I’m watching the news on the LA fire. The wind over night made everything worse. The fire is spreading and the firemen are having very little control over the situation, regardless of the fact that they brought in all kinds of ground and air assets. Simply put, they allowed the thing to grow too big and now it’s beyond control. They can try and clear the fuel from the fire path, but it’s questionable at this point. The aerial assets are the only ones doing anything, but it’s too little and too late. So, it’s time to consider the consequences.

The economy is going to react to this, but it’s unclear how, because the stock market in America is deeply into the red zone of complete insanity. The first-order analysis would be that the impacted businesses from the area will suffer, the real estate prices will drop like a rock since this will be the final incentive for the rich people to leave, since there’s nothing binding them to the place anymore. Sure, they saw it all go to hell for years but it’s a big thing to sell your house and leave everything you worked most of your life for and rebuild everything in Texas. Also, if your job is there you may not be able to leave at all. But still, one would expect most to leave, and few to rebuild. One would expect the shares of the construction companies to go up, and the insurance companies to go down, but since this is America, it might actually be the other way around. Normally, I would expect gold to go up, since rich people everywhere will understand the need for highly mobile capital; however, since gold is hard to get across the border, crypto assets might be preferred, at least until people realise those are worthless in a real disaster.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory is currently in the fire zone. It’s evacuated, but it is still unclear how affected it will be by the fires. This is a major strategic asset that controls all kinds of automated probes across the Solar System. All of this will be affected and control might be relocated to the Space Command bunker in the Cheyenne mountains or something.

All kinds of woke bullshit will be downgraded after this, and this will ripple out throughout both culture, politics and the economy.

However, this is all assuming that the fire is contained where it is now, and this is unlikely. Most likely, it will spread throughout the more populated LA areas, and the amount of chaos that would produce is hard to imagine – it would be almost on par with a nuclear strike. Around 18M people live in the wider area, and most of them are nowhere near as rich as those impacted so far. If they all have to relocate, and they will if the complex structures are disrupted enough, this will be a zombie apocalypse across America. I’m continuing to watch this closely, but I’m also being careful not to remove my eyes from other points of interest, because this fire increasingly looks like a man-made thing, and it might all be a distraction from something else. Possibly, a way to remove important assets from the X in time, in a more-less controlled manner. You see, I’ve been reading the cold war texts about the plans for the evacuation of the LA metropolitan area, and I know they decided it’s impossible and nothing there can be saved. Maybe someone decided to be proactive. So, the second-order analysis is that this might be a way to evacuate the most important people and assets from the area that is expected to be hit by nuclear weapons and impossible to evacuate at that point.