Isaac Saul (3:36)

Thanks Isaac and welcome everybody. Hope you had a wonderful weekend. And for those of you in Los Angeles, again, my prayers and thoughts are with you. I hope these fires, especially the Palisades and Eaton fires, are controlled and extinguished soon. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, the Supreme Court appeared skeptical that a law requiring the owner of the social media app TikTok to sell its U.S. business by January January 19 violated free speech protections, raising the prospect that the app could be banned next week. Number two Judge Juan Merchand sentenced President elect Donald Trump to an unconditional discharge for his conviction of falsifying business records in New York. The sentence means Trump will receive no jail time, fines or probation. Separately, Special Counsel Jack Smith formally resigned from the Department of Justice on Friday. Number three, Job growth in the United States exceeded expectations in December with a 256,000 increase in non farm payrolls. Additionally, the unemployment rate decreased from 4.2% to 4.1%. 4. A federal judge struck down President Joe Biden's proposed Title 9 reforms, which would have expanded protections for transgender students and changed rules governing sex discrimination in schools. The judge ruled that the Education Department had violated teachers rights by requiring them to use students preferred pronouns. And number five the US State Department increased its reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to $25 million. Maduro is wanted for his alleged involvement in drug trafficking and narco terror. Everywhere you look in Fire ravage la scenes of apocalyptic destruction as six different wildfires turn some of the most iconic neighborhoods in the world into moonscapes. On Tuesday, a catastrophic wildfire began in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In the days since multiple fires have caused widespread devastation in the region. As of Monday morning, at least 24 people have died and over 12,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed in the fires. The disaster has prompted debate about the primary cause of the fires and whether their impact could have been mitigated. The largest is the Palisades fire, which has burned 23,713 acres and is 14% contained as of Monday morning. The fire already ranks as the most destructive in Los Angeles history. Additionally, the Eaton and Hearst fires continue to burn in the area, with 33% and 89% containment, respectively. Overall, roughly 150,000 people were under evacuation orders on Saturday and hundreds of thousands more were without power during the week. The fires have been exacerbated by the Santa Ana winds that persisted throughout the week and have severely hampered firefighters efforts to contain the blazes. On Friday, firefighting helicopters and airplanes rapidly deployed to the Brentwood and Encino neighborhoods after a change in the winds shifted the path of the Palisades fire, which grew by 1,000 acres between Friday night and Saturday morning. Meteorologists expect another wind surge early this week. A lack of accessible water has also hindered containment efforts. In particular, all water storage tanks in the Pacific Palisades area ran dry on Wednesday morning and water flow to hydrants in higher elevations was significantly reduced. City officials said. The extreme demand for water strained the city's system, but some lawmakers, including the Los Angeles City Council member representing Pacific Palisades, blamed a lack of investment in fire mitigation resources. Los Angeles Mayor Democrat Karim Bass has faced scrutiny for her handling of the crisis. Bass, who said in 2021 she would not travel abroad while mayor, was on a diplomatic trip to attend the inauguration of Ghana's new president. When the fires began and left the event early to return to the U.S. some critics suggested she should have cut her trip short once the National Weather Service began forecasting destructive fires in the area. Bass said she was in constant contact with city officials during the onset of the fires and took the fastest route back to Los Angeles. Separately, Bass has been criticized for a 2.7% spending cut to the Los Angeles Fire Department, mostly focused on reducing equipment purchases. However, the equipment cuts coincided with a pay raise for city firefighters, along with $58 million for new fire trucks and other department purchases. With those items added to the budget, the city said the Fire department's new operating budget grew by roughly 7% from the year prior. The disaster has also prompted many to examine decisions made by insurance providers in the area in the months before the fires broke out. Over the summer, State Farm canceled hundreds of Pacific Palisades homeowners policies, citing the financial risk of insuring homes in the area amid increasingly frequent and severe wildfires. On Friday, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara announced a one year moratorium on insurance companies canceling or or not renewing policies for homeowners affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires. Backdated to October 9, 2024. Today we'll share perspectives from the right and the left on the Los Angeles fires. Then Ari Weitzman, Tangle's managing editor and environmental studies major and former California resident, will give his take.

Ari Weitzman (9:36)

Foreign.

John Law (9:40)

We'll be right back after this quick break.

