Tag: Twitter

The $850,000 Street Taco

So, last year I picked up a rider in Venice, Indian-American, worked in finance, newly returned to L.A. after a stint in Miami. He told me something interesting enough to write down:

“I’ve always dug Latino culture. One thing I realized moving to Miami is what I actually dig is Mexican latino culture, not rich South American exiles blowing their ill-gotten gains culture. I lived on the 39th floor, right across from the SLS Hotel and all these high end buildings that are 1/3 full because people are just parking their money there. There’s also only one month a year I can leave the house in the daytime without sweating through my shirt. I’m so glad to be back in L.A. I have no need to rent a Lamborgini for the weekend. Mexicans in America have earned their money the hard way and it shows in how they live. The Mayor of Miami is putting up billboards in San Francisco inviting people to move there because of lower taxes. California is worth the taxes. The climate alone is worth it. Don’t come here people, please don’t come here.”

He was speaking from the top of the economic food chain, ensconced in the ocean cooled Westside, a beneficiary of Latino labor, where California frequently feels worth the taxes. Would he have said the same thing if he lived in the Valley? Perhaps, but he wouldn’t care for the noise.

I thought of him again this week in light of Governor Newsom’s televised pitch to Floridians, on day 857 of his emergency powers, to come here, to the land of “freedom of speech” and abortion maximalism.

A thing of wonder, this campaign ad, considering our Public Square is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Silicon Valley: global engine of censorship, digital surveillance, de-platforming, de-monetization, opposition research, Twitter ratio-ing, brigading, tribal hate with your morning coffee, tattling on your neighbors, algorithmic manipulation of the young and impressionable, the ever leftward ratchet toward perfection, social apps bumping your phone when they know you are weakest.

Arthur Rackham, 1909

Our information casino and the technology supporting it is now California’s chief moneymaker and export. Not Hollywood. Not agriculture. Not manufacturing.  The farming of the human id, corralled in feedlots of narcissism, packaged and sold to corporations and politicians in equal measure.

Like Hansel and Gretel we entered the gingerbread house, filling our bellies. Now here we are, too frightened for our livelihoods to call the Witch a witch.

Florida is flat as pancake and as sweltering as the Congo. In a reasonable world who makes that trade? But it is governed for the time being by people committed to the freedoms California is determined to discard. The U-Hauls are only rolling in one direction, away from here, and it’s not just the price point.

Tellingly, Newsom mentions nothing about climate, which no politician can claim credit.   At a certain point in life, when the mortgage is dealt with, or at least made manageable, Mediterranean weather makes it less desirable to re-boot somewhere else.  It’s our indispensable and under-appreciated home court advantage. One window shops on Zillow, agog at what $850K will buy in Cleveland or the Carolinas (though not Idaho anymore), and then goes out for a street taco, squats on a crate admiring the golden light breaking through the foliage at the end of the day and thinks…I can wait another year.  The center is holding, for now.

https://twitter.com/clownworld_/status/1544505941738999809?s=10&t=sT1ITBB-FA3TLWtzOM9oNw

This woman will not likely see a day in jail in Lord Newsom’s California. If you are the woman who owns the truck, to whom do you appeal for freedom from violence?

Twitter and YouTube will shortly censor this video and call it content moderation. The account holder will be warned, then suspended, then banned.  Big Tech will pocket the ad revenue anyway, pad its earnings, bump the stock valuation. Executives will cash out, donate generously to Newsom’s presidential campaign and (as a papal indulgence) to criminal justice reform initiatives that insure no one goes to jail.  They will fund organizations that pay activists to harangue officials at public meetings, to charge the stage, to show up at their homes in the middle of the night with a bullhorn and drums.

I love Los Angeles. It’s kind of an amazing time to be here.   We have set in motion the Hobbesian forces of societal collapse at the same time we are upgrading our kitchens, fabulously.   Nothing is too good for The House and no leftist nostrum is too crazy to affirm.  Nouveau riche Highland Park, land of the $1.5 million bungalow makeover, set the bar by voting a police and prison abolitionist to the City Council.

As a Gen Xer I can afford to be philosophical. I watch. I note. I enjoy the ordered nature of my yard.  I live embedded among Latinos unwilling to vote their interests. For now.  And I have no idea how this movie ends.

Carusovilles and Keith

“I will build 30,000 temporary housing units in the first year. If anyone knows how to build I know how to build. If I don’t get it done vote me out.  I know I can get that done. I’ve talked to the manufacturer.”

So said mayoral candidate Rick Caruso last week, walking through Skid Row for the benefit of local TV news. If you don’t know, Caruso is on the right, displaying the Hand Gesture of Progress.

