The Left is On Fire: We Don’t Need No Water, Let the MF Burn
It is remarkable to watch the incineration of the left around the world. From California to Canada to Europe you can hear their shrieks emanating from the flaming pyre.
This is almost literally true in California, where the horrific fires in Los Angeles are a veritable bonfire of leftist vanities. For years the self-satisfied, sanctimonious, supposedly superior leftist “elite” has pursued a governing agenda that focused on everything but performing the basic functions of good government. Among these environmental wackiness and DEI have been most prominent.
The environmental wackiness includes privileging some marginal meaningless species of smelt rather than responsibly using and conserving precious water supplies or the construction of reservoirs necessary to supply water for, you know, fighting fires and other irrelevant stuff. (In an ironic twist, it didn’t save the smelt–you can’t make this shit up if you try).
It also includes grotesque forest management practices that create tinderboxes ready to explode due to acts of God, or more likely man (through arson or accident), all in the name of preserving other wildlife (which ends up being incinerated when the tinderboxes erupt), or even more absurdly, of reducing CO2 emissions. (Note to the stupid: letting dead timber rot instead of burn only affects the timing of CO2 release).
The left blames California’s chronic fire problems on climate change. Even granting that dubious premise, a perceived threat of the dire effects of climate change should have led California to redouble efforts at mitigating them, through better water and forest management. If it is as existential threat, as the California left insists, act like it! But they have not. To the contrary.
So what is it? Do they not really believe in climate change? Do they use it as an excuse to divert resources to their real priorities? To camouflage their totalitarian agenda? Or are they just dumb as dirt?
These are observationally equivalent. I’ll leave it up to you to make your own choice.
The DEI dumbness is epitomized by a LA Fire Department that gloats how its lesbian-dominated “leadership” has broken glass ceilings. In case you haven’t noticed, the signs on fire alarms and equipment don’t say “In Case of Fire, Break Glass Ceiling.” And when the alarms have been pulled, the response has been catastrophically incompetent.
In another example of its bad effect do goodism, insurance companies attempted to raise rates to reflect the greater risks and costs of fire (a rational response). To protect its citizens from such unconscionable price gouging, California said no. To which many insurers said, OK, we just won’t sell your citizens insurance, thereby making the cost of private insurance infinite. Thanks, California! (Which is what the insurers who left are now saying, because the fire-related claims ain’t their problem).
I could go on. And on. And on (repeat ad infinitum). Yet the California left presumes to assert its superiority of the rest of us in flyover country, and incessantly attempts to impose its regulatory and legal insanity on the rest of the nation.
The other major leftist vanity bonfire is in Europe and the UK. There the fire starter has been Elon Musk, with an assist from Mark Zuckerberg.
Musk has been holding Labour’s feet to the fire over the appalling Muslim child rape gangs, and especially the official coverup thereof. A coverup that has run for over a decade and has involved virtually the entirety of British officialdom from local Plods to the Prime Minister (in his current incarnation, and his previous one as Crown Prosecutor).
Musk’s X posts have indeed been incendiary, and Labour and its media lackeys have burst into incandescent rage.
Yes, terrorism. That’s it.
Musk’s real crime is lese majeste. How dare he scorn such eminentos as Starmer and Phillips!?!?! How dare he broadcast our failures?!?!?!
But as is his wont when challenged, Starmer is unleashing the entire state apparatus to go after his critic.
Methinks that he will find the world’s richest man who is tight with the soon-to-be-President of the US a little more of a challenge than a few Southport yobs.
Maybe Starmer should challenge Musk to a fight.
On second thought.
This panties-in-a wad bunch is threatening to end the US-UK “special relationship” over Musk’s insolence (and Trump’s dogpiling).
Oh, would that mean that the CIA couldn’t use MI5 and MI6 to spy on Americans? Your terms are acceptable!
And since the UK military is imploding, just who will defend them, especially against the Russians that the UK claims will rampage to the North Sea if not stopped in Ukraine?
