Charlie Beck at March 19, 2015 meeting of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, just prior to explaining how LAHSA’s biennial homeless count is gonna let the LAPD start arresting the homeless en masse like God intends them to doThe Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), whose chair is none other than HPOA Executive Directrix Kerry Morrison, sponsors a biennial count of the homeless population of Los Angeles. And what is the purpose of this massive volunteer effort? Well, according to LAHSA, it’s to “[m]ake a difference in the lives of homeless men, women, and children throughout Los Angeles County.” That turns out to be quite accurate. The homeless count will eventually make a huge difference in the lives of the homeless of Los Angeles.
According to LAHSA executive director Peter Lynn, quoted in a January 2015 press release: Peter Lynn, human being experiencing executive-directorship of LAHSA and person duly utilizing person-first language when publicly misrepresenting the motives behind the homeless countThe 2015 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count is a critical opportunity to gain information about the size and scope of the challenge we face to house community residents experiencing homelessness. We use this information to better target our homeless service resources. Volunteers will make a difference in their community, and the lives of their homeless neighbors, by committing four hours of their time.
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→
Happy smiling white people at CIM Group plotting the destruction of Hollywood and raising the question of “how will taxes and permits be enforced, especially given that” CIM shenanigans are essentially “a symbol of the city’s failure to gain control over unpermitted outdoor signs”4? It’s almost certainly a coincidence that the woman on the left looks just like L. Ron Hubbard, right?As we’ve previously discussed at great length, the palefaced economic elites of Los Angeles are all abuzz at the possibility that the City Council might legalize street vending of various kinds, an activity whose practitioners are, for the most part, not that palefaced. As part of their abuzzitude, the palefaces have produced reams of frantic pearl-clutching hysteria regarding the threats posed to truth, justice, the American way, etc. that would, they say, certainly ensue as a result of such legalization.
These white-privilege rage-rants, while mostly grounded in delusion and mental illness, occasionally contain valid and useful arguments. It can sometimes happen, as Albert Einstein said, that “a blind pig has found an acorn.”1A letter by Kerry Morrison, Executive Directrix of the HPOA, to Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, is an example of this. Kerry argues that, amongst other reasons, street vending should not be legalized, at least not in Hollywood, because it “raises numerous questions that must be taken into consideration. For example, how will taxes and permits be enforced, especially given that this is a cash-only business?“2 Typical cash-only business in Los Angeles, beloved of the human residents but hated by the HPOA because of the difficulty of enforcing “taxes and permits.” This one’s owned by an extraordinarily wealthy former mayor of Los Angeles, who evidently didn’t get the memo about how his business practices are RUINING EVERYTHING!!
As an aside, this argument can also be used against iconic Los Angeles restaurants The Pantry, Nick’s Cafe, and Philippe’s. Will the HPOA soon be asking the City Council to shut down these landmark establishments?
In any case, Kerry also lists a bunch of other undesirable consequences that, in her view, are likely to ensue from the legalization of street vending. These are not all illegal, e.g. the horrifying prospect of the potential placing of trash into appropriate public receptacles, but they’re all, says Kerry, “not something we are requesting in Hollywood.” We will refer to these en masse as “Kerry Morrison’s cogent argument.”
Street vendor in Manhattan destroying the prosperity of the city, laying waste to the comfort and privilege of rich white people, and generally ruining EVERYTHING! And now the city of Los Angeles intends to forcibly convert Hollywood into a cultural and economic wasteland like New York City by allowing such miscreants to operate with impunity on our streets. “Not on our watch,” say BIDs.Street food is one of the signature pleasures of the great cosmopolitan cities of the world. Practically alone amongst its peers, though, Los Angeles forbids vending on its public rights of way. This is because there are really no bounds to the willingness of the economic elites of this city to prohibit anything that normal human beings enjoy if by doing so they can stick a dagger in the neck of the poor. They will certainly destroy the village in order to save it. Representative of the Hollywood BIDs metaphorically destroying the city of Los Angeles in order to save it from perceived (albeit delusionally) unintended consequences of an all-too-rare outburst of sanity with regard to its street-vending policy.
Case in point: the City Council recently began to discuss legalizing street vending in Los Angeles. Sane people everywhere rejoice at this attempt to allow civilization to flourish and also bring an estimated half-billion dollars worth of economic activity out of the shadows and onto the bottom line. There’s a hot dog in the public manger, though.
