LIGHTNING DEAL: Supa Ant Emergency Fire Blanket for Home and Kitchen. #CommissionEarned
January 13, 2025
NO GOOD DECISION WAS EVER MADE IN A SWIVEL CHAIR: So, We’re Going to Screw up DDG(X) too? “In the last 15-months in the Red Sea have shown over and over that the US 5” and allies’ 76mm dual-use guns were essential to success. The Royal Navy is not all that happy that they decided to save money with their Type 45 destroyers by killing the anti-air capability of their 4.5” main gun.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: LA Fires Be Damned — Gavin Newsom Will Still Be the Dems’ Frontrunner in 2028. “The principal elected officials in the Los Angeles apocalyptic horror story are Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom. The two have been running roughshod over an inherently bad situation in a clown car armored vehicle. In a just world, both of them would be pilloried in a town square by now.”
WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA: Barefoot children in the winter in the mountains.
THAT WOULD HELP:
12. Call Governor DeSantis to learn how to prepare for a disaster prior, during and after.
— Nate J (@NatJ65FL) January 12, 2025
GLOBAL WARMING INTENSIFIES: Palisades Fire likely started near the remnants of a blaze believed to have been sparked by NYE fireworks: report.
SINCE THE PRESS WON’T SHARE THIS CLIP, YOU SHOULD — FAR AND WIDE:
If Karen Bass was a Republican, this clip would be playing on television 24/7. pic.twitter.com/KZUxkHUOCB
— World Hall Of Fun (@WorldHallOfFun) January 12, 2025
Cowardice mixed with incompetence isn’t a good look but it’s the one she has.
Related, from Kurt Schlichter: There Is No Bottom For Blue California.
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.
They haven’t gotten it good and hard enough yet and, if Kurt is right, maybe never will.
DON SURBER: Thank FJB for the acceptance of Trump this time.
As President Trump returns to power, the commies on the left capitulate and resign themselves to their defeat. After four years of Biden, America and the rest world chant FJB because the world has seen the disaster that was the Biden presidency. The comparison between the presidencies of the two men is clear.
The media may be in denial but young Americans saw his surrender of Afghanistan as the sniveling cowardice it was. A month later, the FJB chants began in the student sections of college football games.
FJB carried over to NASCAR races where NBC led and said the chant was “Let’s Go Brandon.” All that did was make the chant G-rated.
On the world stage, Biden became an international joke—a bungling, fumbling old man whose small brain was going haywire.
He reeked of corruption. The New York Times and the FBI may have buried Hunter’s laptop but the world saw it for what it was: political whoring.
The lawfare against Trump blew up in the faces of Wile E. Democrats and their poodles in the press.
They’re so awful.
JOHN LUCAS: Judge Merchan’s Potemkin sentencing hearing: A continuation of the judicial warfare against Donald Trump and American voters. “Judge Juan Merchan’s sentencing hearing for President Trump on Thursday confirmed the political nature of the judicial warfare in which he and hundreds of others have collaborated in an effort to bring down Donald Trump. Both Merchan and the prosecutor treated the sentencing hearing as if its purpose was to make a rational and fair determination of what sentence the court should impose. That was a fraud and deception. The hearing’s purpose was not to make a rational and fair decision about anything. Merchan had already decided and announced the “sentence” he intended to hand down. The purpose of the phony hearing was to give the prosecutor a soapbox from which he could pontificate and continue their joint efforts to weaken President Trump, just eleven days before his inauguration.”
Well, yes.
SHOCK AND AWE: Trump: I’m Coming, and I’ve Got 100 Executive Orders Ready.
TO THE RESCUE:
Musk is using these Cybertrucks to help augment the communication in Los Angeles that’s been damaged by the fires.
He’s also using them to deliver water and food.
Great gesture!
— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) January 13, 2025
NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE: It Looks Like Democrats and Left-Wing Groups Are Profiting From Wildfire Donations via ActBlue.
JOHN HINDERAKER: A Brewing Constitutional Crisis in Minnesota.
Minnesota is a purple state, balanced on a knife’s edge, as the 2024 election showed. There are 134 Minnesota House districts, and when the returns were in, it looked like Republicans had gained enough seats so that the House would be tied, 67-67. But then it came to light that one of the Democrats’ candidates had cheated: in House District 40B, Democrat Curtis Johnson falsely claimed to reside in the district, a constitutional requirement.
His Republican opponent filed an election contest, which was successful, as the evidence against the Democrat was overwhelming. A district court issued an injunction barring Johnson from taking that seat. A special election will be held to fill the seat at some time in the future; the exact schedule is now the subject of litigation. So currently there are 133 elected representatives holding election certificates: 67 Republicans and 66 Democrats. Republicans hold a majority, brought about by the fact that Democrats cheated and got caught.
Democrats are panicked over the prospect that they will lose control over one house of Minnesota’s legislature, and they have determined on a desperate strategy. The 2024 legislative session begins on Tuesday, and all 66 Democrats are going to refuse to show up for work. Their theory is that by hiding out, they will prevent the establishment of a quorum, and thereby disable Minnesota’s House (effectively, the entire legislature) from doing any business. They hope that at some point in the future, they will win a special election in 40B, at which time they say they will go back to work. Meanwhile, they intend to continue drawing their pay as legislators.
Have you noticed how Democratic state legislatures are always trying to pull something like this? But read the whole thing. I do believe Hinderaker’s legal analysis is correct.
WHAT IS THIS MYSTERIOUS WITCHCRAFT I’M SEEING? HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?
Sure that’s wild and wacky Japan. But as Francisco of Small Dead Animals deadpans, “This would never work in Los Angeles. Where would they get the water? From the ocean?”
