US Intervention in Syria Will Kill Far More Children than Assad’s Alleged Chemical Attack

The U.S. military is in the business of conquest, death, and destruction, not "humanitarian intervention."

The post US Intervention in Syria Will Kill Far More Children than Assad’s Alleged Chemical Attack appeared first on The Free Thought Project.

US Intervention in Syria Will Kill Far More Children than Assad’s Alleged Chemical Attack

The U.S. military is in the business of conquest, death, and destruction, not "humanitarian intervention."

The post US Intervention in Syria Will Kill Far More Children than Assad’s Alleged Chemical Attack appeared first on The Free Thought Project.

1,000s Of "Micro-Homes" Sprout Up All Over Bay Area To House The Growing Homeless Population

Roughly one year ago we shared the plans of a billionaire real estate developer in San Francisco who wanted to build communities for the homeless in Bay Area neighborhoods using stackable steel shipping containers (see: San Fran Billionaire Luanches Plan To House Homeless In Shipping Containers).  Not surprisingly, the efforts were met with some resistance from the liberal elites of Santa Clara who, despite their vocal support of any number of federal subsidy programs for low-income families, would prefer that those low-income families, and their subsidies, stay far away from their posh, suburban, "safe places."

Alas, as the San Francisco Chronicle points out today, like it or not, the boom in "micro-houses" is just getting started in the Bay Area with nearly 1,000 tiny homes, with less than 200 square feet of living space, currently being planned in San Francisco, San Jose, Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland and Santa Rosa.

Planners say that’s just the beginning. “We’re very excited about micro-homes,” said Lavonna Martin, director of Contra Costa County’s homeless programs. “They could be a big help. They have a lot of promise, and our county is happy to be on the cutting edge of this one. We’re ready.”

 

Contra Costa has a $750,000 federal homelessness grant to pay for 50 stackable micro-units of supportive housing, and Richmond Mayor Tom Butt would like to see them in his city. Developer Patrick Kennedy brought a prototype of his MicroPad unit to Richmond in November, and county and city leaders say they are leaning toward choosing it.

 

“They’re very fine, and they make a nice-looking building,” Butt said. “They’d be good for anybody looking for housing.”

The beauty of the tiny units is that they can be built in a fraction of the time it takes to construct typical affordable housing, and at a sliver of the cost, which means a lot of homeless folks can be housed quickly.

The homes have also caught on in San Jose where the City Council just approved $2.4 million to build a village of 40 units to help house the homeless.  Of course, just like in Santa Clara, San Jose residents are lashing out at city officials over plans that they say will only serve to increase neighborhood crime.

San Jose resident Sue Halloway told the council she was afraid putting the village near residences would increase “neighborhood crime, neighborhood blight (and) poor sanitation,” and predicted that it would be “a magnet for more homeless.”

 

City Councilman Raul Peralez said he understands such concerns, but that “there are no facts surrounding these tiny homes and whatever blight or crime they might bring, because we haven’t done them yet.”

 

“I tell people you really have two options,” said Peralez, who said he wants the village in his downtown district. “You can allow the homeless to live on the streets, or you can provide not only shelter but services in a confined area — with security. In my mind, that’s a way better option for managing this community in an organized way.”

So, what do the stackable units look like?  As seen in the video below, prototypes from one manufacturer, MicroPad, come complete with full bathrooms and kitchens and have up to 160-180 square feet of living space...

“These micro-homes may seem small at 160 to 180 square feet, but they’re actually pretty spacious when you’re in them,” she said. “And they go up very fast.”

 

Kennedy’s MicroPads have showers, beds and kitchens. Individually they resemble shipping containers, but once they’re bolted together with siding and utilities, they look like a regular building.

...which is more or less considered a mansion by struggling New York artist standards...

41 Million Americans Are Living In Poverty This Christmas

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Even though the stock market continues to set new record high after new record high, poverty is exploding all over America. 

It is being reported that 41 million people are living in poverty at this moment, and 9 million of them do not receive a single penny of income from anyone.  Once you have been unemployed for long enough, you don’t qualify for unemployment payments any longer, and once you are on the street there is nowhere for other governments programs to send a check to.  I have previously discussed the rising epidemic of homelessness in our nation, but most people don’t want to think about that sort of a thing these days.  Even though New York City has the most homeless since the Great Depression, and even though homelessness in Los Angeles is at an all-time record high, most people want to pretend that everything is just fine.

Well, the truth is that everything is not just fine.

A reporter from the Guardian recently traveled with a special UN envoy to some of the most impoverished areas of the United States.  His report is extremely eye-opening, and I wanted to share a short excerpt from his story.  This portion of his article is about a 41-year-old woman named Ressy Finley who is desperately trying to stay alive on the mean streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles…

Ressy Finley, 41, was busy sterilizing the white bucket she uses to slop out in her tent in which she has lived on and off for more than a decade. She keeps her living area, a mass of worn mattresses and blankets and a few motley possessions, as clean as she can in a losing battle against rats and cockroaches. She also endures waves of bed bugs, and has large welts on her shoulder to prove it.

 

She receives no formal income, and what she makes on recycling bottles and cans is no way enough to afford the average rents of $1,400 a month for a tiny one-bedroom. A friend brings her food every couple of days, the rest of the time she relies on nearby missions.

 

She cried twice in the course of our short conversation, once when she recalled how her infant son was taken from her arms by social workers because of her drug habit (he is now 14; she has never seen him again). The second time was when she alluded to the sexual abuse that set her as a child on the path towards drugs and homelessness.

Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency because the number of homeless is rising so rapidly, and so have nine other cities along the west coast.  For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “As America Gives Thanks, Homelessness Continues To Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation”.

The sad thing is that there are more than a million homes sitting empty in America right now.  As economic opportunities have dried up, many communities in the middle part of the nation are becoming “ghost towns”, and it is getting worse with each passing day…

There are nearly 1.4 million vacant residential properties across the country — abandoned, not for sale, mostly unoccupied homes. With vacant properties comprising as much as 30% of residential properties, some neighborhoods are starting to feel like ghost towns.

Many believe that the answer to the decline of the middle class and the growth of poverty is even more socialism.

But if you want to see where that road leads, just look at what is happening in Venezuela.  People are eating cats and dogs, and just today there were a whole bunch of mainstream news articles about how children are literally starving to death.

No, the real answer is to do what made our economy so great in the first place.  Between 1872 and 1913, we didn’t have an income tax or a central bank, and it was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

What we have today is not free market capitalism.  We have gone very far down the road toward government-controlled socialism, and it has created a giant mess.

