Koreatown flexes its muscles in Los Angeles

Once a district full of non-citizens and non-voting citizens, Koreatown was shaken awake by the L.A. Riots of 1992, and since then has been galvanized even for minutiae like redistricting of City Council seats.

...

RE-UPDATED: Shots fired at Chinese consulate in Los Angeles

You just know this place is filled with lead paint.

UPDATE 2:
AFP is reporting that the person arrested was not Korean but, in fact, a Chinese-born activist:

A Chinese-born activist has been booked for attempted murder over a shooting at China's consulate in Los Angeles after a human rights protest there, police said Friday.

Jeff Baoliang Zhang, a 67-year-old originally from Shanghai, turned himself in to police a few hours after Thursday's shooting, which left a number of bullet holes in the front of the diplomatic building.

"A lone gunman fired several shots at the local Chinese consulate after participating in a protest at the location earlier in the day," the Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement.

"Acting independently from the other protesters, he opened fire on the consulate building and then drove away in his car."

The LAPD said it appeared the suspect was acting alone.

So the possibility I mentioned turned out not to be the case. And for that, I'm glad. It would be very, very, very bad if South Koreans or Korean-Americans are avenging someone's death by attacking or trying to kill random people who have nothing to do with the murder.

Don't get me wrong, the ROK Coast Guard and the ROK Navy need to use adequate force to patrol and protect South Korean waters and South Korean people, but shooting up the consulate has nothing to do with that. We must take the high road, and I'm glad we can still do that.

UPDATE 1:

LAlate.com is reporting that the person who turned himself in is "a 65-year-old Chinese man with grey or white hair." Frankly, I don't know if they wrote Chinese because they know his specific ethnicity or if they are assuming so because the police description was of an "Asian" man and there have been ongoing protests involving mostly Chinese people. Having been in journalism for a while, I'm skeptical: we hope it would be the former but it is, more often than not, something like the latter.

I'm not saying I'm right, that it is a Korean angered by the Coast Guardsman's murder; I think it is equally possible that it's a Falun Gong protester or even a random drive-by. But the timing with the recent Korean-Chinese tension makes it quite a coincidence. Frankly, though, despite having written this post, I'm hoping it's not a kyopo or KoKo.

ORIGINAL POST:
Though I haven't seen the person identified yet, reports are saying a white-haired Asian in his 50s or 60s is being sought was arrested after turning himself in (for earlier pre-arrest reports, see here, here, here, and here). He had apparently been protesting in front of the building before shooting at a consulate security guard named Cipriano Gutierrez. Nine shots were reportedly fired.

Given the escalation of tension* between Beijing and Seoul over the murder of a ROK Coast Guardsman by Chinese fish pirates, including something being fired at the ROK embassy in Beijing and someone trying to ram the PRC embassy in Seoul with his car, one can't help but wonder if this is related to all that.

Seriously, if this is the case, this is getting out of hand. China has behaved badly when it comes to this whole issue of Chinese boats behaving violently when they're caught illegally fishing in ROK waters or the South Korean EEZ, but none of that warrants shooting at the consulate. The folks at the PRC consulate in L.A. have nothing to do with any of this.

* Tensions include a Chinese protester peeing on a flag, though I'm not convinced that wasn't just a coincidence that the flag happened to be where he was peeing. I mean, in Seoul there are flags everywhere, and that's exactly where Chinese pee. Ha ha! I keed! I keed! I keed because I love... to keed!

South Koreans protesting in front of Chinese embassy in Seoul.
Their signs read, "Forget Dorothy... Surrender Toto!"
There, no one can accuse me of not providing
equal time on the whole national mockery thing. 

...

Getting ready for 2012...

Remember the movie 2012, where John Cusack and his brood barely escape Los Angeles in a small plane just as major pieces of the L.A. Basin crack apart and fall into the sea?

Well, this bit of news — and pictures like that above — had images from that flick popping into my head. (Images from 2012 really disturb me.)

Indeed, this stuff about a 600-foot stretch of San Pedro's Paseo del Mar breaking up and falling into the ocean seemed an eery foreshadowing of the grandest snuff film ever made (all but 0.0001% of the population outside Africa dies — though they continue to have excellent cell phone service up until the very end).

...

