I swear I'm eventually going to be driven around the bend by doomsayers. The culprit this time is unexpected: Kelsey Piper at Vox, who says the LA fires "were the product of gross mismanagement by the city and state governments." I don't have the energy to take this on yet again, so I'll just say that her bill of particulars is unfounded except for the insurance commissioner's ineptitude, which really was substantial.
Instead I'm going to comment about her claim that this is just like COVID, which the CDC screwed up: they blew it on testing; they blew it on masks; and they blew it on vaccine distribution. But this isn't true. Only the testing stumble was a botched job, not any of the others. The CDC did change its advice on masks, but for chrissake people, it was only for one month and it happened because we learned that COVID could be asymptomatic. What were they supposed to do? It's time to get over it. As for this:
There were plenty of individuals who did plenty of heroics to try to see what was coming and do something about it, but there weren’t any institutions waiting behind the scenes to save the day. When we got vaccines, it was a bunch of well-meaning private actors organized on Discord who did much of the legwork to make them accessible to the public, often by systematically calling every pharmacy to put in a spreadsheet whether they had availability.
Say what? There were arguments early on about who should get priority, but here's how we did overall compared to peer countries in Europe:
We distributed 13 million vaccine doses in the first 30 days and 56 million in the first 60 days—far more than any other country. That's pretty good performance.
But wait. The US is a big country. Of course we distributed more doses than medium-sized France or tiny Sweden. How do things look on a per capita basis?
The UK was best, but we were second. Eventually we lost our lead, but that was due to vaccine resistance in red states, not distribution problems.
I'm sure the Discord group did good work, but it's just not true that vaccine distribution was some kind of epic horror show. We did a pretty good job.
You want to know what our biggest problem really is? It's the frenzy, whenever something goes wrong, to pronounce it the downfall of western civ. Some of this is deliberate partisan nonsense, but more of it is due to our habit of overreacting wildly to every imaginable setback. That's how we get polycrises; the end of global supply chains; CDC ineptitude; a "chaotic" withdrawal from Afghanistan; and "gross mismanagement" as the cause of fires that couldn't have been contained by any firefighting force on earth.¹ We are a panic prone people, and that's our biggest problem of all.
¹We don't have any more crises than usual; the global logistics network did pretty well during COVID and is decidedly still around; the CDC actually performed admirably; the Afghanistan withdrawal was remarkably efficient under impossible circumstances; and sure, California could do better, but the LA fires were the result of a perfect storm (climate change, warm weather in January, 300 days of drought, 80 mph winds), not mismanagement of any kind.
When I read about the confirmation hearings, I panic. Or at least hyperventilate..
" Eventually we lost our lead, but that was due to vaccine resistance in red states, not distribution problems."
When will that statement, repeated a hundred times in different contexts, elicit outrage rather than resignation?
+1
On approximately the 3rd of Neveruary.
I thought the linked article was terrible as well. Thanks for the debunking!
Also, the audience is the problem. Liberals love to self-flagellate and leftists love to make everything into a crisis that only socialism can solve. Add that to the criticism from the right and you have the majority of our negative media landscape.
both sides
DRINK!
+1
What do you think I said here, out of curiosity?
That both sides are the problem.
Which both sides?
Is there a side that doesn't like criticizing? Even bland Republican-leaning centrists like to complain, too.
Private enterprise is not going to solve global warming. This is a very big problem and it is the right which is impeding the solution. If the left - that is government control - doesn't win on this everybody will lose.
The LA fires are another example of how this is going.
Who were you talking to?
There wasn't any mention of private enterprise.
Bad shit happens.
Happens when Republicans are in charge.
Happens when Democrats are in charge.
When Republicans are in charge, it’s typically a case where nothing could have been done to prevent it.
When Democrats are in charge, it’s typically somebody’s fault and the blame must be assigned.
Oh hell's bells, I remember early in the Biden Admin, they stood up teams of experts to work with factories all thru the vaccine supply chain (lots of precursors that needed to flow and be of sufficient quality) to ensure that nothing got snarled. This was the sort of detailed work that a well-functioning bureaucracy gets right, and they -did-.
You mean like when people inappropriately and unnecessarily abbreviate?-)
I took Western Civ when I was a freshman.
Too funny. I’ve had Vox on probation for quite awhile due to their too-frequent “I’m a progressive but…” and both-siderism. I still got their newsletter but when I started reading Kelsey Piper’s column this morning and hit all the lies I unsubscribed. Bad reporting and outright bullshit are a bridge too far.
+1
I stopped reading Vox long before that
The vaccine distribution graph is fairly misleading because the vaccine manufacturers were prioritizing the US over every other country. The reason the numbers are so much better for the US in that graph relative to everyone isn't because the US had such a better distribution system compared to everyone else, but because everyone else didn't had that many doses available no matter their distribution system.
I'm fairly certain these articles have nuggets of truth in the investigation and the data, but the immature analysis is the problem. Daddy isn't here to fix it for you lickety-split like he did when you fell off your Green Machine ...
KD mentioned it before, big projects take time and TikTok brains cannot experience time in a normal fashion.
Ah yes, "kids these days."
I don't think it's necessarily kids, I see adults act like this too, fliting about like moths around a light.
