California and Vaccine Allocation

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I may have sampling error but I think what the State of California did was to partition up their vaccine supply by the total population of each county instead of asking what proportion of each county was in the designated target audience, e.g. how many 75+ and health care workers. This would explain why counties with a smaller proportion of these designated victims could immediately move on to other target audiences whereas Santa Barbara, with a higher percentage of older people, perhaps, has been struggling. 

If true, there are two morals of this story. First, one more time the State of CA is not being even minimally competent at the tasks they are called upon to do. I would expect better from any undergraduate economics student at a university and I do not even get that level of analysis from the state. Second, choose where you live carefully. and remember this is not the last pandemic.

The California DMV and Insurance Industry

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I expect that various services that are required by law to be provided at a certain level of competence to the citizen.

I am required to have my vehicle insured and registered which seems reasonable, doesn't it? So I gave the state and a private company $1,500 and my car is registered until March and insured until May.

I will almost certainly be in Europe during February - May of next year, so I asked if I could register my car for next year. I was told no. I would have to do that no sooner than 30 days before. Same thing for the insurance.

Obviously, the State of California and the insurance industry which makes so much money from us does not care to do one thing to make it possible for citizens to live their lives and obey the law. You must bend over, give them money, or be punished.

I have yet to see the State of California be other than totally corrupt and difficult to work with. From the DMV, to the Franchise Tax Board, to long term asset seizure of bank accounts, they are either extremely inflexible and difficult to work with, or just corrupt.

California Museum of Science & Industry (1955-1996)

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I loved this place as a kid.

Someone has made a web page dedicated to it.

http://www.whmsicl.cnc.net/CMSI.html

Lions and Tigers and the LAPD, Oh My

One of the great advantages of using mass transit, or at least transit, in this case Amtrak, to go back and forth between LA and Oceanside is that the process throws you in with a lot of other people, and sometimes you end up talking to them while you are waiting for your train.   But if you do that, you might learn something and that might be annoying or unfortunate depending on what it is that you learn.

So here I am minding my own business, waiting for the last train to Oceanside from Los Angeles. It is maybe 9:30 PM at night at Union Station and I am waiting on the platform with about four other people one of them a nice man under 30 or so with his son (who knows, maybe the boy is 8 years old, its really hard for me to tell).

And the nice young man is talking to his son and he says “See that building over there? Thats the big house.”

“Actually”, I say, for some reason adding my two cents worth, “If you mean the jail, I am pretty sure that it is on the other side of the tracks, around the corner. The building you are pointing to is far too nice to be the jail, and besides, it has windows”. So my new friend laughs and looks closer (this is night you understand), and says, “hmmm, you are right, it is too nice and it does have windows”.

“I am pretty sure that the jail”, I say, “ is about a block away on the right side of the train as we leave. I had been trying to figure out what building would be that big but not have any windows, just apparently slits for light, and I am guessing that is the city jail.”

So my new friend and I started talking while his son amused himself with a video game. He had his son for the weekend and was just coming back from San Luis Obispo where his son lived with his mother. And he started entertaining me with stories about life inside the jail, something he knew first hand as it turned out that he had a complicated legal history due to his tendency to drink and drive on occasion.

And in the next 30 minutes or so I learned a lot about what the difference was between jail and prison, and what life was like inside the Los Angeles City jail, run as it is by those stalwart defenders of peace and justice, the LAPD.   And what he told me was bad, really actually kind of bad.

You will notice that I am not going to be specific about what it is he told me.  I am not going to be specific here in print.   You can talk to me in person or over the phone if you want more details.

I asked my new friend whether he understood that what he had experienced was, as far as I know, completely against the law and violated his civil rights. That if his experiences were publicized in the press that there would be a brief expression of outrage, some pious promises by our politicians to “get to the bottom of the story” and maybe a scapegoat or two, but that of course nothing would change.

I also asked him, who knows about this? And he says that as far as he can tell, anyone who wants to know about it knows. All the prisoners know, all police officers know because they are required to work at the jail for their first two years on the LAPD, and he presumes that any politician who cares to know, knows. How about rights groups, I asked. He laughs, oh they are easy to fool. They come in and as they walk through the jail things are fixed up while they are there and as they move on, things revert to normal.

By the way, in case you did not know this, jail is different from prison. You can not be in jail for longer than one year or 18 months (I forget which) and therefore have to be transferred to prison. Prison is apparently nicer than jail because it is run by outside contractors and those contractors are afraid that the former prisoners will kill them if they do shit like the LAPD does in the LA jail. But the LAPD is not concerned with that because everyone knows that anyone who fucks with an LAPD officer in any way is killed.

So where is the ACLU when all this is going on?   Where are our Los Angeles political leaders?

Now here is something you might want to know that many people who are white and middle class do not know. It turns out that the LAPD has a well-known reputation for, well, bad behavior, and that reputation is long standing and non-subtle. What is odd about this reputation is that the only people who don't seem to realize this are my middle class, privileged white friends. Every black person who lives in LA has a story to tell, they are not all making these stories up. It is only my white friends, well off by the standards of most Americans, who seem to be in complete denial about the LAPD reputation.

Are the rumors true? The rumors are always true, at least as far as they go.

So whats my point? I am not in a position to do anything about what I learned.   What, are you crazy?  I have more than enough problems just trying to figure out whether or not I have a career.  I dont need to make an enemy of the LAPD.  That would be quite self-destructive.

You on the other hand, my well-off, successful friends, who laugh at the stupidity of the people who live in the south and point the finger at Kansas City or Charleston S. C., it seems to me that you are just the right person to go out there and organize and end this injustice. Why not clean up your own hometown first?

One day this will all come out in the press I think, at least I hope it will.  Hey for all I know it already has and I just didnt notice.   Trust me, when you hear the details of the bad behavior I am referring to, you will not be amused and you will not think it is subtle.

