Life-threatening' windstorm fans fires in Southern Calaifornia as blazes burn in Los Angeles

@Sweet Lou 4 2 gotta say I agree with Jorge here. Hegseth really isn't the conversation here

 

Why not? If we want to talk about hiring incompetent people into gov't roles, shouldn't we be able to look at the qualifications of the man picked to lead our military?

 

No. Give up.

 

1. You are the one who stated you'd hire any competent white man over anyone else. You still haven't addressed that comment - are you backing off on it?

2. What are the qualifications for Pete Hegseth. You state you don't want unqualified people...his only qualification then is that he hates DEI and anything liberal?

Usually job qualifications center around experience and accomplishments. Not belief systems. In fact, what you are doing is exactly what you are railing against.

 

honestly, and I'm reluctant to wade deeper into the muck here . . . but your posting seems to have really dropped off in quality these past few months. That's not a dig, that's not an insult, that's just an observation from someone who takes you fairly seriously as one of the better posters here. Your posts just seem angrier than they used to be.

anyway. I'll shut up now.

 

Why not? Why are only liberal appointees open to critique?

 

Ok - well no anger at all really. I am just calling out lies and asking questions that seem reasonable to me (and seemingly a lot of other reasonable posters). But thanks for the feedback!

 

I've said I would hire qualified people. Of any race. Goodbye, dishonest person.

 

Unfortunately conservatives have proven otherwise throughout history....

 

Why can't you answer the question regarding the lack of qualifications for the man set to lead our military?

 

related

Caitlyn Jenner predicts ‘change’ in California after LA fires shine ‘bright light’ on state’s ‘weaknesses’

https://nypost.com/2025/01/15/media/caitlyn-jenner-predicts-change-in-california-over-la-fires/

 

Bill Burr has a word for some of you.

 

So you think a man with no experience in management, defense, or leadership is better than a general who commanded 150,000 troops with a 41 year military career?

Let's be honest, if the party name were reversed, you guys would be going apeshit.

 

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gavin-n...n-building-housing-49a18450?mod=hp_opin_pos_0

Newsom Has a Permitting Epiphany
The Governor waives environmental rules to assist rebuilding from the wildfires. Why not for everyone?
By The Editorial Board
Updated Jan. 14, 2025 at 5:41 pm ET

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday waived the state’s environmental laws in areas affected by the fires to expedite rebuilding. Wonderful, but that raises a question: Why not ease regulations for all projects if the rules are such a barrier to development?

More than 12,000 structures in the Los Angeles region have been destroyed by the past week’s fires. At California’s glacial pace of permitting, it could take years for new homes and businesses to rise from the ashes. Rebuilding will cost multiples more than original construction owing to more stringent building codes, high permitting fees and inflation.

That explains Mr. Newsom’s executive order on Sunday waiving the state’s Environmental Quality Act and Coastal Act. He directed his administration to identify other burdensome permitting and building code requirements that can be eased. This is an admission that state regulations increase costs and delay projects, if they don’t stop them entirely.

Green groups and unions exploit the state’s environmental laws to tie up projects for years in court. Developers often settle lawsuits by making concessions—for example, setting aside land for conservation or using union labor—that increase project costs.

Local governments impose excessive permitting fees and other requirements to mitigate a project’s impact. The Supreme Court’s landmark County of El Dorado ruling last year requires such fees to be commensurate to a project’s impact, though local governments can still tie developers up in red tape to force them to make costly concessions.

A 2021 University of Southern California survey of California developers found that it typically took 18 to 45 months—yes, months—for a project to be approved. Half said they had abandoned projects owing to government fees, and 45% said they were required to substantially reduce a project’s density. More than half reported that lawsuits had scuttled projects, and 37% said legal settlements equaled at least half a project’s worth.

Unnecessarily burdensome building codes also balloon costs. New homes in California must comply with efficiency standards that add tens of thousands of dollars to the price. California also mandates solar panels on new homes. Onerous licensing requirements restrict the supply of general contractors and increase labor costs.

All of this explains why “affordable” housing units can cost $1 million to build and the state has a severe housing shortage. The Los Angeles metro area’s population is larger than that of Dallas and Houston combined, but the latter together permitted more than five times as many new homes last year. This is why the median home in Los Angeles County costs $1 million.

California’s environmental laws also delay and inflate costs of needed public works, when they don’t kill them. A new large reservoir hasn’t been built in the state for 50 years. The California Coastal Commission in 2022 nixed a proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Even Mr. Newsom’s Delta water tunnel project and bullet train have been snagged by green tape.

Ditto fire prevention since permits and habitat mitigation are required to clear brush, widen fire access roads and create fire breaks on public lands, especially along the coast, such as where the Palisades fire is burning. If Mr. Newsom agrees that the state’s environmental laws are a problem, why doesn’t he at least try to reform them?

