Teddy Roosevelt believed in speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Donald Trump will never speak softly, or even politely, but he will soon pack the power inherent in presiding over the world’s number one producer of oil and gas.  read more »

Los Angeles city and regional planners are just as responsible for the Palisades, Eaton, and other fires that have burned in the past few days as if they had poured gasoline on the homes and lit the matches.  read more »

Is the US on the edge of a new fascist epoch? To listen to much of the media, progressive politicians and many academics, Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday will usher in a politics we have not seen since the days of Mussolini, Franco and, worst of all, Hitler.  read more »

After her election as mayor of Los Angeles in 2022, Karen Bass was a heroine of California’s Left. A former backer of Fidel Castro, she decisively defeated billionaire businessman Rick Caruso  read more »

From the start, California’s “landmark” climate law recognized that because global warming is a planetary wide phenomena , the state could only have “far-reaching” effects by “encouraging other states, the federal government, and other countries to act.” To achieve this goal, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and leaders, charged with crafting climate policy, could have chosen to preserve the state’s quality of life – the “California Dream” – while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving climate resiliency.  read more »

America’s universities may be a disgrace, but the deeper problems with our education system lie with grades K-12. Higher education still ranks as a U.S. strength that other countries might admire—but our grade schools might even be inadequate for poor, developing countries.  read more »

In 2005, Scientific American published an article saying that the hockey stick graph published a few years earlier by Michael Mann, an academic who now works at the University of Pennsylvania  read more »

Los Angeles authorities’ poor preparation for and lamentable response to the wildfires now devastating the city capture a broader problem – namely, the failure of governance  read more »