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The Frankish Reich

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Everything posted by The Frankish Reich

  1. Trump's sentencing to go forward tomorrow thanks to a 5-4 Supreme Court vote. Completely sensible decision. The trial judge is on record as saying that he will not be imposing jail time or any other punishment, so it is appropriate that the case below is completed and Trump's appeal may raise any/all issues at once. Before you say "oh, of course he agrees with the liberal NY judge," listen up: the Supreme Court should also not disturb FL Dist Ct Judge Aileen Cannon's decision stopping the immediate release of Jack Smith's classified documents report. There are still active defendants in that criminal case, and the general rule is that the trial court judge is granted great leeway in deciding how to ensure a fair trial.
  2. I realize that the shots are quite effective in preventing you from getting the disease, and in turn from transmitting the virus. So firefighters, who routinely provide EMT care, ought to be vaccinated against COVID, the seasonal flu, RSV, and other transmissible infections. That this is somehow a controversial proposition still amazes me. I was in a public contact job (a lot less intimate contact than an EMT, mind you) and I was properly vaccinated as soon as vaccines became available. In part to protect myself, in part to protect those people who had business to conduct with me. Personal responsibility, community responsibility: these used to be core American virtues. Used to be ...
  3. How about applying conservative, market-based principles here? We are subsidizing people to live in places like Malibu by artificially limiting their insurance premiums. Let the market work, let Malibu depopulate.
  4. Just want to be left alone? Then don't work for the government in a job that often requires close contact with vulnerable individuals who may acquire and die from the infection you give them. Selfish jackasses is what they are.
  5. Exactly. Parts of Florida's coast and Malibu/Pacific Palisades are two sides of the same coin: overbuilding in an area that is virtually certain to create catastrophic loss. All created by Democrats? Think again. https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/ “Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable. After one of the most protracted legal battles in California history, the court granted the state right-of-way through Rancho Malibu. Opened to traffic in 1928, the Pacific Coast Highway gave delighted Angelenos their first view of the magnificent Malibu coast and introduced a potent new source of ignition—the automobile—into the inflammable landscape. The indefatigable May Rindge continued to fight the road builders and developers in the courts, but in the end the costs of litigation forced her to lease choice parts of Malibu beachfront to a movie colony that included Jack Warner, Clara Bow, Dolores Del Rio, and Barbara Stanwyck herself. The colony’s unexpected housewarming was a lightning-swift wildfire that destroyed 13 new homes in late October 1929. Exactly a year later, walnut pickers in the Thousand Oaks area accidently ignited another blaze, which quickly grew into one of the greatest conflagrations in Malibu history. The 1930 Decker Canyon fire was a worst-case scenario involving 50-year-old chaparral and a fierce Santa Ana. Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames, 1,100 firefighters could do little except save their own lives. As the firestorm unexpectedly wheeled toward the Pacific Palisades, there was official panic. County Supervisor Wright, his nerves shaken by a visit to the collapsing fire lines, posted a hundred patrolmen at the Los Angeles city limits to alert residents for evacuation. Should the “fire raging in the Malibu District get closer,” he gasped, “our whole city might go.” Ultimately, this apocalypse (which may have given Nathanael West the idea for the burning of Los Angeles in his novel Day of the Locust) was avoided—no thanks to human initiative—when the fickle Santa Ana abruptly subsided. In hindsight, the 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Only a few months before the disaster, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.—the nation’s foremost landscape architect and designer of the California state park system—had come out in favor of public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain areas between Topanga and Point Dume. Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936, and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded the wisdom of Olmsted’s proposal for a great public domain in the Santa Monicas. The county of Los Angeles, for example, squandered an extraordinary opportunity in 1938 to acquire 17,000 acres of the bankrupt Rindge estate in exchange for $1.1 million in delinquent taxes. At a mere $64 per acre, it would have been the deal of the century. A monomaniacal obsession
  6. So, so much ignorance on display here. The southern California Santa Ana winds are a special case. Learn some geography. Joan Didion, c. 1969: Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains. Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects. https://www.murrieta.k12.ca.us/cms/lib5/CA01000508/Centricity/Domain/1538/The Santa Anas.pdf
  7. Oh, you mean these jackasses who were on paid leave for more than 2 years? https://www.foxla.com/news/suspended-lafd-firefighters-called-back-work-after-vax-mandate-ends-could-still-be-fired They're back, and probably crappy firefighters who won't follow orders.
  8. Buddy, he just took credit for the rise in the stock market after the election. And yes, that signals that the markets expect him to add fuel to the fire. And with that comes the risk of higher inflation, and in turn, higher interest rates. You can't have it both ways. I know he thinks you and yours are too dumb to figure that out, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt here.
  9. Or take a look at the landscape that brought us the deadliest fire in recent history, in Arizona. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarnell,_Arizona
  10. I'm not sure at this point if you've even been to southern California, much less hiked on the trails through these canyons. If you had, you would never say something this silly. And not just California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Fire
  11. You just don't get it. Two old men, both losing it in their own particular ways. One insists on enforcing his own will, regardless of how unfocused (and even idiotic) it may be. One defers to his advisers, who may not espouse the policies you prefer, but who are clearly focused and sane. The former is less fit than the latter. Got it?
  12. Wait a minute, am I Mr. Snob? Or is Doc Ferguson? We're an elite group. Put down the PBR and come join us. The good life awaits (albeit not in Cuba). I'll wait for you before I start muddling the mentha x villosa.
  13. Maybe we should focus on how North Carolina is doing months after a frickin rain storm. I understand the Amish have thrown up a few tuff sheds.
  14. https://www.instructables.com/If-You-Love-Mojitos-You-Need-to-Grow-This-Mint/ I'm gonna get a start on this in March. Remember, never plant mint in a planting bed! Always in a container. (I learned the hard way)
  15. Two different things. Yes, California doesn't have the infrastructure to save water in years of excess snow melt, and winds up pitting environmental interests against residential interests. No, there is no such thing as dampening the forests (or scrublands) in any way that would result in any appreciable wildfire prevention.
  16. I always wear my summer poplin suit when I'm participating in canal construction.
  17. Perfect characterization, except that: - no one is "demanding" anything; they are advising at most - nothing in the article mentions "cloth masks," and the accompanying photo shows a man wearing a serious looking mask.
  18. Call me a liberal, whatever. But I've never had that liberal obsession with Cuba. I have no idea where it comes from other than "my enemy's enemy is my friend" thinking, which of course starts with believing that the U.S. government is the enemy. I have no interest in traveling there to subsidize a horrid government.
  19. Yes, it is bonkers. The following are statements by bitter, egotistical old men who act like children: "Yeah, you won, but only because I didn't run." "You cheated, so I should be declared the winner." Such is the state of American politics. There is something to be admired about Jimmy Carter after all, isn't there ...
  20. Someday someone will explain trends to you.
  21. I didn't know California had a Mayor. But if it did, it would be a Democrat.
  22. So why have treasury yields spiked since the election?
  23. I'm afraid Trump never allowed that to be asked as he "weaved" [read: rambled] his way into something Hezbollah ... Glad to see you gave my pre-November posts your quality seal of approval.
  24. Mortgage rates spike up to 6.93%, highest since July. Explanation: inflationary fears due to expected Trump policies.
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