“The minute we have good, warm, clean bed and food, then people need to move off the streets. No more encampments. You have to enforce the law. We may offer a bed once, we may offer a bed twice. But the third time we are going to have to say I’m sorry but you’ve broken the law.”

I agree with him but this is wishful thinking as policy.

After the third refusal to self-house, then what? Jail? Imagine the headlines. Billionaire Puts Paupers Behind Bars. It’s a moot point. In 2020 Los Angeles County voted to close the Twin Towers facility to felons.

Fines? They’ll never pay. Penalties will accrue. Years hence, upon a hypothetical sobriety, the chains of Dickensian debt will prevent them from re-integrating and we can’t have that.

The pillory?  If this were colonial Virginia we could parade them in Shrews Fiddles through downtown with signs saying Sloth. If only!

“Sorry, but you have broken the law and we have no place to put you” is not exactly a deterrence.

To distill to a sentence our cognitive dissonance around the army of dispossessed who squat and hunker among us, if would be difficult to improve upon a good, warm, clean bed and food.  A solution few have asked for, and when offered, fewer takers.

In a contest between civic good intentions and the unrestrained id, human nature wins in a blowout.

Man is first a social animal. Hunter gatherers roam the urban landscape, forming street families and alliances. From the detritus of the city all can be foraged:  plywood and tarps and cast off tents, couches, old rugs and bikes. Electricity can be purloined from any light pole. Run a cable across the sidewalk, fire up the flat screen and the hibachi and smoke what needs to be smoked with the satisfaction hunter-gatherers have enjoyed at sundown since we first left the caves.

There is a raison d’être to be found in this, even pride, irritating though that might be for the rest of us.

Add EBT, free phones, free health care, pro bono legal representation and the crucial license to steal™ and most of Maslow’s Needs are well met. The weather is glorious.

Sitting in a clean, Boise decision-approved Tiny Home, with a bookshelf and a lock and showers and rules about drugs and smoking? This appeals to taxpayers.  This is what we would do if we were in their shoes, between filling out job applications, and learning to code.

If you were hoping Caruso would do for the armies of dereliction in L.A. what Elon Musk is poised to do for free speech by purchasing Twitter, you may be disappointed.  He accepts the operative premise of Shantytown, Inc., the massively funded bureaucracy of service providers:  we can build our way out of this.

We can’t. This is the fatal flaw of his candidacy: I’m a developer. I will deliver more units per year. 

Too bad, because he’s wealthy enough not to need the local machine to fund his campaign. He doesn’t owe anybody.

For those who think Housing First policy is working, I would remind readers we are running a real-time experiment in the efficacy of Tiny Home villages in Venice and Van Nuys and North Hollywood, and not only are they utilized at about one-third capacity they continue to be surrounded by encampments, thriving uncontested.

The stars come out for Housing Now! 1989

Take a good look at this picture. Lakers coach Pat Riley. Jon Voight. Bea Arthur. Edith Bunker. Casey Kassem.  The great and good coming together to address the terrible blight of Skid Row. They mean well. They’ve opened their checkbooks. In 1989 camping on the sidewalk in Los Angeles was confined to fifty square blocks downtown. To deal with this, the City had a line item in the budget totaling…millions.

For 2022, the City will spend $1 Billion on Homeless, Inc. The County spent half a billion, the State $7.2 billion, 40% of which came here. I have no idea what the Federal government sends us, but it ain’t zero.  Like a well watered garden, the army of addicts and freeloaders have grown ten-fold, from San Pedro to Granada Hills.

Let us not despair, there remains a fourth alternative…smiling at us from the branches like the Cheshire Cat, villainous and coy.

Stop subsidizing it. All of it. Lean into human nature.

Wait, what? Are you serious? Yes. But, but…we can’t! It’s monstrous! Think of the case workers! The administrators and lobbyists! How will they eat? How will those checks make it home to Pasadena?

While we’re at it, re-criminalize theft. I know of no civilization which has survived the abolition of a principle as basic as this.

Here’s Keith from Pennsylvania to explain it.

*btw, this video is eleven years old and this guy was still here as of 2020.

I, For One, Welcome Our Corporate-Sponsored Overlords

Rich wypipo say, look at me

Would you be a cop today?  If you were a strapping young man or woman with a strong sense of civic duty, would you sign up for a career?  Would you encourage your child? If you were  already a cop, in say, Los Angeles, would you put in for a transfer to a rural jurisdiction or take early retirement? If you are mid-career and the rural departments are full up, and you’re stuck in LA waiting out your 20, how proactive are you going to be?  If theft under $1000, mugging and assault are now misdemeanors (provided no gun is used), how much effort are you going to exert chasing violators?

