Kerry Morrison, patrician technician of homeless policy in LA, keeping schtum about her culpability in various matters.On the front page of the Summer 2015 issue of the HPOA newsletter, our heroine and perennial source of subject matter, Kerry Morrison, has an article cynically entitled Discouraging News About Homelessness Surprises No One. Her subject is the 2015 homeless count results, released last month and showing that homelessness in Los Angeles County has increased by 12% over 2013, the year of the last count. In her piece, Kerry gives a number of delusional speculations on why this might have happened: more crazy people, good weather in LA, Prop 47 (srsly), people who, following the example of Jesus Christ, give money to panhandlers, the FREAKING ACLU?!!3
Kerry Morrison, who uses gun-wielding thugs as tools to terrorize, kidnap, torment, and ridicule people but nevertheless expects herself and her henchmen to be treated with politesse on all occasionsThe release of the HPOA’s quarterly newsletter is always an interesting time here at MK.org secret headquarters. On the one hand we’re always aghast at the latest stupidity, cupidity, mental rigidity, and white privilegidity on display. On the other hand, we always end up with a bunch of topics about which to write. The Summer 2015 issue is no exception.
As every regular reader of this blog knows by now, the HPOA is hysterically opposed to the legalization of street vending in Los Angeles. They’ve entered into conspiracies with the abhorrent Central City Association to subvert the democratic process through astroturfing and mendacity. And, according to Kerry Morrison, writing in the newsletter: Devin Strecker, Alyssa Van Breene, Kerry Morrison, and a bunch of unindicted co-conspirators
Before an ordinance is drafted, the CLA [Chief Legislative Analyst] staff presided over a series of public hearings to gain input from the community. Staff representing both BIDs, along with board members, attended each of these hearings and expressed the concerns of the business community. However, members of the business community were outnumbered easily 10:1 at these hearings.
Hollywood board member Alyssa Van Breene and staffer Devin Strecker attended the first meeting on May 28 in Boyle Heights. When they tried to share their concerns the audience booed. Though there were no boos or hissing at the second hearing on June 11 in Van Nuys, the audience was unruly and disrespectful to those testifying against the ordinance or speaking on behalf of small business.
David Graeber’s fine book of essays provides theoretical tools essential to the understanding of the violence of the BIDs, the utter, abject stupidity of the BIDs and their minions, and the both correlative and causal links between themDavid Graeber is one of my eternal intellectual heroes, and I recommend most highly to anyone who can read his stunning, transformative work, Debt: The First 5000 Years. His most recent book, a collection of essays entitled The Utopia of Rules: On Technology Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is, while less sweeping than Debt, essential reading. In particular, for the purpose of understanding the violence of the BIDs and the utter, abject stupidity of the BIDs and their minions, one essay, Dead Zones of the Imagination, stands out above the rest. David Graeber, looking as brilliantly ironic and as ironically brilliant as ever he has done.
I’ll run through the premises and argument after the break, but a crucial conclusion that Graeber reaches here, and one whose relevance will be immediately obvious to sane readers of this blog, is that
…violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.
You probably thought that Batman was the good guy, but it’s time to admit that you were wrong. Here he is, not just terrorizing poor innocent tourists who don’t know any better than to allow themselves to be victimized, but he’s also flagrantly violating trademark law. If he were as honest as we’d been led to believe he’d be hauling his own self off to jail instead of macking on helpless tourist girlies.Stories of the rich and powerful abusing intellectual property laws to stifle free expression, shut down criticism of their terroristic conspiracies against humanity, lock away little old ladies because their grandkids misuse bittorrent, wantonly slaughter cute lil bunnies, and so on, are as common in the tech press as dandelions on the expansive and suspiciously green lawns of Hancock Park before the gardeners show up on Thursday morning. Sesame Street Characters performing for US Navy personnel in a manner which, presumably, the BID finds acceptable because there are no tourists involved. Read more about guys in Elmo suits after the break.
This post-capitalo-apocalyptic legal technology, the use of which reached its supernova-esque apotheosis earlier this month with the City of Inglewood’s mind-blowingly shenaniganistic attempt to assert copyright in video of city council meetings,1 it turns out was being used by our friends at the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance to try to shut down the by-them-much-reviled street performers in a shameless criminal conspiracy with their aiders and abettors at the the City Attorney’s office and the LAPD as late as last August. Although our bosom BIDdies seem to have met with little success, except, evidently, in the case of Elmo of Sesame Street, their futile attempts are quite telling. Read the actual evidence here and our commentary on them after the break. Continue reading HPOA in Criminal Conspiracy with LA City Attorney to Abuse Intellectual Property Law in Never-Ending War on Constitutional Rights of Hollywood/Highland Street Characters→
Another attorney from California that we’d have all been better off without, singing the blues in Beverly Hills in 1962The emails are available here. There’s a lot of chaff, as usual, but a lot of tasty morsels as well. My colleagues will certainly be giving this material the fine-toothed comb treatment in the future, but I thought it’d be nice to announce the availability of the documents to satisfy your hunger and thirst for the truth which, as is well-known, shall set you free.
