The Scratching Post

It blew my mind to hear that there was no water coming out of the fire hydrants during the Palisades fire this week. I know California is mismanaged, but that's simply insane. Others have dealt with the horrors elsewhere, what I want to explore is how the Elites that run California do not, as I have ranted many times on this blog, know how anything works.

First, here's a staggering video from the LAFD.

If she can't carry your husband out of a burning building, that's his problem? And on what planet do I want to see someone responding to my emergency that looks like me? This is DEI and Social Justice taken to it's logical extreme. Projected feelings of various marginalized groups who don't actually have those feelings trump performance.

Meanwhile, the mayor of LA directed citizens to URL if they need information. No, really.

Wow. Luckily, the LA fire chief likes to eat carpet, so we have that going for us.

Not everyone is incompetent, however. Sal Mercogliano, the guy who runs the outstanding What's Going On With Shipping YouTube channel, posted this on X, explaining why some of the hydrants ran out of water.

One needs to understand that water towers are typically filled during low water usage periods (largely at night). The filling line is substantially smaller than the discharge.

Pressure on the hydrants and to homes (which is the same line) is caused by the weight & gravity of the water. 

As homes are burned, all the water connections to the home are opened (sinks, toilets, washers, etc). So you start draining water as you lose each house.

You eventually get to the point where you can sustain the system and run out of water.  

What is needed is a way to shut the towers off from the primary system and have a secondary fire system that is routed to several strategically located fill points for fire apparatus.

You can then fill the tanks and have water for suppression.

But that cost $$$$.

Of course, Sal does not work for the government of California. They would no doubt despise him as he's one of those dirty, little people who worked with their hands.

Having acknowledged that trade-offs have to be made in the design of the water system and allowing others to go nonlinear about the horrific performance of the progs who run CA, I'd conclude with the following.

If you aren't going to provide water, for whatever reason, you simply must keep the fires from starting in the first place. That means aggressive maintenance of the scrub brush. You cannot allow the fuel to build up, no matter how many Schlumberg's Reticulated Voles buy the farm. If you aren't going to provide water and you don't ruthlessly remove the kindling from the area, you're going to get what we've seen this week - parts of Los Angeles burned to the ground.

Three more data points. The first seems to come from Sweden.

Oof. No, I didn't look up the studies, but I've seen other studies for real that show the same thing from several different European countries.

The second is a snippet from a conversation between Jordan Peterson and Piers Morgan. Jordan's solution, an international symposium on Islam, is typical Jordan for those rare times when he makes a mistake - useless eggheadery, but within the conversation is the staggering stat that in some British towns where the industrial-scale rape of white, British girls was being done by the Muslim men, about 1 in 7 Muslim men were participating. 1 in 7? That's insane. Everyone in the Muslim community knew about the rape gangs. Everyone.

The last is this story from a divorced father describing his unsuccessful efforts to keep his autistic daughter out of the hands of the local Muslim grooming gang.

Don't you think he had better things to do with his life than try to protect his little girl from a pack of imported savages?

It's analogous to the problem faced by the settlers on the frontier dealing with the Comanche. It was enough for them to try to support their family by dry-dirt farming, plowing behind a mule, building nearly everything by hand and preparing nutritious, locally-sourced, sustainable, organic food. At some point in time, they lost interest in trying to figure out if the paleolithic savages nearby were going to steal their livestock, burn their farm to the ground, rape their women and kill them or not. Sufficient unto the day is staving off starvation and avoiding freezing to death. They didn't need to add the Comanche, Apache or similar brutes for whom stealing, raping and murdering was both recreational and career-enhancing.

It is impractical to expect the general populace to spend their time and energy managing an alien culture whose attitude towards infidel women is akin to wolves sizing up lambs. In the end, the solution the locals will choose may well be efficient and callous.

There's also a cost-benefit trade-off to the accuracy of the civilized guy's assessment. If the (Muslim, American Indian) is a ruthless savage and you incorrectly classify him as (moderate, peaceful), your women get raped. That's going to bias the assessments in a strongly negative direction. All the finger-wagging in the world from the protected, pampered multiculturalists isn't going to make a difference.

Summarizing with a self-quote, from this post comes this final section.

Wife kitteh's first husband was Sicilian. If I recall correctly, his parents were first generation. They still have close ties to Sicily.

Some of his family members were in organized crime, mostly running gambling rings and other minor odds and ends. Everyone in the community knew who the Big Tuna was and what he did.

Now dig this description of just a sliver of the horrors and moral cowardice of the industrial-scale gang-rape of white British girls that has been going on for over a decade in England.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

Among the Sicilians, everyone in the community knew who the Big Tuna was and what he did. The Big Tuna and his buds ran the numbers racket out of the back of their dry cleaning business. They didn't organize the gang-rape of thousands of girls.

