Every Night At The NWDC in Tacoma:

At The Mortuary in Olympia:

At Pike Place Seattle:

At Cal Anderson Park in Seattle:

Westlake  Seattle:

At Pipsqueak in Seattle:

Sunday, December 3, 2023
3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Letter Writing

Monday, December 4, 2023
1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Know your rights for restaurant workers

Wednesday, December 6, 2023
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Queer/Trans Art Jam

Sunday, December 10, 2023
12:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Queer Sewing and Mending Day

In Everett:

Online:

Recently we have noticed multiple announcements for two meetings of a new group here in Grays Harbor WA. It uses the conspicuous name “America First”, a term with a long and brutal legacy steeped in xenophobia, and fascism. This is a troubling development in a county with too many fascist politicians as is. If we are seeing a wave of America First meetings that means that people here are not even satisfied with the fascistic policies being enacted by their beloved political figures, ones they themselves voted in to office not but a few years ago. They are stuck in the electoral trap, but the historical and current links to far right Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists is still upsetting. We cannot stand by idly and let groups like this openly organize in public in our county. Direct action and sabotage is needed to shut down their meetings and publicly shame the participants.

The Harbor Rat Report recently published an excellent article on the history of the phrase, connections to current Neo-Nazi circles, and considered the future of fascism in the 21st century. This article weaves the story of America First from its roots in anti-British nativism in 1884 through its use by candidates for president of both political parties in 1916, to its use as a slogan by the KKK in the 1920s. We end with the racist and xenophobic use of it by Nazi sympathizers and supporters prior to (and after) the entry into WW2. It was revived in 2016 by two candidates, first by Donald Trump, and secondly by David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK.

The phrase is also used by white nationalists and Neo-Nazis in this country such as Nick Fuentes, of the America First Political Action Conference. He has asserted that Muslim speech is not covered by the First Amendment and said on his show in 2017 “Who runs the media? Globalists. Time to kill the globalists” and “I want people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged because this is deliberate.” Globalist is a term used to code the word Jew in white nationalist circles. Following these and other comments, as well as his public attendance of the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, his employer and publisher Right Side Broadcasting Network parted ways with Fuentes in August 2017.

In 2021, Fuentes was among the coalition of far right individuals and groups who participated in the rallies that led up to US Capitol attack on January 6th. The FBI is currently investigating a large transfer of bitcoin on December 8th to a group of far right activist which included Fuentes. Fuentes received approximately $681,750 worth of bitcoin in he transaction. Two days before the attack he said: “What can you and I do to a state legislator—besides kill them? We should not do that. I’m not advising that, but I mean, what else can you do, right?”

The article then sums up the recent rise of fascism globally as a new forming movement of trans-national fascism. This movement has been term alternatively transnational white supremacy, or more poetically “The Reconquest”, a nod to Reconqusita crusade by Christians to reclaim Spain from Muslim rule in the Middle Ages.

The article concludes this way:

This global fascist movement intends to overthrow all democratic institutions and replace them with localized autocracies based on mutually assured oppression of all non-white individuals across the world. They have no problem with borders, they have problems with brown people. They don’t care about immigration, they want ethno-states, with the black and brown states enslaved and exploited by the white ones.

In America this looks like American flags and Christian crosses, children saying the pledge of allegiance everyday at school, and police at every corner. The fascists of the future will use these instruments as their litmus tests to detect the enemy within. They will use the justice system and federal government to subject everyone to the most extreme Christian white nationalist ideologies. They will oppress minorities and declare LGBTQIA2+ people child abusers then declare that child abusers need to be put to death. They will enact their own holocausts. Their plan is called Project 2025, and its being actively pushed by the most powerful coalition of right wing organizations in the history of the country.

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Election Results

It is turning out to be a tight election for mayor here in Aberdeen. Although both candidates lost votes over their original counts in the primary, so that is heartening. Only about 18.5% of registered voters participated in the election, according to the auditor.

The most recent results from the Grays Harbor County Auditor’s Office show that Doug Orr leads the race by eight votes over Debi Pieraccini — the same margin he was left with after last Thursday’s count, when he bumped his lead up from the two-vote margin he held after the Nov. 7 count. Another 300 ballots have been counted for the mayor’s race since Nov. 9. Orr’s vote total so far is 1,356 (49.62%) compared to Pieraccini’s 1,348 (49.32%).

