- The southern California wildfires, and Will Rogers Ranch;
- How conservatives blame people they don’t like for everything;
- Perhaps I should create a new “Jack Smith” rule to dismiss claims by conservatives, since they always seem to be wrong;
- Lagniappes about Trump and the Mercator Projection of the globe, and his admiration for Putin.
News today is dominated by the wildfires in the Los Angeles area, beginning with the one that broke out yesterday in Pacific Palisades, an area of canyons right along the coast and between Santa Monica and Malibu. That’s not too far from where my partner’s son and his wife live in West L.A., so we texted them to ask their status. They weren’t in an evacuation zone, but they evacuated anyway, driving some 45 miles to Brea, east of L.A., to stay at his mother’s place. We watched CNN news about the fires last night, and again this morning.
Having lived both in So- and NoCal all my life, I’m familiar with the perpetual threat of big fires. I’ve never been near enough to be threatened by one. But I remember, vaguely, the 1961 Bel Air fire, partly through my father’s photos, a couple of which are posted on this page of my family history.
I have found a place that has burned down in the Palisades fire that we knew in particular, because we took a hike there in our December 2023 trip to LA to see partner’s son and wife — via this — the Will Rogers Ranch. I mentioned the hike in my post about that trip. The WRR folks have already posted before and after pics of the ranch house.
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The news is changing so fast I won’t link to any particular CNN or newspaper item. I’ll link this personal summary:
The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf, 8 Jan 2025: The Particular Horror of the Los Angeles Wildfires, subtitled “Southern California is no stranger to fires. But the dreadful blazes that began yesterday are potentially transformative.”
When wildfires began ravaging Los Angeles yesterday, the story was familiar in many respects: In dry and windy weather, a small blaze can spread so fast and so far that no one can do anything to stop it, especially in terrain dense with brush and hard for firefighters to reach.
Pacific Palisades, where the first fire began, is such a neighborhood; its roughly 24 square miles are beside rugged wilderness. The roads are winding. Homes are built on parts of a mountain range and in six major canyons. A fire-hazard map proposed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in 2022 described the area as “very high” risk—the highest possible categorization. And it has burned before, most significantly in November 1961, during a historic blaze.
Yet for all their predictability, these blazes are also outliers. Among people I spoke with who have observed Southern California wildfires for decades, several felt that these fires are unusually dramatic and dreadful, and have more potential than most to alter regional politics.
And so the blame game starts. “Our politicians have failed us.” Maybe, but that’s obviously not the ultimate cause. “Weather is the biggest factor in the city’s fate.” Maybe for a few days. But the broader issue is not mentioned.
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And also this, which provides a segue to the theme of yesterday’s post.
Slate, Nitish Pahwa, 8 Jan 2025: The California Wildfires Just Revealed This Very Grim Truth, subtitled “When the smoke clears, the lies remain.”
Beginning with another decent summary of the fires to date. And then:
So naturally, it’s conspiracy time.
Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we’re getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future. In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes.
California hadn’t even woken to its amber skies Wednesday morning before right-wing media began running with attacks on the L.A. Fire Department’s chief, the first lesbian woman to lead the force and already the subject of ugly attacks purely on the basis of her identity. While other area celebrities—Mark Hamill, Steve Guttenberg—either gave straitlaced updates on their escapes or even helped fire crews clear roads, conservative actor and Palisades homeowner James Woods instead denied that climate change played any role in the fires and blamed “diversity,” citing the LAFD chief’s profile.
The article briefly does some both-sides-ism — “The conspiracies are also not limited to the right.” — but concludes:
Here’s the real, ugly truth: This is just how every major climate disaster is going to unfold online from here on out. There will be criticisms and expressions of fury, some more fair and reasoned than others, But in an ecosystem where social media outlets have purposefully hobbled their ability to provide real-time, reliable updates to users, the people affected by those disasters are literally left in the dark.
