An Email To Pacifica, California CIty councilman Mike O'Neil On RV's and Trailers Parked on The Streets in Pacifica

Dear Mike:

    I'm an ex-homeless person who celebrates 20 years out of homelessness (9/96-6/1999) on 4 July, 2019. I have empathy for these people. But I get upset that our city is being taken over by beaten-up vehicles, trailers, etc.

   Most of us have had the misfortune at sometime on our life of sleeping in a vehicle at night. It gets very cold when the motor is turned-off. This is what these people in these vehicles suffer. We older people also have the challenge of having to go to the bathroom at 2:00 in the morning. If no bathroom is available, please use your imagination. What about showers? I swim over at Oceana Pool. One homeless married couple pays their dues and uses the pool for showers,etc. When I was homeless, I often had to go to the bathroom on the streets. I would sneak into buildings at 05:00 in the morning and use the basin to give myself a quick wash. Try to imagine the awful psychological pain of surviving with no electricity, water, internet or TV. Thank God for Life Moves (Inn Visions) that gave me shelter and hope. I would not have survived without them. Life Moves has excellent programs to help these people. Please talk to the Pacifica Resource Center about this incredible resources.

   Respectfully, I feel that we need "a carrot and stick" approach. We need to let these people know that we will not tolerate their vehicles parked here. But,unlike other cities, we will not just push them out. We will guide them into programs through the Pacifica Resource Center, Life Moves, and other organizations like the VA (for veterans). They are going to have to "do it the hard way" and find jobs that pay them a living wage in this area. These jobs are available. I got an apartment with a $400 grant when I was surviving on $8.00 an hour exploitation jobs and working 16 hours a day. After three months in the apartment, I found a job paying $20.00 per hour. I stayed with that employer 8 years. I met and married Elena. The rest is history. I now have a nice home here in Pacifica and a good life. If I can do it. these other people can do it.

   What have I learned in 70.5 years of life? I have learned many things. Most important is how we treat our fellow humans and animals. Pacifica needs to be the exception and work very hard to solve this problem in a humane manner without breaking the city budget.

  Mike all of you on the City Council have a tough and thankless job. But it is a job that has to be done.

With kindest regards,

-JackW

The Pacifica, California RV Lifestyle

Tom McLaughlin

, Park Pacifica

The “RV Street Lifestyle”

The public “Street Lifestyle” in the Bay Area is expanding and many of these people are looking for a new public parking space to move into and live without being cited or having to pay the cost of parking. Pacifica easily meets those requirements. Pacifica is the new place to move into because the parking codes are very outdated and not keeping up with San Mateo County cities that saw this problem developing over the past two decades. Those cities protected their citizens with upgraded Municipal Parking Codes, not Pacifica. New parking codes have not yet been approved by the Pacifica City Council for decades. New plans to approve upgraded parking codes are still being stalled and delayed by some city council members who don’t understand the risks they are causing to the City of Pacifica. The “Health and Safety” risks for the citizens of Pacifica will continue and increase with the quantity of “RV’s” that are parked on the public streets. The human health risks have been identified, as well as the environmental damages caused by this “Street Lifestyle”. The safety risks have also been identified by this transient lifestyle. Reasonable human instincts and common sense can solve this problem. It is not as complex or difficult to solve as some people want it to be. Who is our city insurance carrier? When the insurance carrier for the City of Pacifica finds out our codes are outdated, do they get to improve our “Health and Safety” with their opinion directed at the city council? We don’t want to loose our insurance carrier and we can’t afford to pay more for unhealthy and unsafe conditions. The photographs included are from a Bay Area City that has people who are looking for new places to move. Maybe Pacifica is being considered? Pacifica City Council, What happens now?

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Neanderthal Desperation

Neanderthal Desperation

Desperate times call for desperate measures, goes the saying.

This might have been the case for the ancient Neanderthals in the south of France when they had to eat their own kind more than 120,000 years ago, Cosmos magazine reported.

In a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, researchers studied the bones of six Neanderthals found in a cave in southern France’s Rhone Valley, all bearing the trademarks of cannibalistic practices – cut marks caused by tools, dismemberment and gnawed fingerbones.

Researchers noted that the now-extinct early humans were living during the late interglacial period, an era of rapid warming that changed the flora and fauna of the region.

At that time, smaller rodents and reptiles started replacing the big game the ancient inhabitants hunted, which led to periods of malnutrition and sickness.

Eventually, they engaged in cannibalism to survive. But Neanderthal flesh wasn’t as nutritious as that of animals like deer, and hunting other humans would have been fruitless since only a few hundred inhabited western Europe at the time.

“They weren’t doing anything different to what modern humans would do in the same situation,” said archaeologist Michelle Langley, who was not involved in the study.

Survival cannibalism has been documented in recent history, such as during World War II and among the survivors of the crash ofUruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972.