If we want to have a healthy middle class again, we need to have a society that promotes entrepreneurs and the creation of small businesses.  Today we are literally choking the financial life out of entrepreneurs and small businesses, and when I am elected to Congress I am going to fight as hard as I can to change that.

*  *  *

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

World"s First Vending-Machine For The Homeless To Be Unveiled In UK In December; LA, NYC Next Year

This is a first, a new charity in the UK called Action Hunger plans to install a vending machine for the homeless in December. The organization describes itself as a charity with a “new approach to combating homelessness.” The initial plan will be installing a machine in the town of Nottingham in the December time-period, then a second machine in Manchester sometime early 2018. If all goes well, Action Hunger plans to do a full release across the UK in attempt to alleviate poverty and hardships– something the government is having trouble in doing.

Action Hunger is working with Tesco and other partners to stock the machines with water, fresh fruit, energy bars, crisps, chocolate, and sandwiches, as well as socks, sanitary towels, antibacterial lotion, toothbrush and toothpaste combination packs, and books. A majority of the food will be provided by a localized network of regional food vendors who will donate excessive food waste.

The charity has partnered with The Friary, an outreached centre in the city, to oversee the people’s access to the vending machines. The machines will operate 24-hours a day accessed by a special card given out by the Friary and can service up to 100 homeless people per day. Key cards are programmed to permit up to three items per day, which offers a low-cost automated solution in dealing with the poor.

Action Hunger explains how the process works: 

According to the Independent, homelessness has increased 34% per cent since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, partly due to benefit cuts and welfare changes. A new study reveals that 300,000 people in Britain are now homeless, with the crisis growing as much as 13 per cent last year alone.

Number of rough sleepers across England on a given night

Number of homelessness applications made to local authorities

Action Hunger is targeting Nottingham and Manchester, two areas where homelessness is out of control.

Across England, housing market affordability is once again above 2006 to 2008 levels— signaling that house prices are once more outpacing income.

Besides the exploding homelessness situation in the UK, there is an even larger market in the United States, where Action Hunger will be installing the vending machines next year in Seattle, New York, and LA.

In August, we reported 1 in 7 New York City Public-School students is homeless. On top of that, NYC shelter officials have admitted a record number of homeless to shelters each night.

In a preview of things to come, automation in the form of vending machines seems to be the short term solution in dealing with the homeless in the UK. The next step for Action Hunger appears to be a multi-city rollout in the United States targeting a much larger homeless population as the middle class deteriorates.

For our American audience, an automated vending machine for the homeless is coming to a town near you. The dying middle class will no longer be able to shop at the Dollar Tree nor Walmart, as they will resort to automated vending machines. The future is bleak.

As America Gave Thanks, Homelessness Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

If the economy is doing just fine, then why is homelessness at levels not seen “since the Great Depression” in major cities all over the country? 

If the U.S. economy was actually in good shape, we would expect that the number of people that are homeless would be going down or at least stabilizing.  Instead, we have a growing national crisis on our hands.  In fact, within the past two years “at least 10 cities or municipal regions in California, Oregon and Washington” have declared a state of emergency because the number of homeless is growing so rapidly.

Things are particularly bad in southern California, and this year the Midnight Mission will literally be feeding a small army of people that have nowhere to sleep at night…

Thanksgiving meals will be served to thousands of homeless and near-homeless individuals today on Skid Row and in Pasadena and Canoga Park amid calls for donations and volunteers for the rest of the year.

 

The Midnight Mission will serve Thanksgiving brunch to nearly 2,500 homeless and near-homeless men, women and children, according to Georgia Berkovich, its director of public affairs.

Overall, the Midnight Mission serves more than a million meals a year, and Berkovich says that homelessness hasn’t been this bad in southern California “since the Great Depression”…

Berkovich said the group has been serving nearly 1 million meals a year each year since 2013.

 

“We haven’t seen numbers like this since the Great Depression,” she said.

And of course the official numbers confirm what Berkovich is claiming.  According to an article published earlier this year, the number of homeless people living in Los Angeles County has never been higher…

The number of homeless people in Los Angeles has jumped to a new record, as city officials grapple with a humanitarian crisis of proportions remarkable for a modern American metropolis.

 

Municipal leaders said that a recent count over several nights found 55,188 homeless people living in a survey region comprising most of Los Angeles County, up more than 25% from last year.

If the California economy is truly doing well, then why is this happening?

We see the same thing happening when we look at the east coast.  Just check out these numbers from New York City…

In recent years the number of homeless people has grown. Whereas rents increased by 18% between 2005 and 2015, incomes rose by 5%. When Rudy Giuliani entered City Hall in 1994, 24,000 people lived in shelters. About 31,000 lived in them when Mike Bloomberg became mayor in 2002. When Bill de Blasio entered City Hall in 2014, 51,500 did. The number of homeless people now in shelters is around 63,000.

For New York, this is the highest that the homeless population has been since the Great Depression, and city leaders are trying to come up with a solution.

Meanwhile, things are so bad in Seattle that “400 unauthorized tent camps” have popped up…

Housing prices are soaring here thanks to the tech industry, but the boom comes with a consequence: A surge in homelessness marked by 400 unauthorized tent camps in parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along busy sidewalks. The liberal city is trying to figure out what to do.

Are you noticing a theme?

Homelessness is at epidemic levels all over the U.S., and this crisis is getting worse with each passing day.  Some communities are trying to care for their growing homeless populations, but others are simply trying to force them to go somewhere else.  They are doing this by essentially making it illegal to be homeless.  In some cities it is now a crime to engage in “public camping”, to “block a walkway” or to create any sort of “temporary structure for human habitation”.  These laws specifically target the homeless, and they are very cruel.

Many of us tend to picture the homeless as mostly lazy older men that don’t want to work and that instead want to drink or do drugs all day.

But the truth is that women and children make up a significant percentage of the homeless.

In fact, the number of homeless children in our country has increased by about 60 percent since the end of the last recession.

And there are thousands upon thousands of military veterans that are homeless.  For example, a 34-year-old man named Johnny that served in the Marine Corps recently used his last 20 dollars to buy fuel for a woman that had run out of gas and was stranded along I-95 in Miami…

Pulled over on the side of I-95, McClure, 27, was approached by a homeless man named Johnny. She was apprehensive at first, but Johnny told her to get back into her car and to lock the doors while he walked to get her help. He went to a nearby gas station, used his last $20 fill a can and brought it back to fill up her car.

 

Grateful, but without a dollar to repay him, McClure promised she would come back with something.

 

In the weeks since, she’s returned to the spot along I-95 where Johnny stays with cash, snacks and Wawa gift cards. Each time she’s stopped by with her boyfriend, Mark D’Amico, they’ve learned a bit more about Johnny’s story, and become humbled by his gratitude.

