28 March 2020

Coronavirus Daily Information Update: 27-28 March 2020

HERE WE ARE: today's links  to what seem the most usefully informative (and thus likely to be censored) Internet reports on the skyrocketing Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic:
 
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(To view a far more visually attractive version of this report -- with essays dating back to 2009, and portfolios of relevant photographs -- all without the obvious, vexing, impossible-to-solve formatting conflicts between Typepad and Blogger -- please go here.)
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Most vital1 reports of the day:

Biden Sides With Big Pharma Against Plan That Could Make Coronavirus Vaccine Affordable
Conclusive proof which side the Democratic (sic) Party is really on -- with big thanks  to William Boardman for sending me this vital link.

Coronavirus: Teenage Boy Died After Being Turned Away From Urgent Care for Not Having Insurance
An atrocity no doubt to be repeated throughout the United States -- and everywhere else health care is, by law or edict, not a human right but a privilege of wealth.
    
Massive Scandal: FDA Grants Exclusive Coronavirus Drug Monopoly Rights
The methodology by which our Masters ensure powerlessness is death.
 
Column: Gilead says drug profits must stay high to pay for 'innovation,' but 100% of its profits went to shareholders
More on the same corporation:  a Neoliberal atrocity by Capitalists so evil even the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM) rails against them.

Charles Koch Network Pushed $1 Billion Cut to CDC, Now Attacks Shelter-in-Place Policies for Harming Business
As with the Democratic (sic) Party, so with the Republicans: anything to boost profits while reducing Capitalism's "surplus" of Working Families.

Why Did Hundreds Of CEOs Resign Just Before The World Started Going Absolutely Crazy?
Contemplating such indications as these, it seems ever-more-probable the COVID-19 pandemic is the pre-meditated, deliberately inflicted Apocalypse our Masters have been planning al least since the publication of  The Population Bomb (Anne and Paul Ehrlich, Ballantine Books: 1968). Question is, who's the perpetrator?

DOJ Wants To Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency
Contradictory reality as we edge ever closer to the martial law our Masters tell us not to fear and assure us will never happen.  Who can doubt what approaches -- and that it brings with it the same sadistic German-Nazi-inspiring deadliness that long ago defined the USian Empire's war against First Nations folk, Working Families and People of Color.

Missouri governor mobilizes National Guard for virus fight
And here it comes, as our ecogenocidal Masters run the death-toll however high they imagine will be necessary to preserve their infinitely Evil omnipotence.  (From the Associated Press; included here because of its indicative importance.) 

Amid Coronavirus Concerns, Pentagon to Send Troops to US Borders With Mexico, Canada
What nations might our Masters add to their enemies lists next? 

Dutch Exceptionalism: Will Holland's Looser Corona Policies Pay Off?
An experiment already criticized as social-Darwinist and genocidal -- clearly duplicated by the United States.
   
COVID-19 threatens WA's response to wildfires
Lest we forget, pandemic disaster may also bring about apocalyptic environmental disaster. 
 
Virginia Pastor Who Said COVID-19 Was Anti-Trump “Mass Hysteria” Dies of Virus
Coincidence? Another proof the Goddess -- our Mother Earth -- is a bit more consciously powerful than her adversaries want us to imagine? In either case, poetic justice.

COVID-19: We Won’t Go Back to Normal, Because Normal Was the Problem
Inasmuch as it was the United States that -- mostly with its ecogenocidal military atrocity machine as the prime vector -- poisoned the entire planet with its Neoliberal malignancy,  it has now become the global cesspool of a deadly infection bolstered to the Nth power by its  Neoliberal destruction of human society.

