A Close Look at the LA Fire

Los Angeles has beautiful but flammable neighborhoods.

They built the city that way because it is the way people like to live -- until it catches on fire.

Today's post is an invitation for readers to watch an hour-long video: Inside the SoCal Firestorms on YouTube.

You might want to watch it because you are interested in what all the fuss is about.

You might want to watch it because you want to know why your fire insurance might get cancelled, or tripled in price, even if you live in a city neighborhood of single-family houses with a fire station less than a mile away. 

You might want to watch it because you should rethink your current landscaping.

I recognize that most readers won't give it that time, so I will give some quick photo highlights. If you do watch the video, don't be discouraged by the bad audio at the very beginning. They fix that promptly.

First, something unusual about the Palisades fire. It started at a high elevation and moved downhill, pushed by wind. It started in brush but then got into houses and moved from house to house downslope. Most fires move uphill. This fire got so hot that it moved from house to house across block after block of houses.

This Google street-view scene shows a Palisades neighborhood that looks like neighborhoods I see in Medford and all across America. It is a widespread idea of "the American Dream," single family homes on city lots with nice green vegetation.

Most homes have shade trees and privacy hedges, some more than others.

The narration called attention to this third blue-gray house. Notice their fire-resilience: bare ground, concrete, trees well away from their home.

It burned up anyway. The adjacent home burned, so it burned.

The narrators said that the lesson from the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed 18,000 structures in Butte County, California, including the town of Paradise, was that the homes that survived were ones that were 60 feet or greater from another structure that burned. 

Embers from burning houses spread to the next house.

A typical entry point is at the rafters, vents, and gutters. The narrators said that when firefighters see a house in this condition, they know the house typically cannot be saved.

Dry conditions and high Santa Ana winds made Los Angeles particularly vulnerable. The fire apparently started in brush land adjacent to city streets. But once the fire entered the developed area it burned houses along with the green, irrigated landscaping. Green vegetation became fuel, not protection.

People do not choose to live in bare ground and concrete. We like green plants. City planners and planning codes encourage density, not sprawl, so by intention urban and suburban houses are closer together than 60 feet. Denser cities make water, sewerages, and public transportation more efficient. But there are tradeoffs that become catastrophic under house-to-house fire conditions.

The conditions in LA were extreme, but not wholly different from conditions that exist in much of the western U.S. on a hot, dry summer day. Medford has three months of dry weather with frequent days of 100+ degree temperatures. Our winters are wetter than are LAs, but that means there is more vegetation to dry out in the summers. I am going to re-think my landscaping, especially the lovely, tall bamboo up against the wooden deck along the front of my house. Green juniper is a common ground cover in Medford. It is hardy, trouble-free, and deer don't eat it. But firefighters call it "gasoline brush" because it burns hot and intensely. That is dense juniper along the front of my house where a discarded cigarette could set it ablaze.

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A fire-fighter comments on the California fires

Bone dry vegetation, low humidity, hurricane winds.

A forest-fire fighter comments.

I had two jobs in the summers of 1967 to 1971. I grew, picked, and sold melons in the cool early mornings between daylight and 10 a.m. After 10 a.m. I was on duty at the Oregon State Forestry fire station, where I was on the hotshot crew. We fought forest fires in the brushy scrub oak wild areas on low elevation land outside the cities. We were the rapid response to small fires, typically from a cigarette tossed from a car or kids playing with matches. If there weren't wind gusts, we could usually contain the fire while it was still smaller than a football field. I know enough about fighting fires to know that wind changes everything.

Gary Shade

Gary Shade knows a lot about fighting forest fires. He was a member of an elite crew of "smokejumpers" who would parachute into remote roadless areas where lightning had started fires. 

Gary Shade is at the top left. Smokejumper crew in Grangeville, Idaho, 1977.

He shared with me a letter he received from a lifelong friend, a Pennsylvanian who gets his news from Fox, who had questions about the California fires. Then Gary's response.

