This is not in bad neighborhoods like the
Tenderloin district, but even in the, in the main areas of the city where in
the financial district. There's human feces all over the place.
FAREWELL, SAN FRANCISCO,
HOME TO NANCY PEOSI, DIANNE
FEINSTEIN, BARABRA “BRIBES” BOXER AND KALAMA HARRIS
while the troika of corruption,
pelosi, feinstein and kamala harris were servicing red china, banksters and any
wall street operating that needed help rigging the economy, s.f. was and is in
meltdown.
so is the rest of california!
San Francisco is a disaster about which
Nancy Pelosi she cares nothing. It is a city ravaged
by drug abuse, homelessness, rampant crime and all the other scourges
of leftism. She lives extravagantly in her gated
mansion. She lives a life of wealth and privilege in city
suffering a civilizational collapse created and orchestrated by her
own party. She revels in it. She has become
a near-billionairess by way of politics of the most corrupt
variety. She is indeed a cancer on the body politic. PATRICIA
McCARTHY
Pelosi is a ghastly creature. She and her ilk –
Feinstein, Boxer, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom – have effectively destroyed
California and they did it on purpose. They strive to import as many
illegal migrants as possible; they've created and fostered the homelessness and
let it fester. California is now a socialist disaster and the further
destruction of the economy is just what they've wanted. PATRICIA McCARTHY
"They will destroy
America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these
plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be
exposed to the cost of the invasion. They have nothing but contempt for us who
must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gangs,
drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt
for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
farewell, san francisco
AUDIO
Farewell, San FrFancisco
10 Blocks podcast
May 20, 2020
California
Cities
Economy, finance, and budgets
Michael Gibson joins Brian Anderson to
discuss San Francisco’s ongoing struggle with public order and his decision to
leave the Bay Area for Los Angeles—the subject of Gibson’s story, “America’s Havana,”
in the Spring 2020 issue.
“Even before
the current Covid-19 pandemic,” writes Gibson, “San
Francisco was a deeply troubled city.” The city ranks first in the nation in a
host of property crimes, and its high housing costs make it prohibitively
expensive for low- and middle-income families. Even tech companies are now
considering relocating their operations; any significant exodus of such
businesses would be a serious blow to the city’s economy.
Audio
Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to 10 Blocks. I'm your host
Brian Anderson, and joining us on today's show is Michael Gibson. Michael is
the co-founder of the 1517 Fund, a venture capital firm, formerly based in San
Francisco and now in Los Angeles and we'll get to that in a minute. He's
written on technology and innovation for The Atlantic, National Review, Reason, and recently a
couple of excellent pieces for City Journal. You can follow him on
Twitter @William_Blake.
His latest essay, which we released online last week and appears in our Spring
2020 issue is called "America's Havana" and it's about San Francisco's
ongoing struggle with public order and other serious urban problems, even
before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Michael, thanks very much for joining us.
Michael Gibson: Happy to be here.
Brian Anderson: Now let me read the very vivid opening
paragraph to your story, quote: "On January 8th London Breed, San
Francisco's mayor was sworn in for her first full term. House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi congratulated her in a tweet saying, 'I look forward to working with you
to continue San Francisco's proud tradition of standing as a guiding light for
progress across America.' I don't know what definition of progress Pelosi is
using, but any candid observer would rate the city that catastrophe. Mayor
Breed was inaugurated on the same day that I moved from San Francisco to Los
Angeles after 10 years working at the cutting edge of science and
technology." You then begin your brief tour of the reasons you and others
like you are leaving the city starting with public order and hygiene. So could you
give a description of how the city was kind of crumbling over the last several
years in these areas?
Michael Gibson: For sure. It's hard to remember when I
first started noticing these things, but they started off slowly and they
picked up, I think for sure some of the issues like homelessness have always
been a problem on the West Coast and in cities like LA, even San Francisco,
Portland, Seattle, but sometime throughout the 2010s, the teens, it really
picked up and, and it started to become very stark. The city scene from a view
let's say you're standing on the other side of the Golden Gate bridge and you
look at the city, it is just resplendent.
