The Black Plague of the 1300s, transmitted by infected fleas attached to vermin, claimed millions of lives across Europe, erasing whole villages and towns. Until that time, organized municipal garbage collection didn’t exist. (Either did plumbing or flush toilets.) England, according to the history books, was the first nation to devote dedicated crews to picking...
A couple of years ago, my wife was robbed at gunpoint in our driveway. It was a weekday evening; it was dark. Very dark. For reasons no one in City government has ever explained to me and my neighbors, for as long as I’ve lived here (27 years) our residential street is the only one...
The persistent showers pelting southern California this past week served as poetic foreshadowing for the hard rain that’s about to fall on some of the well-dressed crooks who control Los Angeles. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s absurd delusion that he’s somehow “presidential” is about to end. Charlatans posing as “community leaders” soon will be exposed. Once powerful...
Before he takes his war chest of political “donations” to the national arena, where his handlers will attempt to re-package him as “presidential,” our bumbling failure of a Mayor, the man who oversees an ongoing humanitarian disaster known as “homelessness in Los Angeles,” seems determined to wreck as many neighborhoods as possible. The Eric Garcetti ethos: If a...
Failing upward. That seems to be the path to political success. You can be a serial fondler, a repeated bankrupter, a fraud — and that won’t disqualify you from positions of power. So long as you’ve got a good story to tell, your failings — both personal and professional — won’t hardly matter. Remember this...
The Coalition to Preserve LA, proponents of last year’s failed Measure S, which would have drastically re-made Los Angeles’s broken City Planning process, are in the weirdly unsatisfying position of being able to say “I told you so.” Nearly everyone familiar with housing development in Los Angeles agrees that the current system is utterly corrupted,...
Let’s say you’ve been given a parking ticket by an overly ambitious City of Los Angeles traffic enforcement officer for occupying a space past the posted 6PM deadline. You check your watch: it’s only 5:57. You take a time-stamped photo of your car and the sign and the street. You schedule an appeal. At the...
Unless you suffer from Crohn’s disease or chronic incontinence, you probably don’t worry about where you’re going to make your next bowel movement. Unless you work in a coal mine or an outlaw asbestos factory, you probably don’t worry about where you’re going to get your next breath of clean air. If, however, you live...
The City of Los Angeles is deeply concerned with Emergency Services response times, and with good reason. One or two minutes can sometimes be the difference between saving lives and arriving too late. For the past couple of years, to measure Fire Department alacrity (or lack thereof), the City has employed a sophisticated data-analysis program...
In the past two years, the City of Los Angeles has paid out more than $75 million to settle lawsuits brought against the municipality. Add in the expense of litigation and the total is more than $113 million. Unsurprisingly, much of that money was paid out to settle hundreds of police misconduct cases — more...
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
The latest poetry collection from prolific author Heather Tosteson, Source Notes: Seventh Decade, is one of those treasured books one finishes and begins to read again. At turns searching and assured, troubled and contented, the poems here range from the deeply personal — including terrible trauma and recovery — to the universally felt. Ostensibly a meditation...
