Tag: George Soros

Sorosville, Year Three

From the Summer of 2021 to this…

Through a quirk of fate I once knew Dennis Peron, the man who did more than anyone to legalize marijuana in California. I knew him in San Francisco as a gadfly from the neighborhood, circulating his petitions for a doomed cause. Cannabis was just one of those things destined to be illegal in 1996. Maybe not a felony, but something on the other side of the law, like numbers running.

Suddenly one day Dennis had an office on Market Street and America’s first medical dispensary, operating on a speakeasy basis. He invited me to his office for a chat.  The gadfly persona was no more.  George Soros was backing him, he announced. The future was neatly laid out. HIV, very much a lethal pestilence at the time, demanded medical marijuana on compassionate grounds could not be denied. Once medical cannabis could be cultivated and exchanged there would be simply no way to stop full legalization for recreational purposes. Only a question of when.

We know how this turned out. Today you can buy flower with the ease of a trip to 7-11 or have it delivered to your house by app. All perfectly ordinary, but back in the mid-90s, not even the most starry-eyed optimistic stoner would have predicted it. Nor the iPhone, nor Instagram.

No one saw it coming, but a billionaire made it happen. It had a salutary effect on Soros, who has since made himself the franchisee of urban chaos, through his army of woke prosecutors, installed city by city, one seven figure check at a time.

We are re-learning civilization requires handcuffs.  It’s hard to believe now but Broken Windows policing was once as settled a political issue as we had in America, so completely transformative of the urban landscape you couldn’t campaign against it, even in Los Angeles.

An entire generation came of age with no living memory of street crime. Now that they’ve tasted it, people are ready to take corrective measures.

George Gascon, Soros’ handpicked prima donna, was a dead D.A. walking, next in line after Chesa Boudin for a public auto-da-fe.

The voters of Los Angeles County submitted 715,833 signatures in support of his recall, where 566,857 were required.

Carlos Gonzalez, SF Chronicle

Yet here he is this week, smiling and dapper, having tap-danced his way around his reckoning at the polls.

How did this happen?  In secret, courtesy of Dean Logan, Registrar of Voters, who managed to disqualify 195,000, or 27%, of the signatures away from the eyes of Recall Committee observers, who were banned from the building on the grounds it was not an election but a signature verification process.

For perspective, L.A. county rejected 1% of mail-in ballots in the 2020 cycle due to non-matching signatures.

Dean Logan has a history. In 2004 he was the Director of Elections in Seattle during the Dino Rossi-Christine Gregoire gubernatorial race, in which Rossi prevailed by 261 votes, then 46 votes in the recount, and then in a second manual recount Logan “found” 573 votes for Gregoire, previously disqualified due to -wait for it- signature matching issues.

The blowback was so intense Logan was forced to resign. Because we can no longer have nice things, and because one can only fail upward in the administrative state, Los Angeles hired him soon after.

People living in saner American climes watch the clip above and express disbelief.  Why do we allow this to happen?  As though we have been taken over by a charm of beguiling whispered in Aramaic instead of the decidedly unsexy nuts and bolts of an election process where billionaires and bureaucrats call the shots.  If signature matching can be manipulated to elect favored candidates and disqualify recall petitions, the person making those decisions holds inordinate power in the new era of vote by mail.

It’s going to get stranger. We no longer have an Election Day. We have entered the era of E+7 voting.  Activist groups have a full calendar week beyond the election to harvest ballots, bring them to drop boxes without a chain of custody, under a verification process that remains opaque. This is how Eunisses Hernandez, police and prison abolitionist, prevailed in District 1 this summer. It’s how Karen Bass went from five points down on the night of the Mayoral primary on June 7 to a seven point lead over Rick Caruso a month later when the results were certified. Or ‘certified’.

Were they late-arriving ballots or last minute? Even the Times couldn’t decide the correct nomenclature for this new reality.

Who would have predicted San Francisco would red pill before L.A.? Stranger things.

A Postcard from Sorosville

So here’s a small data point in our current disintegration.  I ordered an item from Lululemon, a feminine wife-flattering thing.

Given the supply chain constraints, there was suspense as to whether it would arrive in time for Christmas, a tiny leaf floating in the River Ganges of holiday commerce from Groveport, Ohio to Hardin, MO to Mayfield, KS to Canyon, TX to Topock, AZ…dots on the railroad map, clocking in every 12 hours, before disappearing the night of Dec. 23rd at an undisclosed location on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

The shipping container, or its contents, never made it to the distribution hub. For eleven days, radio silence. Then an alert from FedEx the item was at long last on a delivery truck in Sun Valley.

Eleven days sounds to me like they sent a new package across the country. Theoretically, the shipping container itself could have been misrouted in the intermodal transport system.  I find this explanation on a low order of probability.

A differential diagnosis suggests it was waylaid by package pirates in Lincoln Heights. Or the other banditry choke point, outside Pomona.

