Don’t wash your food with bleach. Don’t eat or drink cleaning products. June 6, 2020  These lifesaving warnings may seem like common sense, but a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests Americans are throwing common sense out the window as they attempt to keep the coronavirus out of their homes.
In a survey published Friday, 39% of 502 respondents reported engaging in “non-recommend, high-risk practices,” including using bleach on food, applying household cleaning or disinfectant products to their skin and inhaling or ingesting such products.
The agency also found many people had limited knowledge of how to safely prepare and use cleaning products and disinfectants. Only 23% responded that room temperature water should be used to dilute bleach and 35% said that bleach should not be mixed with vinegar.
More surprisingly, only 58% of respondents knew bleach shouldn’t be mixed with ammonia.
Mixing those two products creates a solution that emits a harmful gas called chloramine – the same chemical reaction believed to have killed an employee at a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in Massachusetts last year.
The CDC said the survey was conducted after poison centers reported a sharp increase in calls. The National Poison Data System noted the following increases in call volumes between March 2019 and March 2020, and between April 2019 and April 2020:
A nearly 60% increase in calls about bleach products in March and a 77% increase in April.
A 94% increase in calls about disinfectants in March and a 122% increase in April.
A 75% increase in calls about hand sanitizer in March and a 56% increase in April.
“They’re getting overaggressive in cleaning,” said Michele Caliva, administrative director of the Upstate New York Poison Center.
Callers have mixed cleaning products, sprayed disinfectant on bread wrappers and wondered if they can eat the bread, bathed their kids in bleach solutions and just generally failed to follow label directions, she said.
In California, police in the city of Vallejo fatally shot an unarmed 22-year-old Tuesday who was kneeling and had his hands up outside a Walgreens, after officers responded to a call about alleged looting during protests against the police killing of George Floyd. Police said they believed Sean Monterrosa had a gun, but later said he only had a hammer in his pocket. Witnesses say when police arrived, Monterrosa quickly dropped to his knees and surrendered, when a police officer in an unmarked car shot him five times through the windshield. Monterrosa grew up in San Francisco and had previously worked at a Boys & Girls Club. LINK
Ryann Milligan is the PENN STATE student identified.
Question; what kind of stupid privileged brain dead whore would think this was a good idea? There parents should be ashamed of themselves!
“Allowing her to remain a student of Penn State is a disservice to all Jewish people, living or dead,” the petition stated. “It sends the message that antisemitic actions and ideals are accepted by the university, and that Penn State doesn’t care about protecting its Jewish students, as well as other oppressed and underrepresented minorities.”
Ryan Devereaux on police ideology and "the thin blue line." —Erika
Hundreds of miles away, in Cincinnati, reaction to the protests was taking a different shape. While demonstrators were gathering in Brooklyn, a group of Hamilton County sheriff’s deputies dressed in tactical gear and body armor, many of them carrying rifles, hoisted a pro-police flag outside of their office. Ubiquitous in some parts of the country, the flag replaces the red of a traditional American flag with black. The banner incorporates a blue band to symbolize the “thin blue line” that some police officers believe they represent: society’s well-armed firewall, protecting an otherwise defenseless public from the forces of evil.
Sheriff Jim Neil later said that the flag replacement was only temporary, after an image of his deputies’ informal ceremony went viral. The office’s American flag had been lost to vandals, the sheriff tweeted, and the current one was meant to honor an officer whose helmet was struck with a bullet the previous night. “The flag has been removed and we will replace it with the American Flag in the morning,” Neil wrote.
Though minor in comparison to the acts of physical violence and outpourings of grief seen across the country, the episode in Cincinnati was significant. The “thin blue line” flag is the known symbol of a social, cultural, and political movement that is inextricably linked to the country’s current unrest. The flag is the centerpiece in a world of merchandise and policing philosophy, all built around the idea that the police are an embattled tribe of warriors, maligned and reviled by a nation that fails to appreciate their unique importance. The blue line is a reminder that much of the policing community sees itself as separate from the rest of society — and as the nation has witnessed in recent days, in video after shocking video, this well-armed population, imbued with the power to deprive citizens of life and liberty, does not take kindly to those who challenge its authority.
“What we’re talking about here is a worldview that says that police are the only force capable of holding society together,” Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of “The End of Policing,” told me. The view turns on the notion that “without the constant threat of violent coercive intervention, society will unravel into a war of all against all,” he explained. Seen through this lens, “authoritarian solutions are not just necessary, they’re almost preferable.”
In the wake of Floyd’s killing, with protests in every state in the union and U.S. security forces at every level called to respond, the country is now witnessing what years of militarized conditioning, training, and culture have wrought: a nationwide protest movement running up against a nationwide police riot.
A memorial in Louisville for Breonna Taylor, on what would have been her 27th birthday.
