Preston Martin figured the retro blue Volkswagen van he slept in for a year during college was a goner, given that he had parked it in a Malibu neighborhood just before the Palisades fire ripped through, reducing homes and cars to rubble and charred metal.

So the surfboard maker was stunned to find that the vehicle had survived. Not only that, a photo of the vibrant bus taken by an Associated Press photographer was circulating widely on television and online, giving viewers a measure of joy.

“There is magic in that van,” Martin, 24, said Tuesday in an interview with AP. “It makes no sense why this happened. It should have been toasted, but here we are.”

Martin purchased the 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 somewhat on a whim sometime around his junior year studying mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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What-iffing Trump troops in the streets

D.C. National Guard Military Police, Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C. on June 2, 2020. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Revé Van Croft, 715th PAD)

Donald Trump talks tough about deploying troops in the streets. Why? For the same reason he muses about “acquiring” Greenland and the Panama Canal.

Trump, Alex Shepard believes, “is driven almost entirely by his desire to appear strong—or, more to the point, his fear of looking weak. This is why he picks senseless fights with smaller allies while avoiding brawls with the strongmen he so greatly admires.”

Yes, Greenland may have significant resources, but as we pointed out last week, that’s not really why Trump wants it. That’s about Trump’s obsession with size (The New Republic):

As is almost always the case with Trump, though, the cleanest and perhaps most persuasive explanation is the simplest and dumbest: The territory, like Canada, looks really, really big on the commonly used (and widely distorted) Mercator projection. Adding it would be a huge ego boost for a man who, hours after planes hit the Twin Towers, boasted that he now owned the tallest building in New York City. (He didn’t, but that’s beside the point.)

Twenty years of war has created tens of thousands of broken men and women.

Recent headline-making events in two of America’s most famous party-hardy cities sent us back to our well-thumbed copy of Touching the Dragon, a 2018 memoir by James Hatch.

Never heard of Hatch? Well, maybe that’s because he spent much of his military career as a Navy SEAL “warfighter” always “close to the enemy” in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but never seeking headlines. A survivor of 150 combat missions, Hatch returned home in bad mental and physical shape; in fact, his crippling wounds of war ended his career. Then, adding insult to injury, he was “forced to … reintegrate into a society that I had spent two decades defending, but in which I didn’t feel I had a place.”

In his insightful and prophetic book, Hatch warned that his generational cohort of “special operators,” who experienced a similar “volume of fighting,” were now facing “a serious volume of aftermath. Marriages falling apart. Alcoholism. Guys getting kicked out of their houses. Guys drowning in opioids. The real recoil hasn’t even hit yet.”

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The final missions of two previously unknown Army sergeants—37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger and 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar—left millions of other Americans scratching their heads. Why would two much-saluted young men—who served their country so honorably at home and abroad, for a combined total of 33 years—both rent trucks in two different locations, within the same week? And then turn them into instruments of mass and/or self-destruction?

Michael Tomasky wrote an excellent piece today about the unaccountable president, laying out the process by which he gets away with everything. No one expects anything of him and no matter what he says, the right wing media, the Congress and his allies in the judiciary will back him up.

As an example he suggests that even if Trump were to be found to have given nuclear secrets to North Korea he would either claim it was fake news and the entire wingnuts apparatus would launch into gear calling it another hoax or he would admit it, saying it was a perfect move of a very stable genius and they’d all back his decision as necessary for national security despite its madness. That is not an exaggeration. I believe there is nothing that can make them abandon their support at this point.

We’ve Never Been Here Before: The Zero-Accountability Presidency
The only institutions that will try to hold Trump accountable are powerless, while the only ones with the power to punish him will never do it.

So here we are, at another one of those Trump moments that by now can only be called boringly surreal: The president-elect was sentenced Friday in New York in the hush-money trial, 10 days before taking the oath of office. He was given an “unconditional discharge.” At least he had to appear. Amazingly, the Supreme Court, this once, did not bail him out, although four justices were ready to.

