Tag: california

California moves to provide surrogates to gay male couples in the name of ‘fertility equality’

California Bill SB 729 seeks to redefine “infertility” to be a status, as opposed to a medical condition. Changing the definition to “a person’s inability to reproduce either as an individual or with their partner without medical intervention” would classify gay men as infertile. 

The bill, which passed the Senate last month, would require insurance companies to cover in-vitro fertilization procedures. With the change in definition, this would also include forcing the firms to cover surrogacy for gay males. 

Co-author of the bill Sen. Caroline Menjivar (D) said the bill “will ensure that queer couples no longer have to pay more out of pocket to start families than non-queer families.” She continued, “This bill is critical to achieving full-lived equality for LGBTQ+ people, as well as advancing well-rounded and comprehensive health care for all Californians.”

An organization called Men Having Babies boasted that the bill will “remove financial barriers” for gay men who wish to rent a woman’s womb to have a child who has the DNA of one of the males in the relationship. 

The group states on its website, “Central to our fight for more equitable access to parenting options is what we know from our combined experiences: The anguish and yearning that same-sex couples and singles feel due to their inability to reproduce without medical intervention is equal to the anguish of heterosexual couples who suffer from ‘medical infertility.'” 

According to the Free Beacon, the opposition to SB 729 comes from California business and insurance groups who claim that it will raise insurance premiums by more than $330 million a year. Others point to the erosion of the traditional family structure.

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California Bill Would Punish Parents Who Don’t ‘Affirm’ Their Child’s Gender Identity

A newly revised California bill would treat parents’ refusal to “affirm” their child’s gender identity as a violation of health, safety, and welfare in the context of custody disputes.

The bill, which has already passed the State Assembly, would require judges adjudicating such disputes over transgender-identifying children to favor the parent who “affirms” the child’s preferred identity. Earlier this week the authors released an updated version that specifically defines “the health, safety, and welfare” of a child to include “a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity”—a change that the bill’s opponents worry will open the door to non-affirmation being treated as abuse.

“When you say that gender affirmation is in the child’s best interest for health, safety, and welfare, it takes nothing to say [non-affirmation] is now abuse—because you’re not taking care of the health, safety, and welfare if you’re not affirming them,” said Erin Friday, a San Francisco attorney and co-lead of the parent coalition Our Duty.

The amended bill, known as A.B. 957, is the latest in a slate of legislation to enshrine left-wing gender ideology in California law. State senator Scott Wiener (D.), who coauthored A.B. 957 with Assemblywoman Lori Wilson (D.), is simultaneously advancing a separate bill that would require foster parents to promise to “affirm” trans-identifying children. In 2022, he introduced a first-in-the-nation law enshrining California as a “haven” where out-of-state minors can obtain sex changes without their parents’ consent.

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R.) declared last year that helping kids get sex changes is child abuse.

Wilson’s spokesman disputed that the latest revision changes much about the bill and noted that A.B. 957 only relates to family law, not criminal law.

“It’s not saying [affirmation] is the most important factor or determining factor,” the spokesman, Taylor Woolfork, said. “It’s one of many factors that the judge should consider while working out a custody agreement.”

Wiener’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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California Lawmakers Want To Make Tech Companies Subsidize News Media

California lawmakers are moving ahead with plans to make Google and Facebook subsidize traditional media. Legislation from state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D–Oakland) would require some digital platforms “to remit a journalism usage fee payment…equal to a percentage…of the covered platform’s advertising revenue generated during that month multiplied by the eligible digital journalism provider’s allocation share.”

Essentially, A.B. 886—dubbed the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA)—would make entities like Google and Facebook pay to link and send traffic to media websites, despite the fact that media outlets get as much if not more out of this arrangement.

This sort of “link tax” not only makes no sense but is “actively harmful to the open web” and “based on a ridiculously confused understanding of basically everything,” writes Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick. More:

In short form: if any website does not want to get traffic from Google or Facebook, they have the power to control that by using robots.txt or redirects. It’s easy.

The problem is that they want the traffic. They want it so bad that they hire “search engine optimization” experts to help them get more traffic.

The problem is that they don’t just want the traffic, they also want to get paid for that traffic.

This is backwards in so many ways. It’s basically saying that they should get paid to have other companies send them traffic.

It also breaks the most fundamental concept of the open web — the link — by saying that the government can force some websites to pay for linking to other websites (and, on top of that, force the paying websites to have to host those links, even if they don’t want to).

Everything about this is filthy and corrupt. It’s literally Rep. Buffy Wicks and others in the California legislature saying “we’re forcing companies we dislike to give money to companies we like.”

Under the CJPA’s terms, online platforms would be subject to the link tax if they have at least 50,000,000 monthly active users or subscribers in the U.S. or are owned or controlled “by a person with either…United States net annual sales or a market capitalization greater than five hundred fifty billion dollars ($550,000,000,000), adjusted annually for inflation” or “at least 1,000,000,000 worldwide monthly active users on the online platform.”

