How about this for a plan for sprucing up our nation’s crumbling housing projects: ship lazy black folks out to the subprime suburbs, privatize their apartment buildings and hand them over to real estate developers. That’s what T.A. Frank, a New America Foundation think tank shill, thinks Los Angeles needs to do with Jordan Downs, a notoriously dilapidated and crime-wracked project in Watts: (more…)

I don’t want to go too deep down the Fort Hood Rabbit Hole Of Weirdness, so I’m just going to get off my chest some of the incredibly weird shit that’s being thrown around in the media to confuse us or throw us off. It’s looking pretty clearly like there’s a cover-up in progress, and not a very professional cover-up either. But the sad thing is that all the confusion and bullshit thrown our way will probably succeed in its goal of steering the public away from whatever it is the military doesn’t want us to find out about the shooting massacre.

Anyway, here’s my list of The Top Twelve Disinformation Tales to keep an eye on:

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We had ourselves one hell of a crime-filled summer out here in the greater metropolitan area of Victorville. And it’s only getting hotter as the High Desert transitions into the icy nights and gale-force winds of autumn that are starting to roar through. Case-in-point: just in the past week, there were three four bank robberies, a triple homicide, a couple of deadly shootings and a foiled drive-by (and that’s not counting all the usual petty crime and DUI manslaughter stuff). (more…)

Fuck, why did I listen to the asshole who told me that ground water up here in the desert was some of the cleanest in the nation? I’ve been drinking it straight out the tap for six months now, and just yesterday I found out that I’ve been gulping a whole lot of arsenic down with it.

The EPA recommends that there be no more than 0.02 ppb (parts per billion) in drinking water, and California’s set the limit to 0.01 ppb or less. In Victorville, most recent tests show a concentration of 11 ppb. That’s a 1,100 times over the limit! Let me repeat that: the concentration of arsenic in Victorville’s water is ONE THOUSAND TIMES  over the threshold of safety.

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This article was first published by Vice magazine.

We do not live in a democracy because America is all about serving the haves and the have-mores: a capitalocracy, where money talks and broke nobodies like you and me walk. Many people vaguely understand this, but I get to see it every day up close and personal in my adopted home of Victorville, California. (more…)

This should be nothing but good news for local Mexican haters, but don’t be fooled. While it may bring smiles to their faces, the story has a dark-lead lining for hardworking red-blooded Americans: (more…)

VICTORVILLE, CA—Following the general trend seen all over the country, there’s been a push around these parts to convince people that the recession will soon be a thing of the past. Local papers have been publishing articles with laughable headlines like “SoCal housing market may be stabilizing” or “Local economy back in growth mode.” Meanwhile, the city of Victorville has been abandoning non-mission-critical development projects, raising utility fees and borrowing from itself like mad to keep a few core development projects afloat to, you know, keep up appearances. Last week, community elders pulled together a who’s who of obscure shills for the 10th Annual High Desert Economic summit, hoping that a pep talk and some community time will help shake out the recession blues. (more…)

This article was first published by Vice magazine.

It was a hot day, still 98 degrees at 6 PM, as I zoomed through gridlock on my freshly fixed 1979 Kawasaki KZ-400, squeezing between the monster trucks and lifted SUVs clogging one of Victorville’s main drags, pouring sweat into my helmet and leather jacket on my way to an anti-Obamacare “town hall” meeting at the local community college.

I thought I knew what to expect when I got there. Like everyone else in this country, I had been watching the packs of deranged tea bagger types and their astroturfing overlords dominate the healthcare reform debate like a pack of retarded howler monkeys in heat. But TV hadn’t quite prepared me for the reality of it. You can’t really appreciate how fucked this country really is until you see, as I did, hundreds of blue collar Americans sync up their primitive brains in a paranoid racist-hick seance, channeling White Power ideals through Reagan’s damned soul. (more…)

Exiled editor Yasha Levine has officially hit the Big Time. The front page of Victorville’s Daily Press newspaper featured a profile of our fearless Domestic War Correspondent, his life, his wisdom, and his work, as well as a Q&A sidebar to help locals get to know the celebrity in their midst. A full-color photo of Levine is splashed marquee-like on the front page, of course. (more…)

VICTORVILLE, Calif. — On a sun-baked afternoon in October 2008, a group of soft-drink executives and city officials gathered for a groundbreaking ceremony at an old Air Force base on the outskirts of the city, 100 miles east of Los Angeles.

They were standing on the edge of the Mojave Desert, one of the driest, most inhospitable terrains in America. Yet there they were, posing for photographs, gold-plated shovels in hand, to mark the construction of a massive new bottling plant and distribution hub for the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, a facility that will suck up hundreds of millions of gallons of water a year from this water-scarce area to supply soft drinks to 20 percent of its domestic market. (more…)

This article was first published on Vice’s blog.

California’s State Assembly dipshits should congratulate themselves for a job well done. They finally managed to pass a bill that will reduce the state’s prison population by 17,000. All it took was a riot that tore a prison in Chino apart from the inside. That, and a federal court ruling handed down in early August that said the state had to clear 25 percent of its 150,000 prisoner inventory.
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