This was reported (and commented on here) earlier this week, but it shouldn’t disappear under the tsunami of Charlie Kirk news

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especially to burned-out homeowners expecting help

If FireAid benefited mostly ‘non-profit’ profiteers, Big Philanthropy is just a giant con

Nearly eight months after the FireAid concerts raised $100 million to help victims of the Los Angeles wildfires, essentially none of the cash has actually gone to help victims.

Instead, the Annenberg Foundation has showered the money on politically connected nonprofits that burn the donations on social-justice activism and other absurdities. 

Of course, the foundation honchos calls them “trusted local nonprofits” that are concerned with “connection and well-being across entire communities.”

Trusted by who? Which communities?

Certainly not the actual people who were burned out of their homes.

So who did get helped?

  • The Alliance for a Better community, which “advances social, economic, racial equity and justice for the Latina/o community” got $350,000.

  • $250,000 went to FreeForm, which claims it “drives systemic change” on gender-based violence. Stopping violence against women (if that’s what the group actually does) is a fine cause, but has nothing to do with fire relief.

  • Even odder: The $100,000 for the California Native Vote Project, which says it assists “Indigenous leaders seeking to pursue elected office for the very first time.”

  • In perhaps the most “meta” grant, FireAid sent a quarter-million bucks to the Center for Nonprofit Management, which calls itself a “nonprofit capacity building organization” dedicated to “accelerating positive social change.”

Nonprofit groups donating money to nonprofit groups that teach nonprofit groups how to most effectively support other nonprofit groups . . . have we got that right?

In the 40 years since LiveAid set the pattern for benefit concerts, superstars have lined up to raise funds in the name of AIDS, farmers, 9/11 first responders, Haiti, African famine and a host of other worthy causes.

People rightly dug deep to help the needy, near and far.

Yet a whole industry of middlemen has evolved to divert this charity off into an unaccountable vortex of professed do-gooders who mostly seem to scratch each others’ backs.

It’s sure looking like Big Philanthropy has become one giant con.

Looking like?

Riverside pending sale

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155 Riverside Avenue, a 1965 Murphy house* built on a slab in a swamp, was priced at $1.689 million and is probably going for more, considering it went pending in just 10 days. It looks as though the kitchen and baths have been updated but it looks essentially the same as it did when my friend David Carlisle lived there in 1970; I don’t know who aged better, David or the house (I haven’t seen David since high school, but the house, at least, is still with us.

*So named by us locals in honor of a local builder, Murphy, who specialized in building marginal house on marginal land and selling them at marginal prices: I believe this one sold for $27,000 back then, which even in 1965 was pretty cheap.

I've wondered about this Riverside apartment building since I attended Tiny Tots Nursery School across the street in 1956

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90 Riverside Avenue Unit 4, one bedroom, is available for the low rent of $2,525. I’ll pass on the opportunity to live in this 1838 building, but it’s … interesting what twenty-five hundred (won’t) get you these days.

bedroom access?

presumably, the landlord will provide a seatbelt upon request

A clarification of that picture of 166 Indian Head Road

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Not content with merely perusing Britebart, Brother Gideon has also thoughtfully provided a more accurate photo of 166 Indian Head Road, the listing for which I wrote about yesterday:

causing several readers to question my assertion that the house lacked its own dock. The photo above shows the location of the dock, as Gideon says, “very much on the neighbor’s property”.

Here are some of the listing pictures that gave rise to the confusion:

They do it deliberately because they know that no one reads the corrections to the original hit piece

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Brother Gid took time off from ironing his ascot collection to send along this Britebart article along with the note, “the best part about this article is at the end, the ASTOUNDING list of hoaxes perpetrated by the leftist media (and I think this list actually is missing a few!)”. Gid’s right, of course, so I’m reprinting the original post:

New York Times’ Rush to Smear Charlie Kirk Results in Humiliating Correction

The far-left New York Times rushed to smear the late Charlie Kirk as an anti-Semite, an act that has now resulted in a humiliating correction from the far-left hate-outlet.

The original smear job was published on September 11, 2025. Later, the Times was forced to admit it put antisemitic words in Kirk’s mouth that came from someone else, something he denounced…

A correction was made on Sept. 11, 2025: An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was quoting a statement from a post on social media and went on to critique it. It was not his own statement. [bold and italics original]

Here are the lies (in my bold) the Times published that are now deleted:

Mr. Kirk supported Mr. Trump’s campaign against immigration, endorsing the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which claims that immigrants will soon displace white Americans. The unsubstantiated theory also claims that Jews are orchestrating the dilution of white power by allegedly encouraging mass immigration.

“Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” he said on his podcast, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” in 2023.

For anyone still stupid enough to suggest this was some sort of mistake—no, it wasn’t.

Honest mistakes are not partisan. One side of the political aisle is not the serial victim of “honest mistakes.”

These “honest mistakes” only ever afflict the right side of the political spectrum over at the Times, which tells us this: These are not honest mistakes. These are deliberate smears published by an extremist outlet hoping no one will notice, as it panders to the extremist customer base that is its only remaining life source.

The New York Times regularly and gleefully traffics in blood libels against its enemies on the political right.  This is their business plan. This is who they are. They hate us, and no more will we give this behavior the benefit of the doubt. This is nothing more or less than the Times sending a dog whistle to the left’s demonic assassination culture.

When the Times and other regime media outlets spend a decade engaging in this…