Roses are red Violets are blue Scansion’s important And using an appropriate number of syllables per line and some semblance of competent syntax so you don’t sound like a total doofus is too!We’ve written at some length about ÜbersicherheitführerSteve Seyler‘s unfortunate penchant for poetry. Today, in honor of this, the most poetic of American holidays, we’re highlighting an email exchange from the archives between Seyler and “Good News Joe” Mariani, showing that Richard Dawkins’s notion that cultural practices spread like deadly infectious agents must be taken seriously by serious people. We’ll be damned if we can figure out what this is. Some trash on the street? Anyway, this is to Joe and Steve as Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning were to one another. Rhyme on!
For reasons that we can’t determine from the evidence at hand but in response to the unintelligible photo at left, Good News Joe sent Stevie the following billet-doux:
Steve works so hard
Whether he is near or far
I wish he could go to a lake
Or maybe a Vegas escape
Lack of metrical structure? Check. Unintentional partial rhymes? Check. Unthinking use of brain-dead advertising-slogan phraseology as if it were human language? Check. Complete and utter tin-ear-itude? Check, check, check. He’s learned well from his master, whose classic response may be seen after the break. Continue reading Valentine’s Day Poetry Slam Special!→
Here are a couple of documents regarding the Hollywood Entertainment District BID Patrol’s request to be allowed to hire off-duty LAPD officers to monitor live video feeds. I’m seeking more information regarding this matter and will make it available as it comes in. There’s something interesting going on here in that the BID patrols already represent an effort to privatize policing in Los Angeles, thereby making it more opaque to public scrutiny. If they hire actual LAPD officers for privately assigned work this really exacerbates the problem, doesn’t it? The documents are embedded after the break and can be downloaded here and here. Continue reading Hollywood BID Patrol Sought in 2013 to Hire Off-Duty LAPD Officers for Video Monitoring→
Donuts: The fuel of terrorism. BID Patrol Officers in Vine Street Winchell’s taking a break from strongarming the homeless into leaving the streets of Hollywood.Amongst the emails between Andrews International Security and the HPOA recently obtained by our correspondent, we find a document entitled ANDREWS INTERNATIONAL BID HOMELESS PERSON DIRECTIVE. You can download a copy here or find an embedded copy after the break. There is much of interest in this document, but today we’re looking at the following bit:
If a BID Officer observes a person who, because of their homelessness commits one of the following misdemeanors:
Obstructing passage on sidewalks
Living or sleeping in a vehicle
Loitering in a restroom
Littering
Use of facilities, e.g., sleeping on a bus bench for other than intended purpose
Public nudity as is necessary to carry on the daily necessities of life
Building a structure in a park or public right-of-way
Trespass on or in public or private property
The Officer may offer such individual(s) the option of going to an available shelter in the surrounding Hollywood community as an alternative to arrest. If the homeless person accepts the offer of assistance, no arrest shall take place and arrangements shall be made to transport the homeless person to the shelter.
This was legal in 1942 and, by God, it’s legal now.
Pass over the dyslexic parrot-like legalese. Pass over the semiliterate, unparseable sentences. Pass over the absolutely unintelligible yet still horrific phrase “sleeping on a bus bench for other than intended purpose.” Consider for now just the fact that in June 2014, five months before the date on this document, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found LA’s law against sleeping in vehicles to be unconstitutional.
So Andrews International Security, with the full knowledge and consent of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, has directed its officers to give homeless people sleeping in their cars a choice between arrest or coerced relocation to a homeless shelter. This, despite the fact that common sense, human decency, and the goddamned Ninth Circuit all agree that people have a constitutional right to sleep in their cars, whether or not it’s “because of their homelessness.” Continue reading BID Patrol Directive Orders Unconstitutional Coercion of Hollywood Homeless for Sake of Social Cleansing→
Pollyanna and her cynical mirror image encouraging their own cognitive biases by gazing only at reflections rather than seeing the actual world around themPollyanna, the most famous optimist in American literature, is known and celebrated as the originator and primary evangelist of “the just being glad game.” Listen, O citizens of Hollywood, as she explains it to Nancy:1
“Why, it’s a game. Father told it to me, and it’s lovely. We’ve played it always, ever since I was a little, little girl…the game was just to find something about everything to be glad about—no matter what ’twas.”2
Now, Pollyanna gets a bad rap these days, but she’s our hero, really. We haven’t the space to defend her, though, because we have to analyze a May 2014 blog post by Sarah Besley, evidently the Associate Executive Directrix of the Hollywood Property Owners Association and stuff.
