The Palisades Fire is so Red-Pilling, it’s Like Soup Lines in Armani Suits and Gucci Shoes
I Take My Time to Generate the Greatest Metaphor
Here we are, in a world where social media has largely been reduced to a platform for everyone to have a “hot take” on everything under the sun. Whether it’s a valid perspective or just a bunch of hot air vented out into the digital ether, it’s like trying to drink from a fire hydrant if you spend any time there. I’m not immune to this myself; occasionally, I’ll dip my toes in, share a thought or two. But for this blog, I prefer to let things percolate a bit, to come up with something that might hold a bit more substance, something that could have a lasting impact.
Let’s talk about the LA fires. I’m not here to dive into the conspiracy theories or to pile on about the evident incompetence that exacerbated the situation—basic things like ensuring there’s water, which municipalities are supposed to do in exchange for the hefty property taxes and other funds they rake in. That was a clear dereliction of duty, no doubt about it.
However, what I want to focus on is another aspect, one that’s only just beginning to unfold. There’s a significant “red pill” moment happening for many, especially regarding the incompetence of government when its focus drifts from providing essential services to other, less critical agendas. This realization is just starting for a lot of folks, and given how drastic and dramatic these events are, there’s a good chance this will fundamentally alter what comes next for those who’ve lost everything and still have the means to rebuild.
Let’s start with a story from my friend Dr. Michael Eades in his latest newsletter, “The Arrow.” He often shares personal anecdotes, and this one is a doozy. Then, I’ll touch on something I saw from Jillian Michaels, the personal trainer. The subject? The bureaucratic gauntlet that everyone affected is likely going to have to navigate just to rebuild what they’ve lost, thanks to government incompetence in the first place. In other words, the government juggernaut is just beginning.
So, here’s what some of these elites, these blue-state, leftist voters with money, might not realize unless they’re standing in soup lines in Armani suits and Gucci shoes—well, maybe I won’t live to see that day, but perhaps the ordeal of navigating years of red tape just to get their lives back on track might be the next best thing.
Now, let’s hear about Mike Eades’ experience trying to build a house in Santa Barbara, California, not far from where these fires raged. This is the reality check that many are going to face, and it’s not going to be pleasant. But sometimes, it’s the harsh lessons that stick the longest.
How California Sucks
I lived in California for ten years straight back in the mid-1960s-early 1970s. MD and I have lived there part time for the past 27 years. So what I say comes from personal experience, not hearsay or reading articles. It’s all from personal experience.
Before I get to the bad, let me tell you I’ve been all over California in the time I’ve been here. I’ve lived in the Bay Area; I’ve lived on the Eastern Side of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where I worked for the US Forest Service as a firefighter and trail crew guy; I’ve lived in SoCal in both Orange County and Los Angeles County; I’ve lived in Carlsbad, which is a beach town between the LA area and San Diego. I had my first engineering job there and ended up becoming a Carlsbad fireman (long story). And for the past 27 years, MD and I have lived part time in the Santa Barbara area.
California is without a doubt the most diverse (topographically) and most beautiful state in the country. It has the highest peak (Mount Whitney) and the lowest point (Death Valley) in the continental United States. It’s got deciduous forests, pine forests, redwood forests, giant Sequoia forests, plains, deserts, and a long, beautiful Pacific coastline. I could go on and on, but you get the picture. All in all, from a topographical perspective, it is a magnificent place.
But its politics suck. And it’s not just the Right vs Left politics, it’s the way the entire system works. And it is emblematic of why Los Angeles is burning to the ground. The State of California is horribly mismanaged, and this latest fire is a consequence of its mismanagement. The leaders are more concerned with DEI, ESG, climate change, and the rest of that sort of agenda than they are about protecting their citizens and the actual terrain. And the mainstream media covers for them. Here is a hilarious on-air fact check of one such journalist.
I’m sure you’ll be hearing that this fire was a consequence of climate change. Don’t believe it. It’s just a way to shift blame away from the politicians and onto a fiction that these same politicians have used to explain everything.
The Santa Ana winds have been around forever, and those are what drove the fire in LA to spread so quickly. The Santa Ana winds combined with the winds stoked by the fire itself make the spread uncontrollable. Here is an example of what I’m talking about.
This isn’t just the Santa Anas. This a combo of the Santa Ana winds and those generated by the fire. There is absolutely no way to stop a fire when winds are like this.
Author Raymond Chandler wrote about the Santa Ana winds back in the 1930s.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
These winds are dry and warm. They are downright creepy, in fact. Chandler hits the nail on the head with his description. Let me elaborate.
Late on the afternoon of November 13, 2008, I was out walking a few holes on my golf course in Montecito. It gets dark at ~5 PM at that time of year in Montecito, so I would do my day’s work, then head out to walk a few holes while i could still see. I would end up at about dark. On this particular day, it was really chilly, and I was bundled up. On the next to the last hole, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came a hot, hard wind. It felt good, but I knew it was a Santa Ana.
