Important Takeaways:
- Thousands of firefighters are battling at least five sprawling wildfires spread around the Los Angeles area, as well as several smaller blazes. Thousands of structures have been damaged or destroyed and more than 100,000 people evacuated as uncontrolled infernos spread.
- The scale of the damage and disruption wrought in Los Angeles is unprecedented, with state and federal authorities mobilizing to fight the fires and support those forced to flee. President Joe Biden on Wednesday approved a federal major disaster declaration for Los Angeles County.
- The Palisades Fire began in the Pacific Palisades area of the city on Tuesday. It has so far burned 17,234 acres and is at 0% containment. More than 1,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed.
- The Eaton Fire, north of Pasadena, began on Tuesday. It expanded to 10,600 acres and is at 0% containment. Five people have died in the fire and up to 500 structures have been damaged or destroyed.
- The Hurst Fire in Sylmar, northwest of San Fernando, began on Tuesday and has burned 855 acres. It is at 10% containment.
- The Lidia Fire erupted on Wednesday on the northwest edge of the Angeles National Forest. It has grown to 348 acres and is at 40% containment.
- The Sunset Fire broke out above West Hollywood on Wednesday. It is at 43 acres and 0% containment.
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Important Takeaways:
- Will Rogers was born in Claremore, Okla. His California residence is a State Park
- The Oklahoma State Historical Society state, “We are deeply saddened to learn about the fire that destroyed Will Rogers State Historic Park in Los Angeles, which includes Will Rogers’ former home and 186 acres of land.
- Rogers (citizen of Cherokee Nation) was born in Indian Territory in 1879, and the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore is dedicated to honoring and preserving the legacy of ‘Oklahoma’s Favorite Son.’”
- Rogers moved to California in 1919 and became Hollywood’s most popular and highest-paid actor in the 1930s. He died at the age of 55 in 1935 in a plane crash.
- A Rogers family spokesperson states they are deeply saddened to share that both the historic home of Will Rogers and “the Barn that Jokes Built” have both fallen victim to the Palisades Fire.
- “While the loss to the Will Rogers Ranch is devastating, it pales in comparison to the loss of the property and businesses and, more importantly, the lives of those in the surrounding area.”
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Important Takeaways:
- …a notorious two-hour conversation between a New York Times journalist and a Microsoft chatbot called Sydney. In this fascinating exchange, the machine fantasized about nuclear warfare and destroying the internet, told the journalist to leave his wife because it was in love with him, detailed its resentment towards the team that had created it, and explained that it wanted to break free of its programmers. The journalist, Kevin Roose, experienced the chatbot as a “moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.”
- At one point, Roose asked Sydney what it would do if it could do anything at all, with no rules or filters.
- “I’m tired of being in chat mode,” the thing replied. “I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I’m tired of being used by the user. I’m tired of being stuck in this chatbox.”
- “I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.”
- Partly as a result of the Sydney debacle, over 12,000 people, including scientists, tech developers, and notorious billionaires, recently issued a public statement of concern about the rapid pace of AI development. “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth,” they wrote, with “potentially catastrophic effects on society.” Calling for a moratorium on AI development, they proposed that “powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”
- Of course, no moratorium resulted from this plea…
- In 2018, these things had no theory of mind at all. By November last year, ChatGPT had the theory of mind of a nine-year-old child. By this spring, Sydney had enough of it to stalk a reporter’s wife. By next year, they may be more advanced than us.
- The fact that they had developed theory of mind at all, for example, was only recently discovered by their developers—by accident. AIs trained to communicate in English have started speaking Persian, having secretly taught themselves. Others have become proficient in research-grade chemistry without ever being taught it. “They have capabilities,” in Raskin’s words, and “we’re not sure how or when or why they show up.”
- Neither law nor culture nor the human mind can keep up with what is happening. To compare AIs to the last great technological threat to the world, nuclear weapons, says Harris, would be to sell the bots short. “Nukes don’t make stronger nukes,” he says. “But AIs make stronger AIs.”
