Chris Bray on the paradox of how many western governments manage the alchemy of being both omnipresent and yet absent simultaneously:
Adding to my last post about covering language that masks the massive expansion of government behind performative language about limiting government: The most Los Angeles thing I have ever seen happened behind the Yoshinoya Beef Bowl.
See the alley between the Yoshinoya and the pharmacy? As I drove by on Wilshire, two extremely alert LAPD officers on motorcycles were sitting at the edge of that parking lot, postures tight and poised for action, urgently scanning the street. It was like watching a gunfighter movie, in the scene when the camera closes in on the gunfighter’s eyes, watching his opponent for the draw. These dudes were ready. If you did 38 in the 30 MPH zone, then brother, you were dead-ass done, nailed up in the trophy case.
Also, no more than thirty feet away from them, a little gaggle of filthy human zombies was passing a glass pipe around the circle, throwing up clouds of smoke, at the top end of an alley wall-to-wall full of open drug use and not terribly subtle drug dealing (and probably the prostitution that pays for the drugs, but I didn’t wander into the alley to look). But California made the possession and use of heroin, meth, and cocaine a misdemeanor, and the DA at the time was very proud that he wouldn’t allow his office to file most misdemeanor cases, because misdemeanors are lifestyle crimes that punish people for being poor, or for being “individuals experiencing homelessness”. So that alley full of people Hunter Bidening all day out in the open weren’t doing anything that could lead to prosecution, but your expired registration tags would bring down an immediate police response in you happened to roll by them.
Grand Guignol human depravity and ruin: no big deal. Minor traffic offenses: front and center.
This is Blue Zone governance, full stop, the thing people describe as anarcho-tyranny. Common San Francisco business owner experience: Police don’t intervene in the constant vandalism and tagging that degrades business property, but the highly alert army of code enforcement officers fine business owners for failing to clean up the damage that the city hasn’t prevented.
I forget who recently suggested this on I-still-call-it-Twitter, but go to Yelp and read some reviews for gas stations in Oakland:
Southern California has had a REALLY rough week. Wildfires, started by arsonists and driven by the Santa Ana winds, have burned thousands of acres in the city and county of Los Angeles and destroyed over $150 billion worth of property (and counting). As I write this, the fires still burn and largely remain uncontained, even as new blazes break out. It is a disaster of epic proportions, striking one of the richest and most economically and culturally relevant portions of the country.
Never ones to let a crisis go to waste, the Left responded to this disaster by … focusing on climate change. Not empty fire hydrants, not drained reservoirs, not incompetent leadership, but climate change. These fires, we have been breathlessly assured, are the result of ever-worsening climatic conditions in the region, drying it out and making it susceptible to this kind of affliction. Never mind that observers since Spanish times consistently noted the same kind of weather conditions and hazards that we see today, which suggests that maybe things aren’t actually changing all that much. Of course, those who are blaming climate change fail to recognise the fundamentally chaotic, nonlinear nature of the Earth’s biosphere and the interactions of its constituent parts, something governed by complexity (in the chaos/complexity theory sense of the term). As a result, it’s somewhat foolish to try to draw a direct, causal link between two variables (such as atmospheric CO2 content and temperature) which depend upon nonlinear interactions with hundreds of other factors. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be getting much traction with this.
So what did create the conditions that burned down Los Angeles?
First of all, there was the implementation of a number of policies driven by the state’s radical environmentalist lobby. Thanks to the fanatics, common sense policies that would help to mitigate the region’s inherent fire hazard went undone. Regular controlled burns of underbrush are a standard conservation technique in dry areas that help to thin out brush and prevent wildfires from getting out of control. Building a sufficient number of desalination plants is a good way for coastal desert areas to provide themselves with abundant fresh water for things like drinking, watering crops, filling reservoirs, and fighting fires. In fact, filling reservoirs for future needs would make a lot of sense. But all of these things are “unnatural” and might have “negative impacts” on local wildlife and whatnot.
Another contributory issue is the state’s policies towards the chronically homeless and its de facto sanctuary status for illegal aliens. The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years and California’s particular policies have made the situation in their state even worse. For decades, California has regularly seen wildfires caused by untended campfires started by homeless junkies getting out of control, which the state’s liberal approach to its indigent population has only made more prevalent. Likewise, California’s harbouring of illegal aliens has created a situation in which the state is flooded with masses of hostile foreign elements, some of whom have been caught starting fires all around the LA basin and creating the current catastrophe.
Then there is the fact that California has systematically implemented a set of DEI policies for its governmental workers, including its firefighters. As a result, the state’s leadership in the relevant departments is very good at “promoting inclusion,” but not so good at dealing competently with emergencies when they take place. Indeed, Los Angeles’ mayor Karen Bass and LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley presided over budget cuts for the city’s firefighting capabilities while adding layers of “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy aimed at systematically de-white-maleing the department and depriving it of the demographic most prone to self-sacrifice and overall technical competence. That reflects trends across the board in which the state and the city have regularly spent more on gay choirs and social justice artwork than they have on necessary functions of government.