Later that night, MD and I were watching Thursday Night Football, and I got a call from a friend. I answered, and the first words he spoke were: “ Are you guys all right?” Which is never a good thing to hear.
As it turned out, the Santa Anas had stoked a fire that was spreading like crazy through the Santa Barbara area. I went and looked out the front door, and flames were leaping above the trees right down the street. MD and I and our son and his family all ended up evacuating for a couple of days.
That’s how quickly a fire can spread.
Now let me tell you a bit about the administrative state of California and why all these people who have lost their homes are going to ended up getting screwed. Here is a diatribe from Adam Carolla, who is in a hotel after being evacuated from his home. I apologize in advance for the NSFW language. Also, you can ignore his overt politics re the Dems vs the GOP. He’s a total partisan. But the rest is absolutely true, as I have lived it.
When MD and I decided we wanted to move to the Santa Barbara area in 1998, we took a look at property prices and had major sticker shock. Just to give it a try, we ended up buying a live-aboard sailboat in the Santa Barbara marina. It sounds expensive, but it was vastly cheaper than even the tiniest condo we could find. We lived there off and on for short periods for a couple of years. MD hated living on the boat (she called it a floating Boy Scout camp) and wouldn’t spend but a couple of weeks at a time, so we ended up finally buying a condo that cost three times the price of the sailboat, but didn’t require walking 200 yards to take a shower in the marina restroom complex.
After we had lived in the condo for a while, we came across the most incredible piece of property we had ever seen. It was on a hill and had a 180-degree view of the Pacific Ocean and a 180-degree view of the mountains behind. (In the Santa Barbara area, you usually get either an ocean view or a mountain view. This one had both.) And the property had avocado trees, and a host of other fruit trees. It was idyllic. And, strangely enough, it wasn’t all that expensive.
Plus, we ended up buying it in such a way that we could sell off a part of it immediately, which really reduced our costs.
We decided that was where we wanted to build our dream home. We hired an architect to design it and spent months going back and forth on the plans. During this time, I talked to a number of people about what we were doing. They all said, “Oh, Santa Barbara County is so difficult to work with. You’ll really have trouble trying to get your house built.”
I kind of blew it off, because I had worked with contractors to build a house and several clinics in Arkansas, remodel a house in the mountains of Boulder, CO, an historic house in Santa Fe, NM, and a condo in Incline Village, NV right on the shore of Lake Tahoe. In all three cases, everyone told us how difficult the various planning agencies would be to work with. As it turned out, it was a little hassle, but nothing major.
I figured it would be the same in Santa Barbara County. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
We submitted our plans to the county planning commission and they were savaged. Nothing we did violated any code, but the planners just didn’t want more houses built. So they obstructed. Once we got started with all this, we discovered that people (applicants) had to hire expensive attorneys and private planners to get their request to build approved.
The private planners were people who had previously worked for the County Planning Commission, so knew how things worked on the inside. Ours told us that The County, as it was called, did everything they could to stymie people from building. She had worked there for years, so she knew.
In all the other places I’ve been involved in getting projects approved, the various administrative bodies involved reviewed plans as part of their service. If changes had to be made, you made them, then resubmitted. And they looked again. There was a bit of back and forth, but they finally approved the plans and gave you a permit. The only cost was your architect’s fees and reprinting the plans.
Not so in Santa Barbara County. There the county charges you by the hour for reviewing your plans and having them turned down. You have to pony up a bunch of money into an account that they draw down as their planners beaver away. And not only that, apparently (at least according to our private planner) working there is a high-stress job, so there is a lot of turnover. Every time—and there were several—that the particular planner working on our plans quit, we had to pay to bring a new planner “up to speed.” I shit you not. And these fees were not minor. They were in the $4,000 to $6,000 range.
Since both our architect and planner and attorney assured us that our plans were all within code, I asked why would couldn’t simply sue the county and force them to approve it. They said we could, but only after the county had turned us down. Which they didn’t do. They simply asked that changes be made. Each time we made the requested changes and resubmitted, they found something else.
Our professionals, all of whom we were paying along with the county planners, told us that’s how the country works. They keep throwing up roadblocks hoping you’ll just quit. As the process started getting close to the end, i.e., the point at which they couldn’t come up with any more changes, they started to lighten up, because they didn’t want to get sued. If you could hold out long enough, you could end up getting your plans approved and a building permit. But they were going to make it as expensive and as costly and as difficult as possible.
We were kind of at the end of our rope financially, and we discovered a house was for sale that MD had driven by daily and loved. We made a sort of low-ball offer contingent upon the sale of the lot, and ended up getting the house.
We sold the lot to a guy from Texas, who ran a hedge fund. He had a ton of money, but the county ended up beating him down, and he sold the property in frustration. As his last act of defiance, he cut down every avocado and fruit tree on the property and left a naked hillside. (We had offered to put the trees into an ‘Ag preserve,’ which would have preserved its naturalized state.)