Brian Anderson: It is one of the most beautiful cities in
America. It's true.
Michael Gibson: And you're just excited to see what's going
on inside. And then you get closer and, and then that's where it hit me one
time where I came back down from the Sonoma region. You come down the 101, you
shoot through the Robin Williams tunnel and you get that view of the city and
it just looks like the future of the world. In this veritable gold rush, in the
last tech boom, so much wealth has been created. Silicon Valley became, San
Francisco itself became synonymous with Silicon Valley. And so there was a
sense in which this was the city of the 2000s, that it was going to be the next
Florence or Athens. That it would be a cultural center. But then you pull in to
the city with your car and, and yeah, I noticed there's just drug users out in
the open. This is not in bad neighborhoods like the Tenderloin district, but
even in the, in the main areas of the city where in the financial district.
There's human feces all over the place. That increased over the last
decade. So anecdotally that stuff started picking up. Then the stories broke in
the local newspapers and then whatever counter measures were taken, they
failed. And so it just reached a point by the end of the decade where, I know
lots of friends were uncomfortable walking around at night. It was not unheard
of to have people harass you, yelling at you and coherently and in those kinds
of issues. So that was the lower layer. And then, and then you started to
wonder about the deeper stuff, like, what are the underlying issues? Lots of
conflicts erupted over the last decade. The Google buses started because a lot
of their employees wanted to live in the city and then commute down to Mountain
View. Likewise with Apple and Facebook. And so they started these commuter
buses in these commuter buses would take these employees from the city down the
peninsula.
You had
protests against these buses. Really strong backlash against the tech
community, and the tech community got blamed for this, that somehow they were
crowding out the public transportation that they were driving up the rents. And
that's when I really started to examine the underlying problems in the city.
The tech companies were being scapegoated, but it turned out that you know,
there are a lot of regulations and zoning rules that prevent people from
building anything new in the whole city. And so you had the same stock of
housing, the same, pretty much the same stock of office space and more people
trying to get into the city of the future. And that led to a lot of social
problems.
Brian Anderson: So everything began to come together in a
bad way. In other words, driving you to leave.
Michael Gibson: Yeah, that's right. So it was this weird
combination of you had the expensive because of the limited housing.
Brian Anderson: Yeah I want to get back to that in a
minute, maybe we could talk a little more detail.
Michael Gibson: But then you also had the appalling, which
was this mismanagement of the homelessness situation.
Brian Anderson: And crime is starting to go up there. I'm
not sure, post pandemic what it looks like, but the city's got a very
significant burglary and theft problem. A lot of shoplifting going on cars
getting broken into.
Michael Gibson: Something on average
like 60 cars are broken into per day, That's pre-Covid, who knows what it is
now. But you know, there are famous stories. Alex Rodriguez, the former Yankee now
sportscaster. He was late to a game at the Giants stadium and found a parking
space on the street. He stupidly or foolishly left, I don't know, maybe it was
like necklace or some kind of jewelry in the car worth hundreds of thousands of
dollars. It was broken into and stolen. But yeah, just the sheer number of
these sorts of petty crimes, theft, vandalism led to San Francisco becoming the
leader in the nation in 2018. 2019, it's still high. We have a mayor, or San
Francisco had a mayor, there's a police force, but they did not seem to be
willing to enforce lower-level crimes.
Brian Anderson: Yeah. That's quite striking. You'd like to
think that the city's political class and voters would recognize this breakdown
in order, rise in crime. Yet the brand new district attorney there, Chesa
Boudin, campaigned on not prosecuting quality of life infractions. I'm curious,
how did he win and what's your sense of him against this backdrop?
