Posts Tagged → wildfire
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
Hurricane Trump spawns endless Zeitgeist
Back in the 1980s, which for you young people is when the world began, a confused and confusing publication called The New Republic entered a new-ish word into the American journalistic lexicon: Zeitgeist.
Meaning more or less “the spirit of the age,” this word Zeitgeist has been used among writers and journalists as a way to introduce certain specific government policies or political statements or ideologies for discussion. Or as The New Republic mostly Marxist writers used it, as a foil to hold up for examination certain political motifs they thought wrong. In their case back then, TNR writers were mostly reacting to Republican president Ronald Reagan, who was then aggressively rebutting many of the government policy failures he was elected to end.
Well, President Trump’s first week in office has unleashed so many policies and government actions that America is fully back into the time of Zeitgeist. Trump is waaaay ahead of where Reagan began. By 2024, clearly the American people had had their fill of destructive DEI/ CRT/ ESG nonsense, they voted for a huge and hard break with it all, and we are now witnessing a veritable Hurricane Trump descend upon both Beltway Bandit and Ivory Tower Academic alike, as well as murderous gang members whom the Mainstream Media naturally depict as pet Democrat sad puppies.
Where do we even begin to mark down the wonderful new things among the slowly but inexorably unfolding wreckage?
- California Man Childs: California voters could not adult, they elected man-children as officials, lived a life of unsustainable fantasy, and burned down their most valuable real estate as a result. The wildfires were inevitable. Empty fire hydrants, empty city reservoirs, DEI fire departments filled with overpaid fat slobs chosen because of their female anatomy or feminine appearance, instead of their actual abilities to fight fires and save people or keep fire engines running, the list of policy failures is as long as my arm. The man childs have been busy blaming “climate change ate my homework” and even Trump for their own policy failures, and thus far it appears the California voters are sticking with them. Some human beings are just not programmed to evolve or even to save themselves. Stay tuned for more self inflicted disasters and even more self inflicted voting patterns in California, as Trump demands adult policy changes before taxpayer funding the return to leftist self destruction. Relatedly, an entire federal agency, FEMA, is now under the gun, as a result of multiple failures in North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and now California. FEMA is kind of the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the alphabet agencies popularly hated by the American people (ATF, EPA, FBI etc).
- DEI (“didn’t earn it”): Supposedly, according to DEI ideology, the way to end discrimination against people because of their skin color or gender is by aggressively discriminating against people based on their skin color and gender. DEI does not make sense when you read it this way, which is the accurate way, and the American voters have had more than their fill of it. DEI is DOA in the Trump executive branch, and so the bloated administrative state blood is beginning to leak out wherever DEI stood. Cutesy cat-and-mouse games where DEI staff are re-named something innocuous sounding are being met with beautifully placed sledgehammer responses. The reality of DEI rot damage to our national fabric is becoming apparent, and the American people are vindicated.
- January 6th: Acccording to the Democrat Party’s Mainstream Media, January 6th was the first ever unarmed “insurrection” in human history, and was worse than the Japanese attack on pearl Harbor and worse than the American Civil War (!). This perspective justified the Biden DOJ’s subsequent Gestapo response against their political enemies. I was there in front of the US Capitol on January 6th, and I witnessed the reality: Uniformed police rained down a storm of illegal ultra-violence and abnormal sadistic abuse on peaceful protestors, eventually provoking a just and normal response by a free people. Antifa hoodlums (who I saw with my own eyes) and federal employees led the way in property destruction and violence against uniformed police. With the Biden DOJ Gestapo gone, personal J6 videos are now coming out of hiding. These videos show exactly what the MSM did not show you: A peaceful protest bombed, beaten, blasted into responding to the lawless police, and now a crumbling MSM political narrative just as fake and unsustainable as Los Angeles fire supression and prevention policies.
- Illegal Invaders: Yes, starting in 2021 the Democrat Party opened up the American borders and just let anyone who wanted come into America, and even paid them to do it. This was done to get enough new voters and enough US Census population count bodies to help the Democrat Party create a stranglehold on America. A one-party country, which everywhere else in the world is an autocratic non-free miserable place, was their goal. Meanwhile, across America public schools and hospitals and public parks are awash in these non-English speaking criminals, subjecting taxpayers to an incredible and unsustainable cost burden. Yes, the Democrat Party wants to burn down America to get control of America, but it appears that the Trump Administration will be deporting a thousand invaders a day, at least. Whether America has dodged this particular bullet or not remains to be seen. If strong election integrity laws can be implemented that protect American elections and voters from the illegal invaders, then all will be well in the end.
