@Cassiodorus
The Bagelry still sells day olds. Food not Bombs still feeds people. The shut down has eliminated their sourse of panhandling. The city is moving them back onto the streets which will make more of them likely to catch the virus. Rent will be due putting more on the streets. ucsc is shut down as is the jr college. We are one of the few counties that have kept our numbers down and are open. Many people coming here To the beaches without masks. More local people are wearing masks but not enough. Watsonville has the most cases in the county. Dunno. Sun shines. That’s good.

Take good care and have a good one.

And its tiny cadre of super-rich beneficiaries. You can see the end-result of such a government in the titanic struggles of the "Tax Amazon" movement in Seattle, the end-goal of which is to subject Jeff Bezos to a tax.

The Bagelry had those bags of day-old bagels, which once provided me with a steady source of cheap carbohydrates. I could also get carbs from Food Not Bombs, which served on the weekends. I avoided the St. Francis Catholic Kitchen, if it still exists. To deal with irritable bowel syndrome, I supplemented everything with a daily dose of eggs, cooked on a portable stove in my car at one of the beaches west of town or, if I was feeling daring, in the parking lot at the south end of the Capitola Mall.

I have no idea what it's like now.

@Lookout
Thanks for the links. There is a lot going on here with sustainability. I havd b posted ljj in nks a few times. The world wide web of micro entities is real. There is so much we could with this if everyone would work together.

Take good care and have a good one.

Wishing you the best organizing your community. Just heard some virologist talking about less accurate cheap quick turn around testing. That could be helpful. The US response to COVID reinforces the idea that we are better off organizing and doing things ourselves.

Simple education would be helpful. Vitamin D is important especially for POC. Masks are important. Being outside is safer than being inside. And to me the big silence on healthy diets enforced by the food industry.

Caught an interesting piece yesterday "Are cows the cause or cure of climate change?"
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne4jHo6oGUs]

and just noticed a follow up conversation on agriculture which I have not seen...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0edAkQlC6k

Again good luck with your ambitious project!

@lotlizard
The dems are searching for ways to beef up their Black vote because of K West who is clearly trying to take a bite out of it. The whole thing is a joke imho.

Thanks. Take good care and have a good one.

Democrats will never choose transformative change – so give them no choice (Black Agenda Report)

Racial capitalism has undergone many crises, in the U.S. and globally, and outlived them. As a political economy, it is in its late stage, moribund and incapable of reversing its accelerating decline. But its ruling classes — even when catastrophically split and behaving self-destructively, as has been the case for the past four years — are not the least bit threatened with loss of power, much less their heads. Indeed, no significant social forces are even proposing to nationalize the banks, or to socialize any significant sectors of the economy. And even much of “Black Lives Matter” (the actual organization, with 14 chapters in the U.S.) has failed to actively support community control of the police, the only proposal that puts popular security in the hands of the people, not the agents of white supremacy and the corporate duopoly. That’s how we make the streets of our communities safe for organizing.

There is no political crisis for the ruling order, unless ending that rule is on the agenda of significant social forces. Yet Black people, the (now recognized) leading edge of the current upheaval and the most left-leaning, peace-loving, socialist-minded constituency in the nation, remain locked in the lethal embrace of the corporate duopoly through the Democratic Party, which is hegemonic in Black America.

Three-quarters of the 50 Black full-voting members of the U.S. House ought to be on Black Lives Matters’ shit list (the organization’s and the wider movement’s) as Class A Enemies of the People, based on their votes for the 2018 legislation that made cops a protected class and assault on police a federal hate crime. Black Democrats have for nearly half a century been the hands-on managers of mass Black incarceration, gentrification and austerity in Black America. They don’t give a damn about Africa, including the slaughter of six million Congolese at the hands of U.S. client regimes — the worst genocide since World War Two. They stand (or kneel) with Nancy Pelosi, who keeps the nation and world safe for the oligarchy.

@Snode
At least for this week, I'm okay. It's pretty grim and no way outta here that I can see. Bleak.

Still, i hope that somehow this idea can move forward.

Take good care and have a good one.

I see more and more Trump signs...banners... going up from people that I thought I knew. Sometimes it seems like the only way out is with bazookas and guillotines. Oh well, maybe Europe will send us peons some foreign aid.

@enhydra lutris
Yes, thanks, the University is a great resource. They are not in session this fall except for a few labs and things. I will make some calls and see if I can get any traction. Maybe, maybe not. People are already buried in so many ways. And they all have there little piece of work that they are focusing on. Will they understand the overarching urgency?