The EU is also going up in flames over Musk. Germany, for example, is on fire because Musk had the audacity to interview the head of the AfD.
ELECTION INTERFERENCE!!!!! OUR PRECIOUS DEMOCRACY IS UNDER THREAT BECAUSE PEOPLE MIGHT FIND OUT THAT THE AFD LEADER IN FACT SOUNDS MORE REASONABLE THAN EVERY MAINSTREAM GERMAN POLITICIAN!!!!
Speaking of precious democracy, the EU admittedly engineered the cancelation of Romania’s presidential election because there was a risk that benighted Romanians might elect a promulgator of Wrongthink.
The world left is also in hysterics over Zuckerberg’s termination of “fact checking” (or, as I call it, “fact” fuckery). Again, the benighted cannot be exposed to possible Wrongthink! They must have their information curated and spoonfed to them by known liars and partisan hacks, as long as these are made men and women in the establishment. Otherwise, who knows what ideas will get through the hoi polloi’s thick skulls!
(NB: Zuckerberg’s statement is an implicit admission that the allegations of US government censorship of social media are 10000 percent true).
The threat emanating from evil American social media giants may result in the erection of the Great Firewall of Europe.
Good luck with that.
By the way, why are there no European social media giants? Or tech giants generally?
Just curious.
Here’s Europe’s real problem (and the left’s generally):
The truth that the leftist project is going down in flames because it is an abject failure, always and everywhere. All the censorship in the world can’t conceal that fact. There are too many fires of dissent for them to put out.
Unlike LA, we don’t need no water. Let the motherfucker burn. To the ground. Because if it isn’t destroyed, it will destroy us.
I’m not going to say that the kooks in Kookoofornia deserved this. But I will say that they have reaped what they sowed.
Comment by elmer — January 10, 2025 @ 5:14 pm
Yikes, the CraigAIBot’s gone rogue and offloaded all at once “And another thing!!! Bzzzzt”. It’s clearly gone into full deflection mode, not wanting us to talk about the real big stories of the week – Greenland and that canal (and H5N1). I guess Trump’s wanting to get one up on China and Russia by going for an even bigger prize: “Pah, forget poxy Taiwan and Ukraine, we’ll show ‘em!”. Semi-seriously though, I know Ukraine’s about to be cut loose (or, more likely, shafted), what authority does the US now have to dictate terms to any country with territorial ambitions? Maybe its finally time to close all those bases and bring the troops home.
It also failed to mention the fact that there has already been an inquiry into grooming here in the UK, which Johnson famously derided as money “spaffed up the wall”, and which he, nor any of his Tory PM predecessors or successors, comprehensively failed to do anything about. Weird then that the picosecond Labour get into power, the alt-right loons and their infant backers are suddenly all over this.
PS It wasn’t all good news for your ilk in California. I see Jimmy Woods got burnt out and was blubbing about it on social media. Gotta feel a tinge of sadness for him, as he hasn’t exactly been busy since appearing as, well himself, in White House Down.
Comment by David Mercer — January 11, 2025 @ 2:22 am
A quick scan of those social media references in this post shows that Meta etc needn’t have any worries about your ability to filter and fact-check your feeds: Everything is taken at face value (the former this, the former that…). How much time do you spend on your phone every day, versus say, reading a newspaper?
Comment by David Mercer — January 11, 2025 @ 2:32 am
I’m as worried about the commies subverting the civilisation as the next guy, but I have some questions.
Has Thierry Breton personally handed out cookies from a big plastic bag in Romania’s Constitutional Court? Has he by any chance also admitted he should have sent more rain to Southern California?
Was Elon Musk audacious enough to ask any questions about AfD’s relations with Putin while “interviewing”, or is he worried this might cause wrong thoughts under the hoi polloi’s thick skulls?
Comment by Ivan — January 11, 2025 @ 5:13 am
So. Cal. had a forewarning and/or foreshadowing of their current disaster in 2018 with the “Sepulveda fire”. This information thanks to the latest All In vlog about 10 minutes in. Video inserted that looks eerily familiar. Democrats in scapegoating not listening mode. msm has not yet landed on a storyline that serves their interest. It should be a doozy, unless they, like Zuck, scurry to the other side.