Deciding that they wanted to do even more for Johnny, they started a GoFundMe page for him and have since raised approximately $250,000.

So it looks like there is going to be a happy ending to Johnny’s story, but the truth is that more people are falling into homelessness with each passing day.

If things are this bad now, how much worse will they become as the economy really starts slowing down?  Already, we have shattered the all-time yearly record for retail store closings, and we still have more than a month to go.  The following is from a CNN article entitled “Is This The Last Black Friday?”…

A record number of store closures - 6,735 - have already been announced this year. That’s more than triple the tally for 2016, according to Fung Global Retail and Technology, a retail think tank.

 

And there have been 620 bankruptcies in the sector so far this year, according to BankruptcyData.com, up 31% from the same period last year. Prominent names such as Toys R Us, Gymboree, Payless Shoes and RadioShack have all filed this year, and Sears Holdings (SHLD), which owns both the iconic Sears and Kmart chains, has warned there is “substantial doubt” it can remain in business.

Sadly, analysts are projecting that the number of store closings could be as high as 9,000 next year.

Yes, there are some areas of the country that are doing well right now, but there are many others that are not.

Let us always remember to have compassion on those that are struggling, because someday we may be the ones that end up needing some help.

*  *  *

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Too Good For Too Long...

I"m writing this from my home in Sonoma County at the end of an intense week of witnessing firsthand the devastation caused by the many current fires burning in northern California. While it"s hard to focus on anything other than the moment-to-moment developments of this still-unfolding disaster (which I"ve been chronicling here), it"s already clear that the implications for my part of the state will last for many, many years to come.

It"s amazing how instantly the status quo where I live has changed. The world my neighbors and I lived in when we all went to bed on Sunday night simply no longer existed by the time we woke up on Monday morning. Lives have been lost. Entire neighborhoods - thousands of homes - have burned to the ground. Businesses, hospitals and schools are now shuttered.

Having now experienced this personally -- on top of watching news reports over the previous weeks of similarly abrupt "before/after" transitions in Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico, Mexico City, Las Vegas and Catalonia -- I have a new-found appreciation for the maxim that when it arrives, change happens quickly -- usually much more quickly than folks ever imagined, catching the general public off-guard and unprepared.

We humans tend to think linearly and comparatively. In other words, we usually assume the near future will look a lot like the recent past. And it does much of the time.

But other times it doesn"t. And that"s where the danger lies.

The Cruel Math

In 1987 a Danish physicist named Per Bak released a landmark paper introducing the concept of self-organized criticality. Bak observed that complex systems draw stability through an ongoing cycle of corrective collapses that keep the overall system from becoming too over-extended.

His point is best understood by watching a sand pile being formed. The pile rises as more grains of sand are added to it, until it hits a critical mass. At that point, the addition of more sand grains is likely to cause a limited collapse of the pile. The more grains of sand added, the more frequent these localized collapses are:

The key takeaway is that the end result of these collapses is that the overall size and shape of the sand pile as a whole is maintained -- i.e. the smaller corrections are necessary for maintaining the ongoing stability of the larger system (in other words, the sand pile retains a constant shape over time)

Without them, the system would grow unchecked until toppled by other laws of physics, yet at this point the energy displacement of the collapse is so large that the system is destroyed or re-set (in other words, the sand pile would rise in height over time until it collapsed entirely)

In his later 1996 book, How Nature Works, Bak showed how the same rules apply to the complex systems around us -- earthquakes, traffic jams, biological evolution, forest fires, the distribution of galaxies in the universe — and financial markets, too.

His findings are universal to complex systems. Ongoing smaller corrections are necessary for long-term stability of the larger system. And while you can"t predict exactly when the next correction will occur, the longer it takes to happen, the larger it will be (as it has more pent-up energy to displace). 

Another way to look at this is: If the smaller corrections don"t happen, the system is being set up for a much bigger and more painful collapse in the future.

In many ways, we"re seeing this manifest via the rash of recent disasters.

Let"s look at hurricanes. 2010-2016 was one of the most mild periods on record when it comes to damaging storms making landfall in the US. For whatever reason, the usual seasonal "smaller corrections" just weren"t happening as frequently in the Atlantic.

Bak"s work would predict an increasing probability of an unusually busy season of destructive hurricanes to arrive. And, right on cue, 2017 has now been recognized as the 9th most-active Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history (and the season isn"t over yet!). Underscoring the point, September 2017 proved to be the #1 single most active month for Atlantic tropical cyclones on record.

Similarly, the US West is coming off of a long stretch of regrettable forestry management practices -- logging large trees, fire suppression, and livestock grazing -- which reduced the natural occurrence and frequency of smaller-scale forest fires that prevented the build up of combustible flora. As a result, the system has become much more vulnerable to unchecked fires -- a situation made worse by the effects of the prolonged recent drought (just as the warmer temperature of the Gulf of Mexico is making hurricanes there more potent). Which is why the American West is experiencing its third most severe fire season in history this year.

Et Tu, S&P?

Don"t forget that Bak"s rules for complex systems also apply to financial markets.

With that in mind, it makes the inexorable mania and lack of micro-corrections since 2009 downright frightening. Just take a look at this price chart of the S&P 500, which is currently in its second-longest-ever bull market run:

We see that as stock prices have been on a one-way ride higher over the years, downside volatility has dried up, to the point where it now practically no longer exists:

Going back 55 years, the average cumulative intra-day losses over a 25-day period is about 660 basis points, or 6.6%. As of yesterday (October 10), the last 25 days have seen a grand total intra-day loss of just 96 basis points, or 0.96%. If that seems small, it is.

In fact, outside of the period ending November 26, 2014, this is the smallest cumulative 25-day intra-day loss in the past 46 years – and the only one registering less than 100 basis points.

(Source)

Just as (until this fall) with the US east coast and hurricanes, or like my corner of California with wildfires, things since 2010 have been "too good for too long" for the financial markets. The usual cycle of smaller corrections has not been allowed to happen, resulting in an unnatural build-up of the system to a height from which a destructive re-set is increasingly probable.

How much longer this can continue is anyone guess. But Bak"s work explains why it can"t go on forever, and why the resulting collapse will be more devastating the longer it takes to happen. And with the world central banking cartel set to reduce total global QE -- just as with hotter water temperatures in the Gulf -- the conditions for catastrophy are ratcheting up.

We are getting closer and closer to the day when we awake to find the markets we had the day before no longer exist. Change happens that fast, even with financial markets. If you think you"ll be one of the smart ones to sell your current positions before things get too bad, talk to someone who was invested in the market on October 19, 1987 when it suddenly lost nearly 25% of its value in just a few hours.