Take good care and have a good one.

here this morning, but I wish you well and wish you success. The one thing that came to mind, especially when contemplating literally building a hospital or other care facility, whether building out inside some existing structure, or putting one up from scratch was to be sure to think of all the ways to utilize your special asset - the University. Except for periods like that part of the eighties that spawned Generation Reagan, there's a lot of talent there covering a ton of disciplines, running around with all the latest ideas and tech and very likely looking for a live laboratory in which to try some of them out. Unruly, but still a resource. (Of course, I'm sure that you know that from your prior campaigns, I just drifted off into hospital=>urban planning+environmental design+architecture+etc.== make sure to see what rabbits the kids up at Wurster Hall (here at UCB) could maybe pull out of a hat).

be well and have a good one.

@Marie
Great comment. It is amazing what China did in response to the virus and they are still doing things.

My point with the rapid-response of building a hospital in two weeks is that we should be doing that now for communities.

Not building hospitals per se, but building an infrastructure to take care of people as the current one disintegrates.

The question in my mind in how. I think that the sanctuary model is viable. The real question now is whether we can get people to buy in. If others get it as clearly as Ernestina did then it is possible. She will be the one speaking to people she knows in her community.

The progressive organizers I have worked with here are more involved in their own groups so I will be surprised if anything can happen.

Take good care and have a good one.

will know all the considerations that went into China's medical and government decisions on the coronavirus. Or I should say ongoing considerations and decisions as the situation and knowledge developed. However, it's not a mystery as to why a new hospital was quickly constructed. It goes back to a decision made within the first few days of January when they didn't know what they were dealing with and made the decision to try to limit the spread. All COVID-19 patients were transferred to one Wuhan hospital and none of the other hospitals could accept COVID-19 patients. When the COVID-19 hospital became full, they appropriated large public spaces for makeshift hospitals. As they neared full capacity, they built a new hospital which was also expected to be temporary. At some point, severely ill patients were treated in fully equipped hospitals and those requiring a low level of care were treated in temporary facilities.

40,000 medical workers from other parts of China were sent to Wuhan. Hotels were appropriated for when they were off-duty and all of them were isolated during those hours. They didn't lose a single one of those 40,0000 workers (don't know if any contracted the virus, but if any did, they were identified quickly and the numbers were low). They also worked exclusively in the COVID-19 facilities; so, they wouldn't infect the medical staff and patients in the non-COVID-19 hospitals.

Early on testing was used to confirm the infection of people that were ill and used as a guide as to what medical facility they should be placed in. IOW, those with COVID-19 didn't expose non-COVID-19 patients to the virus. Mass testing and contact tracing weren't feasible at that time, but the lockdown reduced the community spread and limited new infections to those living with others and they were informed of the symptoms to be aware of. Daily temperature checks by volunteers for those living in high rise apartments was introduced within a few weeks.

Overall, it was a massive effort in containment and suppression of the virus. The opposite of a 'herd immunity' strategy. From the earliest stage - late December 2019 - China tackled the issue of 41 very ill and medically unique patients from unknown cause from three directions and acted accordingly to the information gathered:

1) Public health - informed WHO, closed the seafood market because several patients had shopped there in the days before they became ill.

2) Medical - separate these patients from others. Use available standard treatments.

3) Science - what it the unknown agent.

#3 was able to move the fastest. The virus was sequenced. Confirmed the clinical assessment that it was unique and a test for the virus was developed. #2 patients weren't recovering and healthcare workers were getting sick suggesting person-to-person transmission. Person-to-person transmission was confirmed by the third week in January. #1 immediately acted on that. They didn't sit around debating Ro (at that stage it wasn't less than 1), the percentage of those infected that wouldn't become that ill (no data existed then for that proposition), the percentage of those that would die, or how soon a treatment cure and vaccine would become available. They assumed the worst case scenario and acted on that at every stage and in light of all new additional information.

Meanwhile, from 25 Jan on major voices in the west took this as an opportunity to bash China. Wild animal markets and "wet" markets were used as symbols of the backwardness of the Chinese; not recognizing that China had closed a Wuhan seafood market on 3 January and by the end of January had determined that it wasn't the virus vector. The lockdowns were symbols of fascist communism and not rational public health measures for an infectious virus with no medical cure. Then came the "it's no worse than a normal flu;" a symbol that China is medically backwards. The China bashing continued to develop (China hid the virus and had hidden its true infection and death numbers) as western governments and medical communities sat on their asses assuming the very best scenario. (Fauci's claimed lie (it could have been ignorance) about the effectiveness of 100% use of face masks will for me always rank up their with Colin Powell's WMD lies.)

Medical treatment may have improved since the early days and possibly reduced the death rate. Still no cure. Still infectious. Some people are still getting very ill. Some people continue to die. Much still remains unknown. Some people still think Trump is a great POTUS.

A potential unknown is morbidity. The rate of long-term and lifelong disability from the infection. By containing and suppressing the virus, China has minimized that potential. We here in the US will hope for the best case scenario on this as well.