“Medieval” Diseases Flare as Unsanitary Living Conditions Proliferate

Typhus and other infectious illnesses hit homeless communities

“The diseases have flared as the nation’s homeless population has grown in the past two years: About 553,000 people were homeless at the end of 2018, and nearly one-quarter of homeless people live in California.”

Source: “Medieval” Diseases Flare as Unsanitary Living Conditions Proliferate – Scientific American

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By Anna Gorman, Kaiser Health News

March 15, 2019

Typhus and other infectious illnesses hit homeless communities

Credit: Frederic J. Brown Getty Images

 

Jennifer Millar keeps trash bags and hand sanitizer near her tent, and she regularly pours water mixed with hydrogen peroxide on the sidewalk nearby. Keeping herself and the patch of concrete she calls home clean is a top priority.

But this homeless encampment off a Hollywood freeway ramp is often littered with needles and trash, and soaked in urine. Rats occasionally scamper through, and Millar fears the consequences.

“I worry about all those diseases,” said Millar, 43, who said she has been homeless most of her life.

Infectious diseases—some that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages—are resurging in California and around the country, and are hitting homeless populations especially hard.

Los Angeles recently experienced an outbreak of typhus—a disease spread by infected fleas on rats and other animals—in downtown streets. Officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building.

People in Washington state have been infected with Shigella bacteria, which is spread through feces and causes the diarrheal disease shigellosis, as well as Bartonella quintana, which spreads through body lice and causes trench fever.

Hepatitis A, also spread primarily through feces, infected more than 1,000 people in Southern California in the past two years. The disease also has erupted in New Mexico, Ohio and Kentucky, primarily among people who are homeless or use drugs.

Public health officials and politicians are using terms like “disaster” and “public health crisis” to describe the outbreaks, and they warn that these diseases can easily jump beyond the homeless population.

“Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public health crisis,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in his State of the State speech in February, citing outbreaks of hepatitis A in San Diego County, syphilis in Sonoma County and typhus in Los Angeles County.

“Typhus,” he said. “A medieval disease. In California. In 2019.”

The diseases have flared as the nation’s homeless population has grown in the past two years: About 553,000 people were homeless at the end of 2018, and nearly one-quarter of homeless people live in California.

The diseases spread quickly and widely among people living outside or in shelters, fueled by sidewalks contaminated with human feces, crowded living conditions, weakened immune systems and limited access to health care.

“The hygiene situation is just horrendous” for people living on the streets, said Dr. Glenn Lopez, a physician with St. John’s Well Child & Family Center, who treats homeless patients in Los Angeles County. “It becomes just like a Third World environment where their human feces contaminate the areas where they are eating and sleeping.”

Those infectious diseases are not limited to homeless populations, Lopez warned. “Even someone who believes they are protected from these infections are not.”

At least one Los Angeles city staffer said she contracted typhus in City Hall last fall. And San Diego County officials warned in 2017 that diners at a well-known restaurant were at risk of hepatitis A.

There were 167 cases of typhus from Jan. 1, 2018, through Feb. 1 of this year, up from 125 in 2013 and 13 in 2008, according to the California Public Health Department.

Typhus is a bacterial infection that can cause a high fever, stomach pain and chills but can be treated with antibiotics. Outbreaks are more common in overcrowded and trash-filled areas that attract rats.

The recent typhus outbreak began last fall, when health officials reported clusters of the flea-borne disease in downtown Los Angeles and Compton. They also have occurred in Pasadena, where the problems are likely due to people feeding stray cats carrying fleas.

Last month, the county announced another outbreak in downtown Los Angeles that infected nine people, six of whom were homeless. After city workers said they saw rodent droppings in City Hall, Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson briefly shut down his office to rip up the rugs, and he also called for an investigation and more cleaning.

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20% Of California Community College Student Are Homeless, Study Finds

Source: 20% Of California Community College Student Are Homeless, Study Finds | Zero Hedge

http://www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden

Mon, 03/11/2019

Sadly, we can’t say we’re surprised.

