Re-Re-Branding South Central

Lost in translation: Hip nickname for South L.A. leaves some feeling lonely

Two months ago, Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard C. Parks pitched “SOLA” as a hip-sounding nickname for South Los Angeles. He said other communities had been reinvigorated with “contemporary names.”

But there was just un problema: In Spanish, “sola” means a woman who is alone. Or lonely. A woman wearing a “hip” SOLA shirt might actually appear to be looking for love.

At meetings at Los Angeles City Hall this week, some residents of South L.A. said the SOLA proposal was a sign that Latinos — who are now the majority in once predominantly black neighborhoods — were overlooked.

“It's a slap in the face,” said Mari Mercado, a South L.A. teacher. “It's like, ‘I brand you alone and now I'm leaving you alone.'”

Parks said he hoped to usher South L.A. into a new era where abbreviated neighborhood names exude a cool factor. Downtown Los Angeles, which went from a tired stretch of blight to a booming district filled with art galleries, trendy restaurants and pricey lofts, became DTLA.

As he prepares to step away from the dais at the end of his term, Parks said, politics are getting in the way of approving one of his final measures. Any word, he contends, can get lost in translation.

“If you really search hard, almost any word that you have in English and you translate it into another language could have another meaning,” Parks said. “I think we're still in America and we're speaking English. So that's what we tried to come up with.”

...

In 2003, residents said the Southside, lumped together then as South-Central, had developed a reputation in popular culture as an area notorious for crime, gangs and drugs. They petitioned the City Council to re-christen it South L.A., hoping to remove the stigma. That community discussion did not happen this time around, residents said.

General Jeff Page, who was born and raised in South L.A., said there is community pride attached to a place's name and that residents should be considered when a change is made.

“Whether it's South-Central L.A. or whether its South L.A., we need to be clear exactly what we're doing as a community,” he said. “And it should not be City Hall dictating how communities are defined.”

Oh come on already.  If 'South Los Angeles' is as improved these days as we're to believe, then surely it's time to show that by reclaiming its historic name.  And then, bring on the tourists !

We’re Not All Equal When It Comes to Water

Rich Californians balk at limits: ‘We’re not all equal when it comes to water’

By Rob Kuznia June 13

RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.

People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.

But a moment of truth is at hand for Yuhas and his neighbors, and all of California will be watching: On July 1, for the first time in its 92-year history, Rancho Santa Fe will be subject to water rationing.

Plenty of detail in the piece at the Washington Post, but you get the idea.  The truly scary thing to me is this line: 'If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.'  And by implication, if you can't pay...  Which is a very real concern for the future.  A future in which large business-interests are already looking to privatise water-supplies.

There is no commons in that future, the future that seems inevitable with our economic extremism, and the changing climate that we continue to wish away.  There are only those who have, and those who have not.  And if the have-nots don't have enough to drink, so be it.  If they have to starve, so be it.  If they can't breathe the air anymore, too bad.  Shoulda pulled yerself up by your bootstraps, to become one of the monied elites.

Which reminds me of this recent story:

The multi-billionaire owner of luxury jewellery Cartier has said that the thought of the poor rising up and overthrowing the rich keeps him awake at night.

Speaking at a summit in Monaco, Johann Rupert said he fears that a poor uprising will mean the middle classes won't want to buy luxury goods in the future for fear of exposing their wealth.

The fashion tycoon was came up with the scenario as a bizarre way in which to make a point about social inequality in the world.

According to Bloomberg, he said he had been reading about changes in labour technology, as well as recent Oxfam figures suggesting the top one per cent of the global population now owns more wealth than the other 99 per cent.

He asked: 'How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare?

'We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It's unfair. So that's what keeps me awake at night.'

He also expressed concern that robots are replacing workers, suggesting that artificial intelligence will fuel mass unemployment.  

South African Rupert is estimated to have amassed a fortune of around $7.5 billion from brands including Cartier, Chloe and Vacheron Constantin.

Fear of the poor is what gave us the New Deal in the United States and the Social Democratic consensus of the post-war era in Western Europe.  But the elites have learned since then, and presumably are hoping that the populations today are sufficiently cowed by the powers that can be ranged against them by the government not to rise up.  After all, in today's order, they can just label anyone who questions authority a 'terrorist', at which point they can be disappeared, or even simply executed at the whim of the government.  And if the poor or the disaffected in general were to rise up en masse ?  Time for the machine-guns I suppose.

Recycling...

Well, this (from the LA Times via Skippy) is not at all terrifying.

Central Valley's growing concern: Crops raised with oil field water

Here in California's thirsty farm belt, where pumpjacks nod amid neat rows of crops, it's a proposition that seems to make sense: using treated oil field wastewater to irrigate crops.

