Tag: california

‘A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA

Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Without those stellar stats, some doctors at the school say, students can struggle to keep pace with the demanding curriculum.

So when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee’s meeting.

Their reservations were not well-received.

When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.

“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued, because “we need people like this in the medical school.”

Even before the Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action ban last year, public schools in California were barred by state law from considering race in admissions. The outburst from Lucero, who discussed race explicitly despite that ban, unsettled some admissions officers, one of whom reached out to other committee members in the wake of the incident. “We are not consistent in the way we apply the metrics to these applicants,” the official wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “This is troubling.”

“I wondered,” the official added, “if this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female for that matter, [whether] we would have had that much discussion.”

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Disgraced Professor Sentenced for Action That Could Have Trapped Firefighters in Deadly Blaze

A former college lecturer on “criminal justice issues” is going to get some first-hand experience in the subject after he was sentenced to spend five years and three months in prison on Thursday.

Gary Stephen Maynard had pleaded guilty in January to starting a number of fires in California that could have had much more disastrous results than they did.

Maynard, 49, had formerly lectured at Santa Clara University and Sonoma State University, KCRA reported.

The former lecturer admitted to starting at least four fires in July and August of 2021, according to a Justice Department news release, and pleaded guilty to three counts of arson.

One count of arson was dismissed as part of a plea agreement, according to court records cited by The New York Times.

Maynard was charged with starting fires behind firefighters who were working to contain the Dixie Fire, which eventually destroyed more than 1,000 homes and spread over 1,500 square miles, according to KCRA.

“He intentionally made a dangerous situation more perilous by setting some of his fires behind the men and women fighting the Dixie fire, potentially cutting off any chance of escape,” Phillip A. Talbert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, said in a statement (available in full below).

It eventually grew to become the second-largest fire in California history, according to the outlet.

“Maynard faced the possibility of up to 20 years in prison and a $750,000 fine,” KCRA reported. “Besides the prison sentence of more than five years, he was ordered to pay $13,081 in restitution.”

His attorney argued that Maynard was “suffering from untreated and significant mental health issues when he set the fires and has sought treatment since then,” according to Fox News.

“A Santa Clara University colleague of Mr. Maynard, who was not identified, told the police in October 2020 that Mr. Maynard was struggling with anxiety, depression, split personality, and wanted to kill himself, the complaint said,” according to The Times.

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California Democrat Delivers Impassioned Plea to Toughen Penalties for Pedophiles Buying Sex With Children

In a speech on May 23, California State Senator Susan Eggman made an emotional appeal to her colleagues in the chamber, urging them to support a bill that would send pedophiles who buy sex with children to prison.

The bill, SB 1414, aims to address the state’s outdated laws that currently allow individuals who solicit underage prostitutes to be charged with misdemeanors, resulting in a mere two days in jail.

Senator Eggman, a progressive Democrat who has served in the state legislature for 12 years, expressed her frustration with the current system. “I’m done with us protecting people who would buy and abuse our children. I’m done,” she declared.

The proposed legislation, authored by State Senator Shannon Grove, would make soliciting underage prostitutes a felony punishable by two to four years in prison, a $25,000 fine, and mandatory registration as a sex offender. However, the bill faced opposition from a group of rebel Democrats led by State Senator Scott Wiener, who watered down the bill in the Senate Public Safety Committee.

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Fontana pays nearly $900,000 for ‘psychological torture’ inflicted by police to get false confession

Within hours after Thomas Perez Jr. called police to report his father missing, he found himself in a tiny interrogation room confronted by Fontana detectives determined to extract a confession that he killed his dad.

Perez had told police that his father, 71-year-old Thomas Perez Sr., went out for a walk with the family dog at about 10 p.m. on Aug. 7, 2018. The dog returned within minutes without Perez’s father. Investigators didn’t believe his story, and over the next 17 hours they grilled him to try to get to the “truth.”

According to court records, detectives told Perez that his father was dead, that they had recovered his body and it now “wore a toe tag at the morgue.” They said they had evidence that Perez killed his father and that he should just admit it, records show.

Perez insisted he didn’t remember killing anyone, but detectives allegedly told him that the human mind often tries to suppress troubling memories.

At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator.