Driven by the high costs of higher education and the absurdly high cost of living in California, a recent survey revealed a stunning figure: Nearly 20% of Community College students in America’s most populous state are homeless.

Whether they’re sleeping in their cars, or crashing on couches, or are among the growing number of California’s “unsheltered” homeless, some 19% responded to a survey of community college students saying they either didn’t have a place to live, or were simply crashing or living in their vehicles.

What’s worse, instead of seeking out shelter in one of California’s many homeless shelters (which we’ve heard are fantastic environments for fostering academic curiosity), many students are simply “too proud” to do this.

Here’s more on that study from 24/7 Wall Street:

Community colleges are two-year education institutions meant to provide affordable degrees for people who have usually graduated high school but have not enrolled in schools which can give them a four-year college degree. They are often known as junior colleges. In one state, nearly 20% of the students enrolled in these schools are homeless.

There are 1,167 community colleges in the U.S. according to the American Association of Community Colleges. The enrollment in these institutions is more than 12.4 million students. Almost half of all undergraduate students in the United States attend community colleges. Homelessness among students at these institutions is prevalent.

In California, the number is extraordinarily large. Nineteen percent of attendees in the largest state by population are homeless. California is among the states with the most unshelterd homeless.  It also has several four-year colleges where applications are on the rise.

A study by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University’s College of Education in Philadelphia, polled almost 20,000 students at 57 colleges in California. The data was collected during the fall semesters of 2016 and 2018. The report’s lead author Sara Goldrick-Rab told the Mercury News if the information is projected across all of California, it yields the 19% number. She added, “Only 6 percent of students said they were homeless,. The other 13 percent indicated their homelessness by saying where they stayed.”

Community college is inexpensive in most cases compared with four-year institutions. However, that does not mean it is affordable for everyone. According to the Community College Review, among public community colleges, the annual tuition for in-state students is $4,835 per year. For out of state students, the figure rises to $8,594. The data from the study cover 2018 and 2019.

Among the reasons that students do not turn to shelters which are available is that people who consider themselves relatively well educated sometimes have problems admitting to others they are homeless. Goldrick-Rab commented, “And many students don’t go to shelters because these are well-educated people who don’t want to be stigmatized.”

Proposed solutions, at least in California, are for more state support of these students. They also might be supported, financially and in terms of food and housing, by local communities. In the meantime, a number of nearly 20% is high enough that finding a solution for most of these people will take a very long time.

* * *

Of course, maybe if California’s stringent energy-efficiency laws didn’t make building homes in the state roughly 3x more expensive than the national median, there wouldn’t be a housing-shortage crisis, and valuations for existing homes wouldn’t be so high.

California’s Wildfires Are Exposing the Rotten Core of Capitalism

It’s going to get weirder from here.

http://www.vice.com

by Lauren Lee White

Nov 16 2018

Left Image: Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. (Photo by Chesnot/WireImage) Right Image: Megan and Matthew Saxton (photo courtesy the Saxton family)

Around 2 AM last Friday, a neighbor knocked on Megan and Matthew Saxton’s door. It was time to go.

The previous day, the Woolsey fire had begun charting a path of destruction along the Pacific coast of southern California. In Malibu and nearby affluent enclaves, the fire has so far devoured more than 98,000 acres and over 600 structures, killing at least three. Some residents, most infamously Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, were able to call in a private army of firefighters to save their properties. Many others were lucky to escape the state’s latest bout of flames with their lives—the Camp fire, simultaneously raging in northern California’s Butte County, is the deadliest in state history with over 60 fatalities to date and well over 10,000 structures eviscerated.

The Saxtons, both 31, lived with their three sons at the Seminole Springs mobile home park in an unincorporated piece of LA county land off Mulholland Highway. They recalled buying their mobile home and a lot in the park for a combined $420,000 in 2016—not the cheapest spot in town, but a far cry from the neighboring Malibu mansions that go for millions.