Photograph: Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
Breonna Taylor would have been 27 on Friday, but most of the people who showed up in downtown Louisville to mark that milestone did not know her. A lot probably wish they had never heard her name.
If Taylor had not been shot dead by police in March, her mother believes she would have been out here on the streets herself, protesting against the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and David McAtee here, and demanding reform and an end to police brutality, just like the protesters who had shown up for her.
As an emergency medical technician (EMT), maybe she would have been be a volunteer medic at the mass demonstrations that have convulsed the city over the course of almost two weeks. Or maybe – having risked her own health to work in the emergency room through the coronavirus pandemic – she’d be handing out protective masks.
“I’m so grateful to everybody,” said Tamika Palmer, Taylor’s mother, as she gave brief remarks at a gathering that was half celebration of life, half protest.
“Y’all don’t understand. It started off lonely, but it’s so amazing to see so many people standing up for her, just saying her name. And trust: if it was anybody else, Breonna would be out here doing the same thing. And that’s what I want people to understand about her.”
It has been nearly three months since Taylor was killed in her home. Plainclothes cops had been serving a no-knock search warrant in a narcotics investigation when they burst through her door in the first hour of 13 March while Taylor was sleeping. Her boyfriend Kenneth Walker, a licensed gun owner, grabbed his gun and fired off a shot, thinking they were witnessing a home invasion. He hit an officer in the leg.
Police fired back more than 20 times, killing Taylor and sending bullets flying into a neighboring apartment. No drugs were found.
Yet after her killing, Louisville metro police department described her as a suspect. Her boyfriend was charged with attempted murder of a police officer, and a police union called him an “attempted cop killer”. The cops involved in the incident were not wearing body cameras.
Charges against Walker have since been dropped, but the officers still have their freedom and their jobs, driving anger in Louisville. That anger has been compounded by the death of McAtee, who was shot and killed at his barbecue stand far from the center of protests early Monday morning as LMPD officers and national guard troops tried to clear a crowd violating curfew.
Police say McAtee fired a shot, prompting them to open fire. In violation of policy, officers involved were either not wearing body cameras or did not activate them. The killings – combined with nationwide rage over Floyd’s death and police brutality – have prompted widespread protests in Louisville over the past nine days.
On a sweltering Friday afternoon in downtown Louisville, businesses were busy boarding up windows, but the mood at the park was calm, hopeful and welcoming. People signed a large banner wishing Taylor a happy birthday while others wrote birthday cards and letters to the city. A woman painted a portrait of Taylor.
Aleah Cohen and Destiny Hancock hold up signs across the street from Louisville’s Metro Hall. ‘We shouldn’t be scared to leave our houses,’ said Cohen. Photograph: Josh Wood
“I’d just like to tell her: happy heavenly birthday,” said Tamba Foyah, a 32-year-old artist. “That’s really sad that we have to say heavenly birthday, because she should be here. She should be here celebrating her birthday. I mean, she should be here protesting with us over what happened to George Floyd. She should be with us.”
As he walked through the crowd, Foyah was holding an artwork he’d made showing black bodies hanging in nooses from the barrel of a pistol.
“Nothing has really changed,” he said. “It’s just we’re not hanging from trees any more. We’re just hanging from their weapons,” he said, referring to the police.
A 22-year-old who identified himself as Bam Bam was signing a long banner wishing Taylor a happy birthday.
“What I did was, I told Breonna happy b-day, and we want her to look over us,” he said. “Man, it’s hard, and it’s crazy that we have to lightweight turn half the city up so people can hear our voices. It’s not right and it’s not cool.
And Breonna, baby, if you hear us: we love you, we sorry that this BS happened to you and we all here for you.”
He added: “We letting the world know what it really is, what it’s like to be a black person in America. We letting you know what it’s like that we fearing for our life every time we get pulled over by the police.”
Aleah Cohen, 23, was holding a “No justice, no peace” sign for passing cars to see across the street from Metro Hall with her friend Destiny Hancock, 22.
“It’s beyond scary. It’s something that could literally happen to any of us, especially because she’s at home, in her bedroom,” Cohen said. “If you can’t be safe at home in bed asleep, where can you be safe?”
Cohen says she has experienced racism as a young black woman in Louisville. At an old job, her and a friend got called the N-word and she was accused of stealing. She says HR told her to suck it up.
On the night Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 she says a guy chased her around her neighborhood in a pickup truck. She’s moved since, but one of her neighbors is a cop who she says has pulled her over for no reason and asked if she had a weapon.
“Like: we shouldn’t be scared to leave our houses. I shouldn’t be scared to drive around at night,” she said.
Hancock said the protest response to Taylor’s death now goes much further than just getting justice for her.
“It’s for Breonna to make it about more than Breonna,” she said. “It’s about more than just Breonna – it’s about change long-term.”