While you"re at it, talk to someone in Houston, Tampa Bay, Puerto Rico or Mexico City. Or I can put you in touch with one of my friends from Santa Rosa. Any one of them will tell you how stunningly swiftly fate can upend your best-laid plans.

Takeaways From Tragedy

Fortunately this week, I was one of the lucky ones. My family and property were spared.

But I can"t say the same for many in my community. From their loss, as well as from the threat I experienced earlier this week when the fires were much closer, here are some of the key learnings that came out of this crisis:

• Preparation only matters if it"s done in advance. And it matters a LOT -- Those who had "go bags" and disaster kits in place before the fires fared much better than those who didn"t. They were able to evacuate faster, more safely, and with better self-sufficiency. And even a few small steps can make a big difference. I found that already having a stash of emergency cash as well as several containers full of gas for my car put me at a great advantage when it first looked like we were going to have flee our home. Putting it more bluntly: if you don"t have some sort of emergency prep kit at this point, you"re being unforgivably reckless. Need guidance on what to put in it? Read our free Guide To Emergency Preparedness.


• People matter much more than property -- for those who had only minutes to flee the flames, they only cared about getting their loved ones to safety. All the "stuff" they accumulated in life didn"t even factor into their thinking at that moment. The big learning here? Don"t let possessions take an undue importance in your life. A disaster can quickly take them from you, and when forced to choose, you"ll pick people over things every time. So instead, place your focus on nurturing the relationships you value and maximizing the quality of time you can spend with those people. If you could use some professional help in this area and are having trouble finding it, consider contacting the therapist we endorse (full disclosure: she"s my wife)


• Community is priceless -- no one can be prepared for everything. Community will provide for the things you lack. I"ve been blown away by the magnitude of the response from the generous folks living both within and without Sonoma County. As I wrote last week, tragedy offers a way for people to step into their best selves. Invest in your community now, so that it"s as robust as possible when you need to count on it. Looking for ways to build community? We have a free guide for that, too.

These learnings apply to any crisis, but of course, depending on the type -- natural, financial or otherwise -- additional preparations come into play.

In our recent report Part 2 -- Crisis Preparation: What To Do, we detail out, point-by-point, our complete list of the most important steps concerned individuals should take now -- before another disaster arrives -- to safeguard their investment capital, their property, and the personal security of their families. Because whether caused by Mother Nature or man"s own recklessness, we are due for more crisis. Don"t be caught unprepared. Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

San Diego's Deadly Hepatitis A Outbreak Turns "Statewide Epidemic" As "Outbreak Could Last Years"

A few weeks ago we highlighted the staggering outbreak of Hepatitis A in San Diego that had infected 400 people and killed more than a dozen.  The outbreak was first identified in early March, according to the county, and declared a public health emergency in September.

But, as the LA Times points out, the hepatitis A outbreak that started in San Diego is now on the verge of reaching statewide epidemic status, as cases have spread through homeless tent cities all the way north to Sacramento.

California’s outbreak of hepatitis A, already the nation’s second largest in the last 20 years, could continue for many months, even years, health officials said Thursday.

At least 569 people have been infected and 17 have died of the virus since November in San Diego, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles counties, where local outbreaks have been declared.

Dr. Monique Foster, a medical epidemiologist with the Division of Viral Hepatitis at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters Thursday that California’s outbreak could linger even with the right prevention efforts.

“It’s not unusual for them to last quite some time — usually over a year, one to two years,” Foster said.

Hepatitis A is commonly transmitted through contaminated food. The only outbreak in the last 20 years bigger than California’s occurred in Pennsylvania in 2003, when more than 900 people were infected after eating contaminated green onions at a restaurant.

California’s outbreak, however, is spreading from person to person, mostly among the homeless community.

The virus is transmitted from feces to mouth, so unsanitary conditions make it more likely to spread. The city of San Diego has installed dozens of handwashing stations and begun cleaning streets with bleach-spiked water in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, the outbreak has made its way to Santa Cruz and L.A. counties, where 70 and 12 people have already been diagnosed, respectively, as public health officials warn that the worst is likely far from over.

San Diego County declared a public health emergency in September because of its hepatitis A outbreak.

Since November, 481 people there have fallen ill, including 17 who died, according to Dr. Eric McDonald with the county’s health department. An additional 57 cases are under investigation, he said.

Officials from both counties say they’ve vaccinated thousands of homeless people and will continue to do so.

New cases linked to the outbreak might not appear for weeks, because it can take up to 50 days for an infected person to show symptoms, said Santa Cruz public health manager Jessica Randolph.

“I don’t think the worst is over,” Randolph said.

Of course, as we pointed out earlier this year (see: Shocking Video Footage Of Sprawling California Tent City), sprawling tent cities have been popping up all over California for years and are called home by 1,000s of residents in even the most posh cities from Newport to Santa Cruz.  All of which has prompted a wave of vaccinations and a "review of sanitation protocols for homeless encampments"...which we"re sure will be followed very rigorously by residents.

In Orange County, which has had two hepatitis A cases linked to the outbreak, public health workers have given out 492 vaccines, mostly to homeless people, officials said. County nurses have also been visiting shelters and parks to vaccinate people.

Some officials, including in Riverside and Sacramento counties, also said they were reviewing their sanitation protocols for homeless encampments. An L.A. councilman recently called for more toilets in neighborhoods such as skid row and Venice in light of the local hepatitis cases.

In Oakland, city workers, represented by SEIU Local 1021, sent a letter to City Hall last month saying they feared a hepatitis A outbreak in the region’s homeless community. So far, there haven’t been any cases in Oakland or the rest of Alameda County, but city safety steward Brian Clay said he believed the city has allowed unsanitary conditions in homeless encampments.

“There’s syringes, there’s human feces, there are dead animals, rats alive, and dead rats … pee bottles, five-gallon buckets used as toilets,” Clay said. “We’re definitely concerned about this added threat of hepatitis A.”

As Breitbart points out, California"s tent cities are the direct result of "proactive" legislation that forbids police from dispersing homeless people living in tent cities between the hours of 9pm and 5:30am.

California homeless advocates have been successful across the state in forcing cities to accept the homeless living in large tent communities on public property. The advocates refer to anti-homeless ordinances as the modern-day equivalent to post-slavery Jim Crow and Depression era anti-Okie laws that allowed police to disperse people deemed “undesirable” after dark.

The City of San Diego was forced to sign the Spencer Settlement in 2006, which forbids its Police Department from enforcing the city’s “Illegal Lodging Enforcement Guidelines” between the hours of 9 pm to 5:30 am.