Confirming this, Chris Bray talks about current reporting on the wildfires in and around Los Angeles:
In his much-discussed piece on the Los Angeles fires at the Free Press, Leighton Woodhouse looks to Mike Davis for a narrative foundation. In his book Ecology of Fear, Woodhouse notes, Davis “argued that the area between the beach and the Santa Monica Mountains simply never should have been developed. No matter what measures we take to prevent it, those hills are going to burn, and the houses we erect upon them are only so much kindling.” Malibu and the Palisades, the land of hard living. That’s why so many rich and famous people lived there: because it was so inherently miserable and dangerous.
Mike Davis was full of shit for thirty years — he died in 2022 — and I’ve been rolling my eyes at him throughout. He described Los Angeles as an “apocalypse theme park”, a place of ruin and pain, populated by hardened survivors who, “dutifully struggling”, stagger on through the “Job-like ordeal” of clinging to a brutal landscape.
Also, Sierra Madre has bears. The Los Angeles suburbs are a place of horror and agony, because they back into the mountains, where blood-clawed wild animals prowl and stalk and slaughter. Places where life is especially grim and sanguinary, pgs. 240-41: Bradbury, La Crescenta, Glendora, the areas around the hellscape of Santa Barbara. A poodle was eaten by a mountain lion in Bradbury once, as neighbors gaped in open-jawed terror, YET STILL DO FOOLS ENDURE THE HORROR OF LIVING IN SUCH A PLACE.
Current real estate listings in Bradbury, a gated hillside community incorporated as an independent city in the San Gabriel Valley with a population of about 900 people:
How then would ye endure such horror, oh pilgrim, to live thus amid such blood and death? How bearest thou brutal existence upon this land?
Famously, in 1999, the Los Angeles Times, which used to be a newspaper, ran a long story examining Mike Davis and his vision of Southern California. It’s full of sentences like this:
Los Angeles’ most provocative social critic has stretched, bent and broken more than a few facts in “Ecology of Fear,” his latest, darkly themed work on the urban area he claims to love.
… more than a third of the time there were factual problems with his work.
Davis concedes the error.
Davis does not say where he got this piece of information.
“I honestly don’t know what I’m referring to,” Davis said.
Some of Davis’ mistakes involve mergers of fact and fiction, including making up a quote.
Davis attributes the false quote to a mix-up.
Then he takes readers on a partial flight of fantasy …
An examination of the Malibu Times article shows that Davis made up the parts about the jewels, the hair color, the kayakers’ occupations, the evidence of their callous classism and the ethnicity of their maids.
Davis is mischievously unrepentant.
Davis also merges fact and literary fiction, without acknowledgment, while arguing that Pomona, like other older, outer suburbs, is dying.
And so on.
The Times concluded that Davis could be read as “a polemicist, who makes cogent, incisive arguments on big themes”, but not as “a historian who is expected to be reliable, even on details”.
Comments Off on Is there anything climate change can’t do?
Tom Knighton illustrates one of the reasons so many legacy news organizations are being forced to cut back on staff in hopes of staying afloat:
Last week, the LA Times announced a massive layoff of journalists. They were just one of several places that kicked the activists masquerading as reporters to the curb.
This, of course, was met with consternation by the journalistic field as a whole.
Everyone seemed ready to warn of doom and gloom, telling us how important they are to society and that we need them.
Yet absolutely none of them seemed remotely interested in actually examining why the field is shrinking so horrifically.
Sure, the current landscape is very different due to technological advancements. For example, there’s places like Substack where I can reach out to readers directly instead of needing to filter things through a newspaper’s editorial voice.
But journalists also did this to themselves.
[…]
Because journalism’s “inherently political” tribe uses their politics to decide which stories are worth reporting. Journalists, if we can even really call them that anymore, aren’t simply sharing truth. They’re amplifying some stories and smothering others.
How often do we see stories claiming so-and-so is a white supremacist because he favors welfare reform or a tougher stance on illegal immigration? How many publications amplified the nonsense about Border Patrol agents “lassoing” illegal immigrants because of a picture they didn’t understand?
Journalism doesn’t represent the American people. It represents the Democratic Party.
In 1971, Republicans accounted for just over a quarter of all journalists. In 2022, they were 3.4 percent.
Now, in 1971, those independents were probably divided between left-leaning and right-leaning to some degree or another, though the survey didn’t capture that.
In 2022, I suspect many who called themselves independent did so because they thought the Democrats were too right-leaning for their tastes.
What’s more, despite the lack of ideological diversity, that same source found that only 21.8 percent see that as needing to change.
What’s more, starting in 2016, news publications really stopped even trying to pretend they were unbiased. A form of blatantly activist journalism became common, with virtually every news agency in the nation showing at least some signs of it.