Michael Gibson: San Francisco has a history of being
progressive and perhaps that's what Pelosi meant when she said it's a beacon of
progress. The last Republican mayor was elected in his first term, I believe in
1956. I think he'd won a second term. But you know, ever after that, it's been
run by Democrats. So pretty much one-party city for a long time. There are more
moderate wings in that party. And there are very far left wing members of that
party. And I think Chesa Boudin won due to some of the mechanics of voting in
the city for these types of positions where, I forget the exact name of the
mechanism, but if votes are split, it'll go to, let's say there are three candidates
and two of them are similar to each other, so that they split the vote, that'll
open it up to someone who's more radical like Chesa Boudin.
Brian Anderson: And that's kind of what happened here,
right?
Michael Gibson: Yeah, so that's how we won. In essence, two
opponents who were probably more moderate than he was split the vote. But
nevertheless, it's still scary to me at any rate that someone with his resume
and his public positions would get elected at all. You know, not enforcing low
level quality of life crimes is one thing. He has very ambitious goals on
establishing some kind of retributive justice or, sorry, restorative justice
program. There was a humorous moment in one of the debates while he was running
where and addressing this car, the broken window problem with automobiles and
theft. He thought he thought the city should set up a business where if they
caught the the thief, then the thief would have to work for some period of time
in the window repair program that the city would run.
And it
was just seemed like total craziness to me. But I guess it appealed to enough
voters that he was able to win. I believe he served as a translator and
adviser, I don't know in what exact capacity, but he had a direct relationship
with Hugo Chavez, the late dictator. This to me is the kind of relationship
that should just raise all sorts of red flags in the media and in the public.
And the fact that it didn't, I think speaks to how far radical San Francisco
has become. You know, the title of the piece is America's Havana. I chose that
because one it's striking to me that Havana is crumbling on the edges but still
looks the same as it does since the 1950s even people riding around in cars
from the 1950s.
Brian Anderson: All that lovely architecture preserved as
if in amber.
Michael Gibson: And in San Francisco, it's not, you don't
see things crumbling necessarily to that extent in neighborhoods, But it is
striking to me that it looks the same as it does as it did in the 1960s, you
can watch a movie like the Steve McQueen classic, "Bullet", with the
famous car chase scene as he's riding up and down the hills of San Francisco.
And sure enough, if you look at those same locations today, they look the same.
So three, four story Victorian townhouses, Bay window apartments, that sort of
thing, it's all the same. And that's due to those land-use regulations.
Brian Anderson: Yeah. I wanted to get back to that because
you, you listed that as one of the other reasons you've decided to move to Los
Angeles. The cost of housing in particular is a huge problem in San Francisco.
It's problem in many successful cities these days. But I think nowhere in
America is it more of a problem than in San San Fran. I think the medium price
for one bedroom you mentioned is the most expensive in the nation. It's about
$3,700 a month. That's a median price. A single family home on average will
run, you know, well over a million dollars. What's behind the, these
astronomical prices? I guess it's really a supply problem as you suggest. And
it has something to do with the way the city approaches land-use.
Michael Gibson: Right. It has the strictest land use rules
in the nation. Probably the strongest NIMBY lobbyists you can imagine. That
goes back for some time. You can look at any election from the 1970s through
the eighties and nineties, and people are complaining about new construction,
whether it's commercial or, or private residences. So even the main rule is
that height requirement. Nothing can outside of something like 78, 79% of the
city, you can't build higher than four stories. And then there are all sorts of
other problems. The permit process is the highest stakes game of chutes and
ladders known to man. There are multiple stages to this process. Multiple
committees that you need to obtain approval from. And at any step along the
way, after all the money spent and the effort made, you can slip down the slide
and end up back in square one. And there are some crazy examples over the
years. Some guy, it took him like, I think he started in 1978 to build four
units and area of town called Bernal Heights. Spent $2 million and only in the
last year was able to gain approval. Those stories are not uncommon. It's a
real supply crunch. You limit the number of houses, you keep them the same, but
you add more money and you add more people. Well, that's simple economics. The
prices are gonna go up.
Brian Anderson: Now we talk a lot on this podcast and, and
certainly write about in City Journal, the New York City subway system, which
has a lot of problems even before the pandemic. The New York transit system had
seen, you know, a real deterioration in performance, delays which have led to
overcrowding, homelessness becoming a problem on the subways themselves.
