752 posts tagged with california.
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“Charlie is the kind of guy where you just really want to believe him”
Wickwire recalls instances where other climbers lied about their ascents and were quickly banished. “No one would climb with them or believe what they said,” he points out. But when it came to stories about Barrett’s violence against women, people were too willing to look the other way—even after Barrett was arrested and a detailed indictment from a federal investigation was posted online. “There is a dissonance between how climbers think of themselves and what they actually do,” says Kimbrough Moore, a longtime climber, a guidebook author, and a philosophy professor at San Francisco State University. “In my experience, the climbing community has been hostile to women who have come out saying they were assaulted.” As for Barrett, Moore says: “I have never heard of anyone doing more to harm the climbing community than Charlie. He has used his status as an elite climber to hurt people for a very long time.” from How Did This Climber Get Away with So Much for So Long? [Outside; ungated] [CW: rape, sexual violence, violence to animals, stalking, harassment, enabling]
Remain Otterly Ungovernable
Last summer, the California coast had an unusual threat for surfers in the form of Otter 841, who had a passion for stealing surfboards while evading the authorities. With the start of the 2024 season, Otter 841 is back, and just as ready to cause havok as she was last year.
Making knowledge public
The Bobcat Comics series features collaborations between artists and UC Merced scholars. The comics explore research on colonial Alta California, how Latinas use "journey" rather than "war" metaphors when talking about breast cancer, unruly patriarchs and failed women and more. One stand-out is How to Read an Aztec "Comic": Indigenous Knowledge, Mothers' Bodies, and Tamales in the Pot, a collaboration by artist Jordan Collver and Chicana Studies scholar Felicia Rhapsody Lopez about women's representation in the ancient Mesoamerican text, Codex Borgia/Yoalli Ehēcatl. [more inside]
A tantalizing glimpse of a fully armed and operational weed scene
We walk into the smoking area next door, which is as peaceful and quiet as a library, if it was a library where you can borrow bongs, which you actually can. Most of the tables are full. A lot of people are on laptops. A TV above plays YouTube cat videos on a loop. Sure. We grab a booth and spark up. Immediately, I’m both thirsty and hungry, which provides irrefutable evidence that weed cafes are a good idea. from I got high in an SF weed lounge and these should be everywhere mannnnn by Drew Magary
"It’s not for everyone, but it’s a good life."
He sees himself as many Angelenos do: in the gray area between homeless and homeowner. Enough money to get by, but not enough to ever have the picture-perfect California single-family home. One more person with a dream of putting down roots in one of the priciest real estate markets in the country. from An ambulance, an empty lot and a loophole: One man’s fight for a place to live [Los Angeles Times; ungated]
Wet Work
In a state with prolonged bouts of drought and unquenching thirst, stolen water is an indelible part of California lore. But this was not Los Angeles’ brazen gambit to take water from the Owens Valley. Or San Francisco’s ploy to flood part of Yosemite National Park for a reservoir. The water grab described in a federal indictment allegedly happened cat burglar-style, siphoned through a secret pipe, often after hours, to avoid detection. from Feds say he masterminded an epic California water heist. Some farmers say he’s their Robin Hood [LA Times; ungated]
The Sun Is Down, The Battery's Up
NYT: Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity California draws more electricity from the sun than any other state. It also has a timing problem: Solar power is plentiful during the day but disappears by evening, just as people get home from work and electricity demand spikes. To fill the gap, power companies typically burn more fossil fuels like natural gas.
That’s now changing. Since 2020, California has installed more giant batteries than anywhere in the world apart from China. They can soak up excess solar power during the day and store it for use when it gets dark. [more inside]
Simply put, there is a *ton* of fascist-chic cosplay involved
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.” [...] “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said [last October], after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts.TNR: The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco: "If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not okay." [more inside]
Stupor Snoozeday? Not exactly.