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Thursday’s Energy Absurdity: In California, the tax-per-mile ‘conspiracy theory’ becomes reality

For several years now, boosters of the failing energy transition have publicly dismissed critics who have speculated that their ultimate goal where transportation is concerned is not merely to shift private car owners to adopt EVs, but to make the cost of owning a car so expensive that all but the most elite in society give up their cars altogether. Anyone reaching that imminently logical conclusion based on the evidence at hand has been dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ or something worse.

One easy way to make owning a car increasingly costly would be to tax drivers on a cents-per-mile basis. With EVs replacing some percentage of gas-powered cars, states are finding their slush funds of taxes collected at the gas pump dwindling and are looking for ways to get the revenue flowing again. Some states, like Texas, are doing that with a hefty annual fee on EVs, but taking that route is hard to hide and tends to get hubris-filled EV buyers into a tizzy about having to actually help pay for the roads their extremely heavy vehicles do so much to damage. Go figure.

So, politicians being politicians, many are looking for a way to do this that’s somewhat easier to hide and seems “fair,” at least on the surface. For this reason, we now see the politicians and regulators in California (because of course it’s in California – where else?) now running tests on assessing a new tax based on miles driven each year.

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California wants the EPA to allow the state to mandate electric trains that don’t actually exist

California was a leader in mandating electric vehicle sales, and then it moved to electrify trucking. Now, if the Environmental Protection Agency grants the state a requested waiver needed to implement the rule, California will mandate that train locomotives be fully electric starting in 2030. 

Should the EPA give the rule its blessing, rail companies will have a hard time coming into compliance since locomotives that can meet the mandates don’t actually exist. 

Prototype

In November, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed regulations that would require all freight trains to be in a zero-emission configuration by 2035. By 2030, the rule mandates that diesel locomotives that are 23 years or older be retired, even though a locomotive can have a useful life of 39 years or longer. New passenger locomotives by 2030 will need to operate at zero emissions, and long-haul freight trains using new engines will need to be zero emission by 2035. 

Wabtec makes a battery-electric locomotive that uses regenerative braking, which returns some charge to the battery while the train is slowing down. The locomotive runs on 18,000 lithium-ion battery cells, producing 8.5 megawatt hours of electricity. For comparison, a Tesla Model Y with the smallest battery configuration runs on a .06 megawatt hour charge. 

According to a promotion video on the prototype, the Wabtec train has comparable hauling power of a diesel locomotive. However, the company explains that the locomotive is meant to be part of a hybrid system, meaning it runs in tandem with diesel-powered locomotives. Over a three-month trial in California, the system reduced the average fuel consumption of the train by 11%. 

The model would therefore not meet California’s 2035 mandates.

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‘A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA

Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Without those stellar stats, some doctors at the school say, students can struggle to keep pace with the demanding curriculum.

So when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee’s meeting.

Their reservations were not well-received.

When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.

“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued,  because “we need people like this in the medical school.”

Even before the Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action ban last year, public schools in California were barred by state law from considering race in admissions. The outburst from Lucero, who discussed race explicitly despite that ban, unsettled some admissions officers, one of whom reached out to other committee members in the wake of the incident. “We are not consistent in the way we apply the metrics to these applicants,” the official wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “This is troubling.”

“I wondered,” the official added, “if this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female for that matter, [whether] we would have had that much discussion.”

Since Lucero took over medical school admissions in June 2020, several of her colleagues have asked the same question. In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.

Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a “failed medical school,” said one former member of the admissions staff. “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”

This story is based on written correspondence between UCLA officials, internal data on student performance, and interviews with eight professors at the medical school—six of whom have worked with or under Lucero on medical student and residency admissions.

Together, they provide an unprecedented account of how racial preferences, outlawed in California since 1996, have nonetheless continued, upending academic standards at one of the top medical schools in the country. The school has consequently taken a hit in the rankings and seen a sharp rise in the number of students failing basic standardized tests, raising concerns about their clinical competence.

“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything,” a member of the admissions committee told the Free Beacon. “People get in and they struggle.”

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California Senate To Vote on Automatic Sign-Up for Military Draft

The California Senate will vote this week on a bill to automatically register register draft-age applicants for driver’s licenses and state IDs with the Selective Service System for a possible future military draft.

The floor vote in the state Senate on SB-1081 is expected this week and could come at any time. You can use this form to send a message today to your state Senator to oppose SB-1081.