Comments Off on The LA Times recently laid off a bunch of “activists masquerading as reporters”
… “democracy” seems to generate a unique kind of idiocy. This too is no unique insight — William F. Buckley meant the same thing when he said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard — but like all obvious things about human nature it’s lethally easy to forget. A politician in a “democracy” is an unholy mix of circus performer and whore. Somehow convinced that the audience’s applause comes from its appreciation of her own superior virtue, not rude biology, she slips further and further into narcissism, never bothering to wonder why, if the house is packed to the rafters every night, she’s still sleeping three to a room while the circus owner has a mansion and rides around in a limo.
Democracy’s founding fictions reinforce this. It’s easy to see yourself as the People’s Tribune, I imagine, if you just look at the numbers. All those people voted for you, which confirms how wonderful you are!
A better analogy is the professional sports team. Lots of people wear the team apparel of the Los Angeles Chargers. You can find lots of online forums passionately devoted to them. Lots of L.A.-area bars are festooned with Chargers’ stuff. The bobbleheads at ESPN talk about the Chargers several times a day. And yet, come game time, the Chargers only get about 32,000 fans at the stadium. Those are the actual voters — the rest is just social media noise. And it’s worse than that, actually. We all know that the vast majority of people who picked up a Chargers’ shirt because it was in the clearance bin, or ordered a drink at a bar with Chargers’ memorabilia on the shelf, would never bother to attend a game. So even people who think of themselves as “Democrats” or “Republicans” barely bother to vote, much less follow “their” team in office. Even the groups that get pandered to the most — old people, veterans, union goofs — don’t turn out in proportionate numbers.
Come election day, the People’s Tribunes are decided by old cranks on loan from the home, a few office drones on their lunch break with nothing better to do, and homeless people lured in with a promise of a short dog and some change.
But since no one without a vast, yawning chasm in her soul would ever submit herself to the indignities of “democracy” in the first place, these newly “elected” fools hie themselves to Washington, where the money boys feed their self-delusion. They read about themselves in the newspapers, see their names on internal party polls, and since none of their “constituents” could pick them out of a police lineup, they learn that the only way to keep the applause coming is by doing what the newspapers and the money boys say.
Chris Bray on yet another example of our kakistocrats congratulating themselves after presiding over failure:
[Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara] Ferrer is a relentless and enthusiastic interventionist, one of the highest-profile lockdowners and mask fetishists in the country, and here she is still wearing a mask — in the third year of a pandemic that hasn’t been ended by the widespread mask-wearing that has prevailed, and still largely prevails, in Los Angeles. Do X to cause Y, she says, doing X for a third straight year but still rather obviously not causing Y. Again, here’s Ferrer’s chart showing the effect of her bold public health interventions:
You can really see how that infections trendline came right down as Barbara Ferrer boldly threw herself in front of the virus.
But here’s the part that I find most telling: After Ferrer offers a long presentation on mitigations showing clearly that they haven’t worked as advertised, and after she says repeatedly and explicitly that the available Covid-19 vaccines “don’t work so great at preventing infection”, and that vaccinated people will be infected, Ferrer sits down for a discussion with several members of an expert panel. One of the panelists is Michele Kipke, a psychology PhD who serves as a clinical professor at USC and the vice-chair of research at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (and as a school board member in my own small town in the suburbs). Having heard repeated statements about the unmistakably limited effectiveness of the available Covid-19 vaccines, Kipke offers this as a question:
“So, first of all, I just need to say, it is such an honor to be on the same stage with you. Barbara, you are my hero, and I am so glad that you have been our leader through these extremely difficult two years. So thank you.” And then there’s a long round of applause from the panel and the audience. You can just feel the scholarly skepticism and clinical rigor in that auditorium. This, ladies and gentlemen, is obviously the room where the tough questions are asked.
And then she goes on: “And so, as I think about this, I’ve really been asking the questions, what are, just picking up on the, I think, the discussion here, what are those lessons learned? There are, you know, sort of obviously a very difficult couple of years, but we’ve seen some really phenomenal successes that have come out of the last couple years. As Dr. Hu mentioned earlier, I had the good fortune of being a part of leading Vaccinate L.A., where we brought fourteen schools and programmatic units within USC together, and all harmonized our efforts, to get out there and support our communities, and to think about how to support vaccinations. And we engaged local artists. We — it was a community driven initiative, we wanted to listen and learn from the community, and then partner with them …”
And so on, but you get the point. “But through that work we’ve achieved so much,” she eventually says. The video is cued to the start of her “question”, if you want to see it all, but her question, in short, is, Why, in your view, did we do such an amazing job? Pivoting from Ferrer’s extremely open and direct discussion about the obvious limits of the vaccines — again, that actual direct quote is, “Vaccinated people are very likely to get infected” — Kipke asks about the success of the vaccination program.
