True Detective Season 2 Official Thread

[Big Mel]

It was written banged and is criminally underrated doe

Most disappointing rap album of all time.

 

[Tony D'Amato]

You got niccas like @The Taxman talking about the writing and shyt when dude can't read or write at a 5th grade level. shyt is embarrassing

Its so obvious u want paynus

 

[Tony D'Amato]

Most disappointing rap album of all time.

Its better than Shawn Carter's vol 2 and 3. And better than Blueprint 2 as well as everything after Black album

 

[Big Mel]

Its better than Shawn Carter's vol 2 and 3. And better than Blueprint 2 as well as everything after Black album

Debatable. But I wasn't expecting anything other than what I got with those.

 

[TheDarceKnight]

I'm gonna watch this one again friends. I really want to like this season more than I do.

I'm not really comparing it to S1 in my head either. The only comparison I've really conciously thought about is that the dialogue seems...different.

 

[bangbreh]

"Been Had" is classic hood broken Engrish. This season is still atrocious but shame on you for not knowin'. I'm finna go grab a next beer now.

i ain't from the hood breh, shyt just sounds silly to me
I finna let ya'll cook doe

 

[Squirrel from Meteor Man]

I'm gonna watch this one again friends. I really want to like this season more than I do.

I'm not really comparing it to S1 in my head either. The only comparison I've really conciously thought about is that the dialogue seems...different.

I saw an article justifying the weird (putting it nicely) dialogue and delivery by essentially saying "you have to think of True Detective as its own world" like that gives a license for people to sound so awful. Not really buying it. Everyone sounds so pretentious, like they truly believe that because they're in this show they can't sound like a normal human being or say normal human phrases.

 

[Nino Brown]

Needs more secret society murder mystery shyt added to the plot, we havent learnt anything new about any of the characters we didnt already know from episode 1, besides Colin's racist pops, but they keep elaborating on how fukked up they each are, fleshing out the same themes for dumb dumbs that didn't get it. Subtleties shouldn't be underestimated.

Plus the dialogue is not up to par.

Not much else on tv but it def needs improvement.

That being said I don't know how much more I can watch if they keep with this homo shyt

Get that shyt the fukk outta here

 

[Scottie Drippin]

Last night was the best episode thus far. They're fully on track now.

Worth noting that the first two were directed by Justlin Lin, director of Fast 3 through 6. Those eps definitely had his variety of characters just up and explaining through blunt monologues thinly disguised as conversation.

 

[Sensitive Blake Griffin]

Its better than Shawn Carter's vol 2 and 3. And better than Blueprint 2 as well as everything after Black album

Big Mel is a Cornmega stan lmao, he thinks mega is a GOAT level rapper take his opinion on hiphop seriously brehs

 

[TheGodling]

Last night was the best episode thus far. They're fully on track now.

Worth noting that the first two were directed by Justlin Lin, director of Fast 3 through 6. Those eps definitely had his variety of characters just up and explaining through blunt monologues thinly disguised as conversation.

He didn't write the episodes though. The direction was a lot sloppier this episode so Lin leaving did the show no favors so far.

 

[prophecypro]

still a kinda season

 

[fukkyalifestyle]

yoooooooo this shyt is based on a true story sorta, all the corruption in the town and all that.

Top managers for the city of Vernon, Calif., enjoyed pay and perks that outpaced some of the nation's top leaders.

It is one of a growing number of California municipalities confronting questionable practices by municipal employees.

Vernon has only 90 residents, but top city managers were earning an astounding $1.6 million per year with some fancy perks, including first-class air travel around the world and $800-a-night hotel rooms.

"For these city officials to be receiving salaries larger than the governor, larger than the president of the United States is absolutely unjustifiable," said Bob Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies.

The city's small homeowners association is outraged that their city leaders were living the high life, particularly in a town that recently laid off workers and cut health insurance because of budget problems.

At one angry council meeting, residents shouted, "Shame on you!"



More Cities See Exorbitant Pay by Managers
Vernon joins a growing list of California locales facing a payroll problem.

In neighboring Maywood and Bell, the Los Angeles Times uncovered shocking salaries.

In Bell, while 17 percent of the suburb's 40,000 residents were living under the poverty line, former City Manager Robert Rizzo was making nearly $800,000 a year while on the city payroll.

As if years of living well off Bell's taxpayers wasn't enough, Rizzo stands to earn $600,000 a year in retirement -- the highest pension for a public employee in the state of California.

