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Posts Tagged ‘California’

So Who’s Messing With The California Primaries?

by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 168 Comments › )
Filed under Corruption, Elections 2018, Open thread, Politics, Progressives at May 28th, 2018 - 10:54 pm

The California Primaries are coming up on June 5th, the campaign flyers are filling up mail boxes in every neighborhood, and everyone is eyeballing the race for Governor except for those who aren’t.

California has “Open Primaries” which allows one to vote for any candidate regardless of one’s party affiliation, i.e., Democrats may vote for Republican candidates and vice-versa. Although it may sound reasonable to some, it has the potential to allow one political party to determine the nominee of the opposing party, which dilutes and undermines the credibility of election results. Getting the weaker candidate of the opposing party nominated is the game.

The race for California Governor is interesting this year, because there’s a chance, albeit remote, that the voters might wrest control from the incumbent socialists. The top four contenders as of 28 May are:

Gavin Newsom (D)
John Cox (R)
Antonio (aka Tony Villar) Villaraigosa (D)
Travis Allen (R).

Now back to the campaign flyers. Check this out.

That’s a typical flyer of half-truths and misinformation, Travis Allen doesn’t appear to have a chance,  but who paid for it?

Major funding from
Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO)
Eli Broad (NYC multi-billionaire, philanthropist, anti-2nd Amendment, pro-taxes)
Michael Bloomberg (ex-Mayor of New York City)

Note that the not-so-cleverly-embedded “Hillary Logo” attempts to equate John Cox to HRC. Pheeew.

California State Assemblyman Travis Allen is certainly qualified for the position of Governor, but he’s a long shot compared to John Cox, so why would people opposing Cox support Allen? Seems obvious.

[Sources: RealClear Politics 28 May 2018 and scan of an original mailer.]

[Update: Among those who have endorsed John Cox for Governor to date are John Coupal / Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, Newt Gingrich and POTUS Donald J. Trump.]

#Caturday, June 13, 2015: CatConLA is like Comic-Con…but for cat people.

by 1389AD ( 271 Comments › )
Filed under Caturday, Open thread at June 13th, 2015 - 2:00 pm
Simon Tofield at CatComLA 2015
Simon Tofield at CatComLA 2015

CatConLA 2015 took place on June 6-7 in Los Angeles. It’s intended to be an annual event, so if you missed it this time around, go for it next year. The CatConLA website is HERE and their Facebook page is HERE.

No, you can’t bring your own cat to CatConLA, but yes, you can adopt a cat!

More here:

 

Hipsters riot in Isla Vista, California

by Phantom Ace ( 123 Comments › )
Filed under Fascism, Hipsters, Progressives at April 9th, 2014 - 7:00 am

Many think Hipsters are some laughable animal hat wearing clowns, but underneath lies an evil mindset. Just like their Jacobin ancestors, the Hipsters will resort to mob violence when they do not get their way. This occurred last weekend in Isla Vista, California. During the annual Deltopia party, police tries to restore some order to the unruly crowd. Rather than tone down, the Hipsters rioted and caused property damage.

(CNN) — A street party turned into a violent melee that injured six police officers in a California beach community Saturday night.

About 15,000 people — many of them students from nearby University of California, Santa Barbara — crowded the streets of Isla Vista for the annual “Deltopia” celebration when “a major disturbance broke out,” according to a news release from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.

It turned ugly when a UCSB police officer was “hit in the head with a backpack that contained large bottles of alcohol,” causing a “significant head injury,” the release said. A large crowd threw rocks, bricks and bottles at police officers who were arresting the person suspected of hitting the officer, it said.

A “major disturbance, emergency situation” was declared, and law enforcement officers from nearby Ventura County responded to help the Santa Barbara County deputies already on the scene, the release said. “Chemical agents and less lethal foam projectiles were deployed to disperse the crowds.”

The Hipster movement is not a laughing matter. This is one if the biggest internal threats this nation has faced since its founding. One of their own is President an the Hipsters will do everything to keep power an are committed to victory for their cause. laugh at them at your own peril, they are winners and do not accept defeat.

