Meet the LA fire looters

The New Neo Posted on by

At least, here are some that have been arrested so far. I bet they didn’t expect to be caught, considering the way California usually treats thieves, and considering the chaos of the situation. Still, they might just get a mild wrist slap.

I found the first word in this sentence from the article rather odd:

Remarkably, none of those arrested were actually living in the evacuation zone and seemingly travelled with the intention of taking advantage of the devastation.

“Remarkably”? I don’t find it the least bit surprising or remarkable. Did the author expect them to have been from toney Pacific Palisades?

When disasters occur, there are always human locusts to take advantage. I have read elsewhere that in the case of these fires the criminals are looting the intact houses whose residents have been evacuated, and therefore the homes are empty but the belongings are all there and ripe for the taking. This particular sweep didn’t just result in arrests for theft, because most were not caught in the act:

Officers arrested Kaliel Love, who was on probation, in an alley behind the 600 block of the San Vicente Boulevard after he tried to evade police by running away.

Dominic Pacheco Magana, 18, and Miguel Angel Dorantes, 22, are also accused of conspiring to burgle homes after they were pulled over driving a van displaying stolen registration stickers.

Officers scoured the vehicle and found black Nike nylon gloves, a black ski mask and three large freight tote bags and black t-shirts.

Pacheco’s phone had the Watch Duty app open. The app monitors fire and evacuation zones.

‘Based on the items located inside the vehicle, the location of the vehicle stop, the ski mask, and the attempt to conceal their identity and avoid detection by removing the license plate, officers arrested the duo for being in the mandatory evacuation area with the specific intent to commit residential burglaries,’ police said.

Santa Monica Police said two people were also arrested for being in possession of concealed handguns.

The rest of the detainees were arrested for violations including drug possession, driving violations, outstanding warrants, parole and probation violations.

They also caught some arsonists – although not in Pacific Palisades – possibly inspired with a contagion effect:

Two people have also been arrested for lighting fires, including Ruben Montes, 29, who was detained for arson on Sunday in Irwindale, roughly 16 miles away from Altadena, where the deadly Eaton Fire continues to rage.

Mexican national Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, was also taken into custody after allegedly being caught on video walking with a yellow blowtorch before he was confronted by residents in Calabasas, west of Beverly Hills.

I will add here that I know some people in Pacific Palisades whose house burned down. I knew them when they were just starting out and had nothing. They’ve lived there for close to fifty years, and are now old and ill. Harrowing.

The Pete Hegseth hearings

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m doing a roundup for this.

Ace opines, with clips, in this post.

There’s a lot of coverage at RedState.

Legal Insurrection has this as well as this. From the former, the following Hegseth quote: “I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.”

More at Instapundit.

I doubt most people watch these things. I also think Hegseth will be confirmed.

What we know about a possible hostage deal

The New Neo Posted on by

I consider it all rumor until it happens, if it happens – and one of the many things we don’t know is whether it will actually happen. But here are some of my thoughts on the matter.

Because it has come to the point where any attempt at rescue will cause hostages to be murdered by their guards, the only way Israel can get hostages back alive is a deal. The deal was always going to involve the release of enormous numbers of terrorists. The only way that wouldn’t happen is if Israel had considered the hostages as dead from the start, and had refused to negotiate with Hamas at all. I don’t think Israeli society would have stood for that.

Plus, even though theoretically such a no-negotiation policy would have discouraged the taking of hostages in the future, it wouldn’t have discouraged it enough. Why? Because although one reason for terrorists’ hostage-taking is a pragmatic one – the release of prisoners – there is another big reason, which is to inflict suffering on the entire Jewish people. The terrorists are also sadists, and so that motive might be enough in and of itself.

Therefore I think some sort of lopsided deal has always been inevitable.

The release of a thousand prisoners may or may not end up mattering, depending on what Israel does next. It may be hard to believe, but Hamas has been recruiting new people lately. There seems to be no shortage of Gazans willing to die for the noble cause of wiping Israel off the face of the earth. Whether these particular thousand prisoners are released or not, the Israelis are in this for the long haul, and they have to figure out a way to improve the situation enormously or it will happen again and again no matter what they do. They absolutely cannot go back to the way it was before. And so what is most important – and what always was most important, deal or no – is Israel’s long-term approach going forward.

