by Wesley Stewart

Five years ago, I was living in San Francisco as a homeless young adult. My experiences being homeless are formational to the person I am today.

I currently work at The Mockingbird Society as a veteran of homelessness, fighting to uplift the voices of homeless youth and young adults, and advocate for legislation to end homelessness altogether. Although we do not provide direct services to our homeless neighbors, my work has me engaging with the community, service providers, and officials at the city, county, and state level.

I know the Tax Amazon legislation is critical for Seattle’s unhoused population as well as the social workers who sacrifice their health and safety to serve the community. Amazon is a Seattle-based company and as such, has the responsibility to protect and maintain the well-being of its community like any other Seattleite. For too long Amazon has extracted labor from our neighbors, purchased and occupied Native lands, and manipulated our local government with bottomless buckets of cash.

Amazon contributes to the homelessness crisis by employing thousands of moneyed folks, raising median rental prices, and displacing Black and brown communities that have lived in Seattle for decades. Amazon directly escalates the wealth inequality in our area by buying politicians, depleting municipal budgets, and impeding effective crisis intervention by our government.

But for me, Tax Amazon is not about retribution, it’s about community solidarity. A small tax on this multi-billion-dollar company could provide monthly checks to low-wage social workers on the front lines of the housing and homelessness crisis. Like health care workers, social workers are public servants fighting COVID-19 in our community with limited personal protective equipment and no space to social-distance. In addition, the tax could be expanded to provide funds for homeless folks to afford food, housing, and lifestyle goods — thus stimulating the local economy and rescuing small businesses.

The federal government has responded to COVID-19 with a one-time check of $1,200 to “some” Americans. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin appeared to suggest this money could sustain folks for 10 weeks. That is a monstrous assertion. For homeless or recently housed young people, they will not receive a check because they did not file their taxes last year. They can’t get a job because of stay-at-home orders. They can’t safely quarantine, nor can they access health services, so the virus will continue to ravage their under-nourished and over-stressed bodies.

As the Trump administration throws pennies at working people, Amazon spent millions lobbying congress for additional benefits. The Guardian reports that Bezos himself has seen his personal wealth grow by $24 billion since the COVID crisis began […]

via OPINION: COVID-19 Has Escalated Seattle’s Problems. It’s the Responsibility of Our Institutions to Escalate Their Response. Tax Amazon! — South Seattle Emerald

Knox County, Tennessee saw nine deaths by suicide within 48 hours this week as doomsday predictions over the novel Wuhan coronavirus panics an already anxious public and leaves millions unemployed and isolated.

In Tennessee, the crisis is taking its toll on those who were not physically sick but who appear to have fallen victim to the virus anyway. As of this writing, more people have died from suicide in Knox County than people have from the virus in the entire state, where there have been 6 fatalities from the disease, according to the Tennessee Department of Health.

“That number is completely shocking and makes me wonder if what we are doing now is really the best approach,” said Knoxville, Tennessee Mayor Glenn Jacobs. “We have to determine how we can respond to COVID-19 in a way that keeps our economy intact, keeps people employed and empowers them with a feeling of hope and optimism – not desperation and despair.”

via The Federalist More People Died From Suicide Than Coronavirus In Tennessee This Week

A local police officer used to respond to an average of 1 to 2 suicides per week. That has changed now to 7 to 10 suicides per week. He said that these suicides are primarily about financial problems which are overwhelming people.

Unemployment

Not being able to get any other job

Forced to self isolate

Forced to get even deeper into debt to ‘make it’

Not seeing any way out

[…]

via More People Died From Suicide Than Coronavirus In Tennessee This Week

After old age, obesity appears to be the most prominent risk factor for being hospitalized with COVID-19, doubling the risk of hospitalization in patients under the age of 60.

Most COVID-19 patients have more than one underlying health issue. A study looking at 5,700 New York City patients found 88% had more than one comorbidity. Only 6.3% had just one underlying health condition and 6.1% had none.

Obesity also makes you more vulnerable to infectious diseases by lowering your immune function. Elevated blood glucose levels appear to play a significant role in viral replication and the development of cytokine storms. The real pandemic here appears to be dysregulated glucose metabolism; in other words, insulin resistance.