Public outcry has led California Attorney General Jerry Brown to take action.

"We have a case where hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money has been paid out under completely suspicious circumstance," Brown said.





California Attorney General Launches Investigation in City Payrolls
Brown is heading an investigation not only into Rizzo's big payout, but also the salaries of two other city officials.

Former Police Chief Randy Adams and former Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia wereforced to resign along with Rizzo after the Los Angeles Times reported that their annual salaries were $457,000 and $376,288 respectively.

Residents have rallied city council members to take legal action against their high-rolling managers to get back millions of dollars.

The City Council itself was not exempt from high salaries, with some of its part-time workers receiving almost $100,000 a year.



Residents Pay for Payroll Expense
The Los Angeles Times also uncovered that Bell had the second-highest property taxes in Los Angeles County and overcharged by hundreds of thousands of dollars for sewage service.

The spending of taxpayer dollars drew from the residents of Bell, a blue-collar city whose median household income is $40,556 a year.

"They were bankrupting the residents," said Christina Garcia, a community activist. "People were unable to pay their taxes. We pay double what the city of Beverly Hills is paying."

"This is what has ravaged the city, because this city is poor and they don't know how to defend themselves," added Bell resident Steven Brown.

But the city is trying to fight back. In addition to the City Council announcing Friday its plans to subpoena the records of all highly paid managers, the California Public Employees' Retirement Fund confirmed its own investigation into former city officials' pension claims.

 

[fukkyalifestyle]

Another article

Until the Bell scandal, local government had largely escaped the disdain that voters reserve for Washington and Sacramento. Bell undermined confidence in the checks and balances that normally prevent a corrupt regime from maintaining control of a local entity.

Belatedly, the exposure of the Rizzo regime in Bell brought renewed scrutiny to the brazen corruption in adjacent Vernon, creating an opportunity to abolish an essentially criminal enterprise posing as a city government. Assembly Speaker John A. Perez has introduced a bill to unincorporate cities with fewer than 150 residents. There is only one in California: Vernon.

While residents and the media could plausibly claim ignorance of what was going on at Bell City Hall, Vernon has never made any pretense of normal governance. Founded as a family fiefdom, it has remained so for a century. John Leonis, Vernon's co-founder, served 45 years on its City Council. His grandson, Leonis Mahlberg, served 53.

If any real-life entity reflects the cynical manipulation of public institutions portrayed in the iconic movie "Chinatown," it is Vernon. The hereditary dons of the Vernon council serve for decades, jetting off on lavish "trade missions" to Asia, Europe and elsewhere at public expense. They ruthlessly suppress even the shadow of dissent, and rigorously control who is allowed to live in nearly every dwelling in the city. Bruce V. Malkenhorst at one time served simultaneously as Vernon's city manager, finance director, city clerk, redevelopment director, treasurer and chief of light and power, drawing the highest salary of any public official in California. After 33 years as city administrator, he passed the job to his son, Bruce V. Malkenhorst Jr. His annual pension payout of $509,664.60 remains the highest in the state.


Despite periodic indictments (the elder Malkenhorst is currently awaiting trial on charges of having misspent $60,000 of city money for golf trips, massages, meals and political contributions), Vernon has been largely ignored. A recent Times investigation detailed how the latest Vernon power broker, Eric Fresch, has raked in $7.5 million in salary and fees in the last five years. The 2,500 businesses that provide Vernon's huge tax base sometimes grumble over these excesses, but they have no voting power.

Vernon has survived for the same reasons Bell fell into the hands of predators: ruthlessness on the part of city officials and the facelessness of the victims. Those who control the city government have always displayed contempt for the opinions of outsiders. When three interlopers tried to register to vote using a warehouse address in 2006, the city cut off their utilities and hired armed security to shadow them around the clock. When the trio filed to run for office, Vernon canceled the election. It took a court order to force a vote and another to ensure the votes were fairly counted.

What's really protected Vernon all these decades is the disregard for the thousands who work in the city's factories each day but live outside Vernon's tightly controlled borders. The city has an assessed property tax base of $4.1 billion to support a population of 96. Next-door Bell has a tax base of $1.1 billion to support a population of 40,000, many of whom are employed in Vernon. The world was outraged when the South African apartheid regime segregated the urban black population into impoverished "Bantustans," cut off from the white-controlled commercial wealth. Why should we permit similar disparities in the heart of our region?