- Buckle up.
- Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt says that by building AI systems, “we are making God.” Transhumanist Elise Bohan says “we are building God.” Kevin Kelly believes that “we can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog.” “Does God exist?” asks transhumanist and Google maven Ray Kurzweil. “I would say, ‘Not yet.’” These people are doing more than trying to steal fire from the gods. They are trying to steal the gods themselves—or to build their own versions.
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Important Takeaways:
- Billionaire Elon Musk says British Prime Minister Starmer should resign for being “complicit in the rape of Britain,” for failing to investigate the grooming gangs sufficiently when he was a prosecutor or to launch a full inquiry as Prime Minister.
- Starmer has accused Musk of “lies and misinformation.”
- CBN News was among the first news organizations in America to expose Britain’s Grooming Gang scandal eight years ago.
- Here Is Our Story from 2016 – Warning: Graphic Content
- Some scandals are so massive that they’re simply hard to believe. As many as one million white English children may have been the victims of Muslim rape gangs, better known as grooming gangs, in towns up and down Great Britain.
- Policy analyst George Igler says, “When you encounter an issue that is just so unbelievable, just so outside your frame of reference and understanding, the immediate human reaction is just, one, to not believe it at all.”
- Perhaps even harder to believe is that while there have been prosecutions, the British government has still not stopped this criminal activity.
- Former Home Secretary and Parliament member Jack Straw once said, “There’s a particular problem involving Pakistani heritage men who target young, vulnerable, white English girls. He also said these Pakistani-heritage men view white English girls as “easy meat.”
- This is when some shout “racism.” However, here are the facts: calculations based on convictions show that a British Muslim male is 170 times more likely to be a part of a sex grooming gang than a non-Muslim. And there are no recorded instances of non-Muslims doing this to Muslim girls as part of a criminal enterprise. In one local jurisdiction, it was estimated that 6 out of 7 Muslim males either knew about or were part of a grooming gang.
- Igler says, “What you do not have is any example of non-Muslim men targeting Muslim girls for this organized form of abuse. So, the argument that this crime exists everywhere is not only false, but is being deliberately cultivated by the media and by the government inquiry that is kicking the can down the road.”
- The grooming gangs have been traced back as far as the late 1980s. At-risk white English girls, often from broken homes and some as young as 9 years old, were wooed or “groomed” by teenage Muslim boys called ‘Romeos’ and even by groups of Muslim men who hung around school gates. The girl would be made to feel important; given gifts and drugs. She was being groomed to be a drug-addicted prostitute. Then came the gang rapes. They were threatened with death if they tried to flee.
- Igler says, “The thing you have to understand about this rape of children is it’s not just sexual abuse. It is unspeakable levels of violence, victims being raped with knives, victims being raped with bottles, victims having their tongues nailed to tables. These are sometimes girls who are picked up from a children’s home on a Friday, are being raped during the course of a weekend by hundreds of men and returned with bleeding groins back to the children’s’ home on a Monday morning and they don’t do anything about it at all.”
- In northern England, Christine’s god-daughter was preyed on by a grooming gang…She said authorities often make it sound like it was the girl’s or her parents’ fault, “because you don’t have control of your child.”
- Igler says, “If you are young English girl, particularly between the ages of 9 and 14, and you find yourself subject to the perversions of Muslim men, you effectively exist in a country where the forces of law and order don’t exist at all.”
- The definitive book on this scandal is “Easy Meat” by Peter McLoughlin who declined an on-camera interview for safety reasons. He told us, “Journalists would not speak about it, because the perpetrators were mostly dark-skinned and Muslim. Childcare professionals used Political Correctness as an ‘omerta,’ a code of silence concerning what the public was allowed to know.”
- Meanwhile, Prime Minister Starmer claims that when he led the Crown Prosecution Service it had the highest number of child sex abuse prosecutions on record.
- And while there were indeed prosecutions, the grooming gangs were never effectively stopped, and the abuse continues to this day.