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1I select these stories on the basis of my news judgment as it evolved during my 64 years as a writer, photographer and editor, three decades of which were in the working press. (Despite an on-and-off involvement with the alternative press that began in 1963, all but about three of those first 30 earning-years were primarily in the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, at least half in decide-what's-news jobs ranging from sports editor and associate editor to city editor, news-and-picture editor and editor-in-chief. (Though as my colleagues moved stealthily Rightward, so did I move ever-more-openly Leftward, until eventually I was Left...outside.) Beyond that -- and in keeping with today's (unequivocally apocalyptic) context -- it is a matter of relevance plus probability of censorship.  I ask myself three  questions: firstly, is a given story useful – a term in this context I use as synonymous with relevant. If the answer is yes, I than ask, secondly, how likely is it to be suppressed by the MMPM, our Masters’ first ever privately owned, for-maximum-profit copy of Josef Goebbels’ infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. And here my rule is one of inverse returns: the less likely I think I am to see the story disseminated via the National Daily Wipe and Audiovisual Psychodemonic Zombification Monopoly, (NDWAAZPM, with apology to Henry Miller for the Psychodemonics),  the more likely I am to include it in these summaries. Reports that pass the first two tests are each then subjected to the third and final test: do they include indications from which we might evolve estimates of our situations accurate enough to facilitate effective response? If the answer here is also affirmative, the report in question will always be included in the daily update. Meanwhile the first two criteria generate a lengthy list of possibles I winnow down to probables and thence to musts, a process that takes approximately seven or eight hours each day.


About forcible disarmament:

Deja vu: LA County sheriff closes gun shops again
As our Masters intensify their efforts to reduce us all to compulsory pacifism and mandatory victimhood, we should be asking ourselves whose city, county or state might be next? 

LA Mayor To Cut Off Water & Power Of "Irresponsible, Selfish" Stores That Remain Open
With firearms dealerships -- what else -- the primary target.


SAF Frontline Update
Vital updates for those of us whose notion of self defense go a bit beyond surrendering our weapons and cringing in terror.


From the Associated Press:

Virus Outbreak
Probably the one best source for general news on the pandemic -- and for other global news as well. Scroll down for whatever might be relevant to you personally. (From my ancient perspective, this website is almost as good as having an A-wire teletype on my living room.)


Water shutoffs in sharp focus amid coronavirus outbreak
Neoliberal genocide against those of us unfortunate enough to be stuck in in Detroit. Maybe included in the above (mita).

For nursing homes, symptoms aren't enough to tell who's sick
With kindergarten's petrie-dish accommodations and the environmental toxicity of cities, we old people are often down for the whole winter (mita).

California halts evictions for 2 months amid outbreakHumanitarianism our Masters will not allow most of their state vassals to enact (mita).
Maine sail-maintenance shop turns to sewing medical masks
Superb suggestion for like-minded humans in all coastal states -- and in the Great Lakes states too (mita).



NOT REAL NEWS: Debunking yet more false coronavirus contentITB: AP's courageous battle continues (mita).



From other sources:

National Geographic
What scientists do and don't know about the coronavirus. Most informative.


Coronavirus Heroes Are Getting Tossed From Their Homes by Scared Landlords
Why national tenant protection, rent-control included, is a humanitarian necessity -- which tells us precisely why our Masters will never allow it.

 
Coronavirus live updates: U.S. is first country to report 100,000 cases; Trump invokes Defense Production Act
Whatever virus-related propaganda WaPo Propagandamaster Jeff Bezos approves for Working Family indoctrination.2

 
In the American South, Covid-19 Could Find Fertile Ground
Another dimension of the premeditated murder implicit in the poverty inflicted on us and maliciously sustained by Capitalism, Neoliberal or otherwise.

 
New York Hospitals Treating Coronavirus Patients with Vitamin C
I have no basis for evaluating the reliability of this report from Cryptogon via Blacklisted News
, but I am nevertheless posting it here as potentially important information. 


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 2As to what prompts my sudden skepticism of virus coverage by The Washington Post, note how quickly Bezos or one of his zero-tolerance subordinates imposed paywall censorship on this pivotally important 20 March story (scroll down to "U.S. intelligence reports"), which for only a very few short minutes appeared as part of WaPo's  non-paywalled daily virus report.  Pretending to be real journalists rather than  the Regime's scribes -- a mental downgrading inflicted as much by the clerical drudgery necessitated by computers as by the chief Josef-Goebbels-wannabee Bezos himself -- is a form of moral imbecility I cannot abide.
 

Also relevant:

Adverse consequence of long running constant Democrat and Media Attacks on Trump
A prominent anti-Trump conservative makes a most-legitimate point, relevant whatever one's political mindfulness.


