California Burning

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Photo taken from nephews’ home, glendale, CA as family was fleeing

Two of my nephews and their families have had to evacuate their homes in the LA area. The cause of these fires is not known, but one writer speculates that they might very well have been ignited by one of the hundreds (thousands?) of homeless encampments in the hills and spread because of LA’s and our federal government’s mismanagement. Whatever the cause, it wasn’t, as the weather hysterics will soon be claiming, global warming. Human stupidity is far more powerful than phony science.

L.A.'s Firestorm

Victoria Taft, PJ Media:

Firefighters say that L.A.'s hellacious firestorm started at 10:30 Tuesday morning in Topanga Canyon. This paradise is — was? — filled with bespoke homes and came with built-in privacy — a rare commodity. People have been uprooted, their family memories are in ashes, and they have to find a place to sleep tonight. Evacuated entertainment stars such as James Woods, Ben Affleck, Eugene Levy, and more likely haven't had a chance to ask this secondary question: What started this fire? 

First, any number of things could have started the fire that turned into a conflagration that destroyed untold numbers of homes and scorched at least 3,000 acres — and counting — of prime Los Angeles area real estate. Someone could have flicked a cigarette butt out the window. Car exhaust could have sparked dry brush on the side of the road. Arsonists have been known to purposely set fires in Southern California. 

Or maybe it was the same thing that started fires in the past: homeless encampments.

In 2021, Topanga Canyon residents were so concerned with homeless encampments and fire danger that they ostensibly "banned" them. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to ban homeless camps because cooking dinner or drugs outside in dry brush is a really dumb idea. 

Film producer and conservative Mike Cernovich predicts that before the embers are put out of the Palisades fire, a Hollywood "sh*tlib" will blame it not on homeless encampments or an arsonist but on climate change. 

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. 

The I-Team discovered that some of these encampment fires are apparently caused by homeless people tapping into city electrical wires under the sidewalk, meant to bring power to streetlights, and diverting the electricity into their tents.

Here are just a few recent wildfires started by drug-addled "homeless" campers. 

  • Jan 7, 2025: Santa Ana Riverbed Fire one acre, destroyed tents, RVs, and at least 12 cars.

  • Nov. 14, 2024: Van Nuys, impacted commuters on freeways throughout San Fernando Valley.

  • May 2024: Hollywood Boulevard, aforementioned electrical fire, threatened nearby buildings.

  • Jan. 7, 2024: Hollywood, Cahuenga Pass, during high winds. Two cars and some trees were destroyed.

  • April 20, 2021: Venice Beach, one home was destroyed and a dog killed. Believed linked to a string of homeless encampment fires in the area.

 

“GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM, GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM”. Ronald Reagan.

The response has been next to nothing by county and state officials. Gavin Newsom's plan to help the homeless has resulted in missing billions of dollars and a nearly doubling of the homeless population.

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

[T]he U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed. 

The pause comes amid the crucial fall window for planned, controlled burns, which remove fuel and can protect homes from future wildfires — raising concerns that the move will increase long-term fire risks. 

“There are two times in the year when it’s safe to do prescribed fire: in the fall right before the rains come, and in the spring when things are dry enough to burn but not dry enough to burn it in a dangerous way,” said Michael Wara, energy and climate expert at Stanford University. He worries half of the prescribed fire season on federal lands will be sacrificed because of this decision.

Though this doesn't impact what happened in Topanga Canyon, it tells you the mindset of these do-gooders.

Financial wizards

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Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stock portfolio outperformed the S&P 500 index by nearly 200% in 2024

But she still fell behind nine of her congressional colleagues.

Pelosi’s portfolio’s 70.9% increase from Dec. 29, 2023, to Dec. 30, 2024, was nearly triple the S&P 500’s 24.9% return, but it fell well below those of Republican North Carolina Rep. David Rouzer and Democratic Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who saw returns of 149% and 142.3% — topping the list of members of Congress. Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, Republican Texas Rep. Roger Williams and Democratic Kentucky Rep. Morgan McGarvey’s portfolios also saw double-digit increases, rising 123.8%, 111.2% and 105.8% in 2024, respectively, according to financial data platform Unusual Whales’ 2024 Congress Trading Report.

(RELATED: Nancy Pelosi, Husband Sold Google Stock One Month Before DOJ Announced Antitrust Lawsuit)

Pelosi’s annual returns also lagged behind those of Republican Reps. Larry Bucshon of Indiana and Pete Sessions of Texas, who saw increases of 98.6% and 95.2%, as well as Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Republican Tennessee Rep. David Kustoff, whose portfolios grew 77.5% and 71.5%, respectively, the trading data showed.