This means that by any stretch of the imagination no one has the authority to lead, since this process can hardly be called democratic involving only 2,700 votes for the mayoral race. So take that in to account when reading about the new mayor, they have no real authority. The have no mandate. They have little support. They are weak. This should inform our actions going forward, we need to appeal to those who have discarded the electoral system as a route to change, and show them another way.

Blue Zones

After years of planning and about one year of “development”, Blue Zones, an initiative that aims to “boost longevity and happiness in Grays Harbor County based on lifestyle principles from around the world”, is ready to begin on nine projects they have identified as progressing towards that goal.

Chris Frye, the local executive director of this nation-wide company plans to host a kick-off event at local Blue Zone advocate Summit Pacific Medical Center in order to inform the local populace what to expect. Since these projects were drawn up privately and behind closed doors, most people are unaware about the “changes to the food system” and other plans that Blue Zones has developed.

Nick Buettner, a co-founder of Blue Zones, LLC, will be a guest speaker at the event. His brother, Dan, founded the company almost two decades ago after he set out on a 2004 National Geographic expedition across the globe to pinpoint the specific aspects of lifestyle and environment that lead to longer living. His team located five geographic areas with the highest percentage of centenarians, or 100-year-olds: Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; and Okinawa, Japan.

Those areas were dubbed “Blue Zones.”

Further research into these claims have proved them to be dubious at best, and agenda-based at worst.

Saul Justin Newman from Biological Data Science Institute, Australian National University has taken a deeper look at this data and the results a jaw dropping.

The Abstract:

The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.

Using data from the United States and Italy, the statisticians found many anomalies, leading to the questioning of the longevity claims derived from the Blue Zones. Below are some key points:

• Supercentenarian status in United States is found to be associated with a 69-82% reduction in the number of centenarians
• “In total, 82% of supercentenarian records from the USA (N=536) predate state-wide birth certification. Forty-two states achieved complete birth certificate coverage during the survey period. When these states transition to state-wide birth registration, the number of supercentenarians falls by 80% per year or approximately 69% per capita.”
• Average life expectancy in these “blue zones” is lower than the average in the population.
• Okinawa, Japan is a blue zone with the greatest number of centenarians and,
• The highest murder rate per capita of the other Japanese prefectures,
• The worst over-65 dependency ratio
• The second-lowest median income
• The lowest median lifespan
• Essentially, the shortest-lived and second-poorest region of this affluent nation

Okinawa is not alone in the “blue zones” most others represent the least educated and poorest regions of their individual countries.

These “blue zones” have other alarming statistics:

• 17-50% smoking rates (99% in men in Ikaria)
• 50-80% illiteracy (90% of the centenarians in Ikaria)
• 98% of the centenarians had below median wage
• Moderate to high alcohol consumption
• This includes both incredibly low literacy rates and low incomes – these are often heavily-correlated with age-reporting errors and pension fraud, which would falsely increase the number of supercentenarians recorded!

These key health factors are often outright ignored in the Blue Zone data, and when considered it throws the claim of a Blue Zone into doubt – the male population in Ikaria have moderate to high alcohol consumption, a 10% illiteracy rate, and a 99% smoking rate!

A 2010 investigation of Japanese records revealed that 238,000 allegedly living centenarians were actually missing or deceased. Without consistent record-keeping and ways to properly document people’s ages we cannot trust the data being put forward by the Blue Zone folks. Time will likely solve these statistical errors , but for now it is simply dirty data.

With such severe health factors such as smoking and crime rate being alarmingly high in these areas, as well as a lack of adequate education, one wonders how these people are really living so long. The truth is they probably aren’t. Once birth certificates became mandatory, there was an 80% reduction in the number of supercentenatrians.

Take the Adventists of Loma Linda, California; male Adventists live about 7 years longer than other white Californians, and this is ascribed to their lifestyle. The Adventist church recommends being vegetarian, although not all Adventists follow that stricture.