Los Angeles, from Dystopian Nightmare, to Lunatic Asylum.

by Guest Post ( 184 Comments › )
Filed under Guest Post, Marxism, Progressives at March 21st, 2014 - 1:16 pm

Guest Blogger: Doriangrey


Once upon a time, the prophets of Hollyweid told a tale of the future of Los Anegels. Snake Plissken, having already proven his mettle by escaping the Prison of New york City, was sent on an even crazier mission into the fortress Lunatic Asylum formerly known as Los Angeles. Well, it seems that those Hollyweird prophets might have known something after all. the Los Angeles City council is hell bent on proving that, not only is Los Angeles a Lunatic Asylum, but the Asylum is in fact being run by the most batshit insane of the inmates.

LA City Council: Yeah, that earthquake was probably caused by fracking

Residents of Los Angeles felt another rumbling in the Earth last week, registering a rather tame 4.4 on the scale and leading to a few comic moments for local news crews. A quake that size happening anywhere in Southern California generally isn’t going to make the news beyond the local level… unless you find a way to put some new spin on it. As the Chamber of Commerce noted, some LA politicos couldn’t let a good, moderate quake go to waste, so they came up with a way to try to use it to their own advantage.

Three Los Angeles City Council members want city, state and federal groups to look into whether hydraulic fracturing and other forms of oil and gas “well stimulation” played any role in the earthquake that rattled the city early Monday morning.

The motion, presented Tuesday by Councilmen Paul Koretz and Mike Bonin and seconded by Councilman Bernard Parks, asks for city departments to team up with the California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, the U.S. Geological Survey and the South Coast Air Quality Management District to report back on the likelihood that such activities contributed to the 4.4-magnitude quake.

Never mind what the experts have to say on the subject. Even if those experts just happen to be from on of California’s most well known a reputed centers of Marxist propaganda and indoctrination.

Mark Zoback on Hydraulic Fracturing

by Louis K. Bergeron

Vigorous debates about the ongoing boom in natural gas production have grabbed a lot of headlines over the last year.

Energy companies are extracting 20 percent more natural gas than they were just five years ago and moving into areas of the country that have not seen drilling operations before. This rapid expansion, coupled with uncertainties about environmental impacts of the extraction process, has triggered considerable concern.

Natural gas is far cleaner than coal when used for electrical power generation and
is also a flexible fuel, useful for heating, transportation, and providing a back up for wind and solar energy. Nonetheless, the public is right to be concerned about the development of shale gas resources, says Mark Zoback, professor of geophysics in the Stanford School of Earth Sciences.

Much of the debate has centered on the practice of hydraulic fracturing, often referred to as “fracking”, the process of injecting fluid into a gas well and raising the pressure enough to fracture the rock the gas is trapped in, making extraction possible.

But that process—and unidentified, but potentially hazardous chemicals in the fluid—is what has prompted some to fear that hydraulic fracturing operations could extend far beyond the well, opening up conduits for the hydraulic fluid and its “mystery” chemicals to percolate into groundwater reservoirs, contaminating water used for drinking or irrigation.

“There are a number of potentially detrimental environmental impacts of shale gas development that need to be addressed,” says Professor Zoback, “but, ironically, hydraulic fracturing isn’t one of them.”

Zoback points to the fact that whenever leakage appears to have contaminated subsurface water supplies the reason has been shown to be poor well construction. Proper well construction, along with proper disposal of wastewater from drilling and hydraulic fracturing, are critical concerns in natural gas extraction, he says.

Zoback’s area of expertise is geomechanics—the study of how rocks and other Earth materials behave mechanically on scales from the microscopic to the massive tectonic plates that cover the surface of the Earth. He began studying hydraulic fracturing over 30 years ago as a technique for measuring the forces in the Earth. For the past four years, much of his research has been focused on shale gas development. Twice in the past year he has testified before Congressional committees on development issues.