Picture of famed future president and California attorney is, according to Wikimedia, in the public domain. Take that, Helen Gahagan Douglas!
I am pleased to announce the availability of about 1.3 GB of images, obtained from the HPOA under the California Public Records Act. The main archive page is here. You can see a listing of the files for individual download here. I rot13-ed the filenames to protect people’s privacy somewhat.1 You can get the whole batch via bittorrent which, as always, is most efficient if you want local copies of these pictures. I’ll be organizing these into thematic PDF flip-books and publishing them at the Archive and on Amazon over the next few weeks, but as it may be a while I thought I’d make the raw images available now.
If you don’t know what rot13 is you need to get your internet user’s license renewed post haste!
Image of man explaining democracy to the BID Patrol is a public record.
As you can see from the images to your right, the Vine Street Tree Vandal is still at large and hard at his dastardly work as of today, May 19, 2015. One of these three-in-a-row vandalized trees on the west side of Vine Street between DeLongpre and Sunset was hit just last week. What we have here is more than just a crime spree, more than just a peasant revolt against the ham-fisted idiocy of the Andrews International Security BID Patrol, it is in fact an indictment of the BID Patrol’s very competence. The big brass at Andrews will blether on about their self-proclaimed excellence in privatized facism, but when it comes to an actual ongoing crime spree they’re quite evidently helpless. Continue reading Vine Street Tree Vandal Turns the Hat-Trick on May 19!→
Newly vandalized jacaranda tree on Vine Street, May 13, 2015We’ve been writing about the continuing story of the Vine Street tree vandal since October of last year. The Sunset-Vine BID has been announcing the imminent arrest of the criminal for at least that long. In fact, we could have sworn that they mentioned it again at last month’s Joint Security Committee meeting although we’ll be damned if we can find it in there now. We’ve also noted that this criminal does in fact seem to be targeting the BID’s trees, although as Kurt Cobain might have said but didn’t, just because you have enemies doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid. Proof that the vandalism as pictured above was newly committed: as-yet unwilted tree fronds at the base of the tree. Is the baseball cap evidence of the workings of a depraved criminal mind? Obviously. Who else but depraved criminals root for American League teams?As you can see to your left, though, the tree vandal is still at large and working despite the dogged efforts of Keystone Kop-wannabes Andrews International Security, the Hollywood Neighborhood Prosecutor, the LAPD, and everyone else. Perhaps there’s more than one tree vandal, and though they arrest particular instances, new vandals rise up hydra-like after the manner of peasant rebellion leaders everywhere. Continue reading Vine Street Tree Vandal Still At Large Despite Best Efforts of HPOA, LAPD, FBI, NSA, Other TLAs!!!→
A member of the Hollywood Protective Association and spiritual forebear of the modern BID Board member, with the backing of the 1920s edition of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, announces to the world that she’s a moron. Note sign in window stating “Member Hollywood Protective Association.”Long-time readers of this blog will recall that, last month, we broke the story of Hollywood Chamber of Commerce biggity-wig Marty Shelton’s bizarre distaste for black, brown, and poor people visiting Hollywood. Inspired by that, we recently wrote on the white supremacist roots of our beloved Hollywood sign and the inwrought caucasians-only policies of the real-estate development it once promoted. This line of inquiry got us interested in the jim crow history of Hollywood, which turns out to be quite rich.
For instance, a brief discussion in Scott Kurashige’s interesting book The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles1 led us to read up in old LA Times articles on anti-Japanese hysteria in Hollywood in the early 1920s. It seems that in April 1923, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce gave some advice to a bunch of angry white people. The article is here, but the short version is that some Japanese people bought eight lots in Hollywood, four near Bronson and Sunset and four on Tamarind and Gordon, and had the nerve to wish to build some apartment buildings and a church. Jess E. Stephens, City Attorney of Los Angeles in April 1923 when pitchfork-waving torch-bearing howling Hollywood lynch mobs came whining to him about how Japanese people were being meanies and building a church in Hollywood. His response doesn’t seem to be available in the historical record.
The white people got all in a tizzy, you can see one in the image above, and went to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce screaming for help. The Chamber, as opposed to the presence of non-white people in Hollywood as they are today, directed the howling mob to the City Attorney to seek a restraining order and they also started circulating petitions “urging the residents to agree to restrict the use of land to those of the Caucasian race.”2 They were even inspired to poetry! See after the break for an especially creepy example.
