I round up my half-baked and/or frivolous thoughts for the week on Friday mornings. Occasionally, if items on my list continue to irk me over the weekend, I’ll turn those thoughts into an essay for Monday or Tuesday. 

Today, a lot is irking me. I’m full of irks. But today, I’ll confine myself to short rants about my many irks. 

California Fires and Politics

Like almost everyone in the country, I’m very sad for the residents of Los Angeles who have lost their homes and the few who lost their lives. I’m an East Coast person, so I can’t say anything useful about the particulars of the situation. However, I do have opinions about the insane politics that are unfolding around this issue. 

A few voices on social media are pointing out that the homes that burned down were multi-million dollar homes. These are rich people, they say, who can afford to rebuild without a problem. They question why someone living in a $150,000 house outside of Cleveland should pay taxes or see a hike in their insurance premium to cover the costs of rebuilding the homes of Hollywood stars. 

The blame game is just starting. Did “progressive/woke/DEI politics” put a bunch of incompetent fools in charge of the Los Angeles government? Did they make bad decisions that led to this devastating fire? I saw this debate unfold a couple of days ago on CNN (worth a watch here). 

City governments across our country are notoriously corrupt. It’s been that way since my ancestors took over city governments in the late 1800s. Cronyism — giving jobs to your friends — has always been a part of urban government. It’s a bad practice, of course, that shouldn’t be camouflaged by DEI slogans. At the same time, we shouldn’t automatically assume that the mayor, the fire chief, Gavin Newsom, the Sierra Club, and other right-wing boogiemen were at fault. Let’s see how things play out.

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