Tax Dollars, Explosions & Eruptions

the nuclear program there. The Iatola said that Tehran won't ask for permission from anyone to enrich uranium and called statements from America as nonsense. He made these comments during a memorial for the late President Rayisi, who died in a helicopter.

to do it. This is an important look at a city that's dealing with a billion dollar budget shortfall and how do we You can't close that, that's too big of a whole to sew up, but how do you make that smaller?

they've revised the numbers. When Mayor bask came out with this proposal was pretty shocking one. You know, the budget deficit was somewhere between eight hundred million and a billion dollars, as you said, but more concerning was the fact that she says we've got to layoff people more than sixteen hundred flesh and blood workers, not vacant positions like last year, real people who would be losing their jobs and services

that matter to the public in Los Angeles. Now, the budget Committee says, we've got the report together, We've moved some money around, we've finagled some numbers. We think we've got those layoffs down to about five hundred. You mentioned last year that it wasn't laying off real people, was

it just the not hiring to fill vacant positions. That's exactly right, because when a department gets its budget each year, there are a number of positions that do not currently have bodies occupying them, but they're budgeted for, and often what we learned last year going through this process, like those positions often go years, So instead of just dedicating that money to a department, they put it back in the general fund. We see this year that that money

eve operated very quickly. Well that almost so that echoes what we see in a lot of corporations. I'm not putting ours up as a glory of me either example of this. But if the job continues to be done with fewer people, even though there's a technically an open position.

to figure out how to do it. It was going to be harder if the budget were adopted as proposed by mere Bass, because a lot of positions were on the chopping block, positions in street services, street cleaning, and of course the police department. And we learned that when you say there are four hundred jobs to be cut from the police department, not officers, just jobs, that there are jobs related to the process of justice that are

not necessarily done by somebody wearing a badge. And so that got a lot of attention, not just from the public but from the people on the budget committee. There were about four hundred layoffs expected there. They think they've saved about one hundred one hundred and fifty of those. These are photographers, people who process evidence. They play significant roles, but they have asked the police department in this budget report to slow down their hiring. One of the big

issues also has been homelessness and spending on homelessness. Do they address those issues at all a little bit. They are not going to grant Mayor Bass as much money as she would like to have for her inside Safe program. Mayribas also proposed a thirty six million dollar program that would be new within the fire department to have some of that first interaction with homeless people to be housed

in that fire department. It was thirty six and a half million dollars, So the Budget Committee's report takes that away. One other pieces, they are calling for more oversight of the homeless spending in this budget. Recall that it wasn't that long ago that we all kind of learned there's no point person at Los Angeles City Hall keeping tabs

on these dollars. We learned it through a federal court hearing, and then we learned it through conversations out in the open during city council meetings that there's a lot of money exiting that building and nobody keeping tabs of the receipts.

takes a lot of resources and it's very expensive. But in all of these years that you have heard chiefs even come on our air or speak publicly somewhere else and say we can't fill our ranks to the numbers that we want, it doesn't mean that they haven't received the money to do so.

We haven't heard a whole lot else about that or what that means. Here's what happens. The Budget Committee does its thing for two weeks and then they come out with their report. This is our final revision to the budget. They did that last Friday. Tomorrow at La City Hall, the full City Counsel will get their hands on this, and that might be where you hear things about salaries for elected officials.

financial conundrum. They've got a twelve billion dollar budget shortfall. Gavin Newsom has his own headaches related to finances. And then what kind of standard would you set, especially in lean financial times, for the state government if you bail out Los Angeles. What happens when Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, the rest of them have significant problems like this too, and by the way, they do in general ten thousand

maybe twenty thousand foot level. What's the power dynamic in LA in terms of the way the city charter allocates power to the mayor versus the city council, et cetera. And how does that compare to other other big cities. A lot of cities are different. There are many ways to cook a city government. And the mayor does have some executive authority in Los Angeles, but much of the power really lies with the city council here, and that is true in a lot of big cities, but not

all of them. So you know, where I come from, a little place called northern Kentucky, you might have a mayor who sits on a board with commissioners, yet they all have the same amount of power. It's just that the mayor might get a longer term, or the mayor might be the guy who signs certain documents to make them legal, and or the mayor is the grandson of the guy who founded the town. You've been there, I see you visited. Say hello to my mom next time

you're in town. Oh, trust me, bear in mind. Sorry, sorry, no, it's all right, go for it. I would call you stepdaddy, absolutely, stepdad or stepdaddy, whatever you like.

the one that dices it up and adopts it. But we will have to see what the mayor has to say about these revisions. Yeah, and the reason I ask is because of the person herself of Karen Bass herself, because of the time she spent in Congress, because of the time she spent in the state legislature. I'm just I'd be curious to have a conversation with her about how much power she feels she actually has for the city compared to those other positions that she's held in government.

I think she's been wounded by the fires, undoubtedly, public opinion polls indicate that that is true, But at city Hall she appears to still be quite influential. I think we can point to the firing of former fire chief Kristen Crowley that went her way, the Mayor's way, exactly the way that she wanted, with very few falling out

of line. Council President Marquise Harris Dawson is a disciple of Karen Bass, ran the same community based organization that she did before she went into elected office, and even some of the farther maybe democratic, Socialist, progressive members of council still seem to be very strongly in Mayor Bass's camp. Despite her strong position on wanting more police officers, they

seem to be pretty well aligned too. So if it were a different person with the dynamics change, could they change possibly, but right now, even though her popularity may be fading among the electorate, she seems to still have a lot of influence at city council.

