There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
From the L.A. wildfires to the inauguration and much more, Jim had much to present on this edition of the Round-Up. Stories included:
–Israel convened its cabinet today to vote on the hostage cease-fire deal with Hamas. While some are celebrating it as a victory for Hamas, many Israelis are remaining uneasy.
–Some of the terrorists who will be released due to the Israel/Hamas hostage deal will be sent to Judea and Samaria as well as eastern Jerusalem, contrary to the promises that were made earlier to the ministers.
–President Biden extended for another year the executive order declaring a state of emergency at Judea and Samaria. This order enables the imposition of sanctions on settlers whom the administration defines as violent.
–The U.N. has blocked aid to Gaza in order to fake a famine.
–Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass cut tens of millions from the Los Angeles Fire Department months before the county fires erupted. We now have video of numerous Los Angeles Fire Department officials warning that the steep cuts could impact disastrous response. 21 days before the Palisades fire broke out, Los Angeles fire personnel jammed into the L.A. fire commission meeting with a dire warning about the consequences of the budget cuts.
–Firefighters responded only 44 minutes after a prominent Pacific Palisades resident called 9-1-1 on Tuesday morning, January 7th, by which time the Palisades fire had begun burning out of control from high winds according to local residents.
–Los Angeles residents are suing a California utility company for allegedly causing the deadly Eaton fire.
–A group of Pacific Palisades residents and businesses impacted by the fire have filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against the city’s department of water and power, alleging that the city and the agency were unprepared for the Palisades fire.
–There are 1,015 inmates currently fighting the Los Angeles wildfires, working up to 24 hours at a time.
–Governor Ron DeSantis admonished the leftist media over their lenient and biased coverage of California Governor Gavin Newsome and his incompetent handling of the Los Angeles wildfires. Jim provided audio of comments from DeSantis.
–Campaigns to remove Governor Gavin Newsome and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass from office have gained steam as devastating wildfires continue to rage.
–A trove of nearly 200 artworks by Hunter Biden have been destroyed, those being a casualty of the wildfires.
–The Monday presidential inauguration is being moved indoors due to the cold weather.
–President elect Donald Trump has selected a slate of religious leaders to participate in his inauguration, one of which is a deeply anti-Semitic, pro-Hezbollah Islamic Imam.
–President-elect Trump confirmed that he spoke with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, days before he would be inaugurated into office.
Over 25,000 acres are ablaze in Los Angeles in the Pacific Palisades fire, a veritable living hell.
Some 12,000-plus structures were incinerated. More than 250,000 souls have been evacuated and are in need of shelter.
No one has really taken charge yet. And now even the woke culprits for the catastrophe are blame-gaming each other to determine who was the more incompetent, which in this case translates to the most woke.
No one knows how many have died; all know the number will escalate in the next few days.
The eventual price tag of the ruin will exceed $200-300 billion and outstrip the billions of dollars given to Ukraine.
And there are still some fires that are completely uncontained.
The Los Angeles apocalypse was a multisystem, green-woke collapse—and a disastrous reminder that when Soviet-style, anti-meritocratic ideology permeates all aspects of modern life in California, disaster is inevitable.
First, note that the culprit of the catastrophe is not climate change; it is not Donald Trump. Those are excuses for arrogant incompetency and disdain for the public. And it is not racism or homophobia to fault those who paraded and virtue signaled their tribal identities so extraneous to their actual responsibilities for public safety.
Note that all California statewide officeholders are left-wing. The California left holds supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only 17 percent of California’s huge congressional delegation of 52 seats is Republican. California’s judiciary is the most left-wing in the country. There is not a single Republican on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.
Add it all up, and the woke socialist state has been eagerly deindustrializing, decivilizing, and retribalizing its way into what is now a veritable peacetime Dresden on the Pacific.
Again, there is no one else to blame, because California is one of those rare states in which Republicans have de facto zero political power. All the state media, the legacy newspapers, the Silicon Valley daily online news sites, the Bay Area-based Apple, Google, and Facebook monopolies, and the local news outlets are parrots of the woke-green mindset.
To the degree that anything still works in California, it predates 2000. The core of the ossified Central Valley Water Project and the California Water Project remain—though they are in need of massive maintenance, like almost all the infrastructure the current generation of politicians inherited and largely ignored.
Now crowded and obsolete highways that were once the nation’s best still function—but barely. And there are a few remnants of sanity in what is left of the pre-woke and once-great universities of Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford, UCLA, and USC, founded by a now despised but far wiser and more competent long-dead generation of visionaries.
The Real ‘Basket of Deplorables’
Los Angeles brags about its new $50 billion budget and trumpets how it expanded “Care First” programs. Indeed, the mayor’s budget claims it created a new “451 positions”—highlighting its investments in “growing the department of youth development.”
It boasts it is adding positions to the “Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department,” “reducing our jail population,” and expanding “voting solutions for all people.” There is not much about fire, policing, or water—apparently now the low priorities that prior sexist, racist, and homophobic generations once worried about.
The role of DEI? Mayor Karen Bass was warned of the current danger of dry hillsides of chaparral buffeted by record-high, 100-mph Santa Ana winds. Her response?
She went junketing a continent away to the inauguration festivities of the president of Ghana—a strange way to prepare for a possible inferno to come. Does Ghana have firefighting expertise to share with Bass? In damage-control mode, Bass flew back only to be confronted at the airport by a now rare honest—and thus foreign—reporter.
He asked her why she cut over $17.6 million from the LA fire service budget—itself just 65% of the city’s homelessness expenditures. (She had planned to cut millions of dollars more). And why, he asked, was she in Africa at all in her city’s hour of need?
Bass stood mute—shamed into silence.
I think Los Angelenos needed no answer since it was obvious to them: she went to Ghana because she could and wanted to—since identity chauvinism is what ensured she was elected, reelected, and immune from criticism. Look at her appointments and budget, and it is clear public safety, fires, and water are most certainly not her priorities.
Bass was confident that if LA went up in smoke as she pursued her African agendas, the woke megaphones would silence critics as “racist” or “homophobic” or “sexist” in the way Soviet commissars used to send to Siberia any “ideological enemies of the state” who complained that the farms, industries, and trains of Russia no longer worked. And on spec, we now hear it is now racist to criticize a black woman incompetent mayor.
How about the Bass-appointed DEI “deputy mayor for safety,” Brian Williams?
Surely, he stepped up in the mayor’s absence, given his purview of the city’s “safety?” Nope.
You see, he is currently under suspension for suspicion of phoning in a bomb threat to Los Angeles City Hall.
Well, how about the DEI- and the much-acclaimed “first Latina” director of Los Angeles’s vast waterworks? Bass recruited such talent by nearly doubling the job’s normal salary to $750,000 per year.
