Musk Spotlights Old Limestone Mine

Ptel for FBI Director, and then Linda McMahon. President Trump's choice for Education Secretary is undergoing some of her confirmation hearings today. New York's Governor Kathy Hochel has postponed a meeting that was supposed to take place today with the President because the Justice Department revealed it was suing New York State over this sanctuary status. Kathy Hokel had planned to meet Trump for lunch, but is a rescheduled for

sometime next week. According to CBS, comes just hours after the DOJ sued the entire New York State with a lawsuit over its policy of limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. And this is a new sanctuary city I'd never heard of before. Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester, Massachusetts City Council has approved a petition to declare the second largest city in Massachusetts a sanctuary for transgender and gender diverse people after hearing

from residents. Footage from the public comments session of this week's meeting went viral across social media, clips showing people speaking passionately about the need for Worcester to become a sanctuary city for transgender people and suggesting that people in the administration are Nazis. So there is a sanctuary city in Worcester, Massachusetts. Rain, the biggest punch from this storm is expected this afternoon, sometimes say between four o'clock and

nine o'clock for La County. If you get into Orange County Inland Empire, in parts south like San Diego County, it's going to be shifted a little bit later than that, by a couple of hours. But the potential for mudslides is serious, to the point that they have called for evacuation warnings in several of the burn areas, whether it's Palisades fire, the eaten fire over an Altadena and other places as well. Now we are expecting an update from President Trump at the White House.

the Oval office. Remember that the image of him with his son standing next to President Trump at the resolute desk. He referred to the need for us to actually live in a democracy and not a bureaucracy. That when the bureaucracy holds all of the power, or an outsized amount of the power, we are a bureaucracy and not a democracy. He also talked about the need to cut government agencies. In fact, use the term delete entire agencies.

weed to grow back. But if you remove the roots of the weed, it doesn't stop weeds from ever going back, but it makes it harder.

information that should remain private. Pension information for example, that should remain private. And there has been concern about it, but no evidence that that's actually taking place. And there's a difference between the two of them. Yeah, I'd be concerned too if I was afraid that these guys had access to all of my personal information or my family's personal information. But there's no evidence that it's actually happening.

There's just people saying that it might happen. Another thing that he talked about in this meeting today was the focus on eliminating DEI work, at one point linking it to artificial intelligence. Elon said, if hypothetically artificial intelligence is designed for DEI diversity at all costs as the ultimate thing, it could decide that there's too many men in power and execute them. Now, he's been one of those guys who has said AI is an existential threat to the

survival of humans. He also said he believed that X's newly updated AI chatbot because he owned he owns Twitter, He's put together an AI chat bought like chatch ept. His is called Groc. The newest version of it, GROC three, he said, would be ready in about two weeks. He said at one point, it's kind of scary. That's not good. He also went on to talk about some of the business ventures that he's got in Dubai, like the boring company,

Boring like boring a hole. He announced plans for a Dubai loop project, digging tunnels along the company, and then a later statement from Dubai's Crown Prince said that they are looking at the development of about a ten mile underground network of stations that could transport about twenty thousand passengers an hour. All of this is, I mean, that's all hypothetical, way up high in the sky kind of stuff at this point, and a little bit out of character.

If you're going to be the Department of Government Efficiency, be that. Don't be the guy who starts talking about your business ventures in Dubai. You got one thing on your plate right now. And that's what you should be paying attention to. All Right, a little bit more about this limestone mind. Did you hear that he talked about a limestone mine where the government keeps all of its

files on retired federal personnel. It's a real thing, and everybody is whatever fact checking has gone on has said, yeah, yeah, Alon's talking about a real place. We'll talk about that limestone mine we come back.

and then you can't. Nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy. There's like a thousand people that work on this.

when it comes to preserving items like this. And the Government Office of Personnel Management OPM does use Iron Mountain is what they call it, to process and store paperwork if federal workers retire. And he said the most number of people who could retire, possibly in a month, is ten thousand. This is what he's said on Tuesday, and he asked, why is that?

move determines how many people could retire from the federal government. Now, there are plenty of people who said they don't actually have an elevator. The processing of this retirement paperwork varies case by case. No two retirements are the same, and it's going to change depending on the agency that they worked for, the position, and a bunch of different factors. So it's not as easy as saying it's just calculated and then stuck in an elevator. And they said that

it's more than just federal paperwork. There there are treasures from they said, priceless treasures. Studios from Hollywood could rent out space and store the original master copies of classic movies. There are multiple places they can do that. It doesn't have to be in this mind but historical photographs, glass negatives, they said. There are even things like original recordings by

Elton John. Businesses organizations also use the affility facility to store their digital data on servers that do exist down there. So the possibility does exist for the United States Retirement the Office of Personnel Management to use a more updated system and still do it at Iron Mountain. They don't need to sit there with minila folders and shove this stuff like they did, like it's, you know, God forbid

the mid eighties. But it's one of those things that he has pointed out that is, yes, we've done it this way for a very long time, and yes it's possible to continue doing it that way, but just making some minor changes could potentially save lots and lots of money. So again, President Trump is expected to hold a news conference sometime soon from the White House about all of this, about reciprocal tariffs that have supposed to be coming up.