Last year, Zoback was asked to join a panel put together by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu at the request of President Obama
to provide advice on the environmental risks associated with shale gas production. In August 2011, the Shale Gas Production Subcommittee filed a report setting forth 20 recommendations for reducing the environmental impact of shale gas production, including a call for complete “disclosure of all chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluids on both public and private lands,” to help allay public concern over the composition of fracking fluids.

Another concern about shale gas development is the potential for the process to trigger earthquakes.

A typical hydraulic fracturing operation involves pressurizing a relatively small volume of rock for a short period of time, typically about two hours, which generates extremely small microseismic events. “The energy released by one of these tiny microseismic events is equivalent to the energy of a gallon of milk hitting the floor after falling off a kitchen counter,” Zoback says. “Needless to say, these events pose no danger to the public.”

In several cases, however, larger, but still very small earthquakes have been associated with hydraulic fracturing operations. Out
of the hundreds of thousands of hydraulic fracturing operations carried out over the past few years, there have been only a few reports of triggered earthquakes that might have been large enough to be felt by people living in the region and none were reported to have caused significant damage. Of greater concern are earthquakes triggered by the injection of wastewater from the drilling and fracturing process.

Drilling and hydrofracturing a natural gas well typically takes several million gallons of water. That water is mixed with a number of relatively benign additives, Zoback says. However, when the water is injected into shale during hydraulic fracturing, it picks up a number of naturally occurring chemicals from the shale including arsenic, selenium, iron, and sometimes, radioactive particles. When the hydraulic fracturing water is flowed back to the surface prior to gas production, the highly saline “flowback” water must be properly handled.

Most commonly, the flowback water is injected into disposal wells, licensed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. With proper construction, these disposal wells prevent the injected water from leaking into the environment. But the volumes of water and the pressures involved in wastewater injection sometimes exceed the capacity of the geologic formations being used to store them, and trigger small-to-moderate earthquakes, the largest confirmed one being a magnitude-4.7 event in February in Arkansas.

In an article that appeared in the April 2012 issue of Earth magazine, Zoback pointed out that roughly 150,000 wastewater injection wells have been safely operating in the U.S. for many decades with no earthquakes being triggered. He laid out five simple steps that regulators and energy companies could take to reduce the low risk of triggering earthquakes by wastewater injection even further.

Zoback points out that “the preferable solution is not to inject the flowback water at all, but to reuse it in subsequent drilling and hydraulic fracturing operations.” Increasingly, gas companies in the northeastern U.S. have been taking this approach.

It has long been known that burning natural gas for electricity instead of
coal has the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With
the development of hydrofracturing, Zoback says that potential reduction is
fast becoming a reality, noting that, “the rapid switch to natural gas from coal in just the past four years has dropped U.S. CO2 emissions to levels not seen for 20 years.”

Shale gas resources are found in many countries around the world, including China, which generates three times as much CO2 as the U.S. by burning coal for electricity.

“Now that the promise of natural gas
for reducing greenhouse gas emissions
is being realized, it makes the need for environmental protection during shale gas development even more important”, he said.

Zoback is currently serving on a committee advising the Canadian government about shale gas development and environmental protection. Previously he served on the National Academy of Engineering committee established at the request of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to investigate the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

But what the hell would Mark Zoback know, right? I mean it’s not like he is a professor of geophysics in the Stanford School of Earth Sciences or anything. Oh… wait, what’s that you say? He is a professor of geophysics in the Stanford School of Earth Sciences, well, he must have been bought off by the Koch brothers and evil big oil if he is saying stuff like this then.

Or… Maybe, just possibly the Los Angeles City council is full of crack pot enviro-nazi’s and batshit crazy lunatic’s. Me personally, my money is on the Los Angeles City council is full of crack pot enviro-nazi’s and batshit crazy lunatic’s. But then again, I actually live in Southern California, so it’s not like I would know or anything.

Perhaps it’s time for us to take Ripleys advice with regard to Los Angeles, San Fransisco and Sacremento…

(Cross Posted @ The Wilderness of Mirrors)