 2021.

According to NBC 4 in L.A., some of the homeless campfires started from campers illegally hooking up to underground electricity outlets. That's what caused a fire in Hollywood. //

In October 2024, Joe Biden's Administration officially pronounced an end to controlled burns in California for fire mitigation. //

In the Sacramento area, where a homeless camp sparked a 585-acre wildfire in June 2024, local officials were asked to provide homeless campers with firefighting equipment instead of telling the campers to get out. //

FloridaMan
15 hours ago
somebody's battery operated vehicle (there's no such thing as an electric vehicle) exploded... started the whole shebang...?

Changing just 0.001% of inputs to misinformation makes the AI less accurate.

"People stand out for individual cognitive abilities while ants excel in cooperation.". //

Ants maneuvering a T-shaped load across a maze. //

The piano-mover puzzle involves trying to transport an oddly shaped load across a constricted environment with various obstructions. It's one of several variations on classic computational motion-planning problems, a key element in numerous robotics applications. But what would happen if you pitted human beings against ants in a competition to solve the piano-mover puzzle?

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, humans have superior cognitive abilities and, hence, would be expected to outperform the ants. However, depriving people of verbal or nonverbal communication can level the playing field, with ants performing better in some trials. And while ants improved their cognitive performance when acting collectively as a group, the same did not hold true for humans. //

bugabuga Ars Centurion
18y
268
But wouldn't a group of ants "communicate" by default? And "do not communicate" equivalent would mean turning off their sense of scent and otherwise hindered set of ants? The group of humans that does communicate solves problems better, so wisdom of crowds continues to be the expected outcome.

"Let's put individual humans into a group and prohibit them from doing thing that is making group successful. Oh, look, group was unsuccessful!!! AMAZING!" :). //

fkaOld_one Ars Centurion
4y
322
I don't know who I am said:
How did they get the ants to do it?
Yeah… why would ants want to move a piano? //

Calidore Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
11y
121
EmeraldArcana said:
Humans don’t do a good job communicating through pheromones. Those who’ve tried are often ridiculed.

The Doctor: They could communicate only by precisely modulated gastric emissions.

Emma: Oh no! Planet of the Bottom Burpers! So what happened to them?

The Doctor: They discovered fire. //

Les Pane Smack-Fu Master, in training
9y
95
Aren't humans just better at moving pianos because they're chord-ates?

[I'm so very, very sorry for that. Truly.]

Federal toxicology researchers on Monday finally published a long-controversial analysis that claims to find a link between high levels of fluoride exposure and slightly lower IQs in children living in areas outside the US, mostly in China and India. As expected, it immediately drew yet more controversy.

The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, is a meta-analysis, a type of study that combines data from many different studies—in this case, mostly low-quality studies—to come up with new results. None of the data included in the analysis is from the US, and the fluoride levels examined are at least double the level recommended for municipal water in the US. In some places in the world, fluoride is naturally present in water, such as parts of China, and can reach concentrations several-fold higher than fluoridated water in the US. //

The inclusion of urinary fluoride measurements is sure to spark criticism. For years, experts have noted that these measurements are not standardized, can vary by day and time, and are not reflective of a person's overall fluoride exposure.

The agency tasked government labs, research institutions, and commercial companies to come up with better ideas to bring home the roughly 30 sealed sample tubes carried aboard the Perseverance rover. NASA deposited 10 sealed tubes on the surface of Mars a couple of years ago as insurance in case Perseverance dies before the arrival of a retrieval mission.

"We want to have the quickest, cheapest way to get these 30 samples back," Nelson said. //

"It has been more than two years since NASA paused work on MSR," the Planetary Society said. "It is time to commit to a path forward to ensure the return of the samples already being collected by the Perseverance rover.

"We urge the incoming Trump administration to expedite a decision on a path forward for this ambitious project, and for Congress to provide the funding necessary to ensure the return of these priceless samples from the Martian surface."
China says it is developing its own mission to bring Mars rocks back to Earth. Named Tianwen-3, the mission could launch as soon as 2028 and return samples to Earth by 2031. While NASA's plan would bring back carefully curated samples from an expansive environment that may have once harbored life, China's mission will scoop up rocks and soil near its landing site.

"They’re just going to have a mission to grab and go—go to a landing site of their choosing, grab a sample and go," Nelson said. "That does not give you a comprehensive look for the scientific community. So you cannot compare the two missions. Now, will people say that there’s a race? Of course, people will say that, but it’s two totally different missions."

Still, Nelson said he wants NASA to be first. He said he has not had detailed conversations with Trump's NASA transition team.

Brandon Morse @TheBrandonMorse
·
That time Chris Farley, impersonating Newt Gingrich, came to congress to swear Gingrich in as the Speaker of the House.

What a great time in entertainment/politics when we could all laugh together.

3:53 PM · Jan 8, 2025

Salon published an essay that compared the MAGA movement to ISIS. Their reasoning: men are drawn to both groups because of...toxic masculinity. The essay compared “so-called incels who commit mass shootings” to “Trump fans who attack government buildings” and “terrorists imbibing ISIS propaganda." The comparison went on to conclude that "toxic masculinity" was responsible for the radicalization of members of both groups. By the way, gold star for the mental gymnastics required to get that January 6 reference in there. //

🇺🇸 2A Patriot 🇺🇸 🔫Gettr & Truth @RightSideRon
@RightSideRonUSA
·
Follow
Masculinity isn’t toxic. The absence thereof is toxic.
Weak men are abusive and spiteful.
Strong men are protective and loving.
Make masculinity great again.
2:51 PM · Jan 3, 2025

The question is, with billions of gallons dropping out of the sky, where does all that water go? Shouldn’t this be enough to end the drought and leave us with oodles of H2O?

Turns out, the answer lies in bad planning, wasted resources and bureaucratic entanglements. Why do I say that? Because most of this water will fly down the LA River and into the ocean, an ephemeral visitor that we fail to capture or effectively utilize. In effect, God is giving us the very answer to one of California’s most vexing problems—and we’re simply letting it slip through our hands. //

Voters in 2018 approved Measure W, which is aimed at improving L.A.’s aging stormwater capture system. Officials are making progress, but experts say there’s a long way to go. Of an estimated 5 billion to 10 billion gallons pouring into the Los Angeles Basin from current storms, only about 20% will be captured by the county. //

Hoi Polloi Boy
7 hours ago
The California State Water Project, as envisioned by Dem Governor Pat Brown back in 60s when dems were still rational, is only 50% built 60 yrs later.
Meanwhile the population has doubled and water is released from major reservoirs to the sea to save the Delta Smelt.

You can't make this stuff up.