Isaac Saul (9:48)

All right. First, let's start with some agreement Writers on the right and the left express sympathy for the people affected by the fires. Many also suggest that multiple factors led to the disaster, pushing back on those who say that the blame lies with a single entity. All right, let's go on to what the right is saying. The right frames the impact of the fires as a failure of leadership, arguing that California needs to overhaul how it prepares for these threats. Some say state Democrats focus on climate change and social justice left Los Angeles unprepared for the fires. Others say a multitude of factors are to blame for the scale of the disaster. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote about California's climate. Time for choosing the Los Angeles wildfires are awful to behold, and perhaps they are bad enough to cause some rethinking about California's political class. Instead of trying, like Don Quixote, to change the climate, they could spend their money on mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change. The board said the evidence doesn't support the climate change explanation since, among other reasons, California has had a dry climate and Santa Ana winds even with hurricane force Gus on occasions for centuries. Water tanks were filled to capacity before the fires, but three that supplied the Palisades were quickly tapped out. Huge demand caused a loss of pressure, which made it harder to pump water uphill to refill the tanks, the board wrote. If fires are going to be more common, then overhauling water systems will be essential. But governments have limited resources and need to set priorities, and California's politicians, state and local, prefer to spend money on income transfers and green subsidies that buy VOT boats rather than infrastructure that pays off in the future. In the New York Post, Jonathan A. Lesser argued bad leaders, not climate change, are the reason the LA fires are burning California. The most common causes of recent wildfires in the Golden State have been human activities, including arson and poorly maintained power lines, such as those belonging to the Pacific gas and electric company which caused the 2018 campfire that killed 85 people. Another likely culprit? Bad forest management, lesser said. Last April, Los Angeles county unveiled its Community Forest Management Plan. The plan is heavy on buzzwords about the need to ensure an equitable tree canopy and environmental justice, but light on strategies to reduce wildfire risk. Though some good work has been done in that regard, such as by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the latest wildfires demonstrate the ongoing failure of governor Gavin Newsom to manage the problem. California's Mediterranean climate, with its historically wet winters followed by months of dry conditions, heightens the likelihood of wildfires. But instead of removing dead and diseased trees and undergrowth, the state, following environmentalist restrictions, has allowed that natural fuel to build up, creating the conditions for explosive wildfires, lesser wrote. Whether sparked by fireworks, power lines, lightning, homeless encampments or arson, the conflagrations devastating Los Angeles are just the latest result of decades of ill conceived policies. In the Deseret News, Jennifer Graham asked, are politicians to blame for the California wildfires or does it all come down to wind and water? The Los Angeles wildfires were still raging uncontained when the finger pointing started. The devastation was caused not by prolonged drought or the Santa Ana winds, according to President Elect Donald Trump and others, but by Democrat politicians whose priorities allowed the fires to spread, Graham said. But it wasn't just Trump. Questions were flying from Los Angeles residents, including Hollywood celebrities whose homes were destroyed, about water availability and evacuation routes and why authorities weren't better prepared for danger that the National Weather Service had warned about the week prior. The devastation is in part the result of a drought that had turned vegetation into kindling and the Santa Ana winds, which threw embers that ignited new fires and which inhibited firefighting efforts. The devastation is surely also a failure of foresight and leadership, made evident by reports of water tanks and fire hydrants running dry, graham wrote. Authorities don't know