This is not unique to Santa Barbara County. As Adam Carolla points out in his rant above, this is what is going to happen to all these people who will try to rebuild in LA.
Plus, California leans heavily on insurance companies, and the insurance companies finally say screw you and pull out of the state. If any of these poor people try to rebuild, they will be confronted with not being able to get homeowners insurance. Of if they can, it will me preposterously high.
When we had the big fire in Montecito that we had to evacuate from for almost three weeks in 2017, we ended up getting our homeowner’s insurance canceled. It wasn’t really canceled, the company just pulled out of California. We were paying ~$500 per month for homeowners insurance at the time. When we tried to get new coverage, we got prices in the $40,000 to $60,000 per year range. We were stunned. We got an out-of-state insurance agent (from Texas, of all places) who ended up getting us the best deal she could find, which was $25,000 per year. The kicker was that in order to get this deal, we had to pay the entire $25K up front. It was a nightmare. And that was what made us finally decide to downscale.
Most of the houses lost in this Los Angeles fire are in the $5M to $20M range. I can’t imagine what homeowner’s insurance will cost them to rebuild. Insurance may pay to replace their houses and belongings (though I doubt it will completely), but they will be hammered with insurance premiums. And no homeowners insurance means no loans to rebuild.
The nightmare for all these folks is just beginning. And I truly feel for them.
So now you understand why I just shamelessly stole that from Mike. There’s no substituting for an on-the-ground story like that. Do my forever friend Mike a favor and a solid and go subscribe to his newsletter right now. I guarantee you zero regret, and it’ll be the last one you ever unsubscribe from. He’s hyper diligent about it and puts out enough varied content that you’ll have something to love every issue.
… I have a juxtaposition, but first, the promised input from Jillian Michaels.
And she’s on a righteous rampage. Bonus:
YGG.
… OK, now for my juxtaposition.
In the Spring of 2020, just as the whole Covid debacle seemed to be winding down—we’re talking mid-May 2020—I made a move from Chiang Mai, Thailand, to the northeastern part of the country, not far from the Cambodian border, with my girlfriend at the time. I arrived at 10 PM on the night of May 16, 2020, and got a firsthand look at the living conditions of my girlfriend’s family. Her Brazilian boyfriend of three years had started building a house, but let’s be real, it was just one room and a bathroom, pretty much a squatter’s den. So much for a Chiang Mai vegan yoga school owner from Brazil who did a stint in India…. He passed away a couple of years ago, late 40s or early 50s. I don’t have many details, but have my suspicions… starting with a ‘V.’
The morning of May 17, I told her to round up some workers, and we kicked off the building process right then and there. For the next 2.5 months, I had 3 to 5 workers from the local village, all of them Jacks-of-all-trades. In these Thai villages, men have to do everything from farming to construction just to survive, to make a fucking living. These guys can do rebar, concrete, brickwork, stucco; they can weld metal, handle all the plumbing, even build kitchen and bathroom cabinets right in place…out of concrete and tile. The only things I had to subcontract were painting, electrical work, and the interior doors because they were those swinging, commercial-style doors—very trendy in Thailand these days.
I paid them about 5 bucks per day more than the going rate (which was about 12 bucks per day), plus a hot, sit-down lunch and a bottle of Lao Khao Thai rice whiskey at the end of the day to share. The work was 8 to 10 hours a day, seven days a week, and we got the whole damn thing done in 2.5 months. This project became a bit of an economic lifeline for the village amidst the devastation of Covid. I was pouring in over a hundred bucks a day, which was very much welcomed. To this day, if I show up, people come out to see me.
I was even honored by the wonderful people of the village.
Now, about the permitting process to start work the next day—there was none. Zero. Nada. The land had been in the family name for ages, and her neighbors are two uncles, one of whom worked on the build. So it’s all family land divided up amongst the kids. No permits, no property taxes. What did it cost, you ask? Including all the furnishings and all the entertainment systems—we’re talking three big screen TVs—the whole setup came in at about $45,000. Cash. No mortgage. No payments. Utilities like water and electric are just a few bucks a month, and that’s all it takes to live there.
In other words, they actually own it. They aren’t renting it from the county, like Americans do.
Now, contrast that with the so-called “Land of the Free.” Here’s where I get to the point: in Thailand, you can get shit done without jumping through endless bureaucratic hoops. No permits, no bullshit, just build and live. It’s a stark reminder of how we’re often enslaved by our own systems back in the States, where every little thing requires a permit, inspection, and tax.
So, when you hear about freedom, remember, sometimes the freest places are the ones where government interference is minimal, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness aren’t just ideals but practical realities.
Wanna catch a video tour?
Ok, that should about do it for this time.
Do you get what I’ve gotten at? Why is Thailand my home now, not the USA? Is it not obvious?
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Free The Animal is an eclectic writing project about everything since November 2003. 23 years, 5,500 posts, 5 million words.
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