And we'll talk about that and the next few steps in that investigation we come back.

Reddit said that they banned that community specifically because they have rules on Reddit that prohibit somebody from promoting self harm. And again, these nihilist anti lifers believe that the most altruistic thing to do is kill yourself so that you don't tax the rest of society. Why they're people that believe that and then write about it doesn't make sense because I would have thought that, well, they would have killed them.

the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. It's the largest Marine training base in the world, and yes, they have explosives there, but it's not like you can walk on to a Marine Corps combat center and walk out with boxes of explosives. So how did this guy Not that that's where he got him from, but how did this guy get the explosives? Is there a possibility, sure, but there is no affiliation that this guy has with the

Marine Corps. In twenty twenty one, there was a small about a small amount ten pounds of plastic explosives that was missing from twenty nine Palms during a training exercise. At the time, it was suspected to have been stolen. The military says they did recover it, but they haven't explained much of the details In all of that, a former bomb expert with ATF says that this guy's proximity to twenty nine Palms to the Marine Corps base is

clearly something that they would have to look into. That's an obvious line of investigation, and they will interview people that this guy may have corresponded with on social networks, whether it was Reddit or any other way that he was talking to people, and focus on somebody who may or may not have had security clearance that would have provided access to explosives. Again, they're not saying that that's where it came from, but you I want them to track that down.

east as Chicago. You can buy a lot of the chemicals used to make explosives online, and again that's part of the inquiry is was this guy compiling smaller amounts of these materials. If you buy some of this stuff into large of an amount right in one fell swoop, it raises red flags and the government, the ATF they'll they'll you know, they'll drop a dime. They'll do a little quick door knock to see if you're going to blow things up or if you had a legitimate reason

for buying it. As we saw though in the Oklahoma City bombing, there are some very common chemicals that can be used to make very very powerful bombs. One major vendor of these kinds of chemicals warns customers that federal regulations require them to go through all the orders for the possible use in constructing m ads or other illegal exploding fireworks. And obviously that's the more common version of it. Someone wants to make a small explosion, not blow up

their car and try to take other lives with them. Now, if this guy, if there's twenty five year old suspects in the bombing and Palm springs, was researching or was buying these bomb making materials without trying to cover his tracks, it's pretty funny, because this former bomb expert says, you and I would be pretty disappointed or surprised to know there is no all encompassing AI program. There's no algorithm, there's no software that the government has used to screen

their search histories. That seems like it's a pretty I wouldn't say easy fix, but something that to atf ATFE, now that they include explosives, would want to get on. It seems like the images from that explosion in Palm Springs appear to be focused, they said, in one direction, and that's why the current thinking from the FBI is this guy knew what he was doing. It was specifically a targeted directional explosion intended to cause maximum damage to

that fertility clinic. They're still trying to figure out whether he was inside the car or outside the car at the time of the explosion. I mean, if you've seen the images, he's clearly out of the car obviously when the thing blows up after it blew up. But they also said that he may have tried to live stream all of this and failed to do so. As far as what they believe, so it is, it's still an ongoing investigation. It's going to be some time before we

figure out what exactly drove this guy. Outside of mental health instability, shall we say so, speaking of, there is a natural explosion that could possibly be awaiting us. Right off the coast to California. A mysterious and very highly active volcano right under the ocean. We'll explain where that is and why we need to be careful of it, even though it's about seven hundred miles off the coast of San Francisco.

and kids who are healthy. Companies that want to market their vaccines are going to need to conduct very large new studies. According to the FDA, This is a huge change in the FDA's approach to updating these vaccines. The FDDA said today that annual COVID shots will still be regularly approved for seniors and for younger people who might have increased.

Put a live stream up yesterday. Scott Adams is sixty seven. He said that he has also been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has spread to the bone. He said my life expectancy is maybe this summer, and went on to say I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime sometime this summer.

old fashioned volcanoes that explodes or that erupts explosively. That's the way they put it. It's not like Mount Saint Helens. They say, this is more of a Hawaiian style volcano which seeps and leaks. Sounds awful, but it is less likely to create the conditions that would make a tsunami. That's probably not what's going to happen. Axial Seamount is similar to the type of eruptions that you'd see on Kilauea on the Big Island and the eruptions are not

noticeable to us on land. Very different story if you're underwater, which I don't know anybody who is a mile down seven hundred miles northwest of San Francisco, but there are heat plumes from the eruption that will rise to the seafloor, and anything that lives that far down could potentially be killed by the heat. But they're saying that the whales, most of the marine life that we see lives much closer to the surface and would not be would not

be impacted by the heat. Outermost layer, the lava flow would almost immediately cool and form a crust because you know, seawater's cold, and the lava underneath that.

If there was any way for us to get some sort of specific instruments. There are some instruments that are on or near the axial seamount. They say that they could lose those if the lava flow is strong enough, but it would be pretty cool to see up close what exactly goes down below the surface up next all of the swamp watch stuff to get to And a question. We're gonna do a couple of days on this. This

is a question about drinking with your kids. If you have teenagers, do you allow them to drink under your supervision? I assume, but do you allow them to drink? Or when you were a kid, did your parents allow you to drink? And a change at all the way that you think about alcohol and what role it plays in your life.