Amassing data suggest that even when in close, crowded quarters, the infection rate is rather low, and fit, healthy individuals are more likely to be asymptomatic than not when testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection

In this particular study,¹⁵ published in JAMA, high blood pressure at 53.1% beat obesity (41.7%) as the No. 1 most common comorbidity among hospitalized patients, followed by diabetes at 31.7% and coronary artery disease at 10.4% […]

via 88% of COVID-19 Patients Have This in Common; The Real Pandemic Is Insulin Resistance – Dr Mercola

By James Corbett | Corbett Report | May 2, 2020

If you’ve spent any time around the conspiracy realists who understand the true nature of the central banking fraud, the political fraud, the war on terror fraud and all of the other deceptions that are sold to the public by their misleaders, you’ve no doubt heard some iteration of the following remark:

“As long as Joe Sixpack and Jane Soccermom have their football and their cheeseburgers, nothing’s ever going to change.”

The implication is that if we can halt the flow of mindless entertainment that distracts the masses and the chemically-processed garbage that keeps them fat and sluggish, we could have a revolution by the morning.

Be careful what you wish for.

The sports were the first to go. (In fact, the cancellation of the NBA season was the moment I realized they were going to go all the way with the plandemic psyop.)

And now, in case you hadn’t noticed, the cheeseburgers are disappearing.

The latest news is that McDonald’s is now taking direct control over how much beef and pork each franchisee will receive. This comes on the back of ominous statements from major McDonald’s suppliers like Tyson Foods, whose chairman is now warning that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain” as the pandemic starts to cripple food processing plants.

Now, there are no doubt many people who are relieved to hear that McDonald’s may be forced to limit the sales of its chemical-laden, poisonous garbage “food products” (and, trust me, I’m one of them). And there are no doubt many who are relieved to hear of the impending collapse of the factory food processing system that has so utterly disconnected us from the real sources of our food.

But, once again, I must warn you to be careful what you wish for. What is happening right now is not cosmic revenge for the poisoning of the public with toxic garbage that the factory food processors and fast food purveyors have been engaging in for decades; it is actually the next step in the complete reengineering of the food supply and the fundamental transformation of the human experience that such a reengineering entails.

First, we have to understand that this is no mere American phenomenon. It is happening in Canada. And the UK. And Europe. And China. And Japan.

And it’s not just beef and pork supplies that are being disrupted. It’s milk. And produce. And rice. And wheat.

And it’s not just the food processors whose entire industry is being upended by this chaos. It’s wreaking havoc for farmers. And truckers. And supermarkets. And restaurants.

And to make it all even more horrific, the crisis won’t just effect the food supply itself. It will effect all of those workers in these industries who are being laid off as a result of the disruption, who now find themselves among the ranks of the recently unemployed who are lining up at food banks, which, as you might imagine, are struggling to keep up with the record demand on their dwindling reserves.

In case you can’t see the bigger picture yet, what is already in the process of happening is a fundamental disruption of the entire food chain that much of the world relies on. The impact of this disruption is only just now beginning to be felt, and the ripples caused by this cascading chain of failures and crises will directly effect every single person reading these words at some point in the near future.

Demand for food aid is already leading to stampedes in Kenya and protests in Bangladesh and looting in Colombia and clashes in South Africa. Given that we’ve already seen supermarket freakouts and shopping brawls breaking out in the US and Australia and the UK, can there be any doubt that severe food shortages will cause widespread chaos in the streets of the developed world? (In case there is any doubt, I’ll just leave this here.) […]

via Up Next: The Collapse of the Food Supply Chain

All across China, not just in Wuhan, but also in other cities that saw pneumonia cases (and note, Chinese medical teams discuss COVID-19 as pneumonia), people are being cured with vitamin C.

I am including the details from a public report written in Chinese and published by a medical team Xibei Hospital, affiliated with Jiao Tong University, in the city of Xi’an, Shaanxi province. (To complete the translation I used a combination of programs and resources:  Google Translate, Pleco, and Baidu Fanyi).

Given what the doctors in Xi’an knew of reports from Wuhan (which is 500 miles away from Xi’an, in the neighboring province of Hubei), and from seeing pneumonia patients in early February 2020, a team at the Xibei Hospital, devised a protocol centered on the use of intravenous (IV) vitamin C against the Coronavirus. They first treated patients on February 10th. Critically ill patients received 200 mg of soluble vitamin C per kg body weight, once every 12 hours. After the first two treatments, the patient would get 100 mg/kg, every 24 hours, for the next four days. (Those presenting with moderate symptoms were given 100 mg/kg on day one).

