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Kenneth Batiste giving out melons and asparagus on Anna Drive yesterday, Councilwoman Barnes with a load of pizzas for a local senior mobile home park.
……2) So when you give to the needy, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. 3) But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4) so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.… (from Matthew 6:3)
That’s something I learned in my youth and took to heart, and stayed with me into my agnostic adulthood. But some folks I know take it pretty far, and it’s hard for the rest of us not to point out all the great things they’ve been doing.
Well long story short, food insecurity in a shocking number of Anaheim’s working-class neighborhoods has been a problem long before this Virus desmadre hit – as Dr. Moreno frequently reminds us, over 90% of Anaheim’s schoolkids qualify for free school lunches. Well, that’s nice, they get free school lunches. Except, now their being “home-bound” all day during the pandemic not only makes it hard for them to get that free lunch but also makes it even harder for their parents to work outside the home. Networks of impromptu neighborhood activists have been improvising ways to get them lunches at least.
So when our good friend Maritza Bermudez (from the Pauline Street neighborhood) asked me and Donna if we knew anyone in Anna Drive who would help organize and distribute lunches here, we gladly volunteered. And it’s been a lot of fun – an average of a hundred excited hungry kids lining up on the sidewalk at the YMCA van each day. (Enforcing social distancing has been a challenge – but starting Monday we’re going to try to make it a game with chalked squares on the sidewalk, and me as Distancing Captain.)
Kenneth with Congressman Lou Correa
So long story short again, when we mentioned this to our pal Kenneth Batiste who lives a couple miles away, he insisted on dropping by with a carful of produce to give away. You’ve probably seen Kenneth at council meetings, speaking passionately in defense of the Rancho La Paz seniors or the homeless, or railing against the latest corporate giveaway.
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Well, we didn’t know that for years (since around 2014) this retired probation officer and firefighter had been spending time every day picking up extra food from churches and food banks, and delivering it – at first to the homeless encampments on the Santa Ana riverbed, and other homeless encampments he’d become aware of.
More recently, he also frequently drops off food for the seniors he’s befriended at the Rancho La Paz mobile home park – the ones who have been literally forced, this past year, to choose between eating, medicine, and paying their astronomically jacked-up rents.
Speaking of Rancho La Paz, the embattled seniors there feel like they’ve been adopted by West Anaheim Councilwoman Denise Barnes – “and we’re not even in her district!” She checks on them every day, and, along with Dr. Moreno. Once I called her about something political and she was all, “We gotta talk fast Vern, I’m on my way to check on my mobile home people.”
Denise and friends at Pacific Sunset Mobile Homes with food donated by Mother’s Market.
“Really, how many mobile home parks are in your district?”
“Oh, most of them are outside my district. But they need help anyway.”
Since becoming aware of the John-Saunders-inflicted poverty at Rancho La Paz (in district 3) Denise, her husband Scott, and a few friends have started picking up truckloads of food from various sources – the OC Food Bank (which is now starting to run out), Mothers’ Market, Pizza Hut – and handing them out – first at Rancho La Paz, then a few other parks across the city, the downtown senior center, and Higher Ground. They have started to hit some of the poverty-filled West Anaheim motels, and are now trying to figure out how to help some of the out-of-work hotel workers during this pandemic.
But no story like this can be wrapped up without mentioning the People’s Homeless Task Force, which has been feeding the homeless in La Palma Park every Wednesday for a couple of years. No, wait – not “feeding” them – that would be illegal – but “sharing food,” which is not.
This started in 2017 – even before the famous riverbed clearing – when the Anaheim Council brusquely closed down the Mercy House-run storage-and-feeding place across the street from the park, and our local band of rebels took it on themselves to feed dozens of homeless people every Wednesday afternoon with food donated from various local restaurants.
The coronavirus pandemic put an end to the park “foodshare,” but PHTF member, biologist Thomas Fielder, still frequently hands out prepared snack bags to whoever’s there. Occasionally the Task Force will bring truckloads of food to the Rancho Seniors (who are one step away from homelessness), and just yesterday they prepared almost a hundred meals at Judy’s Kitchen in Los Alamitos.
But lest you think the People’s Homeless Task Force is all warm and fuzzy, it’s their lawsuit against the county and a few cities, looked on favorably by Judge Carter, that forced OC to build all the shelters they have in the last couple years. And they’re also behind … but I had resolved to leave politics out of this post!
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One more thing: Scott Barnes said to let everyone know that ACCESSCAL.ORG is currently preparing unemployment applications for free! (I’ll mention that in comments too.)
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Let us know, in comments, about other opportunities for the needy to get food
– anywhere in the OC.
This is your new improved Weekend Open Thread – utilize it responsibly!
Time to listen to Bill Withers’ best songs! You can count ’em on one hand, but they sure were memorable and special:
I couldn’t find the MSNBC clip from a year or two ago of him calling Trump a motherfucker on Joy Reid’s show. Rest in Peace!
Hey everybody – ACCESSCAL.ORG is currently preparing unemployment applications for free!
http://www.accesscal.org
Great Article Vern!!!