Opinion | A Cruel Motive for a Costly Delay
Informative reading. (In such dire times as these, some of those within the MMPM may -- quite surprisingly, given the omnipresence of Neoliberal restraints -- be rediscovering the superiority of ethical journalism over plutocratic propaganda.) 


Held over: 

The Truth About the United States' "Continuity of Government" Plans & The Coronavirus Perfect StormScroll down to the 12th graf to learn how at least eight million U.S. citizens are on our Masters' enemies lists and will be disappeared.

Military, Trump administration ready plans for domestic crackdown as virus spreads across US
From the report: "'a senior military planner working on coronavirus but not authorized to speak on sensitive planning matters [...] says that deployment of federal troops in support roles is being prepared,' including to conduct traffic stops, home searches and seizures and arrests."3
 
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 3Be aware that "home searches and seizures" could include not only confiscation of all real or potential weapons but -- given the ChristoNazi Regime's anti-marijuana fanaticism  -- confiscation of, and arrest for possession of, all the (still federally illegal) medical marijuana upon which such a huge number of opiate-denied chronic-pain victims are now forced to depend. Too -- given the Regime's even more fanatical hatred of women and female sexuality -- such raids might also be used to confiscate all birth-control devices and criminalize all unwed women who possess them, thereby fulfilling still more of our Masters' ChristoNazis objectives. Thus -- by such mass arrests -- could the Regime give its plutocratic owners the ultimate "gift" of permanently enslaving millions of U.S. citizens for brutally hard, typically deadly labor, thereby granting our Masters' wish of exterminating "surplus workers" while following the German Nazis' model of amassing unlimited profits from mass murder. 



Useful references (selected for their absence of snake-oil deceptions):

New (from Associated Press)

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

*****
BACK IN THE DAY, for me more often the night -- my only tools a typewriter and a pencil with which to edit and headline wire-service dispatches as they rolled off the teletypes (the then-ambient newsroom sounds of which I sometimes still employ as a reassuring stimulant) -- I'd have completed such a wrap-up as this in no more than seven hours, often -- given time for editorial conferences and such -- considerably less.  But today -- with all the tedious minutia,  drudgery and frustration of computer operation -- I have discovered it takes me at least 10 hours to do the same amount of work.

Hence -- with apologies to those inconvenienced -- I'll aim for publication by midnight, earlier if possible, probably later given Friday's volume of pre-weekend news and maybe later (depending on what obtains over the weekend) with Monday's report that of necessity includes some in-case-you-missed-it stories that broke during the weekend. Nevertheless -- reader feedback most emphatically requested -- this remains a learning experience for me; after all, it's it's been fully a half-century since I last functioned on a daily basis as a news editor (or what in the Northeast we then still called a telegraph editor), and that was with a technology as different from today's as a birchbark canoe is from a thermonuclear missile. 

Again, my apology; some of my present difficulty is severe dyslexia, unrelieved since I quit nicotine (cigarettes, pipes and occasional cigars) in 1995, on the first anniversary of the death of one of my best-ever female friends, the editor, writer and groundbreaking pagan scholar Helen Farias, who was killed by metastasized breast cancer on the previous autumnal equinox, 23 September 1994. Some of it is no doubt also the oh-so-damnable momentary intellectual sluggishness that comes with advanced old age. 

But most of it is the fact that to me -- never mind I made all-four-point (dean's-list) grades in physics, astronomy and geology (and am of course well aware of the potential implicit in base-2 numbers) -- the actual operation of a computer will forever seem (and feel) so utterly alien, I have to fight myself to keep from believing the entire concept -- especially the technology and its troubling distortions of language (and therefore consciousness)  -- could only have come from, dare we say it...Elsewhere. 

Whatever its source, its sole beneficiaries -- as we are now learning via the Internet's fulfillment of its ever-intended, cunningly peddled, thence moronically self-inflicted  purposes of maximum censorship and total surveillance -- are of course our very own Masters, now methodically resuming all the lethal prerogatives their Confederate ancestors lost in 1863.
   
May all of you -- all of us -- stay healthy and remain alive, which -- or so it seems -- is in these grimmest of times fast becoming what I know from experience survival in homelessness or terminal poverty has always been: a courageous albeit often involuntarily isolated act of revolutionary defiance.
  
LB/28 March 2020 02:37 PDT
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