What did she accomplish on her over $2,000-a-day salary? Did Janisse Quiñones, “the new Chief Executive Officer and Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and the “first Latina woman to lead the organization,” leap into action?
Well, the water very quickly ran out in Pacific Palisades, and the hydrants went dry—as many had been for months prior.
Quiñones claimed that “three million gallons” in tanks above the suburb were mysteriously not up to the task of quenching the LA Dresden. You think?
She apparently gauges disaster preparation by the number of gallons of water available in tanks, not the number of gallons needed to save thousands of homes and lives. And she forgot to tell the public that in fact there is a 117-million-gallon water reservoir atop Pacific Palisades built for some purpose unknown to her.
Yet it was empty and “under repair” for months because of a mere damaged cover. Consider that: a dry autumn, the onset of the usual Santa Ana winds, a recent plague of hilltop wildfires, and Quiñones shuts down the linchpin of a prior generation’s plan to save the Palisades.
Note Quiñones was supposed to be the professional replacement for a retired director of water and power, who himself had been a replacement for another director who was found guilty of bribery and is currently in federal prison.
So goes the agency created by water wizard William Mulholland, who once created the 18-million-person Los Angeles megapolis by tapping every river and reservoir he could to feed the city’s unquenchable thirst for water.
How about fire chief Kristen Crowley? She now blames the mayor for dry hydrants. But in doing so, she pleaded that her job starts only after water flows out of them—as if their inert condition is not really her concern.
The self-celebrity, nonbinary fire chief Kristen Crowley has talked nonstop for the last two years about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and the “LGBTQ community.” Less was said about the need to ensure the most meritocratic force possible, unmatched equipment, and long preplanned measures to prevent conflagrations—and screaming to high heaven that fire hydrants were either being stolen or bone dry.
Instead, like Bass, Crowley was mostly mute about the lack of preparation or the absence of sufficient warning to those about to be engulfed.
How about her deputy Kristine Lawson, who claimed people in need want to see fire officers arrive who look like they do? And if they don’t?
She is also on record with this: “Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out.” Consider that helpful LAFD logic: So, if you are a man who suffers cardiac arrest and collapses on your kitchen floor, it is your fault that you died without medical attention, not Kristine’s, who apparently either would not or could not carry you out the door.
How about morally bankrupt politicians?
The speaker of the California Assembly, Robert Rivas, along with Governor Gavin Newsom, had just called a special session of the legislature to “Trump-proof” California. He wished to allot millions of dollars in state funds—in a year of massive deficits—to sue and impede the federal government.
Will Rivas’s Trump “resistance” session include canceling California’s simultaneous request for hundreds of billions of federal dollars for Los Angeles from the Trump administration? When asked whether it was wise to borrow millions to sue Trump while Los Angeles was burning, Rivas mumbled, stuttered, and revealed himself to be little more than a caricature of an incompetent.
Governor Gavin “Nero” Newsom made his usual performance art, virtual-signaling appearance. When asked why the hydrants were dry, he batted it off as a “local problem.” He now uses his own campaign website, linked to Democratic fundraising efforts, to warn the fire-struck public about supposed “misinformation.”
But what could Newsom do or say? His entire tenure is synonymous with too many catastrophic forest fires and too little water.
He did nothing after the catastrophic Aspen and Paradise fires to revive the timber industry to glean and clean the forests. He never allowed much new grazing on fuel-rich hills or sent crews in to cut back the chaparral.
He never reconsidered his policies of diverting precious snowmelt from the Sacramento River tributaries to flow into the sea to help the delta smelt rather than to ensure that farmers could irrigate their crops or that Los Angeles County reservoirs were fully banked.
Despite an approved 2014 $7.5 billion bond to build three huge dams and reservoirs, Newsom ensured that we built none: not the easily constructed Sites reservoir, not Temperance Flat, and not Los Banos Grandes, all tertiary foothill reservoirs that could have given California by now nearly five million additional acre-feet of storage.
Or is it worse than that?
Governor Dam-Buster still brags about how he greenlit blowing up four dams on the Klamath River—the largest dam removal in American history. The dams provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power, farmers with irrigation water, and the public with recreation and flood control.
Instead of following the voters’ bond to build reservoirs and dams, Newsom preferred to dynamite them. The ensuing muddy deluge wiped out the surrounding riparian ecosystem.
Joe Biden, now in the last days of his disastrous tenure, was in the LA area by chance to boast that he had put thousands of valuable federal square miles off limits.
Instead, he mumbled about his new great-grandson and relief that his kid’s house was saved, as the fire was engulfing 12,000 homes of others. Then Biden unceremoniously left, heartbroken that his last junket to Italy might have to be canceled as Los Angeles continued to burn. Later he too grumbled about “misinformation,” which is his synonym for telling the truth about the Los Angeles green woke bomb.
Kamala Harris? Was the vice president perhaps marshaling federal money and assets to stop the fires in her last weeks in office? After all, we remember from her 2024 campaign Harris’s frenzied efforts to help out during national disasters, as she scolded the capable Florida governor Ron DeSantis that he was not partnering enough with her to mitigate the effects of flooding.
She too proved invisible other than remarking the fire was “apocalyptic.” Instead, Harris was too busy planning a multimillion-dollar junket in her last week in office and of free royal travel.
Insurance? Is there some plan to rebuild these suburbs as they were, to ensure there are some $300 billion to pay out claims? Well, no again. The state is broke and is driving out insurance companies, not enticing them in. Its public “Fair” unfair insurance plan of last resort is underfunded and will go insolvent once a week or two of claims flows in.
California’s failure to effectively prevent and put out fires—along with hyper-regulation and failure to combat an epidemic of insurance fraud—has destroyed the state’s insurance industry. Given the prior inability of homeowners to buy credible fire insurance at any cost, there are thousands of now-homeless who had no insurance at all.
How about the region’s large homeless population that camps out on the streets and in the tinderbox chaparral above the suburbs? Did the city investigate arson or detain, arrest, charge, and jail those rounded up with incendiary devices or seen lighting fires? Of course not. They vetoed any notion long ago of an anti-camping ordinance.
Collective Suicide
Add it all up.
The California nihilist green ethos and the left-wing politicians who run the madhouse ensured there is no effort to glean the forests and hills of combustible fuel.
There is not enough water for hydrants, not enough to deliver to Los Angeles, and when it arrives, there is too much incompetence to know how to use it.
There were no real warnings to residents that they had mere minutes to flee for their lives. Or was it worse still? As the fires wore on, continuous false alarms of new fires sparked unnecessary and dangerous mass evacuations citywide, destroying what, if any, trust was left in the fire department.
There is no reason to believe that such derelict politicians during the next fire will not again be AWOL on DEI junkets, boasting of their genders, their race, and their sexual orientation, but not of their duties to those whose lives they are sworn to protect.