Nothing is shocking anymore. Trump refused to rule out invading Denmark (to take Greenland). Well, of course he did. What else should we expect? That he also wouldn’t rule out invading Panama (to take the canal) took me by surprise, I admit. But only for about three seconds. By the fourth second, it made perfect sense: Jimmy Carter’s decision to give the canal to Panama has been a festering boil on the right ever since it happened.

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Chinese cyber-spies who broke into the US Treasury Department also stole documents from officials investigating real-estate sales near American military bases, it's reported.

Citing three folks familiar with the matter, CNN said the Chinese government-backed snoops compromised the computer security of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), which reviews foreign money funneled into American businesses and real estate to assess national security risks.

Late last year, the Treasury expanded the committee's authority to review the purchase or lease of real estate close to US military bases. American lawmakers have expressed concern that Chinese government agents could buy up land near these bases and use the locations to spy on military activities.

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US officials are analyzing the national security impact of the stolen CFIUS files, anonymous sources told CNN. While none of the pilfered data appears to be classified, the concern is that the unclassified documents stolen in the raid could still provide useful intelligence to the Chinese government.

The next casualty of the epic Los Angeles fires, appropriately, will be the casualty industry. What has gotten immediate press attention is the impact of the fires on local homeowners and on the California state insurer of last resort, the FAIR Plan, which only has about $700 million in cash. The Pacific Palisades alone has nearly $6 billion in insurance exposure, and the total L.A. losses are projected at $20 billion to over $50 billion counting spillover losses to economic activity.

In addition, insurance companies have been raising rates, canceling or non-renewing policies, or pulling out of the state entirely. There will be massive pressure on the state to make up for these gaps one way or another, both for homeowners who have suffered uninsured losses and for others whose insurance is becoming unavailable or unaffordable.

But that is only the beginning of the story. Basically, there is a massive disconnect between what is financially prudent and what is politically possible. Paradoxically, insurers haven’t been raising rates enough to cover risks.

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A more insidious trend is the rise of insurers that are not regulated at all. As regulated insurers have been quitting high-risk areas, a new kind of sketchy enterprise is filling the gap. According to former Federal Reserve governor Sarah Bloom Raskin, now at Duke University, where her research specialty is the impact of climate on finance, these are thinly capitalized companies that don’t meet normal regulatory standards.

Why we’re publishing a previously undisclosed list of all 448 members of the Democratic National Committee

Three weeks from now, the Democratic National Committee will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, to elect a new party chair and other national officers. For Democrats reeling from the defeat of Kamala Harris, this will be their first opportunity to anoint a fresh face for the national party to replace Jaime Harrison, who is stepping down.

A new chair, particularly one elected via an open vote and not merely picked by an incumbent president, as is the party’s tradition, could also change how Democrats operate at both the national and state level. So, while some joke that the race for DNC chair is the ultimate high school class president election, whoever holds the office will have a significant role in how Democrats respond to Trump, how they rebuild, what changes they make to their media, technology, and fundraising practices, and how the 2028 presidential selection process plays out.

But who will make this decision? Officially, it’s a secret. According to the DNC, there are 448 active members of the national committee, including 200 elected members from 57 states, territories, and Democrats Abroad; members representing 16 affiliate groups; and 73 “at-large” members who were elected as a slate appointed in 2021 by the party chairman, Jaime Harrison. For a party that claims the word “democratic” and insists that it is a champion of transparency and accountability in government, the official roster of these 448 voters is not public.

Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public “because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.” He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.

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Will humans lose control over advanced AI systems? Three developments from the final weeks of 2024 should make us worry. In short: Two empirical evaluations showed that systems like GPT-4 and Claude sometimes actively resist human efforts to alter their behavior. Those AIs try to resist human control by lying, faking compliance, disabling oversight mechanisms, and even copying themselves to external servers. Claude and GPT-4, however, are not yet smart enough to succeed at subverting human control. But OpenAI’s new o3 model—unveiled mid-December but not yet available to the public—suggests that it will not be long before AI systems are as smart as their human minders, or smarter.