Enormous financial woes, again, even before the pandemic. But I don't think in
our previous podcasts discussing San Francisco issues that we've really talked
much about the Bay Area Rapid Transit System or BART system. Could you talk a
little bit about that and how it's performing?
Michael Gibson: Yeah, so one of the interesting things
about the Bay Area is that it is so fragmented in terms of its political
organization. So when it came time to build a public transportation system, I
think it was greatly limited by that fragmentation. So it was originally
planned, the BART system was, was going to be a lot like the New York subway
system in the way that it helps unify the many boroughs. In the original plans,
I think for the BART, there were lines that were supposed to go up North to Marin,
across the East Bay into Oakland. And then down South. What happened is that
they couldn't get all these different municipalities on board. And so now the
BART is pretty much limited to the East side of San Francisco, then it travels
under the Bay, into the East Bay, Oakland area. It heads down south on the
peninsula, but stops just past SFO.
So it
doesn't have a lot of range. It was built in the 1970s. I think some of the
engineering choices may have been fine at the time, but now the wear and tear on
them started starting to show itself in the last few years. For me, this has
been. Around town, it's known as the BART howl or screech. The wheels they made
aren't flanged wheels. And so the noise is deafening, especially in certain
paths.
Brian Anderson: Metal on metal, it's so true.
Michael Gibson: Yeah. And this has a quality of life
consequence where, for instance, the high price of living in San Francisco. I
know some people have thought about moving to the East Bay, but it makes the
commute even worse because you can't have conversations, you can't listen to
podcasts. You have to stop your music as you travel underground. And listen to
this howl that seems to be in some sort of deranged contrapuntal noise, because
it's like there's a high level shriek and a low-level rattle at the same time.
It's quite jarring. I looked into that and, there's some other news stories or
blog posts about the construction of those wheels and why they failed to make
the right choices. It's pretty interesting. But for me, it became symbolic for
this lack of state capacity or governance capacity where the infrastructure,
the city itself is not living up to its purpose.
Brian Anderson: Yeah, I'd like to close with a couple of
questions. One, you had already decided to relocate before the Covid-19
pandemic, but what's your sense of the attitude among other firms located in
San Francisco or more broadly in the Bay Area? Are you hearing other companies
thinking along the same lines. And then after answering that question, I'd love
to hear about what it's been like moving to Los Angeles, basically simultaneous
with a big lockdown in that city as a result of the pandemic. What it been like
in LA? So those two questions: are other firms leaving San Francisco or
thinking about it, and then what's going on in LA?
Michael Gibson: Well, the quality of life issues and the
cost of living had started to affect my work. So we run an early-stage venture
capital fund. We make investments in companies at the earliest stage. So often
where we are the first money in, it's a few people and some proof of concepts.
The Bay Area, Silicon Valley and San Francisco to some degree have always been
known for being the hub of innovation and specifically garage startups, right?
You think Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Google, they all literally started in
garages. Well, if the garage costs a million bucks, you're not gonna be able to
have a startup. And it occurred to me that the Grateful Dead also had a house
in Haight Ashbury houses. You know, the ones around it on Zillow sell for like
3 million plus now. So you can't have a garage band either. If the garage costs
a million bucks. So for my work over the last decade, we just noticed fewer and
fewer of the companies that we were investing in were located in the Bay. They
were starting elsewhere. So the need for me to live in San Francisco decreased.
There
was almost like a little perfect storm for you guys publishing this piece
because on the same day that you did on the internet, Twitter announced that it
was permanently allowing its employees to work remotely. And Jack Dorsey had
mentioned something along these lines, too, hinted at it in a quarterly call
with investors last quarter. But yes, the story broke on the same day. And so I
think there's a lot of conversations happening now about the degree to which
companies will remain remote or you know, maybe it's not 50%. Maybe it's 25,
but it's certainly not going to be zero. So I think we're going to start to see
an exodus out of San Francisco. More companies either working remotely or maybe
decentralizing their operations to some degree just because of the quality of
life issues that we've talked about and the high cost. So I think Twitter's a
real bellwether. They're going to be others for sure. Just go on Twitter now
and you can see a lot of prominent VCs and founders talking about it.
