Tag Archives: Principle of Charity

Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 2, in which she Proposes to “Empower” BIDs (Including the Freaking CCEA?!?!) to Deal with Homelessness and, No Joke, to Pay Homeless People’s Parents to Let them Move Back In

Alisa Orduna at the Sunset-Vine BID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015.  Is anyone, anyone at all, listening to what's coming out of this woman's mouth?
Alisa Orduna at the Sunset-Vine BID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015. Is anyone, anyone at all, listening to what’s coming out of this woman’s mouth?
Yesterday we presented part 1 of our coverage of Garcetti aide Alisa Orduna’s visit to the Sunset-Vine BID meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, in which, among other nonsense, she announced that part of what the state of emergency means to the BIDs is that Garcetti is going to spend a million bucks on iPads for the BID Patrol. Today we bring you part two, in which she proposes to empower the BID Patrol (as well as the currently-being-sued-in-freaking-federal-court-for-how-they-deal-with-the-homeless Central City East no less) to deal with homelessness since they’re front-line responders, according to her. As if, with their guns, their shackles, their COINTELPRO-style surveillance of their critics, their freaking blessing by the LAPD, their locking up of every harmless heladero that falls into their clutches, their arrests of over 1000 homeless people per year, they weren’t freaking empowered enough. What’s next? Nuclear weapons? DEATH RAYS? Anyway, you can watch the whole thing here (try Chrome if Firefox acts wonky) and, as always, there’s a transcription after the break. Here’s what Alisa said:

but what’s the role for BIDs? I mean, so many of our BID officers are front line on the street. I met with Central City East BID, this BID, there was another BID, um, I forgot, but, you know, there was another BID that we’ve just been talking to, and the spike in violence, spike in substance abuse, the spike in, um, families, so it’s people with children that are out on the street in these encampments and often are abandoned, sometimes if their parents are active substance abusers, just the spike in the number of people, the spike in, the sense of permanency, I would say, with encampments, when before they’ve been, you know, none of this is [unintelligible], but someone may have been in a sleeping bag at the bus stop, but now, those coming in [unintelligible], they’re out in San Pedro, there was like a block-long encampment, that was pretty sturdy, you wouldn’t just be able to go in and take it down, you know, at some point, there was carpentry skills keeping it up, so it’s, it’s, how do we, how do we, adjust this, and what are, what do you guys see, and what’s, how can we empower BIDs so that, that information that they’re seeing and that experience that they’re having is fed back into us as policy-makers and we can together come [unintelligible] a solution.
Continue reading Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 2, in which she Proposes to “Empower” BIDs (Including the Freaking CCEA?!?!) to Deal with Homelessness and, No Joke, to Pay Homeless People’s Parents to Let them Move Back In

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The Hollywood BID Patrol’s Intransigence on Transience Provides Yet Another Performative Demonstration of David Graeber’s Theory of Violence, Stupidity, and Interpretive Labor

An astounding number of BID Patrol officers on Ivar Avenue by the library, June 30, 2015, milling around not being charged criminally for degrading everyone's quality of life by, through their open display of guns, passively threatening to kill anyone who disobeys them.
An astounding number of BID Patrol officers on Ivar Avenue by the library, June 30, 2015, milling around not being charged criminally for degrading everyone’s quality of life by openly displaying their guns and their self-evident willingness to use them, thus creating the imminent fear that they’ll kill anyone who disobeys them.
Watch here for the final bit of a Hollywood BID Patrol operation on Ivar Avenue on June 30, 2015. There are about 12 of them milling around on the sidewalk after, evidently, having kicked out a bunch of homeless people, most probably on the basis of suspected violations of disgraceful LAMC 41.18(d). Of course, if you know the spot you’ll know that there are homeless people there essentially all the time, only very rarely getting kicked out by the BID Patrol.

So what horrific incident was it that required the presence of about a dozen of Hollywood’s finest1 on a pleasant Tuesday afternoon on Ivar Avenue? Murder, rape, homeless encampment, street-preaching? The amazing thing is that no one there seemed to know for sure except, we assume given that the principle of charity requires us to assume that the BID Patrol both has reasons for its actions and at the same time knows what those reasons are, the officers themselves.