Why do we permit any of this to go on in American in 2015?  Surely we know better by now.

Of course it could be that my friend was just making all this up.

Corruption and Degradation in Orange County

“The law must be honest, just, reasonable and according to the ways of the people. It must meet their needs and speak plainly, so that all men may know and understand, what the law is. It is not to be made in any man's favor, but for the needs of all them who live in the land. No man shall judge contrary to the law, which the king has given and the country chosen. [...] neither shall he [the king] take it back without the will of the people.”

English translation of the Latin from the Danish code of Holmiensis from roughly 1291. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Holmiensis

Why should we, as citizens, be concerned if it turns out that the District Attorney office of Orange County is a snake pit of unconstitutional illegalities?   I am of the opinion that nothing we do could possibly make a difference to our justice system.   Just publicly discussing the issues will probably result in some sort of action against the citizen who complains.  

I suppose that the reason we should care about the local insanity is that it puts us in a better position to accuse the rest of the world of being unjust and racist.  I mean how does it look for us to point the finger but not be aware of our own little, or not so little, corrupt cesspools?

So I want to bring to your attention two scandals closer to home.  The first is in Orange County and involves the District Attorney's office.  The second will be for another post and involve the LAPD.

To give you a feel for the magnitude of this gross violation of law, by those that we trust to enforce the law, consider the following paragraph chosen almost at random from the articles listed below:

In recent months, we've learned, over the objections of the Orange County Sheriff's Department (OCSD), that the agency created TRED, a computerized records system in which deputies store information about in-custody defendants, including informants. Some of the data is trivial; other pieces contain vital, exculpatory evidence. But for a quarter of a century, OCSD management deemed TRED beyond the reach of any outside authority. In Dekraai, deputies Ben Garcia and Seth Tunstall committed perjury to hide the mere existence of TRED. Those lies didn't originate from blind loyalty, however. The concealed records show how prosecution teams slyly trampled the constitutional rights of defendants by employing informants—and then keeping clueless judges, juries and defense lawyers.

from  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/29/1388819/-Judge-disqualifies-all-250-prosecutors-in-Orange-County-CA-because-of-widespread-corruption#

The scandal in Orange County is pretty amazing. The news broke about 16 months ago, but I never heard a word of it until I stumbled on this about a month ago. Why not?   Why isnt our media discussing this, what should we call it, gross abuse of justice? A scandal that affects thousands and thousands of innocent citizens who have been victimized by a corrupt justice department in flagrant and egregious ways.

The thing to realize is that the corruption in Orange County is that it is so bad, that it may literally be the worst of its kind in American history.  True there has been a lot of corruption in American history, so that is quite a statement.  But it may be true because this is a particularly specific form of corruption. 

Its a complex story, a very large story, and I am sure I only know a few percent of the big picture. But let me tell you what I think I know and point you to some news articles. Then the both of us, you and I, can watch our justice system fail to punish the guilty and release and compensate the innocent. We can watch together as our system does what it has always done: support criminals as long as those criminals are in bed with the politicians. As it has always been in America.

What seems to have happened is that through a series of misadventures, a few judges demanded some information which revealed that the entire justice system of Orange County was completely corrupt. That they were keeping a database of evidence that proved the innocence of people which the County was prosecuting and getting convictions for. That the system was running an informant system in the jails that violated the rights of prisoners in an egregious and systematic fashion.

Check these out.  They are pretty terrific.

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2015/06/national_review_calls_forepublicans_to_take_responsibility_in_orange_countys_informant_scandal.php

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2015/03/seal_beach_salon_massacre.php

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/29/1388819/-Judge-disqualifies-all-250-prosecutors-in-Orange-County-CA-because-of-widespread-corruption#

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/03/orange-county-da_n_6993390.html

Excuse me? All 250 prosecutors for the county are disqualified? Excuse me, the entire office of the District Attorney of Orange County?

The problem is, you don't get to wash this shit under the rug forever you know. One day you wake up and find that citizens no longer believe that there is any justice, that all politicians are corrupt, and that the state exists purely to exalt the rich. Of course that is the case, now, all of these things are true: the politicians are corrupt, there is no justice except for the rich, and the state and the law and the economy only exists for the rich. But not everyone knows it. But when everyone does know it, then you have a bad situation. So you want to correct the problems before everyone figures it out. That would be the smart thing to do. Unfortunately, as proven over and over again, our leaders and their masters, the rich, are not smart. They are just greedy and corrupt.

Before we go beating up our friends in the South, I think we should clean up our own puddle of nastiness first.

Lets start with the Orange County DA office.

In another post, I will write up what I think I know about the LAPD and the jail that they run.   But that will be extra credit and later.

Law Enforcement Provides Moral Instruction to the Poor

It does my heart good to see people of our society reach out to the poor and disenfranchised and help them in their misery.   When it is a public servant and they are taking unusual efforts, beyond the call of duty, to help our poor, to instruct them on how to live a better life, then that is truly inspirational, and is worth celebrating.

I know that there is a lot of misunderstanding out there about what our government, both federal and state, do to help the poor.  Many people tell me that the poor routinely use the system to make hundreds of thousands of dollars and drive their Cadillac to the welfare office.  Of course, no one in the world has ever seen these people but they know, they know, that they are out there.

Well, I am not so sure about the Cadillac, but I have personally witnessed the efforts our government makes and how the poor are helped with my own eyes.  One notable example happened just the other day.

I was waiting for my train to LA near the transit center in Oceanside California.   Oceanside is a beach town north of San Diego and famous for its location next to Camp Pendleton, the US Marine Corps Base. Oceanside is like most of N. San Diego County, it is very clean, very presentable, and very safe.  This is not a seedy transit area, and it is safe both day and night.

