Palisades fire and Monday morning quarterbacking

The fires that are raging in southern California are taking a terrible toll on lives and property. They have been intensified by the strong Santa Ana winds that reached high speeds passing through the funnel that makes up the valley and feeding on the dry vegetation.

Of course, whenever a disaster like this strikes, there is immediate finger-pointing at :(1) who or what might have been the cause of the fire; (2) who might be responsible for not responding correctly and quickly enough; and (3) who might be responsible for not anticipating the scale of the disaster and making sure that the response would be adequate. Some of this finger pointing is by people acting to deflect attention from themselves. But others indulging in this activity are those who have no connection to the events nor have any particular expertise in this area but still think they know what should have been done to deal with it and are not shy about sharing their conclusions.

Kevin Drum writes that this kind of after-the-fact pontificating is useless when you are dealing with events that lie outside the normal range that can be, and have been, anticipated, and this fire is one such event. He takes aim at one particular accusation, that authorities had not taken into account the amount of water needed is such a fire occurred in this location, and that using sea water or desalinated water would have helped.
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Would-be ‘Pizzagate’ avenger shot dead by police

One of the more bizarre episodes of the lunatic QAnon conspiracies was the widely circulated ‘Pizzagate’ story of how the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria known as Comet Ping Pong was the location where prominent Democratic politicians indulged in sex with minors, and where their orders for pizza were in code where the toppings represented the kind of victim they sought.

One man Edgar Maddison Welch believed the story and felt that it was his duty to stop this crime and so in 2016 he heavily armed himself with an AR-15 and other guns and drove about 350 miles from his home in Salisbury, North Carolina to stop it. Along the way, he made a recording to his family explaining what he planned to do and telling them that he would likely end up dead. Fortunately, things did not end badly, at least on that day. Arriving at the pizzeria, he searched the place after the terrified customers had fled and found that there was no basement and no nefarious activities going on and decided that he had been misled about the whole thing and surrendered himself. (You can read the more lurid details in my post from back in 2016.)

But last weekend, Welch was killed by police at a traffic stop in North Carolina.
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New DC ‘think tank’ staffed entirely by AI robots

Over at Drop Site, Waqas Ahmed, Murtaza Hussain, and Ryan Grim have unearthed a new DC ‘think tank’ called Beltway Grid. What was interesting was that they could not find any background to any of the people listed in its ‘About Us’ page. It seems to be populated entirely by non-persons.

In October, a new foreign policy think tank calling itself the Beltway Grid Policy Centre quietly entered D.C.’s diplomatic fray. While there was no launch party and no K Street office we could find, the think tank nevertheless began producing its intellectual product at a startling pace, issuing reports, press releases, and pitching journalists on news coverage—much of it focused on South Asia, and, in particular, the ongoing political crisis in Pakistan.
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The end of four legacy empires

Alfred McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the author of many books and articles on the nature of global power. He has written an article chronicling four legacy empires (France, Russia, China, and the US) and their declines.

He starts with France. The details of its colonial heyday were relatively unknown to me.

Let’s start with the French neocolonial imperium in northern Africa, which can teach us much about the way our world order works and why it’s fading so fast. As a comparatively small state essentially devoid of natural resources, France won its global power through the sort of sheer ruthlessness — cutthroat covert operations, gritty military interventions, and cunning financial manipulations — that the three larger empires are better able to mask with the aura of their awesome power.

For 60 years after its formal decolonization of northern Africa in 1960, France used every possible diplomatic device, overt and covert, fair and foul, to incorporate 14 African nations into a neo-colonial imperium covering a quarter of Africa that critics called Françafrique.
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Trump Day One agenda

Trump has made a lot of statements about what he will do on day one of his administration, so many that there will not be enough hours in the day to do most of them even if he were serious about the promises. But I know what his most important priority will be and that is to try and show that the crowds at this inauguration exceed in size what Barack Obama had in 2008. That his inauguration crowd in 2016 was much smaller than Obama’s was something that really rankled him to the extent that he made his then press secretary Sean Spicer look foolish by trying to argue otherwise when the aerial evidence clearly showed the opposite. Trump continued to lie about this long after everyone other than his cult followers knew that it was false. So brace yourself for this to be his top priority.

