∙Ventura has made announcements about closing four to five blocks on Main St. downtown to make them pedestrian friendly, but no one seems to know what that means exactly. Does that mean closing all of Main so that people can walk in the street? Or does it mean removing some parking spaces so restaurants can expand into them?
Where would people park in order to walk downtown? What about the thrift shops and furniture stores, do they all have rear entrances so customers can pick up their purchases? What happens to traffic? Does it just turn and take Poli or Thompson around downtown? Will be interesting to see what this really means.
Not sure if the city council really knows, except that it sounds like a nice idea. And, maybe with the county approving additional phases and opening-up businesses, this might not even be necessary.
∙Readers are asking me what happened to the multi-paper rack that was located in front of the downtown post office. What a good question. Without the courtesy of telling the “vendors”, one day they just removed them without any notice or warning. Very rude and unprofessional. On top of that they took the inserts in the racks belonging to us (which cost about $400), so they actually stole our property.
∙Regarding the virus, it seems that many people only followed the guidelines because it was the law, and not because it was the safe and prudent thing to do. Now that restrictions have been relaxed a little, many people aren’t following any of the guidelines, which will probably mean that the whole situation will just continue and start over.
The first California county to change its reopening plan wasn’t an urban area or a coastal area where beaches draw crowds, but rather a remote city that didn’t have a single known coronavirus case until last week.
All it took was a single infection that spread to four other people before Lassen County, home to 30,000 people living in the high desert of Northern California, temporarily rescinded reopening orders. Dining at restaurants, in-store shopping, hair cuts and religious services are now barred.
This virus isn’t the flu where you take two aspirin and call your doctor in the morning. If you get it, you could spend several weeks in the hospital and then still die. The way some people are acting now it will never go away. No face masks (“If my president doesn’t wear one why should I”), or distancing.
The people who are claiming their constitutional rights to not wear face masks in restaurants are absurd. First of all, this has absolutely nothing to do with constitutional rights and restaurants can set any dress code that they wish. Some restaurants even require that ties be worn (not in Ventura of course), so requiring face masks is just a new dress code.
These people are jeopardizing the health and lives of others. Does the constitution give them that right?
∙If your dead relative got a coronavirus stimulus check, the government wants the money back.
“A payment made to someone who died before receipt of the payment should be returned to the IRS,” the Treasury said in a statement.
In this case the saying, “I’m probably better off dead,” might be true. So, if you are dead, you should immediately return the money or you could go to jail.
∙ Many kinds of scams are on the rise especially those that target more vulnerable seniors. Please, seniors, do not give your vital information to people on the phone or on your computer even if they seem very legitimate. And that call from your grandson held captive in Iran is also phony even if the caller does know all your personal information.
∙ Don’t get mad and critical when our police don’t remove the homeless (and their belongings) from where you feel they should not be allowed. The police are powerless to do such. A federal judge has ruled that Los Angeles must stop seizing and tossing out bulky things such as mattresses that homeless people have on sidewalks or other property based solely on their size. I know that we are not LA, but these types of rulings have applied in many cases that have gone to the courts and would apply here also.
∙The University of California Board of Regents unanimously voted to suspend the SAT and ACT testing requirements for freshman applicants through 2024 and eliminate them for California students after that.
Instead, the UC system , which includes about 280,000 students across the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, Berkeley, and seven other undergraduate schools, will focus on creating its own test “that better aligns with the content the University expects students to have mastered for college readiness” and its values.
∙New words that we need to learn because of the virus that news media are using.
Attestation:
A proving of the existence of something through evidence.
An official verification of something as true or authentic.
the notary’s attestation of the will.
The proof or evidence by which something (such as the usage of a word) is attested.
∙A Florida man who thought the coronavirus was “a fake crisis” has changed his mind after he and his wife contracted COVID-19.
Brian Hitchens downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus in Facebook posts in March and April.
“I’m honoring what our government says to do during this epidemic but I do not fear this virus because I know that my God is bigger than this Virus will ever be,” he wrote in a post on April 2. “Jesus is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”
∙35 of the 92 people (38%) who attended services at a rural Arkansas church March 6–11 tested positive for the coronavirus, ultimately killing three, according to a case study released by the CDC.
Places of worship continue to be a problem for controlling the widespread transmission of the coronavirus, especially as some churches and local government officials push to loosen restrictions on religious gatherings siting religious freedom.
∙The World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it is pausing trials of hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that President Donald Trump said he took as a possible preventative COVID-19 treatment, despite his own government’s warnings about the drug’s potentially life-threatening side effects.
The WHO’s decision came after scientists from six continents linked the drug to higher death rates in a massive study published Friday by the Lancet journal.
∙President Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies, days after Twitter called two of his tweets “potentially misleading.”
Speaking from the Oval Office ahead of signing the order, Trump said the move was to “defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history.”
“A small handful of social media monopolies controls a vast portion of all public and private communications in the United States,” he claimed. “They’ve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter, virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences.”
And this is the man who has 80 million twitter followers. Maybe this is “one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history.”
When defending his decisions of why he fired four inspector generals, Trump kept referring to them as “attorney generals.” Since he doesn’t appear to know what the people do who he is firing, how can he decide they aren’t doing a good job?
