Free Republic

Los Angeles Democratic Mayor Karen Bass has faced a number of criticisms over her leadership amid the wildfires destroying large portions of the city. ** The move came after more than $17 million in cuts the previous year. If Bass did not want to spend money on fighting fires in a state which lives under a constant threat of such disasters, then the question of what the city funded instead must be raised. The budget resolution for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, which said on the front cover that the document was submitted by Bass herself before being modified and adopted...

Jack Parsons via Wikimedia Commons John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons’s life seems too improbable to be believed. But it’s all there in the biographies, Sex and Rockets and Strange Angel (the basis of a TV series of the same name), among other places, including a streaming series based on Strange Angel. Born in 1914, Parsons died in 1952 while working on an explosive special effect for a movie in his home laboratory. The explosion has been called an accident, a suicide, or an assassination, depending on the source. An obituary in the Pasadena Independent described Parsons as “a down-to-earth explosives...