The friend writes:

I have been watching the news the last few days and the main story is the horrible fires in California and I would like to hear your opinion on what the hell is going on out there.      

I watch Fox news, which I think gives a more honest opinion of the real news and I think they do a good job of exposing the failures and causes of the fires. It seems that the liberal policies to protect the environment have   actually helped to  destroy the environment. The people in charge know that every year they have a fire threat and every year they have high winds in Jan and Feb, yet nothing preventive has taken place to prevent the fires or contain them in a timely manner.  I could not believe that they actually cut the Fire Department funds, but raised the homeless allotment by billions of dollars.      

It also sounds like Newsom is focusing on himself and his political future, instead of planning for any possible disasters, which looks like he helped promote, with taking out dams in the rivers and not building water reservoirs, which the federal money was allocated to in the billions of dollars.  Not one reservoir has been built and the ones they had were empty.  It seems like all common sense has left southern California.  I know you have been fighting the forest fires in the past and would like your honest opinion on what is going on. I feel terrible about the loss of life and property and all the wild animals that have been lost and all the forests that have been lost.    

Your friend,

         B. 

 

Gary Shade's response: 

The wildland fire management in CA is complex. Fourty-six percent of the land in CA is owned by the Federal Government. Here in Jackson County, Oregon, the Feds own 53 percent of the land. Imagine if half the land in PA or Montgomery County were owned by the Feds. The Feds are responsible for fuels reduction programs and fighting wildfires on their lands.

The Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Department of Interior are the primary agencies managing these lands. They have been working on fuels management and fuels reduction strategies for decades. The question is, have they done enough? They could do more with more money and less concern for environmental impacts as the argument goes.

The state agency for fighting CA wildland fires on state and private lands is Cal Fire. Cal Fire is the best firefighting agency on the planet, with the US Forest Service second.

The release of energy that destroyed Pacific Palisades was the equivalent of a strike by a tactical nuclear missile, but without the radiation. People are traumatized and angry. This can't be an "Act of God", somebody is responsible and righteous indignation floweth over. 

Weather patterns have been developing for the past two years in southern CA setting up for the perfect firestorm: a wet 2023 and an eight-month drought this year. Brush fields in southern CA were lush from last year and paper dry this year. Once there was an ignition in the wrong place at the wrong time, with hot dry east winds of hurricane force, a perfect firestorm was created. It was a wind-driven fire tsunami or fire avalanche barreling downhill to consume Pacific Palisades. 

The perfect stage has been set for a political backlash. I first think of the political backlashes from repeated hurricanes destroying Florida, or statewide winter power grid failures in Texas. Public outrage seems tempered and muted.  Republicans still keep their jobs.

The catastrophic firestorms in CA have now turned into the perfect firestorm for Dems. Now is the time to plant the stake in the heart of Newsom and environmentalists. And it is working, especially with Dems and their penchant for self-inflicted wounds and public snobbishness. The political goal is to eliminate a national Dems leader as a presidential competitor, punch the environmentalist in the nose, and keep the discussions away from the elephant in the room: a dramatically changing climate. 

The brush-filled mountains above Pacific Palisades had well-established dozer fire lines on all the ridge tops before the fire. There was work done in fuels management, and fire-breaks were effective for a topography driven fire. This was a wind-driven fire. So rather than racing uphill to the ridge-top fire breaks, the fire was driven down-slope by the winds from Hell. 

I live in the woods and a crown fire in the forest next to our compound will take out my home. There is much that I and neighbors can do to create a fire-defensible space around our homes and property. But if east winds blow hard, a fire could become a crown fire that would take out my neighborhood.

The criticisms of Dems are real and appropriate. We can and need to do better. Difficult strategic decisions will need to be made from lessons learned. My take is that, if I lose my place due to wildfire, I am not blaming the governor of Oregon. Now I could move to a more fire-secure location, but I'll take my chances with God's Acts.   

