Jason Levin

Curated politics, tech, and entertainment from across Los Angeles and around the world. Follow me on twitter.  var sc_project=6505781; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="7ea64775"; var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-20525513-1']); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.tumblr.com']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

[jasonlevin]

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield:

As a 17-year-old at the 1984 Summer Olympic games, I saw firsthand how this city came together to redefine a successful Olympics, and will never forget the enduring spirit of the games. My daughter will be 17 during the 2024 games and I want her and all Angelenos of her generation to feel that same pride of city, and sense of limitless possibility that I experienced over the course of those two weeks in the summer of 1984.

In 2024, we have an opportunity to recapture that spirit and build on our own successes to stage a successful, exciting, and smart Olympic games, and show the world the best of Los Angeles. ‪#‎LA2024‬

[jasonlevin]

Make O-Town Great Again

[jasonlevin]

Modern Life

Kel: Did you ever watch "Rocko's Modern Life"? If so, do you remember the episode "Wacky Deli"? If so if so, do you remember what the episode was about?

Me: Yes, no, no.

Kel: Oh, well, in the episode, Mr. Bighead's son is excited to be done with his show, "The Fatheads," but the station tells him he is still under contract for another show. So, he has Rocko, Heffer, and Philbert make a TV series knowing they're dumb and assuming it will fail. Well, they produce a really disastrous and awful show. But the public loves it, and Bighead is miserable. Every episode is more of a hit than the next. One episode is just a half-hour of a single shot of a mayonnaise jar. Bighead is so upset that he can't get out of his contract but also that the public loves such dreck.

Kel: Anyways, I realized it reminds me of the Trump campaign.

[jasonlevin]

Air Force 2

[jasonlevin]

Is Hamas Trying to Get Gazans Killed?

In 2005, the Palestinians of Gaza, free from their Israeli occupiers, could have taken a lesson from the Kurds -- and from David Ben-Gurion, the principal Israeli state-builder -- and created the necessary infrastructure for eventual freedom. Gaza is centrally located between two large economies, those of Israel and Egypt. Europe is just across the Mediterranean. Gaza could have easily attracted untold billions in economic aid.

The Israelis did not impose a blockade on Gaza right away. That came later, when it became clear that Palestinian groups were considering using their newly liberated territory as a launching pad for attacks. In the days after withdrawal, the Israelis encouraged Gaza’s development. A group of American Jewish donors paid $14 million for 3,000 greenhouses left behind by expelled Jewish settlers and donated them to the Palestinian Authority. The greenhouses were soon looted and destroyed, serving, until today, as a perfect metaphor for Gaza’s wasted opportunity.

If Gaza had, despite all the difficulties, despite all the handicaps imposed on it by Israel and Egypt, taken practical steps toward creating the nucleus of a state, I believe Israel would have soon moved to evacuate large sections of the West Bank as well. But what Hamas wants most is not a state in a part of Palestine. What it wants is the elimination of Israel. It will not achieve the latter, and it is actively thwarting the former.

[jasonlevin]

To those who say this issue of civil rights is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this—the time has arrived for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People! Human beings!—this is the issue of the twentieth century. In these times of world economic, political and spiritual—above all, spiritual—crisis, we cannot and we must not turn from the path so plainly before us. That path has already led us through many valleys of the shadow of death. Now is the time to recall those who were left on that path of American freedom. Our land is now, more than ever, the last best hope on earth. I know that we can—know that we shall—begin here the fuller and richer realization of that hope—that promise—of a land where all men are free and equal.

Hubert H. Humphrey, addressing the Democratic National Convention assembled in Philadelphia, 1948.

[jasonlevin]

“Boys, I am going to bless this meal,” Rick Perry said, ducking his head and folding his hands under his chin. We were sitting at Nate ’n Al, the Jewish Deli in Beverly Hills, and the governor of Texas was looking every bit the regular customer in a tight black polo shirt and designer glasses. His face was nicely tanned; his hair, as ever, was coifed and TV-ready. He had just ordered a corned-beef Reuben (“I worked out this morning”) and a Diet Dr Pepper (“you got those critters?” he asked the waiter). But before diving in, Perry took a moment to appreciate his surroundings. “I’m more Jewish than you think I am,” he told me. “I read the part of the Bible that said the Jews are God’s chosen people.” He boasted that he has been going to Israel since 1992. Then Perry got down to business, thanking the Lord for His many blessings, and asking Him to be with “our men and women who defend our freedom, bring ’em home safe, be with the president, give him wisdom.”

