Better in their words…

World can’t wait for Trump’s Inauguration; Greenland idea getting traction; NBC’s truthful article about causes of LA fires; Arson maybe?.

Source: FIRESTARTER ☙ Sunday, January 12, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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The New York Post ran a surprising story yesterday headlined, “Foreign leaders desperately jockeying for invite to Trump’s inauguration: ‘They’re all going crazy.’” It was weird, since Corporate media has relentlessly informed us that the world hates President Trump. More misinformation?

How can anyone blame President Trump for breaking another dusty political protocol, after his enemies studiously ignored countless established customs? Whatever his reasons, this week media criticized Trump for tossing a long presidential tradition of restricting the Inauguration just to Americans, and instead has invited friendly foreign leaders to attend his swearing-in eight days from now.

Some world leaders, like Chinese President Xi, have already politely declined (he’s sending a “top emissary”). But the Post reported that “many others are burning up the phone lines to Washington” to score a coveted invitation. “They’re all going crazy, champing at the bit to attend,” said one registered foreign agent. You could argue some of them already are crazy, but I digress.

“For most,” the Post wistfully noted, “the answer is likely ‘no.’” Countries that never supported Trump during his wilderness years and aren’t bringing anything to the table now are frozen out. The quoted foreign agent verbally shrugged, “I tell my clients the truth. You’re not going to be able to go. If you’re Costa Rica, there is just no way you get invited to this inauguration. What is the value add? You are not bringing business or major companies from your country.”

In other words, ante up.

Maybe Costa Rica can’t come. But Argentina’s Javier Milei has been invited and plans to attend, as have El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro. Italy’s expressive Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is also a plus-one.

In an amusing aside, the Post reported that one as-yet-uninvited leader is “furiously” trying to score an invite and is doing everything he can think of to get one, including “approaching Trump allies.” It’s Ukraine’s martial law coordinator, Volodymyr Zelensky. He’s being an annoying pest. So far though, no invite.

This might seem like just a colorful interest anecdote, or news about the appalling breach of protocol that corporate media claims. But there’s more to this story. I’m not sure which was more impressive: Trump’s 4-D chess, by surrounding himself with world leaders who bring even more security to the event?

What about his genius in minting a marketing opportunity for the US to score material concessions from foreign governments in exchange for an invitation to an Inauguration? Or maybe most impressively, Trump’s indescribable, gobsmacking turnaround story: from pariah-like literal Hitler to the hottest January ticket in the world, which is driving world “crazy” to attend.

🔥 And all this excitment is before the Inauguration. And it is after Trump’s boasting about owning the Panama Canal and Greenland and making Canada into a U.S. state, not to mention his many other promises. Yesterday, the AP ran a very encouraging story headlined, “Trump is planning 100 executive orders starting Day 1 on border, deportations and other priorities.” Even better, the AP’s photo didn’t include a single U.S. official dressed in feathery indigenous garb, colorful African tribal smockwear, or drab tracksuits:

The AP colorfully described Trump’s Day One executive orders as “a shock-and-awe campaign on border security, deportations and a rush of other policy priorities” amounting to “an executive punch unseen in modern times.” Remember, Day One is January 20th — the very same day he gets sworn in.

Trump will take his hand off the Bible and pick up the signing pen:

It’s not entirely clear how many orders he will sign, but Senator John Hoeven (R-N.D.), was briefed by the President in a meeting this week at the Capitol. He said, “There will be a substantial number.”

Confirmation hearings will begin this week so that the Senators can begin voting to confirm as soon as Trump has been sworn into office. It’s not year clear how cooperative the Republican Senate will be. Hopefully, the Senators will recognize the historicity of the moment and the Nation’s mood.

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Chamath Palihapitiya, usually just known by his pronounceable first name, is a Canadian Silicon Valley billionaire and social media influencer. For flavor, he was an early Facebook investor, helped take Virgin Galactic public, and is a major tech venture capitalist. On a recent podcast, Chamath praised President Trump’s “Buying Greenland” idea.

