Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
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The Los County Department of Public Health today begs residents to avoid gathering with people outside their immediate household to watch the Superbowl this weekend. This week, the county surpassed 17,000 deaths from Covid-19 since the beginning of tallies of cases of the disease imported from China. So far, 1.129 million people in the county - over 10 percent - have been confirmed to have contracted the disease. Vaccinations have begun for first responders, health care...
WE Drive-Ins has taken over the parking lot at the old Sears building and is turning it into a drive-in movie theater, dubbing it The Mark. The latest Hollywood movies will be projected nightly via state-of-the-art, high lumen brightness DCI-compliant 2k and 4k studio approved projectors. The proprietors claim these are the same projectors used at your favorite (now probably defunct) indoor movie theater. Sound will be transmitted to the FM receiver of your car radio via a...
January 26 - On Monday, following an announcement by California Governor Gavin Newsom that the state was lifting its Stay Home Order, the LA County Public Health Department also announced an easing of restrictions. The County's directive aligns with the state and allowed the immediate opening of: • Private gatherings outdoors up to 3 households and up to a total of 15 people • Museums, zoos, aquariums outdoor operations at 50% occupancy • Cardrooms outdoor operations at 50% oc...
If you're thinking of going to Dodger Stadium to get yourself or an elderly loved one vaccinated, I can give you the lowdown here, having been there yesterday. Let me begin by saying that all of the workers at the Stadium were invariably kind and polite and eager to help. They were working very hard. Having said that, the operation could use the advice of experts in the field of drive-through - and I'm unclear as to why they haven't done so. Here's the basic lowdown: your...
When the lockdowns hit Southern California, it didn't take wedding industry professional Andrea Cohen long to realize she could turn what seemed like devastation into a new business. The owner of Chuppah Studio, a business that provides custom and rental chuppahs for Jewish weddings, Cohen saw by May of 2020 that the restrictions on gatherings made by state and local officials was not going to end soon since COVID-19 was continuing to move through the population. She reached...
LA County's Department of Public Health announced today the opening of large-scale COVID-19 vaccination sites and introduced a website for making appointments. The vaccine is now available to health care workers, staff and residents of long-term care facilities, and county residents 65 years and older. The actual process of obtaining a vaccine may be more difficult than advertised, however. The website offers multiple pharmacies which then do not allow appointments to be made...
In 1982, California Condors, magnificent birds with a wingspan of over 9 feet, were all but extinct. Only 22 individual birds were left. But since the inception of the California Condor Recovery Program, this number has swelled to over 520 birds. Over half of them are in the wild. The rest contribute their DNA to breeding programs such as the one at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Garden. The 1,720th bird to be recorded in the program was hatched this summer at the LA Zoo, b...
After eleven months of varying stages of lockdown in the State of California and during a botched local delivery of COVID vaccine, a campaign to recall Governor Newsom appears to be gathering steam. Newsom has been the target of recall efforts almost since he took office, but this one appears to have legs. With 1,495,709 valid signatures required, over a million signatures have already been collected. The campaign has until March 17 to reach its goal. "Voters are angry, and...
Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin continued his attack on the city's police union January 12, with an emailed statement claiming the police union alone is standing in the way of the metropolis regaining financial solvency. According to Bonin, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, alone of all employee unions in the city, is refusing to delay taking contracted pay raises. The Los Angeles Police Protective League quickly released their own statement, which saw matters...
State Assemblymember Richard Bloom announced he will run for Los Angeles County Supervisor in 2022. There are five county supervisors, representing roughly 10 million people in Los Angeles county. Incumbents are generally voted back into office but present supervisor Sheila Kuehl has said she will not seek a third term when her service ends at the close of 2022. This gives an opportunity to the progressive Westside Bloom, currently representing District 50 in the State...
The state's Stay Home Order has been extended past the 3-week term originally given at the beginning of December. This is no surprise. Officials warned us when they instituted the additional restrictions on activities that the Stay Home Orders would automatically extend so long as ICU capacity fell or remained below 15% for a region. Los Angeles County currently claims to be at 0.0% capacity in the area's hospital ICUs. By now, California residents are used to officials...
According to the World Health Organization, the purpose of a lockdown should only be "to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted," as stated by Dr. David Nabarro, WHO envoy. Yet California officials have squandered the past three weeks of curfew and Stay Home Orders, mobilizing no more than 3,000 additional possible hospital beds. Meanwhile, they forced 40 million people to curtail their daily lives and made...
Newly installed LA County District Attorney George Gascon was forced to reverse his initial shot at eliminating all sentencing enhancements in charges filed against criminal defendants last week. On Friday, he sent out a public letter claiming he wanted to be responsive to "input" from the community and was therefore making "some adjustments to my initial directives." He ended up agreeing to apply enhancement in charging to cases involving children, the elderly, and for hate c...
