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Week in Review: Sweeps, planes and 600 dollars.

The sweeps keep coming

On May 4th the City of Seattle Navigation Team swept another encampment in the Ballard neighborhood. The city does not like to call these forced removals sweeps, and does not like to say that the people in the area that was not-swept were displaced. The amount of people that were not-displaced in this not-sweep was ##. Per the CDC recommendations “Unless individual housing units are available, do not clear encampments during community spread of COVID-19. Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers. This increases the potential for infectious disease spread.” There should not be not-sweeps unless there is solitary housing available for each person present. According to local reporter Erica Barnett, about 15 people were left on the morning of the not-displacement after a 48-hour written notice was posted – it was unclear how many found their way to a shelter. Transportation was not provided, and in reality the bed count was insufficient to accommodate the majority single men coming from the Ballard camp site. The not-sweep came after a change.org petition was sent to the Office of Mayor Jenny Durkan from the “community” adjacent to the encampment, calling for it’s direct removal and a swift and sturdy response to the illegality of the sites that have arisen recently. “During the current COVID-19 crisis, large unauthorized camps have grown in our neighborhoods” it stated. We have not done a personal count of “We Are in This Together WA” yard signs in the immediate neighborhoods – but our assumption is that it must be pretty low. Or it’s possible that while on a drug-fueled binge a person experiencing homelessness stole them all to use in some sort of drug-related crime while stomping on indigenous fauna and damaging people’s fencing all in an effort to spread Hepatitis A and create a climate of fear in the hearts and minds of normal-law-abiding-Ballardidians; or that’s the hypothesis we came up with after reading the full petition.

We’re all lost in the supermarket

Nearly 1 in 5 workers in the US has filed for unemployment.

That’s the update, that’s it.  

Leave NYC the fuck alone

As of May 7th, 2020 nearly 20,000 New Yorkers had died from the coronavirus. There are neighborhoods in the outer boroughs where refrigerator trucks sit, full of bodies. The morgues are overwhelmed, the hospitals are overwhelmed, the subways are shut down. You are required to wear a mask in public. At some point someone had an idea, a bright idea, one could say. And they took this idea, and they wrote it down – maybe it was scrawled on a post-it, or in a hasty email. But that email was sent, oh yes, it was sent. And it reached the desk of another very smart and powerful person; maybe they even gasped when they opened the email. The email was flagged “important” and forwarded for immediate approval. It slowly worked its way up the chain of command until finally, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio himself opened that email and read the single line it contained “Planes over NYC to applaud first responders”. Maybe Mayor de Blasio himself got the CEO of Jetblue on the phone, maybe they secretly applauded themselves for approving the best idea in NYC history. And yes, on May 7th those planes flew, and they flew low. 3 Jet Blue planes, adorned with red, white and blue paint jobs flew in an oddly shaped circle 2,000 feet above the virus-ravaged city. Yes, a salute was made – and on that day, NYers confined to their homes for weeks on end hit the deck as they had no ever loving idea what in the fuck was going on. But yes, that was… a good idea.

Murder Fucking Hornets

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, now there are murder hornets? WTF, mother nature? Seriously? The end is nigh, people. We thought the locusts were bad… Next you’ll be telling us that bleach cures the coronavirus. But more about that later, we can’t even right now, we’re too busy applying for unemployment…. 

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