asking Buscaino to “Make it make sense.”

Disinformation vs. the Pandemic

Only now is the strategy being revealed, is it too late to stop it?

By James Preston Allen, Publisher

The truth seems to always arrive too late these days to actually make a difference. But late is better than never. Back in 2017, The Guardian reporter Tom McCarthy published a story with the headline: How Russia Used Social Media to Divide Americans. The subtitle read: Russian trolls and bots focused on controversial topics in an effort to stoke political confusion.

What was published by The Guardian on July 15 only solidifies the evidence reported by McCarthy four years ago: Russian trolls and bots focused on controversial topics in an effort to stoke political division on an enormous scale — and it hasn’t stopped, experts say, reads the latest subhead. So what’s this got to do with the current state of disinformation? It hasn’t stopped.

The disinformation programs continue to divide the Americans left, right and center, even to the point that many Americans have shut the news off, preferring ignorance of the facts than confusion. This turn of events is the result of a classic psyops attack, one successful enough to make our own CIA proud if it weren’t executed by our country’s adversaries. As you can see the ex-president and his allies are still propagating the lies about stolen elections, vaccines, masks, critical race theory and transgender rights. In fact, pick a disruptive topic on any given week and the echo chamber of MAGA conspiralists will organize on social media then gather outside a random Korean day spa in Los Angeles to cause confusion and chaos. The cops are called in and arrests are made and then there’s another battle over free speech, police brutality and suppression.

All of this disruption is to what end? According to The Guardian, Russian President Vladimir

Real People, Real News, Totally Relevant Putin, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them ‘social turmoil’ in the U.S. and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.

And currently this all plays to the benefit of Trumlicans, who are intent on blocking any of President Joe Biden’s or the congressional Democrats legislation for infrastructure, expanded voting rights and even the investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building. Yes, that was an insurrection, not a riot, not a parade nor a peaceful demonstration, but an indisputable attempt to overthrow our federal government.

Proponents of this disinformation virus are not unlike those Confederate soldiers and sympathizers who for years, decades even, after the American Civil War never accepted the victory of the North over the South. Seventy years afterwards, whole Southern states were commemorating the “Lost Cause” with statuary for a war that even Gen. Robert E. Lee said was best buried and forgotten. There’s no such humility or circumspection from the anti-vaxxer crowd, MAGA-true believers, Proud Boys acolytes and Three Percenters! Nor should you expect it. These folks are seriously intent on starting the next civil war. If you have any doubts about this perspective, after some 579 people (neoconfederates ) have been charged with crimes and were arrested from the capital insurrection, I would direct you to read the news report on our website titled, Anatomy of an Insurrection: How Military Veterans and Other Rioters Carried Out the Jan. 6 Assault on Democracy (https://tinyurl. com/Anatomy-insurrection).

“Every single person charged, at the very least, contributed to the inability of Congress to carry out the certification of our presidential election,” prosecutors wrote in a memorandum filed with the D.C. district court.

Under any other circumstance, this would be called treason — a charge with which all who participated in the insurrection should be stuck. Even the orange guy himself should at least be charged with incitement to riot and conspiracy to foment insurrection if not treason for attempting a coup d’état.

The evidence is just now beginning to leak out with books like Michael Woff’s Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency; Michael C Bender’s Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost and I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonning and Philip Rucker.

All of this along with Gen. Mark Milley’s assessment of Trump’s intentions to hold on to power regardless of the vote was reported this way. “In the days leading up to Jan. 6,” Leonnig and Rucker write, “Milley was worried about Trump’s call to action. ‘Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.’”

Yet, instead of charging these trespassers of our democracy with misdemeanors and minor felony charges like Anna Morgan Lloyd, of Indiana, who was ordered by a federal judge to serve three years of probation, perform 120 hours of community service and pay $500 in restitution after admitting to entering the Capitol, she easily should be serving 5 to 10 years in prison. She pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge under a deal with prosecutors. The latest one convicted, Michael Curzio, was sentenced to just six months imprisonment.

And still from Arizona’s Cyber Ninja recount to Texas’ stalled voter suppression laws and across this nation in every red state and county as the disinformation flies, vaccination rates stall and the COVID-19 Delta variant spreads the one thing we can be certain of in these times is that the virus may do for the Democrats what legislation can not. The current data shows that the highest rates of infection are occurring in the same counties with the lowest vaccination rates and those just happen to be where Trump won the most votes.

Perhaps this is the proof that Charles Darwin was right.

Where’s the Money, Joe?