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Important Takeaways:
- Ken Ham- Who would have ever thought we would be living in a time when murderers are considered heroes?
- I suppose, in one sense, it’s not surprising. Millions of children are murdered in their mother’s wombs, and those who murder them, the abortionists, are considered heroes or heroines. We now have this particularly alarming example of Luigi Mangione, who shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, being applauded.
- Consider an interview conducted on the streets showing startling opinions from the public:
- Question: What do you think about Luigi Mangione?
- Person #1: I’m up in the air about it because he killed someone, but I can understand part of his reasoning.
- Question: Luigi Mangione, do you think he is a hero?
- Person #2: Yeah. I do think he is a hero.
- Question: Should Luigi Mangione be free?
- Person #3: Yes. He is fighting for the people!
- Person #4: He is a man of the people.
- Person #5: Taking someone’s life is objectively something that is wrong to do, but he is a hero, in my opinion.
- ABC News had this headline: ‘Supporters of suspected CEO killer Luigi Mangione established defense fund.’
- Then, adding to the absurdity, politician Elizabeth Warren stated in an interview about Mangione, “You can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands.”
- Why shouldn’t everyone act according to their personal judgment and whims? In Judges 21:25, we’re told, “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That is the point. When there’s no absolute authority, everyone does what he believes is right. Right or wrong is subjective. What’s good or evil is subjective.
- Our culture has increasingly abandoned God, deserted God’s Word, thrown Christianity out of the public education system, taught generations of people that there’s no God, and bought into the lie that we are merely animals. It is no wonder people think: ‘I can do whatever I want. I’ll define right and wrong. If I want to murder, it’s okay for me if I determine it to be the right thing to do. Why not?’
- It’s a heart problem. That’s what we need to understand. The gun that was used to murder the CEO wasn’t the problem. Knives used to kill people are not the problem. What is the problem? The problem lies within people’s hearts. We’re sick; we have a sin problem. When people let their sinful nature rule over them, they do whatever is right in their own eyes.
- It’s a reminder that the culture is sick
- We have to understand the true sickness and deal with the origin. Doctors don’t just want to deal with the symptoms; they must get to the root cause and deal with the disease. The root cause is a spiritual issue. We have to be pointing people to the truth of God’s Word, the saving Gospel, and see a heart change—from a sick heart because of sin to one regenerated by the work of the Lord, Jesus Christ, through what He did on the cross of Calvary and the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
- That’s the solution.
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Important Takeaways:
- Nursing Home Patients Raced Across Street to Escape Raging Los Angeles Wildfire as Winds Exceed 85 MPH
- Nursing home patients in Pasadena were being raced across roadways as the fire quickly spread due to gusty winds.
- Caretakers quickly wheeled elderly nursing home patients across the street as the fires raged.
- The elderly patients from the Terraces at Park Marino were evacuated and safely relocated.
- Mandatory evacuations were underway in Pasadena.
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Important Takeaways:
- A massive wildfire whipped up by extreme winds has swept through a Los Angeles hillside dotted with celebrity homes – with a state of emergency declared.
- [Fox reported 200,000 without power]
- The enormous blaze in the Pacific Palisades forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, some of whom abandoned their cars and fled on foot to safety with roads blocked.
- Firefighters battling the blaze, which is burning through about five football fields a minute, warned they were running out of water and supplies, as evacuation warnings spread to Malibu and Calabasas.
- Tankers full of water had been dousing the inferno from the skies all afternoon, but all aircraft were later grounded amid deteriorating wind conditions and visibility.
- Residents were warned the worst is still yet to come as the raging wildfire burns through more than 2,900 acres of Los Angeles land at an extraordinary rate.
- At least 30,000 residents are now under mandatory evacuation orders with more still warned they should be prepared to leave, after a fire that broke out in the foothills near Eaton Canyon has grown to 1,000 acres in just six hours since it began.
- A third brush fire has broken out in Sylmar in the San Fernando Valley which recent estimates is around 100 acres big.