CLIP: Chamath on the brilliance of Trump’s Greenland acquisition idea (2:31).

In the show, the tech entrepreneur called Trump’s Greenland concept “next level.” Chamath said he’d looked into it and discovered that, with Artic ice sheet changes, a fabulously lucrative shipping corridor is opening up. Whoever controls Canada and Greenland will control this new corridor, which will be worth trillions and trillions. It could even be more important than the Panama Canal.

As smart as the idea of acquiring Greenland and getting closer to Canada is, it’s still just a wonky, long-term, global-security idea. Chamath is impressed at Trump’s real genius, which is getting everybody to think and talk about this idea, just using inflammatory, all-caps tweets.

All the while, increasingly irrelevant corporate media completely misses the point. As you watch Chamath describing what’s really behind Trump’s incredible plan, consider how little the corporate media has analyzed any of it. Seriously, what do we need corporate media for?

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NBC finally ran a story yesterday with a headline asking the obvious question: “Are arsonists responsible for the Los Angeles wildfires?” While “climate change” has been the progressive crowd favorite answer, “climate change” doesn’t actually start fires by itself. Climate change is just an idea. And when you look at a map of the distribution of the LA fires it is, perhaps, a little suggestive:

The two most common natural causes of wildfires can be easily eliminated. “Experts,” NBC reported, “say it’s easy to rule out one common cause of wildfires: lightning.” And, apart from California Governor Newsom’s methane explosions whenever he speaks, there just hasn’t been any stormy weather in the area.

The second most common, less natural cause is malfunctioning power transformers and downed power lines. But those can also be ruled, out since there aren’t any power lines or transformers in or near the wilderness areas where the fires started.

So, excluding more exotic and less likely causes, we’re down to one common type of cause. NBC explained, “That leaves the source of most wildfires: people.”

People. And not just any people, either. There is one particular group of people who are more likely to cause wildfires than any other group.

It’s easy to imagine. As the Polar Vortex descends and the winter weather cools, LA’s homeless build more and more fires to stay warm. But they are drug-addled, and crazy, so they don’t always adhere to Scouting-level fire safety protocols. To chilly homeless add dry (but much less dry than reported) conditions, poor management practices packing forests with piles of dry kindling, high winds … and voilá. Conflagration.

I mean, what did they think would happen? They are practically begging for it, if not actively helping. I’ll bet you $100 there’s a non-profit in LA that is right now giving homeless people lighter fluid and fire-starting wands because of compassion.

Those homeless have to take their tents somewhere so they can build fires for warmth. They can’t just build fires along the roadway by their tent cities, since the cops will put a stop to that kind of thing. Homeless people making smokey fires along public sidewalks is probably an intolerable eyesore even in Los Angeles County.

And it’s not just crackheads falling asleep and letting the fire burn out of control. Some proportion of homeless are bedbug crazy. They light fires on purpose:

🔥 Copycat arson sounds downright rare. I would have heavily discounted that as any explanation for the LA fires except for having a personal experience with it. Years back, my beautiful wife Michelle’s parents owned a small vacation cabin in Western North Carolina (before her mother passed away). It’s located in a tight neighborhood of people who like their privacy, with well-separated cabins winding up the mountain along a resident-maintained, one-way clay road.

One of the neighborhood’s most beloved and most colorful characters was Mr. Jonesy (name changed for privacy). Jonesy was a retired firefighter, the former captain of a large force from some big city someplace, Chicago or something. He was a neighborhood fixture. He organized the annual road-scraping, cleared fallen debris from the road, And was the informational “post office” for neighborhood gossip (even though his memory wasn’t quite as reliable as it used to be). He was ubiquitous; although in his mid-to-late 80’s, Jonesy patrolled the mountain in his well-equipped ranger every day, his keen firefighter’s eye on the lookout for anyone or anything that might be out of place.

Then came the Great Southern Appalachian Fires of 2016, which affected several states in the Southwest U.S. including Western North Carolina. More than once, the cabin’s neighborhood was threatened by approaching wildfires streaming down the mountain. Local fire teams successfully fended them off, but the local neighborhood Facebook group remained on pins and needles, reporting every rumor or development on a minute-by-minute basis.