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME: Technical snag forces another delay for the first orbital launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture counted down to the final hour tonight, but in the end, the company had to postpone the first-ever orbital launch of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket due to a stubborn technical glitch.
The launch from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was scrubbed a few minutes after 3 a.m. ET (midnight PT). Tonight’s three-hour launch window was due to close at 4 a.m. ET.
“We are standing down on today’s launch attempt to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell said. “We are reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt.”
The faulty subsystem hasn’t been named.
TRUMP HAD THEM BOXED IN WELL ENOUGH BEFORE AND HE CAN DO IT AGAIN: Trump’s Ukraine envoy says world must reinstate ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran.
The world must return to a policy of “maximum pressure” against Iran to turn it into a more democratic country, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg told an Iranian opposition event in Paris on Saturday.
Trump has vowed to return to the policy he pursued in his previous term that sought to wreck Iran’s economy to force the country to negotiate a deal on its nuclear programme, ballistic missile programme and regional activities.
“These pressures are not just kinetic, just not military force, but they must be economic and diplomatic as well”, Retired Lieutenant-General Kellogg, who is set to serve as Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, told the audience at Paris-based Iranian opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).
He said there was an opportunity “to change Iran for the better” but that this opportunity would not last forever.
“We must exploit the weakness we now see. The hope is there, so must too be the action.”
Is it January 20 yet?
YES.
Gavin Newsom admitting that California’s excessive permits and bureaucratic red tape can be removed overnight and they just choose to make their citizen’s lives more difficult and expensive. https://t.co/okVulaDCTb
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) January 12, 2025
HIDE THE DECLINE: Two Months Before Deadly Blazes, LA Fire Chief Said She Needed More Firefighters—Then Karen Bass’s Admin Scrubbed the Memo.
Los Angeles fire chief Kristin Crowley warned city officials in November that her department had about half as many firefighters as it needed. When deadly wildfires struck the city two months later, Mayor Karen Bass’s administration pulled Crowley’s memo from its website.
Crowley wrote to the city’s fire commissioners—a five-person board appointed by Bass—on Nov. 18 and asked them to transmit the message to Bass and the city council. The fire department’s size, she said, hadn’t increased in decades despite significant population growth.
“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s,” wrote Crowley, who also complained that a spike in emergency calls and a shortage of fire stations had led to longer response times. In 2022, Crowley said, 61 percent of the department’s firefighters failed to meet the 4-minute first response time, a national firefighting standard. The National Fire Protection Association, meanwhile, recommends that cities like Los Angeles employ some 1.51 to 1.81 firefighters per 1,000 residents. But Los Angeles, Crowley wrote, only staffs 0.91 firefighters per 1,000 people.
In contrast:
LA Mayor’s race, 2022. The guy I voted for. https://t.co/W3UVIg00Mm
— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) January 13, 2025
Bari Weiss’s Free Press has an article that went up yesterday originally titled “Stop Blaming Politicians. L.A. was Built to Burn.” By the evening the first sentence in the title was quietly deleted. And on one level, the second sentence in its title is understandable — Joan Didion was writing about the Orwellian-levels of doublethink of the people who lived in the fire zones of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. On the one hand, they knew that a catastrophic fire was always a possibility, and yet many simultaneously had plenty of ‘60s-era “California Dreamin,’” “Good Day Sunshine” levels of optimism. But there’s no doubt that over the past twenty years or so, a combination of incompetence and hopeless far left radical environmentalism have made last week’s disastrous fires a far more likely — and deadly — occurrence.
ICYMI: WHEN THERE’S A DISASTER, LOOK WHO’S ALWAYS THERE BEFORE FEMA NOW:
We are going to position Cybertrucks with Starlinks and free WiFi in a grid pattern in the areas that most need it in the greater LA/Malibu area https://t.co/oWilgDyVh5
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 12, 2025
UPDATE: From the comments: “Compare and contrast with ‘I don’t know how the water gets to the hydrants.'”
ANOTHER UPDATE:
Tesla & SpaceX personnel are driving around areas in greater LA/Malibu that are in tough shape with free WiFi, drinks & snacks https://t.co/304vjlXSoc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 13, 2025
LESLIE EASTMAN: Climate Crisis Policies Destructive to Los Angles Area Environment and Harmful to Wildlife.
I have touched on several disastrous decisions made by local and state leaders already, and blog space is limited. There will be a whole catalog of failures to analyze, and thanks to X.com, the elite media can no longer protect its preferred bureaucrats.
In this piece, I would like to note how all of these climate-cult choices have utterly ruined the natural environment and wildlife habitats in the Greater Los Angeles area.
To begin with, California has been leading the charge on electrical vehicle mandates and ending the use of fossil fuels, because human emissions of carbon dioxide (a life-essential trace gas found in trace amounts within the atmosphere) are supposedly causing “global warming”.
Instead of focusing on water infrastructure, revising forest management choices, or funding fire departments, bureaucrats focused on nanny-state rules. As a result, millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent have been released into the atmosphere.
I would like to share some numbers to put it in perspective: The 2020 California fire season released approximately 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Those fires completely wiped away any emissions savings.
Read the whole thing.
ON SUNDAYS I RUN A PROMO POST FOR (MOSTLY) INDIE AUTHORS: Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
There is also a fun vignette challenge.
‘DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO’ IS THE ESSENCE OF PROGRESSIVES’ CREED: Stew Peters and the puzzling case of BBC disinformation guru’s ‘vax’ status.
DOUGLAS AIN’T AFRAID TO SEE THE FOREST FOR THE TREES – NOR TO CALL IT WHAT IT IS: My TCW week in review – thanks to Douglas Murray.