"Malibu: Touring The Aftermath" (opens in separate window)

looters exploit wildfires

friday, january 17th, 2024

As wildfires rage across Los Angeles, which some say is the worst they’ve seen, looters have been emboldened, taking full advantage of the out-of-control region to plunder homes and businesses that have burned down. With LA police officers and private security guards pushed to the brink, the criminal element in the city is running rampant, showing just how fragile the fabric of society has become in this once-thriving metropolis. Unfortunately, the frightening sight of entire neighborhoods overtaken by wildfires has quickly turned southern California, including the Pacific Palisades, into an unrecognizable hellscape.

[FULL TITLE: "LA Descends Into Chaos as Looters Exploit Wildfires".]

Los Angeles city leaders called in the National Guard to help control the havoc wreaked by the fires as looting and possible civil unrest loom in the distance. LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman warned residents of looters and vowed to hold them accountable. Looters have reportedly tried taking advantage of the increasingly fragile environment, which is said to have cost the city $150 million in damage and economic loss.

“While the community rallies to support one another, we are also aware of the individuals who are targeting vulnerable victims to preying on this misfortune, seeking to exploit the vulnerability of those who have already endured so much,” Hochman said. “Let it be clearly known that those who seek to illegally profit from the pain and suffering of others—whether through looting, fraud, theft, burglary, or any other form of criminal activity—will not go unpunished.”

Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) echoed similar warnings, saying that looting would not be tolerated.

However, some of California's most prominent former residents accuse Newsom of "personally ruining" the state.

Arguably, one of the most popular podcast hosts out there, Joe Rogan, ripped Newsom a new one for doing next to nothing to prevent wildfires— a common occurrence in California.

“They spent $24 billion last year on the homeless, and what did they spend on preventing these wildfires?" Rogan asked, speaking to actor Mel Gibson. “Zip.”

Gibson pointed out that, in 2019, Newsom promised to take care of the forest and maintain it.

“He didn't do anything,” the actor said, noting that the state also cut off water supply.

Rogan directed his comments to Newsom, saying he is out of his “f---ing mind.”

“The whole state is so poorly managed," Rogan said. ”It’s so frustrating and confusing. And then he gets on TV and pretends like everything is great, ‘California’s the best, we have the best state, we have the most amazing economy.’”

Gibson argued that San Francisco looks like an apocalypse after Democrat leadership ruined the once-beautiful city, pointing out that the same left-wing policies are slowly trickling down to the rest of California.

According to UPI reports, at least 20 looters have been arrested since the fires began. Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna warned that any other looters would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. On Friday, he announced a curfew order for the Palisades and Eaton Fire areas in all mandatory evacuation zones starting at 6 p.m.

[JS: Shoot all looters, on sight; no exceptions. KILL THEM! $100 per head bounty on all looters, dead. Take no prisoners to waste US Taxpayers' monies on. KILL THEM!

A Day In The Life.

Up at 8a on Friday, I went thru my finger stick to check my BSL (Blood Sugar Level) and recorded it on my Diabetes 2 chart, made coffee and breakfast, skipped the two 50mg Tramadol and 300mg Gabapentin for various pains -- took a 250mg Bayer Aspirin instead -- fired-up the Win-7 Pentium HP Desktop to let 32 million lines of code load, had a couple smokes in the garage and checked the leftover errands list. Today and next week are clear, so I might get some "Sherry Time". (((Smile))).

A very cold 21°F, sunny, no wind, I darned near froze my butt off having a smoke in the open garage, after feeding the squirrels and bluejays. Heh. I had a potentially serious problem with an important web protection in my copy of MaslwareBytes Premium, and had to get help from their support agents to get it cleared, before going back out on the Net. By 11, it was fixed, I had some lunch, Sherry stopped by at 1p, and we had a very nice afternoon together. We drove to Flinchbaugh's Orchard & Farm Market in nearby Hallam, and to Saubel's Market in East York, before getting back to my condo. She left around 4:30p, even though it's staying a little lighter later, as we get closer to Spring.

I moved the Jeep into the garage, due to upcoming Winter Storm "Cora", and closed the condo for the night. That big, Jeep Grand Cherokee HEMI V8 takes up a LOT of room, and I'm seriously *cramped* when I have a smoke in the garage, but it's only overnight, until storm moves thru the area. 1-2" are forecast; no biggie. The South and parts of the Southwest got it far worse, with ice, too. I watched the news and switched to "Gold Rush" until 12:30a. Lights out.