But what about the more consequential things that he has promised to do one day one?
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The phony debate over cutting the budget deficit

One of the longest running pointless discussions in US politics is about what to do about the federal budget deficit. This is simply the annual excess of all government spending over all government revenues. The cumulative total of all such deficits is the government debt. For the fiscal year 2024, the government had revenues of $4.92 trillion and spent $6.75. trillion, leaving a deficit of $1.83 trillion. The national debt up through November 2024 was $36.09 trillion.(See here for more.)

Different people have different views about how big of a problem the deficit is. One school of thought uses the metaphor of the government budget being like a family’s budget, and that a deficit means borrowing money that has to be paid back with interest later. They argue that running up deficits year after year means that the debt burden will become intolerable and that we are leaving future generations (our children in this metaphor) in a fiscal hole that they will have a hard time digging themselves out of. They view this as a horrible prospect.
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The psychology of owning a pick up truck

As is often the case, commenters pick up on some aspect of a blog post that was not central to it and an interesting discussion develops around it.

In my post about poor people living on the edge who sincerely believe that Trump is going to act in their interests and not take any action that might harm them, some picked up on an item in the news report that mentioned that they owned a pickup truck or an SUV, and this was taken as a sign that they were willing to expend what little resources they had to purchase what others might consider a frivolous item they did not need. (Commenter flex entered the discussion with a very thoughtful post that I recommend reading.)

There are some things that are definitely true of life in the US. In most places, some kind of motorized vehicle is essential for people to get to work or fulfill other daily life chores. For many people living on the edge of ruin, what drives their vehicle choice is price. Sometimes an old truck may be all that they can afford. Their purchases are also often driven by the affordability of the monthly payment, not even the actual cost of the vehicle, and so can be persuaded to buy something because of its low introductory payment. Not all buyers are financially savvy and being financially savvy sometimes requires being financially solvent and stable. My choice of a compact sedan (Honda Accord) was made on considerations of its reputation for having low maintenance costs and being trouble free and after having it for 11 years, that has turned out to be true. I could definitely have bought a much cheaper car but could afford to weigh long-term factors over up-front cost. Not everyone has that luxury.
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Don’t believe the lies about the minimum wage

State and federal-mandated minimum wages set a floor for what employers can pay their employees. It benefits more than the minimum wage workers because it raises wages up the line. Hence it is should be no surprise that the capitalist class and its supporters hate raises in the mandated minimum wage and try to do everything in their power to keep them from being raised because it lowers their ability to exploit workers and increase their profits. In their mind, the there should be no mandated minimum wage and all wages should be set by the employer and the employee, negotiating freely. Of course they oppose unions as well since those too interfere in the glorious working of the free-market. In this world view, a single employee and a company or massive corporation are equally matched powers and thus the figure they arrive at would reflect the true market value of labor.

Of course this is a fantasy indulged by the capitalist class and has no basis in reality. There is a massive power discrepancy between employer and employee and you need the federal and state governments and unions to at least partially redress that imbalance.
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The true believers

The only good thing for me to personally emerge from the disaster that we are going through is that I have stopped paying too much attention to political news and have used the released time for other things. But I still read some articles and was struck by this one that looked at the reactions of poor people in one area of Pennsylvania about how they viewed the future under a Trump administration that has vowed to cut the federal budget by huge amounts.

The sad thing is that many of them are under the delusion that the cuts will affect other people, not them, that they will be magically spared and even benefited, because they think that Trump really cares about them and that cutting money spent on these other freeloaders will leave more for them.
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Back in the saddle again

This has been a somewhat long hiatus from blogging due to being down with flu. That may have suggested to readers that I was suffering from serious symptoms. But in actual fact, after the first two days, I was almost back to normal. ‘Almost’ in the operative word here. My temperature was back to almost normal but I could not get rid of a low-grade fever and had a residual dry cough. The latter is for me a common consequence to a flu, not to be shaken for a couple of weeks.

But what really kept me from blogging was sense of blahness that left me with no enthusiasm for doing anything, such as everyday chores or even an appetite. In that condition, the enthusiasm to write, which comes usually comes easily to me, deserted me until today. The fact that it took me this long to get back to normal may mean that this was a different flu variant or that as I get older it will take me longer to bounce back.

It is not that these days were totally wasted. I did find that I could enjoy reading and so took the opportunity to read books that I should have read a long time ago and watched some films and TV shows.
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