Coronavirus Daily Information Update: 20 March 2020

HERE ARE TODAY'S links  to what seem the most reliably informative and therefore (presumably) useful Internet reports on the rapidly spreading Coronavirus pandemic  (a bit late, with apologies, due to the sheer volume of today's news): 

From the Associated Press:

Trump uses daily coronavirus briefing to attack reporter
Predictable. The real question we should be asking is whether the federal union can survive the Trump/Pence Regime's malicious destructiveness.

Trump vs Fauci: President and doctor spar over unproven drug
Donald the Dissembler versus scientific truth-telling. 

Trump contradicts Fauci, slams reporter over drug
Audiovisual report of the preceding story. More of AP's daily exposure of the Regime's innumerable lies.

Parents, police struggle to herd the young in virus outbreak
Cheering the virus as "Boomer Remover," U.S. youth defiantly party-on in the face of global disaster. This is an especially infuriating demonstration of  the carefully-conditioned Ayn Rand moral imbecility and self-obsession imposed to guarantee our Neoliberal Masters that  most USian youth -- robbed from birth of the ability to think logically -- will remain hopelessly subjugated, never able to transcend Neoliberal anti-intellectualism even enough to become effective reformers, much less revolutionaries. (Yes, that's the same sort of propaganda-induced blindness that kept the Germans fanatically faithful to Hitler and the Nazis even as the Red Army overran Berlin.)

The drive-in, relic of yesterday, finds itself suited to now
One of the innumerable examples we are likely to witness in the coming months of the renewed relevance of old technologies.

Returning troops denied water, bathrooms under quarantine
The truth of our Masters' regard for those of us they regard as cannon-fodder.

US virus testing faces new headwind: Lab supply shortages
One of today's many examples of Neoliberalism as genocide. 

Imports of medical supplies plummet as demand in US soars
Another of today's many examples of Neoliberalism as genocide.

Europeans sing health workers' praises nightly from windows
A normal response from civilized people -- with a selflessness unlikely to be found anywhere in the vindictively self-obsessed United States. 

From other sources:

U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic

Though this report was censored by WaPo's paywall only minutes after it was posted as part of the publication's free daily virus report, it is re-posted here as more evidence our Neoliberal Masters knew of the coronavirus pandemic well before it happened -- further substantiation (though not conclusive proof) of both the Chinese claim the virus originated from the U.S. war machine and the more general suspicion our Masters are, in keeping with their shock doctrine,  weaponizing the pandemic to rid the empire of its "surplus" Working Families.

Senators use advance coronavirus knowledge to enrich selves; hospitals becoming desperate
Here are most of the damning truths hidden behind the paywalled WaPo report above. 

Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis
Whatever Oberst-Gruppenführer Bezos decrees should be disseminated to us, we the people of the Empire's peasantry and proletariat.

FBI: 300% spike in gun buy checks, huge backlogs, shutdown threatened
Forcible disarmament -- for everybody but our Masters -- by any means possible. 

Homeless. Vulnerable. And no option for 'self isolation'
Homeless camps as preludes to our Neoliberal future.

Colleges offering dorms as hospital overflow for virus cases
Logical -- and most commendable.

Shoreline COVID-19 facility rapidly built on school soccer field
But officials say it may NOT serve virus-sufferers.

100 Million Masks to be Sewn by Volunteers
Betsy Ross lives! 

Tell Congress: Put trains into airline relief package
A petition, posted (with apologies) because the Mainstream Media is suppressing this story and there is no other way to tell it: that -- again in keeping with our Masters' shock doctrine -- their bipartisan Congressional vassals are in fact weaponizing the pandemic to destroy what (little) remains of what was once the planet's finest passenger-rail and public transportation system.

Geopolitics in the Corona Era: A Global Challenge Needs a Global Response

From the civilized world.

‘We’re not a shipping clerk’: Trump tells governors they are on their own

Quoth Roman Emperor Honorius c. 407 CE: "the cantons must see to their own defense" -- this after the withdrawal of the Legions from Britannia, as the collapse of the western empire accelerated into free-fall. Note -- as at the beginning -- the implications for the (dissolving) federal union.

Also relevant:

How to Properly Make Sanitizers from Household Ingredients
Discovered after publication and -- because of its urgency -- added forthwith.


We Should All Be Seriously Re-Prioritizing Our Lives And Our Thinking Right Now – Caitlin Johnstone
Provocative and useful.

(As always, headlines are reproduced in their original up-style and down-style formats.)

*****

JUST FOR THE RECORD: I have never in my personal or professional life  witnessed anything even remotely comparable to the global coronavirus emergency; I'll be 80 years old on 30 March and have been in professional journalism since November 1956.

And -- yes --  I am old enough to remember World War II quite vividly: blackouts; food rationing; the green ration stamps and the books in which they were to be pasted; the envelopes of orange coloring used to make lard called "oleomargarine" look like butter; stomping tin cans flat (to keep the lids inside) for the ubiquitous paper-and-scrap-metal drives; German-torpedoed U.S. ships burning within sight of the New York, New Jersey and Florida beaches; beaches closed so the authorities could collect the corpses of sailors (some German, most U.S.) washed ashore from all the sunken ships; the huge hole in the dunes beyond the St. Augustine, Fla. beach where the squad of German saboteurs landed from a U-boat had buried their explosives and radio-transmitters; blackout paint on the headlamps of my father's 1940 Ford; boiling black smoke in the overhead sky and my birthmother's abject terror as she carried me bodily to a bomb shelter after an ammunition ship exploded at the Jacksonville piers, this in late 1943 or early 1944.

 

Among the earliest and most vivid of these memories is the visit my father and I paid the fatally wounded Normandie as she listed badly at her French Line pier in Midtown Manhattan. This could only have happened shortly after dark on 9 February 1942, after the fire had been brought under control the night before she capsized; I was a mere toddler, seven weeks shy of my second birthday but -- despite dyslexia -- already had the memory that would later serve me so well as a journalist and historian. 

 

At the time we were told the Normandie had set sail, had been torpedoed by the Germans off Long Island and had limped, afire, back into port; later we were told she was torched by German saboteurs. The true story -- that this fine ship died as a result of  U.S. Navy stupidity, xenophobia and negligence -- did not emerge until after the war. 

In other words, we see again that in times of crisis our most difficult task is finding the truths hidden in the government's tsunami of lies. 

(Which I do as best I can with these updates even as I learn to cope the fact that deadline-reporting on a computer takes at least four times as long as doing it on a manual typewriter did back when I was considered one of the fastest, most accurate rewrite men in the NYC/North Jersey press corps, this c. 1968-1970.) 

 

Stay healthy; stay alive; have the best weekend possible under these steadily worsening circumstances inflicted on us by our for-profit Masters in a land where effective medicine remains a privilege of wealth and Neoliberalism reins supreme -- even in the face of deadly disaster. 

(For more Dispatches, including portfolios of my photographs, go here.)

  

LB/20 March 2020 23:22 PDT

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