Carmageddon condensed

If you were in California, there was no escaping hearing all about Carmageddon, the doom that was supposed to happen to the L.A. area freeway system when the ten miles of the 405 (the San Diego Freeway, which isn't actually in San Diego) between the 10 (Santa Monica Freeway) and the 101 (the Ventura Freeway, I think). We're talking some places that are super ultra mega crowded even on a good day.

Anyway, it was captured in this cool video, reminiscent of a recently popular time-lapse of Seoul (though not as cool as that).



Carmageddon turned out not to be, not because it shouldn't have been made a big deal, but because they made a big deal out of it. Just as Angelenos did during the 1984 Summer Olympics, they showed they were willing to stay off the freeways and off the nearby surface streets if it was needed.

The work finished ahead of schedule. In Los Angeles, it's easier to raze things than raise them.

And there may have been some game-changing results from this. People actually got on trains and rode bicycles (but the people who flew across town for $4 clearly didn't get it). With Carmageddon 2.0 eleven months away, when they knock down the other half of the bridge, maybe some of it will stick (with some people).

Snow down to 500 feet in SoCal?

Growing up in Southern California, the mountains to the north, which reach over 10,000 feet in some places (Mt Baldy, Mt San Gorgonio, etc.) would get enough snow for moderate skiing (maybe Los Angeles should hold the Winter Olympics if things go south in Sochi). Orange County, whose Mt Santiago (aka Saddleback Peak) is over a mile high, would also get its share of the white.

Each winter, it is common for snow levels to get down at least to 4000 feet once or twice, and occasionally to 3000 feet or even 2000.

But tonight they are expecting snow flurries down to 1000 feet, and possibly even 500 feet. That covers a lot more Southern Californians than usual. For a change, a white dusting around the Hollywood sign won't be an illegal import, while farther north San Francisco may get its first snow in thirty-five years.

UPDATE:
The snow has begun falling (this link includes records of when snow last fell in various parts of the Los Angeles area's low elevations).

UPDATE 2:
The official snow level only reached down to 1700 feet, but people below apparently got dusted. The above picture is downtown Los Angeles, whose buildings' base is only a couple hundred feet above sea level.

Meanwhile, down in Orange County, this happened to be the first day of lifeguard tryouts. The would-be lifeguards had to brave the water — which is cold even in the summer — amidst 40°F temperatures (about 4°C or 5°C). These are not polar bears; they are the unemployed.

Is Sochi still a good choice for the 2014 Winter Olympics?

I'm going to sound like an insensitive jackass for saying this so soon after the horrible incident that left dozens dead, but the bombing at Domodedovo International Airport on the outskirts of Moscow has underscored concerns I've previously expressed that the Sochi venue for the 2014 Winter Olympics may have been a poor choice. In 2007, when the IOC met, the South Korean mountainous county of P'yŏngch'ang (Pyeongchang) lost out to the summer resort city of Sochi, Russia, when then-President Vladimir Putin showed up and tacitly threatened the European members of the IOC that there would be dire consequences if Russia was not awarded the games.

In addition to concerns about the weather in the palm-lined Russian resort city (which became an issue at the 2010 games in Vancouver, a venue that beat out Pyongchang four years earlier), I wrote about concerns that Sochi was just "a few hundred miles from Chechnya, a major producer of counterfeit American dollars and angry Muslim separatist suicide bombers with a serious score to settle with Moscow." Almost exactly a year after that post, the bombing at the airport has become the latest in a series of terror attacks that should make us seriously question (a) whether Chechen separatists will use the high-profile games or the FIFA World Cup four years later as a prime target and (b) whether Russian authorities are even capable of stopping that.

And I'm certainly not the only one thinking this. It's certainly on the IOC's mind enough that they issued a statement about it:

The International Olympic Committee has "no doubt" that Russia will deliver a safe Winter Games in Sochi in 2014 despite security concerns raised by the suicide bombing attack at Moscow's main airport.

"Unfortunately, terrorism is a global phenomenon and no region is exempt, which is why security at the games is a top priority for the IOC," the Olympic body told The Associated Press in a statement Tuesday. "At the Olympics, security is the responsibility of the local authorities, and we have no doubt that the Russian authorities will be up to the task."