G. 

 

View of fire taken from a window seat of an airliner

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Trump Blames Newsom.

Donald Trump:

"One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground. It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!"

 

Good governing is a sales job.

Democrats are getting their asses whipped by Donald Trump.

Forest fires happen, and there is only so much one can do to control them.  Every fire site is different, every site's vegetation is different, and high winds can make fires unstoppable. Fires have a life of their own.

Trump was smart and cynical. He jumped on the California fire issue immediately and blamed the fires on a Democratic rival, California Governor Gavin Newsom. Some fire hydrants went dry. Trump blamed it on the failure of California to move water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the dryer south.

"he [Newsom] wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish, called a smelt."

In fact, neither the smelt issue, nor the removal of dams on the Klamath River to restore salmon, had anything to do with empty hydrants in the fire zones. The fire hydrant system had been sized for block-sized fires, not multi-thousand-acre conflagrations of the kind experienced this week. 

Trump is shaping the narrative that California leaders value the environment more than people. The narrative is sticking: Only 30 percent of voters polled by Emerson College approve of Newsom’s handling of the wildfire response; 42 percent disapprove; 28 percent are neutral.

Eventually the fires will go out. Eventually there will be careful review of what happened. We already know some fire apparatus was mispositioned. Dry hurricane-level winds pushed the fire down-hill, the opposite of the way that fires normally move. Most area homes were built with wood, not concrete and steel, because wooden homes do better in earthquakes. People like to live among vegetation -- shade trees and privacy hedges -- so making steep canyon hillsides fire-safe will exacerbate California's already-bad reputation for overregulation. The fix won't be easy. 

Maybe Gavin Newsom is simply a victim of events, like a very good college football coach with an 11-0 season whose team then loses the 12th game on national television. People are disappointed. Someone has to take the fall, so the coach gets fired. But notice that Trump did not take the fall for Covid. He immediately created a narrative that we were attacked by China. China created the virus. He called it the "China virus." He wasn't to blame for the million excess American deaths. China was.

Democrats underestimate Trump. The California fires are a catastrophe and Americans wonder whom to blame. Trump supplied us with the target. He is selling the message that environmentalist Democrats cause catastrophic fires. Therefore, the solution is to elect Republicans and ignore climate change. Instead, drill, baby, drill.

What should Democrats do?  First, get real about the business they are in. Don't look for a policy wonk to lead the party. Policy matters in a democracy only if people hear and believe the policy serves them. Government is a job in sales.

Second, in the case of the California fires, create a counter narrative. It is probably too late to fix this, but Newsom, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, and others need to have a target to blame. Blame the people who ignored the rising temperatures that created bigger hurricanes in the Atlantic, 40-inch downpours in Houston, and the fiercer Santa Ana winds in California. Blame the 44 Republicans who voted against HR 10545, the American Relief Act of 2025, which provided funds for construction of shaded fuel breaks on the West Coast. These no-voters included some familiar names, including Rand Paul and John Kennedy in the Senate, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace in the House, and multiple legislators from states that received significant disaster relief after hurricanes. Blame the hypocrites who sabotaged California while they expect federal assistance for disasters in their own states.

Americans are going to construct a mental narrative of what went wrong in California. Trump provided an easy answer: Gavin Newsom. If Newsom were the right person to be the Democratic nominee, he would already have created an alternative narrative. He hasn't, and I think it is probably too late for him.

The right Democrat to lead the party should step forward now to tell a persuasive Democratic narrative.

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The Jack Smith report:

I have summarized and condensed the 174 pages.

You can read the report yourself: Click.

I saw no new bombshell news beyond what we knew two years ago, when the January 6 committee made its findings. 

The report concludes that the evidence of Trump's guilt was overwhelming. They are confident they would obtain a conviction at trial, but since he was elected president again, no case can move forward.