SB-1081 was held in the ‘suspense’ file by the Senate Appropriations Committee, but was called up and sent to the floor for a vote by the full state Senate despite both Democratic and Republican opposing votes in committee, with only minor amendments that fail to assuage any of the opponents of the bill.

As amended, SB-1081 is still opposed by a diverse coalition including the ACLU, the California Immigrant Policy Center, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

SB-1081 was amended to exempt applicants for driver’s licenses or state IDs who can’t prove lawful residence (but who still need licenses to drive) from being automatically registered with the Selective Service System (SSS). But foreign students and H-1 visa holders, who often live in the USA for years and get regular driver’s licenses, are considered “nonimmigrants” and aren’t required or allowed to register with the SSS.

The state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) would have to question every draft-aged applicant for a driver’s license about their immigration and visa status, and record this information, to determine which drivers’ information to send to the SSS. Otherwise, thousands of individuals who are neither required nor allowed to register with the SSS, and who wouldn’t be subject to a draft, would automatically be mis-registered with the SSS — rendering the registration database less accurate than ever.

The SSS only allows or requires individuals to register for the draft if they were assigned male at birth, regardless of current gender. But applicants can self-select whether to have an “M”, “F”, or “X” gender marker on their California driver’s license, and the same is now true for U.S. passports and Social Security accounts. Especially for individuals born outside the USA, there may be no record in any current Federal or state record of their sex as assigned at birth. So the DMV would also have to question every draft-age applicant about their sex as assigned at birth, and include this in DMV records, to determine who is, and who is not, required to register with the SSS.

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Female Inmate Allegedly Raped by Transgender Inmate in California Women’s Prison

A woman at the Central California Facility for Women says she witnessed the immediate aftermath of a jailhouse rape by a transgender inmate.

Mimi Le provided a sworn declaration to lawyers with the Women’s Liberation Front, which will be included in the organization’s case against California, according to evidence from the filing obtained by Reduxx.

Le reportedly said she was one of many inmates who saw events involving what was described as a “sexual assault” committed by a man who identifies as a woman and was therefore locked up in a women’s prison.

On May 19, a female inmate was taken to a medical-administrative building after other female inmates reported to staff that she had been raped, Le explained, adding that she found the woman to be “barely conscious.”

Less than an hour later, the female victim was taken away on a stretcher under a “Code 3” alert, which means a person is unresponsive and unable to be revived via immediate methods, Le added.

Le and other inmates reportedly identified the alleged assailant as Jonathan Robertson, a biologically male transgender individual going by the name Siyaah Skylit.

Multiple inmates said they had heard Robertson shouting, “Fuck all you bitches. I’ll rape you. I’ll rape your mama. I’ll fuck all you bitches up — there is nothing you bitches can do.” He has also spit at fellow inmates, the women said.

“This was very triggering and saddening for everybody,” Le reportedly wrote in her declaration. “To be threatened by a man with doing a thing that he can do, that he is capable of doing, that he may already have done to other women, is terrifying.”

“They were concerned and discussed how to protect themselves; I convinced them to just go to their rooms while I asked for an update from the Captain to figure out how to proceed,” Le added.

Later, Le said she went to correctional staff to inquire about what, if anything, would be done about Robertson’s threatening behavior, at which point she learned he “had already been released back onto the yard.”

But “once the Captain learned of the rape threats, he decided along with the Sergeant to move [him] to administrative segregation,” the inmate said, adding that “before they could do that, the Warden overruled them, saying that an inmate-to-inmate threat is not an offense sufficient.”

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Cops called on Van Nuys ‘flower grandma’ on Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day weekend is huge for flower vendors, including one 83-year-old woman who can usually be seen on the corner of Sherman Way and Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys.

This weekend, though, LAPD officers approached the woman known to locals as “the flower grandma,” saying they’d gotten a call complaining she did not have a permit. Other vendors in the area, including the owner of the popular Pupusa Express truck usually parked in the same corner, were upset.

“I know [the] police have to do what they have to do,” said Nelson Gonzalez, “but, really?” He reacted by taking his phone and going live on social media to show what was happening. In the video, officers are seen telling him to step back, eventually taking his phone and handcuffing him.

Seeing that scene live on social media, people began to show up at the corner. One of them, Nelson Martin Sandoval, began going live on TikTok, saying he was there to buy flowers. It wasn’t long before dozens of people showed up and bought every single flower from the woman, even saying they’d pay off her citation if she got one.

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