Nonprofit organizations up and down CD 15 are asking Buscaino to ‘Make it make sense’

By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor

Scores of nonprofit organizations applied for the so called “Buscaino Grants,” writing proposals, presenting proposed budgets, asking their supporters for their votes by submitting their information in the councilman’s information portal. Those who ostensibly received the most votes showed up for Councilman Joe Buscaino’s dog and pony show for pictures as they say, “Thanks, Joe.” Only to be told afterwards when the cameras stopped rolling, “It’s going to take a few weeks to receive the money.” Worse still, many were told they would only be reimbursed for half the money spent meaning they’d have to do additional fundraising from donors who’d just been given the false impression their needs had already been met. To top it all off, these are grants whose very existence Buscaino had opposed. According to organizations in Watts (they requested I maintain their anonymity for fear of retribution by Buscaino’s office), the winners of which were announced a couple of weeks earlier than everyone else, theystill have not received their monies. None in the Harbor City and Harbor Gateway have received theirs and zero in San Pedro.

This alone would not be so problematic if it weren’t for the reports I’ve been hearing that Buscaino’s office has been trying to change the

[See Make Sense, p. 7]

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(RLN, “Joe Announces Winners of ‘Buscaino Grants,’ July 8-21, 2021) I have respected your reporting in the past but in allowing your name to be attached to bogus claims about The Beach Cities Alliance grant, certainly reduces your credibility. You draw attention by suggesting that BCA was in some way behaving in an underhanded manner in their grant application. After setting the stage for the reader to become suspect of this organization you belatedly slip in “The longtime councilman’s aide explained that Bridge Cities Alliance has had issues with the IRS website reporting their updated status, which the IRS says is due to COVID-19 staffing. The bottom line is that BCA is a qualified nonprofit.” You raised an issue with no “there there”

I have no idea if you have animus toward BCA or members of it’s board; but many of us are aware that James [Allen the publisher] uses his paper to attack leaders and board members of nonprofits in town- often with unfounded claims. He has done it before and no doubt will do it again. His problem this time might be Mona Sutton? If so, it is likely because: 1. She is a very successful businesswoman, 2. She is the long standing president of the Harbor PD CAC, and 3. Refuses to advertise in the RLN. Or perhaps 4. Is that she and her wife Leslie Jones, are highly respected in our community for their good works; for which the community has often honored them.

When James is unsuccessful in his bullying elsewhere, he uses his paper. This disagreeable habit of his has caused many fine people in this community to avoid the Central Neighborhood Council saying they cannot risk his ire being used against their organizations. Others resign from the board not wanting to spend their volunteer time dealing with a bully and his frequent disruption of meetings.. This may sound harsh but actually I am just telling “truth to power” in this case the power is the publisher of your paper.

Linda Alexander

San Pedro

Community Alert

Child Tax Credit Monthly Payments Started July 15

The first payments of the Advance Child Tax Credit will be issued on July 15. If you didn’t file taxes in 2019 or 2020, visit the IRS website at irs.gov/ childtaxcredit2021 to provide your information using their “Non-Filer” tool. Details: www.freetaxprepla. unitedwayla.org/en/find-help Ms. Alexander,

To your first question, no, I don’t have personal animus towards the board of the Bridge Cities Alliance. My rationale for reporting on these grants the way that I did was not only because it was newsworthy, but that it deserved critical attention given the way the councilman conceived, created and executed the grant program. The story was also intended to address questions of fairness and transparency, which were raised prior to my reporting on the winners of the grants (raised by a few of the nonprofits who participated from throughout the district). But because the grant pro-

[Make Sense, from p. 6] Make Sense

rules after the fact. Winners were being told that in order to receive what they had won, they must have “a contract” with the city or form a contract with an entity that does, but at a cost. One nonprofit executive called it an “exquisite form of extortion and racketeering.”

Can you just imagine how many nonprofits don’t have contracts with the city but who have been doing the real hard work for years without a city contract?

These organizations did what was asked of them, got their supporters to vote, win, take pictures with Joe with the photo op checks, only to have the city council’s field deputies tell them afterwards they won’t be getting this money unless they fulfill some extra requirements.

In Watts, one nonprofit leader, one of the scores that won a grant, said there’s a lot of frustration in his community and that it feels like Buscaino had just pulled a “poverty pimping-move.”

Accustomed to applying for grants on the city, state and federal level, the nonprofit executive said those grants are generally clear and up front. Those grants are either ones you apply for that supply what is needed or they are grants for which you have to find matching funds, or grants for which you have to show your expenditures in order to get reimbursed. He explained that’s not how Buscaino’s grant process went.