Super Tuesday, when the greatest number of states hold primary elections, is a sleepier affair this year with Joe Biden and Donald Trump almost certain to win their respective nominations. But there are still some interesting results to look out for, namely: Can Nikki Haley win any contest outside of D.C. (and what will she do after today)? How significant will Biden's "uncommitted" protest vote be? Whither California on policing and crime -- and which two candidates will emerge from the state's blanket Senate primary? Does a new Trump protégé rise in North Carolina? And will establishment Republicans be able to derail their most problematic House candidates? More: FiveThirtyEight looks at California, Alabama / Texas, and North Carolina - Your guide to every state voting on Super Tuesday - How to watch the Super Tuesday results like a pro - States with same-day voter registration - Find your polling place
Crypto PAC Jumps Into Senate Race, Opposing Katie Porter in California
From NYT (ungated and nytimes.com): Fairshake revealed two weeks ago in federal filings that it and two affiliated super PACs had amassed a combined roughly $80 million in 2023, with most of the money coming from three major cryptocurrency players: Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and Andreessen Horowitz. It is not exactly clear what about Ms. Porter has drawn the crypto industry’s ire other than her record as a progressive who favored regulating the industry to better favor consumers and made the grilling of a financial chief executive a viral moment a few years ago.
About Science (1966-1968)
The About Science Series Collection is made up of 75 radio interviews focused on the advancements of science. Produced by the California Institute of Technology, the series aired on KPPC* in Pasadena from 1966 to 1968 ... Each half-hour episode introduced one or more experts who examined a specific area of interest. Episodes like “About lead in the atmosphere” and “About developments in family planning” provide a unique lens into the technological, political, social, and environmental concerns of the time. Many episodes shed light on advancements that have only become more relevant today, such as “About computer languages,” “About international cooperation in space,” and “About ocean pollution.” [more inside]
The dream, however, quickly turned nightmarish
“The real toll your behavior is going to take is priceless,” she continued. “How dare you pretend to care about justice involved people? How dare you pretend to care about Black businesses? How dare you sit at the Black leadership table with people who have cried, fought, and hustled to build real businesses and brands with nothing and from nothing…. You frequently talked about letting Black women lead. And even though that was clearly [a] fraudulent narrative you used to gain entry, you weren’t wrong. It’s Black women who will ensure you never do this again.” from Meet the Con Artist Who Deceived the Front Range Tech Community
Congratulations to the California Golden Chanterelle
"We go in for excessive bleeding and come out missing body parts!"
Between 1909 and 1979, California ran the most active eugenics program in the United States. California passed a law in 2021 creating a program to compensate survivors of forced and involuntary sterilization. [more inside]
the pickers demanded $1.40 an hour, 25 cents per box of grapes
The story of labor organizer Larry Itliong and Stockton's Little Manila (Youtube link). Filipino farmworkers were the first to walk out off vineyards in 1965, prompting the Delano Grape Strike and, ultimately, the formation of the United Farm Workers. [more inside]
Dianne Feinstein (1933-2023)
“We went from two women senators when I ran for office in 1992 to 24 today – and I know that number will keep climbing.” Dianne Feinstein, whose three decades in the Senate made her the longest-serving female US senator in history, has died. [CNN]
“Pretty soon there’ll be no more of these pachucos.”
2023 was the 80th anniversary of the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles. The name is misleading because it suggests that the zoot suiters — the young Mexican, Black and Filipino men and boys who wore the flamboyant outfits (wide-legged, high-waisted, pegged trousers and coats with wide lapels and padded shoulders; zoot suit girls had their own spin)— were the perpetrators. Text and post title from the timeline (archive.org version). Short video:
The Zoot Suit Riots Cruise brings back ‘a forgotten era’. [more inside]
It’s not language that makes you Latino
The 'no sabo kids' are pushing back on Spanish-language shaming. Being Latino isn’t a monolith — some may speak Spanish, some may speak Indigenous dialects and some may only know English. Mala Muñoz, co-host of Locatora Radio (episodes): “I grew up just constantly hearing the reason dad speaks terrible Spanish is because he wasn’t allowed to speak Spanish. It was kept from him. They were being beaten at school. And that’s why he speaks his Spanglish, and that’s why we speak our hybridized Spanglish.”