There were no official evacuation orders when they were woken in the middle of the night, but the air was getting smoky and they decided better safe than sorry. After grabbing some photo albums and the kids, the Saxtons drove north to stay with Megan’s brother in Thousand Oaks, figuring they’d be home soon to inspect the damage.

They soon found out through the NextDoor app that more than half of the mobile home park had burned. A few days later, Matthew went to the park to see the damage for himself and their worst fears were confirmed: Their home was gone.

The Saxtons were lucky enough to have an insurance policy—it was required as part of their mortgage, they explained. But the policy won’t cover the full cost of rebuilding, they noted, and the soonest they expected to rebuild was a year from now. “We were a middle-class neighborhood in the middle of the canyon, an affordable gem in the middle of all these really expensive homes,” Matthew said.

Natural disasters typically have the most devastating effects on those with the fewest resources. A 2016 UN report on the nexus of wealth inequality and climate change found that the two were locked in a vicious and increasingly terrifying cycle: “…the disadvantaged groups suffer disproportionate loss of income and assets (physical, financial, human and social) when these hazards actually hit them. Consequently, inequality worsens, and the cycle perpetuates with greater force.”

“No matter what the kind of natural disaster, whether it’s flooding or wind damage or fire, the biggest burden of the longest duration falls on the already-poor,” David Lodge, director of Cornell University’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, told me.

In addition to the immediate threats to life and limb that come with any severe natural disaster, there may be a temporary period of homelessness or unemployment that can send someone on the brink of poverty over the edge. Without adequate insurance, savings to rebuild, or a reliable social safety net in place, what Lodge has called “the human face of policy-induced suffering” is revealed.

And with the current trajectory of increasing weather disasters, that suffering is likely to grow. In addition to the spectacular events of the last few years—the current spate of fires in California, January’s wildfire-related mudslides in Montecito, the 2017 hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria—at least 99.7 percent of all US counties have incurred significant property damage from natural hazards since 2000. Between the 1960s and the 2000s, the yearly average of financial loss attributable to disasters (per capita) in the US soared from about $25 to about $80, adjusting for inflation.

Junia Howell and James R. Elliott, sociologists who study social inequality, try to look away from the spectacle and find out what happens after the reporters leave Malibu, or Houston, or New Orleans. Their longitudinal study of how natural hazards impact wealth inequality in the US was motivated by the reality that “these events keep happening,” as Elliott explained to me. “This is not a California problem, this is not a Texas problem, this is not a Florida problem. It’s an American problem.”

It’s obviously also a global problem. Still, understanding the specifics even within American states can help show the bigger picture. So how might this worsening of economic inequality play out in the Los Angeles and Ventura county regions where the Woolsey fire continued to rage Friday?

Lodge suggested thinking of the archetypal Malibu mansion as a small business that employed a staff of service workers.

“While their homes are perhaps not harmed by the fire, their place of employment is destroyed,” he pointed out. “The consequences for them may be almost as severe as if their own homes were destroyed if they’re living on the edge, as many service workers are already, even without a disaster.”

Elliott offered a broader view, pointing to the ways disaster damage to property can affect inequality over time. “If you’re a low-income resident in Los Angeles, even if your property wasn’t directly affected, there can be these indirect knock-on effects for lower-income and middle-income people either because of supply potential going down in housing, or disruptions in work just giving you general precarity,” he said. For California residents, one of these indirect effects might prove to be astronomical utility bills, as Pacific Gas and Electric Company has struggled to stay afloat in the wake of unprecedented wildfire damage.

Of course, like the Saxtons, not everyone directly affected or displaced by the Woolsey fire is a Malibu millionaire. For those in the humbler neighborhoods affected, or for those who bought decades ago before the local real estate market became too hot for most to handle, rebuilding may not be an option. One measure of the fallout will be gauged by following how many of these residents end up having to put more geographical and social distance between themselves and their elite former neighbors.

