While we're on the subject of destructive refusals, researchers have determined that the 2010 whooping cough outbreak in California was probably driven by parents who refused to vaccinate for "non medical" reasons. The pertussis outbreak led to 9,120 cases and 10 deaths.

California just became the first state in America to vow to raise its minimum wage to $10 per hour by 2016. The federal minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour. That may change one day, if our congresspeople ever find the time amid their pointless, 21-hour rants.

Have no fear, all you 14-year-old virgin boys in California who find it funny to post social-media bios that say that you're "hung like a rhinosaurus [sic]" and that you "get more ass than a toilet seat." As of 2015, you will be legally guaranteed the right to delete that dumb shit before serious people who can influence your future see it!

Every town has its weird history, and even the newest housing tract of wet stucco and green 2x4s has some kind of buried backstory. The island city where I live today is loaded with Gold Rush tales and Victorian mansions, but the fact that Jim Morrison spent his formative years around the block is not something you can learn about at the local historical society.

There's sorta hope. The California Legislature just approved a bill to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour by the start of 2016. Currently the highest state minimum wage in the country is in Washington state, where workers make $9.19 an hour.

One California mother is taking a stand against the scourge of twerking by making her daughter hold up a sign publicly apologizing for engaging in the dance-du-jour at a recent school event.

After initial fictional reports that "marijuana" was the cause of the devastating High Sierra inferno that nearly burned up Yosemite National Park, the actual cause has been found. It was a man shooting wildlife in the forest, and his illegal campfire started the 370-square-mile Rim Fire.

The giant hellfire burning through Yosemite National Park continues to spread; by Wednesday morning the Rim Fire had grown to 187,500 acres, roughly the size of New York City. The fire is devastating, of course, but as the above video shows, it's also sort of beautiful, at least when captured with time-lapse photography.

In order to comply with a court order to reduce unconstitutional overcrowding in state prisons, California's governor wants to spend $315 million next year transferring thousands of prisoners to "privately owned prisons and other facilities."

Up in the High Sierra of Yosemite National Park today, a monstrous wildfire is racing through 200 square miles of dense piney forest. The "Rim Fire" is only one of about fifty major wildfires across the American West today, but everyone has at least heard of the majestic Yosemite Valley with its glacier-carved Half Dome and summer traffic jams of vacationers seeking waterfalls and hamburgers, so this is our official Natural Disaster of the week.

In one of the finest demonstrations of Orwellian language in recent memory, a hunger strike by cell-bound California prisoners is denounced as a "gang power play" by the government official who controls all of California's prisons.

A traffic sign installed outside a private preschool in Auburn, California, urging drivers to slow down is certainly getting noticed, but, ironically, is making the street less safe for kids.

A mother of three was arrested in Santa Ana this week after police discovered her ten-year-old son bound up in chains and crying in the courtyard of an apartment building.

A 61-year-old U.S. Navy veteran from Florida woke up in a California hospital in February speaking only Swedish, with no recollection of his past life.

San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, responding to calls for his resignation from former political allies, released a video this afternoon in which in which he apologizes for "[failing] to fully respect the women who work for me and with me" and says he has in the past "intimidated" women. It's the latest shame in what's been a rather difficult week for the city's first Democratic mayor in decades.

Some 30,000 inmates across two-thirds of California's prisons launched a hunger strike on Monday, refusing meals and skipping work and classes in a protest, organized by inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison in northern California, against unjust isolation practices.

According to a new article from the Center for Investigative Reporting, 148 female inmates in California were sterilized from 2006 to 2010 without the procedures going through required state vetting.

An airborne fungal disease without a cure, coccidioidomycosis — also known as valley fever or cocci — is affecting more people than ever in the Southwest, where more than 20,000 cases have been reported this year.

California lawmakers today approved a bill that would allow transgender public school students to choose which restrooms they use and which sports teams they join based on their gender identity rather than their chromosomal gender. The bill is now headed to Governor Jerry Brown for his signature.

Fair warning: Don't watch this video if you don't want to see police arresting a man and then shooting his dog in front of him in broad daylight.