Free Republic

As if residents of the Golden State did not have enough to make them miserable with wildfires, mudslides, mounting crime, high prices, energy shortages, and homeless people leaving various substances on city streets. Now the California Air Resources Board, or CARB (good grief, even the acronyms are ridiculous), is gearing up to rid the state of natural gas heaters and furnaces. According to The Hill, last week, the board passed a proposal that will lay the groundwork to phase out space heaters and water appliances by 2030. The Hill notes that the move is part of an effort to meet...

Every autumn the male tarantula wanders in search of a female to mate with which is why you're more likely to see the usually docile creature out and about, even here on the Central Coast. Tarantulas are generally shy creatures and will retreat to their burrow if disturbed, said Garland Ranch Regional Park, but they don't recommend that you handle them. "Handled, they may bite with their fangs or rub the hairs of their abdomen with their back legs, creating a cloud of stinging hairs that settle in the skin," the park wrote on Facebook.

Screenshot/Public/Twitter/KravGirl2004 Hurricane Kay is forecast to continue smiting Southern California and Baja through the weekend. The massive weather event is currently tracking up Mexico’s Pacific coast, bringing extreme heat to California and downpours through Mexico, according to CNN. Tropical storm warnings were issued throughout the peninsula but the storm is expected to turn west, heading toward San Diego by Saturday. Two to six inches of rain could hit southern areas of California, and a storm surge could lead to coastal flooding and other onshore hazards, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). Satellite imagery of the storm shared online shows...

by Samantha Foster | 24NewsJust one week after passing a law to ban all non-electric cars and trucks by 2035, and just days after begging owners of electric vehicles NOT to charge them, California has made another move that shows the catastrophic effect of their “green” hysteria.Due to the current "critical" strain on its electrical grid, California has declared a statewide grid emergency and facing the potential of rolling blackouts, California has activated four gas-powered emergency generators.You heard that right. The same Gov. Gavin Newsom who is forcing his citizens to buy only electric cars can't power his own state...

California’s energy overseer warned of blackouts starting Wednesday and urged residents to “avoid using large appliances and charging electric vehicles, and turn off unnecessary lights.” The state also wants those thermostats set no lower than 78 degrees. Called a Flex Alert, the California Independent System Operator says households should “reduce energy use from 4-9 p.m. when the system is most stressed because demand for electricity remains high and there is less solar energy available.”“The power grid operator,” the notice says, “expects to call on Californians for voluntary energy conservation via Flex alerts over the long weekend.”And not drive anywhere, I...

by Samantha Foster | 24NewsJust days after Democrats passed a sweeping law that mandates "green energy" policies and spends a whopping $370 billion on wind, solar and "carbon sequestration" in an effort to "slow climate change," America's largest state is about to up the ante with a unprecedented move.California on Thursday is expected to put into effect its sweeping plan to prohibit the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, a stunning move to force a national mandate for electric vehicles.The move comes despite critics warning that the state's power grid could not even power 10% of its cars being...

King Gavin is bragging about a $100 billion surplus. Yet he is silent about the $1.5 TRILLION unfunded liability of CalPERS—and no telling how big the STRS—teachers pension fund—liability is.

California’s urban water users and farmers who rely on supplies from state reservoirs will get less than planned this year as fears of a third consecutive dry year become reality, state officials announced. Water agencies that serve 27 million people and 750,000 acres of farmland, will get just 5% of what they’ve requested this year from state supplies beyond what’s needed for critical activities such as drinking and bathing. That’s down from the 15% allocation state officials had announced in January, after a wet December fueled hopes of a lessening drought. But a wet winter didn’t materialize and unless several...

In “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Victor Hugo told the tale of Esmerelda, a gypsy dancer falsely accused of attempted murder, set to be hanged by an unjust state. Quasimodo, the titular hunchback, swings down from the cathedral of Notre Dame and saves her, carrying her off while crying “Sanctuary!” In fact, throughout European history, churches provided places of safe haven for accused criminals; the claim of “sanctuary” is made to this day by people seeking refuge from the law. It's strange, however, to see the language of sanctuary adopted to protect precisely the sort of activity abhorred by anyone...

