California’s ‘Kiddie Stroll’ is state-sponsored slavery, selling children for sex

Kira Davis | New York Post

California’s laws have made children its least protected class.

As a matter of fact, if an American state wanted to establish a formal means of separating children from parents and other loving caregivers to feed a profitable industry, it couldn’t be done with much more effectiveness than in California. 

In 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation requiring foster parents to “affirm” the LGBTQ identities of any children in their care.  

Naturally he hailed it as a giant leap forward for gay rights — but it effectively kicked committed religious believers out of the foster-care system. 

Last month, the governor signed AB 495, aka the legal kidnapping bill, which allows an unrelated adult to claim a “mentoring relationship” and exercise parental authority over any child. 

Newsom’s cronies in the Legislature touted it as a protection for the children of undocumented immigrants who might get whisked away by ICE in the middle of the day — but it effectively put an end to parents’ rights. 

Then there’s SB 357, which bars police from profiling underage prostitutes.

This was designed to loosen the legal hassles surrounding “sex work” (as the progressives call it, because sex seems like a job to them) and supposedly spare some unfortunate young women an early criminal record. 

Perhaps you’re beginning to see a pattern here. 

Read more

California Parents Horrified At New Sex-Ed Agenda

Liberty Nation 

The debate over whether schools should teach sex education to minors has been going on for decades. But now, perhaps more than ever, many parents are horrified by what their children are being taught – especially when parents, despite their religious beliefs, have no say about the teaching materials.

In a small California community, parents and clergy were so appalled at the explicit and LGBTQ-inspired lessons, they went undercover to investigate deeper. What they discovered at a Riverside County Comprehensive Health Education meeting so horrified them, they determined to stop the curriculum.

Our Watch President Pastor Tim Thompson said:

“We don’t want our children exposed to some of these things they are showing, th(is) pornographic, sexually explicit material. It has no place in the classroom. It’s not right, and it won’t be tolerated.”

Thompson was referring to Positive Prevention Plus, the text for sex ed classes. John Andrews, parent of a student in the Murrieta School District, was sick over the explicit material depicted in the “educational” materials. He said:

“They talk about mutual masturbation. They discuss gender roles, the gender spectrum, and in the support materials … they take it even further. They discuss everything, topics like roleplaying for different genders, blood play, dental dams … fisting is mentioned. I mean, they mention it all.
“If I were to show that material to a child, I would be brought up on charges. But somehow our public schools are allowed to teach this to junior high and high school kids.”

The graphics in the instructional guides use cartoon images so detailed that many parents found them inappropriate. Wanting to discover more about what children would be learning, Thompson’s group attended meetings held by the school boards. At one particular meeting in Riverside, a woman went “undercover” and recorded the event. Thompson said he was shocked to discover some of the biggest contributors to the new sex ed curriculum included Planned Parenthood and Cardea Services, which he said is a huge advocate for the LGBT community. Another shocker was that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was on hand to explain how to excuse children from class to get abortions without parents finding out.

“We knew parents had to see for themselves or else they weren’t going to believe it,” Thompson said, referring to the video he posted.

Read more

The Shaking Won’t Stop: There Have Been More Than 10,000 Earthquakes In California And Nevada In The Last 7 Days

Michael Snyder
End of The American Dream

The ground is constantly shaking in southern California right now, and this has many concerned that another large earthquake may be coming.  I have been keeping my eye on Cal Tech’s recent earthquake map, and as I write this article it says that there have been 10,053 earthquakes in California and Nevada over the past 7 days.  I have never seen that number so high, and southern California is being hit by yet another new earthquake every few moments.  Most of the earthquakes are happening out in the Ridgecrest area where we witnessed the magnitude 6.4 earthquake that hit on July 4th and the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that hit on July 5th.  But as you can see from Cal Tech’s map, there has been a tremendous amount of seismic activity along the San Andreas fault as well.  As I discussed the other day, the San Andreas fault is “locked and loaded” and it is way overdue for “the Big One”.  Could it be possible that all of this earthquake activity is leading up to something really big?