But there are homeless people everywhere in America, even Oceanside.

So while waiting for my train I came across a homeless person, a woman who was very old, very frail and very poor.   She looked like everyone's grandmother when she gets on in age.   She ought to be home with her cat, her television, knitting, and talking to a grandchild.  But this one was poor, she clearly had no place to live, no clean clothes, just rags, and a shopping cart.

She was being attended to by a pleasant, young man of perhaps 30 years of age, who was a member of the local police forces. He was seeing to it that this woman got the care she needed. Now what care might she need?  How about a place to sleep, some clean clothes, a shower and a hot meal?

No!   That is not what she needs, not at all.  What she needs to understand is that her circumstances in life, the tragedies and failures that have led her to being destitute, starving and desperate, were her fault because she lacked moral values.

The police officer was haranguing this poor miserable person, yelling at her, telling her what a bad person she was.  Because she was a thief!  She must have stolen that shopping cart to push her rags around in, she was a bad person!  Morally reprehensible!

He was not physically beating her up, but he was surely verbally beating her up, and for good reason. More than anything else in America, we hold private property to be sacred.  If anyone could just choose to take a shopping cart then pretty soon people would be stealing Porsche's and God only knows where it would go, but our society would collapse.

For those of you who care about these details, the homeless woman was white and the peace officer a nice looking, but very loud,  black man in uniform.  I mention this because it is the opposite of some of my fellow American's preconceptions about race in our society.

I was happy to see this desperate and frail woman was getting all the help that our society provides.  Forget about food, shelter, and that sort of thing.  If she wants to eat, she can grab old rotting food out of a garbage dumpster for all our government cares. What she needed right then was a lecture by a figure of authority who could throw her in jail, a large well-fed man with a gun and a stick, telling her that she was morally depraved.

Thats the kind of compassion and care that the poor and the homeless receive in this country in 2015.  It just makes me feel good about America when I see this sort of thing.

270 Million People and the History of Religion in Los Angeles

[Apparently there may be 80 million Methodists worldwide, but about 10 million in the USA.  See other thoughts at the end of the post].

The point of this essay is not to run down Los Angeles, or call Los Angeles or the people who live here bad people.  But it is to support the thesis that Los Angeles is a different place, different from what people who have not lived here think it is.  And also that LA may very well be different from what the people who do live here think it is because they just do not notice.

Now, it is true that this particular issue, indifference to history, annoys me a lot.  But that is just me and if I dont like it I should not live here.  Which is correct, I should not live here.

There is also a potential perceptual error in this post.  I assume that because I did not know something, that no one did, and in fact I have asked around, and no one I have talked to seems to have known this story.  But maybe everyone else does, and I am just wrong.   Lets see what you think when I finally get around to telling the story at the end.

But before we begin, why should we care about history?

History is how we know what happened in the past, good things, bad things, great things and small things. It allows us to memorialize places and events in a way that can be inspirational to all our people.  But LA is not at all interested or sentimental about its history.  You can live here all your life and not realize how much of the history of aerospace, or the history of contemporary architecture, or the history of broadcasting,  to name just three fields, happened in this town.

I, on the other hand, am very sentimental. I think that there should be signs around the city to indicate points of interest.   For example, I think there should be signs where James Dean crashed his Porsche, where Jim Morrison lived when attending UCLA Film School, where Tom Mix had his log cabin, where Harry Houdini had his mansion and where Howard Hughes crashed his jet. If it were up to me, that is what I would do.

But LA would have none of that. Their eyes are always on the horizon, looking to the future, not the past. They care about what is happening now. What important landmark can they destroy now to build a new mini-mall? What innocent can they exploit today? Who can they steal from now, not who did they steal from back then. The citizens of our fair city of the angels have priorities and keep their eyes firmly on their goals.

This particular story is about the history of religion in Los Angeles, and no, I am not talking about hippies or the love generation or Transcendental Meditation.  This is about the creation of a new denomination of Christianity that has done very well for itself over the last century.

Most people believe that religion is something that was started long ago, and that is of course somewhat true. This country is primarily a Christian country of one type or another and obviously Christianity started roughly 2,000 years ago. Most of the notable religions around the world started over 1,000 years ago, but there are some exceptions. There are some aspects of modern Hinduism that are more recent, also the same with certain sects of Buddhism. Marxism is certainly a religion and that is much more recent. Shinto is very ancient in certain ways, but it has also been reinvented and reinterpreted much more recently as well.

And of course, the history of this nation and its religion is very much tied into the history of Great Britain from 400 years ago, in particular, the history of the Protestant Reformation. New England was founded by people who were radical Calvinists, Virginia by the children of the Anglican gentry. The descendants of the Virginians' became what we call Episcopalians when the American Revolution happened. And of course there are various other denominations, Presbyterians, (ana) Baptists and so forth. The Methodists came into existence before and during the American Revolution, and John Wesley came to America to speak about his ideas at the invitation of the people of Savannah, Georgia. You can not be in Savannah for longer than about fifteen minutes before they proudly tell you about this.

Some of the history of religion in this country is not so pretty. Most people know of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (e.g. the Mormons) and know that it was founded by Joseph Smith. What most Americans do not seem to know is that Mr. Smith was murdered in Illinois while in jail on a trumped up charge and his murder was sanctioned by the government. No due process of course. No one was punished for his murder although they knew who did it. Another proud moment in American history swept under the rug.

So now, I am going to propose a metric to indicate whether a religion, or denomination, is important. There are about 15 million members of the Church of LDS and about 10 million Methodists in this country (said to be 80 million worldwide) as counted by the churches themselves (and thus are taken to be approximate).