Arguably, these doses are too low. Practitioners and researchers like Dr. Suzanne Humphries (2014) and Thomas Levy, J.D., Ph.D. (2017), posit that intravenous infusions of vitamin C should be from 50-100g per day, and can be repeated every 3-7 days.

The Xibei Protocol

Using the Xibei protocol, a person weighing 70 kg (154 pounds), would receive a total of 28 grams of vitamin C on the first day. Thereafter, they would receive 7 g per day. The clinical trial in Wuhan gave similar doses. On February 14th, 2020, the university hospital started giving pneumonia patients a non-body weight-dependent dose of 12 g of vitamin C every 12 hours for seven days.

Even with their relatively low doses, patients in Xi’an were released after four to eight days of vitamin C. Thus, the protocol, emphasizing the antioxidant, ascorbic acid, has been a clear success […]

via healthimpactnews China Cures Coronavirus with Vitamin C

via China Cures Coronavirus with Vitamin C

By Infoshop

Report from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief about building an autonomous response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Community mobilizations for mutual aid and medical solidarity have formed in as many spaces as the new coronavirus (Covid-19) has spread.

From continent to continent, people have innovated and navigated through information suppression, governmental inadequacy and unpreparedness as well as supply shortages in panic-economies with global financial markets plummeting.

The global pandemic is a disaster enveloping all of the intersections where climate catastrophes typically surge, storm-batter and strand impacted regions, but when every community is a different version of ground zero, sourcing from within, in as much as possible, becomes a critical component.

Piecing together carefully constructed information on defending our communities, building bridges over access and info gaps for folks with differing vulnerabilities and sharing comprehensive information on harm reduction, DIY resource building and responding with best practices is the radical solidarity being generated by folks across the world.

A compendium of this information below constructs this piece, every bit as much as it deconstructs the notion that the state will save us in a time of crisis.

As this piece is being written, so is a bailout package for industries whose profit-losses have pushed public safety to the back-burners in a time when we face desperate testing capability shortages, medical facility supply shortages, thousands of Covid-19 deaths and over 120,000 cases of infection worldwide.

Don’t panic. Organize […]
via When Every Community is Ground Zero: Pulling Each Other Through a Pandemic

By Keith Preston

Deference to credentialed and experienced experts is generally a good plan barring compelling evidence to the contrary, but “experts” are not divine oracles, and science and medicine can become corrupted, abusive, or incompetent as much as any other kind of institution.

One thing that I have found interesting in this COVID-19 situation is the way that different political and cultural factions have responded based on their respective biases. The Left has generally been deferent to government authority and the authority of “experts,” and supportive of workers that have gone on strike in protest against hazardous conditions. The Right has generally been suspicious of the lockdown, less trustful of “experts,” less supportive of strikers but more supportive of anti-lockdown protestors. The Right thinks the way out of the present economic mess is to open the economy as soon as possible while the Left is more likely to call for UBIs and extending unemployment benefits. The Left has called for reducing the prison population to combat the pandemic but criticized restrictions on international travel, while the Right has praised travel restrictions but attacked prisoner release plans.

As usual, these biases seem to be more reflexive and tribal than rational. Public health, worker safety, mass unemployment, business failures, government overreach, blundering politicians, the fallibility of “experts,” rent and debt liabilities, and transportation systems and systems of incarceration as conduits for the spread of the virus are all genuine areas of concern for reasonable people […]

via Anarchists for the White Coat Priesthood?

From the time the UK saw its first set of golden arches go up in 1974, our nation had never experienced a widespread closure of McDonald’s restaurants… until COVID-19 crossed our shores.

As of 7pm on March 23, each of the 1,270+ McDonald’s locations across the UK closed their doors, with no set date for their reopening. These are unprecedented times.

A bad thing

For the first time in decades, people no longer have access to the American company’s signature burgers and chicken nuggets. But is this such a bad thing for customers? And how will this impact animals?

With growing concerns about food safety in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and estimates that three out of every four new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals, it’s about time that food companies ramped up their efforts to prevent the spread of such diseases.