Brian Anderson: The piece is getting an enormous amount of
attention online and reading the responses and the letters is fascinating
because it does clearly suggest that a lot of San Francisco residents and other
firms are beginning to see or have been seeing the same kind of things you are
and getting fed up about them.
Michael Gibson: It's going to hurt San Francisco should
this happen to any great degree. If you look at the 2010 budget, I think it was
about $6.4 billion. The 2020 budget for the was almost twice that, $12 billion.
A lot of those revenues are coming from taxes collected on tech companies and
their employees who live in, shop, and spend money in the city. And so should that
drain, I think that the city, which has already stretched financially, is going
to feel a pinch. So I chose to move down here before Covid. I sense this as an
accelerant on, on that trend of decentralizing the office, to some degree,
maybe to a big degree. LA, I moved down here not because there's a hotter tech
scene and I was looking for companies here. I moved here for a few reasons. One
is that it is a main transportation hub. A lot of our investments occur across
North America. So being located not far from LAX, I thought I could travel
quite easily. I wanted the nicer weather and the beaches. But maybe what was
the most appealing thing to me was the way San Francisco, those dynamics we
discussed have also made it very much a monoculture. In part my industry, the tech
industry, but really, when people talk about that it's the big tech companies,
Google, Facebook, Apple. The prices have driven out all the artists and all the
different types of people. There's only one kind of culture in the city. And so
Los Angeles to me represented something where you still had all these different
types of people in the city, whether it's entertainment, aerospace, just a
larger number and that appealed to me. Post-Covid, it's hard to tell what's
going to happen. I mean, the mayor here is quite stringent, and the city
administrators. They're threatening to lock down the city at least through the
summer, maybe until there's a vaccine that's not quite clear. So you know,
maybe the quality of life here won't be as good, but I'm not sure what to do
about that in short term.
Brian Anderson: Well, thanks very much Michael. Don't
forget to check out Michael Gibson's latest essay for City Journal. It's called "America's Havana." It's getting a lot of
attention. You can find that and an earlier piece by him on our website and
we'll link to it in the description. He's on Twitter @William_Blake,
and you can follow City Journal on Twitter as well
at @CityJournal,
and on Instagram at @cityjournal_mi and if you like what you've heard
on today's show, please give us a rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening and
thanks again Michael Gibson for joining us. Thanks for having me.
Bet Your Life -- Vote for Democrats
I’m
trying to restrain my anger and speak measuredly, but it’s damn hard to do so.
(Nancy Pelosi’s latest trial balloon -- an investigation into the President’s
handling of
the Wuhan virus, was so preposterous it drove me into something I never do --
binge watching old TV serials, in this case “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”) The
Wuhan virus spread throughout the world due to the Chinese government’s lies,
and the acts of the head of the WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreysesus who came to that position from the violent Ethiopian Communist
party and covered up for China as did the mainstream U.S. media.
The same press outlets have been engaged in a
scandalous attempt to represent the Chinese response to the crisis as brilliant
and to accept Beijing’s claim to have eliminated the virus within its own
borders, in embarrassing contrast (they suppose) to Trumpian floundering about.
In reality, the Chinese were inexcusably
dishonest in withholding the proportions of the coronavirus outbreak, have not
uttered a truthful word about it up to and including this week -- as they claim
to have had almost no further fatalities and none at all in the past few days;
and were extremely negligent in not moving promptly to restrict outward travel
and warn the world.
The same American press which has acclaimed the
official Chinese performance with an adulatory hallelujah chorus have railed against
President Trump for following the normal practice of identifying the
coronavirus geographically. The subordination of the World Health Organization
as a cheerleader for China’s odium and criminality will require that the entire
leadership of the WHO to be sacked and replaced by people in whom it is
possible to have some confidence.
