Posts Tagged → los angeles
One Year Later…SoCal still a disaster
Recently I had the pleasure of visiting southern California. But the much vaunted amazing Mediterranean climate SoCal is famous for was nowhere in sight, as buckets of rain fell day after day. The temperature stayed between 45*F and 60*F, which coming from the frozen East Coast sure felt like a vacation to me. But boy did the locals beeatch up a storm of complaints about this unseasonal discomforture.
What was striking about the trip’s weather was not so much the uncharacteristic cold, but the lack of official preparation for the torrential rains that accompanied the cold. You would think that the people there have been through this enough to know what to do by now. You know, mitigate the threat, reduce the pending damage, save lives, save property.
Much of SoCal’s building surface is a weird mix of loose dirt and small rocks, and it is prone to easy erosion. This has been known since the time of Ronald Reagan’s ranching days there, an Ice Age ago. As we drove north along the 405, we could see many large, often extravagant buildings perched unsteadily over chasms below, which had once held enough dirt to comfortably, on which to confidently, build a house.
And then the summer fires came (year after year) and burned the vegetation that holds the dirt in place, and then came the winter rains that washed the loose un-anchored dirt away, and left the expensive homes literally hanging, clinging for life to shreds of dirt on the uphill side of the ever-deepening slope below.
Eventually all the homes and buildings we saw hanging out in the wind, perched over a void, will slide downhill like a toboggan, like those before them that were once closer to the growing chasm and which are now completely removed from that landscape.
Their once carefully secured electric, water, data, phone, and sewer connections will be lost forever. Many are already visible, sticking out of the dirt like veins and arteries of a heart held high in the hand of a surgeon, or of an Aztec priest.
The place, the actual land itself, that was once surveyed and measured and given a parcel number, will no longer exist. The old building lot will be seen on paper and on old aerial photos, like a ghost, but the actual dirt that it was once made of will no longer exist. That building lot will go the way of so many others right there over the past few decades: Mass wasted by heavy rains downhill into steep arroyos, and eventually washed out into the Pacific Ocean.
When I was a kid, people not from California joked a lot about how the great San Andreas Fault would eventually crack open, Biblically swallowing great swaths of expensive SoCal real estate and its fancy cars and shiny people, and then shearing off the surviving residual into the Pacific Ocean. The more culturally conservative the joker was, the more emphatic was their lack of humor about this looming armageddon. And why not?
Yes, you and I must be curious about the strange mindset of all those tanned beautiful people living their pretty plastic lives over there in SoCal, surrounded by palm trees and perennially perfect days. It cannot possibly be real. Kind of like the American Pompeii – not if it will happen, but simply when. Especially curious about the people, because They seem so damned judgmental and contemptuous of Us, the great unwashed and untanned living in Flyover Country.
And while there have been some exciting earthquakes in SoCal, it is more the tick-tock-tick-tock metronome-like regular prosaic wildfires and monsoons that are the real threat to house and home and happiness in SoCal. These natural disasters happen like clockwork, and yet are treated each time with wide-eyed amazement by SoCal residents. Yes, the rains come every winter, but these rains, oh God, THESE rains, this year, they say…
Even worse have been the elected officials, whose reactions have run from feigned amazement to outright glee at the opportunity to score so much waterfront or Pacific view properties at such low prices…and so why not wonder at both the residents and their duly, unquestioned elected leaders, who fail to prepare for the erosive rains or the wildfires. A year ago this week, catastrophic wildfires ate a lot of beautiful SoCal real estate and homes, due to no brush management, no water in reservoirs, incompetent DEI firefighters.
Nothing has changed a year later. SoCal residents now just as defiant and silly as they were last year, still blaming the unusually extra strong sunshine or some guy in Washington DC for their unhappiness. I think just one building permit has been issued for the thousands of homes lost last year, and yet the Los Angeles mayor and the California governor enjoy plenty of support from their victims.
But just maybe the failure to issue building permits to last year’s total loss homeowners of Malibu and Palisades is the biggest mitigation step ever taken. That would be ironic. I don’t know, can’t know, and really don’t want to know. Rather, I am sitting over here on the cold East Coast drinking a hot cocoa with a splash of whisky, watching SoCal go through the death convulsions and twitches of a dying body politic and its sick land base.