how the LA wildfires began and there will doubtless be years of inquiries about how or if the widespread destruction could have been prevented. Accountability is needed, but for now it's about coming together to serve those who need help. Alright, that is it for what the right is saying. Which brings us to what the left is saying. The left argues that both human and environmental factors are responsible for the fire's destruction. Some say the disaster is a preview of what's to come without a concerted effort to address climate change. Others worry about the downstream consequences of the event, particularly for homeowners. In the New York Times, David Wallace Wells wrote about the human failure behind the fires on X and Truth Social Indeed, Fox News they were playing the hits. The fires were not the result of climate change or an extraordinary wind event meeting an extraordinary drought, but the responsibility of Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and the city's fire chief. Wallace Wells said global warming has already remodeled the risk landscape in California and indeed well beyond, making gigafire burns and urban firestorms like this one so much more likely. But so has housing policy, which has directed much more development into the path of fire across the vast tinderbox of the American West. What would that hardening look like, enacted at the scale of not just a community but a megalopolis, perhaps a whole state or even a continent? The job is in ways both forbidding and banal, wallace Wells wrote. On the urban side of what's known as the wildland urban interface. We probably need a program of systematically reducing risk to property by property, retrofitting homes and roofs, eliminating flammable flora, ensuring homes sit clear of anything flammable. Beyond that, some way of overcoming long standing nimbyish resistance, explained less by partisanship or climate denial than a more quotidian mix of lack of urgency, homeowner libertarianism and simple wishful thinking. In the Guardian, Eric Holthaus said the Los Angeles wildfires are climate disasters compounded. An exceptional mix of environmental conditions has created an ongoing firestorm without known historical precedent across Southern California this week, the ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near hurricane strength winds and drought foretell an emerging era of compound events, Holthus wrote. These fires are a watershed moment not just for residents of la, but emblematic of a new era of complex compound climate disaster. Conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history. Until they do now, the greenhouse gases humans continue to emit are fueling the climate crisis and making big fires more common in California. As the atmosphere warms, hotter air evaporates water and can intensify drought more quickly, Halthus said. These fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decadescompound climate disasters that, when they occur, simultaneously produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance. In Bloomberg, Mark Gongloff suggested the California fires expose a $1 trillion hole in U.S. home insurance. The wildfires terrorizing Los Angeles this week have been like something out of a movie vast, fast moving, unpredictable and merciless. Their scope and nature have surprised even fire jaded California. They are also evidence of the sort of consequences that can be expected as the planet continues to heat up, consequences for which traditional risk management tools like say, home insurance are increasingly obsolete, gongloff wrote. The glut of homes in the increasingly fire prone places has created an insurance crisis in California, with many big insurers pulling out of the state to avoid more losses. This isn't just a California problem. Other states on the front lines of climate change are underinsured for fires, floods, hurricanes and other disasters that are becoming more frequent or intense or both as the planet warms, Dongloff said. At some point, policymakers and the people living in risky places will have to decide when enough is enough? How many times should we pay to rebuild a home on a wildfire prone California hillside or a flood prone North Carolina beach? How many first responders lives are worth risking so people can have beautiful views? When does insurance become a band aid on a gushing wound? Alright, let's head over to Ari for his take.