And it isn’t just earthquakes that we need to be concerned about.  According to Fox News, “geologists are nervously eyeing eight nearby volcanoes”…

California’s uncanny “earthquake pause” is over. It should have already had several “big ones” by now. All that pressure has to go somewhere. Now geologists are nervously eyeing eight nearby volcanoes. And why has Yellowstone supervolcano been acting so weird?
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has warned Southern California to expect more big earthquakes to come. Some, they say, may even be more powerful than those experienced in the past few days.
“(These quakes do) not make (the Big One) less likely,” local seismologist Lucy Jones told The Los Angeles Times. “There is about a one in 20 chance that this location will be having an even bigger earthquake in the next few days, that we have not yet seen the biggest earthquake of the sequence.”

Read more

Sheriff of America’s Deadliest Police Force Caught on Camera Admitting Killing Suspects Is ‘Better Financially’

The Root

A recently discovered video of a California sheriff talking to law enforcement officers shows Kern County’s chief lawman explaining that killing citizens is better than wounding or injuring them because it costs less money and makes the family “go away.”

Although Kern County had a population of 875,000 people in 2015, its law enforcement officers were responsible for more deaths than any other county in America that year, according to the Guardian. During that year, Kern County deputies and Bakersfield, Calif., police killed 1.5 people for every 100,000 residents, more than three times the rate of Los Angeles County and 10 times the rate of the New York Police Department in 2015.

The Kern County Sheriff’s Department is led by Donny Youngblood, who has served as sheriff of the county for more than a decade. During his first campaign in 2006, Youngblood spoke to a group of police officers, telling the cops that shooting to kill was better financially for his department.

“You know what happens when a guy makes a bad shooting and somebody kills them?” Youngblood explained. “Three million bucks and the family goes away after a long back and forth.”

“When a deputy shoots someone in the streets, which way do you think is better financially—to cripple them or kill them—for the county?” Youngblood asked. When someone replied, “Kill them,” Youngblood responded, “Absolutely. Because if they’re crippled we get to take care of them for life. And that cost goes way up.”

The video was uploaded to Facebook by the Kern County Detention Officers Association on Monday and called for the sheriff to be replaced. The group told the Guardian that the full hour of video contains even more concerning quotes and said the group was “disgusted” by the video.

Read More

California to Become First State to Mandate Adult Vaccines: Criminal Penalties for those Who Refuse

Awareness Act

 

California recently became the first state in the U.S. where lawmakers removed religious exemptions to those opposing vaccines for their children. This bill mandates proof of vaccination for measles, pertussis and…..

Optional annual flu vaccine for daycare providers, early childhood teachers, head start teachers, parent co-ops where money is exchanged, YMCA early childhood and after school program caregivers, in-home daycare providers and parent volunteers who care for and supervise children.

SB792 would eliminate an adult’s right to exempt themselves from one, some, or all vaccines, a risk-laden medical procedure. The bill would make California the first state to require mandated vaccinations.

Commencing September 1, 2016, a person shall not be employed at a family day care home if he or she has not been immunized against influenza, pertussis, and measles. An employee shall receive an influenza vaccination between August 1 and December 1 of each year.

This bill would be eliminating all medical autonomy, crushing religious freedom, undermining personal freedoms, and burdening quality providers with a non-optional medical intervention in the form of mandated vaccines that are not even 100% effective.

Read more

California Water Wars: Another Form of Asset Stripping?

Ellen Brown
Web of Debt 

In California’s epic drought, wars over water rights continue, while innovative alternatives for increasing the available water supply go untapped.

Wars over California’s limited water supply have been going on for at least a century. Water wars have been the subject of some vintage movies, including the 1958 hit The Big Country starring Gregory Peck, Clint Eastwood’s 1985 Pale Rider, 1995’s Waterworld with Kevin Costner, and the 2005 film Batman Begins. Most acclaimed was the 1975 Academy Award winner Chinatown with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, involving a plot between a corrupt Los Angeles politician and land speculators to fabricate the 1937 drought in order to force farmers to sell their land at low prices. The plot was rooted in historical fact, reflecting battles between Owens Valley farmers and Los Angeles urbanites over water rights.