We Have so many good people looking out for the community,pre- COVID-19.. and now we are in a literal fight for our lives and those that are in such dire need need our help even more, Thank You, Councilmembers Dr Jose F.Moreno & “My Councilmember”Denise Barnes & Scott Barnes, Community Leaders Yesenia Rojas,Kenneth Batiste,George Grachen,Mike & Jeanine Robbins, Rebecca Kovacs-Stein,Tom Fielder,Pat Davis,David Duran,Vern & Donna Nelson, and so many people in the Community… People that have been doing this long before any pandemic and will continue to do this long after we’ve passed this dark moment in our life.. the loss of life we haven’t even realized yet, it continues to compound ‘hour by hour’ ‘day by day’,.. is the great football coach George Allen would say “if 40 players stick together we can’t lose”!!.. I would paraphrase by saying if we is the people stick together we can’t lose,… “This is what democracy looks like”to know so many of these ‘special people’ that the Lord has put on this Earth for a mission and they’re fulfilling that mission, and it’s a long road ahead, please be safe ‘see you on the other side, of all this’!!
For the Open Thread:
I personally don’t care if a MAGAt dies after following the medical advice of tRump. To me it’s just chlorine in the gene pool. I do care however if the same idiot takes an innocent with them.
The resident of the aptly named White House is a fucking idiot and is quickly becoming Jim Jones 2.0 with the way he relentlessy pushes his grape flavored hydroxychloroquine Kool-aid – which I have no doubt he, his grifter family and all his cronies, have financial ties with.
You shouldn’t have to be told to NOT take MEDICAL ADVICE from someone who thinks:
– windmills cause cancer
– there were airports during the Revolutionary War
– an ID is required to buy milk and cereal
– the WH was burned down by Canada
COVID-19 is already killing enough people on its own without having stupidity helping it along. There’s not only plenty of blood on 45’s hands. There’s also an abundance on the hands of any news outlet that continues to air his press conferences.
I’d give him a pass on he last of those, despite this: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/us/politics/war-of-1812-history-facts.html
Canada was already the British territory of Canada in 1812 (or, more to the point, 1814), though it was separated into Northern and Southern Canada, both of which were involved in the War of 1812. So while the soldiers who inspired Francis Scott Key were not under the control of the Canadian Government, they were under the control of Canada’s overlords and the attacks came from the territory of Canada. Canada being both part of the British Empire and the base for the attackers and the site of the war, it doesn’t seem entirely wrong to say that we were fighting Canada. Technically wrong, ok.
One thing never mentioned in American history books – there WAS a northern front in the War of 1812, and a lot of American politicians and military thought Canada should be part of the US and tried to take it over … well, Canada kicked our ass!
Good Lord, everybody knows about the “northern front” – the naval and army l actions on and around Lake Erie. Oliver Hazard Perry? “Don’t Give Up The Ship”? “We have met the enemy and he is ours?” The death of Zebulon Pike? The great Algonquin Conferderacy under Tecumseh?
The looting and destruction of York (Toronto) precipitated the burning of our capital in retaliation.
Sheesh.
*The latest news on the Vaccine Treatment concept is: “Should the Scientist find a cure for Corona-Virus-19 and give everyone a shot….or Should they have to give everyone a shot EVERY year?” Since Monsanto is probably doing the Free Research….we can be very
sure that since Monsanto makes Farmers buy NEW seeds every year laced with Round-up
that the answer is probably quite academic.
We have the genome, we have tests from outside of Monsanto. Monsanto will not be able to do for COVID vaccines what it has done for Roundup Ready seeds, unless the President’s team figures out how to grant them an amazing exclusive patent. If that happened, you’d see people storming the Bastille, so to speak.
I was reading a site called “The Cut” which published an article entitled “When Will the Coronavirus Peak in the U.S.?”
https://www.thecut.com/2020/03/when-will-the-coronavirus-peak-in-the-u-s.html
It contained these paragraphs:
NO! NO! NO! to the portion I put in boldface.
I’d like to think that this was an error on the reporter Amanda Arnold’s part rather than on the part of Mark Lurie, associate professor of epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health. whom she was interviewing. If not, it’s a scandal.
The “central tendency” — loosely called the “average” — of a numerical distribution of interval values (as opposed to rank values) is usually measured in one of three ways: mean, median, and mode. (We’ll save geometric and hyperbolic means for a different time.)
The mean is what you usually call “the average” — add up all of the values and divide my the total number of values you added: 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, 6/3 = 2. This is NOT what anyone is talking about when you describe the “peak” of a distribution.
Literally, “the peak” would be the “mode” — the number appearing most frequently in a distribution. If you assigned each person’s date of infection, or of confirmed infection, or of resolution (recovery, stable partial recovery, coma, or death) on a chart, one day would be higher than, or at least equal to, the others. For example, if you’re looking at confirmed cases, “The peak is the day on which there are the highest number of cases, after which the number of cases will start to decline.”
