Watson: Los Angeles is a Shit hole (13 min)

Oh me Gad, he is right. The whole LA thing is starting to look like a scene from the movie “Idiocracy”.

Extreme poverty, medieval diseases, plagues, and obscene wealth inequality, is this where the USA is heading under Agent Orange? To be fair, we can’t blame all on the Trumpster as this is merely the continuation of countless fake corrupt politicians.

No worries. According to some, the San Andreas fault is about to be active again.  A coming natural disaster is coming soon. Earthquakes, tsunamis, medieval contagious diseases, zombies (see people on Spice), extreme wealth inequality…

Why do people live there? It’s biblical people, get out of there!

 

Medieval Art Humor

The Los Angeles Disease Renaissance: Typhoid and Typhus Make A Comeback

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Sarah Cowgill via LibertyNation.com,

Sat, 06/08/2019

As the homeless population in Los Angeles grows, so does the unfortunate revival of many third world diseases…

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through Los Angeles to stem the rising tide of homelessness, a resurgence of medieval diseases has the city – and neighboring states – on edge. Typhoid fever and typhus, borne by fleas, body lice, and feces, are turning the once glitzy and glamorous city into a third-world worthy environment.

Yes, Typhoid Mary is back, in a sense, living on the streets and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting people in the Golden State.

These diseases, along with an uptick in tuberculosis, hepatitis A, and staph, are easily and rapidly spread and have wide-reaching consequences. They’re highly contagious and can infect anyone through casual contact.

Typhoid fever

An LAPD officer was recently diagnosed with typhoid, and several other city employees are exhibiting the classic symptoms of high fever, muscle pain, and weakness.  Left untreated, the disease can be fatal – and let’s face it: The malady wiped out entire populations during the Dark Ages and took a heavy toll on American Civil War soldiers and early American settlers.  Some historians blame the malaise for obliterating the Jamestown settlement.

Where The Heck Did They Come From?

Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority recently released a report showing 59,000 people living on the streets in Los Angeles County – a 12% increase since 2018 – with 36,300 of them within the city limits of Los Angeles.  The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), reports that “California accounted for 30% of all people experiencing homelessness as individuals” throughout the United States.

The progress of these once eradicated and near eradicated diseases is so alarming that the politicians who once spent copious amounts of time covering up the warts and putrid pustules in their liberally run cities and state are now showing disbelief and disgust.

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) broke his silence during his state of the state speech in February: “Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public-health crisis. Typhus, a medieval disease. In California. In 2019.”

Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti (D), who many believed would be a 2020 presidential contender, calls the crisis, “the biggest heartbreak for me and my city.”  Garcetti campaigned extensively for the initiative known as Proposition HHH, which designated $1.2 billion over the next ten years to build homeless housing.  But now residents are howling about the pricey plan’s abject failure.  One local L.A. news outlet polled residents and found that “Forty-five percent said it’s failing, with 18 percent saying it’s a complete failure.”

Voters passed Propositions 47 (2014) and 57 (2016), downgrading theft and drug offenses to misdemeanors and redefining many felonies from violent to nonviolent to release a horde of inmates – some addicted to drugs and suffering from now untreated mental illness.

And they wonder why there are so many people on the streets living, sleeping, and breathing surrounded by urine-soaked sidewalks and piles of human feces?  And, of course, they don’t have to show symptoms to carry and transfer these diseases – simple casual contact from a carrier will do just fine.

Asymptomatic Mary Mallon was presumed to have infected over 50 people between 1907 and 1915, yet never experienced a day of sickness.  She died under quarantine – from complications of a stroke, not typhoid.  Her body was cremated and her ashes interred, but her legacy as Typhoid Mary lives on.

What’s The Plan?

Garcetti is doubling down on his homeless housing project, but his highest hurdle is his choice for building sites.  It seems no Angeleno wants drugs, typhus, and hepatitis bubbling and festering on their own block.  A short story made long, aside from Proposition HHH, there is no solid plan to curb the worsening rotting of Los Angeles.