You could possibly write the script to this Hollywood movie, but I think the best one was already written a long time ago. It is called The Bible…
(My iPhone screenshots of the 2025 fire are below, taken as it developed, and they include some heartbreakers such as spectacular homes and barns catching on fire, and a homeowner racing back to his home in his pickup truck, only to be blocked by smoke and then fire, and then turning and retreating just as the flames engulf his position, his beautiful mansion going up in flames behind him. Some of the mountain cameras send messages that they cannot upload their images… because they have been burned to a crisp)
Recall that the beautiful Will Rogers homestead and farm in Topanga burned to the ground. It was my favorite hiking destination in SoCal
Note the pickup truck on the road. One of the screenshots I took showed the driver get out with his hands on his head, obviously upset
Memes, memes, memes
EDS NOTE: OBSCENITY A flash bomb explodes on the 101 Freeway near the metropolitan detention center of downtown Los Angeles, Sunday, June 8, 2025, following last night’s immigration raid protest. (AP Photo/Eric Thayer)
California teaches America a lot of lessons
Southern California is on fire, and why it is still on fire one week, at least fifteen lives lost, endless misery, and $150 Billion in losses later reads like a graduate course in Bad Government 101.
California has been the drug addict child of the United States for a long time, but especially in recent years. Californians can’t ever get too much woke politically correct crazy, and so they keep voting for more of it and for the drunk sailor spending that enables it. No one there knows where the money is coming from, no one cares, they just keep throwing money around for empty virtue signaling.
And no money for saving water for a bad day and cleaning up old brush around residential areas. No, these two activities were generously funded, but not implemented. They both contributed to the annual Santa Ana Winds-fueled wildfires now leveling entire neighborhoods in the Los Angeless area, as reservoirs were dry, hydrants had no water, and years of unaddressed dry brush resulted in uncontrollable fires.
For many years already, California has suffered at the hands of criminal homeless and illegal aliens. Suffered unnecessarily in the name of some vague understanding of some sad people somewhere. But these fires may have taught the citizen voters there that there are limits, hard breaks, up against the best of intentions fail.
Lessons taught, maybe not necessarily learned:
a) Repeat voting for a single political party that continuously places homeless and illegal immigrants ahead of taxpaying citizens is unsustainable and will end up destroying your society.
b) Repeat voting for a single political party that makes DEI and ESG and other foolish woke virtue signaling a central point and purpose of government will end up destroying your society. The pathetic and avoidable failures of state and local government across the Los Angeles area are all attributable to race and gender ideology hiring choices, incompetent people, not hiring practices based on merit and individual capabilities, resulting in competent people who have fire hydrants with water in them in case of a fire happening in a fire-prone ecosystem.
c) Making silly, emotional, childish public policy choices, instead of responsible adult-level decisions is no way to run any level of government. These bad choices will always come back to haunt those who are subject to them. Eventually you must pay the piper. California is now paying for Gavin Newsom’s childish ideas and bad policies.
In sum, California voters now see that they have a real choice to make. They can move forward and select leaders who make responsible decisions that protect the citizenry, or they can continue to select leaders who blame human-caused wildfires on supposed “climate change,” and continue to fail.
My own takeaway from California’s fiery carnage is that no one is more racist than a white liberal Democrat. No one. The amount of destruction they wreak on people of color everywhere is unimaginable. Chicago, Philly, New York, you name an American city and you will almost always find failure and black people suffering there, for decades, and it all goes back to people like California governor Gavin Newsom and his fellow white liberals. They just can’t not hurt people, especially people of color. It has to be purposeful.
Here it is, right in front of you, urban Americans. You can learn from this lesson in California, or you can ignore it and continue to suffer. It is your vote. Just don’t continue to vote for the Gavin Newsoms of America and then put out your hand and demand American tax dollars to fix your bad policy decisions.
Nope we Americans have now learned that lesson.
Hollywood trash
Whatever may be said about Hollywood’s corrosive effect on America’s collective soul through its films, there is no debating that it is also a physically disgusting and filthy place.
Blessing or curse, we had the recent opportunity to walk a lot through Hollywood. What we saw was the unfilmed insider look at the real, unfiltered Hollywood.
Beverly Boulevard of Beverly Hills fame was until yesterday loaded with heaps of rotting rubbish and trash. Both sides of the street, block after block after block.
Most of it was deposited by insane homeless bums who hoard every scrap of civilization they can get unto their respective shopping cart, and when it all overfloweth, they leave heaps of this detritus lying on sidewalks.
Everywhere. Every fifty feet, both sides of the street.