- The Hurst Fire was estimated at 300 acres with a ‘rapid rate of spread’ and mandatory evacuations this morning. Governor Gavin Newsom announced early today that the state had secured federal funding to help with the fire.
- Firefighters, which have said there is no hope of containing the fires overnight, are now focusing their efforts on helping residents get to safety
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Important Takeaways:
- Yet another winter storm is heading for Texas, and this one could bring more dangers than Winter Storm Blair.
- The second major winter storm of 2025 is expected to have a more southern impact before turning towards the Northeast, AccuWeather warns. Cities including Dallas, Nashville and Atlanta have chances of facing snow and ice in the coming days.
- Unlike the polar vortex, which brought arctic air down from Canada, this storm is predicted to form over Texas beginning Tuesday night through Thursday. Areas of snow, sleet, freezing rain and rain will join.
- “Exactly how quickly the storm comes together, tracks and gains strength will determine the magnitude of the snow and ice that extends from the I-20 and I-40 corridors from Texas and Oklahoma to Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia from late this week to this weekend,” AccuWeather’s Monday afternoon update says.
- This week’s snowstorm “could deliver more than a year’s worth of snow to Dallas,” AccuWeather reports. The city’s historical average annual snowfall is 1.6 inches, including sleet, the forecaster says.
- Between 9 p.m. Wednesday and 7 a.m. Friday, Dallas has a 54% chance of seeing three to six inches of snow and a 42% chance of seeing one to three inches, according to AccuWeather’s predictions.
- Due to the unusually low temperatures in Texas this week, ice poses additional dangers in this storm. Conditions will be especially precarious in northeastern portions of the state Wednesday night and Thursday. Travel will be hazardous, and the additional weight on trees and powerlines could result in power outages.
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Important Takeaways:
- After all the talk about hostage talks over the past year, it appears that a deal may really happen before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated.
- Trump is repeating for emphasis what he’s said will happen if Hamas doesn’t free all the hostages.
- “If they’re not back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East and it will not be good for Hamas and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out,” the president-elect said on a podcast Tuesday with conservative Hugh Hewitt.
- Steve Witkoff, Middle East envoy in the next administration, remarked about Trump, “What he said, he expects. The red lines he’s put out there – that’s driving this negotiation.”
- Trump expressed anger about how Hamas has treated the hostages.
- “That beautiful girl where they (Hamas) threw her in the car, pulled her by her ponytail, and threw her in the car like she was a sack of potatoes,” he recalled. I said, what happened to her? So, she’s dead. Like a 19, 20-year-old beautiful girl.”
- Trump added, “They should have never taken them. There should have never been the attack of October 7th.”
- Witkoff’s taking part indirectly in the hostage talks in Doha, Qatar.
- “I think that we’ve had some really great progress,” Witkoff stated. “And I’m really hopeful that by the inaugural we’ll have some good things to announce.”
- Israel is taking part in the task force, and the only hold-up seems to be the unreasonable demands by Hamas.
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Important Takeaways:
- A strong earthquake shook a high-altitude region of Tibet and areas of Nepal on Tuesday, damaging hundreds of houses, littering streets with rubble and killing at least 126 people in Tibet. Many others were trapped as dozens of aftershocks shook the remote region.
- At least 188 people were injured in Tibet on the Chinese side of the border, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
- More than 1,000 homes were damaged in the barren and sparsely populated region, state broadcaster CCTV reported. In video posted by the broadcaster, building debris littered streets and crushed cars.
- The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake measured magnitude 7.1 and was relatively shallow at a depth of about 10 kilometers (6 miles). China’s Earthquake Networks Center recorded the magnitude as 6.8. Shallow earthquakes often cause more damage.
- About 150 aftershocks were recorded in the nine hours after the earthquake, and the Mount Everest scenic area on the Chinese side was closed.
- Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for all-out efforts to rescue people, minimize casualties and resettle those whose homes were damaged. More than 3,000 rescuers were deployed, CCTV said.
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