Up at 6:45a on Saturday, to an overcast, very cold 19°, 2-3" of fresh snow from WS "Cora" covering everything, I bumped-up the heat, made coffee and had a couple smokes in the crowded garage. Nothing live worth listening to, on Saturday, so I used iHeart Radio to get the "CS Show Podcasts" Menu, and catch-up to him, since he's going national, syndicated and big time. I scanned the weather and news, and was sad to see that the CA Fires are still burning and out of control.

Poor California. A debacle of a disaster and no Republicans in sight to blame it on.

I lounged around all morning, listening to several of last week's missed podcasts, went thru 162 new emails, got ready for the day late morning, had an Olive Loaf Sandwich & Chips, did 2 errands and got back before dusk. I closed the condo, bumped-up the heat, and watched the 6p news. CA Fires still running wild. Motor Trend's "Mecum Auto Auction" (Kissimmee FL) was on and the high end vehicles of all kinds, were amazing. By 12:30a, I was nodding-off, and unplugged.

Up at 5a on Sunday -- ZERO DARK THIRTY -- I fired-up the heat, made coffee, had a smoke in the cold garage, and checked the weather and news on the office-sunroom desktop. Lots of things to get done today, before the new week starts, and since my cleaning lady wasn't in last week, I'm doing most of those things, too. After a 4-stack of French Toast, I did 2 loads of laundry, changed the bed's luxurious Flannel Sheets, a load of dishes, readied the garbage and recycle bin, and then took a break. By 2p, I was tired, and took a short 90 min nap on the LR couch. I closed the condo as it got dark and colder, had dinner, and watched the news and Discovery's "Homestead Rescue", until 1a, and bagged it for the night

Up at 9:15a on Monday, a cloudy, windless 34° morning ,forecast to hit 42°. I upped the heat, made coffee, had a smoke and tuned into the "CP Show LIVE". It took a while for my sleep-addled brain to wrap itself around the day's errands, but after the first carafe of Kona Coffee, I had it figured out. 1 of my 3 External 2Tb WAD Drives was unplugged, and it took a few minutes to find the 'glitch', but I quickly found the errant USB plug. After more coffee, and a couple smokes, I got ready for the day at 11a, and did a few quick chores before leaving for points south, at 12:30p.

Traffic was light, as I made the 4 stops, and was home by 2p, with 3 weeks of laundry (Shirts & Jeans) returns that I had to carry upstairs in 2 loads. TOO MUCH STUFF! After a Olive Loaf Sub, I grabbed a short snooze on the LR couch, while listening to the last of the morning's "CP Show Replay", in the background. Nice. I checked into FNC for the late afternoon news, and the CA Arson Fires' death toll is now moving past 24. Damn.

After dinner, I watched the usual evening Fox News and switched to Motor Trend's "Iron Resurrection" and then to The Weather Channel's "Weather Gone Viral" (forecasts and updates on CA ARSON fires) -- Here's just a few of thearsonists arrested so far -- until 11:30. Lights out.

Up at 6a on Tuesday -- another ZERO DARK THIRTY start -- I upped the heat, made coffee, tuned into the "CS Show LIVE" and fired-yup the oscillating Dyson Heater in the garage. At a bone-chilling 17°, it'll take a while to get any rise in temperature. Hey, it's Winter and it's supposed to be cold. I lounged around until 11"3-, got ready for the day, and did a couple nearby errands. The big HEMI V8 in the Jeep, requires 5-6mins to warm-up before driving. Metal against metal, without oil/water lubrication, when bitter cold, isn't a good thing, and will damage an engine's internals.

Back from the errands, I looked at a print-out of my 2024 purchases from Rite Aid, for 2024 Income Tax Medical purposes, stunned me: $62,840.80 Geisinger Medical payments, and $4,203.66 paid by me. YIKES! The insurance company's costs have almost tripled since 2023. Out-freaking-rageous.

I had lunch, worked on paperwork, did some condo chores and took a 90 min snooze on the LR couch. Later, I skipped dinner, watched the news, switched to History's "Curse of Oak Island" for the evening, and bagged it at 12 midnight.