On Thursday, December 17, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School Board voted on a plan to support a modified hybrid learning model once Los Angeles County reaches a Tier 2 level regarding COVID-19. Parents and teachers arrayed against each other for the contested decision, with parents wanting an in-person learning experience for students and teachers wanting the safety of virtual classrooms. The School Board's decision to pursue a "Distance Learning Plus" model with students...
Parking will be free at the downtown parking structures 1-6 from December 14 to December 25 in a strangely mixed message from the City of Santa Monica. A press release from Downtown Santa Monica (DTSM) Inc exhorts the public to come on down to the Third Street Promenade and shop. Meanwhile, the city's COVID webpage tells us to "stay home except to go to an essential job or to shop for essential needs." Apparently, shopping at local businesses and keeping them from going...
The state government reversed its ban on outdoor playgrounds on Wednesday, December 9. Playgrounds were one of the sectors closed when the state's Stay Home Order went into effect on the Monday of that week. The Stay Home Order was triggered by the remaining ICU capacity in the Southern California region falling below 15%. No discussion was entertained and no reasons offered for closing playgrounds via the Stay Home Order. Children under the age of 18 are not at high risk of d...
UPDATE: After winning election as the District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles by 53.53%, Gascon has set about doing every single thing he promised in the below article. While 53.53% may sound like a lot, it leaves a possible 4,647,000 people extremely unhappy with his policies. He hardly has a mandate and will soon discover as much. George Gascon, a Havana-born former police officer, resigned his position as San Francisco District Attorney in October, at the same time...
December 9 This week Santa Monica officials got exactly what they wanted when they approved a $76.7 million dollar City Hall annex in 2017 - at a whopping cost of $1,528 per square foot. They won an award. Specifically, they won an award for being so gosh-darn sustainable and environmentally conscientious. The U.S. Green Building Council-Los Angeles awarded Santa Monica's City Hall annex design their Project of the Year award in the Un-Built Category. (Unbuilt? This project...
December 6 - Over the weekend, ICU remaining capacity at hospitals in the Southern California region dipped below 15%, triggering a new set of of closures in various sectors of the community. The new restrictions will take effect Sunday, December 6 at 11:59 pm. Governor Newsom had warned last week that if ICU capacity at hospitals in a designated area, such as Southern California, dropped below 15% remaining capacity, the state's Regional Stay Home Order would kick in. On...
Two defendants face possible life sentences for extorting a transgender woman. On October 4, Javier Trimin-Rodriguez aka Golden, 22, and Margarita Valencia aka Inquieta, 23, extorted the transgender woman and Trimin-Rodriguez stabbed her with a knife. A third defendant, Donoban Fonseca, 24, is also charged in the stabbing. Trimin-Rodriguez and Valencia face additional allegations of committing the crimes in association with a criminal street gang. Trimin-Rodriguez faces...
UPDATE: ICU capacity did drop below the magical 15% over this weekend. The additional restrictions will kick in at midnight on Sunday, December 6. The fear-mongering statements predicted were made by Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health: "we are likely to bear witness to one of the worst healthcare crises our county has seen in our lifetime." See our article https://www.smobserved.com/story/2020/12/06/news/no-more-haircuts-entrance-scree...
A small but noisy protest was held outside of LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl's house in Santa Monica this Tuesday morning. The previous week, on Monday, November 23, Kuehl voted to close all outdoor restaurant dining. A day later Kuehl was observed eating outdoors at Il Forno Trattoria on Ocean Park Boulevard - the last day, according to her own rules, that such activity was permitted. According to an eyewitness account, the Santa Monica Police Department met the 10-15...
About 75 protestors marched up the hilly roads above Dodger Stadium on Sunday to protest outside the home of Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health. Ferrer has been the orchestrator of the various lockdown orders beginning in March. An expert in social justice and health equity, Dr. Ferrer is now referred to on talk radio as "doctor non-doctor" or "not-a-doctor" Ferrer. She makes almost half a million dollars a year in salary and benefits and has no medical...
Two Los Angeles County Supervisors led a failed attempt to reverse the county Department of Public Health's decision to close outdoor dining at area restaurants. Supervisors Kathryn Barger and Janice Hahn co-authored a motion to allow outdoor dining to continue at 50 percent capacity. The motion failed 3-2. The two supervisors' motion followed an announcement on Sunday, November 22, by the county's Public Health Department that they were ordering the closure of all outdoor...
It's been almost two weeks since the City's Planning Department hosted their first webinar about the Housing Element Update - the plan to zone for an additional 8,874 residential units as ordered by the Southern California Association of Governments. Although the questions raised during the webinar have been posted online, none of the promised answers have been given. Every eight years, SCAG distributes among the 191 cities of the region the portion of expected new housing...