Elliott predicted that number would be high. “The more costly the event, the more inequality in wealth is going to emerge over time,” he told me. “Given the amount of property damage there, that would be our expectation for Southern California.”

To some extent, good policies can mitigate effects of the disaster-inequality crises. Local government can carefully consider where people are allowed to build or rebuild, for example, keeping in mind whether it’s fair for taxpayers to subsidize homes and businesses in areas that are frequently flooded or burned, as Lodge suggested. Or they could earmark funds for affordable housing or rental assistance for those whose homes weren’t directly impacted by a disaster, but who have suffered economically from the fallout, as Elliott offered.

Or we could yield to the increasingly popular oligarch model of billionaire-owned newsrooms and individuals with more wealth than the bottom half of the US, and directly ask some of the better-off Malibu residents to spread some wealth to less-visible casualties of the Woolsey fire.

For the Saxtons, the future seemed shaky. Their property now “looks like the landscape of the moon,” Matthew said, and they expected its value to plummet. They figured they’d need to rebuild and stay there for four or five years just to break even on their original investment, and that they’d have to find a way to cover the difference between the cost of their new mobile home and what their insurance would pay them. Matthew worked at an office in Malibu, and when we spoke earlier this week, he was waiting to find out once the evacuation orders were lifted whether the building* remained.

Against a broader backdrop of accelerating political chaos and routine mass shootings—including one that left 13 dead in Thousand Oaks, where the Saxtons took refuge, just hours before the Woolsey fire forced residents to evacuate—an increasingly dystopian reality loomed. Though the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said there has been no looting in Malibu, singer Pink’s husband Carey Hart posted a photo to Instagram on Tuesday of a group of gun-toting, masked men bearing a sign that read “LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SITE!” Another Instagram feed with the handle @prayformalibu posted a photo of a similar sign: “Welcome 2 Point Dume Looters get bullets Fireman get hugs.”

At a moment when asking what really stands between Americans and civil war is not entirely unreasonable, addressing “wealth inequality is an issue not only of fairness,” as Lodge noted, but also critical to maintaining social stability.

*Correction 11/16/2018: A previous version of this story suggested Matthew Saxton was concerned about his job, when in fact he was worried solely about the office building in which he worked. We regret the error.

Apocalypse Now: California Fires 2018

Unusual phenomenon captured in video of California fire

This marks just one of the many anomalies captured on video pertaining to the California fires.

Source: Unusual phenomenon captured in video of California fire

With permission from

Intellihub.com

November 12, 2018

A rather unusual phenomenon was captured in an up-close video of one of the current California wildfires in which a fiery-electric-looking pilar of intense heat can be seen supercharging the massive blaze.

ABC 7 News reporter Laura Anthony posted footage of the Camp Fire to her Twitter page last Friday showing what she is calling a ‘fire devil’ which is essentially a ‘fire whirl.’

Some online conspiracy theorists believe there is much more to the recent fires and are even going as far as to say that “directed energy weapons” a.k.a. “DEWs” are to blame.

Melted cars, wheels, engine blocks, blown out neighborhoods, they all look suspicious as renown MMA fighter Eddie Bravo pointed out on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in which he appeared on Saturday.

“There are some crazy people out there saying they are being started by some sort of directed energy weapons,” the Jujitsu master explained. “I don’t know that’s what the crazy people are saying.”

“There’s just a lot of weird shit out there like houses like you can see house, house, house completely leveled and all the trees around them nothing wrong the trees at all,” Bravo said.  “Weird. Just weird shit like that.”

Bill Proposal in California Targets Those Who Torture ‘Targeted Individuals’

When German soldiers used the “I was just following orders” defense during the Nuremberg trials as a justification for heinous war crimes, it was established that “defense of superior orders” is not a defense for war crimes. As Nuremberg Principle IV states, The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior […]

Source: Bill Proposal in California Targets Those Who Torture ‘Targeted Individuals’ – Collective Evolution

http://www.collective-evolution.com

By Richard Enos

November 13, 2018

In Brief

• The Facts:Dr. Tomo Shibata has proposed a Bill to members of the California legislature entitled ‘The Organized Torture Act,’ which seeks to criminalize many of the types of attacks that are clandestinely made on Targeted Individuals.
• Reflect On:How does making each individual in society culpable for their immoral and illegal actions, despite the pressure brought to bear on them to do these acts by their authority, help to liberate us as a collective?