Up at 7a on Wednesday, a sunny, bitter cold 17°, breezy morning, forecast to hit 31°. I upped the heat, made coffee, had a smoke and tuned into the "CS Show LIVE", and scanned the news and weather. I lounged around all morning, did a couple condo chores, had lunch, and Sherry arrived around 1p. We stayed at my place, and talked for the afternoon, had a great time, and she left before it got dark, by 4:30 or so. I had some dinner, watched the evening news, and switched to History's "American Pickers" until 12:30a. Lights out.

Awake and up at 8:30a on Thursday, I fired-up the furnace to 75°, made Kona Coffee, and finally tuned into the "CP Show LIVE". It was a bitter cold 19°, cloudy, light snow-on-the-way morning, so I fed the squirrels and bluejays, and did some more "Lounging", as usual. I like clear weeks, as this week and next week are. After a late breakfast, I had a quick run to a local convenience store to get a couple cartons of Marlboros, After a leftover load of laundry, I finished-off the dwindling pile of paperwork on my office-sunroom desk, and enjoyed the light snowfall. Sherry called to reschedule tomorrow's visit, and we'll do that over the weekend.

After dinner, I watched the 6p FNC News, and switched to Motor Trend's "Mecum Auto Auctions -- Kissimmee" until 11:30. Lights out.

Tomorrow starts a new day here in the "Journal", and it's another clear week, except for the few, usual errands. I'm enjoying the numerous periods of snow, as squalls regularly move thru the Susquehanna Valley.

Dresden in Los Angeles and Our Confederacy of Dunces.

LA is burning. And the derelict people responsible are worried that they are found out as charlatans and empty suits.

The leftwing voters who enabled them are getting angry over the inferno that their chosen politicos green-lighted—as if they are shocked, shocked by the consequences of their voting.

The dam buster Nero Newsom made his accustomed fiddling appearance and then split—when the media began pointing out that he prohibits new reservoirs, sends precious water out to sea, blows up dams, prevents precautionary gleaning of forests and chaparrals, and then usually blames “Climate change” or “Trump” when called to account.

Poor Karen Bass was DEI-ing in Uganda after being previously warned that lack of rain, record winds, and kindling-like hillsides put her city in existential danger: Out of sight, out of mind.

Or did she junket across the world to consult about fire prevention with Ghana’s new president?

Was slashing nearly $18 million from the $50 billion city budget, after bragging about creating “451 new positions” in various woke/DEI fields, a way to prevent 25-square miles of Dresden-like desolation?

The embattled Fire Chief Kristen Crowley for two years has bragged not of response time, not of preventive strategies to stop fires, not of slashed budgets and water shortages, but instead about her DEI credentials as the “first” (fill in the blanks) LGBTQ etc. woman, who has hired “70 percent” of her force as either nonwhite, or nonmale, or nonbinary, or non-old fashioned, tough-guy firefighters.

The LA utility head? Usually AWOL. The permanent director of LA infrastructure is usually quickly fired or resigns for incompetence, bribery, or malfeasance.

Joe Biden? He was there—but only to try to put thousands of acres of federal land off-limits to roadblock the evil incoming Trump administration.

Did Joe have ideas to save LA? Maybe, but as usual he talked instead about himself—in this case his new great-great grandson and the miraculous salvation of his grandkid’s house (not the 1100 structures that then were ashes). And then he left, dispirited that his last junket to Italy may have to be cancelled.

Kamala Harris, our vice president?

Remember her during the 2024 campaign and how she rushed to Florida to glom onto Gov. De Santis’s masterful performance in dealing with record flooding?

Nowhere was the LA resident to be seen, as she too plans next week a last minute multimillion-dollar freebie junket.

What is the attitude of these “public servants” in times of existential crisis?

Maybe it’s: “Ashes, ashes, all fall down"...

There Is No Bottom for Blue California.

After a fire that never should have happened burned thousands of houses to the ground in a liberal enclave of Los Angeles through a combination of Democrat incompetence and more Democrat incompetence, you might ask yourself whether the deep blue people of Los Angeles are ever going to come to their senses and start electing people who aren’t a bunch of communist morons more concerned with Ghana junkets and lesbian representation at the fire department then with actually doing their jobs. Don’t bother asking. The answer is “No.” They’re never going to change. They can’t change. They’re going to keep on electing the same brand of Democrat mediocrities who got them into this mess, but they do have a plan. They’re going to blame the weather, insurance companies that don’t want to lose money, Donald Trump, and anything but themselves for the chaos they voted for.

