The Essence of the Scams

January 15, 2025 by Karl Denninger

The California fires have laid bare, for those who can think anyway, the sheer scale of the scams, grift and frauds that every American deals with silently and -- in many cases without even thinking about it -- every single day.

They've got a "public works" employee who makes $750,000 a year. How many ordinary people in LA make $750,000 a year? Exactly how do you justify a salary nearly double that of the President of the United States when you can't manage to keep fire hydrants full of water under pressure when there is a fire?

The Fire Chief, who publicly stated that LGBTQRS++++ and "equity" were the most important things in her department, and even went further and when questioned on this, since there are basically zero women who can pass firefighting physical standards designed to insure you can carry a grown man down a ladder out of a 2nd story window if required that "if that happens then the man shouldn't have been there" -- and this was good for a total pay in 2023 of $439,772.39. Oh by the way, the next two down the ladder in the Fire Department in terms of salary are paid $331,371 and $403,577 respectively for a total of roughly one million in salary and benefits.

None of those three nor anyone else in LA's alleged "engineering" departments thought that buying sea-scooping aircraft was advisable even though dropping water from the air is one of the best ways to fight fires that are not adjacent to a public street simply because there are no pipes there -- and in the case of LA there is an inexhaustible source of water right there called an "ocean."

Apparently none of these people believed that a public campaign demanding that fire mains not connected to the domestic supply lines be installed -- even where they could be quite cheaply, such as right on the Pacific Coast highway and beach! HDPE, the common pipe used today for mains, is heat-welded, thus has no couplers to fail and is impervious to corrosion including by salt water. You cannot use domestic water mains for large-scale firefighting -- they're adequate for a single house fire but not for widescale fires because (1) as each house burns and fails the entrance pipe to it is destroyed and once a few of those houses burn the system is open and pressure will collapse as it goes beyond the maximum design demand and the number of hydrants you wish to use exceeds the capacity to fill them. Empty reservoirs don't help but the fact is you need large fuel-driven pumps to drive pressure through dedicated fire mains for such service which are not connected to the domestic supply mains and thus will not go "open line" and suffer a pressure collapse as houses and businesses burn. Yes, such a system is expensive but wildfires have always been inevitable in that part of the country.

Further, none of those three nor anyone else in LA's alleged "engineering" or public safety departments believed that getting the fuel off the forest floor or forcing the electric company, which enjoys rights of way granted them by said government to remove all trees that could contact power lines, clear the ground under said lines of all combustible material and invest in replacement of aging poles and attachments so when there is a windstorm (1) the lines don't come down and (2) if that fails there is nothing to ignite. Oh by the way they also did not force said utility to invest in the capacity to monitor for arcing on said transmission system and disconnect any portions of it where it occurs. Arcing produces a very distinctive electrical signature that looks like nothing else and thus can be detected and interdicted if you look. That this occurs is in fact why all newer homes have to have arc-fault breakers on the panel for all bedroom circuits because arcing causes fires and people do stupid things like run extension cords under rugs.

So now in addition to not having any resources to fight said fires the same public works people refused to mitigate human ignition of fire which is the cause of basically all (>90%) of wildfires in that part of the country! The reason is simple: Dry lightning, which is the natural cause of fire, is extremely rare in that area.

Instead of actually mitigating risk and then having infrastructure in place to deal with the problem if the mitigations fail despite best effort everyone out there who is trying to save their own scalps from well-justified gallows that should be under construction right now by the residents blames "climate change" -- which is outrageously false and should get these people executed on the spot as it is nothing more than a rank admission of their own culpability and grift.

Don't kid yourself that this is only about certain people in LA -- or for that matter California. Its not. While at a State level Californians voted for a bond issue to provide billions of water storage and transport for firefighting -- which many years later resulted in zero being spent on that and presumably blown on other things like housing and providing medical care to "migrants" at a national level Congress appropriated billions for rural Internet connectivity several years ago that has not connected a single person to the Internet. Since money is all fungible the truth is that it was stolen and spent on other things -- like EBT cards and $500/nt hotel rooms for illegal aliens rather than its intended purpose.

Never mind the CR that was just passed including $100 billion for hurricane relief and now FEMA is kicking people in WNC out of hotels so, as Biden has assured California, he can divert (that is, steal) the $100 billion and give it to the very same chucklefucks who are responsible for the fire having occurred and their inability to effectively respond to it because hiring lesbians who can't actually hump the gear to fight a fire was the stated goal of the fire chief!

Congress' response to this? A shrug of the shoulders; they appropriated the money and could claw it back before its spent on something other than its claimed appropriated purpose. But they haven't and won't so spare me about how "your" chucklefuck Congress-critter is somehow "better" than the ones representing all the various blue zoos. I will toast any death by freezing should it occur to any of them and/or any of their family members, yes, including their children since they seem to think that's perfectly ok for those in WNC they voted to assist and then sat on their ass and played with their genitals, probably while watching porn and/or fantasizing about sexually abusing children as the current Administration boasts that they're going to steal the money.

Now look at firms like Blackrock which is up to its neck in various schemes such as "ESG" in allocating funds which incidentally a recent court decision against American Airlines says is illegal under ERISA. This is egregiously unlawful in that ERISA is clear in the responsibility of plan administrators as fiduciaries to the plan members and permits no other superseding goal. That act was malicious as ERISA was long in existence before the "ESG" crap started and the law is both clear and unambiguous so where are the criminal indictments against Blackrock and others? Oh by the way note this from the decision:

But the pilots failed to prove a violation of the statute’s prudence rule, he said, because the airline “acted according to prevailing practices and in a manner similar to other fiduciaries in the industry.” That’s true even though those standards may stem from BlackRock’s “alarming degree of control and influence over the retirement industry"—an industry O’Connor described as “incestuous” and full of “oligopolist or cartel-like behavior.”

That's a separate felony under 15 USC Chapter 1, remember?

Well?