Joshua

Father of 2; Southern California Public Affairs and Transportation Lover. Retweets are not endorsements

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The 100 year old pipe that just sinkholed Sunset Boulevard was already on LA's replacement list. Construction was scheduled for 2031.

LADWP budgeted $280 million to replace 6.4 miles of this exact 36-inch trunk line. The project is still in the design phase. Work starts in 2031 and finishes in 2035. The pipe burst 5 years before the first crew would have touched it.

The replacement math explains why this keeps happening. Last fiscal year, LADWP's goal was to replace 1.1 miles of trunk pipe. They replaced less than one. LA has roughly 550 miles of trunk line. Even at the department's new target of 3.5 miles a year, each mile gets replaced once every 157 years.

Riveted steel pipe lasts about 100.

And Sunset Boulevard has run this exact experiment before. In 2014, a trunk line from 1921 ruptured under Sunset near UCLA and sent roughly 20 million gallons through campus, submerging Pauley Pavilion. That break is what made LA's aging pipes national news and launched the current replacement program.

Twelve years later: same street, same vintage of pipe, same aerial footage.

Cities schedule pipe replacement on political time. Pipes fail on material time. LA is replacing 100 year pipes on a 157 year cycle, and this morning is what the gap between those two numbers looks like.

[L.A. in a Minute @LaInaMinute]

Incredible photo of a coyote (and that sign!) on the Sherman Oaks side of the Santa Monica Mountains

@JJEnglander

[Prep Baseball Scouting @pbtscouting]

2029 1B Nate Englander (@NateEnglander)
Legacy National (@LegacyBBGroup)

Turns on this pitch and crushes a line-drive three run homer over the left field fence.

#WCPI26 | @PrepBaseballCA

[Joshua @JJEnglander]

@megan_souza @TyeGregory And the money is used IN America.

And it’s not genocide. If it were there would be a Gaza or Palestine.

War is horrible. And in an urban war, civilian casualties are high. But the rate of civilian casualties in Gaza is below every previous urban war. So how is that genocide?

[Dr Charlie Ward @DrcharlieWardQ]

BREAKING Adam Carolla: “People say to me all the time, ‘Oh, you’re Republican and right-leaning. I go, ‘Listen, I don’t own a g*n, I’m not religious at all, I’m for abortion and pot smoking. How right can I be?’”

Bill Maher: “You put your finger on the thing that makes me so incensed about the woke and far-left… We need no further credentials to let you know that we are certainly not conservatives, we’re not right-wingers, we’re not whatever you think.”

“And yet, it’s never enough for them. It’s never enough.”

“We’re just not willing to go along with your insanity. That doesn’t make us conservatives.”

[Joshua @JJEnglander]

@grok @SonofKiese @FordJohnathan5 @grok wouldn’t the state constitution supersede HB622?

[Joshua @JJEnglander]

@aria_gerson Y’all are going to love seeing Tronny hit and run.

[Jonah Platt @JonahPlatt]

Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan says he can debunk Israel's defenders in under 60 seconds.

His method? Reading a list of names really fast.
That's not an argument. That's a filibuster with a bibliography.

Fine. Start the clock.

Here's the problem with his fifty sources: it's one source wearing fifty costumes.

The UN cites Amnesty. Amnesty cites a different UN report. That one cites the BBC. The BBC cites UNRWA. UNRWA cites the Gaza Ministry of Health. The Gaza Ministry of Health is Hamas.

Even a member of his own genocide scholars association has a name for this: "citation washing."
Congratulations. You just traced fifty "independent" voices back to one terrorist press office.

Now, a few of his star witnesses.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars? $30 and you're in. Emperor Palpatine is a member. So is Cookie Monster.

Amnesty? Their own report — page 101 — calls the established legal standard too "cramped" to reach a genocide finding. The law as written wouldn't convict Israel, so they loosened the law.

B'Tselem said the quiet part louder — their report openly adopts "a broader analytical framework" than the legal definition. That's lawyer-speak for "we changed the rules."

The UN? The General Assembly passed 17 resolutions against Israel in 2024. Seven against the entire rest of the planet combined. North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia — one each. Sudan, where actual mass slaughter is happening right now? Zero.