The mode is a perfectly reasonable measure to use. But I’ll tell you what it isn’t: it isn’t “the median” — which is the day (measurable only from the full distribution, out to the last case) on which the 50th-percentile case occurs. That is the case after which exactly as many cases occurred before it as occurred after it. (With an even number of cases, the median will fall between the two cases closest to 50th percentile, and is usually taken as their mean.)
In a perfect normal distribution, the mean and median and mode will all be the same. But we know that this is NOT going to be a perfect normal distribution — in part because it is likely to have a “long tail” on the right. To the left on the number line (that is, earlier), the distribution can only go back so far. To the right, though, it may go on for a very long time. Someone on a remote island in Alaska or a remote shack in Idaho may get it after not having been exposed at all, while it slowly moved through the people nearest to them, a year from now. (In statistics, this is called a “floor effect”.)
So the next statement, “[by] definition, 50 percent of cases will occur after the peak,” is completely wrong. It describes the mode, but then gives the definition of the median. By definition, the “by definition” definition is wrong. This is unthinkable for an epidemiologist.
This is the second howling error I’ve seen attributed to an epidemiologist recently; the other was when the calculation of a how many people would die given an “R-zero” (the number of people the first person in a chain of contagion would infect) would quickly increase to a number beyond the global population. No, because the number of available targets reduces. (I’m still waiting, though, for the discovery that people who have less severe cases of Covid-19 are more susceptible to reinfection because, surprise!, they have many fewer antibodies. Like the recently accepted “you wear a mask to protect others from your own coughing and sneezing” notion, the obvious is sometimes trailing badly these days.)
So take the predictive statistics you hear with a measure of salt: either biologists or reporters aren’t studying enough math. (Descriptive statistics, like how many people are falling into what category, are still good — if they are well-defined and accurate. (And they aren’t, in absolute terms — we still don’t know how many people have the SARS-2 coronavirus because we haven’t been testing everyone, even those showing some symptoms, due to the Glorious Test Shortage — but they’re still useful in relative terms, both along the timeline and across spaces and demographic categories.)
The basic advice of “flattering the curve” — technically, achieving “negative kurtosis” — is still the best: try to get sick when others are not, so that the treatment you need will be available, and you won’t get triaged, and better technology (like the coming “bladder respirators” that you just squeeze as needed) becomes available.
Of course, the benefit of getting to the far right tail of the distribution is eliminated if all of the respiratory technicians have died, so don’t begrudge them and the doctors and nurses getting first pick of the N95 masks — and if you can help make PPE (personal protective equipment), get to it!
*Encouraging News: The CoronaVirus-19 has been found in several animals, which
includes a 4 year old Bengal Tiger at the Bronx Zoo.
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/04/05/tiger-at-nycs-bronx-zoo-tests-positive-for-coronavirus/23970471/
*What is encouraging is that Virus may have mutated back into a typical CoronaVirus
disease. We will have to wait and see……but it is encouraging….since the Corona Virus
has generally been known only to infect Animals.
That some SARS-2 coronaviruses have mutated to be able to survive in tigers does not mean that they all have or are all heading that way. Evolution isn’t like larks following each other in a new direction. It’s about creating genetic variation which is then selected by the environment. Some mutations (or pre-existing differences) may have enabled some of this strain of viruses to survive in tigers, while the rest inside the tiget died off, leaving only the ones that adapted to the “inside of a tiger” environment to reproduce within it. But most coronaviruses are doing quite well inside of humans, and it’s hard to think of mutations that would make them more effective at reproducing within us or in being transmitted by us, so they’re going to keep on going just as they are. They have plenty of humans left to infect, they just need to hitch a ride on some bodily fluids to get there.
FWIW-
*Yeah, lets beat up hard on that Chinese Dragon….who else can we blame? As W.C. Fields said so eloquently: “I hate children…..and all things being equal, I’d rather be in Philadelphia!” So far the only major country to make a comeback from the CoronaVirus-19 is China! Their people are back to work and feeding their families….meanwhile, here in the So-called Greatest Country in the World…..we can’t even find painters mask, so we can paint or IKEA Furniture or polish our cars.
Social distancing in the Anna Drive lunch line – each family on a happy face!
It worked out good today, although there were less kids than usual, probably because of the rain.
This just arrived on YT – FWIW
“Please don’t bury him down in that cold cold ground
He’d rather have you cut him up and pass him all around”
John Prine, now dead of Covid-19, was amazing. Here’s his Rolling Stone obit:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/john-prine-obit-253684/
He seems to be remembered today for his beautiful, haunting, and timely “Hello in There,” and that’s perfectly right. But “Please Don’t Bury Me” is a hell of a lot funnier.
Here’s him performing it:
He’s going to make a lot of new fans today. If you haven’t been aware of him before now, I invite you to be among them.
For decades now, I’ve had arguments with friends on the broad left, who were not trained scientists (as I was before I turned to law) who objected to the government gathering data on race “because race is a construct.”
Well, race *is* a construct — but it’s a construct that affects social and societal interaction. (So does beauty; so does intelligence.) If you want to know why we need to collect and process data on the “construct” of race, here’s a good explanation of why:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/opinion/coronavirus-blacks.html