Digital Ink Los Angeles

George Holliday was a man with a video camera — how silly that sounds now, 17 years later. The voyeuristic world we live in — with the ubiquitous YouTube and HULU videos we’ve come to love — has really embraced the amateurish video of handheld consumer-camera reporting. On March 3, 1991, George Holliday focused his lens on a highway off-ramp outside his apartment near the intersection of Foothill Blvd and Osborne St. in Lake View Terrace, north Los Angeles — this is called “inverse surveillance“, when citizens are watching the police.

A little more than a year later, on April 29, 1992, the acquittal of Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Rolando Solano led to an onset of violence and mayhem that gripped the city of Los Angeles for nearly six days. At one point, LAPD Police Chief Darryl Gates called in the National Guard to protect the sprawling metropolis from complete destruction.

I remember sitting in my living room, watching the beating of Reginald Denny, thinking what’s really going on? I watched numerous businesses burn, some I saw actually torched by rioters. I saw cars driving by, loaded with stereo and computer equipment, looted from stores. Korean businessmen were targeted, and, from then after, owners were always carrying holstered handguns.

17 years later and Rodney King has been arrested for drugs and DUIs and entered rehab several times. His guilt on that fateful March evening has never been questioned, and his insults toward a female California Highway Patrol officer appear to be the real reason the LAPD officers unleashed their angry batons upon him. But, what’s really going on? What makes a metropolis erupt in burning anger and gluttonous thievery? The disparity between class structures? The seemingly disproportionate scales of justice? The lack of hope and available opportunity?

Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States of America on the platform of “HOPE” and “CHANGE“, and a nation expects these broad social measures to be realized. The question is, have things really changed, and what can we expect the next “Social Upheaval” to look like? Some say the undercurrents point in a different direction, with those of privilege and wealth striking defiant, reactionary poses. Makes it all seem so much like the constancy of conflict is just what it is — good ole-fashioned free-market competitiveness. Until the batons start waving, fires start burning, and blood starts spilling. In the words of Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?“

As the economy bottoms out, the nation dusts itself off, and people begin to breath a sigh of relief from this global calamity, what are the currents of change going to bring? One can only hope it will be one of peace and leadership, instead of hate and vengeful mania.

Beautiful day.

Nice setting.

World-renowned writers.

Cool books.

You can view their web site here:  LA Times Festival of Books!

The third stone from the Sun.

The green planet with one moon.

Birthplace of jazz, baseball, and the internet.

Happy Earth Day 2009!

– BJL

Can’t say as I didn’t warn you. These guys, or girls, are tough, they’re mad, and they’re trained to kill. But, what’s perception and what is reality when it comes to these terrorists? There are some that seem talented in their endeavors and focused with their energies to consummate an American prize. These are the images Americans conjure when thinking of newly created agencies like Homeland Security and TSA. And the broad spectrum of Ashcroft and Gonzalez sponsored initiatives to lasso these terrorists in our midst.

What is really scary, and any doomsdayer will tell you it’s real, is the domestically nurtured terrorists we see making their way to the forefront of any Islamic movement. These guys are like Guns-N-Roses meets an episode of “24“, with a little Borat mixed in as well.

In a recent mess-up, British-style, the leader of 10 Downing Street’s Counter-Terrorism outfit, Bob Quick, was caught with his proverbial pants down, except it was a more disconcerting display of state secrets with regards to an upcoming raid on Pakistani militants who sought to destroy the already teetering kingdom.

You can view the NPR.com article here.

The raids were strikingly academic in their focus, with many of their dozen or so suspects rounded up in dormitories and college commons around the Liverpool area. These kinds of domestically born terrorist operations have become increasingly threatening in recent years. There’s evidence of a Somalian terrorist organization developing out of the Great Lakes of the northern U.S., with ties to al Qaeda and Somalian pirates.

Makes you wonder about the perceived threat and the real threat. Can you picture a college kid, already socially disengaged because of his immigrant status, his less-than-stellar Western style, and his misogynistic tendencies?

He stays up late at night, watches bad cowboy-movies, maybe drives a taxi to make ends meet outside of his engineering scholarship? Maybe the taxi-driving student loves the “Hard Rock” music played at the local nudey bar he has been to — but only once. He begins to call himself “Travis” to his friends. The taxi terrorist gets a handgun permit to protect himself while he drives the dangerous streets at night, then he begins to like the guns…

The Golden Boy announced it officially on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009.