Et In Arcadia Ego
The urban fog that has trailed shibboleths of progress to the Pacific Rim hovers over a reflection in once-clear water that looks final in its murkiness: finding the barbarisms of modernity exacerbated and multiplied on the outer cusp of the American continent, settled under the false assurance of beginning anew, we can no longer dispute that the monsters are us. It is through [Lana] Del Rey, a moody transplant with a made-up name, that this lineage finds its most opportune and poignant expression. A damsel in distress inured to the fatalism of our time, her songbook is a secular Revelation for the coming fall, illusions of redemption having all but burned out. from California Gothic [The Baffler; ungated]
Withering Green Rush: California Cannabis Breeding at a Crossroads
Most people struggling through cannabis prohibition wanted legalization or at least decriminalization, and to empty the prisons. But the way legalization was implemented in California, it remained unclear if the crop was a drug or an agricultural product; stuck in limbo with the worst of both options proved in time to be the worst way to go. Overregulating certain aspects, treating cannabis as a drug, and under-regulating other aspects led to an economy-of-scale agricultural consolidation... We are left in a situation where the rich history of California cannabis is being eliminated one farm at a time. [more inside]
California second state in the US with free prison phone calls
"At a time when most consumers enjoy free or low-cost calling, prison phone calls at their peak in California cost more than $6 per 15 minutes via a private telecommunications provider. That allowed only hurried, superficial conversations between the siblings — with one eye always on the clock.
" Los Angeles Times: California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation
“It was a hard process for everybody"
The human impact is also evident. In one photo, a tractor drags a white house on a rolling platform through a field. In the foreground, two men in cowboy hats are turned away, as if they don’t want to watch. Their body language is bent, resigned, sad. In another photograph, a couple walk through the cemetery with their backs to the camera. The woman appears to be holding flowers. Soon the graves will be dug up and the bodies moved to a new cemetery ... As the “government men” came in, the demolition sped up. “Catastrophe came to the old Berryessa Valley,” the text reads. “Fires burned. Dust and smoke filled the air.… The valley is black at night.” from Lost Beneath Lake Berryessa [Alta; ungated] [more inside]
Otter 841
Her name is 841. She is a sea otter. Her attacks on surfboards are escalating. She has so far managed to evade capture. Her popularity is growing.
AMPTP's endgame for writers: They should all be homeless
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” - California is notoriously expensive to live in and rife with homlessness, writers are notoriously poorly paid and living precariously (and likely to become more soif the WGA's concerns are not addressed), and thus the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) has decided its tactic to settle the current writers strike and finally break the WGA: Wait for the writers to be broke and homeless.
Killing an ecosystem for hay
Agriculture slurps 80% of the Colorado River in the U.S. each year, and a single forage crop, alfalfa hay, is responsible for over a third of that drain.
You've probably read about the drought in the southwestern US and how Lake Powell hit historic lows (though this winter has improved things somewhat). But the real problem is not the drought, but overuse. The classic analysis, Cadillac Desert, first published in 1986, is no less true now than it was 40 years ago. [more inside]
World Famous Clown Motel
I came here in January, wanting to learn more about why America — my adopted home for 16 years — so strangely and uniquely fetishizes its brutal past. Nowhere is this more true than in the American West, and nowhere have I seen it better epitomized than in Tonopah. from In the American West, a Clown Motel and a Cemetery Tell a Story of Kitsch and Carnage by Andrew Chamings
Mysterious Company Buys entire California Ghost town for 22.5 mil
"A road diverges in the yellow flats along the outer rim of Joshua Tree National Park. The two lanes in the middle of the desert peel off Interstate 10 ..." "A few foremen live on the premises full time to keep watch over Eagle Mountain. Verdant palm trees poke out from the street they live on, while the rest of town remains preserved by dust. One night in the stillness, a foreman heard trespassers in the dark. The sound of a shotgun blast into the sky scared them off."