Today the water wars continue on a larger scale with new players. It’s no longer just the farmers against the ranchers or the urbanites. It’s the people against the new “water barons”  – Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Monsanto, the Bush family, and their ilk – who are buying up water all over the world at an unprecedented pace. 

Read more

California’s Exceptional Drought Just Keeps Getting Worse

 

Bloomberg

California’s three-year drought just went from bad to dreadful. In the course of the last week, the crimson expanse of “exceptional drought” grew to engulf the northern part of the state.

The chart above shows the drought’s progression as reported today by the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Archived maps show the end of July for each year since 2011.

All of California is in “severe drought” (shown in orange), and 82 percent is rated “extreme drought” (in red). The agency’s highest drought rating — “exceptional drought” (crimson) — now covers 58 percent of the state, up from 36 percent a week ago. Exceptional drought is marked by crop and pasture loss and water shortages that fall within the top two percentiles of the drought indicators.

The water reserves in California’s topsoil and subsoil are nearly depleted, and 70 percent of the state’s pastures are now rated “very poor to poor,” according to the USDA.

Read More

Bailout Architect Runs For California Governor; World Laughs

 

Neel Kashkari

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

I want to apologize for this space being blank for quite some time. I actually spent the bulk of the last two days on a long blog post about the "Dr. V." story in Grantland. But then I got all the way to the end, and realized I was completely wrong about the entire thing.

So, I spiked my own piece. Now I've been in Talk Radio-style "This is totally dead air, Barry" territory for about two weeks. I could swear I saw a cobweb when I logged on this morning.

So thank God for Neel Kashkari, and the news that this goofball footnote caricature of the bailout era has decided to run for Governor of California. Never in history has there been an easier subject for a blog post.

If you don't remember Kashkari's name, you might be excused – he was actually better known, in his 15 minutes of fame five years ago, as "The 35 year-old dingbat from Goldman someone put in charge of handing out $700 billion bailout dollars."

Now you remember. That guy! Neel Kashkari when he first entered the world of politics was a line item, usually the last entry in a list of ex-Goldman employees handed prominent government and/or regulatory positions, as in, ". . . and, lastly, Neel Kashkari, the heretofore unknown Goldman banker put in charge of the TARP bailout program . . ."

Kashkari was not just a former Goldman banker handed a high government post – he was a former Goldman banker handed a high government post by a former Goldman banker, in this case former Goldman CEO and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

Neel was also the human parallel to the original TARP proposal written by Paulson, which was famously just three pages long.

Paulson's TARP proposal was essentially the last, unaired episode of Beavis and Butthead, with the three pages of script just containing a single scene in which Butthead walks into the U.S. Senate and says, "Can you, uh, like, give us 700 billion dollars? Uh-huh-huh."

Kashkari then was more or less an equally blank slate, a little-known tech banker from Goldman's San Francisco office who somehow ended up being Paulson's choice to administer a bailout that Paulson wanted to feature no oversight whatsoever. The original three-page proposal specified no review "by any court of law or any administrative agency."

It never came to that, not exactly – Paulson had to expand his three-page proposal – but it's worth remembering now that the Treasury's original plan for the bailout was to give literally unlimited powers to distribute $700 billion of taxpayer money to a low-level banker that prior to 2006, even Hank Paulson had never heard of.

So Kashkari takes the job as bailout czar and starts hurling fistfuls of cash at the banks, in a fashion that turned out later to have been beyond haphazard. Critically, even though the Treasury promised only to give out TARP funds to institutions that were "healthy" and "viable," Kashkari had no protocol in place to even decide whether a bailout recipient was solvent or not.

They forked over billions in cash to failing institutions and then failed to enforce crucial provisions, like for instance measures put in place to prevent executives from bailout-out companies from giving themselves huge bonuses.

