Jan. 9: Why Los Angeles Is Burning
Jews are #1 (in NYC hate crimes); Fluoride makes you dumb, scientists say; The teen gender gap in Norway
The Big Story
Several major wildfires continued to burn throughout Los Angeles on Thursday, displacing thousands and causing billions in property damage. The following graphic, from The New York Times, shows the location of the major fires and of the evacuation orders (red) and warnings throughout the city as of midday Thursday:
The two largest fires, in Palisades and Eaton, are already the most destructive wildfires in L.A. history, and together burning around 27,000 acres over the past two days. In the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, the upscale residential area that has seen some of the worst destruction, fire hydrants ran dry late Tuesday and early Wednesday, as surging demand brought water levels in the local tanks below the minimum water pressure required to push the water uphill. Firefighters’ response was also limited by the Santa Ana winds, which not only helped spread the fires but also kept aircraft grounded, preventing the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) from deploying its fleet of firefighting airplanes and helicopters. Those winds died down on Thursday, allowing airborne firefighting to commence, but the Palisades, Eaton, and Sunset fires all remained at 0% containment as of The Scroll’s publication time, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The winds are expected to pick up again on Friday, which could once again ground aircraft and push the fires into new areas of the city.
The LAFD appears to be attempting to be doing what it can in a horrific situation, and both the state and federal governments have deployed additional resources to the L.A. area. But the disaster has brought a torrent of criticism, much of it justified, of the city and state’s preparedness.
Current LAFD Fire Chief Kristin Crowley in 2022 had declared DEI to be one of the department’s top priorities, as we wrote yesterday, and others pointed out on social media that the department had placed at least 113 firefighters on unpaid leave in 2021 over their refusal to comply with vaccine mandates, though most had been recalled to duty over this past summer. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana when the fires broke out, and while she quickly returned to L.A. on Wednesday, she delivered a disjointed press conference in which she told residents who needed help that emergency resources could be “found at URL.” To be fair, neither the DEI push nor Bass’s Africa trip had anything to do with the blazes, but both suggested an LA political echelon focused more on the frivolities than on core government responsibilities. President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, blasted Gov. Gavin Newsom for California’s water policies, which, he said, had prioritized the survival of a “worthless fish,” the Delta smelt, over emergency preparedness. Newsom and others on the left have in turn blamed “climate change” for the conflagration.
More serious were the accusations that the city and the state had failed to adequately prepare for fires by constructing additional water reservoirs and clearing brush through controlled burns and mechanical removal. Both have been limited in one way or another due to environmental concerns. As the writer Matthew Zeitlin explained in a recent article for Heatmap, the federal Clean Air Act, in its current interpretation, actively discourages controlled burns for fire management, since the Environmental Protection Agency counts emissions from controlled burns in its assessments of states’ compliance with federal air-quality standards. Emissions from wildfires, which are considered “exceptional events,” don’t count. Underclearance of fuel is particularly troublesome because, as the Johns Hopkins climatologist Patrick Brown observed in a June 2024 X thread, fires are a natural part of the climate in many areas of the American West. As humans have established denser settlements, agriculture, and conservation in these areas, they have “over-suppressed” natural fires. The result has been to allow the long-term accumulation of fuel, as seen in the following pictures of forest development in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest:
The State of California, meanwhile, has been ponderously slow to construct new dams and water reservoirs. A February 2023 article from CalMatters, for instance, noted that the state had been planning to build the Sites Reservoir—intended to provide drinking, agricultural, and firefighting water to Southern California—in a corner of the Sacramento Valley for at least 40 years; state voters had even approved $2.7 billion in new funding for water storage projects in 2014. Yet completion of the project is not expected until 2030 or 2031, with much of the delay attributed to the slow process of permitting and environmental review. “My personal rule of thumb is that for every year of construction you spend about three years in the planning-permitting-engineering stage,” one developer told CalMatters. “Since Sites’ construction takes six years, the [permitting and review] process would be expected to take 18 years.”
Ultimately, however, wildfires of this scale and destruction may simply be an inevitable result of expanding settlement, population density, and property values. In an interview with Michael Shellenberger of the “Public” Substack, Jon Keeley, a scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey, said that a “high-intensity fire in Southern California” is a “normal event” historically. What has changed is human settlement patterns:
If you look at fires history in the San Gabriel Valley, which is where the Eaton fire occurred 50 years ago, we didn't have events where fires burned into communities. In part that was due because the urban environment was surrounded by citrus orchards. And that's what buffered the communities from the wildland areas. And if fires started within those citrus orchards or burned into them, they generally burned out. Today, we don't have citrus orchards. We just have more homes.
