Podcast #143
John Steppling, Dennis Riches, Max Parry, Shaenah Batterson, Aghogho Akpomé , Hiroyuki Hamada, and Daniel Broudy.
https://www.csun.edu/~rdavids/350fall08/350readings/Davis%20Case%20for%20Letting%20Malibu%20Burn.pdf
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-malibu-burn-20181114-story.html
https://justinpodur.substack.com/p/a-tankie-primer?r=ri1m&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/01/02/will-warnings-of-a-nuclear-war-go-unheeded/
https://indi.ca/babel-come-down/
https://john-steppling.com/2024/12/undreamt-dreams/
Shaenah brings up an important point about fire management. I live in N. California, close to the Oregon border and we have fires yearly for the same reason. Indigenous peoples have used fire as a tool to manage the land for thousands of years. Cultural burning by the indigenous was halted in 1836 even as settlers clear-cut the forests, but the healthy burning has begun again here on BLM and private lands. We are happy that our communities are working together to restore balance to the land even as they tear down the dams to restore the health of our rivers.
The timing of the LA fires is suspect. I grew up in So Cal and only moved here 15 years ago. The Santa Ana winds are usually not this early in the new year nor as strong. Add in that the water tanks were not full enough to produce the pressure needed to work properly, that the copters and water planes could not fly early on because Biden was supposed to be coming to town and that the insurance companies (many of them) pulled out again recently, and that it is said salt water from the ocean is hard on the fire plane equipment so not used (even if it could have saved homes and livestock) and there is much to raise suspicions.
One matter which I don’t believe you mention is Elon Musk’s decision to highlight the “Muslim rape gang” meme. This is admittedly a UK matter though it will probably have parallels elsewhere. The story goes that Arab men have been grooming white girls in Britain and the police are too frightened to do anything about it for fear of being called racist.
It is an amalgam of two of the most oft repeated memes in imperialist propaganda: that brown men are raping white women (as astonishingly resurrected in those images given in the German press after the alleged sex abuses in Cologne) and the old “enemy within” I.e. those lily livered Left liberals are weakening us by making allowances for “savages”. (,And as we all know, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”.)
One curious thing is that the media is stoking up this topic from both sides. Channel 4 has run articles that uphold the rape gang story and others calling it fake news.