This latter failure was what led to one of Kashkari's more infamous public appearances, in which Maryland congressman Elijah Cummings raked Kashkari over the coals for allowing AIG executives to give themselves $503 million in bonuses. "I wouldn't want to be asking my friend for some money to stay afloat," hissed Cummings. "Then my friend, who can barely afford to go to McDonald's, sees me in a restaurant costing $150 a meal. There's absolutely something wrong with that picture!" He added:

I'm just wondering how you feel about an AIG giving $503 million worth of bonuses on the one hand, and accepting $154 billion from hard-working taxpayers. You know, because I'm trying to make sure you get it. What really bothers me is all these other people who are lined up. They say, well, is Kashkari a chump?

After this "chump" episode, and others, Kashkari apparently became despondent. He and his wife reportedly were particularly upset by a snickering item in Gawker. The item read, "Financial Crisis Taking a Toll on Our Favorite Asshole Banker," and made the neatly cruel observation that that Kashkari, who was a fit/lean/bald banker of Paulsonian persuasion when he arrived in Washington, had begun "putting on classic stress-related weight under his chin."

The item featured before and after photos. The "after" photo was shot from just below chin level. It was brutal.

Now, a lot of people have been ripped in Gawker. I think everyone with a Q rating above 0.00003 has been ripped in Gawker. I personally remember having to Google-image Peter Beinart because Gawker described me as looking like the computer-generated love child of Beinart and Ashton Kutcher. It's an Internet-age rite of passage and they give great service – I mean, Gawker's insults are almost always really good. Probably most people who get ripped on the site flip out at first, and then laugh about it later.

Not Kashkari. He was so mortified by items like the Gawker bit that he literally disappeared into the woods like Ted Kaczynski and committed himself to a vengefully ascetic fitness regimen, apparently determined to return someday to society and have the last word.

Read more

 

California schools to begin monitoring for Fukushima radiation 'arriving this year'

Natural News

Two prominent academic and research institutions in California are joining forces to conduct an in-depth study into how radiation from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility is affecting California's pristine kelp forests. According to a recent announcement by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the project will involve monitoring radioactive contaminants set to arrive later this year from Fukushima, further proof of the plant's continued release of radioactive materials.

Steven L. Manley, a professor of biology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and Kai Vetter, head of the Berkeley Lab's Applied Nuclear Physics department, will together lead a team of researchers from 19 academic and governmental institutions in tracking the extent of contamination by Fukushima radiation along the entire California coastline. From as far north as Del Norte to as far south as Baja California, the team will collect samples from the many kelp forests that stretch along the Pacific.

As it turns out, there are currently no published data on the levels of radiation present off the Pacific coast, and particularly in California's kelp forests. These forests serve not only as diverse biological communities for hundreds of species of marine life but also as a source of food and habitat for entire marine ecosystems. Without them, in other words, hordes of diversified sea creatures would quickly disappear.

"The California kelp forest is a highly productive and complex ecosystem and a valuable state resource," stated Manley in a recent statement about the project. "It is imperative that we monitor this coastal forest for any radioactive contaminants that will be arriving this year in the ocean currents from Fukushima disaster."

Read more
 

Another Photographer Detained in Southern California

 via Activist Post

For the second time in a month, police in Long Beach, California detained a photographer for taking pictures in public.

And now it is becoming apparent that they are probably following guidelines issued by the Los Angeles Police Department that explicitly states that people taking photos are to be viewed as suspicious. 

According to page 40 of the LAPD’s “Suspicious Activity Report,” published in June 2008:

"Takes pictures or video footage (with no apparent esthetic value, i.e., camera angles, security equipment, security personnel, traffic lights, building entrances, etc.)."

This gives police the green light to detain photographers who are doing nothing but taking photos.

The Suspicious Activity Report was highlighted in an article by Greggory Moore of the Long Beach Post, who was detained by Los Angeles County sheriff deputies for photographing a courthouse on June 2.

In the article, Moore writes about another incident involving his colleague, Sander Roscoe Wolff, who was detained on June 30 for photographing an oil refinery for artistic purposes.

Even though Wolff wasn’t breaking the law nor was he driving, Long Beach police officer Asif Kahn demanded his driver’s license. [...]