Don't Have a Heart Attack in Lomita

Just heard a story on the local TV news, and I don't have any information beyond the two minutes, on air report, so take this one with a grain of salt. Lomita, California will be charging $300 for every 911 call from Lomita residents, and if you're driving through town, it will be a hefty $400 charge. My former, next door neighbor's boyfriend used to beat the shit out of her and I had to call 911 a couple of times a month. If L.A. starts to charge for 911 calls, I'll have to think twice about calling the cops. Got to wonder how many people are going to end up dead because the good Samaritans of the world aren't willing to go broke to do the right thing?

The Cult of Apple

Despite the fact that I don't own an I-Phone, I-Pod, I-Pad, or even eye drops, I have a fascination with Apple's marketing. With the always emaciated Steve Jobs, dressed in black, looking more like a monk in the church of Johnny Cash, than a fairly ruthless CEO, as front man, Apple pushes a cult like ad campaign, with Apple's product line positioned as holy objects rather than somewhat useful bits of technology. Apple's latest Zen marketing is an announcement that they've discovered child labor in their Chinese factories and that Apple no longer will have any of their products built by children. Ah, let me see if I understand Apple's core business decision; for years Apple has taken advantage of cheap labor in a country that has a well documented history of allowing children to slave away in factories, making products for western consumers. Apple's wilful ignorance of a business model, so common, that it would be naive to think that any product coming from the People's Republic doesn't have some child labor in the product supply chain allows the always pacific Mr. Jobs to claim morality from former immorality. That is if child labor is to be viewed as wrong.
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I'd turn this post into an attack on Apple but, like most Americans, I have a number of Chinese made products in my home, and as such, I'm as guilty of child exploitation as anyone else, though certainly not on the level of western CEO's, including Steve Jobs. I'd much rather ask the obvious question: Why do so many Americans, including many who self describe themselves as liberals, invoke Tom Friedman and his "world is flat" philosophy and smugly point out that American workers need to start competing in a flat world, and if they aren't willing to do so, it's their own fault if their jobs disappear. What does that mean? Should the United states and the EU, repeal child labor laws? Should we start shooting union organizers? Should we abandon environmental and work safety laws? I have a relative who describes herself as being far to the left who at the same time refers to Tom Friedman as being brilliant. If she is right, and if Tom Friedman is so brilliant, than it's time the west embraces slavery, child exploitation, and massive environmental degradation. I can't imagine any other way in which the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the EU can compete in a truly flat world. Dare I suggest that Tom Friedman might be wrong? Maybe the world isn't flat, and maybe the side that feels comfortable with 10 year old children working in factories, slave labor, and repressive regimes will win because western, democratic societies want cheap I-Pods. Downloads, anyone?

Again and Again

I keep wondering about the stupidity of the average foothill dweller in Los Angeles. Year after year, there are fires, and then if we have a wet winter, the fires are followed by mudslides. In the past couple of weeks, we've seen rain storms, mud, and destroyed homes. And then the people who have lost their homes are interviewed on TV and they assure their fellow Angelenos that, yes, they do intend to rebuild, and that they will not be defeated by this bit of adversity. And then some talking head on the evening news will say, "Aren't they courageous."
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Courageous isn't the word I would use. I'd say stupid. Like it or not, there are places where people should not live. If it was just those who loose their homes that insist on building in fire and flood zones, I wouldn't care overly much. But, we spend millions of dollars defending homes from fire and mudslide and then spend even more millions trying to engineer mountain and canyon sides in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable. It would be far cheaper and far more sensible to just buy these people out and turn the mountain sides into open space. It isn't viable to remove the entire city of Los Angeles as a defense against earth quakes, but it does make sense to buy out a few hundred or even a few thousand homes.