Ninety containers are compromised (read: broken into) per day.

Union Pacific has made “over 100 arrests of active criminals vandalizing trains” in L.A. County. Per a special directive from D.A. George Gascon all were released within 24 hours. Of the arrests, none to date have resulted in court proceedings.

Add train robbery to the growing list of unenforced felonies in Sorosville.  A pry bar, bolt cutters and a willingness to climb a slow moving flat car and you too can be Butch Cassidy.

It’s baked into the price of everything we do now.  So let us break out the world’s tiniest violin for Mrs. UpintheValley’s late arriving gift.  As I said, a small thing, a mere data point in a sea of annoyance. There are families with real grief this week.

Sandra Shells, ER nurse, attacked without provocation at a bus stop at Union Station, succumbed to a brain bleed after her head struck the pavement.

Brianna, unrequited martyr?

Brianna Kupfer, an architecture grad student knifed to death in Croft House, an upscale boutique on La Brea Avenue, mid-afternoon.

Money was not a motive in either attack. Straight murder, nasty, brutish and pointless.

The killer, masked, backpack and hoodie, anonymous and indistinguishable from the army of shambling street people is as of this writing still at large. I will go on record now and predict he has been in custody and released without sentencing for other crimes in the past two years, probably more than once.

Brianna calls to mind Polly Klaas, all grown up. If ever there was a designated victim tailor-made to galvanize the public into a ferocious response it is she. If ever there was a face to push Westside liberals off the sidelines, to make them stakeholders in the unfolding tragedy they helped to set in motion, this is it.

I’m not sure it’s going to happen. Los Angeles of the 90s had the moral sense to boo Robert Shapiro at the Laker game during the O.J. trial, to vote for broken windows policing and three strikes laws.  It had a very different media. It didn’t have out of town billionaires writing checks to install our carpetbagging fashionista D.A.

The man in the tailored suit who swore an oath uphold the law had this to say: “The reality is that we go through these cycles, and we go through the cycles for a variety of reasons … In many ways we cannot prosecute our way out of social inequalities, income inequalities, the unhoused, the desperation that we have.” 

Prosecution is exactly how we rid ourselves of this scourge. Inequality, however defined, and housing status will be with us always.

Being right is of no use at the moment.  It has little persuasive value. It has no name in the street. Persuasion is in the hands of an ever smaller coterie of people who own/curate our media feed. They simply cannot afford to let Brianna become Polly.

Counterintuitively, working class strongholds like Van Nuys might be at an advantage right now. We’re not a soft target. We see you coming.

A Time for Re-Learning

A small but spirited Recall George Gascon rally took place at Topanga and Victory yesterday, in quiet response to the noisy lawlessness of 2021.

Is this the mustard seed of a Prop. 13-style rebellion? A beginning of the return to broken windows policing? Or a doomed last stand by a declining demographic? I have no idea. After the past year I can’t trust my political instincts when it comes to predicting events in Los Angeles.

Shootings are up 73%. We don’t enforce property crime or public nuisance crime at all, so any numbers on that front are meaningless. No one is allowed to say so, but there is a historical connection between the two.

We are in the midst of our Great Unlearning. Or Re-Learning, depending on your view.

Note, but a year ago Jackie Lacey was on the verge of reelection in the jungle primary for District Attorney -Gascon a distant second place with 28% of the vote- when BLM activists began showing up outside her Granada Hills house in the middle of the night, chanting, knocking on her door. After weeks of this, her husband David emerged at 4:30 AM flourishing a weapon, ordering everyone off his porch and property.   An orgy of sanctimonious media coverage ensued. Menacing! With a deadly weapon!  Jackie Lacey, Crenshaw raised, a member of that disappearing breed of law and order Democrat, was recast as Wife of Dirty Harry.  The Times saw to it she never recovered and now we have this George Soros-backed carpetbagger from San Francisco making decisions as to where the societal guardrails will be placed in L.A.   Apparently they will be in El Segundo.

The recall rally took place across the street from the now defunct Promenade at Woodland Hills. Which invites a question: what if the restoration of law and order that brought people back to the cities is destined to become an artifact of the 90’s, like the traditional indoor mall, or Dawson’s Creek?

The same tech companies that devoured the mall also de-platform critics of BLM.  Make of that what you will.

The final remaining tenant is the AMC theater. Like Macy’s, AMC may also be on its way to the graveyard of commerce.  You can stream unlimited programming, so there’s that.  But there also has been a decline in public decorum and fewer people willing to sit in close proximity with the unhousebroken.  Cinema is becoming either an evening of Netflix on the comfy couch or $30 tickets at iPic in a posh zip code far from the unruly.

I saw The Dark Knight here. A packed house and a most un-woke film. It was so much better as a bonding experience with strangers. We walked out of the theater together knowing we had been part of something special.

America was another country then. Same people, different set of rules.