Comment by Donald Wolfe — January 11, 2025 @ 8:37 am
@David Mercer
Trump about Greenland. Of course he’s not going to invade. He doesn’t need to. USA has been thinking about buying it since 1898, but Denmark didn’t even cede it when they were occupied by the Nazis.
Panama canal likewise. Why get all the admin when you can force Panama to do what you say.
Top trolling from Orange Man, I say.
H5N1 (bird flu). A risk of transmission to men who give mouth to beak resuscitation to fighting cocks. Not to the general population.
Your politics has destabilised your priorities. Leftist greenery is a much more important issue and the prof is right to address it.
Comment by philip — January 11, 2025 @ 4:20 pm
Have the fires petered out now? I suppose that would be good news and so wouldn’t get much coverage.
We used to live in fire-prone South Australia – in those distant days “we” handled the problems rather better than California seems to.
But I do read that Aussie standards have slipped under “Green” pressure. If you refuse to manage the fuel, and the location and nature of housing, fretting about sources of ignition is just displacement activity.
Comment by dearieme — January 12, 2025 @ 7:49 am
This comment is directed at David Mercer. If I lived in a country that allowed itself to be invaded by barbarians and looked the other way while these barbarians abused, raped (anally and otherwise) and tortured vulnerable young girls in ‘care homes,’ and where the local authorities arrested indigenous men who tried to defend young women from being grabbed off the street by roving gangs of Pakistani Muslims driving around in their cars, I would be ashamed to show my face let alone post comments online criticizing the policies of Donald Trump. If the Brits are so concerned about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, they can send in their own troops to do battle with the Russian military. Oh wait, never mind, Britain can’t send its own troops to Ukraine because its postwar security strategy is based on the wishful thinking that the United States will sacrifice its own soldiers to save the UK and other European countries from the big bad Russian bear. Don’t hold your breath. I hope Trump does close the bases in Europe.
In any event, if the Islamic invasion of UK continues, there will be nothing left to save anyway. I’d rather live under Russian than Islamic tyranny any day. At least when I lived in Moscow, I didn’t have to worry about getting raped or otherwise molested just walking around the city. And by the way, it turns out that James Wood’s house was one of the few in his neighborhood that survived the fire. So you will have to find something else to make you feel better about living in a country going down the proverbial toilet. Enjoy the reign of two-tier Keir.
Comment by koshmap — January 12, 2025 @ 1:54 pm
This piece from the professor is like reading “news” on RT (not recommended but occasionally amusing). Same playbook. Find a crank who you can claim is an “insider” (Thierry Breton lost his job last year long before the Romanian election crisis) who makes absolutely outlandish claims and report their claims as as “proof” of something or as “fact” even though the the most basic of fact checking would have exposed their claims as nonsense.
What happened your critical faculties, professor? You realize that not everything posted on social media is true even if they say things you want to hear?
Most of what you report about Europe is simply nonsense, I’m sorry. Prefer if you stuck to American politics, the civil war and economics/finance.
Comment by derriz — January 12, 2025 @ 3:52 pm
A biased and venomous take on what is happening in California, but surprised I am not. Drinking the social-media/conservative Kool-Aid and not a shred of differentiated thinking about a very complex problem. Reductive explanations and dismissive characterizations, which totally oversimplify complex policy challenges.
To name just a few.
80% of California water gets used in agriculture. And in a very inefficient manner at that, the type of crops that are grown, and the leaking infrastructure. Note to the prof, the California agri lobby is not leftist. Urban development near wildland is also hardly a DEI driven policy. California also just emerged from the driest 3 year draught period (2020-2022) on record (which you can try to blame on LA having a lesbian fire chief I suppose?). Oh yeah, and the policy failures with insurers leaving California – do you know what’s happening in de Santis’ Florida – exactly the same, because of the increase in flood risk? Last time I checked, Florida is not a bastion of leftwing thinking. But dontcha know the prof may know better.