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More than 90% of Calif. pot farms infected with ‘severe’ pathogen

An infectious pathogen inside California’s pot farms is attacking cannabis plants and growing invisibly for months only to spoil a crop just as a farmer is ready to harvest. Scientists believe that it’s in nearly every pot farm in the state and could be causing billions of dollars in damages to the national weed economy.

Hop-latent viroid, or HLVd, shrivels pot plants and reduce how much weight they produce by as much as 30%. It also destroys the amount of THC, pot’s most common active compound, that a plant produces, greatly reducing the value of affected plants. 

HLVd was first documented in cannabis in a pair of scientific studies published in 2019, including a study that confirmed the viroid’s presence in samples from a Santa Barbara pot farm. It’s now infected at least 90% of California’s cannabis grows, according to a 2021 estimate. It’s spreading globally, and a recent scientific paper declared the pathogen was the “biggest concern for cannabis” growers worldwide.

But one Bay Area startup has a new tool that they think will stop the pathogen’s spread in its tracks.

Oakland’s Purple City Labs released a new HLVd test earlier this year that can be conducted on site and deliver results to pot farmers in just a few hours. That’s much faster than the current methods for finding HLVd infections, which are predominantly done by farmers mailing samples to labs and waiting days or even weeks to get a result.

The company said this new at-farm testing could be pivotal in slowing the spread of this global pathogen, as it allows farmers to quickly identify infected plants.

“We didn’t just identify a great test that is accurate, but it’s [also] easy to use and it doesn’t require a high level of expertise,” said Luke Horst, director of business development for Purple City Genetics. “You can take microbiology to the public and put it in their hands. … It’s important for people to have this type of testing.”

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The “Mojave Triangle UAP”: A Closer Look

On May 23, 2023, investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp released exclusive footage of a UFO, dubbed the “Mojave Triangle UAP”, hovering over the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms – Camp Wilson. The event, which took place on April 20, 2021, between 8:20pm to 9:30pm PST, is labeled by Corbell as a “mass UFO sighting” and said to have over fifty eyewitnesses. The object, captured on iPhones and infrared, is described as a silent triangular-shaped craft, estimated to be between half the size of a football field and a three-bedroom, two-story house​​.

Following the sighting, Corbell stated there was a “significant air and ground response,” which he further claimed was a search and reconnaissance effort related to the UAP event, lasting approximately three hours. Given the location of this sighting within the restricted airspace of an active United States military installation, it is believed by Corbell that a significant amount of data, including radar, thermal, electro-optical, and signature intelligence, were accumulated​​.

However, later the same morning that the footage appeared online, The Black Vault pointed out that on the date of the sighting, April 20, 2021, the Weapons and Tactics Instructor (WTI) course 2-21 was well underway at the same location. This course involved the deployment of numerous aircraft and ground troops during a seven-week total training exercise​.

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‘I knew aliens were real’: Marine’s footage of mystery objects over military base sparks UFO talk

Mystery lights over Camp Wilson in eastern California in 2021 have sparked talk of UFOs two years later after a couple of experts released video of it on their podcast.

Six new videos and two photos were shared by Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp on their podcast “Weaponized.” According to Corbell, he got two phone calls from sources that urged him to look into the mysterious lights and, for two years, his team has been working on finding information.

At least 50 people, including dozens of Marines, witnessed the large objects with lights around their perimeter, his report said. It was in the air for about ten minutes, and military officials dispatched helicopters and trucks to the area. The helicopters remained in the air for approximately three hours.

“They responded big time,” said Corbell of the military intervention.

The Marines recorded videos using smartphones, which Knapp and Corbell released on the podcast. One had the timestamp of 8:29 p.m. PST on April 20, 2021, TMZ first reported.

The podcast’s description says the marines watched as the military fired two flares into the sky, “hoping to illuminate the mysterious craft. However, the craft quickly disappeared before it could be illuminated by the flare.”

The video shows the two flares above the other lights and then falling. From Corbell’s observation, the “craft” lights seem to go out. It’s unclear if that’s the case or the camera couldn’t focus, he confessed.

In the podcast Corbell cited one source saying that the object was “the size of a two-story house and as long as half a football field.”

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Mystery buyer snaps up dusty California ghost town for $22.5million complete with abandoned bowling alley and café which housed prisoners until a deadly riot broke out during the 2003 World Series

A ghost town in California‘s desert has been purchased by a mysterious buyer for a cool $22.5million.

Eagle Mountain, a once-thriving community that sits on the border of California’s Joshua Tree National Park, was recently purchased by a company named Ecology Mountain Holdings.

Not much public information is out there about the company, aside from its Cerritos, California, business address.

According to SFGATE, the company is associated with Ecology Transportation Services, a company known for its red big rigs – the front part of a tractor-trailer.

The town was purchased from a company in Ontario, California, called Eagle Mountain Acquisition LLC, which was apparently the last of various Kaiser subsidiaries to own the town in the last 40 years.

Eagle Mountain was last a thriving company town in 1983, when the bulk of the area’s population worked for the Kaiser Steel mine.

