A Biblical Inferno Signals That We Have Hit Rock Bottom

California burning is a metaphor for something much bigger.

It is simply tragic that it has come to this. That we must endure an inferno of biblical proportions in order to bottom out truly speaks volumes. Hundreds of thousands of people have had tragedy fall upon them. At last count, 11 people are dead, and countless others have lost their homes and all of the personal things that make life a little less mundane… their irreplaceable heirlooms, their precious keepsakes, cherished photographs, albums, books, musical instruments, cars, and so on. All gone. Children have lost their schools. People have lost their businesses and places of employment. All incinerated. It’s absolutely heart wrenching. If you really think about it, or if you are hearing the horror stories from one of the fire victims directly, it’s almost too much to think about. Humans tend to shut down when something too upsetting is presented to them. It’s a sort of coping mechanism. But you need to absorb this one because there is a tremendous lesson to be learned in the smoldering ashes.

Of course I am referring to the stupendous fires that are burning Los Angeles and other parts of California since last Tuesday, January 7th. For those who think this tragedy does not affect you because you are nowhere near California, you are clinging to false hopes. Those fires affect not just the Californian victims, but all Americans. Here’s why…

First, Biden has already declared that the federal government (ie with your and my tax dollars) will bail out California for the unprecedented cost of the destruction which could reach over a hundred billion dollars as the fires show no sign of slowing yet. This is a rather snap decision by Biden considering he doesn’t actually know what the price tag is going to be. Does California know they’ll get bailed out, and that spurs them to reject sound safety protocols and prevention measures? I mean, it’s not like this is their first wild fire catastrophe. They’ve been dealing with dangerous fires for well over a century, since at least 1889 with the Santiago Canyon Fire, right up through today. The most destructive fire (up until now) was just a few years ago, the August Complex, in August 2020 which resulted in 1,032,648 acres burned, 935 structures destroyed, and 1 death.

Secondly, and perhaps more potently, California burning is the perfect example of how the far left policies that have been implemented these past four years have destroyed lives, and brought a once great nation to its knees. Those toxic policies have come from the top down, nationwide, stemming from Biden/Harris, and have been going on in radically led states like New York and California for even longer. What’s happening in California right now (and for the past 6 days), could happen in any state. True, fires are not unique to California alone, but my deeper point is that the radical policies are the true toxin. Could these fires have been prevented? Possibly. We don’t know yet because it’s still unclear if they were intentionally set or not. (Note: a man was arrested by concerned citizens, but then astonishingly released by the LA police due to lack of probable cause, despite the fact that he had a blowtorch on him and the residents said they saw him trying to light a fire. I kid you not). However, that is an irrelevant fact to my point in this particular moment, because whether set by psychopathic hand or by lightning strike, the fact is that the fire damage could have been at least mitigated. If only the “leaders” were inclined to put the hard working, tax paying citizens first.

I explain…

What happened was a total rejection of logic, training and safety. Was it on purpose or simply incompetence? That’s a tough question to answer, but I will say that I find it hard to believe such gross incompetence, by so many, over a period of time is possible.

California is home to 40 million people, our largest state by population. Since the point of government is (supposed to be) to protect the citizenry, top on the list of a state government’s agenda needs to be to protect its people from grave dangers like fire, water, food shortages, etc. Parts of California (like with other states) are prone to fires at certain times of the year due to environmental factors like winds and precipitation levels. Last year’s budget for California came in at just shy of $300 BILLION. Despite that staggering number, Governor Gavin Newsom cut $101 million from the wildfire prevention budget. That’s a tremendous amount of money to take away from such a basic safety precaution. But that’s not all he did.

California has recently removed four dams (to the tune of about $450 million), in an attempt to help salmon. Though that sounds warm and fuzzy, the other side of that imbalanced coin is that dams not only supply us with lakes for recreation, they are also used for hydropower electricity production, flood control, drinking water supply chains (reservoirs), and life-saving irrigation routes. Speaking of reservoirs, in 2014 Californians voted for The Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act which requires spending close to $3 billion dollars on the creation of new reservoirs. It is now 11 years later, and not one reservoir has been constructed. Moreover, the reservoir near the LA fires was, get this, bone dry! It had been drained to perform a repair, and is still empty today. Meanwhile, California allows billions of gallons of stormwater to flow into the ocean instead of capturing and storing it for emergency uses, as many other states do. It’s called stormwater recycling, and the EPA is for it. Here’s a clip from a 2022 EPA report on stormwater reuse:

Water reuse, also known as water recycling, is the action of reclaiming water from a variety of sources and reusing it for beneficial purposes such as agriculture, irrigation, potable water supplies, groundwater replenishment, industrial processes, and environmental restoration. Water reuse enhances sustainability, water security, and resiliency by providing alternatives to existing water resources. Stormwater reuse involves storing water runoff from storm events and using it for other purposes. In locations with limited water supplies, water reuse can conserve water resources and benefit surface water quality.

But Newsom and the radicals that run California aren’t on board with water recycling, apparently, as their work in this area is anorexic.

Adding to the lack of a robust stormwater recapture infrastructure program, Newsom also blocked a project to bring water from northern California to southern California where water is more scarce. Five years ago, he rejected President Trump’s plan for California which would have channeled more water from the north to the farms and communities in the south. In fact, Newsom sued the Trump administration over said plan, citing concerns that diverting the water would negatively impact the state’s smelt and salmon populations. Putting fish before humans, yet again.

It’s fascinating that Newsom (and other electeds) are scratching their heads about how so many of the fire hydrants the LA fire fighters have tried to tap into these past several days are either empty or not pulling sufficient water to douse the blaze.