The Table of Contents begins describing the evidence of Trump's crimes:

The report describes the chaotic events of January 6 in the context of two months of illegal actions by Trump and his co-conspirators. We know about Trump's pressure on state officials in Georgia ("find 11,780 votes) and Arizona ("we just want you to throw out those electors and put in Trump’s.")

One new fact emerged from this report. Apparently many of the GOP's alternate electors were reluctant to sign documents claiming they were "duly elected," since they knew this was untrue.  I have written several times saying these fake electors were stunningly foolish to sign. Only two of the seven states included language that said their election was contingent on future recounts or lawsuits that reversed the election outcome.  Trump's conspiracy needed absolute assertions of election by the fake electors. On page 11, the report says that the fake electors were lied to by the Trump campaign. 

During the call, Co-Conspirator 2 told a lie that the co-conspirators would use to induce the cooperation of many of the fraudulent electors: that Mr. Trump's electors' votes would be used only if ongoing litigation in their state proved successful for Mr. Trump.

Maybe they weren't liars and perjurers. Maybe they are better understood at gullible and careless. Their criminal error was to trust the Trump campaign.

The report lists the criminal deceit. Trump tried to get the Justice Department to announce falsely that it had independent information that fraud had taken place in the battleground states. Trump pressured the Vice President and told him he was "too honest." 

The report presents evidence that the Capitol invaders took inspiration from Trump, but not that Trump had direct control of the mob. Nor does the report claim Trump led an insurrection. The DoJ concluded that an insurrection requires an intent to overthrow existing government, not to cling to power unjustly. The report says that the provable definition of Trump's crimes comes in statutes regarding fraud, not insurrection. Trump led a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

The defraud clause of the general conspiracy statute makes it a crime "[i]f two or more persons conspire ... to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy." 

  Crucially, not only was Mr. Trump's voter-fraud narrative objectively false-he knew that it was false. Mr. Trump's false claims were repeatedly debunked, often directly to him by the very people best positioned to ascertain their truth. Campaign personnel told Mr. Trump his claims were unfounded; so did state officials, a White House official who engaged with Mr. Trump in his capacity as a candidate, and even his own running mate. 

The report clarified that one possible defense for Trump -- his reliance on counsel -- was not available to him. Lawyer John Eastman, now permanently disbarred for his role in the election aftermath, was a co-conspirator with Trump. Attorney-client privilege and the reliance-on-counsel defense cannot be used if the lawyer is an active participant in the fraud.

The report concludes with a defense of the investigation and prosecution of Trump. This isn't selective prosecution. 

It bears emphasis that Mr. Trump's knowing deceit was pervasive throughout the charged conspiracies. This was not a case in which Mr. Trump merely misstated a fact or two in a handful of isolated instances.

[T]he district court rejected [the claim of selective prosecution], explaining that Mr. Trump was "not being prosecuted for publicly contesting the results of the election; he is being prosecuted for knowingly making false statements in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy and for obstruction of election certification proceedings."

The United States has witnessed a giant case of jury nullification. Voters know that Trump is a sleazy crony capitalist con man who attempted to overturn the 2020 election by lying about it. About half of America's voters aren't particularly troubled by that. They like what he represents and what he claims he will do.  

The jury was the 152 million voters, and they voted to acquit. They voted 76.9 million for Trump and 74.4 million for Harris.

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Fight fire with testosterone.

Of course Fox News would blame Democrats for the LA fires. That was a given.

What is curious is their line of attack. Today Fox returns to the theme that California fires are due to insufficient masculinity.

Cain

I had never heard of Dean Cain, an actor who apparently played the role of Superman at one point. He formerly lived in Malibu but departed to Nevada because of the fire danger and the cost of fire insurance. Fox is using this obscure (to me, at least) actor to make their point. This continues the GOP long-game effort to gender the political parties. Democrats are the soft party; the feckless don't-face-up-to-hard-reality party; the party that prefers diplomacy to warfare, and gets pushed around by allies and opponents. Democrats aren't cowboy, rough-rider, masculine enough. 