Comments Off on The cognitive dissonance of the elites
It’s one of my standard quips that the more government tries to do, the less well it does everything, but Chris Bray‘s city government shows that I’m being far too Pollyanna-ish:
We’ve built political systems that are astoundingly disconnected; they go where they go, and you can’t turn them, or even try to communicate with them. I just spent weeks trying to get basic information about the operation of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live — a problem I started writing about here. Just as I was getting really frustrated that I couldn’t get anyone in county government to tell me anything about anything, I saw an interview with Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who says that he’s never met our district attorney, and has only managed to speak to him on the phone once. Then a staff member in the office of our county supervisor finally responded to my repeated questions about local criminal justice statistics with a quick message letting me know that, as Supervisor Barger’s criminal justice staff assistant, she doesn’t have local criminal justice statistics. So, no, you’re probably not going to communicate with your government; it doesn’t even communicate with itself. The sheriff has never met the DA. That’s the world we’re living in.
I live in a tiny suburban city, a little over three square miles. As I’ve written before, the city is a relentless shambles, constantly fumbling its simplest tasks while holding city council meetings to offer bold pronouncements on the city’s direct role in managing the climate of the planet. We went the better part of the last fiscal year without a budget, because the fifth finance director in two years screwed up the budget proposal so badly that the council couldn’t vote on the worthless thing.
Cities are supposed to regularly adopt an updated general plan that makes educated guesses about business and residential growth, so they can prepare for change around questions like do we have enough fire stations for the population we expect to have in five years? Our current general plan was adopted in 1998; the city is now in its sixth year of a fumbling effort to write a new plan, with no sign that it’s moving toward success. Meanwhile, our small-town city council is focused on getting electric patrol cars for the police department — to control the climate of the planet — and banning the sale of tobacco products, to take the fight to Big Tobacco. (Three square miles.)
I can’t get my city government to fix a bunch of basic and obvious problems, in a city where I pass members of my city council in the supermarket. I send out email messages to them, but nothing comes back from them in response. They go where they feel like going, endlessly pursuing lawn sign politics in a city government that struggles to complete budgets and basic planning documents; currently they’re signaling that their next interest is in developing a local mandate for residential greywater systems, and they won’t be talked out of it in favor of completing their endlessly incomplete basic tasks.
Now: Put your hands on the levers to stop the madness of the United States of America sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. Right?
Comments Off on City governments that can’t even set a budget want to spend, spend, spend to fix global problems
We should all be ready to do our duty as American citizens and, when duty calls, each of us should embrace our inner Rooftop Korean.
The year was 1992, 27 years ago right about now, and the city was Los Angeles. Several police officers who got into a videotaped brawl with a petty criminal named Rodney King were acquitted of beating him up. The city exploded. It was chaos.
I was a first-year law student, back a year from the Gulf War, and I had just joined the California Army National Guard. My unit was the 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry, and we got called up early the first night and were on the streets for three long weeks. Making it even more delightful was the fact that the unit was in Inglewood, which was pretty much on fire. They burned most everything around, except our armory – that would have gone badly for them – and the Astro Burger.
My battalion commander grabbed then-First Lieutenant Schlichter, and we went all over the city in his humvee as he led his deployed and dispersed troops. Our soldiers came, in large part, from the areas most effected by the riots, and they were notably unpleasant to the thugs and criminals who quickly discovered our guys had no patience for nonsense. One dummy discovered that the hard way when he tried to run over some Guard soldiers from another battalion; he had a closed casket funeral.
The city went insane. Order simply ceased to exist. It was Lord of the Flies. I remember a cop totally breaking down because everything was completely out of control.
But I had a M16A1 – a real assault rifle – and I had a bunch of buddies with M16A1s. The regular folks … not so much. The decent people of LA were terrified, and with good reason. See, the dirty little secret of civilization is that it’s designed to maintain order when 99.9% of folks are orderly. But, say, if just 2% of folks stop playing by the rules … uh oh. Say LA’s population was 15 million in 1992 … that’s 300,000 bad guys. There were maybe 20,000 cops in all the area agencies then, plus 20,000 National Guard soldiers and airman, plus another 10,000 active soldiers and Marines the feds brought in. Law enforcement is based on the concept that most people will behave and that the crooks will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers of officers. But in the LA riots, law enforcement was massively outnumbered. Imposing order took time.
And until then, our citizens were on their own, at the mercy of the mob. Betting that the cavalry was going to come save you was a losing bet.
LA’s Korean shopkeepers knew that. They operated many small businesses in some of the least fashionable areas of Los Angeles, and they were already widely hated by activists, being scapegoated for problems and pathologies that long pre-dated their immigration to Southern California. So, they became targets for the mobs.
Bad decision by the mobs.
See, most of these Koreans had done their mandatory service in the Republic of Korea’s Army. Those ROK soldiers are the real deal – the Norks are not a theoretical threat and the South Korean army does not spend a lot of time talking about feelings. They were some solid dudes. So, when the local dirtbags showed up for some casual looting, they noticed the rooftops were lined with hardcore guys packing some serious heat, including the kind of scary rifles that the Democrats want to ban.
The Rooftop Koreans.
It did not take long for the bad guys to realize that the Rooftop Koreans were not playing games – they were playing for keeps. The mob went away in search of softer targets.
