At the November 11, 2014, meeting of the Central Hollywood Coalition, kommisariat of the Sunset-Vine “Baby BID,” there was some discussion of visionaries doing something or another to do with “mobility”⁶ in Hollywood.² One of the visionaries mentioned was Janette Sadik-Khan,⁵ late of the erstwhile nouveau-Napoleonic Michael Bloomberg NYC empire, who now works for Bloomberg-the-corporation spreading Bloombergian bullshit around the world as fast as they can shovel it out and also gives TED talks.¹

Bloomberg is one of these pezzonovante self-styled “reformers” like Eli Broad who thinks that because he’s a zillionaire he understands everything. Sadik-Khan is his Charlie McCarthy.⁴ These people’s zombie clones brought Los Angeles, among countless other horrors, Dr. John Deasy, who finally left this city with a stake through his heart and unsettling thoughts of Mark Berndt’s cookies dancing through his jug-like head. They’re probably up in the hills right now scheming to bring Michelle Rhee in to replace the guy. Of course, this kind of the-wealthy-gonna-fix-everything Kool-Aid is irresistible to the CHC-slash-SV-BID, a group whose entire foundational principle is “rich people must be smarter cause otherwise why is they so rich?” Hence their eagerness to let Sadik-Khan explain it all to you.

Anyway, Besley’s description of what’s obviously an impending trainwreck³ moved Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Executive Director Kerry Morrison to opine thusly:

It’s not pleasant to walk in Hollywood, you know, it’s not a [unintelligible] scene. I would say I can walk a mile in New York and not even know I walked a mile because it’s so interesting to look in the storefronts and, you know, just a lot of [unintelligible]. Here, you know, we have a lot of [unintelligible] and also people, um, don’t feel safe? Uh, sometimes [unintelligible]

Tra-la! The Executive Director of a group that, delusionally, wants to make Hollywood acceptable to Sandy Friscans now thinks New York City is not only more interesting than Hollywood but also safer. The latter is a mere factual error that a little bit of google could refute. The former, though, is hard to argue against with people who just don’t have ears to hear or eyes to see. The blind won’t get colors no matter how much explaining one does. But really, if these people hate Hollywood, hate Los Angeles, so much, why don’t they all skedaddle off to Visionary Island (née the Island of Misfit Toys) or at least back up to the holy Bay Area, the Jonestown of their people?

1. How can you tell when a TED speaker is shitting you? Their mouth is moving. Even if a TED speaker says something true, it’s still wrong.
2. You can watch the entire soul-killing discussion here, which is a link to the whole meeting starting at about 28:30.
3. Pro-tip: You want to know how to fix transportation, don’t ask a bunch of ideological bike-lane-as-fashion-accessory proponents. Ask some people who ride buses. They’re hard for you to notice, guys, cause a lot of them aren’t white. But you’ll see them if you look carefully. Some of them probably clean your houses.
4. Or vice versa. Who’s keeping track?
5. Sadik-Khan is not only despised by sane people. Look here for a wtfly loony attack on her from the right by a woman who doesn’t understand that Sadik-Khan’s boot in the face is still a boot in the face even when it’s a TOMS cable knit suede boot instead of the classic black iron heel. Don’t think that that particular slice of crazeballs can be surpassed? It can.
6. “Mobility” seems to be TED-code for bike-lanes-understood-as-a-disruptive-technology or some such nonsense. Why can’t these people learn English if they’re going to live here? Or Spanish. Any human language would do.

Image of visionaries released under CC BY 2.0 and available thanks to Wikimedia Foundation here. Image of Kerry Morrison is in the public domain because we declare it to be so.