Police encounter uncooperative suspects in a state of acute drug intoxication every day.  There are protocols for this. Those protocols were followed in the case of George Floyd. Up until the last three minutes of the encounter, that is. The prosecution conceded as much at trial.  Now Derek Chauvin has been convicted of murder. Not negligence. Not a failure to exercise caution. Murder, of a man with advanced arterio-sclerosis and a lethal level of fentanyl in his system. A man who had overdosed on fentanyl several months prior and for which he was hospitalized for five days. A man who left two chewed fentanyl tablets in the back seat of the police car with his DNA on them.  Nine minutes with a knee across the shoulder blades is not going to induce cardiac arrest in a healthy person. Don’t believe me? Try it at home.

Chauvin inspires little empathy from me. He was negligent. I worry about the badge, not the man. I worry about the thin blue line, forgive the cliche, separating civilization from barbarism.

What happens to police work now? For starters, physical contact with violent subjects will drop away to nothing.  Unless you’re charging at someone with a knife. Oh, wait…

Columbus, Ohio, the day the Chauvin verdict was read

After Chauvin, cops will no longer be proactive. They will drive by and wave. They will show up to take statements and file incident reports. Protection? Not so much. The broken-windows model, the one that transformed every shitty realm in LA, the policy which allowed the historical neighborhoods to rediscover their former glory, the policy that put equity into the hands of so many working class people, is now inoperative. We are entering the realm of No Handcuffs for Violent People.  How does this effect Van Nuys? Too early to tell.  How about the mortgage-holders in the neighborhoods in proximity to DTLA? Not good. Not good at all.

Mark Zuckerberg underwrites a private army worthy of Pablo Escobar. There are 6,000 security people on the Facebook payroll, $18 million per year dedicated to his detail alone. There is an escape chute in his office that goes to an underground garage and a waiting vehicle, staffed by ex-Secret Service and military people.  He maintains this posture of maximum deterrence while living in Palo Alto, the least diverse and safest city in California.  All while donating millions to the Racial Justice Accelerator Fund, which backs BLM, George Gascon, and various pro-crime initiatives, including the effort to de-felonize mugging and assault down here in L.A.  He’s not alone in this. Jack Dorsey, Laurene Powell Jobs, Mackenzie Scott, Dustin Moskowitz, Patty Quillan, all heavy donors to The Cause. (That’s Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Netflix, if you were wondering)

The widow Jobs, and one of her many homes

Lets unpack this.  The wealthiest cohort in California is funding political street violence and altering laws that allow a very diverse population -lesbian Wiccan schoolteachers to chain-smoking Armenian bodyshop owners- to amicably share space.  Truly remarkable, when you think about it, 17 million people speaking 43 different languages can share L.A. roads every morning, conduct commerce, work amongst one other despite incompatible and mutually exclusive understandings of the cosmos, socialize and dine, with a minimum of friction. This is possible due to agreed upon societal guardrails, developed over centuries.  Los Angeles is the anti-Lebanon, the living rebuke to the idea Diversity+Proximity=War.

What if Palo Alto decides: let’s burn it all down in the name of perfection. That couldn’t really happen, right? Only in dystopian fiction…

Well….a small sliver of the population provides most of the funding for left wing causes. A handful of editors and producers at the Times and the networks set the narrative of our news feed. A microscopic percentage of the people who work in the entertainment industry decide what programs and films are greenlit. A tiny subset of administrators and admissions officers can impose Critical Race Theory on the education system by fiat, determining who is allowed to ascend into the professional classes. Five people and their advisors control the platforms on which freedom of speech is exercised in America and practically speaking, speech itself.

What if the Wuhan virus was the second most impactful event of 2020? What if the big reveal is just how small The Clerisy is and how ruthlessly it intends to impose its will?

Hello, 2021. Ready for more?

The Chauvin verdict was made with a rioters standing ready outside the courthouse, and racially motivated looting and arson taking place in Minneapolis.  With our very own Maxine Waters on the ground (behind police protection) calling for “confrontation” should the jury return a verdict for less than murder.  One is obliged to forget a whole lot of American history to believe this ends well.

Apple has an ongoing crowdsourced billboard campaign promoting the capabilities of the iPhone. This year, in keeping with the moment, they chose black photographers utilizing black subjects. Fair enough.  Take a look at the photo at the top of the page. This is what greets you as you enter West Hollywood, our most heavily looted neighborhood of 2020. This is not happenstance. TBWA/MediaArtsLab chose this photo out of countless others, and chose to place it at Doheny and Santa Monica, on behalf of the world’s third largest corporation and its major shareholder, Laurene Powell Jobs. This man, it says, has license to punch you.  Little people, take it and like it.