Chris Bray on the increasing inability or deliberate choice of most legacy media outlets to avoid presenting basic facts in favour of pitching a scenario with the preferred outcome prepackaged and largely predigested for the consumer to accept uncritically:
Over and over again, journalism doesn’t begin to accurately describe; consuming it, we don’t get to the starting line of a functioning political discourse, which is just knowing what’s happening, more or less. We’re buried in fakery, in representations of reality that have no connection to reality. […]
I wrote last week about the disappearance of basic information on the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live. We have an ongoing debate over our Woke DA’s policy choices — but the more I look at the debate, the more I’m sure it’s a debate about nothing, because the slogans used to represent the DA’s policy choices really don’t seem to begin to reflect the reality of the DA’s actual policy choices. The slogans look from here like cover words, chaff fired as a rhetorical countermeasure to cloud the air. I’ve been trying to get clear information from people in Los Angeles County government, which has been … interesting, so stay tuned on that question. But what are we debating if we’re exchanging our thoughts on the empty fakery the DA is deploying to prevent us from noticing what he’s doing?
Back in 2016, the vapid mayor of a tiny city in Los Angeles County boldly announced that she had banned Donald Trump from her community, ordering city staff to burn the witch. Journalists reported it straight: TRUMP BANNED FROM LOCAL CITY.
It was left to lawyers with a media presence to seriously examine all of the problems with the remarkable claim that a part-time small-town mayor owns a personal fiefdom and can ban people from it. A not-especially-gifted politician with ambitions for higher office made up some nonsense to get herself in the news, and it worked. But the news was about nothing, because she had no authority to do the thing she announced in the press release.
This is more than half of the news: Noise with nothing it, a press release from an idiot typed up by idiots. What debate over questions of principle can proceed on the foundation of an informational void? (“I’m for empty hole!” “Oh yeah, well I’m against empty hole!”)
We’re beginning to solve some big pieces of that problem with alternative media, which is why you’re hearing so much complaining about misinformation. “Our democracy,” that hilarious phrase that doesn’t mean what it says, relies on the screen of fakery. Nothing happens until we punch enough holes in that screen.
Comments Off on “We live in such a degraded information environment that we can’t get to discussions of principle”
There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything [during the pandemic]. It’s okay that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.
“Education is political”, says Ms Myart-Cruz, who boasts of her ability to act with near-impunity, and whose list of Intolerable Things includes cognitive testing, “structural racism”, border controls, policing, and the supposed “privilege” of parents who would like their children to actually learn things, including times tables. Our Mistress Of Higher Purpose struggles to comprehend why parents might object to their children’s education, even in basic skills, being supplanted by the nakedly self-serving and increasingly weird activism of the people paid to teach them those basic skills. Instead, she endorses claims that such objections must be driven by “white-supremacist thinking”.
In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald looks at the recent hysterical attacks on gubernatorial hopeful Larry Elder based on the notion that he is somehow a kind of stalking horse for white supremacists:
Larry Elder at Camp Pendleton for the ceremony presenting the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to his father, Staff Sergeant Randolph Elder, U.S.M.C., 16 August, 2013. US Government photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.
The media have focused particularly on Elder’s views about crime and policing. The self-described “Sage from South-Central” maintains that criminals, not the police, are the biggest threat in the black community. According to Elder, the false narrative about lethal police racism has only led to more black homicide deaths. “When you reduce the possibility of a bad guy getting caught, getting convicted and getting incarcerated, guess what? Crime goes up,” he said recently at a campaign event in Orange County.
Elder also rejects the charge that white civilians are gunning down blacks, as LeBron James maintained in a tweet during the George Floyd riots: “We are literally hunted everyday, every time we step outside the comfort of our homes.” Elder has a different take. If a “young black man is eight times more likely to be killed by another young black man than [by] a young white man,” Elder told the Orange County Republicans, then “systemic racism is not the problem.”
Such statements are anathema to the establishment Left, deeply invested as it is in the idea that blacks have little agency in the face of ubiquitous white racism. Few subjects are more taboo in elite discourse than the elevated rate of crime among blacks, as it suggests cultural pathologies that — at the very least — complicate the victim narrative. To the Left, black crime is little more than a racist fiction. Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero claims that the crime statistics Elder has cited “over the decades to support his views and policy proposals are misleading, if not outright false, casting Black people as unusually crime-prone.” Black people are not “more inclined toward violent crimes,” nor do blacks “disproportionately victimize whites,” Guerrero wrote, citing Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan and other criminal experts. (Fagan was the plaintiff’s expert in a trilogy of lawsuits against the New York Police Department in the 2010s.) Fellow Times columnist Erika Smith sneered that Elder “keeps trotting out statistics that purport to show that Black people are particularly prone to murdering one another.”
Unfortunately for Elder’s critics, the statistics showing vastly disproportionate rates of black crime and victimization come from some of the Left’s favorite sources. CDC data show that in 2015, for example, the homicide victimization rate for blacks aged 10–34 (37.5 per 100,000) was 13 times the rate for whites (2.9 per 100,000). That disparity is undoubtedly much greater now, given the record-breaking increase in homicides since the George Floyd riots — an increase disproportionately affecting blacks.