So I hope you will agree with me that a denomination of Christianity that has about 270 million members and which is arguably the fastest growing denomination of Christianity is worthy of notice. And perhaps you would be as surprised as I was to learn that this denomination(s) was founded here, in downtown LA, a little over a century ago in 1906.

The story, somewhat simplified, goes like this.

In the year of 1906 a preacher from Texas was invited to come to Los Angeles and preach to a congregation in downtown LA for a month. He was a poor man, and lived at the home of a member of this congregation as a guest while he did so. The congregation decided that they did not like what he had to say for various reasons so they asked him to stop coming around, so he did. But he continued to live as a guest at that address on N. Bonnie Brae Street and somewhere around April 9, 1906, he started preaching out of the house to the people of the neighborhood and the people who came around to listen. The word got around and more and more people dropped by to hear what he had to say. After a while, they rented a space upstairs nearby on Azuza Street and he continued preaching from there.

The house on N. Bonnie Brae Street

The prayer meetings were exciting and eventful, supposedly.  The true religion was in the air for those people and the word spread.   People of all races and from all over the country came to hear William Seymore and his associates speak.  It became a phenomenon which lasted about four years and is now called the Azuza Street Revival.

The space on Azuza Street

I have of course oversimplified this story. There is more back story and many more people involved as the movement grew and evolved, as you would expect from a movement that in a century has hundreds of millions of members all around the world. But it is the case that the Pentecostal movement is really that large today and is the fastest growing Christian denomination in the world. And it started here, in that poor neighborhood of Los Angeles, that day in 1906 when William Seymore started preaching out of that house on N. Bonnie Brae Street.

Wm Seymore and his wife, Jennie

Now, I will be first to admit that I do not understand the Pentecostal movement. Speaking in Tongues seems off the wall to me, but that is fine.  There are lots of strange things in religion, and also strange things in our society, and I am not going to make judgments.

How is it possible that a major religious movement could start in the city of Los Angeles and yet no one here seems to know about it?   Is it because this movement was started by a poor black man and had beliefs outside that of the religious orthodoxy?  Is it because there is no particular way to cash in on the story and make money?  Perhaps.  I really don't know. I do know that the LA Times wrote nasty articles about the movement back in the day and the LA Times has always been the voice of the people who run Los Angeles.

But I also know that a denomination of 270 million people is worthy of notice and if it started in my city I would want to know about it.

So again, remember, I am not saying LA is bad.  Just that LA really is indifferent to history of any type, and certainly does not care about its own history.   Seriously, does not care.

I think its a little weird, ok?

[Further reading has suggested other explanations for the apparent neglect.   Although all the Pentecostal organizations and independent churches do, apparently, trace their origins to the Azuza Street Revival and William Seymore, these organizations and churches are not at all united and have various differences between them.  Of course that is true in many different denominations in Christianity and all other religions I am aware of.  But it would help to explain why there is not one important voice calling for recognition and acknowledgement in Los Angeles.  Furthermore, I was not aware of the extent of the hostility between the more established Christian churches and Pentecostalism.   Only recently has Pentecostalism been acknowledged or partially acknowledged as a legitimate part of Christianity.  Whether I have that right or not, the extent of the outsider status of these Church(es) could also help to explain the anonymity in this, its home city.]

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Mormon Statistics

http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-stats

Methodist Statistics

https://www.drew.edu/library/methodist/faq#m1

The Churches of Richmond Virginia

http://www.churchesofvirginia.org/

Pentecostalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentecostalism

Azuza Street Revival

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azusa_Street_Revival

The Miracle of Light Rail to Santa Monica and Other Transit News

Watching a city build a transit system is like watching the grass grow. Not much seems to be happening on any given day but things are happening nevertheless. In the case of Los Angeles, we have a decades long process which is distinguished by world class obstructionism, stupidity, failure, self-destructive behavior and progress.

For those of you just joining us, Los Angeles has been slowly building a light rail system to various communities in the greater Los Angeles area and much more slowly and expensively building an underground heavy rail system, e.g. a subway.  The latter, the so-called Red and Purple lines, have been notable for their dysfunctional politics at the local and national level.

But its no big deal. I mean, its not really important. Why should it be important?   Los Angeles claims its a major city, but every street has potholes, except in Beverly Hills, of course. The traffic, as predicted, collapsed into a puddle of congealed shit two decades ago, and the smog caused by the automobile, the Port of Los Angeles, and the refineries results in an air quality which damages the life of everyone who lives here.

But slowly but surely things are starting to improve, and remarkably we are about to achieve a transit milestone I did not believe I would ever see. The light rail from downtown, through USC, and ending in Culver City is in the final stages of being extended to 6 th Street in Santa Monica. This extension is not sometime in the far distant future (see below) but is actually nearing completion and will be in test within 12 months.

Now 12 months is a reasonable time frame.

Expo Line extension being built out to Santa Monica

Furthermore, another extension to the Expo line will turn left at Crenshaw, pass through some of the worst parts of town, but then arrive at a new LAX combined transit center (i.e. where the shuttle buses meet the train and the rental cars).  And this is scheduled for completion in four years or about 2019.

Now four years is a little longer than we might like, but is still in the foreseeable future. And at that point we will have a light rail system that serves downtown, Pasadena, Long Beach, USC, Culver City, Santa Monica, the airport and several other communities.

But lets give credit where credit is due.  I am proud to say that all through this, citizens of Santa Monica have done everything in their power to destroy the extension of the transit system. True to their values. Pure and unspoiled.   They will fight a transit system to their last day.   Yes, they are that .... oh I don't know..... how about selfish and fucked up?

It is 2015 already.  We are 15 years into the new century.  Traffic collapsed in Los Angeles, repeat that word, collapsed, over 20 years ago.  As we all knew it would.   That means the city became unlivable, not that the city was becoming unlivable.  No.  20 years ago (or so) it became unlivable.  To oppose something as simple as light rail to Santa Monica for any reason other than something really serious, such as it destroyed an important historical monument, for example, is more than merely weird, it is insane.  Light rail could only help.  Opposing it is not just a sortof bad idea, it is nutty-boy crazy. 