Oil giant Chevron recycles 21 million gallons of that water each day and sells it to farmers who use it on about 45,000 acres of crops, about 10% of Kern County's farmland.

State and local officials praise the 2-decade-old program as a national model for coping with the region's water shortages. As California's four-year drought lingers and authorities scramble to conserve every drop, agricultural officials have said that more companies are seeking permits to begin similar programs. The heightened interest in recycling oil field wastewater has raised concern over the adequacy of safety measures in place to prevent contamination from toxic oil production chemicals.

...

Until now, government authorities have only required limited testing of recycled irrigation water, checking for naturally occurring toxins such as salts and arsenic, using decades-old monitoring standards. They haven't screened for the range of chemicals used in modern oil production.

No one knows whether nuts, citrus or other crops grown with the recycled oil field water have been contaminated. Farmers may test crops for pests or disease, but they don't check for water-borne chemicals.

...

One environmental group has tested the irrigation water for oil field chemicals. Over the last two years, Scott Smith, chief scientist for the advocacy group Water Defense, collected samples of the treated irrigation water that the Cawelo Water District buys from Chevron. Laboratory analysis of those samples found compounds that are toxic to humans, including acetone and methylene chloride — powerful industrial solvents — along with oil.

...

Methylene chloride and acetone are used as solvents in many industrial settings. Methylene chloride is classified as a potential carcinogen.

One sample of the recycled Cawelo irrigation water, for example, registered methylene chloride as high as 56 parts per billion. Smith said that was nearly four times the amount of methylene chloride registered when he tested oil-fouled river at the 2013 ExxonMobil tar sands pipeline spill in Mayflower, Ark. That spill was declared a federal disaster, spurred evacuations and resulted in a $2.7-million fine for the company.

Chevron told The Times it does not use acetone or methylene chloride in its oil extraction process. The company would not disclose the fluids used in drilling or well maintenance.

...

Microorganisms in soils can consume and process some impurities, Sanden said, but it's not clear whether oil field waste is making its way into the roots or leaves of irrigated plants, and then into the food chain.

It's unlikely that petrochemicals will show up in an almond, for example, he added, "But can they make it into the flesh of an orange or grape? It's possible. A lot of this stuff has not been studied in a field setting or for commercial food uptake."

Carl K. Winter at UC Davis, who studies the detection of pesticides and naturally occurring toxins in foods, said some plants can readily absorb toxins without transferring them to the leaves or the flesh of their fruit.

Still, he said, "it's difficult to say anything for sure because we don't know what chemicals are in the water."

So we don't know exactly what chemicals are being pumped into the ground for fracking (proprietary trade secrets, natch.), but the stuff we find when we bother to properly test the water that is now being recycled for agriculture contains massive amounts of potential carcinogens.  And we don't know to what degree the soil could filter out this shit, or to what degree these chemicals could end up in our food-chain, but...profit.  So, we'll just assume it's safe and continue shipping the produce grown thus all across America, and all across the world.

So, just in case you thought fracking didn't affect you, because it was happening somewhere else, ask yourself: have you ever eaten agricultural produce from California ?

And of course, expect more of the same, as we continue to try to squeeze the last dregs of fossil-fuels from the earth to sustain our unsustainable economy and lifestyles.  What a species we are.

Blue State California

No, this isn't just about California, but it's drought-ridden California in the headlines currently (Talking about the US; No I didn't forget about the existence of Australia), what with the recent headlines about the state only having a year's worth of water-supply remaining.  And what with the scientists telling us that historically the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually represented an abnormally wet period for California, the news isn't likely to get better any time soon.  Still, always helps to get, a little perspective...

By now, the impacts of California’s unchecked groundwater pumping are well-known: the dropping water levels, dried-up wells and slowly sinking farmland in parts of the Central Valley.

But another consequence gets less attention, one measured not by acre-feet or gallons-per-minute but the long march of time.

As California farms and cities drill deeper for groundwater in an era of drought and climate change, they no longer are tapping reserves that percolated into the soil over recent centuries. They are pumping water that fell to Earth during a much wetter climatic regime – the ice age.

Such water is not just old. It’s prehistoric. It is older than the earliest pyramids on the Nile, older than the world’s oldest tree, the bristlecone pine. It was swirling down rivers and streams 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans were crossing the Bering Strait from Asia.

...

“What I see going on is a future disaster. You are removing water that’s been there a long, long time. And it will probably take a long time to replace it. We are mining water that cannot be readily replaced,” said Vance Kennedy, a 91-year-old retired research hydrologist in the Central Valley.

Time to short Almond stocks ?

Love: Alone Again, Or