Penna Dexter
Who or what is to blame for the scale of the wildfires that destroyed massive swaths of Los Angeles this winter?  Some politicians point to climate change and fossil fuels. Two California legislators have filed a bill to allow insurers and homeowners impacted by the fires to sue oil companies for their losses.
Lawmakers hope to cover damages the state is liable for through its underfunded insurance, the last resort for millions of Californians as state-imposed price controls have driven private insurers out of the state.
Tom McClintock, 8-term member of Congress from California, says climate change is not the culprit here. It’s the state’s “environmental and social policies.” In a Wall Street Journal, op ed, Rep. McClintock says California’s once-competent fire management policies and infrastructure, explain “why fires became less threatening throughout most of the 20thcentury.”  He points to federal environmental legislation, first passed in the 70’s, which has been taken to extremes in California. Consequently, forest thinning projects cost millions and take an average of 5.3 years to be approved. Brush suppression is made more difficult.  Cattle grazing “has largely been regulated out of use.” And “leftist officials neglected the region’s basic water infrastructure” in favor of wind and solar spending.
The 21st–century result: devastating loss of forests and homes. There are fixes for aging water lines, pumping systems, water tanks, and even reservoirs. But they have mostly not been implemented. National Review’s Noah Rothman describes a “bombshell” report, published in the Los Angeles Times, which could help Angelinos hold leaders to account “for their maladministration.” This review of thousands of pages of state, county and city records “reveals how thoroughly officials in Southern California dropped the ball when it came to fire management.” But, officials and the press have mainly tried “to persuade the public that the details revealed in this report amount to “misinformation.”
Our country has bold new leaders. Californians should find some. 

Kerby Anderson
Eight months ago, I wrote about the book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, written by Victor Davis Hanson. In his book, he provides four historical examples: the city-state of Thebes, ancient Carthage, Byzantine Constantinople, and Aztec Tenochtitlan. The leaders believed their illustrious pasts would be enough to prevent their destruction. Alexander the Great, Roman Scipio, Muslim Mehmet, and the Spanish conquistador Cortés proved them wrong.
The book is a warning to us today, but I also realize that few people will read his book. That is why I would encourage you to watch his five-minute video summary produced by Hillsdale College, just click “Watch More.”
He says his book “is about the existential destruction of the losing side in a war. This is very rare in history. It doesn’t happen very often. But when it does, it should enlighten us how it does, why it does, and can it happen again?”
He explains that he wrote his book “not just as a historical journey to document the rare cases of a targeted nation being completely destroyed, but as a warning that human nature doesn’t change.” We naively assumed that globalization would create a common humanity and bring an end to global conflict. Instead, he “noticed that there were more and more existential threats coming from autocratic regimes.”
He wants us to be aware that what happened in the past could happen in the future. We need to learn from the past and protect ourselves in the future. As I mentioned in a previous commentary, the world needs a strong America so that we can prevent “the end of everything.”