As some of these individual policy happenings show us, a true Zeitgeist is emerging: A Spirit of ’76, a recapturing of the federal bureaucracy by those American citizens who pay for it and underwrite it, a re-purposing of the federal government away from funding the world and instead funding our own American citizens in need.
Hurricane Trump has only just hit the coast, it has barely started to move inland, and so-so-so many much needed changes are already well under way. Things are looking beautiful.
Why California burns
Year after year, Americans are treated to images from California of flaming cars and zillion-dollar homes either burning down to the ground or sliding down canyon walls like toboggans on ski slopes.
No, these images are not from Hollywood movie sets designed to create fake images. These are the real thing, a hell on earth environment does in fact happen as badly on the ground each time we see it from afar.
Why these fires happen is right now subject to some debate, which does not make sense, because their explanation is very easy to understand.
No, President Trump did not cause these fires because his administration’s budget cut the fat off of some bloated California line item cost passed on to Americans everywhere. What a silly thing to say; it is just more “Trump did it!” goofball politics stuff.
No, “climate change” did not somehow cause these fires or the damage resulting from them. That would be impossible. Again, this is just silly politics stuff.
And no, sorry President Trump, these fires are not necessarily happening because California is mismanaging the forests there. That accusation would be correct for a lot of other Western areas, like Colorado, but I am sure that it does not apply to Malibu, California.
It is a fact that much of California’s landscape is a fire-based ecosystem, where wildfires are a constant, expected, and necessary part of the area’s natural cycles. Not only do the plants and trees there burn easily, some of them actually require fire in order for their seeds to germinate. For example, both redwoods and sequoias, two hugely famous trees that grow along California’s coast, have pine cones that will not open unless they are subject to fire. Without fire, these two tree species will not naturally regenerate. They evolved in a fire-based ecosystem.
Humans have built widely in this natural wildfire zone, by choice and with a lot of fore-warning about what they can expect while living there. So it is a mystery why the humans there then run about wringing their hands and trying to blame politicians whenever there is a wildfire that burns down their poorly placed buildings. Serious wildfire is one of the few things they can actually expect to experience at least once a year, every year.
Additionally, the soils along the California coast are the absolute worst types of soil for building on. These are crumbly, loose soils that move around easily, often following gravity downward and carrying whatever humans have built on them along for the ride.
Think about it this way: New York City is famously built on bedrock, a great feature for standing still on a solid base when humans have invested billions of dollars on skyscraper buildings above. Coastal California soils are the exact opposite of New York City’s bed rock.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “[these] soils are on side slopes of hills and mountains. These soils formed in residuum and colluvium derived from inter-bedded shale and sandstone. Slopes are 4 to 75 percent.”
What this sciency lingo means is that these soils are loose and easily eroded. Moreover, fire temporarily reduces plants holding the soil together, and then water carries the especially but temporarily loose soil to the ocean. This is natural, it is how this area was created. Building on it is foolish.
A dear friend of mine owns a wonderful vacant lot in the heart of Malibu. Her large tract overlooks the Pacific Ocean and is surrounded by very expensive futuristic homes. Despite this lot’s beauty, she hasn’t built on it yet, because it has been washed away several times and burned at least once. One night we were looking for her corner survey stakes, and we found them down the street. About two feet of soil had washed away in that rain storm; it was mass wasting, really. A home there would have gone along down the street.
Which begs the question: Why would people build homes in a wildfire-dependent ecosystem and on soils that are as slippery as wet soap and as solid as sand?
Well, there is another question, too, which is why are all those expensive homes built on the San Andreas fault? But we can’t answer that until The Big One rocks California to the bone (and we get to see if Californians have an ounce of self-reliance left).
More important, something is going on with the people who live in California. This ‘something‘ is not good, because they are living in a self-imposed fantasy land that does not want them to live there; it is trying to burn them out and flush their buildings into the Pacific Ocean. The people there know what to expect, and yet they do the wrong thing anyhow, over and over.
Watching them now trying to blame President Trump for their own poor judgment would be funny, except the political consequences are serious.
California: Beautiful place, fascinating geology and ecology.
Californians: Bad character, poor judgment, American taxpayer welfare queens.
UPDATE: A friend commented and pointed out that New Orleans is built below sea level next to the seashore, and that Miami is built on a sand bar in the direct path of most hurricanes, and that Phoenix, Arizona, is built in an arid desert with no water anywhere around. These are all similar examples of humans tempting fate and defying Mother Nature. Good luck with that. And yes, I do feel badly for the people who have been directly affected by the most recent fire around Malibu, Paradise, and other California locations. How could I not feel bad for them? It is a sad situation. But the message of this post is that humans cannot successfully defy Mother Nature. It just never ends well for either party, but unlike the humans, Mother Nature can almost always fix herself. Humans need better development planning.