Vernon has 55 cops to patrol its streets, Bell just 38. Vernon could easily support high-quality public services for the half-dozen threadbare cities that surround it and provide the workers that sustain it, but instead the city lavishes huge salaries on a handful of municipal pirates.

Few care. The municipal soap operas of the immigrant-dominated cities of Southeast Los Angeles elicit ridicule but far too little empathy for the hardworking residents. That Vernon is allowed to steal the money that could fund libraries and parks is shrugged off. It's time to end this vestige of "Chinatown" cynicism. Vernon should be wiped off the map. The swiftest way to do that is to adopt Perez's bill and ensure it is signed by our next governor, Jerry Brown.

 

[fukkyalifestyle]

Last one, just google vernon california corruption tons of shyt comes up, truth is stranger than fiction

True Detective, via HBO
The second season of HBO's True Detective debuted on Sunday night. The show is set in Vinci, a small, corrupt town on the fringes of downtown Los Angeles, which is quite obviously based on the city of Vernon.

The season appears to be mining Vernon's colorful, century-long history of corruption in much the way that Chinatown mined the story of the L.A. Aqueduct. Neither one should be taken as a faithful historical account, but the parallels are obvious enough.

How obvious? Well, about 10 minutes into the first episode, there's a shot of a water tower that gives the whole thing away. This is Vernon's most recognizable landmark — a big, ugly, tan bulb planted alongside the L.A. River. The only difference is that in the show, the words have been changed from "City of Vernon" to "City of Vinci."

From there, it's easy to spot a number of other Vernon landmarks. The show establishes its gritty, industrial milieu with shots of a power plant, which happens to be the Vernon Light and Power facility. One of the main characters is Vinci Det. Ray Velcoro (played by Colin Farrell), who lives in a small house in the shadow of Vinci City Hall. That house is on Furlong Place in Vernon. The city owns it and all the other ones on that street, and it is indeed adjacent to Vernon City Hall.

Beyond that, the basic set-up of the two cities is pretty much the same. For more than a century, Vernon has been known as an "exclusively industrial" city, with rendering plants, cold-storage facilities, a slaughterhouse, and many other manufacturing and distribution businesses. About 50,000 people work there, but only 114 people live there.

In Vinci, the numbers are slightly different — 70,000 workers, 95 residents — but the idea is the same. There's a lot of money sloshing around, and not enough of an electorate to keep an eye on things. In Vernon, this resulted in a lot nepotism and inflated salaries and pensions. In Vinci, it leads to murder.

The first episode turns on the death of the Vinci city manager, which a trio of hard-bitten detectives come together to investigate. There's a loose parallel here with Eric Fresch, who was Vernon's city administrator and later worked as a consultant to Vernon Light and Power, the city-owned utility, making more than $1 million a year. He was forced to resign in 2012, and was found dead a month later at a Bay Area state park. While there was initial speculation he may have committed suicide, the death was eventually ruled an accident.

Fred MacFarlane, Vernon's spokesman, says the HBO production spent a couple of weeks shooting at locations in Vernon last year. The City Council doesn't mind the attention, he says, because they're big supporters of keeping entertainment jobs in the L.A. area.

MacFarlane doesn't think the show will hurt Vernon's image much, because so few people know anything about the city in the first place. He did, however, hasten to note that the show is fictional. "Even if it were fact-based, the cable TV show would be a depiction of a Vernon that no longer exists," he said.

Indeed, since Assembly Speaker John Perez nearly shut Vernon down in 2011, the city has undertaken sweeping reforms. Among other things, it capped council salaries, instituted term limits, and set aside millions of dollars for a "good neighbor" program to fund community projects in surrounding cities. The city has also brought in a developer to build a new 45-unit low-income housing complex, which will soon double the city's population.

Still, it's fun seeing all the parallels to real life. In the third episode, the detectives drop in on Vinci's mayor — at his mansion in Bel Air. "The mayor of Vinci lives in Bel Air?" one of them asks. Indeed, Vernon Mayor Leonis Malburg, who served on the council for 53 years, lived in a 7,000 square foot mansion in Hancock Park.

Vinci has so many similarities to Vernon that the differences become annoying. For instance, there are many moody shots of the Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange — where the 105 freeway meets the 110 — which is more than eight miles away from Vernon. The show often cuts to aerial views of Tesoro oil refinery, which is almost 20 miles away in Carson.

As one of the characters says in the second episode, "What is this fukking place?"

Good question.