But I figured this is a good day to talk about fire because it's kind of far from our minds because the amount of rain coming in. But the Army Corps of Engineer said that it's not going to order soil testing at the sites of the Eton and Palisades fire after they've been cleaned up. For one thing, it removes a giant hurdle for those people who want to get back and start rebuilding their lives in those areas. But there are some people who are concerned about the

lack of soil testing. We'll talk about all of that we come back.

to freeze in these news conferences. He's literally been carried from wheelchair to car in the last few days, and it looks like he's just flipping double birds at Donald Trump on the way out. So we'll talk about what Mitch McConnell has been doing, specifically when comes to the cabinet picks and trying to but unsuccessfully, trying to put a speed bump in front of Trump's administration. So we

are keeping an eye on the White House. President Trump is expected to hold a news conference from the White House here pretty soon. Among other things, he's going to be signing some executive orders. He's expected to talk about elon Musk and doge and also reciprocal tariffs. Well, now's as good time as any to talk about the fires

because we're not worried about the fires today. We are worried about the potential for atmospheric river and the storms that are coming to bring some mud slides to those areas.

Army Corp of Engineers is done in the past. They said, it's a way this soil testing the safeguard to ensure that there's no lingering contamination that's left after the cleanup. Federal and state officials have called for soil samples to be collected and analyzed at homes and schools cleaned by the work crews. It's called conformation sampling is the word

the term that they use. It's intended to verify that the soil at these properties doesn't have any more toxic chemicals in it that would be above the state's legal limit for cleanup standards. Once the ash and rubble are removed along with six inches of topsoil. The standard practice is that that's six inches of top soil once it's removed from these properties that have burned most of the most of the most toxic chemicals would go with that

top soil and then that's disposed of. But Army Corps officials said that taking the six inches of topsoil should be enough. They don't need to go back and test because it is so commonly believed that that six inch top soil removal is enough. At a news conference just yesterday, the Army Corps Colonel Eric Swinzon explain this decision. Said, the state does when the state does a request for direct federal assistance, they make it a FEMA and we

get brought on to do a specific scope. And so these are the limits of what we can do under this disaster. And he says, these are our instructions and guidelines, and we have to stick to those guidelines. Now, county officials have said that that's probably not a great idea. They want to make sure that everybody is safe once they go back and start to rebuild. Catherine Barger, for example, said that we don't want to discount it. We're going

to have to regroup and figure this one out. The executive director of California Communities Against Toxics, Jane Williams, says, if you're not willing to do confirmatory test sampling, that tells us they're willing to leave the properties contaminated. It also means that there is a desire to get back

to these communities. There's a desire to start the rebuilding process as soon as possible because of the danger of dragging your feet and yes, you do want to make sure that it is safe enough for you to go back. As an example, the campfire in twenty eighteen up in Paradise, there was a company called Tetra Tech hired to test

the soil on more than twelve thousand properties. After the cleanup cruise did that standard practice removing all the rebbel and then taking six inches of top soil, and about a third of those properties still had enough toxic chemicals in them that they were in excess of the cleanup standards, including things like lead and arsenic, And in light of the soil testing, workers did go back to those properties, in one case as many as five times to dig

out more contaminated soil so that then they would meet the clean up standards set by the state. Without the soil testing, the army courses, they will not be going back to do any additional soil removal in the Palisades fire area or the Eaten fire area. So I mean,

Barbara Ferrara says, that's a bad idea. So far, about seventy three hundred property owners and those two fires have filled out the forms to say they seventy three hundred, about ninety nine percent of them have opted for the Army Corps of Engineer to remove the debris and the contaminated soil rather than pay what's probably going to be a much more expensive route, albeit quicker, to have a

private contractor come in and do it. So they've been supervising so far as these federal cleanup crews have been going in. They have been using excavators. They've been pulling large objects. Think about just think about it, the burned out cars, the washing machines, the big appliances, the water heaters, I mean, all these things that exist in these homes that have burned out and are just sitting on these properties.