California, with 115,738 homeless, now accounts for about 21 percent of America’s total homeless population. Due to legal settlements against vagrancy laws, about 72.3 percent of California’s homeless are unsheltered, usually living in tent cities.

If you like your socialist utopia, you can keep your socialist utopia.

Some Journalists are Just Arsonists Pointing Fingers

Via The Daily Bell

Setting a fire is easier than putting one out.

And sometimes the people who fail to put out a fire are persecuted by the ones who don’t show up at all–or worse yet, fan the flames.

A recent Gizmodo article basically criticizes a volunteer fire department. No, not literally. This has nothing to do with actual fires of fire-fighters.

This has to do with an article called, “Some Crypto-Capitalists Just Want to See The World Burn.”

Conspicuously lacking in the article is… how exactly the “crypto-capitalists” want to see the world burn?

The article tears apart all the ways the attendees of the Startup Societies Summit are trying to put out the fires of the world. It tries to torch innovative ideas about how to end poverty, clean up the environment, stop government abuse, feed the hungry, and advance modern medicine.

The author of the Gizmodo piece, Bryan Menegus, is like an arsonist saying, “awfully suspicious that every time there’s a fire, all these firefighters are on the scene…”

If Menegus had a superpower, it would be the uncanny ability to find nefarious motivations for even the most innocuous solutions to serious problems.

Summoning his powers, he first cherry picks two sentences from a 15-minute presentation on how to solve the refugee crisis using Special Economic Zones (SEZs).

Among the most extreme examples of expanding SEZs was Michael Castle Miller’s presentation on “refugee cities”—a proposal to turn refugee camps into their own Shenzhens. “We can actually convert refugees into economic assets that drive us towards the economic and social progress we want to achieve,” he says. Through one lens it gives those stuck in political limbo a semblance of normalcy; through another it sees immigration as a problem in need of solving and turns refugee camps into company towns running off the labor of the displaced. “It’s an investment opportunity because now all of a sudden there’s a huge labor force out there of untapped skills that nobody else can access.”

Maybe in the utopia in Menegus’ mind, immigration is not a problem in need of solving. But in the real world, millions sit in camps not allowed to work for their own economic benefit.

Apparently, governments setting up camps and then funding them without end fits into the Savior Complex of Gizmodo and associates. Instead of freeing and empowering individuals, they think of people as weak, in need of constant nurturing by mother government. Yet these refugees are being smothered by their matriarchal providers. Governments don’t let them work and refuse to let them integrate into economies surrounding the encampments.

You might think allowing someone the opportunity to work and provide for themselves and their families would be a good thing. All Menegus sees is exploitation. Somehow, he casts company towns as worse than the literal prisons in which refugees now live.

When he wants to criticize, Menegus has no difficulty conjuring up images of a burning world, ripe for greedy capitalists to take advantage of desperate victims in need.

Yet all these troubles evaporate when he questions the suspicious actions of the event’s speakers.

When asked what he’s running from that requires a man-made island on the ocean, Joe Quirk says “pretty much all the governments that exist.”

Menegus had countless examples of how the naive attendees, refugees, the poor, and others would be taken advantage of by greedy capitalists. But suddenly the scary world in need of government protection disappears. What’s so bad that you need to run?

I don’t feel like rehashing the genocides, wars, exploitation, nor the racial, gender, and religious discrimination perpetrated by various governments. From Jim Crow laws to Ruby Ridge, from the Tuskegee experiments to torture at Gitmo, there is plenty to run from in reference to the U.S. government alone.

But also, why ignore the failures? The failure of the government to end poverty, the failure to solve crime, the failure to restore the environment, heal the sick, and so much more?

As much as Quirk runs from the psychopaths in government, he tackles the problems they have never been able–or willing–to solve. I suppose Menegus would just have us wait for our saviors to get around to rescuing us poor helpless souls.

But the people involved in Startup Societies prefer to take matters into their own hands.

Let’s Talk About Failure

Don’t all the people at this conference know how many times these ideas have failed, the article suggests.

If only we could all be like Edison, The Wright Brothers, and Einstein, who all got the lightbulb, the airplane, and the theory of relativity right on their first try.

Of course, failure alone does not mean you will eventually succeed. But Menegus has to ignore the mountains of evidence in order to pretend the projects discussed have no future.

And ignore the data, or twist it, is exactly what he does.

The hope, for those like Strong, is that these experiments will not only alleviate global poverty, but show otherwise oppressive nations a better way forward—a concrete oasis that paves a path to more liberalized future governance—but it’s unclear if that’s been the case in any of the dozens of countries currently hosting an SEZ. If wages and conditions improve in one zone, what prevents corporations from packing up and finding a new crop of foreign bodies to run the machines?

It’s only unclear if you haven’t bothered to look into it.

Read another way, here is what Menegus is actually asking:

A special economic zone could improve the lives of workers and residents so much that companies no longer have cheap labor in the SEZ. Now that their former workers have the economic freedom to choose other options, what’s to stop a company from finding new crops of foreign bodies to lift out of poverty with the same methods?

Imagine the horror! What if these companies just bop around the world creating wealth, and empowering individuals until there is no one left to exploit!? Then who will Gizmodo and Bryan Menegus save with their snarky articles and sassy critique?

Relevant comparisons are ripe for analysis.

Why do South Koreans live in a normal wealthy nation, while North Koreans have not advanced since the two countries split? Before the Korean War, the populations were equally matched economically.

What’s the difference between China and Hong Kong that makes Hong Kong one of the wealthiest places on Earth? What about Singapore’s rapid development after their independence in the 1960’s?

Joe Quirk’s book Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians, highlights how experimenting with government could lift people out of poverty, solve overcrowding in cities, feed the masses while reducing the environmental impact of farming.

And yet he is likened to snake-oil salesmen. Menegus doesn’t miss the opportunity to take a shot at Quirk’s hair–which I think is lovely–and “frat boy” attitude.

Ironically, some of these experiments that Menegus is so quick to torch as libertarian fantasies, are not very libertarian at all.

Sure, economically speaking Singapore is very free. But Joe Quirk points out in his book that it also has universal health care and an annual government budget surplus. On the other hand Singapore has no minimum wage and 2% unemployment.

Hong Kong requires no licenses for any business. They also boast “no sales tax, no capital gains tax, no goods and services tax, no value added tax, no annual net worth tax, no inheritance tax, and no estate tax.”

Yet 50% of the residents of Hong Kong live in a form of subsidized housing and every resident receives free emergency medical care. The top 8% of Hong Kong residents shoulder 60% of the tax burden, and the bottom 60% of residents pay no income taxes.