The final tragic irony?
California’s DEI “humanism” and Green New Deal environmentalism ensured the cruelest imaginable treatment of thousands of people and unrivaled destruction of the natural ecosystem.
No one in the government dares to guess about what might have caused the fires, even as they cry “climate change”—as if to do so would expose their own incompetency or confirm rumors of sporadic homeless arsonists.
The California green utopians, by their very ideological zealotry, ensured their fires likely will have released into the atmosphere several weeks’ worth of the entire state’s collective auto emissions.
The fires will have wiped out thousands of protected flora and fauna, will have released toxic fumes into the air, and will have destroyed the lives of thousands of Los Angeles residents for years to come.
To paraphrase a 1960s California left-wing slogan—green-woke is not healthy for children and other living things.
The California wildfires, which have destroyed thousands of homes and forced tens of thousands to evacuate, were exacerbated by strong winds, increased population density, and Governor Gavin Newsom’s failures in managing forests and conducting controlled burns.
Claims about failing to fill reservoirs for hydrants are substantiated and result from two sources: infrastructure and demand issues, as well as mismanagement of water resources.
While there is no evidence that DEI initiatives hindered the response, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley has emphasized DEI as a priority and implied a focus on increasing diversity in hiring rather than hiring the best candidates.
Critics, including actor James Woods, argued that Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley’s emphasis on DEI in her leadership priorities detracts from the department’s ability to respond.
Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley has emphasized the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD).
In November 2022, alongside then-Mayor Eric Garcetti, she launched the department’s first-ever DEI Bureau, focusing on creating a safe and inclusive workplace.
Chief Crowley has stated that fostering a diverse workforce enhances the department’s ability to serve Los Angeles’s varied communities effectively.
She has expressed a commitment to promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity within the entire organization.
Just weeks before the wildfires, Chief Crowley warned that budget cuts were hampering the fire department’s ability to respond to emergencies, including training, preparation, and large-scale incidents like the ongoing wildfires.
The department’s budget was reduced by $17.6 million for the 2024-25 fiscal year, eliminating 58 positions and cutting overtime funding.
While Mayor Karen Bass claimed the cuts did not affect the response to the fires, the operational strain was evident, with the department overspending $66.6 million the previous year due to unbudgeted contracts and overtime.
Ironically, the fire department’s budget cuts came as a result of left-leaning policies. Mayor Bass faced backlash for cutting Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year, prioritizing funding for homeless services instead.
This decision reportedly hampered the department’s ability to respond to the crisis. Bass was also criticized for being in Ghana on a nonessential trip when the fires broke out, although she defended herself, claiming to have stayed in contact throughout her flight back to Los Angeles.
Mismanagement of forests has been one of the greatest contributors to the devastating effects of the fires, exacerbated by the limited implementation of controlled burns.
Controlled burns, or prescribed fires, are a vital forest management practice that involves intentionally igniting specific forest areas under controlled conditions to reduce excess vegetation, which serves as fuel for wildfires.
Despite their importance, California has struggled to use this preventive measure effectively. In 2024, the U.S. Forest Service temporarily halted prescribed burns, citing the need to allocate resources for active wildfire suppression.
This pause, occurring during a critical period for planned burns, raised concerns among experts who warned that delaying these measures could significantly increase the long-term risks of severe wildfires.
Historically, California’s landscapes experienced frequent, low-intensity fires that naturally managed vegetation density. However, decades of aggressive fire suppression policies have led to an unnatural buildup of flammable materials.
This accumulation creates conditions where wildfires can spread more rapidly and with greater intensity. Experts estimate that approximately 20 million acres in California could benefit from prescribed burns to mitigate wildfire risks.
Water mismanagement further exacerbated the emergency. During wildfire crises, some regions experienced depleted hydrants and limited water availability. These shortages are attributed to local infrastructure and demand issues, reflecting a broader challenge of insufficient water planning and preparedness.
Newsom’s administration upheld environmental regulations aimed at protecting ecosystems, such as the Delta smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
These policies have occasionally limited water deliveries for agricultural and urban uses, which some critics argue could have been redirected to support other needs.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration has faced significant challenges and failures in maintaining California’s water reservoirs, directly impacting the state’s ability to manage critical resources during emergencies such as wildfires.
One notable incident was the 2017 Oroville Dam crisis, where poor maintenance and neglect led to the failure of the dam’s main spillway after heavy rainfall.
This failure resulted in the evacuation of over 180,000 residents and revealed systemic issues in reservoir management. Investigations confirmed that the California Department of Water Resources had not completed necessary repairs despite prior warnings.
With such flawed leadership and mismanagement, it’s no surprise that a 2024 local survey found 56% of Californians were considering leaving the state for good.
Some of the images of the destruction that has taken place in the Los Angeles area are hard to believe. We are being told that approximately “75% of Pacific Palisades has been completely leveled by fires”, and the use of the phrase “completely leveled” is not an exaggeration at all. It literally looks like a nuke went off and wiped out everything. There have been plenty of fire disasters in California before, but never anything like this. At this point, Accuweather is projecting that total economic losses will be “between $52 billion and $57 billion”…
The blazes — which are ripping through some of the nation’s priciest real estate — are likely to cause between $52 billion and $57 billion in damages and economic loss, according to a preliminary AccuWeather estimate.
That may sound like a very high estimate, but JPMorgan analyst Jimmy Bhullar came up with a very similar figure…
A separate estimate from JPMorgan analyst Jimmy Bhullar also pegged total economic losses from the LA fires at close to $50 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. That total includes insured losses at more than $20 billion and “even more if the fires are not controlled,” Bhullar said.
Those losses would make the Los Angeles-area infernos the costliest wildfires in U.S. history.
Previously, the Camp Fire in 2018 was the most destructive wildfire in history — causing an estimated $12.5 billion in insured losses, WSJ said.
Read that last sentence again.
Prior to 2025, the costliest fire disaster in U.S. history caused 12.5 billion dollars in insured losses.
This disaster is going to beat that by a very wide margin.
One of the reasons why this disaster is going to be so costly is because homes are being destroyed in an area where home values are extremely high…
Some of the worst damage is located in Santa Monica and Malibu, where median home values are over $2 million, AccuWeather said.
On Thursday, multiple fires continued to spread all around Los Angeles.
Sadly, it was being reported that the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire were still zero percent contained…
Firefighters on Thursday continued to battle multiple deadly wildfires that erupted across Los Angeles, creating an apocalyptic scene as residents fled the raging infernos.
At least five fires were active in Los Angeles County, scorching more than 40 square miles across the region, according to Cal Fire. The Palisades Fire in the coastal Pacific Palisades community and the Eaton Fire, located east in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, remained the largest blazes with 0% containment.
Why aren’t they able to contain these fires?
