When Dutch prog rock legends Kayak released album number Seventeen, longstanding keyboard player Ton Scherpenzeel looked back and pondered what might have been

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently attempted to deflect blame for the Los Angeles wildfires currently ravaging the city, shifting blame to local leaders while taking shots at President-elect Donald Trump.

The following sounds like a very good case. Fox Business Editor Elizabeth MacDonald thinks it’s a good case. It would be great to see some accountability for a change. She wrote on X: “Growing talk and reports in Los Angeles over invoking city laws that can hold city officials, including the mayor, accountable for criminal […] The post California Burning: City Officials Liable for Criminal Negligence? appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

The death toll from fires raging around Los Angeles has risen to 14, according to the Los Angeles County sheriff. Sheriff Robert Luna said in a press conference on Sunday morning that the death toll from the LA wildfires has risen to 14, including 11 dead from the Eaton Fire and three from the Palisades Fire. The death count from the fires remains somewhat ambiguous as law enforcement and emergency workers continue to sift through the remains of thousands of houses and structures. A Sunday report from CNN placed the death toll at 16, crediting the Palisades fire with another two deaths. Luna said that law enforcement has arrested about 29 people for looting and other crimes. “I saw a gentleman who looked like a firefighter and I asked if he was okay because he was sitting down. I didn’t realize we had him in handcuffs. We were turning him over to LAPD because he was dressed like a fireman and he was not. He just got caught burglarizing a home,” Luna said at the press conference. The Eaton and Palisades fires remained largely uncontained on Sunday morning. According to Cal Fire, California’s state fire agency, the Palisades Fire has burned nearly 24,000 total acres and is 11% contained. The Eaton Fire has scorched more than 14,000 acres and is 27% contained. Another smaller fire, the Hurst Fire, has burned less than 1,000 acres and is nearly 90% contained. Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone warned on Sunday that fire risk remains “very high” across the county. “These winds, combined with low relative humidities and low fuel moistures, will keep the fire threat in Los Angeles County very high. I asked our county residents in wildfire-prone areas to understand that the necessary public safety power shut-offs are important for our collective safety in preventing the next wildfire natural disaster,” Marrone said, according to CNN. More than 100,000 people remain under evacuation orders and California officials continue to urge people to stay away from threatened and already burned areas. Officials have compared burned out neighborhoods to a “war zone” with charred buildings and downed power lines. “Driving around some of these areas, they literally look like war zones. There are downed power poles, electric wires. There are still some smoldering fires. It is not safe,” Luna said. “We want to get you back into your homes, but we can’t allow that until it is safe for you to do so.”

'Fork in the road'

'There is an overemphasis on environmentally friendly policies'