Oscar De La Hoya won 10 titles in six weight classes, displaying his pugilistic talents on a record 19 pay-per-view fights, generated roughly $700 million in such pay-per-view revenue, and kept boxing thriving during the competitive times of current martial arts and sapping demand.

View LA Times Sports Editor Bill Dwyre‘s article HERE.

As of April 7, 2009, the total U.S. federal debt was $11,152,772,833,835.89 ($11.2T), or about $36,676 per capita. Of this amount, debt held by the public was roughly $6.869 trillion. That means, each and every citizen in the U.S. owes a public creditor, basically the Chinese government, approximately $20,000 to pay for our accumulating “U.S. Government Public Debt.”

Do you know what the U.S. Department of Treasury does? Let’s consider the Treasury’s central task to be what they are good at: printing money. In addition, when printing money becomes functionally impotent, we must seek funding for public programs — stimulus packages, military theaters, healthcare for kids — from ulterior sources.

Check out the PBS FRONTLINE special at this link: TEN TRILLION AND COUNTING!

This story commences with PBS FRONTLINE correspondent Forrest Sawyer escorting viewers to a secret location: the Treasury’s debt auction room, where the U.S. government sells securities backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States.” On the day FRONTLINE’s cameras are in observance, the government is auctioning $67 billion of Treasury securities. The money borrowed, or auctioned, will be used to fund services and programs that the government cannot pay for through tax revenues alone.

Observers warn that the United States’ reliance on borrowing to fund essential programs is a dangerous gamble. For the first time, investors are beginning to question the ability of federal government to meet its growing financial obligations, and fading confidence can have dire consequences.

“You might have a situation where there is one day when the government says we need to sell several billion dollars of bonds, and nobody shows,” Economist reporter Greg Ip tells FRONTLINE. “No money to pay the Social Security checks, no money to give to the states for their Medicaid programs.”

Yet more borrowing is exactly what the Obama administration plans to do: hundreds of billions to bail out the banks and other financial institutions; tens of billions more for the auto industry; $275 billion for homeowners and mortgage lenders; and a giant $787 billion stimulus package to jump-start an economy spiraling downward. Just like the Bush administration before it, Obama and his team are going to borrow big.

“That’s the paradox of the situation that we’re in now,” observes Matt Miller, author of The Tyranny of Dead Ideas. “Government has got to run big deficits to stimulate the economy, deficits that would have been unthinkable … because government’s the only entity with the wherewithal to prop up a demand in the economy when businesses and consumers are all pulling back.”

The question is, what’s the end game? Who’s going to explain this to the next generation, hell-bent on saving our global climate and dominating the global interface of our digital world? This is a very interesting New Economy we’re developing. I don’t speak Chinese, but my kids might.

Marathons are crazy. Although historically inaccurate, the legend of a Greek messenger running the 28 miles to Athens with news of the victory became the inspiration for this athletics event, introduced at the 1896 Athens Olympics, and originally run between Marathon and Athens. The essential element behind running — of any distance — is we used to track and hunt our prey by means of rapid bipedalism — hunting on the fly.

We humans are runners, certainly. Since the days of caves and spears, we’ve been of the predatory variety, inclined to chase down our prey and engage in its demise. But this takes stamina, healthy legs, and clear lungs. Watching Olympic Gold Medalist, Usain Bolt, is a study in human running at his or her finest — smooth, thunderous, power and grace. This biomechanical display also takes something else, and it’s physiological — short toes.

That’s right. The article in the April issue of SEED Magazine, states:

“Our toes, for instance, are shorter and stubbier than those of nearly all other primates, including chimpanzees, a trait that has long been attributed to our committed bipedalism. But a study published in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, by anthropologists Daniel Lieberman and Campbell Rolian, provides evidence that short toes make human feet exquisitely suited to substantial amounts of running.”

“In tests where 15 subjects ran and walked on pressure-sensitive treadmills, Lieberman and Rolian found that toe length had no effect on walking. Yet when the subjects were running, an increase in toe length of just 20 percent doubled the amount of mechanical work, meaning that the longer-toed subjects required more metabolic energy, and each footfall produced more shock.”

One of our little human quirks, the short-toed advantage, lends an ear to physical superiority in less-than-obvious ways, something pointed out in Malcolm Gladwell‘s New York Times Bestseller, Outliers. There are advantages in life that allow one to exist above and beyond your peers.

Cute little toes make you a better hunter. Imagine that. Back when we said, “Honey, I’m gonna run out and get some food,” you meant exactly that. That’s fast-food. I’ll take the short-toed special.