“What are you?”
MIXED! Stories of Mixed Race Californians. “People are defining you according to this boundary, that you have to be ‘this much’ this,” said Fulbeck. “You have to speak this language. You have to take off your shoes, whatever it is. It's like if you're going to go off those definitions, then you're going to be in a world of hurt. You have to find your own way to define yourself."
And How Can This Be? The Return of Lake Tulare
The Ghost Lake Rising in California - "Tulare Lake used to be the largest freshwater lake in the Western U.S., fed by water flowing down from the Sierra Nevada. It dried up about 80 years ago when the land was re-developed for agricultural purposes." (previously: 1,2) [more inside]
An Epic Tale of Redemption Through Irrigation
The club’s nine-decade history and its forthright, sporty name may convince you that Barbara Worth was a real person—say, a pioneering female golfer, a contemporary of Patty Berg and Babe Zaharias who founded the club after a successful pro career. That is not the case. Barbara Worth exists in the pages of a novel and in a silent film. She was the creation of Harold Bell Wright, the most popular and influential California writer no one today has heard of. Together, author and heroine propelled California’s favorite story about itself: that given will and engineering prowess and water, the state can be whatever it wants to be. from The Most Famous California Novel You’ve Never Heard Of
California dreamin' 2 (electric bugaloo ;)
Cedar the Goat
9-year-old California girl wanted to save her goat from slaughter. Then came the search warrant [The Sacramento Bee]
Din Tai Fung Is Causing Drama in Los Angeles
The Great LA Dumpling Drama - "Last August, moments after news of the Din Tai Fung move broke, the man who runs the Americana at Brand Memes Twitter account was out to breakfast with his mother-in-law when his phone began buzzing." [more inside]
Hoover won.
Can One City Be a Microcosm of Everything That's Wrong? [ungated] - "In his new book, 'Palo Alto,' Malcolm Harris makes the case that the story of his hometown represents way more than you might expect." (previously) [more inside]
Dianne Feinstein: Will she stay or will she go?
A strong instinct: Fitting acorns into holes
An exterminator in Santa Rosa, California recently discovered 700 pounds of acorns stashed in the wall of a local home. According to The Guardian: acorn woodpeckers – peculiar little birds with a shock of red feathers on their head – ... are prodigious acorn collectors. Normally, the birds store thousands of acorns in small holes they drill into dying tree stumps, which they protect with outsize pluck. “But that instinct to fit an acorn in a hole and store it is pretty strong with these guys,” explained Angela Brierly, a PhD researcher at Old Dominion University who studies the species at the Hastings Natural History Reservation. [more inside]
Regional textile economies (aka soil-to-skin)
Each year, the United States produces enough wool to create millions of sweaters. But a big hunk of that wool production ends up composted or even landfilled. The Regional Fiber Manufacturing Initiative at Fibershed includes tons of research, e.g. current capabilities of Western U.S. fiber manufacturing (artisanal bottlenecks and all) and their Fiber Visions of how dogbane, wool, and cotton could honor Indigenous practices and regenerate soil health for Central & Northern California. Small wool mill Ewethful (in Oregon) on what goes into the price of a skein: 12 lbs of unprocessed wool --> skirt the wool (remove any vegetable matter, poop and/or unwanted fiber) --> 9 lbs of raw wool --> wash --> resulting in 6.5 lbs of clean wool. [more inside]
The Circus Came to Town—and Bought the Place
Spiegelworld, a Las Vegas-based company known for adult-themed acrobatic performances, purchased Nipton, Calif. The company has never owned or run a town before. (archive.today link)
At just 4 mm long, Perdita yanegai is one of the state’s tiniest bees
BeeSip features the work of artist turned full time bee photographer Krystle Hickman (Instagram account, LA Times profile), including videos of West Coast (U.S.) native bees burrowing and nesting.