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has made its way to California. The variant’s presence in the state — reported Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — is not unexpected. First detected in southern Africa last month, the strain has already been found in nearly two dozen countries around the globe. Still, the arrival of the highly mutated variant comes at what was already shaping up to be a particularly precarious time in California. Officials have long expressed concern that the one-two punch of the end-of-year holiday season and colder weather will increasingly push people to...

A FULLY VACCINATED, traveler from S Africia.

The California governor’s first Covid emergency order was declared March 4,2020. “Winter is coming. Winter is here,” Newsom said. “And as we are to be reminded and should be reminded, last year we had a challenging winter, particularly down here in Southern California. We started to see around this time last year case rates, positivity rates, hospitalization rates, ICU numbers start to increase. We’re starting to see that now all across the globe. We’ve seen those trends, not dissimilar to last year.” The order extends provisions implemented to expand our health care workforce during the pandemic, allowing health care workers...

After a long cross-country flight, I made it out of LAX and into an Uber. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but the driver was. And hearing that I was a journalist, he wanted to tell me a story. I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years, but this may have been the most important one I let go. He hadn’t always been driving an Uber at 11:30 at night. Not all that long ago he used to have his own business with 7 trucks before he was bankrupted by California’s insane regulations. I listened, but didn’t pay...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Southern California's Los Angeles and Long Beach ports handle the most ocean cargo of any ports in the United States, but are some of the least efficient in the world, according to a ranking by the World Bank and IHS Markit. In a review of 351 container ports around the globe, Los Angeles was ranked 328, behind Tanzania's Dar es Salaam and Alaska's Dutch Harbor. The adjacent port of Long Beach came in even lower, at 333, behind Turkey's Nemrut Bay and Kenya's Mombasa, the groups said in their inaugural Container Port Performance Index published in...

No way in hell you are going to put a wok on an electric stove.”That was Steven Lee, a San Francisco official and restaurant investor, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle last year after the city’s Board of Supervisors voted to outlaw natural gas in new buildings.Nevertheless, they persisted. Per the Sierra Club, the quickening campaign to phase out natural gas recently notched its 50th city-level win in California alone. (Take a bow, Encinitas!) No. 50, as with some others, has “situational exemptions” for restaurants and the like, but the overall push to compel an all-electric design for homes...

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed off on the new law on Saturday banning gas-powered equipment that uses small off-road engines. Gas-powered equipment includes generators, lawn equipment, pressure washers, chainsaws, weed trimmers and even golf carts. Under the new law the machinery will have to be battery-powered or plug-in.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced Friday that school children will be required to take a coronavirus vaccine to attend in-person classes, once the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves inoculations for their particular age group. “Once the FDA approves the vaccination in different cohorts starting with 12 and above, grades seven to 12, we will begin to apply that requirement in the next term, either Jan. 1 or July 1, whichever comes sooner,” Newsom stated during a press conference. “Our schools already require vaccines for measles, mumps and more. Why? Because vaccines work. This is about keeping our kids...

Some things in California never change—accusations of election fraud, for example. On Saturday, poll workers informed 88-year-old Republican voter Estelle Bender. that she had already cast her ballot. The problem was, she knew she hadn’t. “I went to El Camino High School to vote,” Bender told KTLA5 reporter Chris Wolfe. When Bender gave a recall election poll worker her ballot information to scan, she told Bender the computer said she’d already voted. “I said, ‘no, I haven’t,’ and she said, ‘This has been happening all morning.'” Clearly, Bender wasn’t the only concerned voter who was informed she’d already voted. “The...

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a settlement to Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, who kept their doors open throughout the COVID-19 pandemic despite L.A. County’s health order. The county settled for $400,000, which will come from the county Health Department’s budget and will go to pay the church’s legal fees. The state will reportedly pay an additional $400,000 under the agreement. “It appears that the county wants to settle this because they do not want a trial,” the church’s pastor, John MacArthur, said from the pulpit in a video posted on Aug. 30. MacArthur said the...

A record number of container ships are stuck waiting to enter California’s two largest ports as labor shortages and COVID-19 disruptions continue to roil a supply chain that’s being pushed to its limits ahead of the busy holiday shopping season. A total of 46 freight ships are at anchor or in a drift area waiting to enter the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which operates the Vessel Traffic Service for those two ports, reported late Monday evening. “Trend at anchor and in drift areas is essentially steady next 3 days,” the group...