A witness to the June 30, 2015 incident who also had no firm idea of the BID Patrol's intention, but was willing to exert effort to come up with a shared theory that fit the known facts, proving that he, unlike the Patrol, has not yet placed himself outside of normal human society.
A witness to the June 30, 2015 incident who also had no firm idea of the BID Patrol’s intention, but was willing to exert effort to come up with a shared theory that fit the known facts, proving that he, unlike the Patrol, has not yet placed himself outside of normal human society.

One witness, though, spent the time and the effort to share his theory on the BID Patrol’s motivation with our correspondent. This is what David Graeber calls “interpretative labor,” an activity which, as Graeber has it, “much of the everyday business of social life” comprises, an activity in which people with guns, made stupid by their own potential for state-sanctioned violence, do not typically engage, as they clearly do not in this case:2

Thank you for filming, cause they only pulled up when I started talking about God and Jesus. I was just talking about God and Jesus and taking the Illuminati down, and every day they don’t never bother nobody, and let them sit here, right? Well, all of a sudden today I came and started talking about God and Jesus and taking down the Illuminati, cause I’m in the middle of a documentary, all of a sudden they get a hundred calls a day. God bless us all, the Holy Spirit, in Jesus’ name.

Continue reading The Hollywood BID Patrol’s Intransigence on Transience Provides Yet Another Performative Demonstration of David Graeber’s Theory of Violence, Stupidity, and Interpretive Labor

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Freud, Jesus agree: Kerry Morrison finds LA County mental health court plans to be “hindering progress, in the way”

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
As outlined here, Kerry Morrison, Executive Director of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, recently wrote to California State Controller John Chiang asking him to force the State Judicial Council to pay the $42,857.88 that the HPOA claims they are in arrears. Well and good, we suppose, but in her letter, we find this argument:

Finally, though the courthouse has significantly scaled back its operations in the past couple of years, I understand that there are ambitious plans underfoot to centralize the county’s mental health and diversion courts into this facility. As such, with the anticipated crush of people — court employees, jurors, family members, and professionals — coming to Hollywood to do business each day, the services provided by the BID will help to enhance this experience for everyone.

Oh happy day! Imagine that you’re a mom or a dad coming to the Hollywood Courthouse to watch, e.g., your schizophrenic kid get locked up in Atascadero, where he will spend the rest of his natural life pumped full of thorazine and shut away in the restraint room but at least, thanks to the BID, you don’t have to step over a bunch of homeless people drinking Taaka vodka as you make your way into the building. Your experience surely would be enhanced, would it not? After all, what are drunken homeless people if not unwelcome reminders of the likely fate of the schizophrenic kid if he’s ever let out of the snakepit?

But that’s not the subject of tonight’s post.
Continue reading Freud, Jesus agree: Kerry Morrison finds LA County mental health court plans to be “hindering progress, in the way”

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Hollywood Media District Goes Full CYA, Approves Falsified Minutes

Richard Nixon takes break from crying over spilt milk in Hell, speaks from grave, reminding one and all that the coverup is worse than the crime
Richard Nixon takes a break from crying over spilt milk in the republic of Hell to speak from the grave, reminding one and all that the coverup is worse than the crime
Long-time readers of this blog will recall that on October 23, 2014, Sharyn Romano of the Hollywood Beautification Team essentially confessed on camera that she turns a blind eye to the criminal activities of her subordinates. We spent the last month feverishly anticipating the minutes of that meeting, wondering what fantastical description of this faux pas might be presented.

The safest thing, and what we were expecting, would have been to just not mention the hateful affair at all. Meeting minutes are a record of what was done in the meeting rather than a transcript of everything that was said. Since Sharyn’s report didn’t contain any action items it would have been totally reasonable to just note that she gave a report. But, for whatever reason, that’s not what happened.
Continue reading Hollywood Media District Goes Full CYA, Approves Falsified Minutes

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