[jasonlevin]

The TobaccoFree Research Institute Ireland, a Dublin-based health-advocacy group, released studies in 2013 showing a 26 percent post-ban reduction in heart disease throughout Ireland and a 32 percent decline in strokes, suggesting that over a decade the smoking ban may have saved more than 3,700 lives.

[jasonlevin]

The city's on a roll, collecting more than $3.5 billion in federal grants and loans since January. Among many reasons, it helps to have a friend in the White House.

At last month’s Capitol Hill signing ceremony for $1.25 billion in federal funding for the Metro Purple Line, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti quoted Vice President Joe Biden, calling it “a big friggin’ deal.”

It’s not the first one in the mayor's brief tenure.

In just the past six months, the City of Los Angeles has received grants, loans and promises of more than $3.5 billion. And that’s not counting the $500 million the Army Corps of Engineers has said it will seek for the L.A. River restoration. 

How did L.A. do it?

[jasonlevin]

"In 10 years, he'd be a Senator. In 13 years, he'd be elected president. In 16 years, he'd be dead."

[jasonlevin]

EXPLAINER: Vox on Thailand's coups.

Thailand has endured 12 successful coups (plus seven attempted coups) since 1932. They are connected. There are a few key things to understand about this cycle. Thailand has some factors that political scientists say make a country especially susceptible to coups, but there’s a lot more going on here. There is a self-perpetuating cycle in which one coup leads to another. There is a king who is just powerful enough that people expect him to intervene over political disagreements but just weak enough that he doesn’t. There is a superficial but contentious fight over a telecom billionaire who lives in Dubai and his attempts to influence Thai politics. There is a military that sees a big role for itself but tends to always take the same side. And, maybe more than anything else, there is a huge political divide between two very big segments of Thai society.

Read more at Vox.com

[jasonlevin]

...the app economy in mobile is far smaller and weaker than the web economy on the desktop. To a big web company like Facebook, that’s very threatening. Facebook’s business on the web depends on it being the hub of your social interaction, which it analyzes to target advertising customized for your interests. On mobile, Google is working hard to build its own social features into Android, and the whole idea of a single social hub is threatened as social features are built into a wide range of mobile apps. Although Facebook’s latest apps on mobile have been far more successful than its first efforts, it’s still at risk of being walled off by the platform vendors on one side while it is nibbled to death by a hoard of developers on the other side.

So the question for Facebook is what its fundamental role will be in mobile. Can it find new ways to capture social information for use in ads? Can it create standards that give it a stable power base against the platform companies? And can it find a way to leverage the swarming strength of the little app companies? 

[jasonlevin]

To make that risky a judgment based not just on your instincts but on your experience as commander in chief, and have it succeed, does something important psychologically that's hard to quantify.

Obama: From consensus to instinct.

[newyorker]

Why Jill Abramson Was Fired

[jasonlevin]

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, has had to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for many fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. (I was also told by another friend of hers that the pay gap with Keller has since been closed.) But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy.

[jasonlevin]

Venezuela is a case study of how not to do it. The country, which has the world’s largest crude reserves, set up three different oil-savings funds in recent decades, all of them with one thing in common: they lacked direct accountability to citizens, and they all failed. One set up in 1973 quickly became the government’s piggy bank to cover budget shortfalls. Almost 25 years later, Venezuela’s Macroeconomic Investment and Stabilization Fund was meant to save half of the country’s oil revenues, but politicians changed the rules constantly to reduce how much oil money was saved. In 2003 Venezuelan politicos revamped the fund again and began depleting the $6 billion it had managed to save. Those responsible for frittering away the savings are still in power, and Venezuelans can’t do much about it.

[jasonlevin]

From LA Observed:

Dean Baquet, the former editor in chief of the Los Angeles Times who was pushed out during left the worst of the Tribune Company manhandling of the LAT, today was named executive editor of the New York Times. Baquet returned to the NYT in 2007 after leaving Los Angeles and worked his way back up to number two under Jill Abramson. But a memo from publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. announced, without elaboration, that she is out and Baquet, the managing editor, is number one effective immediately.

[jasonlevin]

"The clock tower has never sounded: It was built without chimes. No billboards were allowed on the property, streetcars were pushed to either end of the station and utilities were hidden underground.

... The significance of the station lay not in architectural decoration or symbolism but in the way it reshaped a huge section of downtown Los Angeles and consolidated a set of ambitious ideas about how the city as a whole ought to grow. Then as now, its nostalgic architecture was merely a mask."