The reason is Democrats in Sacramento are beholden to the green lobby, which opposes most development and uses the laws to extort businesses. It’s nice of Mr. Newsom to ease permitting so L.A.’s affluent can rebuild. Perhaps he’s worried they might leave if it takes too long or costs too much to rebuild. Moonscape neighborhoods wouldn’t look good if he runs for President in 2028, or when the Olympics comes to town the same year.

But what about all the others who are leaving the state because they can’t afford its astronomical housing prices?

Appeared in the January 15, 2025, print edition as 'Newsom Has a Permitting Epiphany'.


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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/end-of-...-failures-7c4478a1?mod=hp_opin_pos_4#cxrecs_s

End of a Climate Delusion
Amid California’s fires, voters wake up from the dream that green pork is a solution.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Jan. 14, 2025 at 4:50 pm ET

CO2 emitted into the atmosphere is rapidly and, for all practical purposes, uniformly distributed around the planet.

I may be stating the obvious but it needs to be pointed out. Voters and even political leaders are surprisingly poorly informed on this point. Emissions cuts in California don’t have any significant effect on California’s climate. They also have no global effect. California’s cuts are too small relative to the global whole; they also are largely illusory.

Emitting industries leave the state. They don’t stop emitting. If California imports Canadian hydro to charge its electric vehicles, consumers elsewhere have to burn more coal and gas. If Californians drive EVs, more gasoline is free to be burned by others, releasing more CO2 that influences climate change in California and everywhere else.

Green-energy subsidies do not reduce emissions. This will be news to millions of California voters. It contradicts a central tenet of state policy. It isn’t news to the actual enactors of these subsidies. A National Research Council study sponsored by congressional Democrats in 2008 concluded that such handouts were a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases” and called for carbon taxes instead.

Unfortunately, the incoming Obama administration quickly discovered it favored climate taxes only when Republicans were in charge. Backers would later engage in flagrant lying to promote Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, knowingly citing bogus predictions that its trillion-dollar spending profusion would reduce emissions.

A 2019 University of Oregon study had already revealed the empirical truth: Green energy doesn’t replace fossil fuels, it enables more energy consumption overall. That same year the EPA calculated that the potential emissions savings from subsidizing electric vehicles had been offset five times over by the pickup truck and SUV boom Team Obama facilitated to assure the success of its auto bailout.

Last year, the premier journal Science put a nail in the question: 96% of policies supported worldwide as “reducing” emissions failed to do so, consisting mostly of handouts to green-energy interests.

And yet certain Journal readers still assail me with the epithet “denier.” They confuse my criticism of Democratic hypocrisy with my imagined views on climate science. As I’ve written back to many, “Don’t think politicians haven’t figured this out about you. That’s why they can give us unsustainable corporate welfare boondoggles and call it climate policy.”

A CNN moderator Saturday urged viewers to vote in an online poll on whether the California disaster should be blamed on climate change or poor leadership. Notice the non sequitur: as if climate change is an excuse for not acting against fire risk.

By all means, let politicians proclaim a “climate crisis” or any other rhetorical flourish if it helps mobilize support for public actions that actually serve a useful purpose. But a prerevolutionary situation has been building in California for two decades, starting with the Third World blackouts in late 2000 not because of any shortage of power but because of large helpings of political cowardice.

A decision in 2019 authorized yet more Third World blackouts instead of reasonably shielding utilities from lawsuit risk over fires their power lines might be accused of contributing to. One result, predictably, has been a proliferation of backyard generators, which increase fire risk.

Californians are stuck adapting in the ways left open to them. Since 2017, half a million have fled Los Angeles County.

Two social technologies might help but the state has been intent on denying itself their advantages. One is a functioning insurance market. If you can’t afford the insurance, you can’t afford the house. Get ready, instead, for a torrent of federal and state money to help residents, some of them wealthy, rebuild in high-risk fire zones.

The other is a functioning market in water. Five gallons to produce a walnut probably isn’t tenable under any realistic system of water pricing. If water were properly valued, municipalities would also rapidly discover the logic of building aquifers to capture seasonal runoff. A thousand things would change if water were priced to flow to its most highly valued uses.

Here’s another concept: Climate change can exist and yet be an insignificant variable. In Southern California’s Mediterranean climate, anytime 100-mile-an-hour winds start blowing embers toward densely packed housing developments, a conflagration is certain. The only answer then is to have the manpower and resources ready to put fires out as quickly as they start.

I’ve written repeatedly about climate and energy policies in the Western world being a colossal example of “sophisticated state failure,” in which attempts to address complex problems yield only a succession of boondoggles and economic crises. If California voters don’t wise up now, they never will.

Appeared in the January 15, 2025, print edition as 'End of a Climate Delusion'.



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