So much for the positive news, now lets talk about the weird expensive heavy rail system. It stops right where it ought to stop, naturally, and sensibly at Wilshire and Western. Oh. Yes, I suppose that is a stupid place for it to stop, but hey, that was only 20 years ago. They plan to extend it all the way down to La Cienega and Wilshire!  And they will have that done in a mere 8 years, or 2023.

I can barely catch my breathe!   Those animals!  So speedy!   And then to Century City and finally all the way to Westwood in a mere 20 years or roughly 2035.

Planned Westside Extensions to the Transit System

If heavy rail is so expensive and slow, maybe they should put in light rail in the interim?  It would be no trouble installing light rail on Wilshire Blvd because you could just shut down the street while you were building it.  I mean why not?   The traffic is already fucked.

This should all have been started in 1980 and completed by 2005, a mere 25 years.  But not Los Angeles, no.   No one would describe the people and government of Los Angeles as far sighted and progressive.

In case you wondered who was paying for this, it is not the people of Los Angeles.  As far as I can tell, it is the Federal government, at least for the Purple Line extension.

Still, it is amazing that a working system from downtown to Santa Monica is nearly there .... that in and of itself is a miracle.

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Exposition Transit Corridor, Phase 2 to Santa Monica

http://www.metro.net/projects/expo-santa-monica/

Metro Breaks Ground on Purple Line Subway Extension
http://la.streetsblog.org/2014/11/07/metro-breaks-ground-on-purple-line-subway-extension/

North County Transit and the Kindness of Strangers

A few nights ago, I came back from Los Angeles by train to Oceanside and discovered that I had left my car keys somewhere else. It was 8:30 at night and I was roughly 20 miles or $90.00 by taxi to get home.

It turns out that I got home by spending $6.00 on local transit and $10.00 for the final 3 miles. It took a few hours, but was otherwise pleasant and educational. But it would not have happened without the help of many of the other people on the poor trail home.

The North San Diego County Transit Authority (NCTA) runs all the buses and trains in the North County. Believe it or else, there is a light rail system that connects Oceanside (pop 180K) to Escondido (150K). How is it possible that these two communities are connected by train when in Los Angeles they can not connect Santa Monica to Los Angeles? Well I am here to tell you that they act that way down here out of fear, fear that they will turn out to be Los Angeles, that hunk of vile stinking shit, if they are not careful.

But even a train does not do people much good if it is not run and the fact is that all good white people in North County are home in bed by 8 PM in order to be able to get up at 5 AM when the rooster crows and they have to start plowing the back forty. And except for Friday night when they run it late for their teenagers, the last train east is at 8:33 PM.

So here I come wandering up at about 8:40 PM and all I see is an empty train station and one black guy hunched over his bike. So I say to him, I think we missed the last train. He looks at me. I say, I think we missed the last train. He says, where you going. I say Escondido. He says so am I. We have to take the 302/303 and then connect to the 305, he says. It takes about two hours.

Now I had been living in this here part of the world for a few years now and I can tell you that I had never been able to figure out the buses. I had not tried all that hard, it is true, but I had tried a few times to figure it out and I could not make heads or tails out of it.

But with some discussion with my new friend and his bicycle these are the things that I have learned which I write here so that the knowledge may not be lost. And to encourage others to use the system when it fits their lifestyle or circumstances.

1. Although the train stops about 8:30 PM, major segments of the bus system continues until about 11 PM or so on weekdays. After that, I think you are either walking, taking your bike, or staying over in a local motel or hotel lobby.

2. All the buses that I saw were new, clean, did not seem to be pumping out diesel or other shit, and were driven by nice people who spoke English, whatever their first language may have been.

3. Every bus I saw that night had room for two bicycles on a rack in the front. I do not know what would happen if a third bicyclist showed up, but that did not happen.

4. It is not self-explanatory, but once you know, you realize that the 302 bus goes from Oceanside to Vista. And that the 305 goes from Escondido to Vista and, although it does not say so, back again. And furthermore, that the 305 arrives at Vista a few minutes after the bus from Oceanside arrives at Vista.

5. Now, armed with that knowledge, and with the knowledge that the buses of the NCTA actually run on time, at most a minute or two late, you can take two buses and arrive at Escondio transit center.

6. But even better than that, I noticed that the bus to Escondido also stopped at Nordahl & Mission, which is several miles closer to my house.

7. Now I have to admit that the 302 in particular seemed to go in circles and that not everything was as speedy as it might be. It took about an hour to go the 7 miles from Oceanside to Vista but it took about 30 minutes to go the 12 or so miles from Vista to Escondido.

8. On top of that was a very nice, young, hip security guard at the Vista station who was extremely helpful.

9. I was also impressed that everyone was looking out for my interests, moneywise. Unlike my experience in Escondido where you are expected to pay like you were living in Manhattan or Beverly Hills, the people of the NCTA and their passengers made no such assumption, and worried whether I would have the 2 * $1.75 fare to get home.

Then as a footnote to all this, when I arrived at Nordahl & Mission expecting to have to walk the 2 plus miles home, I ran into a taxi cab, which never happens, and he took me home for $10 including one stop at the local mini-mall.

So there you have it.  It is not speedy, and the routes seem to be quirky as hell, but it does get you there and the people are very friendly.  Be prepared to walk the last mile or two, of course.

I really have to get over my “I hate buses” thing which I developed living in LA where the buses are dirty, slow, unfriendly and made me sick from the exhaust fumes.

Armed with my spare set of car keys, I am now setting off to walk to the train and see if my car is still there in Oceanside.