Ari Weitzman (19:21)

For four years I lived in San Francisco. In that time, I saw firsthand how the western edge of our country has struggled to respond to wildfires. In 2016, I volunteered with some coworkers to plant trees in a burn scar in Nevada that was left by the Little Valley Fire. That fire was caused by a prescribed burn that had gone wrong. The fire showed how hard it can be to prevent windstorm fires, which utterly destroy some homes while leaving others eerily intact. Residents I worked alongside described the hopelessness they felt watching embers carried by the wind for over a mile across the Washoe Valley, just hoping their homes wouldn't be hit. The number of lives upended by the burning of the California coast is heart wrenching. I'm writing this editorial for my almost finished home in the Vermont Mountains, reflecting on how devastating its loss would be. Thinking of all the people in California having to flee their homes now. Before we talk about the causes of this fire, I want to clear the air by listing a few things that are easy to criticize, but whose importance is being overstated or invented. First, the Delta smelt. You may have seen accusations led by President Elect Donald Trump online that efforts to conserve this little fish caused the failure to contain these wildfires. The smelt lives in brackish estuary zones. Its habitat doesn't have much to do with Los Angeles water access strategy Second, dam removals. Environmentalists would do well to consider the trade offs required in local conservation at the expense of hydroelectric power and water access. More broadly, however, criticism against Governor Gavin Newsom for his massive dam removal initiatives is also not that relevant here. California worked with Oregon to remove dams on the Klamath river, which is nowhere near Los Angeles. Third Mayor Bass Trip it was terrible optics for Los Angeles Mayor to be on a diplomatic trip to Ghana during the fire. I'm sure the mayor's absence during the emergency made matters worse, and her response to criticisms has been disappointing. But the mayor's comportment is pretty far down my list of contributing causes. Lots of blame is going around causing a great deal of confusion about what happened in Los Angeles County. The full story isn't that hard to tell, it just requires that you take the time to understand it. Let's start at the beginning. Parts of California, including Los Angeles, are just hazardous places to live. Some of the most beautiful places in the world, Los Angeles included, are constructed on the precipice of nature's wild edge, where civilization can look off into the dangerous wild from relative safety. But the price of that proximity is a greater risk of calamity. Southern California is home to the Santa Ana winds, a periodical reversal of normal wind patterns that brings hot and dry air inland from the desert and gusts that can reach over 60 miles per hour. These winds can stoke wildfires and make them hard to fight. The list of the state's deadliest fires spans the decades, and many of them occur during natural dry wind events like the Santa Anas. However, an obvious trend emerges when you sort California's fires by most destructive and list the years they occurred, Starting from the 2018-2017-2025-2025 1991-2003-2020-2015, 2007, 2020. Simply put, these fires are getting more common and they're getting worse, and there are three reasons for that. Part of it's flukish, another part is climate, and the third part is infrastructural. First, the flukish. Last year, California had an incredibly rainy wet season with historic rainfall that filled the state's reservoirs. This wet season has been rainy again in Northern California. However, Southern California is experiencing an incredibly dry winter. When you put a year of high rains causing productive vegetation in front of a dry year that turns that vegetation into fuel. Then add the Santa Ana winds, you get a tinderbox. We still don't know what caused these fires, but in that kind of environment A small spark can grow into a racing inferno with terrifying speed. Wind speeds at the start of the wildfires reached 100 miles per hour. That not only made the blaze expand, but also impossible to fight. Second, the patterns when flukish events like a huge wildfire in January become common, they're no longer flukes. The state's weather patterns are changing regardless of whether or not you believe climate change is causing them. However, if you don't think that increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere resulting from human emissions are driving these changes, I urge you to interrogate that belief or bias. When climatologists tell us for decades that global temperatures will get warmer and cause wilder swings of precipitation and more extreme weather events, especially in the south and west of the United States. And then average global temperatures increase and extreme weather events become more common, then their models are validated. Third, the infrastructure, our national infrastructure, is failing to adapt to meet the trends of more dangerous wildfires. California and Los Angeles are part of this failure. California experienced record rainfall last year. Where is that water now when firefighters need it to combat a blaze on the doorstep of the country's second largest city? The answer is simple. It's in the ocean. The state's reservoirs filled up to their capacities and excess rainfalls flowed into the Pacific at a state level. Why have the reservoirs not been increased? Why was the Pacific Palisades reservoir offline and empty before the fire? What exactly did the budget cuts to the LA Fire Department affect and how much did those cuts impact the emergency response? Why hasn't Los Angeles county invested in pumping stations to get water uphill and service the fire prone Pacific Palisades and Altadena communities in their time of need? Pumps are expensive, but you could argue that investing in that kind of infrastructure would be partially offset by decreasing the massive insurance costs that are causing private insurers to flee the state. Lastly, why didn't LA county introduce some buffer between local vegetation and nearby neighborhoods as required by state regulation? While cutting and buffering wouldn't have prevented the windstorm fires from growing, it could have greatly mitigated the damage. California's leaders, from Gavin Newsom to local boards and Palisades are all responsible for these failures. California is a state capable of extraordinary responses since an earthquake leveled San Francisco in 1906. The state has literally written the book on how to develop seismic safe buildings. As it faces a future likely to be filled with more dangerous wildfires, the state once again has an opportunity to lead the way with improvements at civic infrastructure and wildfire fighting and prevention. Hopefully they answer the call.

John Law (26:25)

