Showing posts with label LATimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LATimes. Show all posts

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Incompetence from sea to shining sea: Trump releases water needed for summer agricultural irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley to fight fires but that water will simply evaporate in Tulare Lake


 

... The two reservoirs are used to hold supplies for agricultural irrigation districts. Nemeth noted that winter is not the irrigation season for farms, which require more supplies to grow crops in the summer months, “so there isn’t a demand” for the water in the San Joaquin Valley at this time. ...

Peter Gleick, a water scientist and senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, said dam managers would typically only release large quantities of water in the winter when major storms create a need to make space for large inflows of runoff. But Southern California has been very dry and the snowpack in the southern Sierra remains far below average, so “there is no indication that that’s why these releases occurred.”

“In addition, when those kinds of releases do occur, they’re always done in consultation with local and state agencies,” Gleick said.

“I don’t know where this water is going, but this is the wrong time of year to be releasing water from these reservoirs. It’s vitally important that we fill our reservoirs in the rainy season so water is available for farms and cities later in the summer,” Gleick said. “I think it’s very strange and it’s disturbing that, after decades of careful local, state and federal coordination, some federal agencies are starting to unilaterally manipulate California’s water supply.”

Vink agreed, saying that given how dry it has been in the region this winter, there was no need to make such a release. In fact, he said, farmers were counting on that water to be available for summer irrigation.

“This is going to hurt farmers,” Vink said. “This takes water out of their summer irrigation portfolio.” ...

 




Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Drudge's poorly paid help calls one of the most destructive firestorms in memory from the LA Times story "the most distructive in history" lol

 The LA Times doesn't lose its cool when reporting the news, but Drudge does.

More than 1,100 homes, businesses and other buildings have burned and at least five people are dead in wildfires scorching communities across Los Angeles County, making this one of the most destructive firestorms to hit the region in memory.     

Always, always, always read the sources.



Anarcho-tyranny in Pacific Palisades Fire: No water in some fire hydrants


 

 From the Los Angeles Times here:

“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Caruso said. “The firefighters are there [in the neighborhood], and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. ... It should never happen.”

A spokesman for the Department of Water and Power acknowledged reports of diminished water flow from hydrants but did not have details on the number of hydrants without water or the scale of the issue.

In a statement, the DWP said water crews were working in the neighborhood “to ensure the availability of water supplies.”

“This area is served by water tanks and close coordination is underway to continue supplying the area,” the DWP said in its statement.

 

Providing basic fire fighting resources is a bare minimum function of local government, at which this very wealthy community is obviously failing, mirroring California government's overall statewide failure to reduce wildfires.

State Farm stopped insuring roughly 30,000 homes in California in the summer of 2024, in part due to the danger to its business there from catastrophic fires in communities where multi-million dollar homes are common, and too commonly go up in smoke.

You'd cut your losses, too, if you suspected the locals had become as hopelessly bad as the one party state under Gavin Newsom.

Monday, August 5, 2024

The LA Times wants you to know there are way fewer Trump signs in rural Michigan right now, perhaps because of the Trump assassination attempt

 Some rural and suburban Michiganders also reported a general sense of unease and even fear, particularly those who say they were spooked by the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania last month. Kitchen said she “kind of shut down” her previously active Facebook account after the attack, because the political rhetoric got too heated.

Raffy Castro, 22, was fishing for bass from a dock over the Clinton River on Monday afternoon. Though this will be the first election the Sterling Heights resident has voted in, he recalled much higher enthusiasm in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

“I haven’t heard people talking about it,” he said. “I think people are scared, especially with the shooting. I guess people don’t want to portray who they support.”

More.

 

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

The truly mentally ill person in this story is the tolerant woman who was brutally attacked and raped by the same man who murdered the other one

 


  She's as much a danger to the rest of us as the perp.

 2 women are brutally attacked on Venice Canals, focusing debate on crime, homelessness

She feels the attacks are emblematic of an issue no one wants to address: the mental health and drug crisis among the unhoused residents of Venice.

"It's not like they're horrible people," Klein said. "It's just we need to stop being in denial about our family members and our community members who are in desperate need of mental health help — especially those who are really struggling on the streets."

 

Monday, June 3, 2024

LA Times editorial board lol: You’re not alone if it seems like your electric bill is getting too damn high

From the story here, slightly edited for clarity:

State greenhouse gas reduction Fascist government policies are pushing forcing residents to adopt electric cars and appliances that will only increase their electricity consumption.


Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Victims of the permanent psychedelic trip demand accommodation

 From the LA Times here:

“This disorder has stigma and shame attached to it. People often dismiss people with HPPD as druggies,” he said. “We deserve the same amount of caring and attention as people with any serious life-altering condition. … For that to happen, doctors need to know this is a thing."

I'd be more sympathetic if there were even one word in this story suggesting that drug liberalization laws have been a big mistake, but no. There isn't the slightest hint of remorse.

We've known since at least the 1960s that psychedelics can cause permanent harm, removing users from productive society and making them a burden on us all.

There is no excuse for this sorry state of affairs.

Monday, April 8, 2024

LA Times blames out-migration under Gruesome Gavin Newsom on "not enough room" left in California lol

 Here:

California just got too big for its carrying capacity — at least in the sprawling, ranch-house lifestyle that so many people covet and symbolizes the state’s easy-living persona. “Grow and grow and grow and eventually there’s not enough room,” says Hans Johnson, a demographer at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. “The easy places for growth have been used up. Growth today means infill development [in cities]. That’s expensive and controversial. Or you live further away from your job.”