But Mormons in California and Utah appear to have about the same increase in life expectancy as the Adventists, and they are not vegetarians. So why aren’t Mormons on the Blue Zone list? Is it because of an agenda? The company Blue Zones was recently purchased by the Health Care wing of the Seventh Day Adventist Church known as AdventHealth, a parent company with its own controversies, and a vested interest in promoting its lifestyle as a longevity cure. It is the largest not-for-profit Protestant health care provider.

Newman has some interesting hypotheses behind the high rate of centenarians and super-centenarians in these regions in the absence of birth certificates – illiteracy, poverty, and the absence of birth certificates can allow for pension or government assistance fraud. Even with validated birth certificates, there have been cases of taking on the identity of sibling and even parents in order to advance some financial or property gains. This is actually a current area of controversy with Jeanne Calment (oldest ever living person) where there is a possibility that she took on the identity of her mother when her mother died to commit insurance fraud.

Despite these flaws in the data, Dan Buettner eventually published a book on the subject in 2008 and the company began piloting the concept in American cities. They applied the principles first to a small town in Minnesota, then moved to the beach communities of California, and on to Iowa.

Today Blue Zones is active in about two dozen communities across the country, including five in Washington state: Walla Walla and Spanaway, where the company has implemented projects; and Mason, Lewis and Grays Harbor counties, where ideas are still being developed.

Grays Harbor County stacks up as one of the unhealthiest in the state based on life expectancy and quality, according to the 2022 County Health Rankings and Roadmaps from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The county has higher rates of smoking and obesity than the statewide average, and fewer access opportunities to exercise by a factor of one-fifth. This makes it an excellent candidate for the Blue Zones faulty data scheme.

Those statistics were incorporated into Summit Pacific Medical Center’s community health needs assessment for the next two years. The hospital played a large role in bringing Blue Zones to Grays Harbor, including launching an initial study to see if the community was interested in the concept. The assessment was backed by a $25,000 contribution from the Grays Harbor Board of County Commissioners.

Frye, who lives in Hoquiam, has spent about one year as executive director of the local project. He’s spent that time reaching out to local governments, nonprofits, agencies, other leaders and people from different facets of the community. A similar group met at a summit held in Aberdeen this summer. They exchanged ideas about potential projects for improvements to public spaces and food systems, which then bounced back and forth between Grays Harbor and a national Blue Zones team, ultimately whittling a long list down to nine projects chosen by the Blue zones team, not representative of the ideas of the community partners.

County-wide plans

Now after one less-than-inspiring summit, they say they have developed nine projects which span from Ocean Shores to Elma.

The two largest in scope are to be a centrally-located park and a county-wide trail system. According to Blue Zones’ final action plan, the park idea is intended to address “community disconnection” discovered during conversations with local leaders, and provide an opportunity to “unite toward a shared goal.” How novel.

A third project would help Hoquiam create a looped walking and biking path system in coordination with the upcoming levee project. Shay said the city already planned to incorporate trails into the levee system, and that aligned with the goals of Blue Zones. This is one excellent example in a long line of examples of how Blue Zones proposes obvious measures that the community being “helped” have been trying for years, and then take credit when it happens.

Blue Zones will partner with local governments or other agencies to apply for grants for projects, Frye said, but would not be in charge of administering any of the funds.

“Nothing is ever just ‘hey, Blue Zones is going to do this,’” Frye said. “Everything we do is through community.” This is how they are able to take credit for so much.

The final project tailored toward “built environment” would be to host a training event for local housing developers in Hoquiam with the goal of increasing middle housing capacity, whatever that means.

Physical projects are only part of what Blue Zones has planned for Grays Harbor County. The other part is food policy, projects that aim to expand local food incentive programs from local farms and develop support for local gardeners and growers in coordination with food organizations. More things that sound great but have been stewing among those in the community who have been working towards these things for years, and have been sidelined by this shiny new company saying it can accomplish everything. They plan to revive and coopt the Food Policy Council that existed here previously, and use that to make recommendations to local food programs and “leaders”.

It’s unrealistic to expect each of these projects to be fully constructed or completed within the next two years, Frye said, but the goal is to have funding, plans and permits lined up by that time, when Blue Zones would then decide whether or not to roll into the next phase. Frye said he will spend the next two months adding members to the Blue Zones committees before beginning to actively pursue projects in January.