Keeley was dismissive of the idea that climate change was responsible for the fires, but also pessimistic that they could be avoided altogether:
I don’t think these fires are 100 percent preventable. We can reduce the probability of a fire. You can reduce the probability that they’ll be destructive. There are things you can do. But, these fires are a normal part of the environment.
Read the full interview here:
The Rest
→Stat of the Day: 54%
That’s the Jewish percentage of hate crime victims in New York City in 2024, according to statistics released by the New York Police Department and reported in the New York Post on Wednesday. That means, as the Post writes, that Jews were targeted “more than all other minority groups combined.” Overall, the NYPD reported 345 anti-Jewish incidents over the past year, up slightly from 323 in 2023, even as overall reported hate crimes decreased from 671 in 2023 to 641 in 2024.
→Fluoride exposure is linked to lower IQ in children, according to a federal systematic review and meta-analysis published this week in JAMA Pediatrics. The New York Times reports that the analysis, which looked at 74 studies in foreign countries (45 from China, for instance), concluded that “for every one part per million (PPM) increase in fluoride in urinary samples … IQ points in children decreased by 1.63.” Most of the studies in the analysis come from countries with higher water-fluoridation levels than those in the United States, but the findings are nonetheless concerning, as the meta-analysis found a “dose-response relationship” between fluoride and IQ, “with IQ scores falling in lock step with increasing fluoride exposure.” And while a 1.63-point-per-PPM decrease in IQ may seem small, the researchers note, a “5-point decrease in a population’s IQ would nearly double the number of people classified as intellectually disabled.” Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said that one of his first acts in office will be to “advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.”
→Lebanon’s parliament elected the chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces, Joseph Aoun, as president on Thursday, fulfilling the long-nurtured Obama-Biden dream of placing a fictional executive in charge of the fictional Mediterranean country. Aoun has promised to both “deter [Israeli] aggression” and to ensure that the Lebanese state has a “monopoly” on the right to carry arms, according to The Times of Israel. The latter has led to a great deal of optimism among the foolish in the United States and Israel, who are now crowing that Aoun intends to “disarm Hezbollah”—something he’s shown no interest in doing during his eight years in charge of the LAF—and restore “stability” to the country, plus other similar nonsense. In reality, as David Daoud notes on X, Aoun was elected with Hezbollah’s support and votes in parliament, and his election is in any case “irrelevant,” since neither he nor any other Lebanese president will disarm Hezbollah for the very simple reason that Hezbollah controls Lebanon.
→Microsoft is joining Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in donating $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural fund, Gabe Kaminsky reports for Washington Examiner. The amount doubles the $500,000 the company gave to Trump in 2017 and to Biden in 2021 and is further evidence—alongside Meta’s abandonment of its fact-checking policy earlier this week—that Big Tech is seeking to mend fences with the incoming administration. Kaminsky notes, however, that Microsoft’s gift to Trump’s inaugural fund is still less than the $2 million that the company gave to Barack Obama’s fund in 2013.
→Chart of the Day:
This chart is taken from a preprint by the University of Bergen political scientist Ruben Mathisen, who looked at a dataset of interviews with 130,000 Norwegian high-school students from 1989 to 2023 and found that Norwegian teenagers are more politically polarized by gender now than at any point in history. According to Mathisen, 40-50% of the polarization is driven by diverging opinions on what he calls the “gender equality issue,” with teenage boys increasingly likely to agree with the statement that “gender equality has gone too far.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Israel Update: Mike’s Visit to Damascus
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“ Emissions from wildfires, which are considered “exceptional events,” don’t count.”
So, they get a pass from the EPA when a huge chunk of the state and thousands of peoples homes, cars and businesses burn down, but not for any efforts which might need to be taken in order to prevent such a catastrophic occurrence from happening.
Obviously, someone is just making up all these absurd regulations Willy-nilly as they go along. It’s like a freaking game to them.
They truly are certifiably insane.
“ fulfilling the long-nurtured Obama-Biden dream of placing a fictional executive in charge of the fictional Mediterranean country.”
Hahahaha!
C’mon man, as Obama’s American fictional character has been wont to say, how stupid do you think we all really are?
It’s like a Shakespearean tragedy/ comedy play.