FIFA also expressed support for Russia, which will host the 2018 World Cup in 13 cities. It will host the Confederations Cup as a test event in 2017.

"FIFA is confident that Russian authorities will ensure adequate security plans are in place," soccer's governing body said in a statement.

To be fair, the downing of Korean Airlines flight 858, an apparent terror attack planned by Kim Jong-il himself ten months before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, was no reason to change the venue of South Korea's showcase event, but South Korea was not the victim of repeated and seemingly constant terror attacks. Russia, on the other hand, seems unable to escape such events thanks to its on-going separatist war. The Guardian has a list of major terror attacks in the post-Soviet era.

And if the separatists are able to pull off such attacks in Moscow, at a place like an airport that is supposed to be relatively secure, imagine how easy it would be to visit such assaults in Sochi, which is only a few hundred miles away from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Moreover, the separatists who are remind the world of the carnage in Chechnya would want to strike at such a time when the entire world is watching. Sure, lots of innocent people would die, but these folks have shown that even killing schoolchildren is acceptable to them.

Now, don't get me wrong: this is not sour grapes and I certainly don't think that Pyongchang should be retroactively awarded the games. In fact, if a venue change were to come, it should not be now, but sometime later, with something else as a pretext. The terrorists should not score a victory this way. But I do think the IOC should come up with a plan whereby they declare the summer resort of Sochi just not on schedule or some such, and then have Vancouver or Nagano or Lillehammer or some other prior venue host the games. (Frankly, even if Pyongchang is awarded the 2018 games, I don't think its on-going preparations make it ready to host four years ahead of time.)

Switching already-chosen venues for world events is not so unusual. Or, at least, thinking about switching venues is not so unusual. Civil unrest in South Korea in the spring and summer of 1987 led then-mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley to suggest that L.A. would be willing to host the Olympics for a second time in a row if the IOC decided Seoul was too dangerous.

In 2002 and 2003, as it became clear Athens was way behind schedule for construction of venues for the 2004 games, some suggested moving the games to Seoul or Los Angeles, which had the infrastructure ready to go. Indeed, had that happened, perhaps Greece might not be in the debt crisis it now finds itself in.

More recently, some have considered whether or not Qatar should remain as the host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup if doing so would require a calendar change to January (which would interfere with regular soccer and the Winter Olympics), as FIFA head Sepp Blatter has suggested, to keep the players from dropping dead in the 45°C desert heat. Indeed, that last one underscores that Pyongchang and South Korea keeps losing out to places that probably should not have won the hosting rights for these events at all.

But let's be realistic: On February 7, 2014, we will almost certainly be watching the opening of the winter Olympics in Sochi. And I hope and pray that everything goes off without a hitch. Despite worries about attacks in 1988 and again during the Korea/Japan World Cup in 2002, the games were safe and secure (it was the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, I believe, that last saw a terror attack), although North Korea did try something out in the Yellow Sea just as the games were ending.

I do think Russia, if it sets its mind to it and takes this seriously, can do the same. But next time, IOC and FIFA, take this kind of thing a bit more seriously.

SoCal's Metrolink adds more crash-savvy cars from South Korea

In a follow-up from this December 2009 story, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that the L.A. area's commuter railroad is buying twenty more Hyundai Rotem Co. coaches, touted as providing "first-in-the-nation" safety technology, which will make up 137 of 160 passenger cars:

Bolstering the effort to improve safety at Metrolink, directors of the commuter railroad on Friday agreed to buy 20 more state-of-the-art train cars that can better protect passengers and crews during a crash.

The board of the Southern California Regional Rail Authority pushed aside financial pressures and unanimously voted to exercise an option to buy the cars made by the South Korean Hyundai Rotem Co. for $1.68 million each, about $1 million below the market value.

Rotem cars have energy-absorbing crush zones and other safety improvements now required by the federal government — measures that Metrolink has sought since a deadly crash on the border of Glendale and Los Angeles five years ago that killed 11.

While I'm happy to see South Korea becoming a go-to place for highly safe high-tech, it bothers me that the United States finds it so difficult to make things like this. Could be Americans' general aversion to public transport having led to a profound lack of a demand and thus little opportunity for such an industry.

Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels

As I walked around this new place, I wondered if The Marmot would be impressed by the architecture.