California – Page 4 – Blazingcatfur

California Needs a Reality Check

Gavin Newsom’s plans for offshore wind energy are more fantasy than strategy.

Earlier this year, after the federal government leased 583 square miles of deep-ocean waters off the coast of California for offshore wind farms, California governor Gavin Newsom said that “offshore wind energy has gone from a distant pipedream to a burgeoning reality.” Maybe—but it’s hard to imagine an energy project that is costlier, riskier, or less practical.

When completed, the project is set to deliver 4.5 gigawatts of electricity to the California grid. But because even the steadiest offshore winds blow only intermittently, the average production of the turbines will be around 1.8 gigawatts—just 5 percent of California’s current electricity consumption. If California goes all-electric, as state regulators insist it must, these wind farms will represent, at best, 2 percent of the electricity the state will require. “California is pinning a lot of hopes on an industry that scarcely exists today,” notes an MIT Technology Review article.

by Blazingcatfur•July 21, 2023July 20, 2023•0•California, Green-Scam

The California militia ready for civil war

In Shasta, libertarian cowboys control the county

Redding, the capital of Shasta County in the far north of California, spreads out in thin strips of suburbia, its freeways reaching up into mountainous upcountry. Here, 19th-century gold-mining settlements crouch in the valleys among snow-ridged glaciers and lines of pine trees ravaged by the yearly forest fires. Looming over all of this is Mount Shasta, a huge volcano associated with Native American legends, New Age cults, and purported UFO sightings.

by Blazingcatfur•June 27, 2023June 26, 2023•0•California

California State Senator Urges Families to Flee the State

His warning comes as the California house passes a bill that strips rights from parents.

The attack on children continues as California state Sen. Scott Wiener sponsored two bills in the state Legislature that endanger minors and strip rights away from parents, handing them over to the state.

AB 665 and 957 each concern the rights of parents in relation to children, especially children questioning their sexual identity. AB 665 is waiting to pass the senate. AB 957 has already been signed into law.

Attorney Erin Friday calls AB 665 “state-sanctioned kidnapping” and says that under Ab 957 parents could be guilty of “child abuse” for refusing to affirm the child’s gender identity.

by Blazingcatfur•June 26, 2023June 26, 2023•0•California

Gavin Newsom’s claim there is no California exodus, debunked

In an interview with Sean Hannity last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) claimed the idea of an exodus from California is a myth. But the data tell a far different story.

Let’s start with the basics: Between April 2020 and July 2022, California’s population decreased by more than 500,000 people. And when considering net domestic migration, 700,000 more people moved out of California than moved in during that period.

by Blazingcatfur•June 19, 2023June 19, 2023•0•California

Secession is a threat Californians should take seriously

The state’s restive interior is becoming a more influential force

At the height of the anti-Trump hysteria after 2016, Democrats in California talked often about “Calexit”, which would allow the Golden State to secede and, no doubt, form an ideal Ecotopia of its own. Now that the Democrats are in power in Washington and Sacramento, there are new calls to break up the Golden State, this time from more conservative regions in the state’s interior.

by Blazingcatfur•June 18, 2023June 17, 2023•0•California

Divesting from Big Oil Is an Empty Gesture

California lawmakers want the state’s public pensions to get rid of fossil fuel stocks, claiming that will help save the planet. Who are they trying to kid?

Eleven years ago, the prominent climate activist Bill McKibben wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine in which he acknowledged that decades of effort to slow global warming had been largely ineffective, and proposed a new tactic: divestment.

Taking his inspiration from the divestment campaign that preceded the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, McKibben called on institutions that managed money to sell their shares in fossil fuel companies. He quoted Bob Massie, an investor who had been active in the anti-apartheid campaign, as saying, “Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective.” McKibben soon founded a grassroots organization, 350.org, that made fossil fuel divestment one of its primary goals.

by Blazingcatfur•June 7, 2023June 7, 2023•0•California, Green-Scam

‘Literally Impossible’: Trucking Companies Brace for California’s Electric Mandate

Logistics companies are scrambling to meet California’s upcoming 2024 mandate that all trucks servicing ports, railyards, and distribution centers in the state be zero-emission vehicles, with experts questioning limited access to charging stations and the viability of switching from diesel to electric fleets.

Availability of electric semi-trucks is a concern, as is the price of the vehicles, the number of miles they can go on a charge, and the cost of maintenance and replacement parts, all of which currently remain unknown variables, according to industry experts.

Insanity, it’s as if California’s government lives in some kind of altered reality.

by Blazingcatfur•June 6, 2023June 5, 2023•0•"EV's - Electric Vehicles", California, Green-Scam

Why are teachers striking over slavery?

