Ep 10 | Canceling Daily Wire Hosts, Trump Isn’t Hitler, LA Water Chief

Recently there’ve been a lot of people playing Monday morning quarterback about the LAFD’s handling of the Palisades fire. I think a lot of the discussion is correct and emblematic of liberal “leadership”. That is to say that liberal leadership, such as it is, is either incompetent or evil, sometimes both. The focus on the the LAFD’s DEI program, not hiring otherwise qualified people because they were white men, and the general idea that an emergency responder should look like the community they serve is pretty damned stupid. Though there is a kernel of truth to that idea, especially when there is a language barrier between patient and responder. Or when there is a cultural nuance that can impede the responder providing care.

Sure enough, the talking heads are right that the LAFD chief has apparently warned that her department was unprepared. It was likely understaffed, thats just a guess but I’d bet I’m right. The Mayor $17 million from the budget certainly didn’t help. Some might argue that the this cut is rather small in the grand scheme of the LAFD’s overall budget but, having looked at fire department budgets, I can say that they are often operating at a deficit. This 2% cut means the difference between hiring crew members, pursuing extracurricular training, and preparing for the high impact low likelihood events like wildfires.

As a side note these things, high impact and low likelihood are the most dangerous events we can face. There is a continuum of impact and frequency and this idea matters, a ton. You see the things that are high impact and high frequency are big and scary but the team doesn’t need a bunch of special training because they get the reps on a regular basis. CPR? High impact, high frequency. This is a thing they do, with success, everyday. But a wildfire potentially consuming huge swaths of LA is a low frequency and off the charts impact event. As such, they need training and equipment.

Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, as the saying goes.

All this has caused the talking heads to speak quite out of turn about women in the fire service. Here’s Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles.

They are all completely ignorant of the reality of the situation. They have this Hollywood idea that all firefighters are and should be hulking men. To be honest I had that same idea until I met my wife and became quite involved in EMS and fire department. As I’ve said before, my wife is a paramedic fire fighter with over 30 years in action.

Historically, roughly 80% of fire department calls are medical not fire related. But that data is rather old, infant it’s pushing over 90% for many departments. Women often provide better medical care than men do. So having women on the team is a real positive impact here.

But what about that 10 or so percent of fires? Only 1-3% of that 10%, location dependant, are fires of real significance. The rest are a mix of flase alarms or little yard fires that can be managed with a garden hose.

But what about that 1-3%? That sounds like low fequqncy and high impact. What if some one needs to be carried out of the building? The idea of a firefighter shouldering a victim and barreling out of a building is down right stupid. If you stand up in a fire, you die. The actual protocol is dragging someone out, because you can’t stand up in a fire. Second, no matter how big and strong you are it often requires multiple people to get one person out.

Does this mean that big hulking firemen aren’t needed? No, of course not. What I’m trying to outline here is that women can, and do, play an important role on the team. As Ben Shapiro likes to say, two things can be true at once. Men and women bring important skills to the fire team.

Finally, there is the capability argument. Can women pull hoses, raise ladders, and do all the physical things that are required for the job? Yes, they can and the men and women who are hired should be able to pass an annual physical test to prove it. Just to say it, pulling hoses isn’t that hard, they aren’t that heavy, and further they have water canons that a child could use successfully.

So, jIt ’s with great displeasure that I have to borrow a theme from Matt Walsh and cancel Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles.