Firehose #129: Sensory Overload

Also: M.C. Moynihan interviews H.R. McMaster

It’s OK to admit data-processing defeat in the face of too much news. Here on Inauguration Day, as Donald J. Trump (pictured, right) prepares to re-instate Melania as Permanent First Lady, issue eleventy billion executive orders, and bite the head off a live chicken in the Capitol Rotunda, the news-hits just keep on coming: Hostage returns in Israel, the three-hour TikTok ban (“Thanks, Trump!” my horrible teen says), yet another Particularly Dangerous Situation fire warning in SoCal, and OMG DID PRESIDENT POOPY-PANTS REALLY JUST PARDON ANTHONY FAUCI???

There’s enough One-Hitter fodder here to stop even Snoop Dogg in his tracks, and the podcast will do our level best to cope, but humans were not designed to handle this much craziness at once. Which, I suspect, will be a sentiment repeated often in the coming weeks….

So instead let’s go hyper-local. On our last Second Sunday (excerpted on Members Only #244), we listened to the heartbreaking tale of beloved listeners Lisa Brounstein and John Gaffney, who lost their Altadena dreamhouse in the Eaton Fire. Because I am nothing if not discreet, I suggested to the world’s best Shabbat-host, ChayaLeah Sufrin, that maybe she should invite the newly homeless couple to her weekly hoedown in the LBC. And … voila!

This truly is the best good goddamned community I’ve ever been around. The Brounstein/Gaffney GoFundMe is still accepting donations.

* OK, before we go any further, I have a bit of life advice that may be of use to droolingly functional 19-year-old boys, and sadly also to some of us middle-aged types with, uh, gaps in our education. It is this: Let’s say you’ve noticed for a week or two that the ol’ fridge isn’t as cold as it used to be. Let’s say further that some otherwise safely dated milk in said fridge recently turned out unexpectedly curdled. Let’s additionally posit that, whilst engaging in the time-honored dad-tradition of assembling the family-leftovers burrito for lunch, you get your nosehairs singed after opening the Tupperware lid over some not-that-old leftover white rice.

I cannot stress this enough: Please don’t eat that rice.

The part of your brain saying Rice? THAT can’t go bad is … not demonstrating allyship. Well, at least my convalescent view was nice:

* OK, we’re going to keep it local by upvoting this Comment of the Week, from Jason Swihart, who surely knows that an authorized GoFundMe would get some loving attention from these quarters:

Altadena is a shabby, proudly unincorporated little town in a pretty part of LA. We moved here in 2015 because my wife sends things to other planets. Yes, Leah, some foxes really are aerospace engineers.

Last October we were on the Cape watching the LARGEST SPACECRAFT EVER launch for Jupiter on a Falcon Heavy. On it, four instruments my wife oversaw. It was a glorious culmination of a five-year slog.

mobilhomme

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Last Tuesday, warm in a Colorado condo with our two dogs enjoying apres ski, we received word of a serious wind event and a small fire in Eaton Canyon. Concerning, but not unusual for Altadena—we’ve made it through others. [EATON, not “Easton,” Matt “sugar walls” Welch].

That afternoon, a friend collected a few essentials from our house, evacuated his own home later that evening amid a rain of cinders, and we sat there as it snowed trying to piece together info from Facebook pages and feckless local news reporters.

24 hours later, a neighbor sent us this:

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I hated that fucking chimney and had been scheming to remove it in a future, imagined remodel.

We drove back from Colorado and arrived yesterday. Now we’re safe in a dreary corporate suite in Monrovia where we’ve started negotiating endless man-made road blocks designed over decades to prevent anyone from recovering from this (largely) man-made natural disaster.

I went to our town last night to see what I could. It’s encircled by National Guard and LA’s finest stationed at all inbound streets, taped off on at least two sides like a crime scene investigation. Big, ugly military transports are stationed on most of the street entrances. I really don’t think my Land Cruiser would be any match for some of the 50 caliber machine guns I saw.

But because I know where I’m going, I (genuinely) accidentally transgressed the cordon sanitaire. Inside, there is no power and the streets are lined with ash-covered cars. I probably could have gone wherever I’d wanted merely by driving and acting confidently. The smatterings of law enforcement, national guard, and utility workers within seemed like nice folks. I spoke to several as I tried to find my way back out. One deputy seemed unsure about which street she was on and gestured vaguely toward Long Beach. I was reminded of cub scouts, standing around, den-motherless, none of them sure when the pinewood derby would start.

The air is rancid. It’s not great in Monrovia, but in Altadena and far south, it is unfit for human consumption, probably known to the State of California to cause cancer. I’m sure someone is printing the warning labels right now.

California could and should be paradise. I grew up here (Nor Cal) in the 70s and 80s and remember the endless, self-righteous battles by adults to stop—the dam, the hydroelectric facility, the reservoir, the nuclear plant, the bridge, the subdivision, the road, the street, the highway, the bypass, the development, the shopping center, the sports facility. As a kid, I loved visiting my grandparents in Paradise, which was reduced to cinders in 2018.

Yes, we plan to rebuild. But there are rules. In almost the same time my wife and thousands of colleagues, designed, built, assembled, tested, and launched an enormous ice-mapping, solar-powered space robot, the County of LA has been unable to approve our plans to build a simple detached garage on our land in our town.

* My drummer buddy and fellow Altadena-house-erasee Steve Coulter/S.W. Lauden, who I talked about last week, began grappling with the loss of his large vinyl collection by remembering fondly some of the records he lost. Hey Coulter, I got half of those lying around! Pal and former guest Meghan Daum had related thoughts about (sadly!) very related things. Also, since my rice experimentation cut short what was supposed to be a productive week of writing, here’s me & the gang of The Reason Roundtable talking last Monday about fire policy, the new tech-Trump bromance, and suchlike:

* OK, throw up a hand if you want to see M.C. Moynihan interview former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster about his book At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. Here ‘tis:

* Amazing, emotional scenes in Israel this weekend, as the first tranche of hostages came back in the deal we talked about in Episode #486. In advance of that return, our friends at Ask a Jew convened a special pod w/ Karol Markowicz and friend Mary Katharine Ham (#345 & #430). ChayaLeah and Yael will also be having a Zoom call Monday night; details of which I’m sure they will share!

* Did you watch the Dave Chappelle Saturday Night Live monologue? Probably. Well, now you can watch it again, knowing that the aforementioned Moynihan & his 13-year-old tyke caught most of that same set in a small club the night before, and that … I would have been there if it wasn’t for that confounded rice!

* I was perhaps a tad unfriendly toward departing Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Some Reason headlines to explain why: “Surgeon General Gins Up a Questionable Drinking Causes Cancer Scare,” “Surgeon General Vivek Murthy Refuses To Acknowledge the Government's Misrepresentation of Mask Research,” “Vivek Murthy's Demand for Data on COVID 'Misinformation' Is Part of a Creepy Crusade to Suppress Dissent,” “Surgeon General Launches E-Cigarette Scare Campaign That Will Harm Public Health,” and on and on. Stupid hat.

* There is a Reason Speakeasy event in NYC Tuesday night, at which Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379) will interview economist Bryan Caplan and pro-immigration analyst Alex Nowrasteh (#303) about “the state of U.S. immigration policy in 2025,” including “the implications of the incoming Trump administration’s immigration proposals, and…why more immigration will make America great (again).”

You know what? I could throw plenty of other stuff in here, but with every passing second there’s gonna be new news about Biden pardoning Saddam Hussein or Trump nominating Tupac for Secretary of State, so let’s just walk this baby off like it’s 1980 all over again: