Coronavirus Daily Information Update: 1 March 2020

BEGINNING TODAY, I'LL post links to what seem the most reliably informative (and therefore useful) Internet reports on the rapidly spreading Coronavirus.

For as long as I am able (or until the crisis ends), I'll upload these brief anthologies -- seldom (if ever) more than a half-dozen reports -- each day around 10  p.m. PST, with supplemental postings as required by breaking stories.

 

As I do in more routine times, I'll reduce the sometimes awkwardly long Dispatches URLs to TinyURLs. This is  both for readers' convenience and to reduce opportunities for ideologically hostile internet service-providers (ISPs) to block the material. (As always, headlines are reproduced in their original up-style and down-style formats.)

Authorities announce 2nd coronavirus death in US  

New virus: Nearly 89,000 infected, over 3,000 dead

How Does the Coronavirus Compare With the Flu?
Thanks to Deputy Director Laurie Jinkins of the Tacoma/Pierce County Health Department for Tweeting this useful report out from behind the NewYork Ttimes' paywall. (Ms. Jinkins, a Democrat, also represents Tacoma's 27th District in the legislature at Olympia, the Washington state capitol.)

The US Is Not Prepared For Coronavirus; We Need To Take Action
A detailed analysis of how bipartisan Neoliberal austerity has severely crippled our ability to deal with the crisis, plus useful hints for protecting our individual and community health and wellbeing.   

Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the US Is Your Civic Duty
Informative reporting from Scientific American.

LB/1 March 2020 21:57 PDT

*****

(Also, for context, I have reproduced below my first two reports in this series. These were originally transmitted as personal emails to friends and colleagues.)

29 February 2020

Breaking: https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/61611-as-a-doctor-ive-watched-republicans-make-the-us-more-vulnerable-to-coronavirus-than-it-ever-should-have-been

Latest figures: death rate seems around three percent at present save in Iran, where it is hitting seven percent; coincidence? (I doubt it):  https://apnews.com/fd006734bacfb34a9dba966694359e5f

Best single source on the overall crisis: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/29/coro-f29.html

First death in US is 35 miles north of Tacoma, close to a senior assisted-living facility at which everyone has grave preconditions, is already infected and will therefore presumably be killed by the virus: https://apnews.com/f175d89567a26d59cab27725c9e8a0d7

Measures of gravity (I): already the worst financial crash since '29: https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/76381/5-trillion-wiped-out-from-world-stocks-amid-fastest-collapse-in.html

Measures of gravity (II): more financial analysis: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/29/econ-f29.html

Analytical note: thinking as the Army taught me to think at Fort Holabird (Jan-July 1960), there are only two possible explanations for the seemingly vector-less outbreaks -- i.e., those with no connection to known sources of infection: these are (1) -- unknown vectors (which further underscores our helplessness and therefore hopelessness in coping with the disease); and (2) -- aerial dispersion, which is the most effective form of CBR attack.  Given the givens, particularly the truly infinite Evil repeatedly evidenced by our Masters --  I am way more inclined toward the latter explanation than the former.

(As before, those of you who no longer want these gleanings please let me know and I will omit you accordingly.)

///loren

*****

28 February 2020
Most reliable and detailed reports I can find: 

(Note there is no longer any doubt our Overlords are severely downplaying the magnitude of the crisis.) 

https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/61585-a-corrupt-response-and-cover-up-trump-admin-appears-to-have-sparked-coronavirus-outbreak-in-us
(See my comment)

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/02/28/very-important-that-you-read-this/

https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/nouriel-roubini-on-coronavirus-this-crisis-will-spill-over-and-result-in-a-disaster-a-e811cf3b-d495-4c52-bf79-d872c8f164ac?sara_ecid=nl_upd_1jtzCCtmxpVo9GAZr2b4X8GquyeAc9&nlid=bfjpqhxz

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/28/pers-f28.html

https://apnews.com/f8c382a5234bc12ec6d4f5430f8ec2e3

(I will keep doing this as long as I am able. If you want me to stop emailing these stories as they break, please let me know. Thank you.)

///loren

(For earlier posts go here.)

Republicans Join Democrats to Forcibly Disarm U.S. Civilians

Fearing Revolution, the Plutocrats Unite for Class War 
against Legal Gun Owners, Retaining 2nd Amendment as Propaganda but Imposing Prohibitive Fees and Taxes, Thus Redefining Self-Defense as the Exclusive Privilege of Our Masters and Their Collaborators

*** 
Still Doubt DemoPublican Back-Room Unity? Read On

*** 
Plus See Below for DfD's Long-Promised New Format

WHAT I HAVE ASSEMBLED  here is hitherto obscured but nonetheless compelling proof the Trump/Pence Regime -- secure behind its ever more crippling effluent of Nazi-style Big Lies and other Josef-Goebbels-type deceptions -- is so terrified by the intensifying likelihood of socialist revolution, it is now collaborating with the Democratic (sic) Party to forcibly disarm all U.S. Working Families. 

The proof is in the following jig-saw puzzle of reports...

(To read the rest, go here.)

The ChristoNazis Want Greta Thunberg Burned as a "Witch"

Condemning All Environmentalists as "Pagan Barbarians," a Leading Fascist Journal Damns Greta as a New "Joan of Arc," Thus Implicitly Threatening Her with the Martyr's Hideously Painful Death by Fire

I MISSED THIS STORY when it broke last September because Wonkette -- the website that chose to ignore The Federalist's terrifyingly obvious lynch-mob agitation but otherwise scooped the world by sarcastically reporting that publication's potentially murderous accusations -- is unfortunately but justifiably disreputable for its identity-politics vindictiveness and is therefore almost never taken seriously by the Internet sources¹ on which I am most dependent for my daily doses of relevant information.

But before we can acknowledge the full horror of The Federalist's position, we need to understand the magnitude of its threat: yes, dear readers, there truly are masses of alleged humans out there in Neo-Confederate White Christian America who intend to bring back public executions including witch-burnings and the stoning of adulterers, adulteresses, persons of nonconforming sexuality and so-called "heretics," disobedient small children included.

And these days their de facto neo-Confederate nation -- for which see the color charts linked below -- is nearly all the geographical U.S.A. save parts of 13 coastal states² and perhaps a few more cities.³

 

Quoth Joe Bageant in a 2004 Dissident Voice report that today is recognized by most of us on the Real (socialist/pagan) Left as terrifingly prophetic:

Christian Reconstruction...calls for the death penalty in a wide range of crimes, including abandonment of the faith, blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, striking a parent, and ''unchastity before marriage'' (but for women only). Biblically correct methods of execution include stoning, the sword, hanging, and burning. Stoning is preferred, according to Gary North, the self-styled Reconstructionist economist, because stones are plentiful and cheap. Biblical Law would also eliminate labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools...Reconstructionist doctrine calls for the scrapping of environmental protection of all kinds, because there will be no need for this planet earth once The Rapture occurs...

Its impact on politics and religion in this nation have been massive, with many mainstream churches pushed rightward...Other mainstream churches...flinch and bow to the Reconstructionists at every turn. 

Lest the Christian Reconstructionists be underestimated, remember that it was Reconstructionist strategists whose "stealth ideology" managed the takeover of the Republican Party in the early 1990s. That takeover now looks mild in light of...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Forget the Impeachment Charade; Here's a Taste of Real News

NO I DIDN'T STUTTER; yes I regard "impeachment" as an archetypal Neoliberal crusade, infinite noise and zero action, intended to preserve the ecogenocidal Big Lie of USian "democracy" by protecting the perpe-traitors whether governmental or cor-pirate while providing sufficient circuses to distract Moron Nation from its ever-worsening lack of bread whether edible or spendable.

(For detailed elaboration of my views about impeachment -- which thus far is the Democratic (sic) Party's scam of the century -- go to comment threads here,  here and here. ) 

Now on to an anthology of reports I recommend as essential to our understanding of the ever-more-nightmarish era in which we Working Class folk abide (upper and lower case -- "upscale" and "downscale" in newsroom parlance --  as in originals) : 

Dangerous Levels of Warming Locked In by Planned Jump in Fossil Fuels Output
As I concluded last year and have been saying ever since -- no doubt why I am the target of (thus far) low-intensity electronic harassment -- the ever-more-blatantly obvious explanation for such deliberately ecogenocidal policies is that our Neoliberal Masters have weaponized terminal climate change to serve their Shock-Doctrine agenda of perpetuating their technological omnipotence by radical population reduction. Which if you read their ideological sequels to Mein Kampf is to be by elimination of 90  to 95 percent of the present 

(To continue reading, go here.) 

Bloomberg: Hoplophobic Juggernaut as Presidential Tsunami

(For those unfamiliar with the Classical Greek-based term, a hoplophobe is what the late Jeff Cooper, a world-renown firearms and self-defense expert, came up with as an apt, more easily headlined synonym for "forcible-disarmament fanatic" -- a creature so hateful s/he is leaving us utterly defenseless in face of the accelerating apocalypse.) 

*****

I SUBMITTED THE following analysis to the comment threads of two Reader Supported News reports,  never mind its conclusions should be slap-ourselves-on-the-forehead obvious to any USian in whom random chance has retained the abilities to unplug brain from cellphone  and see beyond the serial mind-warping perpetrated by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM). 

Alas, in this instance it seems we've also got to transcend the conflicting-obligations silence of so-called "progressive" media as well -- a silence as understandable as it is intolerable once we focus on the seemingly unbridgeable gap that (again seemingly) separates the forcible-disarmament fanatics from the white-supremacist goons, never mind each are willing servants of the most diabolically cunning Ruling Class in all human experience.  

Even so, merging the two groups is impossible,  no? 

But wait! What if Bloomberg loudly promises the FDFs he'll disarm the WSGs with prohibitively expensive fees and taxes -- exactly the mechanism Bloomberg-seduced voters imposed on Tacoma and Seattle -- even as he whispers and dog-whistles to the WSGs the licenses will be issued by Homeland Security, thereby not only guaranteeing the WSGs will remain armed but -- dog whistle again --

(To read the rest, go here.)

A People So Fanatically Self-Centered, Solidarity Is for Never

(Thus the Powell-Memo/Ayn-Rand Moral Imbecility That Perpetuates 'American Exceptionalism' Dooms Us All to Ecogenocidal Extinction)  

CRADLE-TO-GRAVE AYN RANDIFUCATION -- maliciously seductive conditioning in the principles of Mein Kampf¹ and the Powell Memo that make tyranny fun and profitable for the plutocrats and inescapably deadly for all the rest of us -- has become the sole determinant of the quality of life in today's United States. 

This remains the one pivotal  truth of our existence no matter how frantically we might try to ignore or deny the skyrocketing horrors of its obvious results, a frog-boiled compound of deliberately ruinous afflictions that make it excruciatingly obvious we are never again to be granted even the tiniest mercy of an antidote, much less an actual cure.  

These ultimately non-survivable assaults include:

• The death-blows -- whether physical or mental -- endlessly dealt us by the fascists, ChristoNazis, Original Nazis and all the other antihumans vengefully massing on the global Right:
• The socioeconomic fragmentation the equally ego-driven USian Left imposes on us with the innumerable fads of identity-politics and zero-tolerance "political correctness" it employs to blind us to the urgent reality of ecogenocidal class war;
• The me-first recidivism by which We the People of the 99 Percent are endlessly conditioned to perpetuate our own socioeconomic powerlessness;
• The murderous coup of 22 November 1963, to which -- with the terror and terrorism of at least a dozen more political murders -- our Overlords have since added the police-state guarantee of their own ever-more-obviously irreversible omnipotence;
• The nearly two million children, women and men our Masters slew in Southeast Asia to begin transforming the global-enslavement agenda of Neoliberalism into the ecogenocidal agenda of the terminally White Christian USian Empire;
• And -- last but by no means of lesser significance -- the apocalyptic revelation implicit in the defeat of the Soviet Union: specifically that there will never again be a people or nation on this planet allowed to develop the capability of overthrowing our conquerors by any means less  suicidal than thermonuclear war.

Thus we are infinitely more paralyzed by subjugation than our officially enslaved ancestors could have ever imagined -- so subjugated, in lethal fact, that even the most far-fetched possibility of liberation is now eternally beyond our reach -- "eternally" used here in the sense our species' self- destruction-by-patriarchy will be literally everlasting.

 

This is because our Masters, employing their unprecedentedly diabolical cunningly, have gradually but methodically reconstructed human society to deliberately rob all the rest of us --

(To read the rest go here.)

Ten Reports Exemplify Our Intensifying Wretchedness

(Re-Posted Here in Hope They'll Help Shape Our Responses)

AGAIN, THOUGH I had not planned on writing anything  more in this space for probably another month, some breaking stories demand attention well beyond the aggrieved but fleeting glances by which we now routinely (and often suicidally) try to defend ourselves against the horrors they expound.

Why pay these disturbing reports additional heed? 

Because most come from the alternative press, which means they received little or no coverage in the so-called "mainstream press" owned and operated by our overlords, the privately-owned for-profit successor to Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda that now peddles the Big Lies, disinformation and maliciously manufactured confusion central to the USian Empire's Neoliberal agenda of suppression, conquest and enslavement. 

And because the reports featured here are what they are,  there is always a chance -- never mind ours is the most rationally hopeless of all human epochs -- of someone finding ideas therein for activism that might ameliorate the horrors our masters are bringing down upon us all. 

Sea 'Boiling' With Methane Discovered in SiberiaResearchers on an expedition to the East Siberian Sea said the "methane fountain" was unlike anything they had seen before, with concentrations of the gas in the region to be six to seven times higher than the global average.  Observation: This is the newest report on the bobsled-speed with which terminal climate change is intensifying. Meanwhile our Neoliberal overlords are obviously escalating their efforts to weaponize the Apocalypse and thereby exterminate 90 to 95 percent of the 99 Percent and permanently enslave the survivors. 

This report, brought to us by Reader Supported News, also exemplifies the sorts of information we are routinely denied by the Imperial USian censorship and brain-warping apparatus, the most ruinously effective such program in all human experience -- which is precisely why we should be doing everything in our power to preserve RSN, the censorship-nullifying source of so many vital stories. PLEASE therefore contribute to help RSN continue providing the most relevant summary of vital news available on the English-language Internet.  

 

Sexually Transmitted Diseases Hit New Highs Again in USMore than 1.7 million cases of chlamydia  were reported last year. The infection rate rose 3% from 2017. It’s the most ever reported in a year...About 580,000 gonorrhea cases were reported. That’s the highest number since 1991. The rate rose 5%. Scientists worry antibiotic resistance may be a factor. And the syphilis rate rose 15%. About 35,000 cases of the most contagious forms of the disease were reported — also the most since 1991. Factual Observation: These disasters are entirely the fault of the Fundamentalist Christians and their diabolical, intentionally murderous campaign to abolish sex education as well as all public health and reproductive care. Indeed their Prosperity Gospel Jesus is fast becoming humanity's most deadly enemy. 

White Kids Burn Latina Author’s Book After She Discusses White Privilege
But while some students at the Statesboro, Ga., school expressed disgust and shame, others defended the actions. Note: Do not dismiss this atrocity as "just the South"; uncontested brain-warping by Neoliberalism has made such neo-Confederate bigotry the defining characteristic of nearly all the USian interior states (in addition, of course, to all the original state perpe-traitors of secession). 

War on Plastic Waste Faces Setback as Cost of Recycled Material Soars
For years the cost of making plastic products from recycled flakes was cheaper than relying on virgin plastics made using fossil fuels, meaning the sustainable option was an economic option too. But...new plastic is becoming cheaper to make due to a flood of petrochemicals production from the US driven by the shale gas boom. Note how this deliberately ecocidal trend is imposed on the world by -- what else -- the USian Empire (which by any accurate accounting is by far the most deliberately ecogenocidal empire that ever murdered and enslaved our kinfolk and otherwise infested our probably doomed plane).   

         

Wildfires and Forced Blackouts Lead to Multiple Deaths in CaliforniaThe past week of events in California underscores the complete bankruptcy of the entire capitalist system, which subordinates every aspect of life—including the most basic needs of the population such as electricity—to the profit interests of the financial aristocracy. With all control over this vital resource left in the hands of the executives of...

(To read the rest, go here.)