If California’s Democrats didn’t have their incompetence, they wouldn’t have any kind of competence at all.

People ask me if California has finally hit bottom, but there’s a problem with that premise. The problem is that it assumes that there is a bottom and that hitting the bottom would result in some sort of directional change in the downward trajectory of what was once the greatest state in the Union. But there is no bottom, not for them. You need to understand that. These Democrats are not concerned with governing, so their complete inability to do it is utterly irrelevant to the analysis. Being competent and governing wisely was never the objective. Instead, the elite is concerned with power, and the leftists who vote for them – whose houses are now all burned down – are only concerned with the failures of government when it comes and bites them on the fourth point of contact.

Now, you need to understand that experiencing the true fallout of government incompetence is not something that the kind of people who live in Pacific Palisades often experience. Instead, they are usually insulated from the consequences of their choices. Do you think bums, losers, and scumbags wander around in Pacific Palisades like they do in the rest of LA? Oh no. The LAPD has instructions to actually enforce the law in rich neighborhoods like the Palisades. They are disconnected from the utter chaos of the social pathology that the rest of the city experiences. They rarely have to face it, so they don’t really care about it. But now the fires have come, and you think they might care about it, but they won’t care about it for long. They’ll get over it. They’re going to cry and complain a little bit about Governor Hairstyle and Mayor Dumb Bass, and then on Election Day, they’re going to look at their ballots, and they’re going to mark somebody with a D.

It’s not that they can’t learn. They’re not stupid in the sense that they don’t understand that the people they’re voting for are blithering idiots. It’s that human nature prevents them from accepting the fact that they’ve been wrong so that they can change. They are emotionally invested in the liberal project that they grew up in, and to vote against it now would require introspection and an admission that everything they believed in was baloney. Most of them can’t do that. Most of them won’t do that. And nothing’s going to change.

I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I’ve lived here 50-odd years, and I know the score. I got here when California was the Golden State, and now it’s the Charred Black State. It was a middle-class state in the 70s and 80s, but today’s California is a feudal society with an affluent aristocracy – their castles and keeps were the ones burned in this fire – lording over a huge caste of serfs. The middle class is either gone or leaving. That’s OK with the Democrats because it was the middle class that made California a Republican state for so long. They were the ones who demanded good government. Most of them are now in Texas or Idaho.

That leaves a bunch of really poor people and a few really rich ones. The poor people vote Democrat because the Dems feed them scraps, and the rich people vote Democrat because it makes them feel that they’re not the complete scumbags that, in many cases, they are. Have you noticed how it’s always the worst people who seem to be the most vocally liberal? Paging Harvey Weinstein – he probably worked with half the people whose houses burned down, and he probably tried to score with the other half.

The thing you must understand about the rich Californians who vote for Democrats – and not only vote for them but actively campaign for them and donate to them – is that this kind of leftism isn’t just a belief system. It’s their religion. Well, more accurately, it’s a substitute for religion. There’s an empty space inside every human being that normal people fill up with things like faith, family, and patriotism. The rich blue voters of California fill it up with commie gobbledygook. They add some wokeness, a dash of climate change, and a heaping helping of smug self-satisfaction. The resulting dog’s breakfast is what passes for their souls.

So, to ask them to look at the reality in front of them, that the people that they’ve diligently insured were running the city were never actually running the city, is to ask them to do a 180° turn away from the liberalism that has been their core identity all their lives. A few can. Have you noticed that a significant number of us conservatives are former leftists, but few leftists are former conservatives except the Never Trumpers who get paid to be? The most you get are people who grew up in Middle America, came to LA, and decided to crap all over where they came from for social cachet. They weren’t really conservative. They were just teenagers mad because their parents wouldn’t let them be trashy back in their small towns.

In any case, it’s very hard to ask somebody to admit they were wrong about everything they ever believed. It’s much easier to blame someone else. See, it’s not the total ineptitude of the California Democrats who run everything that is the problem. The problem is Donald Trump pointing it out and not being nice when he does it. It’s childish, and it’s stupid, and they don’t believe it, but it’s human nature. It’s much easier to blame someone else instead of looking at yourself in the mirror and realizing that you were looking at the cause of your own misfortune. And the cause of California’s misfortune is Californians.