The government is never blameless when it comes to the impacts of and recovery from wildfires and storms. Still, while it takes time and effort to extinguish flames and dispatch reliable information in favor of the public interest, opportunistic liars need no such time to push their agendas. After decades of fossil-industry-funded climate denial, far-right figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene can get away with claiming Jewish space lasers are responsible for fires and that “they” can “control the weather” in order to target North Carolinians.
One can only do so much to debunk each individual conspiracy theory as brutal fires like California’s continue to spread. And as climate change supercharges more storms, fires, earthquakes, and other inevitable tragedies throughout this year and beyond, prepare to have to deal with these ambushes as well. Climate change doesn’t just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too.
And the “opportunistic liars [who] need no such time to push their agendas” are virtually always on the right.
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One more:
NBC News, 8 Jan 2025: Trump blames Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom for deadly wildfires, subtitled “A spokesperson for Newsom called Trump’s comments ‘pure fiction’ and accused the president-elect of ‘playing politics’ with the disaster.”
I won’t quote what this article quoted from Trump. Trying to be balanced, it tries to think what could Trump have possibly meant by the accusations he made. For example:
Trump and his allies spread conspiracy theories about FEMA during the last months of the 2024 presidential campaign last year and in the aftermath of several destructive hurricanes in the south.
The falsehood appeared to conflate two FEMA funds — one for disaster relief that legally cannot be used for other reasons and one Customs and Border Protection fund that FEMA was instructed to disseminate to communities who received an influx of migrants.
But as usual he’s twisting and oversimplifying things in order to demonize his political rivals. He has no interest in truth, or actually helping people.
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Years ago, in the second month of this blog, I posted How to Be a Successful Prophet: Applying The Jack Smith Rule. The rule, essentially, was to take every prediction by any psychic or self-described religious “prophet,” predict the opposite, and you will win, you’ll be right much more often than they are. There were a couple examples in the post of diabolical predictions (one from Orson Scott Card!) that of course did not come true.
For year’s I’ve tried to understand the conservative mindset. Do they think lies don’t matter because they live for a higher cause? Do they live by ideology and not reason? Do they simply not understand — given religious inculcation as children — that conclusions should be based on evidence, and not assertions or ancient stories or wishful thinking? For whatever reason, I think one conclusion can be drawn. That, like those claims of prophets and other charlatans, you can simply dismiss claims by far-right-wingers, and for that matter most Republicans. They do not live in a reality-based world.
Hmm, what name should I give this new rule?
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Lagniappes
Here’s a claim that presumes that Trump is really dumb. Seems plausible to me.
Slate, Jim Newell, 7 Jan 2025: I Know Why Trump Really Wants Greenland, subtitled “It’s the same reason he wants to annex Canada.”
Because the Mercator projection of the world, which I’m showing here rather than the image from the article, implies that Greenland and Canada are *huge*. In a way that is not true, as is evident by looking at a globe. (Alas, SNL still uses that Mercator projection behind its “Weekend Update.”)
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Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 8 Jan 2025: Trump’s minions are laying the groundwork for military action, subtitled “Donald Trump appears to have taken some inspiration from Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion”
It’s well-known that Trump admires authoritarian leaders, and wants to be one too.
His central conceit all the way back to 2016 was that he’s a man of peace who wanted to put America first. People misinterpreted it as a sort of pacifist isolationism. It was not. He wanted to spend massive sums to build up the U.S. military to make allies pay up for protection and he believed that tariffs should be used as economic weapons to dominate other countries. In other words, he believes that U.S. power should be used to bend the world to his will.
His recent comments about Mexico, Canada, Panama and Greenland show that this strategy has matured beyond just extorting money from other countries at the end of some very big guns, both military and economic, and has now become a full-fledged policy of territorial expansion.
In that typically crazy press conference on Tuesday, he made the startling announcement that he plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. His loyal hatchet woman, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, promptly announced legislation to do just that so that the government could get to work changing all the maps. The fact that the Gulf of Mexico has been called that since before there was a United States of America makes no difference. Trump wants it and he’s going to make it so.
He is a megalomaniac moron. Why don’t people see this? Is this an indictment of people in general, or Americans (with their fantasy of exceptionalism) in particular? Or are most people really like this?
(Draft)