So why is Menegus so quick to rule out these projects, when some of them resemble the progressive dream?

Quirk’s point is not that progressives are wrong and libertarians are right. He says “While the West argued, the East experimented.” There simply have not been enough modern experiments in government to yield any concrete data. We need more experiments. 

No Thanks, I’ll Take My Business Elsewhere

Menegus dismisses one of the clearest signs that the “exitarian” strategy is viable.

Peter Thiel helped found the Seasteading Institute. Among other things, they promote the idea of islands or ships hosting medical tourism offshores from restrictive or expensive countries.

Offshore medical research is something Thiel is already engaged in, and which has been described as “patently unethical.”

What the Menegus refers to is the testing of a herpes vaccine. You know, the thus far incurable virus.

Instead of being thwarted by the costs and bureaucracy of the FDA, or waiting 20 years and hoping the “valley of death” doesn’t scare off investors, Thiel took action.

So some shmucks connected to the U.S. government call it unethical. Big surprise.

Volunteers with herpes are getting a chance to be cured, without having to wait 20 years for the FDA to–maybe–approve it. What’s so unethical about skirting an agency known to be corrupt, which derives a big chunk of its revenue from being paid off by pharmaceutical companies?

In truth, Menegus’ Gizmodo article reads like a Newsweek article from 1995 triumphantly declaring the internet would never catch on.

This is, of course, laughable now. In a few years, it will be laughable to think we should have continued another 1,000 years of government identical to the last 1,000 years of government.

Startup Societies are primed to revolutionize the way government works. Singapore, Hong Kong, countless special economic zones, and even innovative cruise lines stand as clear signs of times to come for anyone paying attention.

In 1995, the internet was sometimes more hassle than it was worth. It didn’t do any of its functions particularly well. There was still a lot of experimentation needed to flesh out the proper applications.

Twenty-two years later, it is hard to imagine the world without it.

Everyone has an Agenda

I don’t want to be misleading here. The event organizer, Joe McKinney, who Menegus trashes in the opening of his article, is a friend of mine. I don’t like to see my friends maligned, especially when they are working their asses off to seriously improve the world. And yes, that is going to make me somewhat biased.

But the idea that Menegus is a neutral journalist is laughable. He, and Gizmodo, have an agenda.

They promote the idea of helplessness. They sell a victim mentality. If someone’s making money, someone else must be getting screwed. If someone aligns with a particular political agenda, then everything else they say should be ignored.

Of course, their political beliefs are altruistic and legitimate. They are just trying to fight Nazi’s and help the poor. But when Joe Quirk talks about how to help the poor, he’s just a used car salesman trying to make a buck.

Menegus assumes the worst of any business and assumes government has the best intentions. But people are people. Some are motivated by greed, and others by altruism, regardless of whether they join the government or the private sector.

But you can disengage from businesses. Menegus didn’t have to be at the Summit, and he doesn’t have to join any Startup Society. No one does.

Yet all 7.5 billion people on Earth must choose between 195 countries. And in reality, most of them can’t choose to leave or enter any particular country at will.

All the Startup Society Foundation is saying is that we should have more options. Let’s get more experiments going, and we can see what type of government works the best.

Menegus can start or join one with a universal basic income and censorship if he wants.

The people at the Startup Society Summit are looking for peaceful solutions. Yes, some of them want to exit, and no longer consort with the type of people who read Gizmodo. How crazy to want to disengage from people who say things like:

These people are so entrenched in a helpless victim mindset, they can’t think of any way to solve simple problems of security without government. But they do highlight the biggest threat which faces Startup Societies: violent governments enabled by angry, hateful voters.

Why exactly do these people want to see everyone with differing views murdered by terrorists and governments?

Other commenters were quick to point out the similarities of Startup Societies to the video game Bioshock. The attendees of the event preferred history and science to inform their comparisons.

But the best comment has got to be this one:

I feel that we would get a lot more realistic and useful tech and vision from these people if we shipped them to a government-free island for a few years. Then when they come back they should have at least a basic understanding of what the government is here for, for better or worse, and how to get what they need they will need to work within the current system because it’s not possible to just exclude themselves and create another – they are wholly dependent on it.

This comment reveals the clear misunderstanding between the Startup Societies project and the uninformed critics.

First, the people involved in Startup Societies are attempting to put themselves on “islands” without traditional government. They are begging to not be attacked by governments for simply trying out their own forms of governance. If the critics aren’t afraid of the results, why are they so violently opposed to the experiment?

Second, the Startup Societies may be critical of typical government, but they aren’t opposed to any governing structure whatsoever. Every project proposes mechanisms for how to govern the territory. It is just that the methods of rule-setting don’t involve coercion, theft, and violence.

The truth is they would never come back from the island. But plenty of people would be begging to come join–just like in Singapore and Hong Kong.

This won’t be the last hit piece on Startup Societies as the ideas catch on. But who cares? The whole point is to disengage from people who want to control us, who thinly veil their violent aggression with altruistic excuses a Savior Complex.

"The Maduro Diet" - Venezuelans Suffer Drastic Weight Loss As Hunger Crisis Strikes

Shortages are becoming ever more severe in Venezuela. As Deutsche Welle reports, according to the World Health Organization, hospitals lack 95% of necessary medicines. Many people are undernourished and they receive no help from the government.

"An estimated 75% of Venezuelans lost at least 10 kilos last year because there is not enough food to go around... people here call it "The Maduro Diet"...

"When we say people are eating from the garbage, we are not joing, it"s our reality... people don"t have enough to eat."

Furthermore, a lack of food and basic services is also creating an education crisis with more than 1 million children no longer attending school due to a lack of food, running water and/or electricity.

About 30 percent of students who now stay home do not attend school because of water problems at home or on campus, 22 percent do not attend because of electricity blackouts and 15 percent do not attend due to school strikes, the survey found.

About 10 percent said a lack of food at home or in school was the reason for their absence. The survey said those in that category are considered among the poorest who previously never skipped school because they did not have food at home.

Of course, the failure of Venezuela"s socialist utopia likely means that civil war is all but inevitable at some point in the future absent a quick doubling of crude prices...

San Diego Wants To Allow Homeless People To Live Inside Empty Football Stadium

Via TheAntiMedia.org,

In an effort to combat a growing homelessness crisis, city officials in San Diego are developing a plan to temporarily house vagrants at a university practice field, local media reported Monday.

The proposal comes as the city unveils a new 62-unit apartment complex specifically designed to shelter homeless individuals and families.