By the time this horrible virus has ravaged the
underdeveloped world -- which is completely unprepared to deal with it and
where the danger of horrific human devastation is the fear that dare not speak
its name -- the complacent support of the corrupt leadership of the United
Nations and its agencies by African and Asian states may have abated.
Their
actions should not be ignored. But the actions of some elected Democratic
officials doubtless contributed greatly to the spread of the disease, and as we
show, seem to have had a disproportionate effect on the poor -- especially
African Americans in these states and cities, the very blocs of voters who
voted them into office.
The
people most at risk from the virus are the elderly and the immune-suppressed.
Diabetics, pre-diabetics, those with high blood pressure, and the grossly
overweight are immune-suppressed and seem hardest hit. At least in NY, these conditions are found disproportionately in the black community.
The
contagion also seems concentrated in denser urban areas and among the poor, who
must rely on public transportation, live in closer quarters, and whose lack of
storage space mean they must risk shopping more often for food and essential
supplies. This picture seems clear in NYC. In Southern California the picture
may be more closely related to travel from China and crowded conditions in areas
with lots of illegal immigrants -- post-virus analysis may clarify that.
New
York City's and California’s loony politicos are hooked on identity politics
and see racism everywhere, ignoring objective science. The consequences of
ignoring reality: overwhelmed medical facilities, lack of proper medical
equipment, and soaring death rates.
Daniel
Greenfield, writing at Frontpage Magazine, dissects in depth the
role of identity politics in New York City, a case history in the
consequences of stupid politics and utter mismanagement.
In
brief, Mayor de Blasio’s City Health Commissioner, Oxiris Barbot, is a radical
who previously served as Health Commissioner of Baltimore where she “had given
the city’s race rioters ‘space to destroy.’” Space which continues after her
move to New York to result in a soaring murder rate.
She
boasted of seeing health policy through a “racial equity lens,” a lens so
fogged that she concentrated on discouraging those arriving from Wuhan from
going into self-quarantine and encouraging New Yorkers to attend the Lunar New
Year celebrations in the city.
"As we gear up to celebrate the
#LunarNewYear in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for
anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the
city because of #coronavirus," she insisted.
By then there had already been over 17,000 cases
of the Wuhan Virus in China with nearly 3,000 new cases in one day. For the
first time, someone outside Mainland China had died of the disease.
Manhattan’s Chinatown, where Barbot had appeared,
is one of the densest parts of the city. The old core community where the Lunar
New Year celebration is based is a maze of cramped tenements, narrow
streets, tiny stores whose counters extend far into the street, and other unsafe
conditions
Barbot went on urging people to participate in
the parade while spreading misinformation about the risk. “You won’t get it
merely from riding the subways -- you get it from secretions,” she even claimed.
To
her, the enemy was racial prejudice, not a rapidly transmissible, often deadly
virus with a spread we can only hope to reduce by practicing social distance
and good hygiene.
New
York’s health authorities ignored objective research and placed the city’s
residents at great risk, and the outbreak exploded.
So blinded by identity politics was the mayor that
he never even ordered protective equipment until mid-March.
A staggering 6,582 additional people tested
positive for the deadly bug since Thursday evening, bringing the city’s total
confirmed cases to 56,289. Another 305 New Yorkers died from the virus, pushing
the death toll up to 1,867.
More than 1,100 more coronavirus patients were
hospitalized in the past day. Since the outbreak 11,739 people have been
hospitalized. The city’s ICU capacity is at 88 percent with just 370 beds left
unfilled.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday, just before the
new statistics were released, that the coming days will be even
darker.
The greatest city in the world is teetering on
the brink so its Mayor seizes the opportunity to remind us he is a useless
buffoon:
- COVID-19:
De Blasio urges US enlistment program for doctors and nurses
- Mayor calls for medics to be moved
to places in greatest need
- New
York City prepares for surge in coronavirus cases
- "Enlistment
program"?!? WHAT did he say?
- New
York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, has called for a national enlistment
program for doctors and nurses, to handle an expected surge in coronavirus
cases in New York and across the US.