Rogue AI

Leading AI scientists have long warned that advanced AI poses “societal-scale risks” on the order of “pandemics and nuclear war.” The basic concern is that, as AI systems become more generally intelligent, they will also become able to do much more, for better and worse. On the “better” side of the ledger, their mastery of synthetic biology may help researchers cure diseases. In the “worse” column, those same capabilities could help terrorists make bioweapons.

But bad human actors are not necessary for AI catastrophes. A related concern is that AI systems themselves will take actions that harm humans, without anyone intentionally directing them to do so. Imagine, for example, an AI system trained to maximize profit for its owners’ company. Like profit-seeking humans, such a system might figure out that theft, extortion, threats, and even war can sometimes be profit-maximizing strategies. Worse, such a system might forcibly resist even its owners’ attempts to redirect it, turn it off, update its goals, or otherwise stop its harmful behavior. After all, you can’t maximize profit if you’re turned off.

These are known as “rogue AI” scenarios. In the past, rogue AI concerns have been criticized as speculative and science-fictional. But as 2024 came to a close, a trio of developments from the frontier of AI progress pushed rogue AI substantially toward the realm of science fact.

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It is a truth almost universally denied that the apocalyptic fires engulfing Los Angeles—my hometown—are merely a magnified version of the normal.

Donald Trump blames Gavin Newsom, because that’s Trump’s knee-jerk (or just plain jerk) response to any California misfortune. In a similar display of politically targeted bile, Rick Caruso, the Bloomberg-esque Republican turned Democrat who lost the most recent L.A. mayoral election to mainstream Democrat Karen Bass, blames Bass. Any day now, Wall Street Journal editorialists will blame the New Deal and some Latin Mass Catholics will blame Pope Francis.

If there’s one person whose analysis we should take seriously, it’s the late Mike Davis. In 1998, Davis followed up City of Quartz—his critically successful dissection of Los Angeles—with Ecology of Fear, which looked more specifically at the apocalypses that were and are a constant feature of L.A. life. (I edited a number of such Davis articles at the L.A. Weekly during the ’90s.) In the decade since he’d written City of Quartz, Los Angeles had experienced the Rodney King riots, the Northridge earthquake, recurrent fires and floods in the hills surrounding the city, and the decimation of the area’s middle class with the huge post–Cold War downsizing of the region’s largest employers, the Pentagon-funded aerospace companies. Plunging himself into obscure archives, traversing L.A.’s tinder-dry hills and firetrap tenements, Davis chronicled and explained Los Angeles’s unending physical and social combustibility with the zeal and scholarship of a peer-reviewed Cassandra.

Chapter Three of Ecology of Fear is entitled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” It begins by noting that L.A.’s pre-European residents, the Chumash and Tongva Indians, annually set small fires in the hills of Pacific Palisades and Malibu to clear out the brush that would explode if left in place. Mike notes that Richard Henry Dana wrote in his seafaring classic Two Years Before the Mast that when he first sailed up the California coast in 1826, he saw a fire engulfing Topanga Canyon. Mike then documents the 13 fires that had burned at least 10,000 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains just west of the Palisades between 1930 and 1996. Mike makes a compelling case that the dry hills surrounding Los Angeles, running from Pasadena in the east to Malibu in the west, will regularly ignite when the Santa Ana winds blow, and that building houses in those hills all but guarantees that many of those houses will burn, particularly when those winds soar above 50 miles per hour.
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I want to explain why and how to hold John Roberts accountable for Trump’s corruption. It is based on the following presumptions.

Blaming Merrick Garland for Trump’s reelection has required inventing facts about the timeline, which is why I argue it is conspiratorial thinking.

Because of how SCOTUS rewrote the Constitution, no counterfactual gets Trump disqualified before the election, and probably doesn’t get him to trial.

This was a political failure that started well before January 6.

So one reason I advocate focusing on accountability for John Roberts is because he and his colleagues, in fact, are responsible. They intervened to ensure the leader of their party would evade accountability. And so they enabled everything that comes next.

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