“I think all things are on the table,” Councilman Chris Cate said Monday. Cate is a member of the city’s Select Committee on Homelessness, and the plan is the brainchild of the committee’s chairman, Christopher Ward.

"We hope that as we’re able to provide additional housing opportunities, some may be years down the road when those come online, that we’ll be able to scale back some of the need for immediate resources — that’s certainly the intent here,” Ward said, emphasizing that the plan is a short-term measure as the city looks for more permanent solutions.

Homelessness in San Diego has surged in recent years. A January tally put the number of transients in the city at over 5,600, up more than 10 percent from last year. The total number has risen more than 40 percent since 2014.

The chairman’s idea is for the city to construct temporary housing on the practice field of Qualcomm Stadium, where the San Diego Chargers played until 2016, and the San Diego State Aztecs play.

Housing would also be built at Golden Hall, a 3,200-seat indoor arena. The committee agreed to consider Ward’s proposal and expects to have a concrete plan outlined by September. The stadium’s fate has been subject of heated public debate following the Chargers’ decision to move to Los Angeles following the 2016 NFL season, leaving it relatively vacant.

Ward contends that a major obstacle for homeless people to overcome in trying to improve their living conditions is that they have no way to secure their property. Ward says temporary housing would provide them with a way to store items while they’re away:

“One of the big barriers people have from getting off the streets today is that their stuff is on the streets. So trying to go interview with the Housing Council or seek health assistance or do a job interview, they don’t want to leave their stuff. We don’t have enough storage and that’s something the city can provide.”

The plan was announced on the same day city officials celebrated the grand opening of the Cypress, a six-story permanent housing complex for the homeless that offers private kitchens and bathrooms, communal spaces, and access to social services and substance abuse programs.

Here's How (Rich & Poor) Americans Spend Their Time

Today’s visualization comes from data scientist Henrik Lindberg, and it shows America’s favorite past-times based on the participation of people in different income brackets.

It uses data from the American Time Use Survey that is produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to break down these activities.

COMMON INTERESTS

As Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes, while activities are all over the map, it appears that some past-times are more common across all income groups.

Team sports and solo pursuits both are represented well in the center. In fact, reading for personal interest, dancing, computer use, hunting, hiking, walking, playing basketball, or playing baseball can all be found in the middle of the spectrum, appealing to Americans in every income group.

Closer to the top and bottom of the visualization, however, we see where income groups diverge in how they spend their time. It’s probably not surprising to see that people with higher incomes spend more time golfing, playing racket sports, attending performing arts, and doing yoga than average. On the flipside, lower income Americans spend more time watching television, listening to the radio, and listening to/playing music.

CURIOUS ANOMALIES

Every data set has its own peculiarities. Sometimes these things can be explained, and sometimes they are just aberrations created as a result of how data was collected (i.e. how a survey was worded, bias, or some other error).

Here are some of the stranger anomalies that appear in this data set. We won’t attempt to explain them here, but feel free to speculate in the comments section:

• Higher income Americans disproportionately enjoy softball – while baseball has more universal appeal across income groups.


• While activities like boating are typically associated with higher income levels, the activity of running is generally not. Yet, running is disproportionately enjoyed by higher income Americans, according to this survey.


• Despite playing baseball being fairly universal across the spectrum, watching baseball skews higher income.


• Writing for personal interest has an interesting distribution: it is enjoyed disproportionately by poorer and richer Americans, but is underrepresented in the middle class.

Can you find anything else that stands out as being an anomaly?

Who Cares About the “Wealth Gap” if Everyone is Richer?

Via The Daily Bell

How many successful people can there be? It seems like, after every article you read these days, the author bio talks about a book they have written, an invention they created, a prestigious award or some other indicator of great success. Yet I’ve never really heard of most of them.

I used to get pings of jealousy when I would see descriptions like that of successful people; it almost felt like there were a limited number of “success” spots on planet earth, and if they were taking one up, it made it that much less likely for me to get one.

But it’s not true. There is no limit to the number of successful people that can exist, especially since everyone has a slightly different idea of success.

And in the same vein, there is no limit to how many wealthy people there can be. Wealth is not a zero-sum game, there is not some amount of wealth out there that once it is grabbed, is gone. Anyone can create wealth. Growing a garden is a great place to start creating the necessities to live and giving yourself a little food shortage insurance plan.

When people say the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, that is a huge misrepresentation of what is really happening, even if the rich have far more compared to the poor.

For example, let’s use the amount of healthy food that can be purchased as an indicator of wealth. If a “poor” person could once only afford 10 pounds of healthy food per week, and a “rich” person could afford 100 pounds, the rich person is ten times richer than the poor person. But now suppose a poor person can afford 100 pounds of healthy food per week, and a rich person can afford 2,000 pounds.

True, the wealth gap has doubled from 1-10 to 1-20, yet the poor person is living as richly as only the wealthy could in years past.

This is the true nature of the wealth gap. Almost everyone is better off these days. The gap doesn’t matter as much as the minimum standard of living.

The classic example which always comes to mind for me is of President Calvin Coolidge who lived in the White House fewer than 100 years ago. One of the most powerful people on Earth watched helplessly as his son died of an infected blister from playing tennis.

In that sense, everyone living in America today has a higher standard of living than the President and his family had 90 years ago. Advancements in medicine, technology, information, and production have risen the standard of living for everyone.

This chart shows the exponential nature in which people are being lifted out of poverty.

Poverty has not yet been entirely eradicated, but at this pace, as long as those in power don’t thrust the world back into the dark ages, it is only a matter of time until Earth is basically free from poverty.

And at that point, when all needs are being met, what does it matter if the richest person has 10, 50, or a thousand times more wealth than the poorest?

Options and a Backup Plan = Freedom

There was a time when the options for a person to create enough wealth to live were very few.

Do you want to live in a one room dusty, dirty, festering farmhouse and work the fields for 14 hours a day to scrape by in grinding poverty? Or do you want to live in a crowded apartment, and work in a dingy, smoky, stuffy factory for 14 hours a day and scrape by in regular poverty?

Not a great choice to have to make. Today that conundrum is disappearing from almost all lives on Earth. If the trend of eradicating poverty continues, it shouldn’t be long until everyone on earth has a better option to create wealth.

But unfortunately, governments and their crony deals with corporations are standing in the way of the quickest progress. They keep destroying the wealth in wars and misallocation of resources that would otherwise be spread through the ranks of the people.

A great place to start would be to actually allow people to keep the products of their own labor, instead of taxing it away, or writing laws and regulations which make it all but impossible to survive without bowing down to the corporate overlords.

This, of course, means respecting the honestly acquired wealth of the richest as well as the poorest. You can’t support the poor being freed to get ahead while simultaneously calling on the rich to be robbed to even things out.