Check it! Sarah Besley is scared of freeway overpasses: In Los Feliz, even the goddamned overpasses are cute, cute, cute![An overpass] may be one of the worst statements EVER to anyone who visits and certainly to anyone who lives in or around it – especially if their community has been severed in half. An overpass literally says: this community favors cars over people and I dare you to walk underneath me and emerge on the other side alive. This is the message I’ve been getting for the past couple years as I commute from Los Feliz, along Franklin Avenue, down Argyle…3
But wait! Maybe Los Felizites are scared of freeway overpasses because they don’t have any there?4 The terror of the unknown is formidable and possibly overwhelms slurbians when they come to the big town.5 Hollywoodies, living in raw urban splendor in the very heart of the city, surely just take them in stride, don’t they? The answer would appear to be yes, even on Sarah Besley’s testimony:
Everyone Poops, but some poopers are more privileged than others.Human shit has a number of remarkable properties. First of all, every human produces shit. Secondly, every fully autonomous human handles the disposal of their own shit. In fact, properly disposing of one’s own shit is a necessary condition for being considered a fully autonomous human being. Thus it is possible to efficiently and completely dehumanize people by preventing them from dealing competently with their shit.
Polish authorities in 1947 explaining to Rudolph Höss, erstwhile commandant of Auschwitz, that it’s not OK to force people to live in their own shit in order to facilitate genocideThis principle was grasped early on by the National Socialist founders of the infamous complex of concentration camps known collectively as Auschwitz,1 where the subhuman (Jews, Russians, etc.) inmates were allotted only 0.2 square feet of toilet space, less than one twelfth the amount allocated for ordinary criminal prisoners. Historian Robert-Jan Van Pelt summarizes the view of historian Terrence Des Pres that design choices like this, which resulted in every surface in the camps including human flesh, being covered with shit, were “the result of a deliberate policy to destroy the last vestiges of the prisoners’ sense of self-worth. It was not enough just to kill the prisoners. They had to be totally broken first.“2 As Van Pelt summarizes, “with the latrines submerged in excrement, with very little water to be had at very few points, and with mud all around, what remained was an inmate population without the means to preserve any outward sign of human dignity.”“2
It’s not discussed in the article we’re citing, but it’s surely plausible that such degradation made it easier for the SS to go about their unholy work of genocide. No matter how cruel the project, the guards carrying it out were still human beings, and is it not easier to send millions of people to their deaths if they’re smeared with their own shit and therefore, at least in that one sense, not fully human? Or to move them away from their native land so that you and your totalitarian buddies can move in? This principle has been rediscovered throughout history by those who have need of such a tool.
Steve Seyler, thinking deep thoughts about deep shit and who ultimately ends up in it
What if you shoplifted but it was really felony burglary and then someone died because of what you done and that person would have invented a way to prevent an asteroid from hitting the earth and killing EVERYONE?!? You’d be responsible for genocide under the FELONY MURDER LAW!! You know you’re not supposed to commit genocide, don’t you, you maniac?!Look and listen here as a smarmy, self-satisfied little BID Patrol guy whose name seems to be Baxter interrogates his victim, who evidently stole a bottle of Justin Timberlake™ perfume of some sort. (NOTE: We made the video private at the request of the subject. The transcript is accurate, and you can obtain a copy from Kerry Morrison under the CPRA like we did if you want one)
In the video (complete transcription after the break), Baxter, in his smarmy cop interrogation tone of voice, gets the man to admit that he entered the store intending to shoplift. This used to be a favorite creepy cop trick for inflating minor charges beyond all reasonable proportion. Once on a time California Penal Code §459 could be used to charge such an act as burglary instead of mere theft. Security minions such as Baxter, not content with merely protecting the interests of their employers, would routinely use this nasty little loophole to overcharge people. Why? That’s just what they do, these icky little lawboys. It’s how they keep score in their psychotic little game.