And what of the role of the upcoming Trump administration in any deal that may be made? Certainly they have exerted some pressure, but I don’t know the extent of it. Trump has motivation for a deal to be made before he takes office so he can claim victory on that score, and Biden has motivation for a deal to be made while he’s still in office so he can claim victory on that score.

I don’t think Netanyahu will sell his country down the river, and I have to trust that the Israelis have more tricks up their sleeves than we know about.

With all that as background, here’s an article on the deal:

Key mediator Qatar said Tuesday that a day earlier it had presented both parties with a “final” draft of the agreement. Israel’s Channel 12 news reported Monday that Jerusalem considered it broadly acceptable, and senior Israeli officials said they were waiting for Hamas’s reaction.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Hamas accepted the deal as well, citing two officials involved in the talks. However, CNN later cited an Egyptian official as saying the mediating countries — Qatar, Egypt, and the United States — had not yet received a response from the Palestinian terror group.

Hamas did say the ongoing negotiations had reached their “final stage” and that it had held consultations with other Palestinian factions and informed them of the “progress made.”

See what I mean? Clear as mud.

Details:

The three-phase agreement — based on a framework laid out by US President Joe Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council — would begin with the gradual release of 33 hostages over a six-week period, including women, children, adults over the age of 50, and severely sick and wounded civilians.

Israel believes most of the 33 are alive but that some are dead.

In exchange, Israel would release many hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners. The BBC put the number at 1,000 prisoners, including approximately 190 terrorists who have been serving sentences of 15 years or more.

On Monday, Israeli diplomatic officials, briefing military and diplomatic reporters, said high-profile “murderer” terrorists would not be released to the West Bank under the deal, and nobody who took part in the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught would be freed.

Time will tell.

Hostage deal rumors

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s now a week till Trump’s Inauguration Day – which is also Martin Luther King Day, by the way – and once again there are rumors that a hostage deal is nigh.

We’ve heard such rumors before. Are they real this time? Beats me. I think there is a slightly greater chance of it happening now because of Trump’s impending presidency than before the election, but there are still major stumbling blocks. The main one is that Hamas wants Israel to give up way too much. That is my fear as well.

From the article, for what it’s worth:

An Egyptian official, meanwhile, said that there had been good progress overnight but also acknowledged that it would likely take a few more days, although the sides were aiming for a deal before Trump’s January 20 inauguration. A third official also assessed that a deal was possible before Trump enters the White House, and said that although they were not yet wrapped up, the talks were in a good place.

A Hamas official said a number of contentious issues still need to be resolved, including an Israeli commitment to end the war and details about the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners. The official was not authorized to brief media and spoke anonymously. The Egyptian official confirmed that those issues were still being discussed.

Israel has previously insisted that any ceasefire must not prevent it from continuing the war at a later stage, and the matter has been a key sticking point between the sides. Israel has made the demolition of Hamas’s military and governance capabilities one of its war goals.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is.

Jen Rubin leaves the WaPo

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t say I’ve ever “gotten” Jennifer Rubin. Since I go back a long way in the blog world, I remember briefly meeting her around 2006 or 2007 at some PJ get-together. At the time, she was nominally on the right and was supposedly a political changer, having once been on the left or at least a Democrat. Her previous work was as a labor lawyer, but she wrote for the Weekly Standard and had a several-year-long stint at Commentary online. Her main topic back then, as I recall it, was Islamic terrorism. She was a hardliner on that, as well as pro-Israel.

I didn’t read her stuff much because I found it to be somewhat boring. But it seemed straightforward and there was nothing especially wrong with it. Then in 2010 she was hired by the WaPo and for a while things went on as before. But somewhere along the line Trump Derangement Syndrome set in, big-time.