And this is Biblical crap: Defecation -covered clothing, food wrappers, styrofoam cups, stained rags, heaps of trash, everything buzzing with insects and smelling of urine and rotting food. Occasionally a dejected human is guarding a particular heap, but as we witnessed over a week, even homeless bums reeking of long-unwashed bodies and wounded spirits eventually abandon their treasure and castles. They seem to move in unison, crossing the street en masse and setting up their tattered tents and new trash piles against walls, sidewalk benches, each block having its own long line of stench and crap. Old or new, there’s a lot of crap.
But suddenly the city of Los Angeles descended upon the heaps on Beverly Blvd yesterday. Workers wearing environmental protection suits used large snow shovels to scoop up the garbage into green-colored and clean-themed trucks.
While the trash disappeared, stains in the concrete and smells in the air remained.
Talking amongst ourselves, we surmised the situation was so dire that not even Los Angeles city government could ignore it. After all, this situation is hardly representative of America, democracy, successful self-government or even just simple wealth. Wrong again, rational people!
Turns out this morning is the LA Marathon. Beverly Blvd, La Brea Blvd, and nearby connecting roads and streets were shut down to allow new masses of sweaty, smelly humans to stampede through today. All disgusting crap already in place along the route was in the way, and had to be removed.
Plenty more discarded trash will be available to walk around and through tomorrow, after the race has ended.
Takeaway here?
Los Angeles is full of people, run by people, who embrace all kinds of bizarre notions in general, and who daily live completely out of synch with nature, who live wildly consumptive and environmentally unsustainable lives, and yet who also believe they can and must berate the world around them about all kinds of real and fake environmental issues, like human -caused climate change, the evils of cars, etc.
Los Angelinos and their city are literally full of crap.
Invasives & Sustainability
Invasives present a challenge to sustainability because they quickly fill gaps where natives take longer to grow and thrive. Natives evolved in their environment over long periods of time and they perform certain key services and functions that are necessary for the overall system to function properly.
As non-native invasives proliferate, they choke out the natives and reduce their ecosystem services. Almost always, the non-native invasives perform limited or no services, despite showy appearances. Their presence is totally unsustainable and is ruinous if left unchecked.
A day or so ago while walking on my favorite rail-trail, it was impossible to ignore the sickly sweet smell of Japanese honeysuckle, a huge invasive nearly everywhere in Pennsylvania. For whatever reason, Japanese honeysuckle has spread like wildlfire in the past few years. My only neighbor’s property is like Ground Zero, so whatever fight I am carrying on at my place is limited in effect by the invasive sanctuary across the boundary line. Like a shrub explosion.
Sure, the ruby throated hummingbirds benefit from honeysuckle, and who doesn’t like watching the gentle, delicate little birds flit around?
But this much honeysuckle is quickly crowding out native trees that benefit our native wildlife. Occasionally deer will browse the tender tips of a honeysuckle shrub, but after the first inch it’s just tough woody debris that deer won’t eat. So it grows pretty much unchallenged. And boy does it ever grow!
Along with Japanese honeysuckle comes barberry, multiflora rose, and autumn or Russian olive, often all popping up unannounced in large clumps. Interesting, isn’t it, that they all appear together? Once in a while a nasty ailanthus (“Tree of Heaven”) will push its way in among the other invaders.
After years of battling these non-native invasives, I have come to rely on pulling up the barberry by hand, usually with the aid of a length of re-bar, and spraying the smaller olives, honeysuckle, and multiflora rose with glyphosate. Sawing substantially into the larger honeysuckle shrubs and spraying the cut with glyphosate usually does the trick; it works much better than trying to spray the whole big shrub.
Intriguing, don’t you think, that the biggest advocates of fighting non-native invasives are the ones most aggressively pushing non-native invasives in the form of lawbreaking illegal border crashers?
Recently I was on the West Coast, in an area in the grip of a Biblical-size drought. Water scarcity is becoming a serious problem. Public demand for water far outstrips supply. A drive through the Central Valley revealed apocryphal “Dustbowl” conditions, with signs everywhere warning about the consequences of poor water management.
It is not a sustainable situation. Yet this area also holds the greatest number of illegal invaders in America, who put an unsustainable demand on other public services besides water. Public transportation, public schools, roads, highways, sewage treatment, public spaces like parks, police, fire and hospital services are all stretched way beyond capacity by the presence of the non-native, non-tax-paying invasives.
And yet the voting citizens of Los Angeles and California continue to aggressively vote for unsustainability.
Boggles the mind.