Apparently, many of the nonprofits were told that while it would take time to receive their money, they will be reimbursed up to 50% of the grant they won if they keep track of their expenditures.

One nonprofit head asked, “How are our nonprofits that don’t have anything supposed to benefit from that?”

The nonprofit head posed the hypothetical, “If we’re a nonprofit and we need to buy a vehicle to deliver food because that’s part of what we do — It’s what we wrote the grant for ….We don’t have $15,000 to drop on a truck. How are you going to reimburse us for money that doesn’t exist in the first place? This is why we ask for the grant, so that we can do the work,” he said.

Continuing the thought further, he said it would be great if these organizations already had $70,000 for which they could be reimbursed. But why then would they need the $70,000 in the first place if they already had it? It doesn’t make sense, right?

Even if Buscaino made good on this promise, how unfair is it to tell nonprofit organizations to purchase something for $15,000, and have the city pay them back with an IOU?

What made this so galling, besides the fact that Buscaino Facebook-lived these events and got on television talking about how he gave all of these organizations tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars is that people connected to Joe has, according to my sources, begun reaching out to these organizations’ donors and constituent bases using the information he harvested from the competition. To say these folks feel used is the understatement of all understatements.

These organizations depend on individuals donating funds to them. So, when Buscaino gets on television and says he gave these organizations $30,000, $50,000 or $100,000, donors who were previously donating to these organizations would shift their monies to organizations they perceive as more in need.

Now there’s talk of going to the city attorney over this. It’s not lost on these organizations that Buscaino opposed the cuts to the police budget that made these grants possible in the first place. These were supposed to address social justice and alternative crime prevention. Not be used to finance acts of patronage to elicit love, adoration and votes in third world countries.

To recap, Mayor Eric Garcetti initially proposed a budget that included a budget increase of more than $100 million over the previous year for the Los Angeles Police Department while most other city departments faced budget cuts. After pushback by a coalition of groups organized by Black Lives Matter LA, the mayor altered the budget by shifting $150 million to other budget priorities such as reimagined community safety, universal aid and crisis management and built environment. Buscaino is on record opposing this reordering of priorities.

But here we are. Buscaino cheesing in front of the cameras in Black and brown communities, taking credit for money they haven’t received.

I gave Buscaino’s office an opportunity to respond to this critique. I did not receive a response before we went to press.

cess was ongoing and no one was willing to publicly “bite the hands” attempting to feed them, they didn’t go on the record. But we did, to the best of our ability, investigate those questions.

For us, Bridge Cities Alliance was just one of the questions that emerged. We first reported on the anti-hate organization in 2018 when it organized San Pedro’s first Pride event after rallying against hate following an anti-gay incident. Originally headed by Aiden Sheffeld-Garcia, his partner and other leading civic leaders representing San Pedro’s LGBTQ community (including Mona Sutton and Leslie Jones) and their allies, the organization provided an important contribution to this Harbor town’s civic life. So we paid attention. But a number of the original board members moved away, and the organization’s website ceased being updated and then disappeared entirely.

At its inception, Bridge City Alliance was founded as a 501(c) (3). When we heard grumblings that their status was indeterminate, we followed up and found, via www.causeiq.com and irs.gov, that the organization’s 501(c)(3) had been revoked in November 2020. We had also searched Guidstar.org and found no listing at all. This is why we reached out to Councilman Buscaino’s senior aide, Branimir Kvartuc, and asked him. While Kvartuc provided an explanation, the lack of a paper trail of a nonprofit that is supposed to exist has been unsatisfying. Their nonprofit status should be of interest to you also because your neighborhood council gave them a Neighborhood Purpose Grant which can only go to qualified nonprofits.

As for the coverage of the local neighborhood councils and your assertion that the publisher of this newspaper uses it to bully people, I assert that he uses this paper as a bully pulpit, advocating for greater civic engagement, transparency and democracy — a pushback against this town’s tendency to take care of the public business in private spaces under manufactured consent. James Allen’s role is obviously complicated by the fact that he serves on the Central Neighborhood Council even while he exercises his bully pulpit at his discretion. It’s the reason why any particular issues he personally wants to address are relegated to his At Length columns while a reporter focuses on reporting on the Harbor Area’s neighborhood councils to the best of his ability. Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor And Then More Criticism

I am tracking your ongoing efforts to exploit the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council from within as a method of generating stories for your newspaper. That is a matter of public interest and our stakeholders, including advertisers in your newspaper, have a right to know that and how you do this.