On the Beach

Well, it's happening again. There is a long tradition in California of developers trying to steal public land by blocking access to the general public. The beach may be free for anyone to use, but if builders block a way to sea, for all intent and purpose, that public land becomes private property.
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Today's Los Angeles Times reports a more subtle attempt at a land grab. In order to get building permits and permission from the states coastal commission, developers of a high end, gated community at Orange County's Dana Point, offered up a plan with multiple access points to the beach, as well as an inclined railway to the sea. Seems like the money men were bending over backward to insure that swimmers, and surfers could easily get to the water.
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But, things are not always what they seem. The fly in this particular ointment is an attempt to limit the hours that the public can use the beach. "Ah shucks, it's just a matter of privacy. Isn't it unfair that surfer dudes might loose their way on paths after dark and stumble onto people's lawns?" My guess is that if Headlands Reserve, the developer, is allowed to restrict access to certain hours, as time goes by, those hours will become even more restricted, with flimsier and flimsier excuses given until only the residents of the north strand gated community can get to the ocean. I understand that people who are paying millions of dollars for a home in a gated community might not want someone walking by their kitchen window with a surf board tucked under their arm, but the law has always been that public access to beaches is a right in California. It's not like the home owners didn't know, ahead of time, what came with those great ocean views.
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California has a conservancy, set up by the state, to preserve the Santa Monica Mountains; a conservancy that has been so successful that it's been able to expand its reach to other local mountain ranges. It's time that California had a similar conservancy to preserve ocean beaches, river fronts, and stream banks. It would have been far better if the Dana Point headland had been preserved as open space by such a conservancy. Too, river and stream banks, when developed, have a tendency to prevent public access and free navigation in favor of a property right that, quite often, is nothing more than a de facto land grab. I know that proposing that all ocean front property and river and stream banks should be owned by the state sounds insanely ambitious, but I would remind readers that a sizable percentage of such lands are already preserved in California's many state and federal parks, and forests.

Jackal States

There they were. Roaming the streets of downtown Los Angeles, dressed as Cupids and handing out greetings from the state of Colorado. "Colorado Loves California." Another state trying to make us feel better during our on going budget crisis? Hardly, it was Colorado trying to lure businesses away from California and to Colorado.
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Is this what its' come down to, one state acting like a jackal, trying to enrich itself by driving another into a permanent economic crisis? Sure looks that way. Welcome to the new America. We're not trying to grow native economies anymore. In a country that has endured thirty years of Reaganomics, the only way to survive is to screw the other guy as quickly as possible, because if you don't, he'll do it to you. The social/economic Darwinism envisioned by Ronald Reagan and his cartel conservative supporters has reached it's nadir. There's nothing left but to pick over the rotting corpse of Reagan's America.

Who Dat?

Just thought I'd brag a bit about my correct prediction on the Super Bowl. (See my post of 1/24/10) I didn't get the score right, but I did pick the Saints over the Baltimore Colts.
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Oops, I mean the Indianapolis Colts. It looks like, some time in the next couple of years, two NFL teams will be moving to Los Angeles, and since the Colts are playing in an old stadium, in a small market, it's not impossible that this years also ran could be here in L.A. I've got to admit that I have mixed feelings about the possibility of Indianapolis, Buffalo, Jacksonville, Minnesota, or St. Louis moving to southern California. As an Angeleno I'd love to have my own team to root for. (I grew up in a small town fifty miles from Pittsburgh, so I bleed Steeler black and gold. The Steelers will ALWAYS be my first love.) But, in the United States, pro sports are heavily subsidized by government. We develop the players in public schools, we build the infrastructure around stadiums, and often we build the stadiums as well. As long as football is subsidized by our tax dollars, I don't think that team owners should be allowed to play musical stadiums. If owners want to argue the free enterprise card, they should go off the public teat.

It Never Fails

It never fails. Every year the fires come to the mountains of Los Angeles, and when the winter rains come, the denuded hillsides become rivers of mud, sliding down to the houses that we have foolishly allowed to be built in areas prone to fire and mudslide. What is new this year, is that some of the people who have lost homes are demanding to be reimbursed by the federal government because it's federal mud.
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Wow. Not too long ago I had a conversation with a young, twenty something, lady who cursed the greed and short sightedness of the baby boom generation. It was her theory that boomers were so incapable of denying themselves anything they wanted, that they had pretty much destroyed the world around them. As a boomer myself, my first inclination was to defend myself, or at the very least point to that most self mythologizing generation in American history, the sixties generation. But, I gave her complaints some thought, and then reluctantly agreed with her. For all our yammering about how much the boomer generation changed the world, we are, as a group, unable to accept that we might have been more destructive than not.
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So what does this have to do with the natural cycle of fire and avalanche in southern California? It's pretty simple really. The development of the mountains and canyons ramped up to unprecedented levels in the past 40 years so that boomers could live in pretty places with nice views. No thought was given to the environmental damage so long as some artificial sense of living with nature could be indulged. No, the federal government doesn't have a responsibility to recompense people because they made very bad decisions on where they wanted to live. We already spend disproportionate sums of the public treasury to defend homes from the inevitable wild fires and to put up barriers in a futile attempt to save home owners from mud slides. And we should. Once the zoning boards give permission to build in dangerous, though beautiful places, those homes become a joint responsibility for us all. My point is that our own stupidity is at the heart of these problems. An unwillingness to think beyond our own immediate desires.
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Santa Monica Mountains National Park. See my post of 12/23/09. Tejon Ranch National Park, an idea whose time has come.