war. So I'm guilty of probably, I don't know the specifics, but I think I probably reposted some fake news yesterday because there was so much speculation and not quite accurate. So I want to talk about the things we think we know and put them in context. If you haven't done this yet, I recommend it highly. If you're not watching one of the fake news networks like CNN talking about the context of how we got to this situation in California, you're not really hearing the other side. And this is one of those things where there's a fog of war. But on top of it, two completely different versions of what happened have already emerged. No surprise. No surprise. But you really need to hear the alternative explanations of what happened. It's going to blow your mind that any of it could be a little bit explained.

Now when I say a little bit explained, my macro theory is that there's massive incompetence. There needs to be some kind of addressing that. I don't know what that looks like. So there's massive incompetence. But some of the accusations clearly don't fly, and I'll tell you which ones they are, because I feel like we want to be mad, but it's such wasted energy to be mad at the wrong things. There's plenty of things to really be mad at.

Now I will remind you, well we'll get to that. So here are some of the things that people accused the LA government and management of doing. So first of all, the reports were that the fire hydrants either didn't have water or had no water pressure. Now there's two versions. If the problem is they didn't have water because there was no stored water there, there is some evidence that there was a water reservoir that was not filled. But I'd like to know more about whether it was possible to fill it, because maybe there was no water to put in it. And I don't know whose fault that would be. So all of these things that look like they're simple, they've all got some bigger story behind them, which doesn't make it any good or right. It's just that you should know the context. It's never as simple as the posts on X.

So there, it's possible, well there definitely was low water pressure in some places, and there definitely were hydrants not producing water. Some were. So we do have reports of some working hydrants, some not. Possibly or even maybe probably the reason the water pressure was insufficient is that there were so many hydrants being used at the same time, attempted, and the entire place had been destroyed. So there were a lot of open fountains like water being wasted just in homes. So if the area was served by the same water source, be it the hydrant or inside the house, if the house has broken pipes and the water is spewing everywhere, and everybody's trying to use water at the same time to put out the fire, there's not going to be enough water pressure or maybe even water. So water and water pressure were both a problem.

It's not entirely clear that either of those were some direct mistake that you could put on some particular person. They're all complicated. There's a question of forest management. Trump has been on it for years, literally years. He's been saying that California is not managing its forests like places like Austria, where they don't have this kind of fire. And managing the forest means partly removing the underbrush, the really, really flammable stuff. Because the trees can do a much better job of surviving if it's just going tree to tree. It's not going to go as fast as if there's this underbrush that's just ready to go. Because trees, the living trees, are a little bit wet, so they'll slow things down. But the dead underbrush, it's just going to be traveling like crazy.

So the forest management thing is a real thing. It's really important. It's really not done well. But I don't know if that had a causation in this case, because most of what I saw burning were residential homes. And there's at least one report that I don't think is confirmed that somebody said the fire started in somebody's backyard and then spread up a hill. If it started in somebody's backyard and spread up a hill, which is not confirmed, not confirmed. It's just something I saw. A fireman on the scene who was working it said if it was set by somebody, we heard reports that, which are fake. These are fake reports. Somebody, and oh that's one of the fake ones that I think I reposted. So that's bad on me. That's just a mistake. I should not have been trusting that kind of information that early in the story.

All right, so that's just an unforced error on my part, believing that story that some homeless person set it, which did not happen. That's on me. That's just an error. I should have said, some reports say it, but we don't know. That would have been the right answer. So we still don't know. But I can tell you that I don't see a direct link from forest management to this particular fire. I do see a gigantic risk if our forests are not well managed, and that appears to be the case.

So we don't know about the water reservoir thing. There are a whole bunch of questions about whether water resources have been managed correctly for years. It doesn't look like it. It looks like there are enough allegations of things that could have solved the problem. I guess years ago there was some big plan to capture the water runoff and make it available for fires, but that didn't get passed. Some people will say it's because of the Democrats. Other people will say, well, you know, we tried to get this bipartisan bill to have more water, but the Republicans said no for some reason. So I don't know. But I would say the one thing that I'm confident about is I'm confident that California has completely mismanaged its water resources. Would that have made a difference in this specific case? Maybe not.

There's a video of Joe Rogan in 2024 in the summer, which is just six months ago, in which he was saying he talked to a fireman. So six months before this fire in LA, a fireman said we've been lucky so far. If we get the wind at the same time as a fire, all of LA is going to burn. This is from a professional fireman who said there's no way around it. You're not going to be able to stop it if the fire starts at the same time as the high wind, which is exactly what happened. There is no defense. So if you say to me, if only we had more water, we could defend it, I say to you, maybe a little, but it probably would have still taken out most of the area. Maybe you could save some houses, but it would have taken out most of the area.

So the bigger problem was it was a known problem that was not directly addressed. So is it a problem that forests are not managed? It's a big one. Maybe not directly a factor in this fire. Is the water management a problem? Yes, poorly done. Was it directly a problem in this fire? Yes. If your house burned down because the fire hydrant didn't work, you're probably going to say, why didn't you account for a fire this big or something like that. But maybe it couldn't have been stopped. Maybe the fireman in 2024 was exactly right, and there just wasn't anything you could do.

The mayor, Karen Bass, she happened to be in Ghana for some government thing that she thought was interesting. And I'm not sure that anything is different because the mayor was in a different country. Mayors travel, and even though there's no reason they should have been doing some international work, I mean, she could have been on vacation. There are lots of reasons people are out of town. I doubt that her absence had any impact on the emergency response. But in emergencies, you want your leaders to act capable and have empathy and be on hand and tell you everything they know, give you some hope that they could get this under control. So I don't think she did a good job on anything, but probably didn't make any difference to any house that burned or didn't burn.

Then I've got to spend a moment on this. There's a lot of accusations that this is caused by DEI. And I'm going to make some suggestions about this. So I'll talk about DEI after I give the list of other things that people are saying. I don't think you can pin it on one person and say that's a DEI hire, or even more than one person. But more on that in a moment.

So let's see. There's something about the smelt fish. Smelt. Is it a smelt fish or is it just a smelt? Apparently Trump calls it an extinct fish. I don't think it's extinct, which is the whole point of trying to preserve it. If it were extinct, we wouldn't be worrying about it. But it's funny that he calls it an extinct fish. But apparently there was some movement to provide more water for LA, but it didn't work because it would have been bad for these rare smelt, the Delta smelt. Well, let me tell you what else smelt about this situation. Everything. So I don't know. I think that smelt fish is going to be one of those two movies on one screen. I think CNN's going to tell you, oh, that was a bipartisan thing, or Republicans should have said yes, or there's going to be another story to that. I don't think it's as clean as we traded smelt for human beings. Although in some ways it looks exactly like that. But probably there's a little extra context on that one.

And then the part that is definitely true is that the insurance policy caps that California tried to put on fire insurance policies caused a shortage of fire insurance policies. Because the fire insurance people said, no thanks. If we can't make money, we don't want to be in your state. So they pulled out.

So what makes this particular situation go from tragic to, how do I say this without being cancelled? All right, I'm going to speak as indirectly as I can, and you can piece it together. If an ordinary tragedy happens, you get into tragedy mode. You're trying to help people. You're feeling sad. You're feeling impacted. You're basically just feeling terrible but trying to do what you can. If it's just a tragedy, if it's a tragedy which wou