There is a long-held belief that two American presidents succumbed to Typhoid.  The ninth Commander in Chief, William Henry Harrison, is remembered to have died of pneumonia after only 31 days in office, but recent studies suggest he likely died from typhoid.  Number 12, President Zachary Taylor, was most likely felled from the disease as well – due to the unsanitary conditions in the Swamp in the mid-19th century.

Ironically, the only thing that seems to have changed in Washington D.C. is that the deadly infections are in the heart and soul and not the body of the toadies on the Hill.

Here we are in the throes of the 21st century with running water, inoculations for just about every known malady of the last millennia, and welfare programs to heal the poorest of our citizens.  Yet Los Angeles remains a hot, malodorous, infectious mess – and it could be spreading toward a city near you.

Kunstler: America’s Not Going Socialist, It’s Going Medieval

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Fri, 06/07/2019

In response to what has become a nation of shameless racketeering, vivid wealth disparity, and shocking destitution on display in city streets, the party of the common man seeks remedies in the redistribution of capital. Seems more than fair to many. It’s not for nothing that they style it “social justice,” the cutting edge of an economic system called socialism — with overtones, of course, of settling racial and gender scores for good measure.

Socialism might seem to be the answer to all this unfairness and indignity. And naturally, it focuses on the two activities that have turned into the worst rackets in America: higher education and health care, a.k.a. “Eds and Meds.” Both are now cruel bloated parodies of what they used to be, turning their customers into debt serfs and bankrupts, apart from their dismal failures of basic mission: to prepare developing minds for reality and to “first do no harm.”

The proposed remedy is for the national government to take responsibility for running them and making their services free to all. That would do nothing, of course, to reform the patent idiocies of the gender studies departments; or rescue the sorry victims of obesity and diabetes from their toxic consumption of whoppers, pizza, and slurpees. Those dynamics operate on feedback wheels of futility for which there is no happy ending outside of drastic changes in thought and behavior.

The Left now promises redemption from these great quandaries with the tag-team of Robin Hood and Santa Claus ushering in a new golden era of free stuff. It’s understandable perhaps, considering how desperate so many citizens of this land are, and how desperation feeds rescue fantasies. And the Left may even get a chance to try this wizardry after the next election. But it’s really not where history is taking us. America is not going to go socialist, it’s going medieval. Why is that?

To put it simply, the money is not there. But the “money” is only an abstract representation of material wealth of one kind or another — energy, goods, resources, and delivery systems — and all that is becoming more of a fugitive presence in reality-based civilization. We don’t have the mojo anymore to nationalize and centralize these sprawling activities. It must be obvious that government is not only fatally beyond bankruptcy, but that it has also reached the stage of diminishing returns from over-investment in complexity that translates into generalized incompetency. It’s hardly just Mr. Trump alone that is responsible for the chaotic paralysis all around us.

Societies are self-organizing, emergent phenomena. They respond to the circumstances that reality presents, and they take us in unexpected directions. The general expectation in the USA since the Second World War has been for ever-increasing material comfort provided by an inexhaustible techno-industrial cornucopia, kind of a cosmic goodie machine. Well, we’d better adjust our thinking to the fact that the horn-of-plenty is shockingly out of goodies, and that no amount of financial hocus-pocus is going to refill it. Valiant attempts to redistribute the already-existing wealth are liable to prove disappointing, especially when the paper and digital representations of that wealth in “money” turn out to be figments — promises to pay that will never be kept because they can’t be kept.

So, instead of fantasizing about free PhD programs for everybody, and free insulin for the multitudes, consider instead the vista of a reduced population working in the fields and pastures to bring enough food out of the long-abused land to live through the next winter. Consider a world in which, if we are lucky, the electricity runs for a few hours a day, but possibly not at all. Imagine a world in which men and women actually function in different divisions of labor and different social spaces because they must, to keep the human project going. Imagine a world in which the ideas in your head about that world actually have to comport with the way the way that world really works — and the severe penalty for failing to recognize that. That’s the more likely world we’re heading into. It won’t put an end to dreams of utopias and cosmic rewards, but it will be a sobering moment in history.