The Case of Daniel Chong: DEA and DOJ Work Together

It is often said that US Government Agencies can not work together well.  Here we have a case where two agencies, the Dept of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is part of the DOJ by the way, worked very well together in order to hide an unlawful arrest, torture and attempted murder through negligence by the DEA.

www.cryptome.org has published on their website a FOIA response in the matter of Daniel Chong. Mr Chong, a student at UCSD, was falsely arrested by the DEA, thrown in prison, told he would be released, and then held without food or water, in handcuffs, for the next five days where he was discovered by accident in a holding cell, unconscious and near death, and rushed to a local intensive care unit. Someone, we do not know who, called various Department of Justice (DOJ) hotlines describing the situation and informing the DOJ of the situation.

Mr Chong did survive. Several investigations were held, he was given a chunk of cash, and the DEA and the DOJ attempted to suppress the matter. No one from the DEA was in the least bit reprimanded, nor dismissed, and the Southern California Attorney General office declined to prosecute for “lack of evidence”.

You may read the FOIA document at

http://cryptome.org/2015/01/DOJ-OIG-DEA-DanielChong_2012-2013.pdf

Here are some obvious questions after reading the report.

1. Why are the names of the DEA Special Agents blacked out?

An innocent citizen was falsely imprisoned tortured by starvation to within an inch of his life and nearly died. Why do we, as American citizens, not have the right to know which of our public servants perpetrated these apparent crimes?

2. For what reason have the people involved not been dismissed from government service?

At the very least we can say they were grossly incompetent and criminally negligent.

3. Why have criminal proceedings not being brought against these people?

The statement of “lack of evidence” is not the least bit credible. From the description of this case, there would seem to be ample evidence of criminal negligence if not malicious intent.

4. How do we know that others have not been tortured by the DEA and possibly murdered. What assurance can you give us that this is a one time anomaly?

Since by all appearances the DEA and the DOJ are covering these crimes up, it gives me no confidence that it has not happened before and is likely to happen again.

If the US Government wants to be given the benefit of the doubt regarding matters that an informed citizenry can not truly know about, such as the NSA matter, then it is all the more important for them to come clean on matters that we certainly have the right to know about.   Very clearly gross incompetence led to the torture and near murder of a citizen and the Attorney General's office does NOTHING?  

Wake up, DOJ.  Its time to do your job and apply a little justice to the matter.  Do it.  Do it now. Or do not be surprised when in the future people do not believe a word you say and assume that you are just lying.

It is nice to discover that DOJ and DEA can work together so amicably in order to repress justice showing once again that there is often a silver lining if you look for one.

Comment from Dave Moon about Tomorrowland

I was delignted that Dave Moon, formerly of the MIT AI Lab and Symbolics, commented on my Disneyland / Tomorrowland post.

He wrote: 

____________________________________

    Dave Moon December 26, 2014 at 11:37 AM

    
    I am shocked, shocked, to learn that Disneyland has been commercialized!

    You will perhaps be pleased to know that in Disneyland's clone sister in Florida, as of a year and a half ago, 
    the People Mover had been refurbished and was back in operation.

    The Carousel of Progress is still in operation there and pretty well corresponds to my memory of it from the New 
    York Worlds Fair in 1964. Presumably it has been refurbished too, but its essence is unchanged. If you haven't 
    read Cory Doctorow's novella The Great Big Beautiful Tomrrow, you should.

    The train people are cool in Florida, too.

    --Dave Moon

____________________________________

Dave

Its great to hear from you. Its been a long time. You may not remember this but I used to lurk on one of the ITS systems at MIT and used to see you logged on and apparently active at all hours of the day and night. This would have been about 1974 and I was at the time “mike@ucsb-mod75”

I am delighted to hear that the Carousel of Progress is still in Disneyworld. I was under the mistaken impression that it was not there but that GE Horizons in EPCOT had replaced it. Well apparently the Carousel is still there but its “sequel”, Horizons, is gone. Also good to know about the Peoplemover.

But even if those were recreated at Tomorrowland it would still not solve the “vision” problem that I am talking about. Both of those two attractions are from the 1967 or so vision which benefited in no small part from the triumph of the 1964 World's Fair. I believe that the 1964 World's Fair was the apogee of American civilization, when we had hope for the future, economic strength and a great sense of design. We might go so far as to say that the 64 World's Fair was the REAL Tomorrowland for our nation, and the others were pleasant but pale reflections.

The problem today is not merely to clean up the decayed infrastructure, or to create some new cool attractions, both of which I am sure Imagineering can do just fine. The problem is to create a vision of the future, a vision that we can believe in. That feeling, that vision, that gestalt is not there now and not even the Carousel of Progress or a roomful of robotic presidents can bring it back.

Do we really believe that there is a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day? I don't think so.

Hope all is well, tell me how you are.

        Sincerely,

             MW

Report on the Overland Train Route to Disneyland

In Southern California, we take any efforts to build a mass transit system personally. How dare the swinish scum-sucking politicians use our tax money to build a system that does not use the holy automobile! The most pure are the politicians of Los Angeles who will sink to any level to obstruct or destroy anything in the public interest such as mass transit.

But the city of Anaheim is not at one with the body of Christ in Commerce for they are failing to obstruct mass transit. These do-gooding, tree-hugging, business hating lefty swine think that they can build infrastructure for the public good. I laugh at their pathetic efforts here in Southern California. Don't they know that the Republicans will rise up and destroy them?

Nevertheless I am here to testify that I have personally taken the train to Disneyland from Oceanside and it worked very well. Furthermore, Anaheim not only makes this convenient, they have built a whole new transit center / train station / bus station / etc. to support the activity. In other words, they appear to want people to use mass transit. Crazy, huh?