There’s more to the story (such as Newsom and the radical Dems’ not prioritizing the cleaning up of forest beds, or not conducting controlled burns, or slashing timber companies’ ability to harvest trees), but I want to shift now to local governance, for there is a stolid lesson to be learned there, too.

Los Angeles, where the bulk of the fire is raging, is the third largest city in the country. The mayor, Karen Bass, had this to say at a recent press conference about the catastrophic fires, “We have to protect lives, we have to save lives, and we have to save homes.” Sounds good as a soundbite, doesn’t it? But let’s look at the facts… Bass and the radicals that run LA cut the budget for the fire department by over $17 million. That’s the first blow. (But note, they had enough funding to send fire protective equipment to Ukraine's first responders!) Furthermore, there were no solid evacuation plans in place. People tried to flee their homes in their cars, but there was such bad gridlock, they abandoned their cars and walked to safety!

You can check out this news report here.

Then there’s the DEI side of the story.

The LA Fire Chief, Kristen Crowley, was appointed by Bass in 2022. She makes over $400,000/year. Much was made in the media of her being the first woman, first lesbian fire chief, and her plans to make the fire department more “equitable” under her tenure. Here’s what she said in an interview about becoming chief, “Our efforts will be maximized by making sure diversity is celebrated and valued, and that equity and inclusion are intertwined into every policy, procedure and practice.” She even created a “DEI Bureau” within the fire department which is run by Kristine Larson, a black lesbian who makes $300,000/year and has sparked much fury with a video where she defends DEI by saying she believes that when people’s houses are burning down, they want a firefighter to show up who looks like them. She goes on to say it’s irrelevant whether or not a woman fire fighter can carry a man out of a burning building because, well, according to Larson, he shouldn’t have gotten himself in that position in the first place. What?!

Watch HERE

Leaving that insanity alone for a minute, let’s focus on the theoretical purpose of the DEI here. What exactly does all of this DEI have to do with fighting fires and saving lives?! Not a single thing. Is Bass qualified to be the LA fire chief? I don’t know. I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt. My first question would be, how many fire departments, and of what size, has she managed prior to running the one that services the third largest city in our nation?

DEI is dangerous because it puts ideology ahead of merit. Americans don’t care if their fire department is full of all women, or all LGBTQ, or all blacks, or all whites… Instead, they care that the fire fighters are the best possible hires who can climb towering ladders with massive hoses and oxygen tanks on their backs in record time, carry a grown man or a disabled child out of a burning building, and so on.

How about the Chief of the Water and Power Department, Janisse Quinones (also hired by Bass). Quinones made it very clear that her primary goal was, what? Ensuring there was sufficient water in their reservoirs and/or finding new ways to collect and store emergency water sources for the height of wildfire season? Nope. None of that. Here it is in her own words, "It's important to me that everything we do is with an equity lens and social justice and making sure that we right the wrongs that we've done in the past."

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This woman makes $750,000/year!!! By the way, that’s almost double what her predecessor made.

This absolutely outrageous salary spurred me to take a look at some of the other salaries of the LA Water Department, and I almost fell off my chair. Take a look:

See full chart HERE

And yet, Bass and the LA Dems cut almost $18 million from the fire budget, and California spends about $31 BILLION a year on illegal aliens, according to FAIR. Let that sink in.

These are the leaders you/we are voting for?!

I’m not going to make this political because it is just heart wrenching what is going on for these hundreds of thousands of fire victims, but you cannot ignore the facts. LA County is one of the bluest counties in the country. They overwhelmingly voted for this. Will the residents realize the atomic bomb they are now experiencing was in large part the result of the “leaders” they voted into power? So many people there have not only lost everything, but very soon they will have to try to rebuild. Now they will experience another type of pain when they see how the radicals they put into power have destroyed our once well-oiled machines that led to a once prosperous society. Just wait until these people (rich and poor alike) try to get their permits to clear their land of the rubble and debris and then pull permits to start building from scratch. I have a very strong feeling they will get bit by their own snakes. (Remember, I spent almost two decades in the world of real estate law prior to the COVID era). The wealthy liberals in LA who are normally untouched by the radical left’s degrading policies will now feel the pain of those overbearing, nonsensical rules, regulations and laws. The rich are mostly untouched by soaring inflation, many have their own private security or live in gated neighborhoods that shield them from crime, and they simply drive past the homeless on the streets if they even see them at all. Their money makes them immune from stifling liberal government… until now. Rich, poor or somewhere in between, they will feel the ravishing effects of how inept the radical agenda is.

I will close by circling back to my comment about the cause of these unprecedented fires. Mainstream media, controlled by the left, is ignoring everuthing I just told you, and they are instead hammering away on the idea that manmade climate change caused a lack of rain, and that is what caused this tragedy. But that’s not what the evidence shows. Take a look at this chart of historical rainfall below:

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I agree that this epic firestorm is man’s fault. It’s man’s fault, but not because you drove your internal combustion car to work this morning. It’s because you elected people with far left, radical beliefs and goals to run our government. Now you see (hopefully) that they are not up to the job. The only thing these people know how to run is for office. They tear down dams and allow almost half the state’s water to run out into the ocean, and refuse to build more reservoirs, and allow existing reservoirs to sit empty, and fail to heed warnings from the National Weather Service, and ignore the power of recycled stormwater, and refuse to practice time-tested fire prevention techniques like controlled burns. Now look at the devastating consequences to man: the loss of precious human lives, and irreplaceable property, the damage to our environment, the stupendous carbon emissions, burning plastics, metals and unknown others, decimated wild life burned to a crisp…

It makes you wonder if they want the State to incinerate and the people to suffer. Figuratively and literally, this is an inferno of biblical proportions, and it has caused us to hit rock bottom. We, as a nation, can do better, folks. So much better.

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