Weekend Links: May 20-22
Road-trip roundups, goose poop, and 8 other stories to consider in your quest to understand the Golden State
Greetings from What is California? HQ! It’s Friday. It’s windy. I’m exhausted. A little melancholy. How are you?
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ICYMI
The podcast is on hiatus until later this summer, but you can catch up on the first two seasons below (or wherever you get podcasts!):
On with the Weekend Links!
Meanwhile, I hope you'll consider checking out some of these nifty California stories if/when you are so inclined:
Joan Didion’s Magic Trick - Caitlyn Flanagan, The Atlantic
Five months after her death, the Joan Didion encomia just keep coming. I kind of wish I’d thought to try this one myself: It’s an assessment of her career (particularly the power of her first two essay collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album) masked as a moody travelogue of California places Didion called home. I’m partial to the Sacramento section, obviously, and read with fascination the passage from a McDonald’s in Citrus Heights that today sits on former farmland owned by the Didion family. I’ve driven by suburban Didion Court so many times and had no idea it was linked to Joan Didion’s family. Flanagan nails something new about Didion’s art, too: “She gets us on the side of ‘the past’ and then reveals that she’s fully a creature of the present.” This really is the platonic ideal of a WIC? Weekend Read; I hope you’ll check it out.
After plane crashes and close calls, pressure mounts to close this L.A. airport - Rachel Uranga, Los Angeles Times
Whiteman Airport in Pacoima is a tiny facility serving small aircraft in L.A. County. It is also mere steps from neighboring homes, which have felt the brunt of pollution, close calls and crashes—13 of the latter over the last decade—that have grown alongside the airport’s activity. These little airports are everywhere in the state, and as Uranga reports, the push to redesign or even close them has gathered momentum among community residents and advocates. “Feel my heart. It’s racing,” said one neighbor who narrowly escaped death in 2020 when a plane crashed in front of her house, killing the pilot. “You relive it every day. You live in fear.”
California’s progressive laws take a tumble in the courts - Emily Hoeven & Grace Gedye, CalMatters
Remember that law we passed a while back saying that all publicly held companies in California must have at least one woman on its board? Well, if you didn’t remember, the courts definitely did: The good-intentioned but totally unconstitutional statute was wiped out last week by a California judge who confirmed that the law violated the equal protection clause by singling out gender. This is just the latest progressive law to bite the dust and/or encounter pushback at the polls—and as reported here, there are kind of surprisingly a lot. Is this how we do law here now? Pass something unenforceable, threaten folks into compliance for a few years (if at all), and then pat ourselves on the back for whatever minimal change we wrung from doomed policy? Come on.
Environmentalists oppose more life for California nuke plant - Michael R. Blood, Associated Press
You just know that 2025 felt like forever from the comfortable confines of 2016, when PG&E was merely a truly terrible utility company and not a criminally negligent actor in the slow, fiery ruination of California. Nevertheless, PG&E did agree in 2016 to shut down the seaside nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon within 10 years, conceding at the behest of environmentalists and unions that maybe a coastal bluff next to fault lines wasn’t the best place for nuclear energy to generate electrical power for hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. After all, the conventional wisdom went, we’ll be so much further along with renewable energy in 2025, right? Yes! But also, because this is PG&E, no: The Newsom Administration announced recently that maybe 2025 was too ambitious for the plant’s closure, essentially giving PG&E a pass for Diablo Canyon’s indefinite operation. Now the activists who pushed for the closure are pissed: “Your suggestion to extend the operational life of the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility is an outrage,” they wrote in a letter to the governor. “Diablo Canyon is dangerous, dirty and expensive. It must retire as planned.” Good luck, folks.RELATED: The Legislature this week also killed SB 953, which would have ended offshore drilling in state waters. The bill was a response to last year’s oil spill in Orange County, and was summarily halted by opposition from the oil and construction lobbies. So for those keeping score at home: Our fair liberal California has run on nearly 100% renewable energy multiple times this year. Yet greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb, and entrenched industrial interests continue to drill and nuke the state into submission.
Investors are buying up mobile home parks. These Fresno tenants have a different idea - Cresencio Rodriguez-Delgado, PBS NewsHour
Did you know that there’s a nationwide movement to help the residents of mobile home parks team up to buy their communities? The idea is to establish not only ownership and equity among low-income residents but also a bulwark against derelict landlords and investment groups increasingly looking to scoop up the parks and their high profit potential in states like California. It’s not without drawbacks: The residents of Trails End Mobile Home Park in Fresno would suddenly have a whole community of mobile homes and its attendant property to maintain, which takes time and even more money. But if the model can work here, then it’s a way to keep thousands of potentially at-risk Californians in their homes.
