Baldwin Park is along the #I-10 east of #Los_Angeles. I used to hear regular reports of slowdowns on the freeway in that area due to "police activity".
Because it is so destructive to agriculture, #California dept of food and agriculture will be releasing 250K sterile male medflies per week to try and prevent reproduction. I remember walking home at night with one of my brothers after work while helicopters were spraying malathion laced bait to stop an infestation of Mediterranean fruit flies in the #SGV San Gabriel Valley.
A younger brother worked at a different, more distant mall. He used to catch a bus from his mall to mine, and we'd walk home together. Later on, I saw people wearing t-shirts with the name of one of the affected communities and "medfly" with a drawing of a fly.
At the time, some were worried about the effects of the pesticide on humans, pets, and on vehicle paint. But 40+ years later, I am unaware of any effects that could be blamed on malathion.
Finding #Medfly was a pretty serious thing for a farming state. The risk was that #California produce would not be allowed to be shipped overseas, but also would be banned from US destinations.
Now, it just happens that the areas underneath spray patterns were usually lower-income and ethnic minority communities.
Seriously, didn't anyone on the city council attend a US high school? In #California, we had to read the Constitution as part of a required "US Government" class.
#California Legislature bill would increase funding for school salaries by 50% within 7 years. It is supposed to go to teachers, aides, and specialists, but it doesn't require it.
I can see school superintendents and other administrators gobbling it up and leaving teachers underpaid.
In #California, some years back, they passed a law to restrict general elections to the top two vote-getters in the primaries, so that no third parties ever get the chance to get before the main electorate.
That affects me as a "decline to state" a party voter, because there's zero chance for me to vote for someone whose views and agenda are similar to mine. (Not that I've seen any third party candidates whose views are similar to mine, but if such a candidate ever arose, they aren't likely to be in the Democratic or Republican parties.)
> At the turn of the 20th century, the eugenics movements captivated much of white America, fueled by a zealous faith that the burgeoning field of genetics could socially engineer away America’s “ills”, including poverty, crime and “feeblemindedness”. Thirty-two states had sterilization laws, but California’s program was unrivaled. It contributed to a third of total national sterilizations, and set an example for Nazi Germany’s sterilization laws.
> "California was the second state to pass eugenics laws in 1909," two years after Indiana made it legal to sterilize the "feeble-minded," according to University of Virginia bioethicist Paul Lombardo.
> Lombardo is an expert on eugenics, a school of thought popular around the turn of the 20th century. Eugenicists thought they could improve the human species through selective breeding, which meant preventing habitual criminals, inmates of insane asylums and sexual deviants from having kids.
> Many people who lived in state-run hospitals, homes and institutions through 1979 were sterilized, leaving them unable to have biological children. Additionally, many people who were in custody of a state prison or other correctional facility after 1979 were forcibly or involuntarily sterilized.
> The Forced or Involuntary Sterilization Compensation Program financially compensates survivors of state-sponsored sterilization. The California Victim Compensation Board (CalVCB) administers the program.