Governments and corporations have indeed set up the world to make it hard to get ahead, and true justice would involve them paying damages to those they have wronged. But don’t believe that government power can be used to solve the problem that they created.

Staggering Number Of Homeless In LA Shows How Tough It Is To Get By

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

The number of homeless people in Los Angeles is skyrocketing. In just one year, the figures revealed that the homeless population in the city grew 20% while the numbers for the wider Los Angeles County were even higher at 23%.

As if looking at those numbers isn’t cringeworthy enough, The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported Wednesday that 6,000 homeless young people were tallied across the county in January, a 61% increase over the 2016 total. Most of the young people are ages 18 to 24. All the youth shelters have waiting lists and affordable housing is tough to find, even with a rent voucher, according to Heidi Calmus of Covenant House California, an international youth homeless services agency with a branch in Hollywood. “The system is overwhelmed,” Calmus said Tuesday night as she and a colleague, Nick Semensky, delivered toiletry bags and sandwiches to young people living in the streets.

Despite efforts to combat the problem, the number of homeless continue to go up. In 2015 authorities declared a public emergency as the numbers sleeping on the streets soared. City officials committed $100 million to tackle the problem. It’s safe to say that whatever is being done right now is not working.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn described the figures as “staggering.” “Homelessness in LA County has grown at a shocking rate,” she said in a statement. “Even as work is being done to get thousands of people off the street and into housing, more and more people are becoming homeless. It is clear that if we are going to end the homeless crisis, we need to stem the overwhelming tide of people falling into homelessness.”

But it isn’t that easy. Experts are placing the blame on soaring rents and a high cost of living as the two major factors. According to Expatistan.com, a 900 square foot furnished apartment will cost over $2400 per month.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said there was “no sugarcoating the bad news”. “It’s impossible to wrap your head around the numbers,” he told reporters, adding that soaring rents and the city’s high cost of living were partly to blame. “We can’t let rents double every year,” he told reporters. Average rents in Los Angeles County have increased by 32% since 2000 while average household incomes for people renting have fallen by 3% when adjusted for inflation, according to the California Housing Partnership.

Mayor Garcetti is correct in that you cannot sugarcoat these numbers. In its latest report, the LAHSA said there were 57,794 people homeless in the county during its survey in January, compared to 46,874 in 2016. In the city there were 34,189 with no permanent roof over their heads, the report said, compared to 28,464 the year before.

The solution, according to the politicians in Los Angeles, is of course, to throw money at the problem. The county needs to build more than 550,000 affordable rental homes for low-income households, the LAHSA says. Los Angeles recently approved new measures to raise $1.2 billion in bonds to build 10,000 new units of housing for homeless people. There are also plans to raise about $3.5billion over 10 years to pay for other homelessness projects.

When the number of homeless increases this dramatically, it’s easy to see that the nation is in a bit of an economic bind.  It’s getting harder and harder to get by, and any sort of financial issue, no matter how small, could easily cause homelessness for those living paycheck to paycheck.

Washington D.C. To Hold Massive "Coordinated Terror Attack" Drill This Wednesday

April 26th is shaping up to be a busy day.

As we reported on Friday, that"s when Operation Gotham Shield, an exercise involving FEMA, Homeland Security and a myriad of law enforcement and military agencies and which simulates a nuclear bomb blast over Manhattan, is set to conclude.

Then, as we learned earlier, April 26 is also when the entire Senate will be briefed by Donald Trump and his four top defense and military officials on the situation in North Korea at the White House, an event which Reuters dubbed as "unusual."

April 26 is also when the USS Carl Vinson is expected to finally arrive off the coast of the Korean Penninsula.

Now, in a statement from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the regional association reports that "law enforcement officials and other first responders will participate in a full-scale exercise on April 26 designed to prepare for the possibility of a complex coordinated terror attack in the National Capital Region."

The statement adds that emergency managers who work together at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) planned the exercise to help protect residents by preparing for an attack involving multiple target locations and teams of perpetrators.

The exercise will be conducted across a widespread geographical area. According to the release, the regional exercise will be staged at six sites in the District of Columbia, suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia, and will involve hundreds of police, fire, and emergency medical service personnel and volunteer actors.

The locations include neighborhoods in the northeast and southeast quadrants of the District of Columbia, Prince George’s County, and Arlington and Fairfax Counties.  Residents in those neighborhoods will be notified ahead of time to expect the exercise.

According to Scott Boggs, Managing Director of Homeland Security and Public Safety at COG, “Law enforcement officials practice and exercise their skills on their own regularly because that’s the best way to ensure we are always ready to respond quickly and professionally. On April 26, we’ll go one step further and stage a very realistic emergency event involving multiple sites and actors posing as the casualties.  However, there is no reason for residents to be alarmed because the exercise will occur in a controlled environment.”

The is scheduled to take place near or at George Mason University, and last from 8;30am until 4:30pm.

The statement also advises that the only media availability will be in a one hour block before the exercise, from 7:30am - 8:30am on April 26.

Full statement below (link).

Full-scale exercise focused on preparing for complex terror attacks to include National Capital Region first responders, emergency managers

Law enforcement officials and other first responders will participate in a full-scale exercise on April 26 designed to prepare for the possibility of a complex coordinated terror attack in the National Capital Region.

Emergency managers who work together at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) planned the exercise to help protect residents by preparing for an attack involving multiple target locations and teams of perpetrators.

The regional exercise will be staged at six sites in the District of Columbia, suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia, and will involve hundreds of police, fire, and emergency medical service personnel and volunteer actors. The locations include neighborhoods in the northeast and southeast quadrants of the District of Columbia, Prince George’s County, and Arlington and Fairfax Counties.  Residents in those neighborhoods will be notified ahead of time to expect the exercise.

“Law enforcement officials practice and exercise their skills on their own regularly because that’s the best way to ensure we are always ready to respond quickly and professionally,” said Scott Boggs, Managing Director of Homeland Security and Public Safety at COG. “On April 26, we’ll go one step further and stage a very realistic emergency event involving multiple sites and actors posing as the casualties.  However, there is no reason for residents to be alarmed because the exercise will occur in a controlled environment.”

MEDIA AVAILABILITY PRIOR TO EXERCISE ONLY (see details below)

WHEN: Wednesday April 26, 7:30 – 8:30 A.M.

WHERE: Maryland National Capital Park Police Headquarters, 8100 Corporate Drive, Hyattsville, MD 20785

Contact: Jeanne Saddler
Phone: (202) 962-3250
Email: jsaddler@mwcog.org

h/t: @stockboardasset