My thought about Rubin back then – and it remains my thought – is that she never underwent a real political conversion to the right and never was a conservative. Her “conservatism” was focused on Islamic terrorism in general and also on Israel, and as far as I can tell she retains those views while otherwise being essentially a garden-variety leftist.

So now Rubin has said good-bye to the WaPo. Owner Bezos seems to be wanting to tack slightly more to the right, and she’s made this announcement:

Veteran Washington Post opinion writer Jennifer Rubin said Monday she is leaving to join a startup — and blasted the Beltway broadsheet’s billionaire owner on her way out the door.

Rubin, an outspoken critic of President-elect Donald Trump, had recently publicly attacked the paper and its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for appearing to seek to get into the Republican’s good graces.

“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy,” Rubin wrote in her resignation note.

Here’s where she’s going: to a new site called “The Contrarian.” Of course, it is highly likely she left theWaPo because otherwise she’d have been booted. You can find a list here of others who are supposedly going to be writing at the site, too. It seems to be positioning itself as a rival or perhaps adjunct to The Bulwark, the anti-Trump group started by once-conservative Bill Kristol.

Here’s some of the flavor of what The Contrarian is about – self-righteous Trump Derangement all the way:

Our pre-election warnings that Donald Trump posed an unprecedented threat to our democracy were often treated as alarmist. However, the election of an openly authoritarian figure who traffics in conspiracies, lies, unconstitutional schemes and un-American notions, has moved the United States to an inflection point. The future of our democracy, and what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth” hangs in the balance. And yet corporate and billionaire media and too many in the political establishment persist in downplaying the threat and seeking to accommodate Trump and his radical agenda. We refuse to follow the herd.

Unlike most corporate or billionaire media, The Contrarian will not offer Trump the benefit of the doubt. We will not normalize him. We will not engage in false equivalence. We will not excuse enablers in the media, government or business. We will not infantilize his supporters nor treat them as victims; we will confront them with the consequences of their presidential pick.

Trump is no ordinary politician and will be no ordinary president so the response must be extraordinary. His insane pronouncements—be it a premature and utterly false declaration that the New Orleans terrorist had just come over the border or a threat to annex the Panama Canal and Greenland—cannot be ignored or treated as hyperbole. They reveal a warped mind and dangerous agenda that would take America down the road of other authoritarian states such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

There seems to be some sort of market for this sort of thing. I’m not it, though.

[NOTE: This blog has made very little mention of Rubin over the years. All I could find were two brief references to her opinion on Obama – not in favor of him – and one on Romney when he was running for president.]

The two most informative videos I’ve seen on water for firefighting in California

The New Neo Posted on by

It can be hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff in California fire news and information. But I highly recommend listening to the following interview with Brett Barbre, who is a Yorba Linda Water District board member. He really really seems to know his stuff:

And here is another video I find highly impressive. It’s about the question of using saltwater to fight fires in California. It’s not too long, but chock-full of information:

Reading my own posts on Updike without knowing they’re mine

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently was looking up some information about John Updike and clicked on a link to another website. There I found an essay on Updike and read it thinking, hey, this is pretty good. Then I thought, wow, the person who wrote this agrees so much with me!

As I read on, the feeling of mind-meld became more and more astounding. I felt a yearning to meet this person with whom I had so much in common. We’d get along so well!

And then I thought, hey, wait a minute. I hadn’t recently reread the tributes to Updike I wrote at the time of his death fifteen years ago. So I looked them up and was surprised to find that they were identical to what I’d just read. In other words, someone at that site had simply posted my own essays without attribution (this one as well as this).

At first I was somewhat miffed. How dare they? And then it struck me as very amusing. How had I not immediately recognized my own work? It’s like someone looking in a mirror and not realizing that’s his or her own reflection and starting to greet the stranger.

The explanation is that after writing close to 21,000 posts over the years, I can be forgiven for forgetting the exact content of many. At least those Updike ones seemed a bit familiar. Sometimes I see old posts of mine and have zero recollection of ever writing them, but I think I do remember the vast majority.

Zuckerberg’s interview with Joe Rogan: remind me again, who are the fascists?