Russia: Breaking Ice

RUSSIA

Breaking the Ice

President Vladimir Putin unveiled ambitious plans to triple the size of Russia’s fleet of icebreakers and construct new ports on both sides of the Arctic shipping route in a bid to boost cargo shipments from last year’s 20 million tons to 80 million tons by 2025.

Addressing leaders from Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden at the Arctic forum in St. Petersburg, Putin said Russia is already building three nuclear icebreakers to add to its fleet of four, and plans to have 13 heavy icebreakers, including nine nuclear-powered ones, by 2035, the Associated Press reported.

That could put Moscow in pole position, so to speak, in the race to assert jurisdiction over parts of the Arctic as melting ice creates new opportunities for shipping and resource extraction, the agency noted.

Already, Russia has modernized a string of Soviet-era military bases to strengthen its hold on the region, which is estimated to hold up to one-quarter of the Earth’s undiscovered oil and gas. Meanwhile, other leaders at the forum spoke of the need to focus on areas of mutual interest to ensure peace and stability.

Do Not Lose Sleep Over An Electro Magnetic Pulse Nuclear Attack on The ELectricity Grid.

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/emp-threat-real-it-shouldnt-keep-you-night

We May Be Able To Rejuvenate The Brain

In a stunning piece of research, Stanford neuroscientists have hunted down a single gene that encodes a protein responsible for age-related cognitive losses, targeted it with special blocking antibodies, and shown in mice that these antibodies can rejuvenate old brains to work as well as young ones.

It all starts with the microglia, a class of brain cells responsible for immune responses and routine cleanup. Among many other functions, microglia spend their time gobbling up bits of protein deposits and cellular debris that result from normal brain activity, and it's long been known that their garbage-collecting performance deteriorates with age.

Tony Wyss-Coray, Ph.D, professor of neurology and neurological sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, thought it was a "decent bet" that the decline in microglial cleanup performance might be linked to the kinds of cognitive declines we see with aging. Both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, for example, are linked with abnormal activation patterns for genes associated with the microglia.

The hunt for a cognitive decline gene

So Wyss-Coray and his team set off on two concurrent lines of investigation. In one set of experiments, the team chose about 3,000 microglia-related genes they judged could be targeted with drugs. They filled Petri dishes with cultured mouse microglia cells, and gave them a flourescently-marked latex to chew on, and set about blocking those 3,000 genes one by one to see which ones made the microglia better or worse garbage eaters.

In another set of experiments, the team took the same 3,000 genes, and took measurements of each one's activity levels in young and old mice, looking for which genes changed their activity levels substantially with age.

And when they compared results between the two studies, expecting to find a long list of genes that both change microglial eating patterns and significantly change gene activity levels with age, they were stunned to find just one that fit both categories: a gene known as CD22 that's found in both mice and humans. They followed up and found the CD22 protein was three times as prevalent on the surface of old mice's microglia as on those of young mice.

Blocking the effects of CD22

With a possible culprit identified, the team set about blocking CD22 proteins using specially designed antibodies – ones that are too bulky to break through into cells, but can easily target cell-surface proteins. They injected these antibodies into one side of mice's hippocampuses, and for a control they injected a different antibody that couldn't bind with CD22 into the other side of the hippocampus.

This time, they used flourescence-labeled bits of myelin to track the brain halves' performance in scavenging waste – myelin being one of the microglia's chief scavenging targets, and also representing something that accumulates in aging brains. Sure enough, 48 hours later, there were far less of these myelin bits left on the side with the CD22-blocking antibodies. They tried the experiment again to see if the scavenging effect would be just as strong for Alzheimer's-related beta-amyloid and Parkinson's-related alpha-synuclein protein debris as it was for those bits of myelin. It was.

So by this stage the team had zeroed in on a gene protein that both decreases microglial scavenging performance and increases its activity with age. It had managed to block the activity of this gene, and shown that the administration of special antibodies could rejuvenate the ability of old brains to clean up a range of garbage proteins that begin to build up in older brains – ones heavily associated with serious cognitive illnesses. So how did these antibodies affect brain performance?

Turning back the hands of time

After a month of continuous CD22 antibody infusion on both sides of mice's brains, the researchers achieved a stunning result. The mice improved their performance on two different learning and memory tests to the point where they significantly outperformed control mice of the same age.

"The mice became smarter," says Wyss-Coray. "Blocking CD22 on their microglia restored their cognitive function to the level of younger mice. CD22 is a new target we think can be exploited for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases."

Stanford immediately rushed to file patents on IP related to the study. As always, it's much too early to get excited about the possibility of this research producing a fountain of youth-style drug that can let octogenarians enjoy the mental acuity of 25 year olds again. But the fact that CD22 is found in both the human and mouse genome certainly makes this a promising research area to keep an eye on.

The team's research appears in the journal Nature.

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Falcon Heavy To The Moon

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/nasa-chief-says-a-falcon-heavy-rocket-could-fly-humans-to-the-moon/