Of course, as with all such nonsense, it ends up being the people of California who pay the price. Not just the petty criminals who get overcharged into oblivion, whose lives get ruined by undeservedly severe criminal records and the horrific collateral consequences that ensue, but also the taxpayers who have to support prisons full of nonviolent people, support courts and jails and probation offices and all the apparatus necessary to track and control the people dumped into the justice system by creepy private security henchmen who are so pleased with their delusory cleverness that they film themselves in the act so they can laugh about it later with all their cop buddies…
Convergent evolution: It’s hard to tell the cactus from the euphorbia, isn’t it?8 Just like it’s hard to tell the BID patrol from the Gestapo. Hint: one is an armed gang of thugs, brutally enforcing the racist policies of their masters against the most helpless members of society. The other is a Nazi organization.Convergent evolution occurs in biological species when two types of organism occupy similar niches, are subject to similar selection pressures, have to solve the same sorts of problems in order to succeed in the tasks that their environments set for them,1 and so on. Thus when two organisms have evolved similar survival tactics, it’s reasonable to draw the conclusion that they’re trying to solve similar problems in the world, that they play a similar role in the grand scheme of being.2 More convergent evolution: It’s also hard to tell the HPOA device from the Nazi one, for about the same reason. Hint: One is a vicious tool of oppression used by quasi-privatized gangs of thugs as an essential tool in their politico-corporate masters’ program of social cleansing. The other is a milk-can with a swastika painted on it. Read on for details!
And it’s an undeniable fact that Kerry Morrison and the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance are, against the express will of Jesus Christ, obsessed with discouraging people from giving money to panhandlers directly. Just the briefest glance at any of their newsletters will convince you of this. In particular, see page 7 of the Summer 2014 issue, in which Kerry Morrison asks herself and, by extension, you, the reader, if she should give money to panhandlers (SPOILER: no!). Kerry gives no real reasons at all here or anywhere, so far as we can see. Clip from the Summer 2014 HPOA Newsletter explaining how to use technology to thwart the will of Jesus.
Admittedly she gives what seem like reasons at first glance, e.g. she asserts that the homeless will spend the money on alcohol and then get arrested by the BID patrol for drinking it in public, but there’s no explanatory force here. Kerry’s the Executive Directrix of the HPOA and thus the big boss of the BID patrol. She is a woman under authority, with soldiers under her; and she says to this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes.3 If she doesn’t want people getting arrested for drinking in public, all she’s gotta do is tell her gunmen to stop arresting them. There’s no need to propagandize against giving money to the poor if the goal is merely to arrest fewer people.
And it doesn’t stop with propaganda, either. There are actual machines involved. See, e.g., page 5 of the Summer 2014 HPOA Newsletter, in which Kerry promotes machines that people can put money into instead of handing it personally to panhandlers. This, says she, is “a positive option for passersby to contribute change to help people.” These machines cost $2500 a pop and they’re looking at getting 12 of them. That comes to $30,000 altogether, which is actually about 2% of the HPOA’s annual security budget. There’s some serious purpose at work or the HPOA wouldn’t be willing to spend such an outrageous amount of money,7 but we’ll be damned if we can see what it is. Fortunately, we have an analytic tool that will let us understand everything and then explain it to you! Continue reading So-Called “Donation Stations” in Hollywood and Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich: A Curious Instance of Convergent Evolution→
Aerial view of one of ” L.A.’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.” Look at the grinding poverty, the misery of the natives, the hunger, the violence, the crime. Just imagine the seething hell it would be without the unappreciated efforts of a bunch of tricycle-riding cop-wannabe inchoate-Daniel-Pantaleo BID patrol officers.Did you even know that “Since 2007, as part of a public-private partnership focused on community safety and quality of life solutions,” the super-powered security wallahs at Andrews International have operated something called “a Community Assisted Problem Solving (CAPS) program in some of L.A.’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods”?1 Did you even know that?? Well, it’s evidently true, because on December 23, 2014, their PR flacks spewed forth a press release announcing it to the world.
