California Energy Problems

When something like the North Complex Fire breaks out in California, authorities assume that they are going to notify people via all kinds of modern communications. But there is a problem with that assumption. Power outages hamper evacuation warnings and distance learning in wildfire-torn California

PG&E turned out the power to keep power lines from starting even more fires. And in some of these areas, cellphone coverage isn’t too good. And internet goes away without electric power. Even if you have a generator, chances are your ISP’s entire network doesn’t have redundant power. And you wondered why the old copper telephone lines had their own power source.

Mays scoured the Butte County Sheriff and California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) websites as best she could with her limited reception. “It was two hours past the evacuation order before I could even see the [evacuation] map on my phone,” Mays told NBC News.

Now it seems like she got out Okay, but in the case of the Camp Fire, two years ago, waiting two hours would have been a death sentence. Probably.

Now most of the cellphone towers around me have diesel backup generators, well, some of them do anyway, but they probably only have 3 or 4 days of diesel. Natural gas not being available. Where I am sitting right now, I often can’t make or recieve a cellphone call, and I don’t try to surf the web via 3G, because I finally have decent internet service at this location. One of the reasons that I have an old-style phone, not real-old-style, is to be sure that I can dial 911 in an emergency. The county recently announced that it can accept text messages to 911, though they prefer that you call. (They’re not QUITE ready for 1997.)

The moral of the story is, don’t rely on other people to make decisions for you, especially when

1. Your life may depend on the actions you take, or don’t take, and
2. You can’t reach those people to know what they are telling you anyway.

So How Would This Have Ended If She Was NOT Armed?

The Left would prefer that she was raped or murdered, than that she had the means to defend herself. Homeowner fires warning shot; deputies arrest attempted burglary suspect

“The suspect allegedly made entry into her home,” said Shirley Miller, spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Station. “The victim went into a room of her house, and it sounds like the suspect made entry into the room where the victim was at.”

The suspect reportedly was unarmed, but the victim was not, Miller noted, citing a report taken at the scene.

When cops arrived the would-be bad-guy was lying on the front lawn. Probably with someone pointing a gun at him. Cops show up and arrest him.

California’s Electric Grid Is On the Brink

What happens when you bet heavily on unreliable power sources? California’s Electric Grid Is Near Collapse – California Globe

But California politicians and appointed agency officials, under pressure from radical environmental organizations and lobbyists, decided to ignore the energy producing natural resources, and instead move to an all-electric grid, and the only approved “renewable energy:” solar and wind energy.

A meteorologist friend, Anthony Watts, said Tuesday, “we are on the cusp of a massive failure of the electricity grid in California.”

Click thru for the ugly truth. Renewable energy doesn’t work the way it is advertised.

Self-defense in the People’s Republic of California

He probably thought no one was armed in the Deep Blue state. Homeowner shoots burglar during attempted home invasion in Southwest Bakersfield.

When police arrived, they found a man trying to break into a residence but the suspected burglar was shot multiple times by the homeowner. Police say the suspected burglar was taken to the hospital with moderate, but non-life threatening injuries.

The investigation is ongoing, and while self-defense is a human-right, I don’t think I would count on the prosecutors in California to recognize it as a legal right.

The Power Grid is Failing in California

Green energy. Not so green, and there is a distinct lack of energy. California’s Green Blackouts.

Millions of Californians have lost power in recent days amid a brutal heat wave, and state regulators warn of more outages in the days and perhaps years to come. Welcome to California’s green new normal, a harbinger of a fossil-free world.

And it is only going to get worse. That is the position of the Public Utilities Commission, not just my take.

California’s Independent System Operator (Caiso) has been warning for years that the state’s increasing dependence on intermittent renewables, especially solar, is making it harder to ensure reliable power. Renewables currently make up about 36% of California’s electric generation, and Democrats have set a 60% mandate for 2030 and 100% for 2045.

Who knew that cloud cover could be a problem for solar power, or that weak winds could impact wind energy? Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together.

Hat tip to Moonbattery.

