Reading my own posts on Updike without knowing they’re mine
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?
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:
HOLY SHLIT. Mark Zuckerberg says the Biden admin called his employees and “screamed and cursed” at them to take down Covid/vaccine content. They wanted Meta to censor memes too.
When he pushed back, the Biden regime started investigating his companies.
“It was brutal.” pic.twitter.com/rNwZtoq0hO
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 10, 2025
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
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
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.
Open thread 1/11/2025
Why do so many YouTube narrators have somewhat off-putting voices? But the content is interesting:
The fallout from the LA fires
A great many people seem to think that the abysmal and disgraceful failure of those in charge in California will lead to political change – that is, a turning to the right. I’m sure that will be true of some people, but I doubt it will be widespread enough to end one-party rule in that state.
There’s so much news around the LA fires that I’m going to resort to a roundup on the topic:
– A reservoir that serves Pacific Palisades was empty and being repaired at the time of the fire.
– Suspected arsonist arrested in Kenneth Fire.
– LA Mayor Karen Bass’ pro-Communist roots, by Roger L. Simon.
– Governor Newsom passes the buck to locals.
On a personal note, the photos of the burned-out areas of LA don’t surprise me at all. They look like Paradise did in 2018, except that was the whole town. When I went there about a month after the fire, I took tons of photos. They don’t do justice to the scope of the thing, but since I don’t believe I ever posted them, here are a few:
Bricks survive:
Antique cars:
This was an area where I used to walk:
The local Safeway and some shopping carts:
Arrival at Gerard’s house:
Leaving Paradise in the fog:
As I said, the photos don’t do it justice. Almost no buildings were left standing in a town of 30,000 people.
Judge Merchan unconditionally discharges Trump’s sentence in the “hush money” case
This was expected, but it is still news:
Judge Juan Merchan sentenced President-elect Donald Trump to unconditional discharge.
In New York, an unconditional discharge means the court found someone committed the crime but thinks a punishment doesn’t serve a purpose.
That means Trump won’t serve prison time, fine, or probation supervision.
The sentencing means Trump is a felon. None of us are stupid. We all know the whole point of this circus was to slap Trump with the felon label.
But they’ve been calling him a felon – a convicted felon – ever since the kangaroo court’s verdict. It was repeated over and over during the campaign. It wasn’t technically true till now, but I doubt most people care or cared about such niceties or have even been aware of them.
The lawfare that has been directed at Trump and others on the right has given a new meaning to the phrase “trumped up charges.” Every time someone on the left talked about how Trump was a convicted felon, it served to remind a great many people of the depths to which the left was willing to go – and actually had gone – to try to destroy Trump. It made the Trump opposition look bad, but they didn’t realize it, which was another example of how far they’d gone.
So now they get to continue to call him a felon. They’ve learned, though, that it didn’t much matter; Trump got elected anyway. It is, however, a way to continue to try to defame him and his supporters, by saying that those who voted for him don’t care about the law and are willing and even eager to vote for a criminal. Such arguments must appeal to those on the left, but fortunately that’s not the majority of the American people.
Remember that dockworkers’ strike that was postponed till mid-January, in order to help Biden prior to the election?
In case you don’t remember, this will refresh your memory:
The International Longshoremen’s Association, which represents 45,000 striking U.S. workers, said the union and USMX have reached a “tentative agreement on wages and have agreed to extend the Master Contract until January 15, 2025 to return to the bargaining table to negotiate all other outstanding issues.”
On Wednesday this announcement was made:
“We are pleased to announce that ILA and USMX have reached a tentative agreement on a new six-year ILA-USMX Master Contract, subject to ratification, thus averting any work stoppage on January 15, 2025,” the two parties said in a joint statement. “This agreement protects current ILA jobs and establishes a framework for implementing technologies that will create more jobs while modernizing East and Gulf coast ports – making them safer and more efficient, and creating the capacity they need to keep our supply chains strong.”