Odilo Globocnik, “the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known,”1 master architect of mass murder and a guy who was very proud of his work, enough so to boast about it in public although not, so far as we know, in poetry. Globus, as his SS buddies called him, had to be told by his boss Heinrich Himmler to shush up because his antics were interfering with the mission.Odilo Globocnik first came to the attention of SS bossman Heinrich Himmler because of his relentless antisemitism and his willingness to murder the Jews of Vienna on a freelance basis even before such practices were sanctioned by German law. Consequently, in 1939 Himmler promoted Globocnik and moved him to occupied Poland. In 1941 Himmler directed Globocnik to oversee one of the most enormous instances of genocide in the history of the world: Aktion Reinhardt.
This was a big step up for Globus, as Odilo was affectionately known to his buddies in the Schutzstaffel, “the vilest organization ever known.”1 In localized modern terms, it’s like being moved from the suburban backwater of Inglewood to the big-time bright-lights-big-city cosmopolis of Hollywood! Globus took to his new surroundings like Samson to the Philistines, and, by late 1943 when he wound up operations, more than 2,000,000 Jews were dead. The organizational aspects of this accomplishment were overwhelmingly intricate, so Globus felt understandably proud of his masterful work and wanted to crow about it. STOP digging any more mass graves and clear up the old ones. Any form of publicity will be harmful. AND STOP WRITING POETRY, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!!However, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and Globocnik’s boss, had begun to notice that the rest of the world, and even a significant number of German citizens, weren’t too happy about the systematic deportation and gassing of human beings on this scale. As historian Bettina Stangneth has it:
The Nazis might have kept telling themselves that the extermination of the Jews was the only means for their survival, but they lacked sufficient faith in this view to share it with the rest of the world. The Nazi police state was born of the fear that not even its own population would understand its campaign of murder. Himmler guessed early on that this “glorious chapter of our history” could never be written, and he prevented Odilo Globocnik from sinking a memorial plaque into the earth for the heroes of Operation Reinhard…In summer 1942 [Himmler] ordered his commanders to find a way to avoid digging any more mass graves and to clear up the old ones. Any form of publicity would be harmful.2
A man restrained in BID Patrol car and riding along with two BID Patrollies. He’s clearly mentally ill. They’re putatively trained professionals. Why are they being delusional?Look here to see a man restrained in a BID patrol car after having been arrested for trespassing. But on the way to the station it turns into something else entirely.
Man: You let me go or you die.
BID employee: Why would I die?
Man: You let me go or I’ll get hurt.
BID employee: How are you gonna hurt us?
Man: [Unintelligible] … but you will let me go, it’s not valid.
BID employee: Well we can’t let you go, that would be you, uh, trying to subvert the legal process…by your…
Man (interrupting): Whaddaya mean you can’t let me go? OK [Unintelligible]
BID employee: We’re required by law to deliver you to the Los Angeles Police Department.
Man: For what?
BID employee: We, we tried to keep you out of that business. You kept disrupting the business…
Man: [Unintelligible] Why did you fucking put me in this car, you punks? What if I kick you in your head right now? What if I kick you right in your head, you little punk? What if I kick you right in your head? You let me out of this car, now. And you don’t bring me to jail or I will kick you somewhere.
BID employee: OK, we’ll take you to the office and get you out there.
Man: You better…you better not put me in no jail cell, punk.
BID employee: OK, we won’t…we won’t.
Man: I didn’t say nothing wrong to you or him. I’m arguing with him. I argued with that last one in the store. I did nothing illegal or wrong.
BID employee: OK.
Man: Now you’re fucking harassing me. Don’t you fucking take me to jail in this car. If you harass me at all I won’t forgive you. I never will. You’re gonna pay. You’re gonna pay with your life. Cause I’m gonna kill you with a knife. [Lengthy unintelligible part]
BID employee: You know, when you whisper, I can’t hear you. My hearing’s bad.
Man: [Continuing to be unintelligible]
BID employee: You’re gonna find me and burn me up? Is that what you said?
Man: [Continuing to be unintelligible]
BID employee: Ah, you realize you’re making terrorist threats, right?