The New Neo Posted on by

Wow:

… [T]his really hit the most extreme, I’d say during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. Yeah, I’m generally like pretty pro-rolling out vaccines. I think on balance the vaccines are more positive than negative.

But I think that while they’re trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it, and they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true, right? I mean, they, they basically pushed us and said, you know, “Anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.”

And I was just like, well, we’re not gonna do that. Like we’re we’re clearly not gonna do that. I mean that that that that is kind of inarguably true.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s telling you to take down things to talk about vaccine side effects?

MARK ZUCKERBERG: It was people in the Biden administration.

And there’s also this:

Zuckerberg seems to be positioning himself as the victim here rather than as a coward caving to the government; Facebook certainly did cooperate to a significant extent with the administration’s censorship demands. Too bad he wasn’t a total profile in courage, but how many people are? The Biden administration knew how to engender fear, and it was clear they were willing to use lawfare against anyone unwilling to cooperate with their dictates.

My sense is that, after his experience with the Biden crew, Zuckerberg is genuinely happy – at least for the moment – at the prospect of Trump becoming the next president.

Kamala’s dangerous statement about insurance companies

The New Neo Posted on by

Thank goodness Kamala Harris wasn’t elected.

Here’s her statement on insurance companies and the LA fire:

Many insurance companies have canceled insurance for a lot of the families who have been affected and will be affected, which is only going to delay or place an added burden on their ability to recover.

I think that is an important point that must be raised, and hopefully there can be some way to address that issue, because these families — so many of them — otherwise will not have the resources to recover in any meaningful way, and many of them have lost everything.

Harris implies that the companies have canceled insurance because of the fire or during the fire, even though she doesn’t explicitly say it. What she leaves out is the fact that the policies were canceled some time ago and it had nothing to do with this fire and everything to do with California’s insurance rules that make it a loss to cover people in high-risk fire areas. This is a description of what has actually happened:

Even before this week’s wildfires hit, California was in the midst of an insurance crisis, with many residents unable to obtain homeowners insurance due to several carriers limiting their exposure in the state or pulling out completely in recent years because of heavy losses and the inability to adequately raise premiums or assess risk due to California’s regulations.

Insurance companies are businesses. If the risk is high they must raise rates. If the state forbids them to raise rates enough to cover losses, the companies won’t be doing business there.

More:

The state’s largest homeowners insurance carrier, State Farm, announced in March of last year that it would not renew some 72,000 home and apartment policies in the summer. The company cited inflation, regulatory costs and increasing risk of catastrophes for its decision and had previously stopped accepting new applications in the state.

Several other leading insurers, including All State, Farmers and USAA, have also in recent years curbed new policy applications in California as part of an effort to limit their exposure to policies that carry what they see as undue risk given what the state’s regulators have allowed them to charge policyholders. Similar reasons of escalating risk, high repair costs and rising reinsurance premiums have been cited in those decisions.

While it is illegal for insurance companies to cancel policies before they expire in California, many homeowners whose policies were not renewed have struggled to obtain or afford coverage, as the number of carriers in the state continues to shrink.

California doesn’t employ adequate fire prevention or mitigation measures despite the high risk there, and then it makes it so that insurance companies can’t afford to do business there because premium rates are capped in an artificial and unrealistic manner.

And why do I call Harris’ remarks dangerous? I think the answer is obvious after the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the fact that so many people justified his killing.

California: about those fire hydrants and that reservoir

The New Neo Posted on by

From an interview with LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley [my emphasis]:

“So if there’s no water, I don’t know how the water gets to the hydrants. Please defer that to DWP or whomever controls that part,” she added. “But I can tell you the resiliency of our firefighters. If there’s no water, they’re going to go find water. They’re going to figure out a way to do the best they can with what they’ve got in a very dynamic situation.”