It’s been proven that the immune systems of animals raised on lower welfare factory farms are far weaker than any other; couple this with the immense overcrowding seen on these intensive farms – where some 90 percent of farmed animals are raised – and the risk of contracting and spreading dangerous diseases is worryingly high

McDonald’s contribution

That being said, how is McDonald’s contributing to this issue? In part due to their size, chickens are the land animals raised in the greatest numbers by far. Every single year, approximately 25 million chickens are bred and slaughtered for McDonald’s UK alone.

That’s nearly one chicken for every two Brits, before even factoring in the many other animals that suffer immensely in order to maximise the company’s profits.

But maybe these birds are raised to high welfare standards and meet a relatively painless end…? Sadly not. Despite key competitor KFC adopting a robust set of chicken welfare standards in July 2019, known as the Better Chicken Commitment, McDonald’s is still yet to follow suit.

Welfare issues

Among other issues, the company has failed to make a commitment to end the use of fast-growing chickens, meaning that the millions of birds in its supply chain grow so big, so fast, that their legs and organs are pushed to the absolute limit.

Some become unable to walk, while others die of heart attacks in just the first few weeks of their short lives. To make matters worse, these enormous birds are shockingly packed into sheds by the tens of thousands, each having as little space as an A4 piece of paper […]

via Is COVID-19 The Beginning Of The End For McDonald’s? — The Extinction Chronicles

On Sunday Tyson Foods  ran a full page ad in the New York Times in which they admitted that “the food supply chain is breaking”…

Tyson Foods, one of the U.S.’s biggest meat processors, didn’t mince words in a full page New York Times spread that ran Sunday, in which they warned, “the food supply chain is breaking.”

“As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain,” John Tyson, Chairman of the Board of Tyson Foods, wrote in a letter published as an advertisement. “As a result, there will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed” […]

via “The Food Supply Chain Is Breaking” And We Are Being Warned That “Meat Shortages” Are Imminent

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care in Kern County, California refuse to wear masks outside. They say the longer people stay inside, the more their immune system drops.

Local NBC News affiliate KGET in Bakersfield interviewed the two doctors this week (April 2020), and the video of the interview was posted on their Facebook Page where it has already been viewed by almost 3 million people at the time of this publication.

Will Facebook remove it, since these doctors disagree with other health authorities? We are publishing the YouTube version below, although Google is censoring views like this on YouTube also, so it will be interesting to see if they censor something a corporate-sponsored “mainstream” media source has published at the local affiliate in Bakersfield, California.

The doctors are reportedly the owners of the largest testing site in Kern County, California. They’ve tested over 5000 people already for COVID-19.

Some quotes from the doctors:

We both have had extensive classes in microbiology and biochemistry and immunology. We’ve studied this for each of us 20 years.

And we take everything that we’re seeing today, and put that against that back drop and say: “Does this make sense?”

Are we following the science? We keep hearing “following the science.”

What is the science essentially? It’s the study of the natural world for experiment through observation.

So that’s what we’re doing. We’re studying the disease around us, or making observations.

We’re doing testing experiments to figure out exactly what’s on.

And so this has caused some severe disruption for Accelerated as we have people coming in 7 a.m. until midnight.

They continue:

Typically you quarantine the sick. When someone has measles, you quarantine them.

We’ve never seen where we quarantine the healthy, where you take those without disease, and without symptoms, and lock them in (their) home.

Based on the volume of data they have collected and observed over the past two months, they say:

Does it necessitate the shut down, loss of jobs, destruction of the oil companies (Bakersfield is a big producer of petroleum), furloughing doctors?

If you have no symptoms, you should be able to return to work. Are you an asymptomatic virus shedder? Maybe. But we can’t test all of humanity.

Is the flu less dangerous than COVID? Let’s look at the death rates. No, its not. They’re similar in prevalence and death rate.

Regarding sheltering in place:

As I shelter in place, my immune system drops. You keep me there for months, it drops more.

The secondary effects, the child abuse, alcoholism, loss of revenue – all of these are, in our opinion, significantly more detrimental thing to society than a virus that has proven similar in nature to the seasonal flu that we have every year […]

via California ER Physicians: Sheltering in Place Does More Harm than Good – Lowers Our Immune System