Well, of course it isn’t: they merely (falsely) use the "endangered species" claim to stop all development of any kind

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Snail darter revisited: Famous fish that halted a dam's construction is not endangered after all

And lets not forget the spotted owl, the excuse for shutting down the Northwest’s timber industry and the logging towns that once flourished there. The owls are thriving; the towns and their residents are gone, exactly as intended.

Monkey see, monkey do

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Senator James maroney WAtches how it’s done

The Balkanization of the United States continues.

A Democratic lawmaker who is among the nation's biggest legislative proponents of regulating artificial intelligence is hopeful to see legislation pass this year to protect residents from potentially discriminatory and harmful uses of algorithms.

State Sen. James Maroney, D-Milford, introduced legislation last year to regulate artificial intelligence that ultimately died when Gov. Ned Lamont signaled his dissentover concerns that Connecticut would legislate the issue differently than other states as the issue becomes more salient nationally.

Maroney said he believes this year can be different though after leading a consortium with representatives from 47 state legislatures last year.

“I think we’re in a different place from last year; the governor didn’t want to be the first or the tip of the spear,” he said.

Last June, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a comprehensive artificial intelligence regulation bill. Maroney said other states have adopted bills with smaller pieces of the Colorado bill and the bill proposed in Connecticut.

"I'm in close touch with Sen. (Robert) Rodriguez who passed this bill in Colorado and keeping abreast of what's going on with Colorado so we can make changes with our bill here," he said. "But our goal is to stay as close as possible to the Colorado bill."

DISKWINATION! It’s all about Diskwinimation

According to an overview of the Colorado bill that Maroney seeks to emulate, the law requires algorithm developers to disclose information demonstrating they took reasonable care to protect from discrimination. This can include providing a statement about the information used to train the model and a risk management policy, as well as making consumers aware they are interacting with an artificial intelligence model.

Maroney said one challenge of artificial intelligence algorithms is when they are deployed for things, such as approving housing and hiring, since they are only as good as the models they're trained on, which may include discriminatory biases.

“We have been doing our best in the absence of federal legislation, which I think is highly unlikely, to work across the states,” he said. "I think we will see a similar number of bills in other states."

Here’s the Colorado law:

AN ACT CONCERNING CONSUMER PROTECTIONS IN INTERACTIONS WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS.

(I drafted a lengthy summary of all 26 pages of the document, but then conceded to myself that only a law junkie would want to plow through it all, so I’ve just left the link, and you can dip into it or — almost certainly — not. Suffice to say that it places an incredibly onerous, time-consuming burden of AI developers and the companies that use their programs to draw up and submit to the state bureaucrats a detailed plan of how they are ensuring that the devloprs’ algorithms only discriminate against white, able-bodied males.)

Like this:

DEFINITIONS:

(1) (a) "ALGORITHMIC DISCRIMINATION" MEANS ANY CONDITION IN

WHICH THE USE OF AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM RESULTS IN AN

UNLAWFUL DIFFERENTIAL TREATMENT OR IMPACT THAT DISFAVORS AN

INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP OF INDIVIDUALS ON THE BASIS OF THEIR ACTUAL OR

PERCEIVED AGE, COLOR, DISABILITY, ETHNICITY, GENETIC INFORMATION,

LIMITED PROFICIENCY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, NATIONAL ORIGIN, RACE,

RELIGION, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, SEX, VETERAN STATUS, OR OTHER

CLASSIFICATION PROTECTED UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS STATE OR FEDERAL

LAW.

No mention in Colorado’s law is made of how many new DEI graduates will have to be added to the state payroll to monitor and review all these new reports, and our own Senator Maroney is mum on the issue himself but I’ve never met a Democrat politician who considered expanding the unionized government labor force a bad thing, so I doubt they’ve even considered the matter, nor will they.


Related?

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Greenwich here we come

Greenwich December stats are out. Single family homes:

  • Median Price up 30.34%, $2.9 million vs $2.225 December ‘23

  • Days on Market down 32.8%, 51 days vs 76

  • New to the market, up 33.333%, 16 vs 12

  • Inventory still dropping, down 21.6%, 98 vs 125.

And then this:

NYC sees ‘staggering’ 146.5% spike in felony assaults by repeat offenders as top cops blame ‘broken system’