Famous people are the only people that live in Southern California. Actually, that's not true, but all these stories we're hearing of celebrities fending off flames during this week's massive SoCal firestorm make it seem that way.

We heard earlier that our favorite faux-reality couple, Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, barely escaped the Malibu inferno with their home intact.

"Spencer was literally down there putting out the fire and I was screaming at him 'Come back here, the firemen are coming!'" Heidi told Ryan Seacrest on his morning radio show yesterday.

Sean Penn wasn't so lucky. Acres of land on his estate and 2 trailers were consumed in flames on Sunday as the Malibu blaze was fanned by Southern California's infamous Santa Ana winds.   more »

It is vitally important that those of us on the political left have a firmer grasp of the historical context in the rise of ‘humanitarian’ interventions worldwide.

Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers - above all, the United States - in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks.

The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq.

Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention-discovering new “Hitlers” as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.   more »

Do you think that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms, or do you think they have specific geopolitical objectives?

Well, I believe that terrorism is a tool that has been utilized throughout history to achieve certain objectives. Some have been ideological, others territorial.

There are personality-driven terroristic objectives. The bottom line is, you can't lump all terrorists together. And I think we've got to do a much better job of clarifying what are the motivations, the raisons d'être of terrorists.

I mean, what the Tamil Tigers are fighting for in Sri Lanka, or the Basque separatists in Spain, or the insurgents in al-Anbar province may only be connected by tactics.

They may not share all that much in terms of what is the philosophical or ideological underpinning.   more »

The escalation of American threats against Iran is unwise. It is grossly premature. It is dangerous, as it greatly increases the likelihood of accidental escalation into a preventable war.

It is alarmingly ill-timed, as an isolated United States wages simultaneous ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both conflicts are going badly. And it is diplomatically counterproductive. Congress and U.S. opinion leaders should slam on the brakes -- if they can.

So why rattle the sabers now, at a moment of U.S. military weakness? In 1969, with the Vietnam War going badly, President Nixon devised a plan to spook the Soviets and the North Vietnamese into making concessions by making them think that he was just crazy enough to use nuclear weapons.

Nixon called it the 'madman theory.'

There is speculation that the Bush administration could be trying out its version of the madman gambit by advertising Cheney's alleged desire to bomb Iranian nuclear sites and Revolutionary Guard targets, in hopes of scaring Tehran into submission.   more »

California's Native Americans regularly set fire to the hills above what is now Los Angeles to renew the fresh vegetation they depended on, to clear the land for better hunting and to reduce the chances of being ambushed by enemies in chaparral-cloaked canyons.

Once the fires were started, they sat back and watched them burn toward the sea.

If Cabrillo had approached the Southern California coast this week, he would have seen the same kinds of plumes of smoke, but he would have found that the current inhabitants have a very different attitude toward fire.

When the Spanish took California from its native inhabitants, they at first tried to end the practice of setting land-clearing fires. But eventually they, as well as the Mexican and American ranchers who succeeded them, found that fire filled a useful and in fact necessary role in the oak savannas and on the brushy hillsides.   more »