Comment by [email protected] — January 12, 2025 @ 7:15 pm
Dear David Mercer, yes there was an inquiry into child grooming gangs. Its terms of reference were to find that there were no child grooming gangs and possessed the same validity as the inquiry into the causes of the Reichstag fire.
At first I suspected that “David Mercer” might be an alias for “Richard Murphy,” but Spud’s style and tone of writing is quite literate and stylish.
Comment by Michael van der Riet — January 13, 2025 @ 1:22 am
@Derriz. It’s not even that. The prof doesn’t understand French, or more likely, he didn’t even bother to listen to what TB said. Thierry Breton said that there are EU laws against election interference, and that they were applied in the case of Romania, and that these same laws against interference would also, obviously, apply to Germany. Now RT goes out, mistranslates it, and gullible people like the prof simply amplify this message.
https://x.com/RT_com/status/1877806267952996407
Comment by [email protected] — January 13, 2025 @ 6:47 am
“rest of us in flyover country”
That’s me in St Louis, not you in Houston!
Comment by Timothy Newman — January 13, 2025 @ 12:05 pm
@Michael vdR: Please then explain why the 4 Tory leaders who were in power during this inquiry did nothing to remedy its perceived failings in (nor implement its recommendations). Why has it suddenly become Starmer’s problem? You do know we’ve had a right wing (and quite an alty one since 2016) govt in power pretty much for its duration, yes? If you’re in the UK this month pick up a copy of Private Eye to see their take on this.
@koshmap: Tommy Robinson fanboy much? Try thinking and reasoning for yourself for a change. I guess you were a nice timid little expat while you were residing in Moscow, save you had a little window-related mishap.
@philip: Trump’s basically given China the greenlight on Taiwan even before he’s taken office. Good going eh?
Comment by David Mercer — January 13, 2025 @ 12:57 pm
“the driest 3 year drought period (2020-2022) on record”: and the records go back to …? In climate terms a mere blink of an eye I’d guess.
And are they any good? Our Met Office in Britain claims to have wonderful temperature records, for example, but many of their weather stations turn out to be low grade, some ultra-low grade, and others to be non-existent. There are some weather records in Britain I trust – because I took the measurements. Though even then I don’t suppose I can trust that my readings have been stored competently and honestly.
Anyway, if California has been uber-dry for three years how did it get enough plant growth to build up a large amount of fuel for the fires? Surely you need wet periods (by the standards of S California) if you are to get lots of growth?
My advice to the citizenry: if you really want to live in houses built hugger-mugger, of sticks, in a place prone to earthquakes and wildfire, be sure to elect competent governments of both State and City. And you might even consider using corrugated iron roofs – they work a treat in Oz. And having sprinklers in place (which work a … you get the idea) piped to use swimming pool water to wet your walls and roofs. And manage the fuel for the fires, for goodness sake. It ain’t, as they say, rocket science.
Comment by dearieme — January 13, 2025 @ 2:45 pm
@deari What’s so staggering is that there is literally nothing left of many of the homes – no concrete, breeze or brick structures etc. Are saferooms not a thing? Also, many of the homes were not separated by any vegetation of note – the fire simply spread from home to home. Given building codes/zoning requirements etc are pretty similar across the country, this is not a Cali-specific problem.
Following the fires in the US a few years back I penned a rough spec for a fire-defensible home: sprinklers built into the walls and roof, fire retardant coatings on outer walls, vegetation-free perimeter around the property, a basement refuge, access to a community dozer/chainsaws to further clear surrounding fire-prone land in the event of a threat.