“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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http://www.scientificamerican.com

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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Medieval hostage-taking and prisoner swaps are back in vogue

Source: Medieval hostage-taking and prisoner swaps are back in vogue – Middle East Monitor

http://www.middleeastmonitor.com

Yvonne Ridley

@yvonneridley

January 18, 2019

People protest outside the White House over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Washington on 19 November 2018 [Win McNamee/Getty Images]

 

Do its member states take the UN Charter seriously any more? The United Nations was originally set up “to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained”. However, since those heady days when international law commanded respect and due reverence from East to West, it now seems that the Charter is no longer worth the paper it’s written on.

An alarming demonstration of this is provided by the number of innocent citizens, many with dual nationality, who are being held hostage by various countries around the world. Indeed, there appears to be an outbreak of hostage-taking by states who are using people as bargaining chips or, in the case of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, something much, much worse.

This was exactly how business used to be conducted in Europe during the Middle Ages when hostage-taking was the norm in society. The recent proliferation of this odious phenomenon, though, should be viewed with alarm as it is becoming a political as well as a legal issue today, in the 21st century.

The latest victim is an old friend of mine, American-born journalist Marzieh Hashemi, 59, who has been detained in the US for reasons as yet unknown. The popular anchor for Press TV, the Iranian state-funded broadcaster, was seized by the FBI as she checked in at St Louis Lambert International Airport on Sunday. From there she was transferred by the Bureau to a cell in Washington, DC; as of Wednesday, her son Hossein said that the family had “no idea” what led to her arrest. “Everyone we ask is very vague and the information is still limited,” he told Associated Press.

At the time of writing, no charges have been filed against Marzieh Hashemi. She was filming a documentary, Black Lives Matter, in St Louis, Missouri, and was about to board a flight to Denver when she was arrested. The FBI has so far refused to comment about her arrest.

I have worked with Hashemi, and always found her to be witty, acerbic and professional, as well as driven in her career. We met while she was living in Tehran where she sometimes works; she has dual US-Iranian citizenship. Her documentaries are hard-hitting and, no doubt, embarrassing for Western powers as she reveals the hypocrisy of their foreign policies.

US law allows judges to order witnesses to be arrested and detained if the government can prove that their testimony has extraordinary value for a criminal case; that they would be a flight risk if not detained; and that they would be unlikely to respond to a subpoena. Press TV is standing by its employee and has held a news conference and launched a hashtag campaign on social media.

“We will not spare any legal action [to help Hashemi],” insisted Paiman Jebeli, deputy chief of Iran’s state IRIB broadcaster. According to Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi, Hashemi’s arrest indicates the “apartheid and racist policy” of US President Donald Trump’s administration.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Bahram Ghasemi in Tehran, Iran on 24 July 2017 [Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency]

Of course, Iran itself is already in the spotlight for arresting people with dual citizenship and others with Western links. It is currently holding US Navy veteran Michael R White and at least four other US citizens, including Iranian-American Siamak Namazi and his 82-year-old father, Baquer, both serving 10-year sentences on espionage charges. Iranian-American art dealer Karan Vafadari and his Iranian wife, Afarin Neyssari, have been sent to prison for 27 and 16 years respectively, while Chinese-American graduate student Xiyue Wang was sentenced to 10 years.

Meanwhile, British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 40, was sentenced to five years in jail more than two years ago for “spying”. The Free Nazanin Campaign has denied the allegations vigorously and has accused the state of using her as a political bargaining chip. Hashemi’s arrest is thus the latest of the tit-for-tat kidnaps — what else can such “lawful detentions” be called? — of people with dual nationality.

Earlier this month, the US State Department urged American citizens to “exercise increased caution” when traveling to China after a spate of high-profile detentions. US-Chinese dual nationals are at particular risk from so-called exit bans that prevent them from leaving China, said American officials.