Then we got some really shocking and unexpected news.

Inconceivably, Old Jonesy had been arrested. The retired firefighter was accused of intentionally lighting the fires that had repeatedly encroached on the neighborhood. Apparently, it was some awful, perverse manifestation of his developing dementia. He’d spent his whole life fighting fires and now, provoked somehow by the constant stream of regional fire news, Jonesy’s dementia-afflicted brain was forcing him to creep into the woods and start fires near his own house.

I never heard anything about what Jonesy may have told police, I’m not sure they’ve ever said. But they didn’t jail him. We’ve been told the old fire chief is being well accommodated in a nice memory care home back in Illinois or wherever his family lives.

To me at least, Jonesy proved it’s not as rare as you might think.

🔥 Folks online are still seeking answers, debating rumors, and speculating about potential causes of the fires, They’re considering everything from arson, as NBC suggested, to more exotic causes like direct energy weapons deployed from government drones or even satellites. But at some point, speculations over the sources of fires can distract us from the government’s many failures that we do know about.

For instance, the following are all facts now widely recognized to be true:

• The LA County’s firefighting budget was cut by about -2.5% last year, and even bigger cuts were proposed for this year.
• In the face of a shrinking budget, the fire department was spending wildly on its DEI programs. For example, it is paying its “head of equity” over $400K a year — as much or more than the President of the United States.
• It is also overpaying excessive salaries for non-DEI roles, such as $750K a year for the water management coordinator. One wonders how much money is used for other priorities like fire planes.
• The County’s fire department has never recovered from firing over a hundred firefighters who refused jab mandates.
• The County’s diverse Fire Chief recently sent a letter to even more diverse LA Mayor Bass warning the department was unprepared for large-scale disaster exactly like this one. There is no evidence Mayor Bass responded in any way.
• Despite paying top dollar for talent, there were many systemic water management failures, such as dry reservoirs and empty fire hydrants, leading to tragic results.
• The entire state suffers from poor forestry management practices, a fact President Trump has complained about for years.
• LA makes kooky environmental choices, such as prioritizing plants over people by refusing to use the largest available water source, the ocean, which is literally right next to LA, because salt water might hinder vegetation.
• Finally, and worst of all, after creating ideal conditions for a devastating fire, LA grew itself an unsupervised army of homeless and illegal aliens and probably paid to get them fire-starting kits.

One of the more popular conspiracy theories fueling motives for malicious government actors is that it’s a land-grab. Under these theories, the fires were intentionally set to drive out the single homeowners so big collectives like BlackRock can buy up the land and build big apartments or something.

But we don’t need to access conspiracy theories to blame the government for a land grab. Existing land-use and environmental regulations already make it impossible or at least implausible for long-time owners to rebuild. The fully intentional land grab has been settling into place for years, in slow motion, and the dumb taxpaying citizens of California have approved it all with their votes again and again.

It’s just that it’s been happening slowly. Slowly enough that progressive Californians could ignore it was happening and pretend everything was great, and the snail darters could live in harmony along side the people.

But no longer.

If government does deserve the blame (which it does), then no conspiracy theory is necessary. You don’t need intentionality. It is just as bad that they’ve been relentlessly negligent as if it were intentional. (Note: I’m not saying it wasn’t DEW lasers. I’m saying we don’t need to argue about DEW lasers because there is plenty with which to convict the government anyway, if we have the courage and energy to do it.)

It does feel though that the national mood is shifting. Even though the government’s thick thumb of censorship has been removed from X, we are getting faster, more, and better information from social media than from corporate media. It will soon be time for Californians to make a choice, and they will be better informed than they’ve ever been.

We’re continuing to pray for all those affected by the LA fires. Hang in there.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you immensely for your continued loyal support of our mutual mission. Come back here tomorrow morning to help kick off the new week with our exciting and entertaining Monday roundup.

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