A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. – Winston Churchill

The other day I wrote about how Californian voters wouldn’t change even after these catastrophic wildfires, and here’s some sadly personal evidence of that:

I’m sad to say that response is from a former acquaintance of mine who moved with his wife from Chicago to LA not long after I returned to NZ. He’s a smart, funny guy with reasonable success in playwriting who wanted to see if he could crack the LA scene. We haven’t been in contact for a few years, although we’re in his Facebook feed.

He’s not quite the target of native Californian Kurt Schlichter‘s rage in the following article because he’s not rich, but the mentality is the same, as is the result, There Is No Bottom for Blue California:

Now, you need to understand that experiencing the true fallout of government incompetence is not something that the kind of people who live in Pacific Palisades often experience. Instead, they are usually insulated from the consequences of their choices. Do you think bums, losers, and scumbags wander around in Pacific Palisades like they do in the rest of LA? Oh no. The LAPD has instructions to actually enforce the law in rich neighborhoods like the Palisades. They are disconnected from the utter chaos of the social pathology that the rest of the city experiences. They rarely have to face it, so they don’t really care about it. But now the fires have come, and you think they might care about it, but they won’t care about it for long. They’ll get over it.

As people with vast sums of money can do. But my old mate is not rich and yet he is thinking and acting the same way:

It’s not that they can’t learn. They’re not stupid in the sense that they don’t understand that the people they’re voting for are blithering idiots. It’s that human nature prevents them from accepting the fact that they’ve been wrong so that they can change. They are emotionally invested in the liberal project that they grew up in, and to vote against it now would require introspection and an admission that everything they believed in was baloney. Most of them can’t do that. Most of them won’t do that. And nothing’s going to change.
…
Don’t bother asking. The answer is “No.” They’re never going to change. They can’t change. They’re going to keep on electing the same brand of Democrat mediocrities who got them into this mess, but they do have a plan. They’re going to blame the weather, insurance companies that don’t want to lose money, Donald Trump, and anything but themselves for the chaos they voted for.

Which is exactly what you see in that Facebook message. But Schlichter also points out a basic structural problem with the electorate that I didn’t talk about the other day, which goes beyond things like the Democrat Party supermajorities in the State:

It was a middle-class state in the 70s and 80s, but today’s California is a feudal society with an affluent aristocracy – their castles and keeps were the ones burned in this fire – lording over a huge caste of serfs. The middle class is either gone or leaving. That’s OK with the Democrats because it was the middle class that made California a Republican state for so long. They were the ones who demanded good government. Most of them are now in Texas or Idaho. 

Simple competent governance is what is required here, not belief. In fact as the American commentator, Mary Katharine Ham, points out, even if you do passionately believe that Climate Change is driving all this then you should actually be trying even harder to prepare for the upcoming disasters, but that’s not what Newsom or the other Democrats are doing:

This environmental priesthood act is his ticket out of accountability, but he’s not a spiritual leader, he’s a governor. If he believes that climate change is making his state more dangerous, it is even more important for him to plan practical ways to mitigate instead of doing sermons. It should be even more embarrassing to Newsom that DeSantis, who has been reviled for deemphasizing climate change in policy, is nonetheless better at protecting his people from extreme weather.

And so behold the result…

Same with the lack of forest management, as the Australian writer, Claire Lehmann, (no stranger to dangerous bush fires) writes at Quillette in “Three Hard Truths about California’s Fire Crisis.”:

California’s progressive leadership has positioned itself at the forefront of climate change policy, championing emissions reductions and denouncing climate scepticism. Yet when faced with the practical requirements of climate change preparedness, whether conducting controlled burns, maintaining water infrastructure, or restricting development in fire-prone areas—they have proven to be inept. They appear more comfortable with grand pronouncements about global challenges than with the unglamorous work of preparing their own communities for climate realities they themselves warn about.

As the saying goes, this is not rocket science:

The simple truth, as even NPR admitted with disbelief, is that Florida and other southern, Republican-run states — with every bit the same level of dangerous seasonal fire exposure — are light-years ahead of sclerotic California when it comes to fire mitigation. And it is very much a matter of governance, not resignation to fate. Florida and other southern states prove, with their smartly and lightly regulated regimes of controlled burns of brush and deadwood, that you can prevent massive fires with intelligent policy. 

Even NPR! Perhaps RNZ should link to that piece.

Meantime the Chicago journalist and commentator, John Kass, who actually thought Lori Lightfoot would make a good mayor of Chicago, reckons that all this is not a result of incompetence or stupidity but entirely deliberate, as he covers off the problems with water storage and supply, stolen fire hydrants, undermanning in the LAFD and so forth:

But suggesting the flames took California unaware would be a big fat lie.  It would be like saying you were surprised by the gunshot, though you loaded that gun yourself and then pulled the trigger.
…
Many years ago, the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley—the city’s great mayor who would have looked for a curb to scrape Newsom and Bass from the bottom of his shoe—had a saying for close aides at Chicago’s City Hall….”take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves.”

Daley was a practical commonsense Democrat. long before Democrats were infected by the woke mind virus  spread by Barack and Michelle Obama. Now the Democrats are like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. And they don’t take care of the little things, like making sure the hydrants have water. They don’t make sure the reservoirs are full. They prize their left wing tribalism over competence… They invent scenarios and rail about “misinformation” which will work only as long as the corporate media carry their water….

Who cares about being fanatical about all that little stuff when there’s the huge issue of Climate Change to be fanatical about, especially because it’s both an endless excuse and not something they actually can do anything about – which means they’ll never be held responsible, at least not in their lifetimes, unlike for the destruction of wildfires.

That responsibility has to be avoided at all costs.