Anaheim Station from a distance

Interior of Anaheim Station

The ticket to/from Anaheim from Ocanside is roughly $20 each way by Amtrak, and perhaps 1/2 that by Metrolink. The trains via Amtrak run about every two hours. I would think that the main application here would be to/from LA and I do not know what it costs, but I can tell you that it takes roughly 40 minutes by train to get from Union Station to Anaheim station.

Once in Anaheim, you have the option of using some sort of bus system to get you to Disneyland, but I opted for using the taxi cabs that were provided in a taxi stand right outside the station. How amazing and unique, what a concept, a taxi stand. There are no taxi stands outside stations in LA other than Union station. The taxi fare is about $15.00 each way, and it takes about 10 minutes.

One thing to keep in mind is that the taxi stand at Disneyland is convenient, but the whole transit situation outside Disneyland at 10:00 PM or so is so confusing that you might want to ask directions rather than just trying to make your way back by memory as I did.

I also tested whether one could see an evening show of some sort, we saw Fantasmic or something like that, and still make it to the final train Southbound from Amtrak which arrives at Anaheim about 10:50 PM. If you do not make that train, then you are stuck overnight or must have some other plan. Even though I decided to stay overnight at a local hotel, I did verify that I could easily make the train after the show. One must not dawdle however, one must push on and get to your train as there is quite a delay walking out of the park with everyone else.

Not only did the transit work very well, but I decided to reduce stress by staying overnight, and I was able to get a very reasonable hotel room at a local Motel 6 at 100 Disney Way, conveniently located, and reasonably priced at $100/night. A short bus or cab ride from Disneyland, one could probably even walk it if one were ambitious.

The new Anaheim station opened (a soft open) the day I returned to Oceanside, and it looks rather Saudi Arabian, which is to say large and futuristic. It seemed very nice to me as I ran though it trying to make my train.

In short, it is completely possible to use the train to go to/from Disneyland from LA or San Diego. It is convenient and probably not all that more expensive than driving and parking.

It's All So Easy When You Have Money

Reading the biography of George Orwell (aka Eric Blair) last night was very refreshing. The number of times he basically ran out of money, the number of times his relatives found him a job or an apartment, or he lived with his relatives while being rejected by publishers for being too left or not left enough, was morale building.

But more morale building than that was the realization this morning that I had no water, that indeed I had forgotten once again to pay my water bill, and that here in Hell, or Rincon del Diablo, the Devil's Place, not paying your bill is quite a sin. Yes, even in Hell you have to pay your bills.

Check out Orwell's military moustache from his time in India.  This is back when he was employed.

But this time, there was no concern because I had the one answer for all problems in America, in Hell and probably everywhere else. Do to my mysterious client, who may even read this blog, I had the silver bullet, the sine qua non, upon which our entire civilization is based. I had the money to get my water turned back on without pleading, or whining, or threatening.

When you have money, its all so easy. You call them up, talk to a pleasant human being (not an automated system), pay your bill online, they receive it at once, and schedule the technician for late morning or early afternoon.

I understand now, its all so clear. In America you just need money, and the more the better. Why had I not known this before?

Remembering the Ancient Celebration of the 4th of July in Santa Monica

How should Americans celebrate the Fourth of July? Should it be in comfortable, respectable, middle-class suburbs with tepid, but safe, fireworks shows? Or should it be an exuberant recreation of that famous artillery barrage from long ago when the enemy cannon fire illuminated the battlefield with explosions at night and revealed to all sides that we stood defiant? Should it be boring, safe, sane, and white, with only people like us participating, or should it be filled with immigrants of every type who have come to this country to try to have a better life in this uncaring and corrupt world?

Santa Monica, a notorious “beach city” as Raymond Chandler related in his various works of fiction [My friend Nick reminds me that it was called "Bay City" in the Chandler novels], and the City of Los Angeles participated for many years in what they planned to be a respectable Fourth of July show.  To their amazement, and with absolutely no intention or planning, the celebration took on a life of its own, and became a day at the beach for hundreds of thousands of people from all over the city, of all colors and financial means.  Although they could barely speak English, if they could speak English at all, they somehow found their way from East LA, South LA, the east and west ends of the valley, Pomona, Compton, and even Watts to celebrate America's birthday.   I suspect that this tradition built up over decades until when I witnessed it, in the late 1970s, it had become a phenomenal street festival.   The estimates for the number of people who attended each year are fairly mind-boggling, but lets just say that many hundreds of thousands would be an estimate on the low end.   Kids came with their friends, or parents brought their children, to spend the day at the beach and then, when darkness fell, to set off, ignite, explode, and hurl through the air vast numbers of legal but mostly illegal fireworks.

A picture of the Santa Monica Pier with lots of people.

Packed nearly shoulder to shoulder on the Promenade in the darkness, barefooted and in shorts, an observer would hear languages and laughter in all the world's languages as he or she tried to navigate the masses of apparently very happy people who threw exploding and illegal M80s and cherry bombs, Picolo Petes and roman candles at and around each other. One friend of mine from the RAND Corporation described it as similar to being in Vietnam in which one moved in darkness and smoke while the native populations jabbered in languages you did not understand while throwing or firing munitions in all directions in some sort of wild frenzy.  The smell, not of napalm, but of black snakes and expended roman candles filled the air. Sparklers were lit, waved around, and thrown at random into the air or through the crowd.  Broken glass and the expended munitions, used sparklers and any other type of portable, hand held, fireworks and some firearms littered the beach and yet barefoot participants of all ages seemed to navigate the broken glass and expended sparkler field without concern or apparent harm.

At 9 PM the main fireworks show was detonated from the Santa Monica pier and presented the usual community fireworks show as one might see in many places in this country, with the added value of having a nice Pacific Ocean to reflect off of when, that is, the evil Santa Monica fog did not obscure everything which it usually did about half the time.  When that was over, the crowd gradually dispersed, many of them having been there all day, and being out of ammunition, went to their homes in every part of the city, somehow.

