Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 111
December 14, 2023 - California State Senator Scott Wiener tweeted on X today his horror at hearing bystanders shout "Free Palestine" at him in Union Square at a Hanukkah celebration there. "Harassing Jews celebrating a holiday has nothing to do with the war & everything to do with antisemitism," he wrote. One wonders what planet Wiener has been living on. Does he still think those who oppose the Jewish State of Israel separate their feelings about Israel from those about Jews? Jewish...
December 7, 2023 - At a congressional hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday, the presidents of three Ivy League universities declined to admit that calls for genocide against Jews violated their policies against bullying and harassment. The presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all called on the primacy of free speech in a university setting and stated that only when speech was "directed and severe...
October 13, 2023 UPDATE: The UC Santa Cruz Chancellor, Cynthia Larive, sent out a response email to those asking the university to pull out of the anti-Israel conference today in which she simultaneously claimed the university as a whole had taken no action to participate in the conference to redefine anti-Semitism and that she had to allow academic freedom to the departments who are part of the university. She claims to "know" the conference comes at a bad time, and is "truly sorry this...
September 7, 2023 - The Los Angeles County Health Department is telling us they "have been seeing a gradual and consistent rise in COVID-19 transmission" over the past few weeks. This alleged information, unsupported by any reliable data, is accompanied by various recommendations, including a plug for the latest iteration of the Covid vaccine. After three-and-a-half years of recommendations from the health department, headed by a non-doctor, non-epidemiologist - none of which stemmed or in any...
May 3, 2023 - The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, already one of the most progressive in the nation, appears determined to head even further into the depths of Critical Race Theory. An email was sent out to SMMUSD families asking for participation in focus groups in mid-May to "ascertain honest and open perspectives and experiences regarding the current culture as it applies to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) concepts." In no possible version of reality is SMMUSD not currentl...
December 9, 2022 - Former Santa Monica Mayor Sue Himmelrich ended her reign in a manner emblematic of its disdain for the public, and particularly for anyone who disagrees with her. She allowed a crowd to boo a speaker critical of her tenure and only afterward reminded the crowd - while laughing - that they were not to speak or make any kind of noise during a speaker's public comment. The Special Meeting of the City Council was held in order to swear in new councilmembers - two days before the...
December 2, 2022 - The California Secretary of State sent out 50,251 more ballots to alleged voters in Los Angeles County than the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder says there are registered voters. Lavote.gov says there are 5,627,796 registered voters in the county. The Secretary of state at elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov says that 5,678,047 vote-by-mail ballots were sent to the county. Before the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020, citizens had to apply to receive a vote-by-mail ballot. Everyone else ne...
August 19, 2022 - In her most recent media briefing yesterday, Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health, had increasing trouble maintaining the notion that she either understood the nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the result of the "safety precautions" her office ordered to control it or wished the public to understand. Rachel Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control, admitted a year ago, in August of 2021, that vaccines were not providing immunity against Covid-19...
July 7, 2022 For many weeks now, Los Angeles County Health officials have warned that a health order requiring masks at indoor public places will be re-instituted when there are 10 admissions or more of "Covid" patients per 100,000 residents for two weeks in a row. The cutoff is a guideline from the Centers for Disease Control. It is designed to reduce the stress on the hospital system. Two questions require to be answered for one to consider this guideline and its implementation to have the...
May 18, 2022 - At a press conference today, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, who has presided over one of the highest increases in crime in the region, sought to educate the public regarding reducing gun violence. According the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, which has sued Gascon for violating state law, there were 859 people killed in the county during 2021. 687 of these deaths were the result of gun violence. Gascon began his tenure as district attorney by forbidding...
March 24, 2022 - A poll commissioned by the Los Angeles Police Protective League shows a plurality of voters would vote to recall controversial LA County District Attorney George Gascon. The same poll conducted last year showed an opposite result, with strong plurality supporting the district attorney. Over the last year, more voters grew undecided and sentiment against Gascon shifted 18 points. The poll, conducted by New Bridge Strategy, solicited the opinion of 800 "likely" voters throughout...
February 25, 2022 - Today, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health, is graciously allowing Los Angeles County residents to unmask indoors - after showing vaccine verification and provided the business owner takes other precautions. The unvaccinated are not allowed to take off their masks because, as Ferrer said yesterday to the press, the vaccinated "get infected at a lower rate," and thus "it's a safer environment" to unmask when only the vaxxed are gathered together. It...
February 22, 2022 - The Association of Deputy District Attorneys, representing over 800 prosecutors working in the county of Los Angeles, voted today to support the recall of their boss, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon. In a vote with 83.3% participation, the highest level of any previous ADDA election, 97.9% of respondents elected to support his recall. The ADDA had asked Gascon to meet with them and explain why they should not vote to recall him, but he refused the meeting....