- “If
we’re fighting a war, let’s act like we’re fighting a war,” he told reporters
on Friday.
- "...unless
the military is fully mobilized and we create something we’ve never had
before, which is some kind of national enlistment of medical personnel
moved to the most urgent needs in the country constantly … if we don’t
have that we’re going to see hospitals simply unable to handle so many
people who could be saved.”
OK, that won't be happening. As a minor point,
there is no time for Congress to pass the relevant legislation. As a major point,
this is still America, we abandoned the draft decades ago, and we don't force
people to work at gunpoint.
And how would it work? NY hospitals are short of
Protective Personal Equipment. So the Feds are going to threaten to arrest some
doctor in Vermont unless he gets down to NY and imperils himself by treating
coronavirus patients? And if the good people of the great state of Vermont need
health care down the road, NY promises to send their doctor back, unless he's
sick or dead or super busy saving New Yorkers in which case, well, that's a
problem for another day? [snip]
As a further illustration that desperate times
require desperate short-sightedness, this order by Gov. Cuomo is outrageous:
Cuomo said he would sign an executive order that
allows the national guard to take ventilators and personal protective equipment
from institutions that don’t need them right now and redistribute them to those
that do. He said those institutions would either have their ventilators
returned to them or get reimbursements. Cuomo said there may be several hundred
ventilators available because of the order.
Right now, the state is fielding a daily need for
about 300 additional ventilators, he said. Those ventilators, officials have
repeatedly explained, make the difference between life and death.
“Am I willing to deploy the national guard and
inconvenience people for several hundred lives? You’re damn right I am,” Cuomo
said…
I guess Gov. Cuomo's message is "tough
luck".
Nancy
Pelosi
The
first reference I can find of a mysterious virus in Wuhan was one in Mandarin dated
December 31, 2019, three weeks before the Pelosi-promoted California
congressman Adam Schiff’s impeachment trial, which began on January 21.
One day after the ill-fated impeachment trial began, the CDC reported the first
domestic virus case and the New York Times reported that the
Chinese government was quarantining Wuhan. Eight days after the first case was
reported in the U.S., the president formed the coronavirus task force. That
same day WHO declared the virus a Global Health emergency. The next day
(January 31), the President declared a public health emergency, quarantined
U.S. citizens returning from China’s Hubei Province and restricted entry into
the U.S. from China. (The Democrats charged him with racism for doing so though
this step has proven critical to slowing the spread of the virus here.)
Two
days later, on February 2, he suspended entry of others who posed a risk of
transmitting the virus (and thereafter, added to suspension of entry people
from other countries where the virus was appearing). On February 4 in his State
of the Union address, he warned of the virus. Nancy Pelosi in a public temper
tantrum and show of contempt ripped up her copy of the State of the Union
address.
On
February 24, twenty days after the President issued his warning about the virus
and almost one month after he restricted entry from China, Nancy Pelosi publicly stated that people should pay no attention
to the coronavirus fears and joined crowds in San Francisco’s Chinese lunar new
years' celebrations, “We think it’s very safe,” she said.
On
March 11, The President suspended travel from Europe, and the WHO officially
declared the virus a pandemic. The following day, NYC declared a state of
emergency and issued a statewide ban on all large gatherings.
I
can only imagine what the death toll will be in California. San
Francisco has immune-suppressed HIV-AIDs affected citizens (about 12,985 people
living with HIV in San Francisco) and thousands of homeless
people living on the streets. So far, the homeless do
not seem particularly affected, but if (or once) it makes an appearance there,
I suspect it will take a substantial toll. I suppose many of these people are
already quite unhealthy, live cheek by jowl outdoors on feces-heaped streets,
and lack access to means to practice proper hygiene. California also has
a large number of immigrants -- in recent years,
largely from Asia:
The majority of recent arrivals are from Asia.
The vast majority of California’s immigrants were
born in Latin America (50%) or Asia (40%). California has sizable populations
of immigrants from dozens of countries; the leading countries of origin are
Mexico (4.1 million), China (969,000), the Philippines (857,000), Vietnam
(524,000), and India (507,000). However, most (56%) of those arriving between 2010
and 2017 came from Asia; only 29% came from Latin America.
