On the LA fires: even if you could snap your fingers and make DEI disappear today, nothing will actually change. 

This is to say that "wokeness" might have made a non-zero contribution to the 38,000 acres scorched and hundreds of thousands of lives upended, but it by no means is anywhere CLOSE to being a major cause. 

It's important to direct outrage properly so that things can get fixed.

You have a city set in a desert growing into outlying forested areas that have been bone-dry. The authorities have not implemented an aggressive program of fire management so the forest floor is covered in tinder. Add arson, careless private burns and lightning strikes (not a factor this time), and this is what you're going to get.

Meanwhile, dismal water management has led to empty critical reservoirs and dry fire hydrants which made it impossible to fight the fires.

It turns out the Getty Center and Villa, located in the midst of the fast-moving fires, managed to avoid being burned at all. Why? 

Museum staff have consistently been clearing brush as part of their fire mitigation efforts. Essentially, the buildings were fire-proofed, constructed with fire-resistant materials and equipped with sprinklers and special air filtration systems to keep out smoke and ash. And in the event that the grounds went up in flames, the Getty has its *own water supply* so as not to be reliant on municipal supplies.

The Getty by the way, is woke AF. It's the kind of place where DEI is institutionalized not just at the staff level but also at the collections level, as it often pays homage to rhetoric about structural racism and decolonization. My friend Jay Snider resigned from the Board in response to their "Diversity and Inclusion" plan. 

Yet they're able to keep their building and collections safe because they focused on the things that matter - things such as preventing fires, in a fire-prone environment.

You see this a lot whenever something goes horribly wrong and it's tempting to go all-in and blame DEI. 

In the aftermath of that door plug blasting open in-flight on Alaska Airlines, the outrage was mostly about Boeing's DEI policies. "Go woke go broke" was the mantra. 

But Boeing's woes are far far far deeper than just DEI which actually can be very easily reversed. Believe me, I WISH it were just DEI. 

The senior management at Boeing became far more concerned with earnings and their stock price, rather than aviation and building quality airplanes. The problem began following Boeing's 1997 merger with St. Louis-based rival McDonnell Douglas. By moving its corporate headquarters from Seattle where it had been for 85 years to Chicago, senior management literally became distant from manufacturing in Seattle and lost touch with the business.

In an effort to cut costs and outsource aspects of production, Boeing spun off crucial parts of their manufacturing and relied on subcontractors whose corporate cultures didn't align with theirs. 

So DEI is a problem obviously, but I think whenever we have these types of disasters they somehow stake out an outsized role in our imagination. Beyond all the issues with hiring talent and damaging employee cohesion and morale, any resources and bandwidth spent on DEI has opportunity costs. 

And those opportunity costs are the time and focus diverted away from proper fire management, etc. 

The real questions here moving forward isn't "should lesbians serve in the LAFD?" if we are actually concerned with California's long-term future given the drought. 

How many insurers are going to be able to stay in the market?  And how many will come up with policies that anyone can afford?  And if they can't, who's going to write mortgages for homeowners who are at-risk?  And if the private insurers can't or won't pony up--and the lawsuits here against the state forcing them to stay in are going to drag on, for YEARS, it's a litigator's dream come true--then who is going to pick up the tab?