February 8, 2022 - Today our alleged district attorney, George Gascon, boasted about a letter his office sent out to Visa, Mastercard and Amex begging them to cease processing payments made to companies that sell "ghost guns." Ghost guns are made from kits of gun parts sold over the Internet. Lacking serial numbers, they are unregistered and untraceable. "By prohibiting online payments for ghost guns, the credit card agencies can take meaningful steps to improve public safety," Gascon wrote in...
January 27, 2022 - At a media briefing today, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health was repeatedly asked when restrictive measures such as vaccine and mask mandates might be relaxed in the future. In each case, she rationalized the continuation of these measures even as she acknowledged the county has "turned the corner" on the surge of Omicron Covid-19 cases. She focused with tunnel vision on transmission rates, completely ignoring the plummeting number of deaths per new...
January 14, 2022 - At Thursday's media briefing, both LA County Supervisor Holly Mitchell and Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer expressed concern over the health disparities between affluent (i.e. white) and non-afflluent (i.e. minority) communities. The reason for the concern? More affluent people are testing postive for Covid-19 than non-affluent people. "We're currently experiencing racism in health care," Mitchell said in her opening remarks at the briefing. She left it to Barbara...
January 11, 2022 - On Saturday evening, SMPD were able to arrest a female suspect in a vendor altercation incident that occurred in November. The original incident on November 21 involved two female illegal vendors at the base of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. stairs. The female victim told arriving officers that she had been challenged by another female vendor to fight. The victim took out her cell phone to record her antagonist's actions. The challenging female, later identified as Michelle...
January 6, 2022 - As of the end of December, the percent of new Covid cases occurring among the vaccinated population of Los Angeles County was 66.4%, as calculated by the Observer using County Health Department data. This nearly aligned with the vaccinated percentage of the population as a whole at 68.5% at that time. In other words, the vaccinated are becoming infected with Covid-19 at approximately the same rate as everybody else. Given the prevalence of Covid - within the last 7 days a full...
December 28, 2021 - On December 23, Los Angeles County health officials ordered health care workers to obtain booster shots of the Covid vaccine. Citing an uptick in the rate of these highly vaccinated workers contracting Covid-19, the County Department of Public Health stated, "requiring booster doses for all healthcare workers is a key protective step aimed at reducing infections by increasing the numbers of workers with the optimal safety provided by the booster does [sic]." The state goal is...
December 7, 2021 - Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon proudly announced yesterday the charging of a Los Angeles man with the murder of Jacqueline Avant. This particular press release was a vast departure for the "criminal justice reform" DA, whose press releases rarely involve boasts about catching violent criminals. His more recent press releases include information about a restorative justice project, an anti-racism initiative, and moves to reform juvenile three-strikes laws....
December 3, 2021 - Smoke signals from health and political officials point to closings and lockdowns in the coming weeks and months over fear of the new Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that was (unsurprisingly) detected in Los Angeles County on Thursday. Our local Health and Fear Czar, Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health, stated in a press release yesterday that "we have always known there would be more mutations, resulting in the possibility of a more dangerous...
Artist Ed Massey's statue titled "In the Image," of a seven-foot-tall homeless homeless man was knocked down by vandals around November 30, almost exactly three years after the supposedly temporary statue was erected at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and 26th Street. The artwork took the place of a sculpture of a family of mother, father, and children dancing in a fountain, a work that stood for decades in front of the one-time bank building on that corner. Mayor Lou Ellen Camelwealthy...
When the World Health Organization held a press conference regarding the latest variant of concern, Omicron, on November 26, every health department in the country knew they had to issue a response to the most recent panic trigger. Los Angeles County's Department of Public Health was no exception. Like every other official health organization, their reaction is irrational, based on nothing more than the preservation of their reputations and power. "We have uncertainty about the level of vaccine...
November 4, 2021 The West Hollywood City Council voted on Wednesday to pass an ordinance to raise the minimum wage in their municipality to $17.64 per hour. The wage increase would go first to hotel workers, who would start earning the extra money on January 1, 2022. Everyone else would get their increase beginning July 1, 2022. The odd-sounding wage rate matches the minimum wage for hotel workers in the City of Los Angeles for hotels with 150 or more rooms - a rate that Santa Monica also ordain...
Covid-19 was a trailing third in causes of death in the United States in 2020 according to "The Leading Causes of Death in the US for 2020" by Farida Ahmad and Robert Anderson in the medical journal, JAMA Network. With 345,323 deaths attributed to Covid-19, the disease caused only a little over half as many deaths as the two top killers: cancer with 598,932 deaths and the winner, heart disease, with 690,882 deaths. Yet the public response to Covid, led by public health and government officials...