So they've tossed the debris into these freight containers. The crews that are wearing hazmat suits have been shoveling the ash into plastic garbage bags. And then of course they go in and, like we said, remove that six inches of top soil to try to get rid of most of the heavy metals.

is we had a brush with catastrophe. There were hundreds of jail inmates at a county facility up in the Castaic area that may have had to have been evacuated at one point during the hues fire that came out up near Lake Casteak. That would have been an absolute mess. Describe how close we got to just unlock on the doors for those guys.

and starts a news conference from the White house. The expectation was that it was going to be at about ten o'clock hour time, it hasn't started yet. Also a wellness segment next hour. The difference between running for a long time and running fast is there a difference in which one is going to be healthier for you. In terms of the fires, people are watching the fire areas today because of the rain that's going to be coming in. This afternoon is when it's going to get pretty heavy.

The huge fire is the fire that broke out near Castaic Lake on January twenty second. You heard it here on the show. I don't know why fires start during our show, It's just a gift. But the fire started about five miles away from the Pitches Detention Center North. That's one of four lock up facilities that exists in the jail complex up in Castaic, the County Jail complex. And as the day went on, it grew quickly to

five hundred acres to five thousand acres. It came so close to the facilities there in the Castaic Jail that about forty seven hundred inmates, three hundred guards inside all were within the evacuation zone. And what they didn't do

was evacuate. Sheriff's Department did move a few hundred of the inmates from barracks outside not outside, but barracks to a sturdier concrete building, and then they were scrambling to find or borrow or steal or whatever they were going to do more transport buses in the event that they needed to organize a large scale evacuation. I mean a bus. You've seen those La County buses that are transporting guys

back and forth A lot of times. I see them transporting guys back and forth from the jail complex downtown at to downtown LA and other places. A lot of those buses were out of commission that day, and at one point the flames of the Hughes fire were within about a mile of the jail before the wind died down before crews were able to fight back. The Sheriff's Department did not empty out the jails. They did not evacuate.

They said after they evaluated the strategic options, the life safety risks, the defensible space around the jails, which there is plenty, they said it was better for them to shelter in place. And they described the Franklin fire, which

was over in the Malibu area. Just last year, the Pepperdine University students, you remember they were told to stay on campus, stay take refuge in the library, for example, instead of running off campus into the fire, that they were safer to stay in the fire resistant buildings like the library. The students survived, obviously, the cast take inmates survived, obviously.

But there are people who really pissed off that this didn't have a plan, that the Sheriff's department didn't have a plan in the event that the fire got any closer. A deputy director of the ACLU's National Prison Project said, but for the wind blowing in a different direction, there could have been a catastrophe that would have been unrivaled in terms of car cereal carcerol car carcerole deaths. And

she also said this is nothing like Pepperdine. The college students are not locked in their dorm rooms by university officials like bad guys are when they go to county jail. She didn't say the bad guy's part, because she wouldn't. The Sheriff's department admits they haven't done any air quality testing in the jails, but the air filters that exist in the circulation system, the ac HVAC. They have been inspected,

they have been serviced since the fire. They routinely test the water anyway to make sure that it's state guidelines.

that day for the jail to be evacuated. And it wasn't until mid afternoon that this inmate and some other guys in the dorm caught sight of the fire itself on the TV screen, and as soon as they did, they start calling out. They start calling home trying to get information because apparently they said the guards weren't giving them information. As the day went on, more disruptions, commissary orders didn't arrive. The smoke was growing thicker in and

around the buildings nearby. At the high security North County Correctional Facility, they said black clouds loomed outside the little tiny windows. The jail officials locked down that facility, shut down the air circulation system to keep out the smoke. Other people started in this is inside the jail. They started figuring out, is there any way for us to break the windows and get out of here if the

flames come too close? And rather than evacuating everybody from the jails there the four different facilities, they moved more people into the concrete areas they were outside of the Pitches Detention Center South because those are more exposed, and they moved them into the more hardened concrete structures that are going to be a lot more fire resistant. And again, it's pretty defensible, is the term I would use in terms of the spaceists that exists around there.

He covered his face with an extra shirt to try to keep out the smoke, and by the time he woke up, obviously the worst of the danger had passed. The flames were seated. The Hughes fire, a few days later, was fully contained. In the Sheriff's department, they said, in the end they were able to find about one hundred buses.

Some of them were going to be borrowed from neighboring counties, whether it's Current County to the north and Tura to the west, Orange and Riverside, etc. In San Bernardino, they said, the state prison system, the local public transit system also had buses that they were willing to offer up this week.

Said in a budget presentation, the sheriff's officials said they're asking the county for eleven million dollars to buy eleven more buses next year, in addition to the twenty new buses that are covered in the current budget, because at this point they've got eighty two buses, but even those numbers will not cover the difference between the eighty two buses that we're supposed to have in La County and the eighty two buses that most of them or a

lot of them are currently out of commission because they need to be worked on.

We'll talk about those coming up at twelve twenty and what lessons we can learn about rebuilding.