News Flash: A Politician Is Lying

Governor Newsom wouldn’t LIE to the people of California, would he? Gov. Gavin Newsom didn’t take promised pay cut after slashing state workers’ wages.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom failed to take a promised pay cut after slashing state workers’ wages has reportedly failed to take the ten percent pay cut he promised to give himself after ordering reductions in state workers’ salaries due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Newsom had pledged to reduce his governor’s salary by the same amount he was slashing salaries of state workers — 10 percent — back in May when he laid out sweeping reductions in spending.

If you are expecting the self-appointed political-elite to

1. Live by the same rules they impose on you,
2. Keep promises, and not lie to the public,

then you are probably going to be very disappointed. (Echoes of “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”)

Oh and the head of the union doesn’t have a problem with governor lying to his union’s members.

The head of the state’s largest labor union, SEIU Local 1000, which represents service workers, was willing to give the governor the benefit of the doubt.

Because a Democrat would never LIE.

“It is such a pillage of the taxpayers.”

California’s high-speed rail to nowhere is still a mess. ‘Horrible sequence of mistakes’: How bullet train contractors botched a bridge project.

So they needed to build a bridge with a span of 636 feet to allow car/truck traffic to cross the high-speed rail right-of-way, and part of the existing freight tracks. This is not the longest bridge ever built, but before it was even completed, it started to fall down.

High-strength steel strands supporting the 636-foot-long structure began to snap on Oct. 22, one after another. Ultimately, 23 of the strands, which are comprised of seven individual wires each, broke unexpectedly, according to rail authority documents and officials. The order to stop work was issued Nov. 4.

A forensic engineering analysis, obtained by The Times, found that the strands corroded from rainwater that had leaked into the internal structure of the bridge and then broke.

The bureaucracy on the rail project is amazing, even by 21st Century government standards. And everyone is pointing the finger at everyone. And in the meantime people are stuck. Construction, which was supposed to take a year, is now up to 4. Detours around the site are long.

“The layers on this project are onerous,” said William Ibbs, a UC Berkeley civil engineering professor who has consulted on high-speed-rail projects around the world. “The levels of administration and review are very unusual. No one company is going to be wholly to blame if something goes wrong, because they can spread the blame around.”

Post tensioned concrete for structures are not new. They are used to build most parking garages today, a lot of highway bridges. This is just stupid. And the fact that they have arranged things so that no one will be held accountable is criminal.

And to review, the 20-billion-dollar high-speed rail, if it is ever complete, will connect Merced to Bakersfield. Merced is more than 100 miles from Oakland and the Bay Area, and Bakersfield is more than 100 miles from Los Angeles. Given that high-speed-rail is NOT freight, this won’t be an auto-train, so you will need some way to get from Bakersfield to LA, or from Merced to the Bay Area. I’m sure that they will have bus or train service (if possible) but not high-speed. And given that you can currently fly round-trip from San Jose to LA for about 110 bucks, and be dropped at the airport where there are lots of rental cars… So what is the purpose of this train? To prove the insanity of government? (Hat tip to William Teach)

Gun Free Zone = Defenseless Victim Zone

Because it is all about FEELINGS. Don’t make me think or reason! Defunding School Police: Feeling Safe From Reality.

So the Oakland School District will remove the police entirely in the name of social justice. The need for anti-racism is so great the safety of students and teachers no longer matters. Actually, for these people, it never did. And if experience elsewhere is any indication of future failure, it won’t.

They don’t care about education. They care about indoctrination.

Because education requires order. Order requires discipline. Chaos engenders none of that.

The Liberal State of California – Experimenting on Teenagers

I can’t say I am too shocked by this. Don’t progressives think the State should have the power to do anything? Boy, 16, was given estrogen for behavioral disorder while in L.A. juvenile hall, suit alleges. ODD or Oppositional defiant disorder is what they were “treating” him for.

So a teenager in Juvenile detention was prescribed estrogen by a doctor, and in accordance with basic physiology, he starts to grow breasts. A 16-year-old can’t give informed consent. No one talked to the parents because The State Knows Best. The State is All Powerful. The STATE of California, is insane.

“Estrogen is not a treatment for ODD. I can’t be more emphatic about that,” [James McGough, a professor of clinical psychiatry at UCLA] said. “You won’t find a reference anywhere that supports the use of estrogen for ODD.”