I share the broadly held concern that your interest in chairing the Port Committee is primarily to force yourself into port meetings to berate port officials and, again, to manufacture stories and troll for quotes for your paper. I have not invited you to port meetings because of your extensive history of throwing tantrums there that undermine the council, its efforts, and its official actions. Such behavior reflects poorly on your council and neighborhood. Further, exploiting a government role to join meetings that are closed to the press gives Random Lengths News a level of press access unavailable to other media outlets. It also gives RLN a de facto press exclusive to which meeting participants have not consented.

Past President Guzman also refused to send you as council representative to port meetings for your combative and counterproductive tactics, and I witnessed you shout at him, question his integrity, and throw a fit about his decision at a public board and stakeholder meeting. Ironically, that outburst illustrated why Mr. Guzman refused to send you in the first place. Soon after, you fired Mr. Guzman from his reporting job, correct? Or did he quit following your attacks? Be forewarned that as long as you remain on the council, such negative, abusive, bullying, and counterproductive behavior will be exposed and put down. Fight the port on your own time or your paper’s, Mr. Allen, but you will not abuse and manipulate this council into doing your dirty work.

Louis Caravella,

President, Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council [See Letters, p. 15]

nine days later Death Valley registered a world record 130 degrees — the day after Newsom’s announcement.

The next week, Western Europe was struck with the worst rainfall and floods in a century, with dozens killed and thousands initially reported missing. Many places reported more rain in one day than normally falls in a month — or even two — at the same time it was announced that a major section of the Amazon Basin had now become a net emitter of greenhouse gases, rather than part of the world’s largest absorber of them, as it has been throughout human history.

“These are examples for the context for thinking about drought and climate change — multiple extreme events coinciding around the globe, often breaking records,” environmental scientist LeRoy Westerling of University of California Merced told Random Lengths. “It’s that broader, global, interlinked pattern that is indicative of climate change.” Global warming doesn’t just mean hotter temperatures, but more extreme weather of all kinds, more variability, with increasing frequency.

“Yes we have seen drought in the past, and we will have wet years in the future,” he said, “but climate change is making the west more arid, by: 1) Increasing temperatures — increasing evaporation. 2) Average precipitation is not changing here significantly, so it cannot compensate for the increased evaporation — increasing aridity.

3) Increasing variability of precipitation means more wet and dry extremes within the broad trend towards intensifying aridity as we become more arid, and see more extremes in precipitation and temperature, we will experience with ever increasing frequency what we used to think of as extreme, impactful, but rare drought events. They are no longer rare, and what used to be considered extreme will quickly be eclipsed by even more extreme events.” a quadruple threat, as the New York Times just reported: Direct loss to wildfire, grapes ruined by smoke, lack of water to irrigate, and loss of insurance. The last is ultimately the most devastating. Random Lengths first reported on the insurance problem of global warming 16 years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The insurance industry depends upon knowing what is normal. But the old normal has been crumbling for decades, and there will be no “new normal.”

“The problem is that the climate will contin-

NASA satellite photos of California’s second largest reservoir Lake Oroville in Butte County, show dramatic water level changes from 2019 (top) to the present. The adjacent hydroelectric plant could be forced to operate at reduced capacity.

The wildfire threat could grow even faster, Westerling explained.

“Fire needs flammable fuels. Since we still get wet extremes, and still get similar precipitation on average, we still produce lots of new potential fuels,” he said. “The increasing aridity means they are flammable sooner, and for longer. So fire risk continues to increase.”

And the landscape itself will change.

“As the West becomes increasingly more arid, the kinds of vegetation it can support will change as well,” he explained. “Fire, beetles, and drought related mortality are some of the processes that are quickly rearranging the landscape to better reflect what the new climate can support.”

California’s most high-priced agriculture — Napa Valley red wines — already faces ruin from ue to change for the rest of our lives. So the situation on the ground will also be shifting rapidly,” Westerling warned. “That makes mitigation to moderate future climate change more important than ever, but it also makes adaptation both more important and more difficult.”

This only intensifies the need for scientific understanding.

“The only way we can get enough information about the future risks we need to plan for in building and protecting infrastructure, homes, and services like agriculture, carbon storage, water supply, habitat, recreation, forestry, etc., is with science-based observation, modeling, simulation and scenario analysis,” he explained.

“We are watching as accelerating climate change transforms the world around us in real time.”