fire & rain
This is an article that talks about atmospheric rivers, which can carry more water than the Amazon River and provide California with like half its water. This is a 25-minute video that talks about how to use emergency fire shelters for firefighters. [more inside]
For a While Everything Was Golden
Yet something did survive. In the deepest reaches of a closet was a stack of boxes packed by Eve’s mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and letters. No, inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and was centered in a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of L.A. The Franklin Avenue scene, I call it for reasons that will become apparent. And it had all the explosive vitality that the scene at Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank had for Ernest Hemingway and his fellow Lost boys. It was the making of one great American writer, the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another. These two writers were friends. Enemies as well. They were also women, a fact fundamental rather than incidental... from Joan Didion and Eve Babitz Shared an Unlikely, Uneasy Friendship—One That Shaped Their Worlds and Work Forever by Lili Anolik [ungated] [more inside]
Effing up the ineffable
'Magic mushrooms' would be decriminalized in California under new bill [ungated] - "SB 58 would allow only plant-based hallucinogens, such as psilocybin, the active ingredient in 'magic mushrooms,' and dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, which is found in some plants used to brew ayahuasca. Other naturally occurring psychedelics that would be allowed under the bill include ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid found in the iboga shrub, and mescaline found in cacti other than peyote." [more inside]
The Freedom to Walk Act
The US state of California, where car culture is so ingrained that it spawned its own Saturday Night Live sketch series, has made jaywalking legal starting in 2023 in the Freedom to Walk Act. [...] Pedestrians can only be ticketed for jaywalking – or crossing outside of an intersection – if there is “immediate danger of a collision". The cost of a jaywalking ticket in California could be as much as $250, compared to $1 in jaywalking-friendly Boston. (jaywalking previously and previouslier)
Saving lives with the world’s least impressive inventory-tracking system
In early 2021, in the richest area of the world's richest country, in the home of the world's largest technology companies, the best way to find a COVID-19 vaccine was to go to a website which relied on a small army of volunteers making phone calls every morning to every single pharmacy. This is the story of VaccinateCA, and the United States' bungled vaccine distribution. (warning: very long)
"institutions increasingly use our system to manage their carcass data"
"The California Roadkill Observation System uses a form-based data entry system to report carcasses resulting from wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC). Operating since 2009, it... contains 1,338 users and more than 54,000 observations of 424 species of ground-dwelling vertebrates and birds, making it one of the most successful examples of crowd-sourced roadkill and wildlife reporting." [source, via, cw: dead animals] See similar projects at GlobalRoadkill.net
California Poised to Overtake Germany as World’s No. 4 Economy
“the California dream is still alive and well,” the state’s 40th governor said in a Zoom interview a month before his probable reelection. The truth is that California outperforms the US and the rest of world across many industries. That’s especially relevant with renewable energy, the fastest-growing business in California and Germany. The market capitalization of California companies in this business increased 731% the past three years, or 1.74 times more than their German counterparts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Mike Davis: 1946–2022
A food for unmarried men who didn’t know how to cook
An End to Pornography, Sophistry, and Panty Raids
The Origins of the Elite EdgeLords: I never met Epstein; I didn’t know that some Edgies jetted around in the zillion-dollar private plane known as the Lolita Express. But over the years I got eyefuls of what I was excluded from when Brockman, in our meetings, showed me photos of events packed with men he said were billionaires, Nobel laureates, or somehow both. A bowling league for übermenschen, that Edge: Sergey Brin, Yuri Milner, Jacqui Safra, David Brooks, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Jeff Bezos. [more inside]
The Other Big One
A megaflood that threatens California and the West Coast, could be the most expensive natural disaster in history. It has happened before, The Great Flood of 1862, caused by an atmospheric river from the Pacific Ocean, first loading the coastal mountains with snow that was then melted by heavy warm rains. [more inside]