And here's a name Mehdi will never read off his list: Alice Wairimu Nderitu.

The UN's own Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Their in-house expert. The one person whose entire job was answering this exact question. She looked at the evidence, looked at the law, and refused to call Gaza a genocide.

Her reward? "Hounded, day in, day out. Bullied, hounded, with protection from nobody." Her words. Then her contract quietly wasn't renewed.

She said the pressure to declare a genocide "never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for Democratic Republic of Congo."
The UN's genocide expert said no — so the UN got a new genocide expert.

Oh, and one more name he forgot: the jihadist terrorist group Hamas. The original proponent of the genocide libel — the source his fifty sources trace back to. Somehow they didn't make the list. Neither did any of the scholars, military experts, former hostages, survivors, and millions of common-sense humans united in rejecting the claim.

Instead of rattling off a list of "because they said so," how about evidence? Millions of warning leaflets. Humanitarian corridors. Polio vaccines. 130 babies born a day. The Jewish birth rate during the Holocaust was statistically zero. That's what genocide looks like.

Fifty sources quoting each other isn't fifty sources. It's an echo chamber with footnotes.

So, Mehdi's big question: Who do I believe?
Wrong question. It's not about Who. It's about What.

I believe incontrovertible evidence. Population data. Millions of tons of aid. Hard casualty numbers. Weighed against the actual legal definition — not a list of people and organizations quoting each other.

Because I fact-check.
Time.

[Elex Michaelson @Elex_Michaelson]

Why hasn't Graham Platner dropped out of the U.S. Senate race in Maine?

@danschnur: "he thinks he has leverage. But he has less than zero leverage. Ultimately, he will have no choice but to step aside and Democrats will end up with a much more electable candidate..."

@mikegatto: "we really have to be better with investigating candidates...we've all seen this movie before and it doesn't end well..."

[Joshua @JJEnglander]

@LaDonaDelValle @LaInaMinute You’re welcome to stop by my house and check out our American Flag.

South of the Blvd. @LaInaMinute knows the address

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Why is it ‘cancelled’ in the U.K. but ‘canceled’ in the U.S.?

Because we gave them that L in 1776.

[Joshua @JJEnglander]

@latsondheimer So its akin to a jewish holiday?

[PREP BASEBALL CALIFORNIA @PrepBaseballCA]

⚾ ℂ𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕟𝕚𝕒 𝕊𝕥𝕒𝕥𝕖 ℙ𝕝𝕒𝕪𝕖𝕣 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕐𝕖𝕒𝕣 ⚾

🔋: @Prolineballs

After a record setting season, James Tronstein (@therealjtronny) of @hwbaseball, has been named the Prep Baseball California State Player of the Year. #TronnyBarrels

Story: https://t.co/wdCAr572C3

[Joshua @JJEnglander]

@schneider What would you prefer?

[Joshua @JJEnglander]

@latsondheimer My wife got parking at Midas for $100. Also got a free oil change.

[Elex Michaelson @Elex_Michaelson]

.@FareedZakaria with a blistering indictment of California’s government in this week’s op-ed.

He blasts failures in housing, homelessness and Hollywood and makes the argument that the status quo isn’t working:

[Michael Trujillo @mikehtrujillo]

This would push countywide turnout to over 35.5% but more ballots are processed tomorrow from the post office. We could to be over 40%. But let’s pretend this was it - Nithya would need to beat Spencer by over 16% in these last ballots to catch him, but that number becomes smaller tomorrow with more raw ballots added to the total.

[William Lynch @Will_Lynch2028]

Thank you @hardy03bsbl for the profile about my Future Games Tryout. It was my first PBR Showcase and it was incredible.

@LesLukach @PrepBaseballCA @hwbaseball @LegacyBBGroup

[Joshua @JJEnglander]

Anyone else waiting around for @VoteHub or @mikehtrujillo to give us the latest results and insights?

[Jesse Zwick @jessezwick]

RAND just dropped the most comprehensive study yet of Measure ULA.
High-value transactions 31%🔽. Apartment production 30%🔽. Buildings that sold passed the tax through to tenants as higher rents. ~$452M in lost revenue to city, county & schools. ~16,000 construction jobs lost.