Right, and there is also the fact that too many people (encouraged by the media) is always trigger-happy for some "elites" to blame. This, of course, starts with blaming whoever is in government, but also springs from a deep, chronic misunderstanding of how science works. Too many people think that scientists and engineers have already figured everything out and there's a great big library of great big books that they simply have to consult to do everything right. In reality, science is mainly a process for analyzing NEW phenomena and developing solutions. When a new virus appears, there is no IKEA instruction manual on what to do. It's all NEW.
Same thing with a never-before-seen confluence of extreme climatic conditions and years-long public battles over development involving federal, state, county, and municipal officials, private developers, and NIMBYs up the wazoo in southern California. Huge wildfires aren't supposed to happen in January.
The instinct to get out the torches and pitchforks and then go after the "elites" for being the cause of every problem needs to stop. People need to grow up and realize that shit happens that NO ONE could have foreseen, or if they did, they could never prepare for because some other asshole was hell-bent on stopping them (usually over something having to do with "no more taxes").
Also, prescription fires can't be done in dry years. So there literally was not time in which to have done them safely since the last rainy season.
In the current media environment, hype wins. So we have a lot of it. We have very little Walter Cronkite.
That paired with the pre-existing human tendency to equate "mistake" with "stupid" or "incompetent".
Even the best chess players in the world sometimes blunder a piece or overlook a mate in 1. It does not make them incompetent chess players. It makes them a chess player that made a mistake.
Even a good decision that works out badly because of bad luck gets called "incompetent" these days. Look at the sports world. There's so much of this...
+1
It's not a mistake if the odds were for the decision took.
So, after the Oakland Hills fire of 1991, what changes were mandated in Pacific Palisades et al? Did "management" get serious about enforcing brush-clearing by property owners? Did it update the building codes? Etc etc.
Newer building did do better than older ones--building codes/insurance requirements/people wanting fire resistant home all made a difference, though luck played a big role too.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/17/la-houses-survived-fire
Always fail safe, not catastrophically. Risk-aversion for an unknown is to go extreme, not casual.
But according to Fauci, their advice was b/c they didn't have enough masks for healthcare workers, rather than a change in understanding of the virus.
But, let's say you were responding to what you knew at the time. That virus had spread with better efficiency and was deadlier (at the start) than seasonal Influenza. Shouldn't that have set off alarm bells that face masks were the starting point, not an ending point?
This is wrong, but only because there are 2 reasons the US government was advising against masks very early in the pandemic.
1) Masks were thought to be fairly ineffective against covid.
2) Masks, while not thought to be effective against Covid, are useful for other purposes and Dr's still need masks for those reasons. So we should prioritize Dr's needs of masks over the public using masks because they aren't effective against covid.
Leaving out the context is very, very misleading.
Once the understanding of the effectiveness against covid changed, it no longer made sense to prioritize for other medical uses and the guidance and messaging changed.
As to your question whether or not they should have known earlier that masks were effective....hindsight makes this really easy to second-guess. But it doesn't mean any mistakes were made.
See: https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-because-doctors-shortages-from-the-start-2020-6
That source seems to agree with jdubs.
Yes - up here in Whatcom county (WA) all masks got sold out in just a couple of days. Not just medical grade, the hardware stores were stripped bare of sanding and painting masks. Hardware Sales in Bellingham donated everything even vaguely useful to the local hospitals and clinics. A lot of the other HW and medical supply stores in Whatcom county did the same.
A whole cottage industry in multi-layer home made cloth masks and hand/surface sanitizer supplies sprang up. Some of the masks were quite sophisticated, with pockets for replaceable N95 inserts and adjustable tension bands that went around the back of your head so your ears didn't get sawed off.
A number of the local distilleries started making 190 proof alcohol to be diluted to make sanitizing solutions. (I just went to the local BevMo and bought a large bottle of grain alcohol and cut it with aloe gel to the right strength.) Still have a good bit of it left too.
On another forum, someone said that they should've flexed more lanes in the evacuation. Well, sure, but that's difficult to do on short notice. You'd have to have a plan to do it with some crew from somewhere.
The other poster acted like I said the *shouldn't* do it. Like what?
What exactly did they do wrong? I'm baffled at what they think a few administrators not getting overtime would've done?
The Times was up to their usual on Afghanistan once again this week in an article headlined "Biden's Legacy": "He ended America’s longest war, but the withdrawal was a disaster."
In other words, "The only thing we have to panic about is panic itself!"
"Stop panicking people............
You sensationalize the news ..............
Find people to analyze the news so as to represent THAT news in the best possible light.........
So that the sensationalized news promotes one party over another........
So the voters can "own the libs" or tell conservatives to "go to hell"..........
Every step along the way is meant to "trigger" the opponents.......
We are a nation of excess - and we chose that path ourselves. Its not just a mistake, its a national disaster, its not just illegal immigrants its all immigrants, its not..............(fill in the blank yourselves)
On top of all of this is the problem of "Is this a news show, or a news OPINION show"???????
Compare the size of the Palisades and Eaton wildfires to where you live,
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/17/us/maps-visuals-palisades-fire-dg/index.html
Thanks @cld. I did that and came away with the impression of "oh, that is smaller than I thought." Which probably was not the "intended" reaction?
Je suis d'accord. Seeing it so does put it into greater perspective, but like Leia in the detention cell ...
https://youtu.be/DXn8-meSd8g
In the Vox article and almost everywhere else they blame California for bad forest management. But why? Pacific Palisades is inside the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation area managed by the NPS. Altadena's eastern border is the Angeles National Forest managed by USFS. Why would California manage federal lands?