Common Sense with Paul Jacob

“Though many factors contributed to the devastation (such as fire hydrants without water, too few controlled burns, and insurance price controls),” explains Jack Nicastro at Reason, “it was also exacerbated by land-use policies that pushed homes and residents away from the city center and closer to the wildland-urban interface (WUI). The U.S. Fire Administration defines the WUI as ‘the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development . . . where structures . . . intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels.’”

President Trump has talked about California’s environmentalist hegemony, preventing the routing of huge amounts of water in the north of the state to the desertified south. Trump, and many people online, blame protection of a specific small fish, the delta smelt. Some or all of Trump’s claims have been “fact-checked” by news media outlets, such as CNN.

Meanwhile, to those keeping their eyes peeled to major media coverage, global warming started out as the chief cause of the fires. This seems shaky at best, however, and has been repeatedly been debunked, such as by the Heartland Institute. California has a long, long history of forest fires, and the Santa Anas blow fires into conflagrations, and have been doing so for ages.

Since wildfires are a continual problem for California, governments can hardly be exonerated on account of being “surprised.” And if governments exist to provide the most basic of services — as many argue — surely fire protection would be high on the priority list.

But it wasn’t on Los Angeles’s mayor’s list, apparently. She scuttled off to Ghana to celebrate the continent’s first woman president. But her glorying in a feminist moment was marred by pestering questions about fire protection, and why so much money had been [allegedly] cut from fire-fighting budgets.

And then there has been the talk of arson. January is not the usual time of year for out-of-control fires, so one naturally wonders what ignited the holocaust. And there has been more than one arrest for arson.

Unlike in the fires that raged farther north, in 2020 (after the George Floyd riots), there does not seem to be a blanket denial in the media of arson, and even celebrities are spreading rumors about widespread firebug activity.

“Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately — including for hiring, training and picking suppliers,” reports Axios.

“Meta said it was changing course because the ‘legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing,’ per a memo by Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources.”

And yes, changing is indeed what the legal landscape is: “Meta is not alone,” explains Techcrunch: “Microsoft and Zoom have also rolled back their DEI efforts. Lawsuits have emerged against programs that were targeted toward the Black and Latino communities.”

Behind all this is a landmark Supreme Court decision of June 29, 2023, Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. That decision seemed to put the kibosh on what we used to call “reverse discrimination” at least in college acceptance policies regarding students of various races. The whole apparatus of student enrollment and fixation on race had been acceptable in the past to make up, for a time, for past discriminatory behavior based on animus against whites. But Justice Roberts saw no “going back to normal” in Harvard’s admissions policies: “Harvard concedes that its race-based ad- missions program has no end point. . . . And it acknowledges that the way it thinks about the use of race in its admissions process ‘is the same now as it was’ nearly 50 years ago. . . . In short, there is no reason to believe that respondents will — even acting in good faith — comply with the Equal Protection Clause any time soon.” So the court ruled against Harvard.

Much more recently, however, is the big news relating to sex and/or gender aspect of the DEI agenda: “A federal judge in Kentucky blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to redefine sex in Title IX as ‘gender identity,’ striking down the change nationwide,” according to Fox News’s Ryan Gaydos. “The U.S. District Court Eastern District of Kentucky Northern Division made the ruling in Cardona v. Tennessee on Thursday.”

This cover’s the inclusive aspect of DEI, where men [biological human males] were to be required to be allowed in women’s restrooms and locker rooms if they said they were (or somehow dressed up o “identified as” women. “The court’s order is resounding victory for the protection of girls’ privacy in locker rooms and showers, and for the freedom to speak biologically-accurate pronouns,” tweeted Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. “The court’s ruling is yet another repudiation of the Biden administration’s relentless push to impose a radical gender ideology through unconstitutional and illegal rulemaking.”

And with the re-election of President Donald Trump, the Democrats’ favored “minorities” and “marginalized” policy has hit upon hard times. So the major corporations are blowing with the wind.

Even MacDonald’s is moving against DEI.