 

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Holy cow, Biden's new tailpipe rule will make new gas vehicles extinct by 2032 and the LA Times says he's not going fast enough!

 

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

That's so California right there lol: Adam Shifty Schiff is unflappable and polite, also the man who regularly insulted Trump on social media

 From the LA Times here:

Instead [disgruntled Porter supporter Katie Loss, 69] is supporting Schiff, who she said she has long admired for his intelligence, his more than 20 years of experience in Washington and his willingness to stand up to Trump. And, she said, his polite, unflappable demeanor is "badly needed in the Senate."

Three paragraphs later:

Still, Schiff — through his role as a House impeachment manager and regular appearances on cable news — was the most visible and forceful foil to Trump, who regularly called him out at rallies and insulted him on social media.     

 

Meanwhile, just 48% of the vote in California, tech capital of the world, is counted this morning:

 


 

 

 


Saturday, July 16, 2022

LOL, on Tuesday July 12th Joe Biden told the president of Mexico in a meeting that America has the fastest growing economy in the world

 

Biden, once López Obrador finished, reminded him that America's economy is the fastest growing in the world, while showing no umbrage and restating his respect for Mexico and its leader.

More

 

Joe Biden's own US Bureau of Economic Analysis, June 29th, said GDP fell at an annual rate of 1.6% in 1Q2022:



Saturday, February 26, 2022

LOL, Obama had to drop pallets of cash on Iran because of SWIFT: "U.S. and international sanctions isolated Iran from the international finance system"

 Obama 2016 swan song: 

$1.7-billion payment to Iran was all in cash due to effectiveness of sanctions, White House says

Germany will find a way to pay for heat, too. Keep a sharp eye out for flights from Frankfurt to Moscow, loaded with pallets of cash to get around SWIFT.



Saturday, February 12, 2022

Maybe the shoplifting would decrease if we started chopping off their hands



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Shoplifting reaches crisis proportions

  • "It's out of control — it is just out of control," Lisa LaBruno, SVP of operations and innovation at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, tells Axios. ...
  • “They come in every day, sometimes twice a day, with laundry bags and just load up on stuff,” the Post quoted a store employee saying. ... 
  • District attorneys in cities like Chicago and New York are considering harsher measures against shoplifters. ...
  • Teams of "boosters" will throng a store with laundry bags, grabbing what they can and assaulting workers who confront them — sometimes fatally.

Monday, July 5, 2021

Joel Kotkin has come around, now calls it what it is: Global fascism

In 2018, Kotkin was still tip-toeing around the obvious, but not anymore:

Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world . . .

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. ...

fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. ...

China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. ...

But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

Kotkin recognizes at least that American right-wing libertarianism is part of the problem, not part of the solution:

the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

Regrettably, however, Kotkin still does not connect this failure of the old liberal order in the West with the failure of the old moral order which gave it birth and on which it depended. This is because Kotkin still sees things in primarily materialistic terms.

Kotkin is oddly politically correct when he denounces possible recourse to nativism, which blinds him to the nativism which is at the heart of Chinese state capitalism and gives it much of its appeal and strength. He calls for "a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority" in the West, not realizing that it was Protestantism which made that even possible in the first place.

The problem of the West is spiritual, and Catholicism will never be able to rise to the occasion of refounding it as long as globo-homo defines Rome. The whole idea is inimical to the notion of founding a nation "for our posterity".

Sunday, February 2, 2020

Wuhan doctor in LA Times: Official China tally of coronavirus infection cases is "definitely not reliable"

From the story, Jan 31:

Wei Peng, a doctor in his 40s at a community hospital in Wuhan’s Qiaokou district, about two hours from Gao’s family home, said in a phone interview that at least 12 out of 59 doctors at his hospital, himself included, were working despite being sick with fevers, coughs and lung infections — symptoms of the coronavirus.
“We don’t have the test kit, and we don’t have time for tests either,” Wei said.
Wei suspects he became infected while treating a patient on Jan. 19, when Chinese authorities were insisting the disease, which is suspected to have started in a live animal market, was not transmissible between humans. Wei was wearing only a disposable surgical mask and no goggles when the patient coughed in his face.
“As long as you’re not diagnosed, you must go to work,” said Wei. He and other doctors spend their nights at the hospital because of transportation shutdowns. “We know that we are causing risk of contagion to the patients. But if you don’t work, then what? There’s no one to replace you. Your colleagues must bear more, and they’re also infected.”
The official tally of infection cases was “definitely not reliable,” Wei said. He noted: Too many patients are not being counted. There are not enough test kits. Not enough doctors. Not enough hospital beds. Not enough medicine. Not enough masks. Not enough cars to take patients to the hospital.
“There are a lot of patients and they are anxious,” said Wei, who fashioned his own goggles out of plastic sheets. “Many are calling here and you can hear them shouting on the phone, ‘Save me, save me,’ and they are crying, and there’s nothing we can do.”

Migrant who sounded virus alarm
Chinese welder Gao Fei warned family members in Hubei province of the impending coronavirus threat. When he criticized the government for its handling of the outbreak, he was arrested.
( Gao Fei )