Those black victims of homicide are not being killed by cops or whites. They are being killed by other blacks. In Los Angeles, blacks this year have committed 46 percent of homicides whose offender is known, even though they are just 9 percent of the Los Angeles population. Whites make up 28 percent of the Los Angeles population but have committed 4 percent of homicides, mostly involving domestic violence. These data, reported by the Los Angeles Times, mean that a black Angeleno is 35 times more likely to commit a homicide than a white Angeleno. Homicide data are the gold standard for crime statistics. Alas for Jeffrey Fagan and the Los Angeles Times‘s other experts, the statistical conclusion that blacks are “more inclined toward violent crimes” is indisputable.
Comments Off on Larry Elder’s campaign for governor hit with accusations of “white supremacism”
This month’s Classic Trains featured fallen flag is southern California’s iconic Pacific Electric Railway Company, whose streetcars, interurbans, and buses served the vast area in and around Los Angeles and San Bernardino from 1901 until the passenger services were sold off in 1953. The electric service was converted to bus and the last electric rail line was discontinued in 1961. At its peak in the 1920s the “Red Cars” service was said to be the largest electric railway system in the entire world.
G. Mac Sebree covers the origins of the line in the late nineteenth century:
The story begins in 1895, when a line was completed from Los Angeles to Pasadena; a mere 10 years later, the system was virtually complete. To a great degree, PE was the brainchild of Henry Huntington, nephew of one of the Central Pacific’s “Big Four,” Collis P. Huntington. An active real-estate promoter, Henry needed the Big Red Cars and the transportation they provided to help sell lots and homes in the hinterlands.
His uncle’s Southern Pacific took control of the PE in 1911 in a deal that left the Los Angeles Railway, the narrow-gauge intracity system, in the nephew’s hands. The PE was built to standard gauge, and SP saw a brilliant future in freight for the interurban.
Pacific Electric route map. Original data from http://sharemap.org/public/Los_Angeles_Pacific_Electric_Railways_(Red_Cars) via Wikimedia Commons.
Interurbans were not considered Class I railroads (or any other class — they were not “steam railroads”), but from the very start, PE was big business. The California Railroad Commission said the property was worth $100 million in Depression dollars. Atypically for an interurban, the system served as a gathering network for carload freight shipments from citrus groves, manufacturing plants, oil refineries, warehouses, and the harbor at San Pedro. The three line-haul railroads serving southern California — Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and especially SP — depended on the Pacific Electric to some degree.
Yet in its heyday, PE carried huge numbers of passengers. As late as 1953, 50 percent of its revenue came from riders — but absolutely none of its profit. An all-time list shows that PE operated 143 distinct passenger routes. Despite the so-called “Great Merger of 1911,” in which local and interurban services were supposedly separated, the heaviest PE passenger lines largely served the L.A. urban area. An example was the street-running L.A.–Hollywood–Beverly Hills line, in which two-car trains rumbled down Hollywood Boulevard at 10-minute intervals.
At one time or another, PE single-truck Birney cars plied local lines in Pasadena, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Redlands, Santa Ana, and San Pedro, although the 1920s were not far along before management sought to sell off or abandon these albatrosses.
After World War 2, the writing was on the wall for the Red Cars, as urban expansion and greatly increased car ownership cut at the economic basis for rail passenger service in southern California, especially as the new freeways were built.
After the war, though, things went downhill rapidly. As soon as buses were available, Pacific Electric began wholesale rail passenger-service abandonments. The new freeways were regarded as the rapid transit of the future. PE President Oscar Smith saw one possibility for saving rail service — if the state would pay. Just before the war, a short section of freeway between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley had been built, with the PE tracks relocated to the center of the new highway.
Why not replicate this all over the basin? The PE would cooperate, but public officials turned a deaf ear, and that was that. Freight service, meanwhile, prospered, but by the mid-1950s, PE began replacing its electric locomotives and box motors with diesels (a few steam locomotives also had been used during the war). Over the years, PE rostered about 100 electric locomotives and at least 75 box motors — big business, indeed.
In 1953, PE sold its passenger service (four rail lines out of the 6th and Main station, two out of Subway Terminal, and many bus lines) to Metropolitan Coach Lines. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, first formed in 1951, bought MCL on March 3, 1958, and the end for electric passenger service came in 1961. SP continued the freight work with diesels, and merged PE away on August 13, 1965. Today under the Union Pacific shield, a good bit of the old PE freight lines remain in service, unique survivors, busier than ever.
A veteran Pacific Electric “Big Red Car” already lettered for successor Metropolitan Coach Lines in the 1950s. Photo by Voogd075 via Wikimedia Commons.
Comments Off on Fallen Flag — The Pacific Electric Railway
In Quillette, Amy Alkon talks about the homeless crisis in LA, particularly her own immediate experience with a couple who “camped out” in front of her house.