This is the new-style Santa Monica Pier.  The pier in the 1970s was much more tacky and authentic.

The next day the City of Santa Monica would awaken to the unenviable task of trying to clean the beach of massive amounts of broken glass, unbroken glass, sparklers, expended cartridges and generic trash of all possible types.   Recall that when walking barefoot on the beach, a former sparkler resembles nothing so much as a nearly invisible spike of dirty metal ready to puncture the unwary foot.  It would take all the next day and often the day after that to clean the sand and beach of dangerous, sharp objects.

Every year would come reports of wounds, burns, broken bones and unhappy and damaged children of all ages, some of whom had been actively hurling fireworks at each other at the time, and some of whom were just hanging with the family and became collateral damage.   Of course, every year, there was a call for someone to arrange a Fourth of July celebration that did not have so many injuries involved.

Finally the Cities of Los Angeles and Santa Monica decided to put a stop to this very unhealthy but entertaining situation and made fireworks of any type illegal on the beach.  They encouraged people to attend fireworks shows in their own neighborhoods and told everyone that if they were found with fireworks on their person that they would go to jail.

Some of us, more conspiracy minded, wondered if they woke up to the realization that they had created the potential for a serious civil disturbance.  Lets say on a very hot Fourth of July some Latino got hassled by the incredibly racist and violent LAPD and did not fall to his knees in abject submission as all minority groups are supposed to do.  The LAPD would naturally beat the miscreant into bloody unconsciousness which is their standard procedure in such circumstances (see, for example, Rodney King).    And suddenly you might have a riot on your hands with the minority groups already in the wealthy parts of the city and armed with M80s and other minor explosives.

But probably those who mismanage LA are actually not smart enough to come up with a reason like that, and simply wanted to lower their costs and minimize the injuries to try and prevent the otherwise inevitable lawsuit.

I am glad that I was able to observe this celebration on several years running and regret that it no longer exists in spite of the undeniable fact that it was insanely dangerous and out of control.  It was, in retrospect, a lot of fun for everyone involved.

_______________________________________

Wikipedia Page on M80s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-80_(explosive)

Kate Mantillini Memorabilia

Many readers may wonder why anyone would care that Kate Mantillini's closed suddenly after many years of service.    Kate's became a standard for many of us who had the misfortune of living and working in Los Angeles for the last three decades.   It was close enough to the West Side and to Hollywood to make it possible to meet people there for lunch without driving all day.  It was right next door to the Academy La Peer screening room where the VFX bake off was held and became the traditional meeting place for our VFX clan to meet before or after the screenings. I must have had 100 meetings at Kate's over the years, if not more. There was almost always legal parking on side streets if you knew where to look and if all else failed there was reasonably priced valet parking.  You could tell someone to meet you at Kate Mantillini's later that night and know for certain that it would be open and that you would get a table.

But its gone.

I was able to pass by Kate Mantillini's about two weeks before it was closed and managed to take a few photographs and two (jerky) walkthrough's of the restaurant.  It seems silly, even to me, but I guess I am a sentimental guy.

In chatting with the employees there I learned that Kate's was owned by the family who runs Hamburger Hamlet, and this was, I guess, their more high-end, themed restaurant.

Many of the employees I talked to had been there for years and were then thinking about looking for new jobs in about two weeks when the restaurant closed (about June 15).

If you listen to the dialogue track at the end of the B walkthrough, you will hear me talking to the manager of the restaurant who wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I told him that I had been told that the manager had approved it.... he replied that he was the manager.

Ooops.


I apologize for the jerkiness of the two walkthroughs below.  It was all very ad hoc and spontaneous. I had my cheap digital camera with me and so I just held the camera about chest high, tried to be discreet, and walked purposefully towards the bathrooms thanking everyone I came across.  You can see me in my dissolute and degenerate form reflected in the mirror at the end of take A.   Yes, that is me whistling in the background, trying to be nonchalant.

Kate Mantillini Walkthrough A

Kate Mantillini Walkthrough B

Red Line Madness

Some things mortal man was not meant to understand. 

I had occasion yesterday to test an assumption I had made about the Red Line, that the part of the Red Line that went to North Hollywood was indeed a different spur. After all, Downtown LA to Studio City is basically right over the hill through Hollywood.

No, when you get on the part of the Red Line marked for N. Hollywood, it still goes all the way around the LA basin and then extends your crazy ride a little further from Hollywood to N. Hollywood. That would make a 5 or 10 minute trip a nice 30 or 40 minute trip, underground, at high speed, with very loud screeching as the train tries to make up in time what it has lost in distance.

What you can't really see from this map is that the whole 7th Metro to Hollywood Highland is completely in the other direction from N. Hollywood from downtown LA (e.g. Union Station).   Oh well.

I can tell you I would not want to do that commute every day from N. Hollywood to downtown via the Red Line. That would be incredibly annoying. What are these people thinking?

Its like going between Washington DC and New York via Boston. Or from LA to San Diego via San Francisco.

Crazy man.

I guess it saved them some money or something.

Furthermore, I learned something about light rail vs heavy rail, which is that light rail is infinitely preferable to heavy rail.  Infinitely.  Not only is it less expensive to install and maintain, but it is also, generally speaking, less noisy and above ground, which means that it has better air and much better light.  You can see where you are, and see, for example, the Museum of Science & Industry when you go by USC, etc.   Heavy rail, e.g. the Red Line, is noisy, unpleasant and expensive.  Light rail for me!  

We should be grateful that LA has mass transit at all, and not worry too much about whether or not it was well designed (or not).   I suppose.

The Red Line on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Los_Angeles_Metro)