Programming note: Join me tomorrow, Saturday, for the latest episode of my Serenade Radio weekend music show, On the Town. It starts at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~I think of the fire hydrant as a quintessential bit of American iconography. Yes, they predate the United States, going back to the sixteenth century and the spread of piped municipal water systems in Europe and Asia. But, if you asked the average person to picture a fire hydrant, his imagination would conjure one in the American design - in part because elsewhere (Britain, Germany, Spain) the hydrants are below ground and no one knows their shape. It's the Yanks who brought them up to the surface as if to say: see? here our writ runs; you can count on that. Decades ago, somewhere in Queens, I rounded a corner and found the fire department flushing a hydrant, and the excited kids jumping around and occasionally darting into the spray. Golly, I thought, I've walked into a Norman Rockwell cover. Which I had (see Saturday Evening Post top right).
Silly me. Like Angela Merkel diversity bollards or utility poles in western North Carolina, fire hydrants are now purely decorative:
— Cranky Hank, Disser of Politicians (@CrankyHankJ) January 10, 2025
As I usually say at this point, nothing works anymore. But, when even the fire hydrants don't work, it may be time to retire that line. This is your future - the future they're building for you every day. When you work as assiduously as the west does to become the Third World, don't be surprised that it happens a lot quicker than you thought.
Seventeen years ago, I received a note from a reader advising me to lighten up - on the grounds that we're rich enough that we can afford to be stupid. Almost two decades later, some of us are rich enough to be able to afford a home in Pacific Palisades and are willing to indulge a monumentally stupid mayor who, as the first ciswoman of colour to go on a fact-finding mission to study West African emergency-services management, shattered the glass ceiling before it had a chance to burn down:
Needless to say, it was a whippersnapper of a foreigner badgering and hectoring the poor wee defenceless chief executive of one of the most famous jurisdictions on the planet. Any American "journalist" minded to do the same would never work again. But it will make a great vignette for her pre-2028 political memoir It Takes a Child to Raze a Village.
In case you didn't think California government was dysfunctional enough, Los Angeles County accidentally sent out an evacuation alert to every single resident:
JUST IN: Los Angeles accidentally sends an evacuation alert to every LA county resident, emergency alert goes off during live news coverage.
The alert told people to "gather loved ones, pets, and supplies."
Here is the warning that was sent out:
"This is an emergency message... pic.twitter.com/zkPHgibU7z
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 10, 2025
According to groupies of crackpot Supreme Court eugenicist Oliver Wendell Holmes, there's no right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. But apparently there is a right to shout "Fire!" in the most populous county in the United States and send ten million people (twice as many as New Zealand) stampeding for the exits. Does that include Santa Catalina? Time to jump off and swim to San Clemente Island?
It's bollocks all the way down, folks. What matters when you're in the middle of an inferno is that the fireperson who eventually shows up with a waterless hose is a person "that looks like you" because it gives you "a little more ease". That way you can celebrate diversity even amidst the smouldering embers of everything you own. Take it from LA's Assistant Fire Chief Kristine Larson, a sociology graduate who makes half-a-mil per year from taxpayers as the department's first lesbian to head the Equity Bureau:
LAFD Assistant Chief Kristine Larson:
"Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place." pic.twitter.com/BofTVr6dWP
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 9, 2025
By "got himself in the wrong place", she means California, right?
~Breaking news from FEMA:
Due to the incoming winter storm we are extending our Transitional Sheltering Program stays for 24 hours to those households who are scheduled to check out of their hotels/motels Jan. 11.
If you STILL need assistance with housing, call 1 (800) 621-3362.
Gee, that's nice of them. So you Californians will enjoy the benefit of an extra night in any motel that isn't at capacity with "asylum-seekers".
Oh, wait, it's not California; this is western North Carolina - three-and-a-half months after the hurricane hit. The above has quickly become FEMA Region 4's most viral tweet ever. Was it the tetchy all-caps "STILL"?
"Make America Great Again" is a terrific slogan, but Trump has his work cut out in a land where some of the most lavishly endowed governments on earth can't get water into their fire hoses. Make America Semi-Functional Again!
~Happily, many people are STILL rich enough to afford to be stupid. From Hugo in our comments section:
I have a dear friend who really hates Trump. A few months ago I asked her whether, were she a US citizen, she would vote for a president who would continue provoking the world's largest nuclear power, or for the alternative who would end the conflict, together with the immediate risk of WWIII.
But she told me she couldn't vote for Trump because he uses fake tan.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