Throughout [Los Angeles Mayor Eric] Garcetti’s seven years as Mayor, Los Angeles has witnessed a shocking explosion of homelessness. When he took office in 2013, the city had about 23,000 residents classified as homeless, two thirds of whom were unsheltered, living on the streets. By mid-2019, the figure was about 36,000, and three-quarters of them were living on the streets. Currently, there are 41,000 homeless. Garcetti’s pet plan to alleviate the homelessness crisis was the construction of permanent supportive housing. In 2016, compassionate voters approved $1.2 billion in new spending to fund these units. Three years later, only 72 apartments had been built, at a cost of about $690,000 apiece. Meanwhile, an El Salvador-based company has come up with nifty $4,000 3D-printed houses that look like great places to live and can be put up in a single day.
There’s also been a failure to admit that housing alone isn’t the solution. As urban-policy researcher Christopher Rufo explains, only about 20 percent of the homeless population are people down on their luck, who just need housing and a few supportive services to get back on their feet. Approximately 75 percent of the unsheltered homeless have substance-abuse disorders and 78 percent have mental-health disorders. Many have both.
As a bleeding-heart libertarian, I feel personally compelled to try to help people who are struggling. I do this by volunteering as a mediator, doing free dispute resolution to provide “access to justice” to people who can’t afford court. And since about 2009, I personally have given support to one of those easily helpable 20 percent Rufo refers to, getting him paying work and a bank account, and storing his stuff in my garage. He is a good man and a hard worker — sober for many years — who simply seems to have issues in the “front-office” organizational parts of his brain that help most of us get our act together to, say, pay bills on time. He just needs somebody to back him up on the bureaucratic aspects of life. I’m happy to say he now has a roof over his head. He lives in a motel across the country, and all I still do for him is provide him with a permanent address. I receive his Veterans Administration and Social Security mail at my house, which I mail to him with smiley faces and hearts on the envelopes, colored in with pink and orange highlighter.
This success story would not be possible for most homeless people, the nearly 80 percent who are addicted and/or mentally ill. As Rufo writes:
Progressives have rallied around the slogan “Housing First,” but haven’t confronted the deeper question: And then what? It’s important to understand that, even on Skid Row, approximately 70 percent of the poor, addicted, disabled, and mentally ill residents are already housed in the neighborhood’s dense network of permanent supportive-housing units, nonprofit developments, emergency shelters, Section 8 apartments, and single room-occupancy hotels.
When I toured the area with Richard Copley, a former homeless addict who now works security at the Midnight Mission, he explained that when he was in the depths of his methamphetamine addiction, he had a hotel room but chose to spend the night in his tent on the streets to be “closer to the action.” Copley now lives … at the Ward Hotel — which he calls the “mental ward” — where he says there are frequent fights and drugs are available at all hours of the day. The truth is that homelessness is not primarily a housing problem but a human one. Mayors, developers, and service providers want to cut ribbons in front of new residential towers, but the real challenge is not just to build new apartment units but to rebuild the human beings who live inside them.
The situation is especially tragic for those who are so mentally ill that they cannot take care of themselves, and are often a danger to both themselves and others. And I sometimes wonder which movie star or other famous person needs to be stabbed or bludgeoned before politicians take meaningful action.
It’s fashionable in progressive circles to demonize law enforcement, but Rufo explains that in 2006, then-L.A. police chief Bill Bratton implemented a “Broken Windows” policing initiative on Skid Row. It led to a 42 percent reduction in felonies, a 50 percent reduction in deaths by overdose, and a 75 percent reduction in homicides. The overall homeless population was reduced from 1,876 people to 700 — a huge success. Activists filed lawsuits and ran publicity campaigns, slowly killing Bratton’s program, on the grounds that it “criminalizes homelessness.” As a libertarian, I’m opposed to drug laws and forced behavior — but only to a point. It is not compassion to leave people to be victimized by criminals simply because they are unhoused, nor is leaving mentally and physically disabled people strewn across the streets amidst piles of garbage a form of freedom.
Mayor Garcetti, in lieu of admitting the real challenges — the first step to taking meaningful action to alleviate the homelessness crisis — has simply ignored the human results of his failed policy. As a result, whole sections of the city, including formerly livable streets in my beloved Venice, have been turned into Skid Row by the Sea.
The 9-4 Vikings headed to the west coast for a game against the San Diego Chargers at (I kid you not) Dignity Health Sports Park (I realize that naming rights can be lucrative, but that moniker hardly rolls off the tongue, does it?). It’s a very small stadium (less than 26,000 seats), and visiting teams have often had nearly as many of their fans attend games in Los Angeles as the Chargers manage. You could say that the Chargers don’t really play any home games, based on fan support at the stadium.
The first quarter was relatively uneventful, but the end of the second quarter more than made up for that lack of excitement, as both teams notched interceptions and then the Chargers lost the ball on a pass attempt that was picked up by Vikings backup defensive tackle Ifeadi Odenigbo and run back for a touchdown. Up to that point, the Chargers were looking to take the lead on a strong passing game (with Xavier Rhodes out, Mike Hughes was matched up against a taller receiver (Mike Williams at 6’3″) and Philip Rivers was able to get passes over Hughes for consistent early gains). Matthew Coller:
To open the second quarter, future Hall of Fame quarterback Philip Rivers put on a clinic in anticipation and accuracy, hitting receivers all over the field and converting third down after third down on a 10-play, 75-yard drive to put the Chargers up 10-9.