The lawsuit described the treatment as “experimental.” The doctor who prescribed the estrogen, Danny Wang, could not be reached for comment.

But hey. They are enlightened, and progressive in California. And the Bureaucrats are currently in the “cover their ass” mode. There is litigation, so we can’t talk about anything. Personnel matters are confidential. And more boilerplate in that direction.

Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight

Especially when the cop you are facing is an expert with her weapon. She was known as a ‘top shot.’ Now an L.A. cop is at the center of a deadly shooting.

LA Officer Toni McBride is expert shot. The idiot she faced had a knife and ignored the “drop the knife” command (issued 3 times) before she shot him.

In the middle of a scruffy street south of downtown on April 22, she faced off with a man holding a razor box cutter. She fired six shots from her Glock 17, hitting Daniel Hernandez with every round and killing the 38-year-old carpet installer and father of a teenage daughter.

As The Other McCain notes… he gets the Hat Tip…

Because this is 2020, of course, everybody in L.A. is trying to turn this into an excuse for a protest. “Stupid Lives Matter,” or whatever.

And of course she is being sued because reasons.

Prosecutors and Reporters Don’t Like Self-defense

Especially if they are in California. DA Declines to File Charges in Blue Lake Gas Station Killing.

Still, the DA does admit that self-defense is legal in that part of California. And I guess to be fair, they didn’t sit on the decision for months.

“The employee has stated he acted in self-defense,” the press release states. “No witness statements or other evidence contradict that assertion.”

But what is odd, is the DA also decided not to prosecute any of the gun laws, the Left is always saying we need more of. Charges of felon in possession of a firearm as well as possession of stolen property (the firearm was previously stolen) are both being dropped.

Now I’m not saying I agree or disagree, but what are the odds that Humboldt County District Attorney Maggie Fleming says “we need more gun control” the next time she is up for election?

Another Data Breach

Someday we will have good security, but that day is not today. San Francisco retirement program SFERS suffers data breach.

While SFERS states that no Social Security Numbers or bank account information was contained in the breach, there was enough personal information exposed that could be used by threat actors in attacks.

According to the notification, the types of information that was exposed is different depending on whether a member is retired or if they had registered on the web site.

The leaked information for all members includes a member’s name, address, date of birth, and beneficiary information.

All because a vendor set up a test environment that included real data, but without real security.

They are offering the obligatory 1 year of credit monitoring, which is a sham, because the risk will last more than 1 year.

Antisemitism In Los Angeles

But somehow it isn’t newsworthy. The Los Angeles Pogrom That No Jewish Organization Will Talk About.

After the end of Shavuot, the holiday in which Jewish people joyfully commemorate the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, the Jewish community of Los Angeles concluded it by the new ritual of going to clean off the hateful graffiti from their houses of worship while picking up the broken glass from the black nationalist and radical leftist night of broken glass in Los Angeles.

One small business owner described a “late Saturday night with people driving down the Fairfax district streets screaming, ‘effing Jews'”.

At the latest count, at least 5 synagogues in the area were vandalized, as were three Jewish schools.

There is more at the link.

Blue State Blues

I hope Meep is planning to do all of the states eventually, or at least of of the states in fiscal distress. But that is a tall order. To date she’s done California and Illinois.

First up: States Under Fiscal Pressure: California.

The second one is that, unlike the federal government, they don’t have a money printer, and they really need tax revenue.

Governor Newsom of California announced yesterday that he is relaxing the statewide lockdown sooner than he had said he would.

What gives? I think Newsom is finally recognizing tradeoffs. He started the fiscal year with an expected budget surplus. He now expects a state government deficit of $54.3 billion.

At least they had a surplus going in to this mess. It shows some level of discipline. Unlike Illinois.

Illinois has some serious problems. States Under Fiscal Pressure: Illinois.

They’ve been issuing bonds with some of the highest yields in the muni market because of course they are.

So let’s hit the issues, in no particular order.
Illinois looking to raise public employees’ salaries

Wirepoints: Big raises for Chicago Teachers Union, state’s AFSCME shows where federal aid to Illinois will end up – Wirepoints

As hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans are getting laid off or seeing their pay slashed as a result of the economic shutdown, Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been quietly finalizing the $1.5 billion, five-year contract she negotiated with the Chicago Teachers Union six months ago.

