Weekend Reads 11/17/18

Kim Kardashian's Private Firefighters Expose America’s Fault Lines

Since 1968, when the Forest Service started taking a more naturalistic approach to letting wildfires burn, it has also cut full-time fire staff. But the fires—driven by climate change and an expansion of that same wildland-urban interface—have grown more destructive. The Camp Fire has killed more people and destroyed more buildings than any before it. And two months before the fire started, CalFire had already exhausted $431 million of its $443 million budget fighting earlier devastating fires.

Trump’s Constantly Backfiring Loyalty Tests

Such overt and public demands for loyalty have left Trump particularly vulnerable to a familiar kind of shady operator, one who sucks up to the boss on the way in, does the job poorly once they’re in the job, and then trashes everyone on the way out. Perhaps the best people — and the ones with the keenest sense of professionalism — aren’t going to put on a grand show of loyalty. Perhaps allowing a bit more dissension in the ranks and honest constructive criticism would prevent this sort of volcanic eruption of pent-up resentment once these people turn in their White House passes.

Does Religious Freedom Extend to Child Endangerment? It’s Not as Simple as It Seems

But let me also repeat: government claims of child endangerment may be inflated. Or, they may lead to even greater endangerment, such as the 1993 federal assault on the Branch Davidians. In that event, 22 children were killed as they huddled with their parents in an enclosed room to escape the CS gas injected into the building by U.S. government agents.

Climate activists to Nancy Pelosi: go big or we won’t go home

The resolution — supported by the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, two youth-led organizations pushing for a Green New Deal — has a number of interesting provisions, but two demands are central: that the committee be given a mandate to develop a Green New Deal that would decarbonize the US economy, and that no members be appointed who accept donations from the fossil fuel industry.