So far, over 2,000 structures have been destroyed, and more are catching fire with each passing hour…
Out-of-control blazes are still raging in Los Angeles, with firefighters unable to contain one of Southern California’s worst natural disasters in history.
Roughly 30,000 acres were on fire, and at least five people were dead early Thursday, with more than 180,000 residents ordered to evacuate, and more than 425,000 without power. More than 2,000 structures have been lost in the Pacific Palisades fire and in the Eaton fire in and around Altadena, with critical fire weather forecast through Friday night, local officials said. Forecasters said no rain is expected over the next week.
Huberman, who has 5.2 million subscribers to his health podcast Huberman Lab, took to social media platform X to share the footage, urging people to ‘call in any activity’.
He wrote: ‘People are lighting fires in otherwise non-burning urban areas of LA.
‘Saw this happen first hand in Santa Monica. Called it in & fire dept & police responded.
‘Stay safe and call in any activity ASAP. We don’t need more flames out here.’
Why would anyone do such a thing?
Have they gone completely and utterly insane?
There should be absolutely no tolerance for anyone that is attempting to set new fires in the middle of a major fire emergency such as this.
In areas where fire has already come and gone, many are discovering that there is nothing left of their homes except for a pile of ash…
Some residents ventured back to areas the fire had already swept through, where brick chimneys were left looming over charred waste and burnt-out vehicles. The remnants of a tattered and scorched American flag flapped from a pole.
“I had just come from my family home where my mother lives that was burned to a crisp … And then I came up to my home and – same thing. It’s completely dust,” said Oliver Allnatt, 36, wearing ski goggles and a filtered face mask as he took pictures of the ruins. “Basically just a chimney stack and a pile of ash. I mean, it’s something out of a movie.”
Many of these homeowners will not be able to rebuild because they had their insurance policies canceled.
One woman that was interviewed by KABC was trying to ward off the fires with a garden hose because the home where her parents have lived for more than 70 years was no longer covered by fire insurance…
Lynne Levin-Guzman stood in the front yard of her 90-year-old parents’ home in Los Angeles County, California, trying to protect it with a garden hose — because their insurance company no longer would.
“I know I’m not supposed to be here, but this is my parents’ home and they just lost — they got canceled from their fire insurance. So they’re dealing with this,” she told CNN affiliate KABC. “They’ve lived in this house for 75 years and they’ve had the same insurance and these insurance people decided to cancel their fire insurance.”
“And they wonder why people leave California,” she added.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
As I discussed yesterday, I simply do not understand why anyone would still want to live in California at this stage.
Yes, there are good paying jobs in the state and the weather is nice. But in recent years California has been hit by historic disaster after historic disaster.
Sadly, this is just the beginning.
A lot more chaos is on the way, and natural disasters will continue to be a major theme throughout the rest of 2025.
The past couple of weeks have been really, really strange. On New Year’s Eve, four of the most iconic buildings in the entire country were all hit by lightning. In our political capital, the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol were hit. In our financial capital, the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center were hit. Subsequently, there were terror attack in New Orleans and Las Vegas on New Year’s Day. And now here we are a week later, and our entertainment capital is being absolutely devastated by fire.
In some areas of Los Angeles, it literally looks like a nuclear weapon exploded. Some of the most iconic locations in the Los Angeles area have been wiped out, and even Hollywood Boulevard is being evacuated…
Hollywood Boulevard has been evacuated with 100,000 people told to flee with six wildfires raging as the apocalyptic skies of Los Angeles continue to fill with smoke.
Two new blazes broke out overnight in the Hollywood Hills and Studio City – forcing first responders to redeploy their already-scarce resources to the burnt landscape.
The National Guard has been deployed and could send in military personnel to assist, amid revelations that heroic firefighters are ‘triaging’ homes and neighborhoods.
By the afternoon, the Santa Ana wind-fueled fire had claimed the homes of more than half a dozen A-listers in the community perched above the Pacific ocean: Billy Crystal, Anna Faris, John Goodman, Anthony Hopkins, Eugene Levy and Miles Teller all lost homes there, according to social media posts and reporting by Page Six.
The Palisades home of Adam Brody and Leighton Meester, who walked the Golden Globes carpet together on Sunday, also burned down.
People Magazine has published a list of 47 major celebrities that have lost their homes so far.
We have seen homes owned by celebrities get burned down in past fires, but we have never seen so many get burned down all at once.
Unfortunately, many of those celebrities will be joining countless others in the exact same uninsured boat. In 2024, large insurance companies ruthlessly terminated the policies of tens of thousands of California homeowners…
In 2024 Liberty Mutual and State Farm, two of the largest insurers in the country, told nearly 50,000 homeowners in the Golden State – some of whom were in high risk areas – that their fire insurance would be terminated in a bid to prevent ‘financial failure’.
At least 1,600 people in the affluent neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades – the hardest hit area of the fires – lost coverage when State Farm pulled out in April.
Furious residents are now publicly sounding off at insurance companies in the wake of the deadly blazes, with one local nurse slamming insurers for failing to renew the policy for her elderly parents.
What a nightmare.
Will the federal government come riding to the rescue?
On Thursday, it was being reported that the Biden administration has decided to cover 100 percent of the costs for “the initial disaster response”…
President Joe Biden on Thursday announced the federal government would cover 100% of costs for the initial disaster response to the Los Angeles wildfires.
Meeting with federal officials at the White House, Biden said the funds would go toward debris removal, temporary shelters, salaries for first responders and more for 180 days.
Biden said he emphasized to California officials they should “spare no expense to do what they need to do.”
As I discussed in a previous article, the total economic damage from these fires could be in the neighborhood of 50 billion dollars.
It will take years to recover, and Los Angeles will never look the same after this.
So precisely what will “rebuilding” look like in Los Angeles?
Prior to these fires, officials were planning to transform Los Angeles into a “smart city” by 2028…
Visitors for the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics will find a transformational digital Olympic experience from the moment they arrive. Passing through LAX airport’s completely renovated terminals, they can use the new automated people mover to select between light rail airport connections, rideshare, or taxi transportation choices. They will be greeted by digital signage, directed by multi-lingual electronic wayfinding, and connected through their smartphone with the hotels, restaurants, and venues that they are looking for during their stay. Whether visiting Hollywood Boulevard or Venice Beach, visitors will use smartphones or easily accessible kiosks to learn in their own language about the landmarks and readily available services to enhance their experience, including blind or deaf visitors.
This vision is already becoming a reality. As a three-time United States Digital City Winner (2016-18), the City of Los Angeles has been investing and continues to invest in the infrastructure, digital services, and data tools to be a globally recognized Smart City. The SmartLA 2028 strategy is a concise summary of our vision, our approach to being a Smart City, and our roadmap to 2028.
At this stage, it is going to take an enormous mountain of money just to make the most heavily damaged areas of Los Angeles livable again.