We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, that is it for our take today. Thank you, Ari, again, for hopping on the mic. You know, it's funny. Ari and I and Will and Sophia and Magdalena and John and our whole staff, you know, we don't always agree on everything. In fact, we disagree a lot. That's kind of the point. But today I'm really, you know, I was really compelled and convinced by Ari's take, and I agreed with a lot of what he wrote. So I appreciate him jumping in with that and making me think on this issue. That is not simple, you know, not as simple as you want it to be. With that, we have a listener question from John in Los Angeles, California. John said Elon Musk has been tweeting. If that's still a word about Pakistani rape gangs in the United Kingdom and the failure of woke United Kingdom law enforcement to investigate, prosecute the gangs. It sounds outlandish. What's really going on? Okay, so earlier this month, Elon Musk criticized the decision of Jess Phillips, the United Kingdom's parliamentary underserved secretary of State for the safeguarding and violence against women and girls, that the Brits are always very extra with their titles. He criticized Phillips for declining to investigate, quote, unquote, grooming gangs. That's groups of Pakistani men who groomed and sexually abused young girls in cities in the Midlands of England. Elon Musk tweeted his criticism, suggesting UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is implicated in a massive cover up and obstruction of job justice related to immigrant crime. Starmer responded, calling Musk claims lies and disinformation. So first of all, these crimes are real. South Asian men did groom and sexually assault girls in the Midlands for decades. Even Nazir Afzal, a chief prosecutor of Pakistani heritage in northwest England from 2011 to 2015, said South Asians were, quote, disproportionately involved, end quote, in the kinds of street grooming Musk is talking about. Furthermore, law enforcement was woefully negligent in its response to these crimes. And the individual accounts are genuinely harrowing in the context of police responding to young girls reporting being raped. They called them tarts and dismissed them. And it's now easy to understand why this story, which has been going on for years, would stoke anti immigration responses. Critically, though, Afzal was talking about crimes in this specific region of England, extrapolating a national trend from the very real stories about these gangs in, you know, this kind of local context. Generally, Pakistani men is really truly old fashioned cherry picking. For instance, a 2020 Home Office report found that at a national level there was no evidence to suggest that any racial subgroup had been committing these crimes more often than another. And in a 2022 report they actually found the opposite, that South Asian men were underrepresented in child sexual abuse crimes. We included an image about this that sort of illustrates this in today's newsletter. So I can understand how anyone just learning about these stories would be furious. I just learned about them recently. Obviously we don't cover news from England regularly, and in the last couple years these stories were in the news a lot. And I'm furious too, reading them. I mean, like I said, it's horrifying. The improper response by governments in the Midlands is a really big deal. And it does seem like it was encouraged in part by racial sensitivities as well as old fashioned misogynistic beliefs that these young girls were just sexually promiscuous, not victims. But it isn't exactly breaking news in the United Kingdom. Musk is fundamentally criticizing Phillips for declining another major investigation of these crimes. When we've had investigations, we've had trials, we've had tons of reports from the government about what happened. So learning the full context of the years of reports in response does help to explain why Philips doesn't think this is all worth rehashing now. All right, that is it for our reader question. Big thanks again to Ari for today's my take. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Peace.

Isaac Saul (30:39)

Thanks, Isaac. Here's your under the Radar story for today, folks. Newly released documents by the Central Intelligence Agency reveal that the agency secretly monitored Mexican American and Puerto Rican civil rights activists in the 1960s and beyond. The documents released in late December show that the CIA surveilled members of several major Latino civil rights movements, even using undercover agents to infiltrate student activist groups. The release confirms, in part, Latino civil rights leaders suspicions that the federal government was monitoring their activity during the civil rights era. This document release is an important window into the government's efforts to surveil and disrupt peaceful Latino organizing in the 1960s and 70s. Representative Joaquin Castro, the Democrat from Texas, said Axios has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The number of Los Angeles Fire Department stations within city limits is 106. The number of uniformed LAFD personnel is 3510. The estimated number of structures homes, businesses and other buildings destroyed or damaged by the Palisades fire is 5,300. The estimated number of structures damaged by the eaton Fire is 7,000. The number of structures destroyed by the 2018 Camp Fire, the most destructive fire in California history, is 18,804. The average amount of acreage burned by wildfires in California in January between 2013 and 2024 is 1,360. The approximate amount of acreage burned by the Palisades, Eaton and hearst fires in January 2025 to date is 38,629. The number of home insurance policy non renewals for residents of the 90272 zip code area which contains Pacific Palisades between 2019 and 2024 is 1,930, approximately 28 out of every 100 policies and the total exposure of California's Fair Home insurance program is $458 billion, a 61.3% increase since September of 2023. And last but not least, our have a nice day story. The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently released its annual report on homelessness, revealing a hopeful new statistic. In 2024, veteran homelessness dropped to an all time low compared to the previous year. The number of veterans experiencing homelessness dropped by 7.5% and has fallen 55.6% since 2000. Veteran Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough noted that the report was encouraging, adding that we still have a long way to go, but we will not stop until every veteran has a safe, stable place to call home. The VA has the data and there's a link in today's episode description. All right everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, Please go to readtangle.com and sign up for a member. You can also go to tanglemedia.supercast.com to sign up for a premium podcast membership where you get access to ad free daily podcasts, Friday editions, Sunday editions, interviews, bonus content and so much more. We'll be right back here tomorrow for Isaac, Ari and the rest of the team. This is John Law signing off. Have a great day y'all. Peace.

John Law (34:21)

Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul and edited in engineering by Duke Thomas. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman Will K Back daily Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was made by Magdalena Bokova who is also our Social Media Manager. The music for the podcast was produced by Diet75 and if you are looking for more from Tangle, please go check out our website@readtangle.com that's readtangle.com.