One night in Oldham in 2006, for example, a 12-year-old girl named “Sophie” entered a police station and reported that she had just been molested in a graveyard by a man named “Ali.” A desk officer told her to come back with an adult when she was sober. Two men accosted her in the police station. Joined by a third, they raped her in their car. When they dumped her on the street, she asked a man named Sarwar Ali for directions. He took her to his home, raped her, and gave her money for bus fare home. A man named Shakil Chowdhury pulled up in his car and offered to take her home. He abducted her and took her to a house where he and four other men repeatedly raped her.

It beggars the imagination to suggest that Muslim men raping 200,000 white British girls over more than a decade was concealed from the Muslim community. If it wasn't concealed from the journalists, the politicians and law enforcement, it most certainly didn't come as a surprise to the Muslims themselves. Those white girls must have stuck out like sore thumbs in the Muslim sections of town.

In any army, the majority of the members are not in combat arms. Most of them work in logistics, transportation, administration, maintenance and other support roles.

I guess we shouldn't judge a military based solely on the actions of the few guys who pull the triggers.

It's unjust and bigoted to suggest that she has any awareness of the artillery barrage going on at the front.

The true extent of the Pakistani gang-raping of white, British girls is now coming to light. The numbers are staggering with some estimates as high as 200,000 British girls having been raped by the Muslims over more than a decade. It was systemic, purposeful, organized and the authorities knew about it at the time.

I've got a few things to say about it which you might not have seen anywhere else. The first one is how the West's university system poisoned the culture to the point where the deliberate coverup of the Pakistani rape gangs wasn't just possible, but inevitable.

With apologies to Ohioan, the analogy that came to mind was the Cuyahoga River in the 1960s. If you don't know the story, industries along the river would dump their toxic wastes into the it, poisoning everything downstream. The climax of the adventure happened when the river caught fire in 1969. I vaguely remember the newscasts and my parents discussing it. As a child, I couldn't understand how a river could burn.

But burn it did.

En fuego.

That's where the West is right now. Marxism has captured our education system and it classifies everything into oppressor - victim categories. If your group has done well, it's because you're an oppressor. If your group has done poorly, it's because you've been victimized by the oppressors. Everything the oppressors created was created to maintain their power and keep their victims down. Art, music, literature, science, mathematics, whatever it is, if it came from white people, it's a tool of oppression.

You can be a conservative anywhere in the West or, more specifically, a Tory in England and you still carry this toxic classification tool with you, often subconsciously. The grooming gangs may have operated in places locally managed by Labour, but they happened under a long period of Tory national rule.

The reason I say covering for the grooming gangs was inevitable is because almost everyone coming out of university and, by definition almost, this means everyone in a position of power, can't help but see the Pakistanis as natural victims and white Brits as natural oppressors. No evidence is required because evidence is garlic to the Marxist vampires*.

And so the Tories brought in more and more and more Muslims, members of a faith that see unbelievers as easy meat, particularly when they aren't covered in black potato sacks as Allah intended.

I know that we're supposed to reflexively exhibit a "not-all-Muslims" spasm, but I don't see the need to do that as will be explained in a future blog post.

We have 1500 years of experience with this and it almost always goes in the same direction. See also: Nigeria. See also: Lebanon.

It was completely predictable that the Pakistanis, who have a particularly virulent strain of Islam endemic to their culture, would have a cadre of members who ended up gang-raping as many white British girls as they could get their hands on.

Thanks to the Marxists having captured our education system and poisoned the culture with their unreasoning hate of Western culture, it was also completely predictable that everyone downstream of their poison would make excuses for the victims of white oppression taking their justifiable revenge on the little, British, white girls.

Note: In this post, I've chosen not to link to any of the court testimonies that have been released lately. They're worse than you can possibly imagine and easy to find with search. If you do go read them, understand that you aren't looking at a single set of gang-raping Pakistani Muslims, but a template for a hundred or so gangs spread out across the length and breadth of England.

200,000+ little girls were raped and we let this happen because, thanks to the poisonous effluent downstream of our universities, we felt sorry for the rapists.

* - Hey, you try to write stream-of-consciousness rants almost every day and not mix your metaphors.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I got an email address with our local Internet provider, RoadRunner. They were then bought out by Spectrum. The email address is still there, but it's ability to interact with email apps on my PC has gradually degraded to the point that I can only get to it by webmail.

Webmail is a special kind of hell with Spectrum. Unlike gmail, everything goes so very, very slow and you're constantly afraid of something breaking down. Having an address book is out of the question.

My nom de plume, KT Cat, has a gmail address which works fine, but I don't want to give that out and share the knowledge that I'm some kind of crazed, neo-Confederate, judgmental, Catholic lunatic. I mean, I am all those things, but I don't want it generally known.

I'm looking for an email address that has a decent chance of surviving a decade or so, one that can be used with Thunderbird. I absolutely despise M$FT Outlook. My old email client, Eudora, died long ago, too. Oof.

Anywho, whatever suggestions you might have would be welcome.

A scene from the good old days when I could use Eudora to get my RoadRunner email.