And the destruction is far from over.
Since I began writing this article, even more new fires have erupted.
That is not good news at all.
The region continues to be under a “red flag” fire weather warning, and there is no rain in the forecast for the next week.
Hopefully the winds will at least die down in the days ahead, because that is what firefighters need more than anything else.
Of course once this disaster is finally over, it won’t be too long before more major disasters come rolling along.
We have entered a period of unprecedented global chaos, and I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be filled with lots of unpleasant surprises.
There is a clear consensus among the global elite that overpopulation is the primary cause of the most important problems that our world is facing today. Many of them are completely convinced that humans are literally a “plague” upon the Earth and that extreme measures are required to prevent us from destroying the entire planet. To the elite, everything from global warming to our growing economic problems can be directly traced back to a lack of population control. They warn that if nothing is done about our exploding population, humanity will be facing a future full of poverty, war and suffering on a filthy, desolate planet. They complain that it “costs too much” to keep elderly patients that are terminally ill alive, and they eagerly promote “family planning” in developing nations as a way to combat population growth. Of course just about anything that reduces the human population in any way is a positive thing for those that believe in this philosophy. This very twisted philosophy is being promoted in our movies, in our television shows, in our music, in countless books, on many of our most prominent websites, and it is being taught at top colleges and universities all over the world. The people that are promoting this philosophy have very, very deep pockets, and they are actually convinced that they are helping to “save the world” by controlling the growth of the human population. In fact, many of them truly believe that they are engaged in a “life or death” struggle for the fate of the planet.
The population of the world is currently sitting just above 8 billion, and the UN expects it to peak at 10.3 billion later this century…
The world’s population is expected to grow by more than 2 billion people in the next decades and peak in the 2080s at around 10.3 billion, a major shift from a decade ago, a new report by the United Nations said Thursday.
From the time of Charles Darwin all the way to today, we have been relentlessly warned about what would happen if something was not done to reduce population growth.
Of course the dire consequences that we were warned about have never actually come to fruition.
But that hasn’t stopped the elite from continuing to issue even more warnings.
The following are 47 shocking population control quotes from the global elite that will make you want to lose your lunch…
1.Charles Darwin: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
2.Bill Gates: “The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. (…) And we’ve got to make sure that we help out with the tools now so that they don’t have an impossible situation later.”
3.John D. Rockefeller: “The population problem must be recognized by government as a principal element in long-range planning.”
4.David Rockefeller: “The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.”
6.CNN Founder Ted Turner: “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
7.HBO personality Bill Maher: “I’m pro-choice, I’m for assisted suicide, I’m for regular suicide, I’m for whatever gets the freeway moving—that’s what I’m for. . . . It’s too crowded, the planet is too crowded and we need to promote death.”
8.UK Television Presenter Sir David Attenborough: “We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now”
9.Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson: “The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself…It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet…All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control.”
10.Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
11.Paul Ehrlich, a former science adviser to president George W. Bush and the author of “The Population Bomb”: “Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism… of sexism… of religious intolerance… of war… of gross economic inequality. But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem.”
12.Richard Branson: “The truth is this: the Earth cannot provide enough food and fresh water for 10 billion people, never mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals and schools.”
13.Environmental activist Roger Martin: “On a finite planet, the optimum population providing the best quality of life for all, is clearly much smaller than the maximum, permitting bare survival. The more we are, the less for each; fewer people mean better lives.”
14.Al Gore: “One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principal ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children to have, the spacing of the children… You have to educate girls and empower women. And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”
15.MIT professor Penny Chisholm: “The real trick is, in terms of trying to level off at someplace lower than that 9 billion, is to get the birthrates in the developing countries to drop as fast as we can. And that will determine the level at which humans will level off on earth.”
16.Julia Whitty, a columnist for Mother Jones: “The only known solution to ecological overshoot is to decelerate our population growth faster than it’s decelerating now and eventually reverse it—at the same time we slow and eventually reverse the rate at which we consume the planet’s resources. Success in these twin endeavors will crack our most pressing global issues: climate change, food scarcity, water supplies, immigration, health care, biodiversity loss, even war. On one front, we’ve already made unprecedented strides, reducing global fertility from an average 4.92 children per woman in 1950 to 2.56 today—an accomplishment of trial and sometimes brutally coercive error, but also a result of one woman at a time making her individual choices. The speed of this childbearing revolution, swimming hard against biological programming, rates as perhaps our greatest collective feat to date.”
17.Colorado State University Professor Philip Cafaro in a paper entitled “Climate Ethics and Population Policy”: “Ending human population growth is almost certainly a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for preventing catastrophic global climate change. Indeed, significantly reducing current human numbers may be necessary in order to do so.”
18.Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka: “I have two grandchildren and I want them to inherit a stable Earth. But I fear for them. Humans have overpopulated the Earth and in the process have created an ideal nutritional substrate on which bacteria and viruses (microbes) will grow and prosper. We are behaving like bacteria growing on an agar plate, flourishing until natural limits are reached or until another microbe colonizes and takes over, using them as their resource. In addition to our extremely high population density, we are social and mobile, exactly the conditions that favor growth and spread of pathogenic (disease-causing) microbes. I believe it is only a matter of time until microbes once again assert control over our population, since we are unwilling to control it ourselves. This idea has been espoused by ecologists for at least four decades and is nothing new. People just don’t want to hear it.”
19.Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General from 1997-2006: “The idea that population growth guarantees a better life — financially or otherwise — is a myth that only those who sell nappies, prams and the like have any right to believe.”
21.Bill Nye: “In 1750, there were about a billion humans in the world. Now, there are well over seven billion people in the world. It more than doubled in my lifetime. So all these people trying to live the way we live in the developed world is filling the atmosphere with a great deal more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than existed a couple of centuries ago. It’s the speed at which it is changing that is going to be troublesome for so many large populations of humans around the world.”
22.Actress Cameron Diaz: “I think women are afraid to say that they don’t want children because they’re going to get shunned. But I think that’s changing too now. I have more girlfriends who don’t have kids than those that do. And, honestly? We don’t need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet.”
23.Democrat strategist Steven Rattner: “WE need death panels. Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.”
24.Matthew Yglesias, a business and economics correspondent for Slate, in an article entitled “The Case for Death Panels, in One Chart”: “But not only is this health care spending on the elderly the key issue in the federal budget, our disproportionate allocation of health care dollars to old people surely accounts for the remarkable lack of apparent cost effectiveness of the American health care system. When the patient is already over 80, the simple fact of the matter is that no amount of treatment is going to work miracles in terms of life expectancy or quality of life.”
25.Stephen Hawking: “In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9 per cent per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.”
26.Gloria Steinem: “Everybody with a womb doesn’t have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal chords has to be an opera singer.”