So they’re broke. Beyond broke. And they are handing out raises, and holding their hand out for a handout from the rest of us. Yeah, count me out.

Good Guys 2, Bad Guys 0

Self-defense… Even in the People’s Republic of California, it works. EPD: One person dead and another injured in Eureka altercation, appears to be self-defense.

He told a rowdy group to leave the area. Two responded by coming onto his property and one entered his house. He tried to use pepper spray, but it didn’t work.

At least one subject entered the residence and attempted to assault the resident, according to the EPD. Officials said during the altercation inside the home, the resident fired multiple shots from a handgun, which he had retrieved from inside the residence, striking the subject who was assaulting him.

This subject was pronounced deceased at the scene, according to the captain. A second subject, who was on the porch, was struck in the leg by gunfire, the EPD said.

So far, it looks like justifiable self-defense, even to the detectives.

Self-defense is a human-right.

Because Keeping Criminals in Jail is Unfair

This might just be a record for least time to re-offend. California man allegedly proceeded to strangle a child just 10 minutes after being released from jail.

He was arrested for driving under the influence of drugs and driving the wrong way. He was released from jail the next day.

“Not more than 10 minutes later Orozco forced a female out of her car in the parking lot of Natividad Medical Center. The female refused to give up the keys to her car so Orozco began to strangle the female’s 11 year old child,” the post continued.

According to police, the female then gave up her keys and pulled her child out of the car before Orozco sped off.

Cops caught up with him, and thru him back in jail. No word on if he will again be released under “zero bail.”

Mike Garcia Projected Winner in California Election

Republican Mike Garcia projected winner in House special election in California.

With 76 percent of the vote counted, Garcia had 56 percent, or 78,701 votes, and Smith had 44 percent, or 62,054 votes.

The election is because Rep. Katie Hill resigned.

Good Guys 2, Bad Guys 0

Armed self-defense. It might be legal in California. Burglars evade gunfire from Sunol homeowner, but not arrest.

A homeowner interrupts 2 people burglarizing his car. Then things turn nasty.

The homeowner, who was not identified, said he began shooting at the suspects when they intentionally drove at him in a vehicle and tried to run him over, Kelly said. The homeowner was lawfully defending himself, [Sgt. Ray] Kelly said.

Neither burglar was hit, but the car was, and cops were able to identify it and arrest two would-be miscreants, separately, later. A man and a woman, both in their 30s were arrested. The man is being held without bail on burglary and assault with a deadly weapon. He was on probation for felony burglary. The woman has bail set, and is charged with burglary.

Self-defense is a human-right.

Armed Self-defense In California

Even in that deep blue state, it works. Liquor store clerk shoots robbery suspect in Lindsay, police say.

According to police, three males entered the store, and at least one of the suspects was armed with what appeared to be a handgun.

The manager took out his own gun, shooting one of the suspects — a male juvenile.

The one felon was taken to a local hospital, the other two ran like rabbits.

Self-defense is a human-right, and it might be your legal right in California, though I wouldn’t bet on it.

You Do NOT Have the Right to Protest

Not in California. Forget about the 1st Amendment, you do NOT have the right to Peaceably Assemble. You have the right to do exactly what they tell you to do. Encinitas, Ca., Protesters Threatened With Legal Action For Daring To Protest.

It seems the peasants were protesting overreach by the .gov, which didn’t make the overreaching-bureaucrats happy.

If you are doing any of these things within the parameters of social distancing, what’s the problem? Oh, right, power mad little dictator wannabees (who’ve forgotten there are these things called “elections”). So, the people protested, as allowed by the federal and state constitutions.

Of course the way to get out of trouble is to claim to be an illegal alien, because they have special rights in San Diego County.

Yes, San Diego County is a sanctuary jurisdiction. But, hey, why not put these ladies in jail for following the Constitution, while releasing all sorts of criminals, including a killer?

More protests are planned, and you can bet lawsuits will emerge if the county dares to fine or prosecute. Heck, they should file a suit just on the threats by the sheriff alone