Fox quotes Dean:

You screwed up, Gavin Newsom. You screwed up. There was plenty of water. Last year was record rainfall or the year before, record rainfall. Snowmelt, reservoir the water.

Good times create weak men and weak men create hard times. Weak policy creates hard times. We're now in hard times. We need to have strong men so we can create good times again. That's the way it is. Strong men and women, sound policy. Everybody's going to be in a better position.

Democrats don't concede that feminine means weak. In second wave feminism after publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963, women can do anything men can do. Women are in the professions. Women can be in combat. Women can pay for dates and initiate sex. Women are men's equals. Trump is saying the opposite. Hillary Clinton "lacked stamina," he said, and Kamala Harris has a "low IQ." Trump communicates that women need protection from strong men. 

Presidents and party leaders have a long tradition of representing physical strength and rugged manliness. George Washington was tall and physically imposing. Andrew Jackson fought in duels, carried a bullet inside him, and was nicknamed "Old Hickory" and "Indian Killer." William Henry Harrison was the hero of Tippecanoe; Lincoln was "the Rail Splitter;" Theodore Roosevelt had a rugged cowboy life in the Dakotas, then led the Rough Riders. In my lifetime, JFK praised "vigor" and initiated a presidential physical fitness program. On his ranch Ronald Reagan chopped firewood for the camera. Donald Trump brands himself as a billionaire Lothario, a mix of Hugh Hefner and Rambo. 

If the U.S. had a parliamentary system, a woman representing a feminine-branded party might emerge as a consensus candidate, but the U.S. has a presidential system. Here the president is the head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. This gives an advantage to the party with the male valence and sensibility. The strong-male-protector vibe has traction with voters, including women. This frustrates Democrats. It frustrates me. But Democrats deny this reality of our culture at their peril. 

I think Democrats need to fix their branding by adding back some symbols of toughness and vigor. The worst way to do this is with phony bolted-on masculinity symbols, e.g. John Kerry wearing bird-hunting gear. People can see the staged phoniness.

The best way would be for their next candidate to be an elite veteran -- a Navy Seal or Green Beret --who has stayed in shape. People need to see that the Democratic leader is physically tough, thereby symbolizing mental toughness. It is probably too much to hope for a martial arts cage fighter for the next Democratic leader, since I don't see one on the Democratic bench, but it is not too late for a Democrat with ambition to take up a sport that requires pain and mental discipline. One or more candidates could start training for marathons now. Run them for real. Get sweaty. Mess up your toes and knees and hips. Endure some pain. Run hurt. Legitimacy needs to be earned, not purchased. In 2028, be ready to challenge JD Vance or Ted Cruz to race you, and beat them soundy.

Democrats shouldn't scoff at the notion of Rambo Trump. People seem to like it the idea. Democrats should learn from this. If Americans expect their national leader to be strong, fearless, and tough -- and they do -- then Democrats should give them a candidate with those qualities. 

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Easy Sunday: Mark Cuban is running for president as a Democrat

Mark Cuban isn't "waiting his turn."

He is making his move now.

This is what people say when they are running for president and don't want to announce yet:

Mark Cuban is talking big picture. He is talking about what kind of country this is. He says what he thinks. He is being a leader.

I checked into Bluesky yesterday and got this:

It was forwarded to me by Heather Cox Richardson, the historian and Substack author whose insights are read by millions of subscribers nearly every day. Then it was reposted by Kara Swisher, a podcaster who broadcasts on technology, politics, and culture. Cuban isn't getting validation from the next generation of thought leaders. 

I will be writing again about Mark Cuban. For now, I suggest people put him on their mental radar as a political leader. 