27.Jane Goodall: “It’s our population growth that underlies just about every single one of the problems that we’ve inflicted on the planet. If there were just a few of us, then the nasty things we do wouldn’t really matter and Mother Nature would take care of it — but there are so many of us.”
28.U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
30.Salon columnist Mary Elizabeth Williams in an article entitled “So What If Abortion Ends Life?”: “All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides.”
31.Paul Ehrlich: “Basically, then, there are only two kinds of solutions to the population problem. One is a ‘birth rate solution,’ in which we find ways to lower the birth rate. The other is a ‘death rate solution,’ in which ways to raise the death rate — war, famine, pestilence — find us.”
32.Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne in a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics: “[W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … [W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.”
33.Nina Fedoroff, a key adviser to Hillary Clinton: “We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people.”
34. Barack Obama’s primary science adviser, John Holdren: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.”
35. Another quote from John Holdren: “If population control measures are not initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.”
36.David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club: “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”
37.Maurice Strong: “Either we reduce the world’s population voluntarily or nature will do this for us, but brutally.”
38.Thomas Ferguson, former official in the U.S. State Department Office of Population Affairs: “There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…”
39.Mikhail Gorbachev: “We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”
40.Jacques Costeau: “In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.”
41. Finnish environmentalist Pentti Linkola: “If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die”
42.Author Dan Brown: “Overpopulation is an issue so profound that all of us need to ask what should be done.”
43.Prince Phillip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II and co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund: “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”
44.Ashley Judd: “It’s unconscionable to breed, with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries.”
45.John Guillebaud, professor of family planning at University College London: “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet.”
46.Bill Gates: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent.”
47.Charles Darwin: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”
Take, for instance, a recent story that made the rounds on social media. According to these reports, Oxfam — the British NGO — found that a huge chunk of the World Bank’s spending on climate change-related issues was “missing.”
Thank heavens for fact-checkers like the Australian Associated Press — a Poynter Institute-accredited fact-checker from down under — which set us all straight: “An Oxfam report did not find that $US41 billion has gone ‘missing’ from the World Bank’s climate change fund, contrary to claims online.”
What a relief. Instead, the AAP noted, the Oxfam report found that the World Bank just doesn’t really know where the money went.
See? Totally different!
The controversy centers around an Oct. 2024 report titled “Climate Finance Unchecked: How much does the World Bank know about the climate actions it claims?” Answer: not as much as it probably should.
The findings are front-loaded in a TL;DR on page two of the 33-page report, in case you’re not interested in reading the whole thing through: “Oxfam finds that for World Bank projects, many things can change during implementation. On average, actual expenditures on the Bank’s projects differ from budgeted amounts by 26–43% above or below the claimed climate finance. Across the entire climate finance portfolio, between 2017 and 2023, this difference amounts to US$24.28–US$41.32 billion,” the report states.
“No information is available about what new climate actions were supported and which planned actions were cut. Now that the Bank has touted its focus on understanding and reporting on the impacts of its climate finance, it is critical to stress that without a full understanding of how much of what the Bank claims as climate finance at the project approval stage becomes actual expenditure, it is impossible to track and measure the impacts of the Bank’s climate co-benefits in practice.”
The Oxfam report stated “generous accounting practices by different countries and providers, combined with the lack of transparency and consistency in how climate finance is defined, calculated, and reported, is at the root of the crisis of trust in climate finance.”
As the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists pointed out in a November summation of Oxfam’s findings, this is sort of a big deal when you consider how the World Bank is in the process, more or less, of turning itself into the Global Climate Change Savings & Loan.
“In recent years, the World Bank has touted its spending on climate finance and its plans to dramatically expand it,” the ICIJ noted.
“World Bank President Ajay Banga said in December that the bank had met its goal to devote 35% of its financing to climate three years ahead of schedule and set a new target of 45% by 2025. That goal is well within reach; the bank announced in September that its climate finance investments reached 44% of total financing, or $42.6 billion, over the past fiscal year. ‘We’re putting our ambition in overdrive,’ Banga said.”
The report underscored that there’s a huge difference between the World Bank’s ambition and the world bank’s accounting processes, however, and one that needs to be addressed. But both Oxfam and the AAP fact-checking team wanted to you to be sure that the NGO “was not alleging any mismanagement of funds due to corruption or waste; it was concerned about the World Bank’s reporting process for deviations in planned and actual climate finance.”
“This distinction is significant,” a spokesperson for Oxfam said.
“Oxfam’s report doesn’t suggest funds are missing but points to a transparency issue that makes it difficult to know precisely what the Bank is delivering in terms of climate finance: where it’s going and what it’s supporting.”
Yes, well, excuse us for sounding like negative Nancys, but this sounds a bit like one of those cheerful bosses who describes a major organizational setback as an “opportunity for breakthrough improvement.” Indeed it might b, on some level, but a Panglossian refusal to acknowledge the bedrock realities of the situation that accompanies it becomes downright hilarious — unless you’re on the hook for it, of course.
And if you’re an American, you are! According to a Congressional Research Service report, the U.S. contributes over 16 percent of the World Bank’s total capital through its financial commitments, and has significant voting power on all of the World Bank organizations that provide climate change funding.
Yes, this may be a drop in the bucket in terms of your tax dollars, and yes, there are bigger climate hustles bureaucrats have spent your cash on (hey, whatever happened to that promising green energy start-up Solyndra?), but the difference between “a transparency issue that makes it difficult to know precisely what the Bank is delivering in terms of climate finance” and “missing” sounds an awful lot like the difference between “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” and “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate; in fact, it was wrong.”
Of course, when it comes to virtually any other institutional spending issue, using the word “missing” to refer to something being lost or something being unaccounted for would be a distinction without a difference. Here, it’s unspoken why it’s problematic and why fact-checkers are taking issue with it: When it comes to spending on issues related to climate change and green energy, there are Good Guys and there are Bad Guys.
The Good Guys say this is merely an accounting quibble, the Bad Guys say that this means at least $24 billion and up to $41 billion of World Bank funds are somewhere in the ether of global finance thanks to variances in accounting practices that charitably be described as curious.
Thus, it’s not, “contrary to claims online,” missing. It’s just not accounted for! At this point, I’m not sure which is the bigger racket: dubious national or supranational funding of projects that fall loosely under the aegis of purported climate change mitigation, or fact-checking. At least this can be said about fact-checking: It costs a hell of a lot less.
Credit: ALLISON BAILEY/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
In a dramatic last-minute effort to avert a government shutdown, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution (CR) late Friday evening, funding federal agencies through March 14, 2025.
The bill passed with a 366-34 vote and now awaits Senate approval and Biden’s signature to become law.
More Democrats supported the new bill, with a vote count of 196 to 170.