Canada has also revealed that 13 of its citizens have been detained since last month, around the time that a top Chinese executive was arrested in Canada at the request of US prosecutors. Huawei company executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver to face a US extradition order over fraud charges — which she denies — that are linked to allegations of avoiding US sanctions on Iran.

Just two weeks ago, Russia charged Paul Whelan with espionage. The dual US-British citizen denies the charge, prompting questions over whether this is a genuine case or just another move in a decades-old Cold War. The former Marine, 48, who his family says was in Moscow for a friend’s wedding, was arrested on 28 December. Whelan’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, reckons that his client may just be a pawn in Moscow’s moves to force a classic spy swap, given that his arrest came weeks after Russian Maria Butina pleaded guilty in the United States to acting as a Kremlin agent.

Russia has a history of arresting foreigners with the objective of trading prisoners with other countries. Sergei Skripal was involved in one such prisoner swap; the Kremlin released the Russian military intelligence officer who was convicted in 2006 of spying for Britain. Skripal moved to Salisbury in southern England, where he was subsequently poisoned and almost died in the novichok chemical attack almost a year ago.

One regime which probably warrants its own special category because of the huge number of people it has arrested and detained without trial ever since its foundation is the Zionist State of Israel, where almost 500 Palestinians are currently being held with neither charge nor trial under so-called “administrative detention”. The Jerusalem-based Palestinian prisoners’ rights group, Addameer, understands that Israel currently has 5,500 political prisoners behind bars. Holding people in detention without trial or, as in Israel’s case, without even charging them of an offence, is against international law. It is easier to understand why Israel can act with impunity in this and many other, even more deadly, matters when we see the major superpowers taking hostages for political reasons. We should not be surprised, therefore, that international — and the aforementioned UN Charter — all too often goes by the board.

The practice of holding innocent citizens as hostages was common across the Roman and Persian Empires, and even pre-Islamic Arabia. The fact that hostage-taking is essentially a medieval way of negotiating between competing powers suggests that no matter how much we might pride ourselves on our civilisation, the reality is that we have made little real progress in the skills of dialogue and negotiation. The much-vaunted (and oft-abused) mantra of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is meaningless when even the heads of leading democracies resort to using innocent people in the Game of Nations. When medieval hostage-taking is back in vogue, we can be sure that even more barbarism is not far behind.

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

Glacier cores reveal Icelandic volcano that plunged Europe into darkness

Source: Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ | Science | AAAS

http://www.sciencemag.org

By Ann Gibbons

Nov. 15, 2018

An 72-meter ice core drilled in the Colle Gnifetti Glacier in the Swiss Alps entombs more than 2000 years of fallout from volcanoes,  storms, and human pollution.

NICOLE SPAULDING/CCI FROM C. P. LOVELUCK ET AL., ANTIQUITY 10.15184, 4, 2018

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

To Kyle Harper, provost and a medieval and Roman historian at The University of Oklahoma in Norman, the detailed log of natural disasters and human pollution frozen into the ice “give us a new kind of record for understanding the concatenation of human and natural causes that led to the fall of the Roman Empire—and the earliest stirrings of this new medieval economy.”

Slivers from a Swiss ice core held chemical clues to natural and humanmade events.

NICOLE SPAULDING/CCI FROM C. P. LOVELUCK ET AL., ANTIQUITY 10.15184, 4, 2018

Ever since tree ring studies in the 1990s suggested the summers around the year 540 were unusually cold, researchers have hunted for the cause. Three years ago polar ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica yielded a clue. When a volcano erupts, it spews sulfur, bismuth, and other substances high into the atmosphere, where they form an aerosol veil that reflects the sun’s light back into space, cooling the planet. By matching the ice record of these chemical traces with tree ring records of climate, a team led by Michael Sigl, now of the University of Bern, found that nearly every unusually cold summer over the past 2500 years was preceded by a volcanic eruption. A massive eruption—perhaps in North America, the team suggested—stood out in late 535 or early 536; another followed in 540. Sigl’s team concluded that the double blow explained the prolonged dark and cold.

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Source: Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ | Science | AAAS