The company has received pushback from target cities including in Florida, where fears of government over reach and closed door politics led to a lawsuit against the Collier County district Superintendent Kamela Patton.

Police Gas Mentally Ill Man

Cold Weather Shelter Request Goes Unanswered

The County’s request for proposals for a cold weather shelter went unanswered last month, making the likelihood of anyone opening a shelter this year incredibly low.

The application, which asked for proposals for cold weather emergency services such as a congregate shelter, hotel vouchers and more individualized options like tiny homes or pallet shelters — on Sept. 6, and left the application open until Oct. 23, but did not receive any applications. Services were expected to begin this month.

Since there is still $530,000 in state and county funding for these services, county commissioners have agreed to move toward expanding existing contracts that do not involve a congregate shelter, things like hotel/motel vouchers and street outreach programs.

Grays Harbor County Public Health confirmed with the Washington State Department of Commerce that those are suitable uses for the funds, which include $160,000 in emergency housing funds from the state, which will expire in 2025, and $370,000 in county document recording fees that are not time-sensitive.

Heeding recommendations from public health, county commissioners suggested sending an extra $250,000 to Coastal Community Action Program’s hotel and motel voucher program, as well as $100,000 to Chaplains on the Harbor to expand its day center and street outreach programs.

“That would be a good start, at least to show we’re trying to spend the money that we have appropriately, and while we don’t have a shelter we’ll try and house as many as we can in the hotel- motel situation, and utilizing Chaplains’ street outreach program I think will be beneficial,” District 3 Commissioner Vickie Raines said.

Even these amounts will not be finalized until the commissioners meet again alter this month. As the cold weather has already arrived, many are wondering what is taking so long. This is unfortunately not a new phenomenon, as winter occurs every year, and the local fascists have been pushing against shelters within the Aberdeen city limits for years.

CCAP claims that this amount would more than double their current amount of rooms to potential total of 30 rooms. With hundreds in need of warm shelter this winter it fails to amount to much in the face of such need. The program prioritizes people who are “medically fragile and vulnerable,” or households with children, pregnancies or life-threatening illnesses.

These non congregate shelter options are great for those who can obtain them, demonstrating a higher level of acre and attention paid to those in a consistent hotel room for the winter. The number of people exiting this program into permanent housing was much higher than any other emergency housing service offered last year. But seeing as it only covers a small percentage of people in need it is clearly insufficient.

Providing emergency shelter during the winter months is part of Grays Harbor County’s five-year plan to address homelessness, which was published in 2019. But two of the commissioners, and the Aberdeen mayor, and several city council members have pushed back hard against the existence of a shelter in city limits. Voting last year to outright ban one.

The extra dollars for the program at Chaplains will not include any overnight shelter options either as they will simply expand their day shelter hours and offer their social service engagement services. They claim their decision has nothing to do with new restrictions voted into place in Westport in October. The ordinance required Chaplains to apply for a permit to run the shelter, keep a daily log with names of all shelter guests, and gave the mayor authority to determine the shelter’s maximum capacity.

The city began to draft those regulations earlier this year after the county awarded extra funding to Chaplains to expand overnight capacity at the shelter last winter, which many residents objected to at public meetings.

That extra funding was available because other shelters fell through due to problems with location after the Aberdeen City Council asked that a shelter not be operated within the city limits. It is clear that the hate of the unhoused is strong in the right wing, who voice their views at these city council meetings not often attended by the unhoused themselves.

The Moore Wright Group, another social services organization, applied to host a 7-12 bed shelter in one of its residential houses last year, but concerns over city code and occupancy snagged the proposal. Tanikka Watford, the group’s executive director, said that because past shelter applications hadn’t yielded any county funding, the group “decided this isn’t something that makes sense for us to keep pursuing.”

Without an organization made up of the people living in these circumstances there is no outcome that the current leadership will come up with other than total eradication of the unhoused. By forcing people to live outside throughout a bitter Northwestern winter is cruel and inhumane. Those who want this to be the state of affairs want nothing less than the death of our friends on the streets. No one else is coming to save us. We must organize among ourselves and form our own counter-institutions to resist the efforts of those in positions of power and advance our own agenda of housing for all.

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