Below is a breakdown of the funding allocations across various sectors:
Division A: Continuing Appropriations
This section extends government funding until March 14, 2025, ensuring the uninterrupted operation of essential federal programs.
Key Allocations:
District of Columbia Emergency Planning:
$90 million allocated for emergency planning, including $50 million for the 2025 Presidential Inauguration.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
$625 million to maintain the Geostationary Earth Orbit acquisition schedule.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI):
$16.668 million for cybersecurity and national security system upgrades.
Defense Shipbuilding:
$5.996 billion for Columbia Class Submarine construction.
$2.922 billion for additional Columbia Class Submarine activities.
$5.691 billion for Virginia Class Submarine production and workforce improvements.
Treasury Department – Cybersecurity:
$908,000 for terrorism and financial intelligence measures.
Education Support:
Funds for student loan servicing and aid processing.
Focused on addressing the aftermath of natural disasters from 2023-2024, this section allocates billions for recovery and infrastructure support.
Agriculture and Forestry
Disaster Relief for Agriculture:
$30.78 billion for crop, livestock, and infrastructure losses due to natural disasters in 2023 and 2024, including $2 billion earmarked for livestock losses and $10 billion for economic assistance.
$30 million for crop insurance reimbursements.
$3 million for molasses testing.
Emergency Conservation Programs:
$828 million to restore disaster-affected conservation projects.
Emergency Forest Restoration:
$356.535 million to rehabilitate damaged forests.
Emergency Watershed Protection:
$920 million to restore watersheds impacted by severe weather.
Rural Development
Rural Disaster Assistance Fund:
$362.5 million for rural infrastructure recovery projects.
Food Assistance
Commodity Assistance Program:
$25 million for emergency food aid infrastructure in disaster-hit regions.
Economic Recovery
Economic Development Assistance:
$1.51 billion for flood mitigation, disaster recovery, and infrastructure restoration.
NOAA Disaster Recovery:
$244 million for repair and replacement of observing assets, mapping systems, and geodesy services.
$499 million for hurricane hunter aircraft and disaster response tools.
Fisheries Disaster Assistance:
$300 million to support fisheries affected by natural disasters.
Division C: Public Health and Medicare
Key Healthcare Provisions:
Medicare Support:
Extensions for rural hospital funding, telehealth programs, and temporary coverage of oral antiviral drugs.
Public Health Programs:
Continued funding for Community Health Centers, National Health Service Corps, and diabetes programs.
Medicaid Adjustments:
Reversal of disproportionate hospital payment cuts.
Division D: Defense and Infrastructure
Department of Defense:
Army Disaster Recovery:
$451.894 million for repairing damage caused by storms, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.
Navy Recovery Operations:
$1.454 billion to address disaster-related costs.
NASA:
Facilities Repair:
$740.2 million for repairing infrastructure damaged by hurricanes, typhoons, and tornadoes.
Federal Prison System:
$64.795 million for disaster-related building repairs.
U.S. Marshals Service:
$12 million for enhanced security at Supreme Court Justice residences.
Veterans Affairs:
Flexibilities to fund veterans’ health and community care services during emergencies.
According to Charlie Kirk, the new bill is still a win for conservatives and Pres. Trump.
He wrote:
Big win for Trump in Congress. He first blocked the AWFUL CR.
He now has a clean one, with no Democrat pork or member pay raise, including massive economic and disaster aid for farmers and states affected by the hurricanes. He cut the bill 95% in length down from 1,500 pages.
He eliminated the J6 Committee protection provision and cut out a state department agency associated with censorship. He is already running Congress before he takes office!
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has confirmed that radioactive material was lost in transit earlier this month, heightening fears about public safety and sparking theories about mysterious drone activity in New Jersey.
Officer Lew, a prominent political commentator, highlighted the NRC’s event report during a review of regulatory alerts.
“While looking at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Alerts. I can confirm that there is radioactive material that has gone missing on Dec 2nd, 2024 out of New Jersey. This might be the reason for the drones… just speculation at this point,” he wrote.
The missing material, identified as a Ge-68 pin source manufactured by Eckert & Ziegler, was reported lost by its licensee on December 3, 2024. Shipped for disposal, the container arrived at its destination severely damaged and empty.
According to the NRC’s report, the radioactive source, while classified as “Less than IAEA Category 3,” still poses potential risks if mishandled or exposed for prolonged periods.
The following information was provided by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) via email:
“The licensee reported to NJDEP on December 3, 2024, that a Ge-68 pin source that they sent for disposal has been lost in transit on December 2, 2024. The source is a Eckert & Ziegler model HEGL-0132, with current approximate activity of 0.267 mCi. The shipping container arrived at its destination damaged and empty. The licensee has filed a claim with the shipper. If the source is not located within the 30 days, the licensee will follow-up with a full written report to include root cause(s) and corrective actions.
“This event is reportable under 10 CFR 20.2201(a)(1)(ii).”
New Jersey Event Report ID number: To be determined
THIS MATERIAL EVENT CONTAINS A ‘Less than Cat 3’ LEVEL OF RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL
Sources that are “Less than IAEA Category 3 sources,” are either sources that are very unlikely to cause permanent injury to individuals or contain a very small amount of radioactive material that would not cause any permanent injury. Some of these sources, such as moisture density gauges or thickness gauges that are Category 4, the amount of unshielded radioactive material, if not safely managed or securely protected, could possibly – although it is unlikely – temporarily injure someone who handled it or were otherwise in contact with it, or who were close to it for a period of many weeks.
Source: NRC.gov
Just as this radioactive mishap was quietly made public, a string of mysterious drone sightings over New Jersey has raised eyebrows.
John Ferguson, CEO of Saxon Aerospace LLC and an expert in unmanned aerial systems, has presented a startling theory: the drones may be searching for the missing radioactive material.
Ferguson: My belief is they’re trying to smell something on the ground, gas, leaks, radioactive material, whatever… I do believe that they’re flying low enough that they’re just trying to sniff the ground and try to find something. So again, I hate to be a pessimist or a guy that thinks directly to the negative. However, I know as a professional, we build professional stuff for the military. I believe that they’re actually out there trying to smell something that’s very important.
However, Ferguson linked the sightings of drones to a more shocking claim: the disappearance of over 80 nuclear warheads from Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
According to Ferguson, these weapons have never been fully accounted for, and at least one of them may have been headed toward the United States.
Ferguson recounted a conversation with a government insider who physically handled one of the missing warheads, only to see his warnings ignored by U.S. authorities.
Ferguson: Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had dismantled the nuclear program. With Russia, there were countless nuclear missiles that were disarmed and disposed of. Well, there were over 80, I believe. There were over 80 nuclear warheads that were in Ukraine that came up missing.
We don’t know where they are. Maybe somebody does, but nobody really knows where these are. I speak with some pretty high-level government officials on this stuff. It seems as though that is the case.