The BIDs and their minions have leapt into coordinated action! They are in a cyclonic tizzy, explaining fast and loud how the unintended consequences of the sane and harmless choice to legalize street vending will ruin everything. It will e.g. impoverish small businesses, encourage crime, cause the unauthorized commercial use of public trash cans, cause the unauthorized non-use of public trash cans, provide increased funding to criminal street gangs, encourage armed robbery, cause diseases, and even more stuff too weird to list here. Think we’re exaggerating? Read on! Continue reading Kerry Morrison: Hollywood Businesses too Feeble to Survive Free Market Without Municipally Enforced Draconian Anticompetitive Pinko Racist Regulatory Capture→
The anonymous BID patrol officer discussed in this post, his hand clearly on his gun. Click and zoom to see more clearly.On October 23, 2014, an Army veteran wrote to Devin Strecker of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, among others, the following words:
This morning on my way to work, I was standing waiting to cross the street when I look over and see the gentleman on the left in the picture attached, grasping his weapon as if to draw his fire arm all while chatting away with the gentleman on the right. As I continued to wait to cross the street, I noticed the gentleman on the left start to pull out actually draw his weapon about 4-5 inches out of his holster. All the while standing chatting with his partner. I am ex army infantry, when we even had our hand TOUCHING our holstered weapon, there better had been a life threatening reason to even touch our holstered weapon.
How email works…in Italian!While my literarily profligate colleagues lounge around MK.org secret headquarters drinking cheap wine and writing reams of nonsense about the antic shenanigans of the HPOA I, at least, am working hard to provide actual documentary evidence to you, dear reader. I am pleased to announce the availability of the first fruits of a recent Public Records request to HPOA, faithfully fulfilled by the ever-helpful Kerry Morrison. This set of documents consists of all disclosable emails between HPOA and A/I for the dates October 1, 2014 through November 12, 2014.
They are available through the menu structure in the header, or here, or from our static file storage either as a 7.7 MB zip archive or as individual PDFs. There is more to come.
Image by Massimo Barbieri, released under the CC BY-SA 3.0 and available via Wikimedia.
About a week’s supply of Bourbon whiskey. The post is about vodka, but we found this picture more attractive.According to scientists the top 20% of U.S. drinkers drink an average of 6.3 drinks per day.1 At 0.6 ounces of pure alcohol per drink2 that works out to 3.78 ounces all together. At 30 ml per ounce that comes to 113.4 ml of pure alcohol. Steve Seyler’s bête noire is something called Taaka vodka which is, we assume, 80 proof, or 40% alcohol. Thus 113.4 ml is equivalent to =283.5 ml of actual vodka.
As of October 2014 the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID had made over 600 arrests for drinking in public. Annualized this is over 700 arrests for 2014. By that point they’d made 945 arrests, which we’ll annualize to 1000 for ease of calculation. Thus around 70% of the arrests that BID security makes are for the simple act of drinking alcohol in public. In 2013 the Entertainment district seems to have spent about $1,600,000 on security.1
The Hollywood Property Owners Alliance arguing with itself about alcohol. The moral? The rich are connoisseurs of fine spirits who appreciate a bargain. The poor are going to jail.Look! The Hollywood Property Owners Alliance loves “affordable” “booze”!! For instance, there’s a new bar in Hollywood:
Whiskey Blu, located at 1714 N. Las Palmas, advertises $2 beer, including Pabst, Budweiser, and Coors as well as $5 shots of Makers Mark, Bullit, Crown, Jim Beam and more. … Whiskey Blu has stepped up to serve those who enjoy a nice, affordable drink.
And look again! Another bar closed down but now it’s back:
For several years, Dillon’s Irish Pub & Grill was a hub for sports fans, tourists and nightlife at the famed intersection of Hollywood and Vine. Known for its $3 beers…
And look again again!
For those who love a little booze and music, Hollywood & Highland’s summer series, Wine & Jazz, does not disappoint!
I said WHAT?! You must be crazy… If you click here you will be able to read the Spring 2014 issue of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID’s newsletter. It’s chock-full of mockable goodness, but today our attention is focused on page 7, which contains an article called Combatting Alcohol Issues.
Out of the many mockable statements in this piece, we have chosen for today’s post this minor claim as our topic: “As Albert Einstein said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.”
First of all, Einstein didn’t say this, as anyone with any sense of history would have known immediately.1 Second of all, no matter who said it, it’s not just wrong, but stupidly wrong. Third, it’s a dreadfully overworked cliché. Finally, as with so many too-good-to-be-true misattributions, this is an instance of projection; that is, the author’s alienation2 from her own subconsciously perceived or imagined errors, turning them into imaginary characteristics of some delusionally constructed alterity.3
=283.5 ml of actual vodka.
=1.42 bottles of Taaka. What’s the chance that someone on the Board of directors drinks at this rate and still has the temerity to vote in favor of policies that target homeless people for arrest for doing the same thing that they do every freaking day? It’s pretty high, friends. Details below the fold.