At
the moment the virus is racing faster through Southern California than Northern
California, with Los Angeles County hardest hit. Santa Clara County with a high
percentage of Asian population (37%) was hard hit as well though at the
moment Los Angeles is hardest of the California counties hit.
I
have for reasons for space and time limited the discussion largely to di Blasio
and Pelosi, but they are certainly not the only Democratic politicians whose
foolishness proves they are never to be trusted at the times we need sound
political leadership most.
If
you vote for people like these, you bet your life (and mine).
GLOBALIST BARACK OBAMA AND NANCY PELOSI’S
CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY AND KEEP AMERICA FLOODED WITH DEM
VOTING ILLEGALS
"Along with Obama, Pelosi and
Schumer are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the
eight years of that administration." PATRICIA McCARTHY (BIDEN IS NOT NOTED
AS HE SPENT 8 YEARS DURING THE OBOMB FOR BANKSTERS REGIME SUCKING OFF BRIBES
AND NO ONE REALLY SAW HIM)
Doctors: Suicides Outpace Coronavirus Deaths at Northern California Hospital During Lockdown
3:49
The number of suicides documented by a hospital in Northern California during the ongoing lockdown has exceeded the number of Chinese coronavirus deaths, doctors in the city of Walnut Creek revealed this week as they called for an end to the region’s lockdown order.
In an interview with the Los Angeles-based ABC7 news outlet aired on Thursday, doctors from the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek stressed that there had been an unprecedented rise in suicides, noting that there have been more attempts over the last month than in most full years.
“We’ve never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time,” Dr. Mike DeBoisblanc, the head of trauma at the Walnut Creek hospital, told the local ABC outlet. “I mean, we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.”
“What I have seen recently, I have never seen before,” Kacey Hansen, a trauma nurse at the medical center for over three decades, added. “I have never seen so much intentional injury.”
“Social isolation has a price and I know why we’ve done it,” she also said. “It just has a bigger price tag than I thought.”
Hansen reportedly noted that the Walnut Creek hospital is unable to save as many patients as usual due to a near single-minded focus on coronavirus.
Other doctors, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, have acknowledged that there is a clear and present danger that lockdown measures may fuel mental health issues like suicide.
Lockdowns have “not been necessary to save lives but instead inflicted devastating harm on tens of millions of people,” hundreds of doctors wrote in a letter to the White House.
Contra Costa County’s Walnut Creek is in the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay area.
Dr. DeBoisblanc and Tom Tamura, the executive director of the Contra Costa County Crisis Center, noted that most of the suicides involve young adults who are “worried about the stress that isolation and job loss can bring as this quarantine continues.”
In a statement to ABC7 responding to the trauma team’s concerns about the rise in suicides amid the lockdowns, the county’s crisis center proclaimed:
We strongly encourage everyone in distress to seek help from mental health professionals and local resources such as 211 (the Crisis Center).We understand that this is a very difficult time for many people, and it can feel very isolating to practice social distancing. We want to stress that the shelter-in-place order is saving lives at the same time.
Noting that the region’s shutdown order is having a devastating impact on mental health, Dr. DeBoisblanc declared:
Personally, I think it’s time. I think, originally, this [shelter-in-place order] was put in place to flatten the curve and to make sure hospitals have the resources to take care of COVID patients.We have the current resources to do that and our other community health is suffering.
Nevertheless, the John Muir Medical Center stressed that it is supportive of the shelter-in-place order in the Bay Area, saying in a statement to ABC7:
We realize there are a number of opinions on this topic, including within our medical staff, and John Muir Health encourages our physicians and staff to participate constructively in these discussions. We all share a concern for the health of our community, whether that is COVID-19, mental health, intentional violence, or other issues.
The shelter-in-place order in the region will expire by May 31. Every state in America has begun a phased reopening process as conditions across the country improve, particularly a drop in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new cases.
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