“State Farm, my insurer for decades, canceled my insurance and everyone in our immediate neighborhood just before the fire. State Farm WASN’T there. . . .” — James Woods
“So-called progressives finally achieved what they supposedly warned of but in truth wished for: the eviction of the affluent descendants of colonizers, the incineration of their homes, and the destruction of a city that, more than any other, represents our bloody history of white supremacy and conquest.” — Michael Shellenberger
For those in the USA with an interest in collapsing the USA, the Los Angeles fire is the gift that will keep on giving, and George Soros hardly had to cough up a dime to make it happen. From the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion angle, the fire got‘er done, cleansing nearly the entire PacPal population of snooty, rich, white “allies” of the oppressed and marginalized — who will now have LA to themselves. Chez Whitey is “closed for renovations,” and it might be twenty years before it can re-open, if ever.
Probably never, if the California Coastal Commission has anything to say about it. And why wouldn’t they? They do not generally approve of stuff getting built right up on the beach. They were probably all down on their knees Sunday in the Church of Luxury Belief thanking Climate Jeezus for sweeping Malibu and the hills above it clean.
Ronald Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, rent her garments in The New York Times Sunday op-ed page, wailing:
“My anger over what we have done to this fragile, exquisite Earth was muffled by grief until the other evening when I was watching a news program that had a panel of commentators. The subject was Los Angeles on fire, and one person mentioned climate change as a cause. Another commentator smirked and said he didn’t believe it was the cause.
I felt rage surge up past my grief.
My first thought was: “You think you know more than scientists?”
Of course, my first thought reading that was: Who is paying those scientists? The same question you might ask of the scientists at the CDC, NIH, FDA, and NIAID who declared that Covid-19 was definitely not created in a Wuhan lab, and the mRNA vaccines were “safe and effective.” My second thought was: could you possibly find a better example of elite Utopian-Woke performative acting-out? My third thought was: since when are “experts” infallible? My fourth thought was: doesn’t science advance on the basis of continuous argument? My fifth thought was: if Patti Davis is watching the news, she must be in some comfortable and probably luxurious place that did not burn down. So much for my thoughts, entertained without the rending of garments.
More to the point of the fire itself, you must wonder what is happening to those tens of thousands of displaced persons and families right now? How many of them are sleeping out on their smoldering properties, or in their cars, or just shivering on a sidewalk somewhere. It does not seem possible that they all found a place to go, certainly not at their neighbors’ houses, who were all burnt-out, too. . . and there are just so many hotel rooms not occupied by “the undocumented.” Anyway, how many families can stay in hotel rooms that go for $1,000-a-night, and for how many nights? How many of them lost absolutely everything, including the possibility of a future?
Which gets you to the realization that we have barely begun to see the knock-on effects of this catastrophe. Those tens of thousands of the burnt-out will not be reporting to work anytime soon. They will have all they can do to find a roof over their heads while they hassle with FEMA officials, State of California bureaucrats, insurance company claims agents, and other “helpers.” The rebuilding quandaries have already been rehearsed in the news. Even if politicians suspended all the building and zoning codes, and the tax issues, where will so many contractors come from in any reasonable time-frame? And where do you put all that melted plastic goop and toxic ash that remains on-the-ground where peoples’ lives used to be?
If you lost a house valued at $5-million, it will cost you at least $10-million to replace it. Good luck, even if you were a mid-level movie star. Of course, if your insurance got cancelled lately — or you just didn’t have any because it cost too much — then there is zero chance you will get to even fantasize about living in the hills above Malibu ever again. And that job you’re not able to go to right now due to the pressing needs of sheer survival on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. . . you might never go to that job again. The business you worked for might not be there anymore, either.
If there was ever a proverbial last-grain-of-sand-in-a-landslide, the Great 2025 Los Angeles Fire must be a sure thing vis-a-vis the US economy, especially the financial side of it. An awful lot of homeowners will not be paying their mortgages on a smoldering empty lot. The banks are not in super-fabulous condition these days. How many loans-gone-bad will it take to wreck already unstable banks? And, by the way, the collateral isn’t even there anymore. The re-po man is out of the picture.
What happens to the insurance companies? And the re-insurance companies who theoretically stand behind the insurers? I’ll tell you what happens: they will be backstopped by the government, which doesn’t have the money to backstop them. . . but will create it out of pixels on screens. . . which means expect a considerable uptick in inflation (i.e., a downtick in the purchasing power of the dollar), which will be a black eye for the new Trump administration. How does all this thunder through the US economy as a whole?
Nobody really know just yet, but the signs are not reassuring. You can infer countless chains-of-consequence. Friday’s action in the financial markets felt like a tremor of things to come. The Bubble-of All-Bubbles abides. . . for how long?