When German soldiers used the “I was just following orders” defense during the Nuremberg trials as a justification for heinous war crimes, it was established that “defense of superior orders” is not a defense for war crimes. As Nuremberg Principle IV states,

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Now, Human Rights Analyst Dr. Tomo Shibata would like this form of culpability governing war crimes extended to all those who are participating or are complicit in the ‘Organized Torture’ of Targeted Individuals, which involves a multiplicity of tactics and processes including gangstalking, intimidation, surveillance, and directed Electronic Weapons attacks. Dr. Shibata views these acts at least on a par with war crimes if not even more insidious in their nature and intent. She maintains that, “The proposed bill titled the ‘Organized Torture Act’ declares that Organized Covert Torture is a Crime against Humanity.”

The Targeting Phenomenon

If you are not familiar with the phenomenon of Targeted Individuals, I would like to point you to my previous articles on the subject, ‘Targeted Individuals Need The Awakening Community To Believe Their Stories,’ and ‘Meet A “Targeted Individual” – Woman Shares Her Experience With Directed Energy Weapons & More.’

A comprehensive article by Ramola Dharmaraj covering the genesis of Dr. Shibata’s Bill Proposal helps us better understand the phenomenon:

This proposal was made, Dr. Shibata states, on the basis of complaints to human rights groups from high numbers of residents across California from various cities including San Diego, Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and others, of “organized covert torture” whereby, in lieu of outright abduction, victims are kept under constant control of the covert torture organizations by organized stalking, sustained surreptitious monitoring, cyberstalking, and stealth physical assault and battery with radiation weaponry such as microwave/radar surveillance weapons. Different sources offer varying estimates, running into hundreds of thousands, of the numbers of organized covert torture victims often labeled “Targeted Individuals” within the USA and around the world.

Why this particular form of crime is so insidious is that victims are often unaware that such intentional activities are being performed on them, and as these crimes often involved a concerted combination of physiological, social, mental and emotional attacks carried out clandestinely, the victim is often left in a state of isolation, to deal with feelings of paranoia and doubts about their own sanity.

If any type of crime needed the attention of the general and awakening public it is this one, as a growing awareness and acknowledgment of this phenomenon is absolutely essential to bring solace to the victims as well as empowering them to find ways to overcome these attacks. Dr. Shibata’s initiative is an important avenue for this, and it is why she needs to be supported by the public in this endeavor, especially in California where interested legislators are looking for signs that there is a public need and demand for this bill before tabling it in the legislature.

Who Is Doing The Targeting?

Here is where it gets complex, and for good reason. It’s hard to know who is calling the shots here. In all likelihood, the technology and organization that make these covert attacks possible and prevent any resistance from the citizenry comes directly from the secretive bowels of the Deep State and those areas of the Military-Industrial Complex that this group has infiltrated. Certainly this power has been around for a long time, as John F. Kennedy clearly identified back in 1961:

We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. (source)

And as technology has improved, and remote influence has become more powerful and accurate, it appears that one growing cog of the Deep State’s strategy of domination and enslavement is to experiment on individuals, not in laboratories as they did with MK Ultra experiments that ultimately led to citizens successfully suing the government for damages, but in the course of individuals’ normal lives, while they smugly observe our inability to clearly detect and understand what is going on.

Whistleblower Testimony

We do have brave whistleblowers who have come out to help us see some pieces of the puzzle. One is former FBI Special Agent Geral Sosbee, who spoke with Ramola:

Former FBI Special Agent and Whistleblower Geral Sosbee testified that he believed the FBI leads the process to wrongfully name people Suspected Terrorists or criminals and centrally command DHS Fusion Center contractors and local police to commit and condone the organized stalking and organized covert torture with stealth weapons against them.