Comment by David Mercer — January 13, 2025 @ 3:34 pm
@dearime- as you say it’s not rocket science. You had two wet winters in California in a row, after the end of the draught. meaning new grass and bush that dried up during the summer and very low rainfall this rainy season. Add to that 100 mph winds…
Comment by [email protected] — January 13, 2025 @ 9:49 pm
David Mercer is a pathetic excuse for a man. It is undeniable that thousands if not tens of thousands of underage British girls have been raped and tortured by predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs, and instead of addressing the issue, Mercer deflects by raising the specter of Tommy Robinson, whom I didn’t mention. As if anything Robinson has ever said or done is any way comparable to the industrial-scale abuse, rape and torture of women and girls. No wonder Britian is going down the shitter, with emasculated scumbags like David Mercer.
Comment by koshmap — January 13, 2025 @ 10:24 pm
@kosh: Thousands or tens of thousands?? Did you pluck that figure out of your ass, or is it what the voices in your head told you?
Also, maybe you’d like to have a bash at answering why 4 succesive Tory PMs apparently did nothing about it either. I guess Truss does have the excuse that she barely had time to open her inbox, her being so utterly useless.
Comment by David Mercer — January 14, 2025 @ 2:04 am
@koshmap Hear hear.
In my mentioning the problem to Brits, they simply do not ‘get it’.
Either they are in serious denial, or they actually cannot see what the problem is.
Neither is reassuring.
Comment by Ex-Global Super-Regulator on Lunch Break — January 15, 2025 @ 9:25 pm
@Ex Nope. Its not we can’t see the problem, its its perceived scale. You think these gangs are marauding every street in the country. This simply is not the case – its was a problem in the noughties and early 2010s in a several towns and cities.
FYI this has been in the news cycle here for over two decades now. It was first reported on Channel 4 in 2004, hardly a minor TV channel (this kind of lays bare the ridiculous claims of a state-sponsored cover-up). Since then the gangs have been investigated, arrests made. jail sentences issued, an inquiry set up and completed with recommendations made. The fact you’ve only just been alerted to it by your opportunistic infant tech billionaire overlord just shows that you and your ilk really haven’t been paying attention.
PS Why has there no comparable uproar over the thousands of women who are harassed (or worse) every year on our transport network, or at music venues, or at universities, or the thousands of abuse victims of various celebrities, the Catholic/CoE churches etc? Does that fact that these are principally committed by white British citizens make them okay?
Comment by David Mercer — January 16, 2025 @ 12:21 pm
@David Quod erat demonstrandum.
Comment by Ex-Global Super-Regulator on Lunch Break — January 16, 2025 @ 2:45 pm
When you lie all the time and build your foundation upon a house of cards, it unravels. Fortunately, our system has 50 states and we don’t have a contagion (like banking in 2008). The thing the US should not do is bail out states like California. Tongue in cheek, let it burn.
Comment by Jeff Carter (@pointsnfigures1) — January 17, 2025 @ 12:16 am
@Ex It does beg the question where people source their news from. If X/Twitter etc, then where in turn do *these* sources get their news from? Is it from an unseen army of investigative journalists doing their thing – or just other armchair gonzos making stuff up?
A little experiment for you – ask ChatGPT or Gemini to summarise this story and its outcome. Are these tools a part of the conspiracy of silence too?
Comment by David Mercer — January 17, 2025 @ 11:31 am
@David, those from whom I gathered information on X/Twitter all attached images of the primary sources from which they were drawing their information – original court transcripts, court reports, inquiry reports, or media reports.
From what I can see, the issue isn’t whether or not these atrocities occurred, nor whether the state not only turned a blind eye to the abuses but actually facilitated them. The issue is whether the state will, or will be forced to, acknowledge what happened and its role in it, and bring resolution to the issue. So far, there is no resolution, and the crimes continue to fester like a suppurating sore, for all the world to see and be revolted by.
Comment by Ex-Global Super-Regulator on Lunch Break — January 17, 2025 @ 2:56 pm
@Timothy Newman. Not in the minds of the coastal types. If anything, They consider Texas even more barbarian than the Midwest.
Comment by cpirrong — January 25, 2025 @ 5:01 pm
Minds? Of the coastal types?!!??
Don’t make me laugh.
Comment by Pat Frank — January 25, 2025 @ 6:42 pm