A random post for Easter

First of all, Happy Easter. Today I will be devouring every potato that I see. I gave them up for lent, and I want them back.

Some short news items that I have found interesting:

SouthCentral farmers. This is an issue that my church has been involved with recently. Basically, the city gave a group of farmers a plot of unused land in the center of SouthCentral, which they used to create 330 plots of land for poor families to use to grow extra food to eat and sell. The site was going to be used as an incinerator, but the city backed out of that plan and left it vacant, which meant it became an unofficial dump. Now it supplies 330 families with extra food and income and all they have to pay is $13/month for services like water, trash, and sewage. Now the guy who originally sold the land to the city wants it back, and right now he is getting his way. Not only that, but he sued the city and will likely get it back for its 1980s value, which is maybe 1/3 of its current value, giving him a huge windfall. Read more about it at the link above or visit their website.

City of Vernon elections. I never knew much about the City of Vernon besides its name. Its a weird place. Basically, it exists only for industry and has a population of about 100. Even their motto says "exclusively industrial." In any case, they had an election for City Council and have decided not to count the votes. Instead, the current council voted to keep itself as the next City Council. Why? Because some new people moved there and ran. Basically, they have had the same people on City Council for over 35 years! It gets even more strange. It turns out that once these people filed to run, they had all of their services cut off by the city, stalked by armed private investigators hired by the city, and finally were evicted. The city even sent their election registration packets to the county after stamping them "cancelled", which they do not have the power to decide. However, there is another side to the story. The people that ran were set up with their place in Vernon by a real estate agent who has connections with a scandal that took money from the city of South Gate. Maybe the City of Vernon just wanted to keep these kind of people out. I, however, think that they clearly went about it the wrong way, which is the understatement of the century. It also seems like the City Council gets a good deal of income. The city collects a bunch in taxes, but only offers services to a small number of residences. They can afford their own police, fire and medical clinic. Their city administrator retired and was given $600,000 in salary, vacation, and bonuses. His son is the city clerk that refused to count the ballots. I wonder how much these council members and other city employees get. Actually, most of the residents of Vernon are city employees who live in city-subsidized cheap housing. See what I mean, this is sketchy as hell.

Bush lied again. As proof that there were WMDs in Iraq, Bush talked about these mobile biological weapons labs that they had found. Well, it turns out that these trucks are pretty much what the first investigators thought that they were: nothing. In fact, they were jokingly called "the biggest sand toilets in the world." The article I linked to is pretty long, but on the second page they talk about the now-discredited Iraqi defector that originally told German intelligence about these supposed mobile labs. I guess a lot of the drawings that Colin Powell used in his big UN speech were based on this guy's stories, which we now know were made up. Where can you read the 122-page report on these big toilets? You can't. It is classified and collecting dust on a shelf while being ignored. The only way we know about what is in them is through interviews with the scientists that issued the report. Here we go again.

That's all for today. I'm about 3 articles from publishing the long-awaited Douchebag of the Week(s). We'll see how motivated I am tonight to finish them.