The once-prosperous town was a bustling community with homes, businesses and a high school.

The decline of Eagle Mountain began in the 1970s with staffing cuts at Kaiser that eventually led to its closure four-decades ago.

Following the mine’s decline, Eagle Mountain became home to a doomed low-security prison called the Eagle Mountain Community Correctional Facility, which opened in 1988.

The town’s former bowling alley, café and other buildings housed 438 inmates who were serving time for parole violations and other nonviolent offenses.

The private prison promoted career development for inmates and reducing recidivism rates. In 1992, the Press-Enterprise wrote of the prison that it brought ‘a ghost town back to life.’

In October 2003, a riot occurred while inmates watched the World Series in the prison’s recreation room. Two inmates died and eight were later charged with murder.

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No jail time for axe-wielding black man who set Asian UC Berkeley students on fire with blowtorch

A California man found guilty of lighting UC Berkeley students on fire inside a boba tea shop in 2020 with a blowtorch has been released from custody and will avoid jail time, The Berkeley Scanner reports.

Brandon McGlone, 49, was referred to the Veterans Treatment Court and will be participating in a “diversion treatment” program as part of his plea deal, according to Alameda County Superior Court records.

Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, who ran on “racial equity”, agreed to the plea deal after reaching an agreement with the public defender’s office, the outlet reports.

At a court hearing on April 28, Judge James Cramer said that all charges “will be dismissed” if McGlone succesfully completes the diversion program. According to The Berkeley Scanner, if McGlone does not complete the program he will be sent to prison for up to eight years.

“He must successfully engage in and complete whatever course of therapy is prescribed by the treatment team and abide by whatever conditions are set forth,” Judge Cramer said. “If he fails to do so, he could be terminated from the Veterans Treatment Court program and sentence will be imposed.”

On September 14, 2020, McGlone entered the Feng Cha Teahouse at 2528 Durant Ave and set two Asian men on fire after attempting to set fire to two others outside of the store, according to court documents.

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Taxpayers Shell Out $400K After School Cops Beat the Hell Out of a Child Then Framed Him

Another chilling incident showcasing the deeply entrenched culture of abuse and deceit within the American law enforcement mixture with public education has come to light. Riverside County taxpayers were forced to make amends in the amount of $400,000 to Daniel Silvas, the father of a 13-year-old boy who was allegedly assaulted and falsely accused of resisting arrest by sheriff’s deputies in 2018.

The boy, a freshman at San Jacinto High School at the time of the incident, faced a harrowing ordeal on only his second day at school. It began when he was singled out by security officer Jesus Peraza under the pretense of a suspicion of impending trouble, a suspicion that attorney Jerry Steering, representing the boy, ties back to fights at the school the previous day.

The boy, aware of his innocence, chose to protest and walk away from the confrontation, a decision that triggered a chain of events culminating in an alleged assault and subsequent framing. The school’s resource deputy Derrick Bunn and the security officer followed him in what the lawsuit describes as an “intimidating” manner. The situation escalated when the boy asked the two to stop tailing him, leading to Deputy Bunn reportedly shoving the boy to the ground.

What followed was a spectacle of police brutality, with Bunn repeatedly screaming expletives at the minor while beating him. Not wanting to miss out on the sadistic beating of a child, Deputy Timothy Dunlap joined the fray. Despite video evidence that contradicted their claims, the deputies and Peraza maintained that the boy had taken a fighting stance and cursed at them.

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Cops Raid LEGAL Cannabis Farm and Execute Man’s Leashed Dog

In an infuriating and utterly horrifying incident that lays bare the problematic reality of America’s drug war, law enforcement authorities with a search warrant on a state-licensed cannabis farm in rural Trinity County near Hayfork, fatally shot the cultivator’s dog on May 2. 

This glaring display of militarized policing in response to what is essentially a civil code violation is a chilling reminder of the inhumane costs of enforcing an immoral law about a plant that is legal in most parts of the country. Despite the victim having a valid state license, the county permit was a bone of contention that led to this brutal incident. The video of this appalling act has gone viral, leading to widespread outrage and backlash — especially since the dog was chained up.

The raid was part of several (between six to nine, depending on who you ask) conducted over the first two days of May in remote areas of western Trinity County, notorious for cannabis cultivation. According to the Trinity County Sheriff’s Department, these raids resulted in the seizure of over 16,000 marijuana plants, 7,500 pounds of processed marijuana, 25 firearms, and $64,566 in cash. The horror.

Police argue that their actions were justified when they executed the dog because it was allegedly trained to attack and lunged at an officer. They failed to mention the part where the dog was on a chain.

What’s more, this account ignores the fact that five of the raided farms were state-licensed — including this one. The grower, Nhia Yang, a 64-year-old Hmong man, had taken necessary steps to legitimize his operations and was waiting on the county license due to administrative lag. Furthermore, Yang had received a CDFW Qualified Cultivator grant and passed an inspection just a week prior to the raid, which affirmed his compliance with state regulations.

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