California’s unions prioritise progressivism over fair pay

In 2019, my children’s teachers went on strike for higher pay, and I supported it, which was a bit of a surprise. I’d always thought public-sector unions a mockery of the idea of organised labour — not workers bargaining for a larger share of the value they create, but bureaucrats extracting rents from taxpayers, via politicians. On top of this, I’d trained to be an English teacher. I saw up close the pathetic scholarship and inane doctrines that inform teacher education in American universities. To me, unionised teachers were a convergence of these two unhealthy forces.

With luck it all crumbles into the sea.

by Blazingcatfur•June 4, 2023June 3, 2023•0•"Peak Woke", California, Education K-12, WTF?

The Encampment State

Billions in spending have failed to solve California’s massive—and worsening—homelessness crisis.

Ask the average Californian his take on homelessness, and he’ll say that it’s gotten much worse. Back in the early 2000s, a visitor to Los Angeles’s Skid Row or San Francisco’s Tenderloin would have witnessed scenes of misery that seemed scarcely capable of further deterioration. Intense reaction against street conditions back then gave rise, in many California cities, to campaigns to end homelessness, prompting billions in new spending. But no California city ended homelessness; the average Californian’s impression is correct. According to the best data available, homelessness in California grew during the 2010s and is still growing.

It has also spread.

by Blazingcatfur•May 21, 2023May 21, 2023•0•"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", California

A lament for the Los Angeles we lost — and why I’m off

As much trash as I’ve talked about this city, this state, it’s the closest thing to home I’ve had

Like so many wannabe actors before me, I came to this gritty city with big dreams of “making it” in Tinseltown. I thought I wanted to be an actress until I got here and realized that driving around begging casting directors for approval wasn’t for me. Nonetheless, I stayed in Los Angeles — and over the last sixteen years, this big, messy, giant suburban sprawl has become a part of me.

My husband and I have agonized over the decision of whether to stay or go. Making a cost-benefit analysis — like whether to stay near family in perfect weather or go where we can provide a better quality of life for our daughter in a place with unbearable heat — has felt like trying to solve an impossible math equation. You can’t put a price on either of those things — but as Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

by Blazingcatfur•April 22, 2023April 22, 2023•0•"Progressive Paradise", California

Predator’s Paradise

New laws are making California a haven for human trafficking.

On a Saturday night in South Los Angeles, cars pull up and idle along the side streets of Figueroa, high beams ablaze, so that the drivers can get a good look at “the girls.” The women stand three astride in the middle of the street, in pasties and G-string bikinis under fishnet dresses. Draped over their shoulders are unzipped coats; even in temperate L.A., the night’s January chill is biting. In seven-inch Lucite heels, they teeter toward the driver of each car the way you might walk barefoot across gravel. Less than a block away, their pimps keep company on a sidewalk corner, in hoodies and loose jeans, watching their quarry, awaiting the payout. Absent is the one thing that might typically break up the party: a police car.

A surplus of bad ideas.

by Blazingcatfur•April 18, 2023April 18, 2023•0•California, Human Trafficking

California’s Cautionary Clean Energy

Despite their advocates’ urgent claims, renewable energy sources are still intermittent, unreliable, and far more expensive than advertised.

California’s headlong rush to replace its electricity grid with renewable energy has given the rest of the country a preview of the decarbonized future that Joe Biden and his revived Clean Power Plan envision for America. It isn’t pretty.

Before supply-chain woes and federal stimulus goosed inflation, California’s cost of living already ranked second highest in the nation. Enthusiastic efforts to rely more heavily on wind and solar power—touted as “cheap” sources of clean energy—have only made the state more expensive.

by Blazingcatfur•April 16, 2023April 16, 2023•0•California, Green-Scam

A note from inside Gulag California

If it weren’t so serious, Gavin Newsom’s current assault on red states would be hilarious. What he is peddling as “democracy” is totalitarianism in its worst form. What’s frightening is that there are millions of voters throughout America who will lap up what he’s selling.

by Blazingcatfur•April 14, 2023April 13, 2023•0•"Progressive Paradise", California

California exodus as 500,000 people flee Golden State in two years since the start of the pandemic as crime-ridden San Francisco and Lassen counties see biggest population drop

California has seen a population decline of more than 1 percent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an estimated 500,000 people leaving between April 2020 and July 2022.

In the state where annual wildfires and treacherous mudslides threaten homes, the population dipped by slightly more than 508,000 since 2020.

San Francisco and Lassen counties experienced the largest population declines, at 7.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively.

by Blazingcatfur•April 1, 2023April 1, 2023•0•California

Wealthy Californians Head for Greener Pastures With Lower Taxes

California’s leaders refuse to recognize that their own policies are causing the continued exodus of poor and rich alike.

California lost 500,000 people between 2020 and 2022, which is nearly the equivalent of the entire population of Sacramento, the state’s sixth-largest city. Actually, California didn’t lose these people. We know where they went. People die and give birth, and immigrants still move here, although in fewer numbers than in the past. Beyond that, hundreds of thousands of Californians have picked up stakes and moved to other states.

by Blazingcatfur•March 31, 2023March 30, 2023•0•California