Geral Sosbee stated that it was his “personal opinion–based on also my professional experience–that the FBI is spearheading the most colossal and evil attacks on people ever conceived on the face of the Earth, and they are using Deep Space-based technology, they are using Bio-Chemical Bio Warfare Elements and Agents, and they’re using Psychological Warfare to destroy people.”

Further, Mr. Sosbee testifies that the FBI operate as a global Mafia syndicate; historic analyses of how CIA and FBI operate have shown that they incorporate elements of the Mafia, gangs, and criminal networks in informant, infiltration, and entrapment operations. (source,  source)

“I have learned through my battles with FBI that the agents, operatives, hoodlums, thugs and murderers are the essence of all FBI operations, even though the FBI puts on a charade of semi respectability on popular media. The FBI is in reality a global MAFIA syndicate and most people fear or idolize them.”

In an article describing how the FBI persuades corrupt Federal Magistrate Judges (FMJ) to issue fraudulent court orders against people of integrity and whistleblowers they wish to destroy by making them targets of Fusion Center Surveillance and stealth-weapon “monitoring,” Sosbee describes how local police become pawns in this mission:

“All police and all private security companies are especially reminded not to interfere with the secret orders of a FMJ. With any effort to defend the Target against the order, the licensed investigator or police officer loses his license or is fired through contempt orders.”

The Reason Individual Conspirators Need To Be Held Accountable

There are other testimonies from former agents, politicians, and military people, but the reason I bring up Sosbee’s testimony is for how it paints a picture of the hierarchical web of complicity that makes these operations possible. Law enforcement, fusion center contractors, criminals and even some members of the general public can be complicit in the enterprise. Thus a hierarchical chain-of-command leading upwards into the most secretive and protected bowels of the Deep State means it is nearly impossible for us to get to the head of the snake.

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San Francisco or Mumbai? UN envoy encounters homeless life in California

So sad.

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http://www.theguardian.com

Leilani Farha, UN special rapporteur on adequate housing, says ‘unacceptable’ squalor amid US wealth violates rights law

Alastair Gee in San Francisco and Oakland

Mon 22 Jan 2018

 

Leilani Farha was being given a walking tour in central San Francisco. Near a thronged artisanal grocery store and a food-truck park, she saw something under a freeway that gave her pause.

A young homeless man sat on the ground. He wore two pairs of jeans and had a hood pulled over his long brown hair. Before him was a crockpot filled with burning paper, over which he was heating tortillas in a dirty skillet. As cars, cyclists and tech commuter buses rushed past, white smoke poured into the darkening air.

https://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/2017/02/outside-in-america/embed.html

“The last time I saw cooking on a sidewalk,” Farha said, “was in Mumbai.”

Farha, 49, is a Canadian lawyer. She is also the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, charged with probing deplorable living conditions and assessing compliance with international human rights law. Her latest project is a report on “informal settlements” – shanties, favelas, tent cities – which will be presented at the UN general assembly.

In Mexico City, she spent time in a slum by a railway line. In Manila and Jakarta, she visited decrepit and makeshift houses. San Francisco has a median home value of $1.3m and would seem an incongruous next stop. Farha had come on an unofficial visit, at the invitation of academics and advocates.

“The situation is unacceptable in light of the wealth of the country,” she said, adding that she was “deeply, deeply concerned” by the homelessness she saw.

Poverty in the US is an established UN focus; last month, another rapporteur was dismayed by visits to Skid Row in Los Angeles and hookworm-afflicted deep south communities.

In 2011, a UN representative visited Sacramento. After discovering that homeless people were defecating into plastic bags, the official wrote to the city’s mayor. Such circumstances, she said, could amount to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.

‘It’s structural’

A journey through a land of extreme poverty: welcome to America

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