Extended periods of hot weather and drought create ideal conditions for hard-to-fight forest fires. Although climate models predict that such weather conditions generated by human-caused global warming will increase the incidence of wildfires, recent wildfires cannot be blamed exclusively—or even primarily—on global warming: Weather-driven conditions conducive to forest fires have existed for millennia as a result of naturally occurring climate cycles. For example, studies have shown that over the past 3,000 years, severe fires in the Western U.S. occurred during the 1800s and during the Medieval Warm Period (950–1250 AD), and some of the least destructive happened in the mid-20th century and during the Little Ice Age (1400–1700 AD). Natural climate variability clearly modified historical fire severity, but landscape changes and similar human influences—including logging and farming practices, firefighting practices, the building of railroad lines and electrical grids, domestic livestock grazing, clearing forests for farmland and settlements (including modern suburbs), deliberate agricultural burning, increased recreational use of backcountry landscapes, and the intentional or accidental introduction of weedy, non-native grasses and shrubs—have affected wildlife behavior as they have changed over time, especially since the 1800s. The strongest data for assessing modern forest fire severity over time in the contiguous U.S. come from the Western states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming), where comparable records go back to 1916. These records show that on federal and federally protected lands, fires from 1916 to the mid-1940s (excluding those caused by arson) were similar in scale to fires in the early 2000s. The most acres burned in a given year burned in 2012, but the second-highest number burned in 1919, and some huge fires occurred before 1932 that were equal in size to more recent events. Overall, as can be seen from the chart below, there is no obvious trend over time. Records show that most forest fires (including arson, unattended campfires, discarded cigarettes, sparks from power lines or machinery, etc.) are started by people, whether intentionally or accidentally, and this has largely been true for hundreds of years in North America. For example, a huge forest fire that blazed through Maine in the fall of 1825 was variously blamed on loggers burning slash piles, settlers using fire to clear farmland, and federal agents setting fire to the hay cut by illegal loggers as fodder for their draft animals, in part because such activities were known causes of forest fires at the time. By 2021, 75% of wildfires in Oregon and Washington state were determined to be human-caused, up from the previous 10-year average of 64 percent. Arson is a disturbing subset of human-caused wildland fires, and the deliberate intent that defines these fires can be difficult to detect and hard to prove. However, records show that arson was a serious issue in several southern U.S. states as early as the 1950s, when 35% to 50% of forest fires were judged to have been started deliberately. More recently, one study has determined that about 86% of all fires in California since the 1990s have been caused by human activity. Other studies put that number as high as 95%, with perhaps 21% of these due to arson. Because it takes so long for the judicial system to sort accidental fires from intentional ones, it will be years before we have any reliable data on whether arson fires have increased over the past decade. Nevertheless, research has shown that fires started by people are more ecologically destructive than naturally caused fires triggered by lightning, because they are more likely to start on open, less-forested landscapes and on very dry days with gusty winds, which increase a fire’s intensity and ability to spread quickly. Some advocates have claimed that increased numbers of pest-killed trees caused by human-caused global warming have intensified recent fires, but it appears that purposeful changes in human behavior have been largely responsible for worsening infestations. Recent epidemics of forest pests—including the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae); Western pine beetle (Dendroctonus brevicomis); spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis); and Western spruce budworm (Choristoneura feemani)—have devastated large woodland tracts across the contiguous U.S. over the past 40 years, but all of the evidence points to intentional shifts in forestry and wildfire-suppression practices as primary causal factors, and reduced timber harvests and increased fire suppression as having had the greatest impact on wildfire behavior since 1980. Historical context is critical here, as are the often-ignored potential for other human causes and the beneficial effects of human innovation. Extreme weather conditions with devastating effect driven in part by completely natural, long-term climate cycles, short-term El Niño Southern Oscillation events, and decadal-level cycles in solar radiation—are nothing new to U.S. ecosystems. Evidence from the Western U.S. shows that reduced logging and increased fire suppression are largely responsible for the apparent increase in wildfire severity. Susan Crockford is a zoologist and evolutionary biologist with Pacific Identifications Inc. This essay is excerpted from her Heritage Foundation special report, “Defying Predictions: How Increased CO2 and Innovation Are Mitigating Effects of Drought on U.S. Crops and Forest Productivity,” published in November. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Climate Change Isn’t Responsible for Disastrous Wildfires appeared first on The Daily Signal.

US Steel Sale and Future in Limbo After Biden Block

The hullabaloo surrounding “birthright citizenship” is certain to escalate as the Trump administration begins preparing to carry out mass deportations. Mark Levin says that the notion of birthright citizenship — the idea that if you’re born in the United States, you’re a citizen — is a sham and always has been. Many people believe that birthright citizenship is in our Constitution, but they are wrong. Democrats and the media claim it comes from the 14th Amendment specifically, but they’re lying. “It's not in the Constitution. ... It’s not in any of the legislative history for the 14th Amendment. ... It's not in the 1866 Civil Rights Act,” Levin explains. The 14th Amendment “was intended to ensure that black people were emancipated in every respect and citizens of the United States. It had nothing to do with immigration, legal or illegal,” he adds. Further, Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 of the Constitution states that “Congress shall have power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” “Congress has never passed a federal statute that confers birthright citizenship,” Levin explains. “So it's not in the Constitution, it's not in federal law, it's not in the legislative history, and yet it is being used.” Why? Because Democrats see birthright citizenship as a means to an end. “Birthright citizenship is the argument, is the position, is the policy the Democrat Party holds onto because they want monopoly power for all time, and they don't care if it's foreigners or not,” says Levin. To learn more, watch the clip above. Want more from Mark Levin?To enjoy more of "the Great One" — Mark Levin as you've never seen him before — subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.