I spoke to a gentleman a few months ago who was trying to raise an alarm to the highest levels of our government, which they had their ears closed, about this one particular nuclear warhead that he physically put his hands on.
He physically touched this warhead that was left over from Ukraine. And he knew that that thing was headed towards the United States. That is a very serious deal. And everyone knows that the United States government, this administration, is pushing to get into a war with Russia. We all know that. We all feel it. We all see it. We’ll back up a few years…
Many people seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding regarding where we are in the grand scheme of things. We are not living at a time of endless peace and prosperity. Instead, we are living at a time of war, famine, pestilence and major natural disasters. We really are living in the end times, and the coming year is going to be filled with crisis after crisis. The good news is that you get to be here for it. All of human history has been building up to this particular chapter, and you are one of the lucky ones that is going to get to experience it.
According to the Institute for Economics & Peace, the number of military conflicts that are currently active is the highest that we have seen since World War II…
Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Syria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia… and so on. There are up to 56 active conflicts in the world, the highest number since World War II. Moreover, these carry an increasingly international component, with 92 countries involved in wars outside their borders. These are data from the latest Global Peace Index produced annually by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), a think tank that analyzes everything from military investment and the cost of violence to military laws and deaths in combat in 163 states and territories. “Getting the information is a challenge, but it allows us to compare dynamics. And what we see is a deterioration of peace over the last decade, especially in the last five years,” says Michael Collins, executive director of IEP.
Yes, we really are living at a time of wars and rumors of wars.
In fact, this week there were several more extremely alarming developments. For a detailed analysis, please see an article that I just wrote entitled “World War III Is Heating Up On Several Fronts, But Most Americans Have No Idea”. By this time next year, our world will look far different than it does right now. Leaders all over the globe have developed a really bad case of “war fever”, and we are closer to nuclear war than we have ever been before.
Meanwhile, hunger continues to intensify in many areas of the globe.
If you have plenty of food to eat, you should be quite grateful, because there are tens of millions of starving people that would trade places with you in a second.
In fact, there are tens of millions of people in the nation of Sudan alone that are dealing with severe hunger at this moment…
More than half the people in this nation of 50 million are suffering from severe hunger. Hundreds are estimated to be dying from starvation and hunger-related disease each day.
According to Reuters, every day one woman named Fleg walks two hours each way just to pick a few leaves so that she can fill her stomach with a “barely edible mush”…
So, every day after dawn, Fleg and other emaciated women from the camp make a two-hour trek to a forest to pick leaves off bushes. On a recent outing, several ate the leaves raw, to dull their hunger. Back at the camp, the women cooked the leaves, boiling them in a pot of water sprinkled with tamarind seeds to blunt the bitter taste.
For Fleg and the thousands of others in the camp, the barely edible mush is a daily staple. It isn’t enough. Some have starved to death, camp medics say. Fleg’s mother is one of them.
“I came here and found nothing to eat,” said Fleg. “There are days when I don’t know if I’m alive or dead.”
This is how people are really living on the other side of the planet.
Hunger is rising all over the world, but most Americans do not care because it has not affected them.
I believe that global hunger will get even worse in 2025, and I am convinced that pestilence will also be a major theme during the upcoming year.
Many of us are keeping a very close eye on the bird flu. It is being reported that the number of confirmed human cases in the state of California this year has now reached 31…
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) on November 27 warned residents about a second batch of raw milk on retail shelves that has tested positive for avian flu virus, as official await the results from the latest bulk milk tank testing on the farm in Fresno County that produces the products.
In other developments, the CDPH reported two more infections in dairy workers, raising the state’s human cases this year to 31, all but 1 involving exposure to sick cows. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed those 2 new cases, pushing the national total this year to 55.
Will this be the next great public health crisis?
I don’t know.
Scientists are also deeply concerned about outbreaks of the Marburg virus, a new strain of Mpox, and Oropouch…
A warning has been issued to travelers over the spread of three diseases, including the Marburg virus. It’s a close cousin of Ebola that’s been dubbed the “bleeding eye” virus due to one of its symptoms.
Marburg, Mpox and Oropouch (commonly called “sloth fever”) are spreading in multiple countries, according to the UK Department of Health’s site, Travel Health Pro.
Marburg is a rare but “severe hemorrhagic fever that can cause serious illness and death,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says, adding that there is no treatment or vaccine for it. But, if detected early, supportive care with rehydration and symptomatic treatment improves survival, according to the Africa CDC.
I know that a lot of people don’t want to hear this, but what is eventually coming is going to be so much worse than the last pandemic.
We also live at a time when we are getting hammered by major natural disaster after major natural disaster.
In 2023, the number of “billion dollar disasters” in the United States set an all-time record, and we are very close to breaking that record this year…
With the addition of three recent Atlantic hurricanes, the U.S. has experienced 24 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters this year – a near-record number, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
On Thursday, NOAA’s NCEI released its assessment of the global climate, including U.S. weather disasters. Hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton and one tornado outbreak were added to this year’s billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, bringing the total to 24 events as of October.
According to the NCEI, this year’s billion-dollar weather and climate disasters are second only to last year, which had 27 by this point in the year.
Needless to say, a lot of people out there just want to hear that everything is going to be rainbows and lollipops from now on.
But that isn’t the truth.
The truth is that the times that we are living in are going to be extremely challenging. In my new book entitled “Why”, I explain that God has told us history in advance and that this is extremely powerful evidence for the Christian faith. If you can show someone that God told us very specific things about the times that we are living in centuries in advance, it is going to be very difficult for that individual to ignore the gospel.
So many “experts” are giving us their opinions about what our future will look like.
But if you want to know what our future is going to look like, just read the Book of Revelation.
We are the Book of Revelation generation, and there is no other time in all of human history that I would have rather lived than right now.
“And this is the will of Him who sent me that I should lose nothing of all that He has given me, but raise it up on the last day.” John 6: 39 (NIV)
I took a picture of the recycling truck in our neighborhood a few days ago. “Transforming waste to resources,” reads the sign on the side. It reminds me so much of Jesus.
So often we see the experiences, mistakes and sins in our life as plain garbage. We want to leave it on the side of life’s road and see it disappear into forgetting. Jesus, however, wants to take our waste and is ready to transform it into resources for others who need to know that He meets us and loves us, even in our messiest moments.
In the hands of Jesus, our wasted experiences and the lessons we learn along the way can become a message. If only we would turn our hearts towards Him. As soon as we hold out our garbage to Him, He recycles it into resources and transforms us into His likeness.
Reflect: Is there anything in your life you need to put out for Jesus to recycle?
Jesus, I love that You can transform even my smelliest garbage into something to serve another person’s heart. I place it all before You. Thank You for Divine recycling and transformation. With You, nothing is wasted.
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