     1. Watch for his name. 

     2. Subscribe to his website's updates. The subscription sign-in box is on the right side of his home page.

https://blogmaverick.com

     3. Get the Bluesky app, the one with the blue butterfly, and follow Mark Cuban.  BlueSky is the better alternative to Twitter/X.  

Mark Cuban is a legitimate billionaire, famous for being on a TV reality show, Shark Tank, a co-owner and face of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, and operator of a discount drug company.

He is doing what leaders do. He is charting a new path for Democrats. He recognizes that the job of the U.S. president is public communication. 

As one person commented on Cuban in response to the above post: Mark Cuban "proves that not all billionaires are assholes."

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Trump sentenced yesterday. He's not a stable genius.

Creating false business records is a serious crime.

Trump is complaining about it. He should have expected to be investigated. 

He was stupid. He documented his own crime.

False business records are a crime because that is how most frauds are carried out.

False business records crashed the economy in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. White collar crime steals more money than does armed robbery. A false business record could be the electric company falsifying your electric meter reading or an embezzler giving his employer fake bank statements. It is how people underpay their taxes. In the build-up to the Great Financial Crisis, mortgage companies made false business documents to create "liar loans" which investment banks presented to ratings agencies who pretended they were AAA quality. There was false documentation at every level. 

"Fraud" can involve a chain of actions that only become deceitful when combined. It can be hard to point to any one thing to show fraudulent intent. New York state, the center of the American financial industry, addressed that problem by defining "false business records" as a crime so there can be clear-cut provable elements of dishonesty. It may be hard to show what a Bernie Madoff intended but easy to show that Madoff created the false account statements that made his fraud possible.

Donald Trump created false records in the form of tax-deductible legal fees when his payments were in fact the personal expense of secretly paying hush money through an intermediary. The false documents are a provable crime.

Trump wasn't picked on. He was careless and he got caught.

Trump was running for president. I repeat my good advice for readers considering running for office: Don't be having an affair. Don't be cheating on your taxes. Don't be doing illegal drugs. 

Trump was astonishingly careless. He did something sneaky and illegal, and he created a paper record of it. I am no expert on money laundering, but he could have paid hush money without leaving a guilty-looking and improbable trail of $30,000 checks. Trump owed Stormy Daniels $130,000. He could have given Michael Cohen, his attorney fixer, $160,000 and told him to buy gold coins worth at least $135,000, plus another $25,000 for some nice piece of gold jewelry. Cohen need not declare this as taxable income for himself, since the money is not for him. He would be a purchasing agent for his long-time client. Trump could instruct Cohen to give the $135,000 in gold coins to Stormy Daniels, with the extra to cover the nuisance of her turning them into cash, and bring a $25,000 gold bauble back to Trump, which he can present to Melania as a surprise gift. If Trump bought it himself, the purchase might attract attention and not be a surprise for Melania, so it was an errand handled by Cohen -- a plausible story if this ever came to light. 

Instead, Trump wrote checks documenting tax and election fraud.

Trump should not be angry at District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Bragg was just doing what people in politics do, look to see if a political opponent has some embarrassing secret and expose it. Trump saw what happened to Bill Clinton, Jonathan Edwards, Gary Hart, Bob Livingston, and Denny Hastert. The GOP was in the midst of exposing Hunter Biden. Trump knew the risks of running for election when he had secrets to hide.

My suggestion for Democrats is to respond to Trump's complaints about his crime being prosecuted not with a defense of the legal system. Voters apparently don't care that he had sex with Stormy Daniels and committed fraud to cover it up. Voters know he is a lawbreaker. What they like about Trump is that he breaks the law and wins anyway.  Democrats should make this about Trump's competence. Belittle the "very stable genius" by asking what kind of nincompoop covers up a nasty dalliance with a porn star by creating a paper trail of obviously phony checks. Of course you were going to be investigated, you idiot!  You were running for president! And you covered it up by writing checks. Double idiot! What an incompetent buffoon.

Trump cares more about looking smart than he does about looking honest. 

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