“This is a win-win agreement that creates ILA jobs, supports American consumers and businesses, and keeps the American economy the key hub of the global marketplace,” the statement added.
A separate statement from Harold Daggett, head of the ILA, gave “full credit” to Trump for the deal, telling the incoming president he has “proven…to be one of the best friends of working men and women in the United States.”
He credited a meeting he had with Trump last month as the reason the union won protections against automation.
A statement from Trump says this, among other things:
I’ve studied automation and know just about everything there is to know about it. The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen. Foreign companies have made a fortune in the U.S. by giving them access to our markets. They shouldn’t be looking for every last penny knowing how many families are hurt.”
Interesting.
Open thread 1/10/2025
Cute isn’t everything:
Trump and Obama at Carter’s funeral
Funerals make strange seatfellows:
Former President Barack Obama casually and amiably chats with Adolf Hitler as the latter is set to assume power in 11 days, end American democracy, and impose a white nationalist dictatorship. https://t.co/4tbj46yVk8
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 9, 2025
By the way, Laura Bush still looks fabulous. On the other hand, George W. Bush doesn’t, and he’s the same age as Trump. Is Bush ill?
The LA fires and the lack of water to fight them
There’s no shortage of criticism of the leadership of Los Angeles and the state of California in the wake of the Los Angeles fires. One of the biggest topics is the fact that, in Pacific Palisades, the hydrants went dry.
But the situation is more complicated than most people know. For example:
LADWP’s explanation for the shortage comes down to three nearby water tanks, each with a storage capacity of about a million gallons. These tanks help maintain enough pressure for water to travel uphill through pipes to homes and fire hydrants — but the pressure had decreased due to heavy water use, and officials knew the tanks couldn’t keep up the drain forever.
“We pushed the system to the extreme,” LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones said in a news conference. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”
According to LADWP, the tanks’ water supply needed to be replenished in order to provide enough pressure for the water to travel to fire hydrants uphill. But officials said as firefighters drew more and more water from the trunk line, or main supply, they used water that would have refilled the tanks, eventually depleting them.
That decreased the water pressure, which is needed for the water to travel uphill. …
… [F]ire hydrants have also run dry in the case of other wildfires that spread to urban areas, including the 2017 Tubbs Fire, 2024’s Mountain Fire and 2023’s Maui wildfires.
In these cases, firefighters have to rely on other water sources. For the Palisades Fire, LADWP brought in 19 water trucks, each with capacities of 4,000 gallons.
In LA and other parts of California, large fires are often fought with the addition of firefighting helicopters, but in the present fire the winds have been too high and the visibility too poor to use them.
Then there’s the topic of why California doesn’t have more reservoirs. If you read this article from 2023, you’ll learn a lot on that score. An excerpt:
Last century, California built dozens of large dams, creating the elaborate reservoir system that supplies the bulk of the state’s drinking and irrigation water. Now state officials and supporters are ready to build the next one.
The Sites Reservoir — planned in a remote corner of the western Sacramento Valley for at least 40 years — has been gaining steam and support since 2014, when voters approved Prop. 1, a water bond that authorized $2.7 billion for new storage projects.
Still, Sites Reservoir remains almost a decade away: Acquisition of water rights, permitting and environmental review are still in the works. Kickoff of construction, which includes two large dams, had been scheduled for 2024, but likely will be delayed another year. Completion is expected in 2030 or 2031.
That’s quite a time frame. And the dam would only help the situation about 3%.
More:
Jerry Brown (not the former governor of the same name) of the Sites Project Authority, which represents local water districts pursuing the project, said it takes many years to develop and plan projects of this scale.
“My personal rule of thumb is that for every year of construction you spend about three years in the planning-permitting-engineering stage,” he said. Since Sites’ construction takes six years, the process would be expected to take 18 years.
California is a state with too many people for its water supply, some special geological and climate challenges which present the possibility of disasters, environmentalists eager to block most potential solutions, and one-party Democrat rule. It’s a situation rife with possibilities for incompetence and corruption.