What is this person doing being head of the LA Fire Department? I know, I know; DEI hire. But I think there’s more to it than that, and it says something about government bureaucracy in general – something that was already being satirized back in 1878, which is the opening date of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta “H.M.S. Pinafore.” It may seem that by putting this video up I’m injecting too much levity into this post. But listen to the words; they describe a situation all too frequent, of a person promoted to a high position for various reasons that have little to nothing to do with deep knowledge of the field:

So, should Kristin Crowley know “how the water gets to the hydrants”? I submit that she should. And if her formal training doesn’t include such information, it should. And she – or anyone else in her position – should be curious enough to have found out how it works even if she wasn’t taught it, and even if “the DWP or whomever” controls “that part.”

Part of learning a business is learning all aspects of it. The thing is that, although Kristin Crowley’s resume screams “DEI hire” (first woman; first lesbian), on paper her experience as a firefighter has been broad:

As a 22-year veteran of the LAFD, Chief Crowley has proven her credibility and character by promoting through the ranks. She served as a Firefighter, Paramedic, Engineer, Fire Inspector, Captain I, Captain II, Battalion Chief, Assistant Chief, Deputy Chief, Chief Deputy, and Fire Chief.

She has gained valuable experience in both field assignments on emergency apparatus and administrative duty in multiple areas within the Department. Before her appointment, she served as a Chief Officer for nine years as the Commander of Battalion 13 (South Los Angeles), Battalion 6 (San Pedro), the Professional Standards Division, Fire Prevention and Public Safety Bureau, and Administrative Operations.

So I suspect what’s going on here isn’t merely about Crowley herself or even DEI – I mean, look at the striking incompetence of the LA mayor and Governor Newsom. The latter is no DEI hire. DEI is almost certainly part of it, however, but I think the rot is much deeper.

And then there’s the empty reservoir, and Janisse Quiñones – who seems to be another DEI hire. Get a load of this:

The Daily Mail reports the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones was hired by Mayor Karen Bass on a $750,000 salary in May.

Now, LA Fire Department insiders are blaming Quiñones for a nearby reservoir disconnection and broken fire hydrants, the outlet reports, claiming this has led to firefighters running out of water.

The Mail reports that Quiñones’ past employer was linked to fire scandals. Quiñones previously held a top executive role at electric company PG&E. The company previously went bankrupt over liability for several California wildfires, the outlet reports. …

Quiñones reportedly oversaw the emptying of the Santa Ynez Reservoir in the Pacific Palisades area during bushfire season, sources told the outlet.

I have previously written about PG&E’s role in California fires and the tendency to blame them for everything, which I think is the easy and inappropriate way out. There’s plenty of room for blame on many fronts, and I have come to think that the largest element is California’s government bureaucracy and offices and their mismanagement of the situation. So many people have fallen short on prevention and preparedness in so very many ways.

ADDENDUM: There’s so much more about these fires that’s worth reading, but I’ll focus on Californian Victor Davis Hanson’s take:

… [I]t’s a systems breakdown, a civilizational collapse. When you look at the people in charge, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom flew in, to sort of do these performance-art stunts, but he has systematically ensured that water out of the Sacramento River and the watershed of Northern California would go out to the sea, rather than into the aqueduct, so Los Angeles didn’t have sufficient amounts of water.

He bragged not very long ago that he blew up four dams on the Klamath River. They provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power. They offered recreation, flood control, irrigation. He blew them up.

California’s fire management, whether we look at the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire near where I’m speaking, it destroyed 60 million trees. We have no timber industry in California. [Newsom’s] dismantled it. …

So, it was a total systems collapse from the idea of not spending money on irrigation, storage, water, fire prevention, force management, a viable insurance industry, a DEI hierarchy. You put it all together and it’s something like a DEI-Green New Deal hydrogen bomb.

And to finish, what we’re seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19th-century pastoral condition. They are decivilizing the state, and deindustrializing the state, and defarming the state, but they’re not telling the 40 million people that their lifestyles will have to revert back to the 19th century when you had no protection from fire, you didn’t have enough water in California, you didn’t have enough power, you didn’t pump oil.

So, we are deliberately making these decisions not to develop energy, not to develop a timber industry, not to protect the insurance industry, not to protect houses and property.

And we’re doing it in almost a purely nihilistic fashion.