S.F. firefighters who refused vaccines fought their firings with misinformation and conspiracy theories - Rachel Swan, SF Chronicle
This is really something: Of the 1,735 employees of the San Francisco Fire Department, 17 have refused the department’s Covid vaccination requirement. They all get hearings before being terminated. (Thirteen have been fired to date.) Swan reports on those hearings here, digging into some of the absolutely wild (and genuinely upsetting) statements and public testimony: “Firefighters and their allies have compared the vaccines, which are deemed safe and effective by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization, to forced injections,” Swan writes. “Several insisted that God alone tells them what to put in their bodies. Civil liberties groups and critics of the medical establishment have rallied to help: One employee brought an internationally known vaccine skeptic to testify on his behalf, telling commissioners that the pandemic has all but disappeared.” (Editor’s note: The pandemic has not all but disappeared.)
Foster City looks to control geese population with lethal removal amid health concerns - J.R. Stone, ABC7
Ohhhhh, this is the good stuff. Welcome to Foster City, where the war is on over the fate of Canada geese who’ve taken up seasonal residence in the bayside hamlet south of San Francisco. City officials and some residents have had it up to here with the goose droppings carpeting streets and parks. "It's a problem most of the time—poopoo problem,” says one disgruntled resident. “We cannot walk here, we can not sit on grass, it's always dirty, they are always fighting with each other.” Meanwhile, a very… uh, well-fertilized grass roots campaign has risen to save the geese. “[The geese] were here first and for 40 years they were fine, and now all of a sudden, they are dirty because someone complains about poop?” another woman remarks, condemning the city leaders who have begun seeking lethal remediation of the pesky birds. “They're not thinking right, they've made a mistake," she adds. Yes, there’s video. With buckets of goose poop. Go watch it. Judge for yourself.
Plot to Blow Up Democratic Headquarters Exposed California Extremists Hiding in Plain Sight - Alex Hall and Julie Small, KQED
KQED’s California Report this week dug into the backgrounds of Jarrod Copeland and Ian Rogers, two Sonoma County residents charged with planning to blow up the California Democratic Headquarters in Sacramento. The evidence in the case is damning, and it hums with the usual lunacy about George Soros and “the enemy” and other militia-minded, conspiracy-fueled paranoia. But the thing that sticks with me is the reporting that Hall and Small did with the suspects’ friends and family. “It was maybe like little boys like, ‘I will,’ ‘I can do this,’ or ‘we can do this.’ But it was just like playing,” says Rogers’ wife. Copeland’s cousin in Kentucky had an even more unsettling insight: “Growing up, [Copeland] wasn’t the one who was out hunting and fishing and trying to figure out how to take 30 firecrackers to a pop bottle and make it blow up, you know? That was the rest of us.”
More CSU students graduate during pandemic, but drop may loom - Larry Gordon, EdSource
The California State University is run by unserious people obsessed with 1) raising money and 2) getting students in and out of their campuses with degrees in four years so they can raise more money. I’ve seen it first-hand as a faculty member at Sacramento State, which has increased its own four-year graduation rate from 9% in 2016 to nearly 26% in 2021. That growth tracks across most of the CSU system. But like everything else in the CSU, it’s unequal and unsustainable. White students made the highest gains in four-year graduation averages: Nearly half of the CSU’s white freshmen graduate in four years, which is roughly 13 percentage points higher than the average four-year graduation rates for all CSU students. Yet Black and Latino students both remain stuck at or below 25% four-year graduation rates systemwide, and inequality gaps are about to make it worse. This interview with the CSU’s graduation czar touches on some reasons why (economic inequality, inaccessible classes) but doesn’t get at one of the biggest issues of all: More and more students show up at the CSU as freshmen without any academic preparation for college. Their high schools graduate them at reading/writing levels below college standard, and the CSU can’t (or simply won’t) add the faculty, facilities and counseling needed for students to keep up. Layer on the awfulness of online education during Covid, and the very real economic crises that many of these students face at home (if they even have a home), and is it any wonder students drop out or need another year (or two) for their degrees?
And finally…
Top 10 California summer road trip destinations - John Bartell, ABC10
If you can afford the rapidly approaching $7/gallon for gas, the peripatetic Bartell has you covered for places to check out this summer. I seriously have got to get to Forestiere Underground Gardens!RELATED: Check out our recent podcast episode with Josh McNair, who delivers some of the state’s most compelling destinations via his own travelogue, California Through my Lens.)
Thanks for reading, and have a safe, happy weekend!
-Stu