Along the way, Rivers hit Keenan Allen for 19 yards on third-and-7, and then Allen again for 14 on third-and-8 and delivered a beautiful ball to running back Austin Ekeler for a 27-yard wheel route. The drive was capped off on a fade to 6-foot-3 Mike Williams, who jumped over cornerback Mike Hughes for a touchdown.
At that point you would have put your money on a shootout — maybe one that favored the future Hall of Famer.
But the next three Chargers drives would prove the game to be exactly the opposite — partly because of their own wild incompetence but equally because of the Vikings’ pure talent on defense.
Over the past three-and-a-half months we have not seen the type of stingy defense that the Vikings have normally brought to the table under Mike Zimmer especially against the pass but they still have Pro Bowlers and record setters on the defensive side along with some players who have been developing for a few years. All of them showed up and defined Sunday’s win.
After the Vikings took back the lead with a field goal, Rivers felt like his hot streak on third down would continue. He flung a ball up in the air on third-and-17 and Harrison Smith jumped in for his 23rd career interception.
Giving the offense the ball near mid-field gave the Vikings a shot at picking up a two-score lead but instead Kirk Cousins threw an interception on a screen pass, putting the Chargers in a spot to take back the lead with under a minute remaining in the first half.
An LA touchdown would have been huge considering they were set to get the ball back to start the second half. That’s when Danielle Hunter — who is making his case for defensive MVP — slapped the ball out of Rivers’ hands. It was picked up by improving young D-linemen Ifeadi Odenigbo, who used Hunter as a lead blocker to take the ball back 56 yards for a touchdown.
Early in the third quarter, Vikings running back Dalvin Cook re-aggravated the shoulder injury he’d been nursing for the last few weeks and was declared out for the rest of the game. Backup Alexander Mattison was inactive with an ankle injury, so running back duties devolved to Mike Boone, Ameer Abdullah, and C.J. Ham, who were certainly up to the task — Boone scored his first and second NFL touchdowns. Overall, the teams were far better matched than the final score indicated, but no team can win when you turn the ball over as often as San Diego Los Angeles did (seven … which is six more than the Vikings gave up).
At the Daily Norseman, Ted Glover describes it as not so much a game as a “MurderDeathKill”:
When the Minnesota Vikings took the field against the Los Angeles Chargers, they knew that any realistic hope of winning the NFC North was all but gone, as the Green Bay Packers beat the Chicago Bears 21-13. They still controlled their playoff destiny with the sixth seed, but to ensure a playoff spot they needed to keep winning and keep one game clear of the other Los Angeles team, the Rams.
While the Vikings were taking care of business in Los Angeles, the other LA team was getting their collective ass handed to them by Dallas…
With the win, the Vikings move to 10-4 on the year and hold on to the sixth seed in the NFC. Combined with the Rams losing big to the Cowboys (they were down 34-7 in the fourth quarter at the time of this writing), Minnesota moves to the cusp of securing a playoff spot, as they would lead the Rams by two games with two to play, if that score holds up. A Minnesota win or a Los Angeles loss gives the Vikings the sixth seed, and they still have an outside chance at the NFC North with the Packers coming to town next week. The Rams will head to San Francisco.
In the longer-term view, we may have our future defensive co-ordinator picked out:
"He was giving me some suggestions on the sideline what to call and I was going to give him the headset and let him do it." – Coach Zimmer on @HarriSmith22
Remy updates the iconic Randy Newman anthem for 2018.
Parody written and performed by Remy
Camera and editing by Austin Bragg
Music tracks, background vocals, and mastering by Ben Karlstrom
Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
—-
LYRICS
Nice fall day
In L.A. County
Sitting watching all the leaves change
Temperature dipping into the low 70’s
I dress accordingly
Roll down the window
Put down the top
You know what
Maybe roll it up on second thought
That guy was higher
Than the pension of a state employee
Can’t use straws here
No fois gras here
You can’t park here
Lots of laws here
Every toilet
Barely flushing
But the sun is shining all the time
Looks like another bill to pay
I love L.A.
We Love it
“Definitely recommend this crystal here.
Oh and this one is our number one seller.”
“What’s that for? Anxiety?”
“No. Typhus.”
“Ah”
Public school graduates
Can barely read
And when they try to park
Well this is what they see
Sweet regulations
Ain’t nothing like em nowhere
Beachside
We love it
Mountainside
We love it
Riverside
We…eh….
Fixed streets
We love em
We love L.A.
“Unfortunately I’ll have to fail your restaurant.
I found a rat in the kitchen.”
“That wasn’t a rat that was my, uh,
emotional support rodent.”
“Well why didn’t you say so!”
“And this right here is a great hemorrhoidal crystal.
Uranus is in retrograde.”
The 9-4 Vikings headed to the west coast for a game against the 
