31 March 2020

Coronavirus Daily Information Update: 31 March 2020

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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-in-less-than-two-hours formatting conflicts between Typepad and Blogger -- please go here.)

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HERE WE ARE: today's links1  to what seem the most usefully informative (and therefore most likely to be censored) Internet reports on the skyrocketing Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Scroll down, read whatever is relevant to you and yours, skip the rest:

Vitally informative reports:
  General news:
Russian Covid-19 aid plane to US: Putin asked Trump if he needed help & he accepted, Kremlin spokesman says
Let's hope some trigger-happy U.S. anti-aircraft gunner doesn't shoot the plane down.
A Major Medical Staffing Company Just Slashed Benefits for Doctors and Nurses Fighting Coronavirus
Capitalism in action -- with big thanks to William Boardman for sending me the link.
Hospitals Tell Doctors They'll Be Fired if They Speak Out About Lack of Gear
See too the censorship stories under "Also Relevant."
Evidence mounts that Trump is squashing federal response to coronavirus
Anyone who still doubts ecogenocide is a big part of the Regime's agenda is either stupid or refuses to pay attention.
AP Fact Check
Exposure and rebuttal of the ongoing epic of Trumpian Big Lies, small lies and deliberate disinformation about the pandemic. 
Virus Outbreak
AP's daily national and internal report, updated hourly. Scroll for what's relevant to you and yours.
Coronavirus Updates from The Washington Post
The pandemic according to Propagandamaster Bezos and his band of Josef-Goebbels wannabees.2  

  On the pandemic's most obviously dire consequences:
What Happens In the Wake of the COVID-19 Lockdown? Economic Destruction, Global Poverty, Bankruptcies, Mass Unemployment. Neoliberalism to the Rescue
The Neoliberals weaponize the virus to impose their ultimate vision: Planet Earth as the global version of an antebellum slave plantation. 
'Without Us, Instacart Will Grind To A Halt': Delivery Workers Threaten Strike Over Hazard Pay, Safety Measures Amid OutbreakAs our Masters ever-more-insistently demand we sacrifice our lives for their profits, the slow but relentless collapse of the supply chain continues.  
 
  Vindictively vectoring the virus:
As World Struggles to Stop Deaths, Far Right Celebrates COVID-19
The Nazis and their ideological kindred see the virus as a new Final Solution. 
Angry NYC Mayor Says He May Close Defiant Synagogues and Churches Permanently
Self-explanatory -- and long overdue. (It's only under the Trump/Pence Regime's illegal dispensations that Abrahamic Religion is able to resume its history of murder and sadism toward those of us it deems enemies of its serial-killer gods.)
Negligent Manslaughter
The Regime is not "negligent"; it is deliberately committing mass murder instead. (See above, "the virus as a new Final Solution.")
Democratic Leaders Not Off the Hook
As always, the Democratic (sic) Party throws up a smokescreen of deception to hide its function as the Republican (ChristoNazi) fifth column.

  Forcible disarmament and the foiling thereof:
Groups Sue N. Cal. Governments Alleging Rights ViolationsSecond Amendment activists react to California's most-aggressive-in-the-nation efforts at forcible civilian disarmament -- in other words, the imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood.
Groups Seek Show Cause Order In Cal. Gun CaseMore on the same as California officials attempt to ban all civilian purchases of firearms and ammunition just as the looming breakdown of society means we the people might soon need them for self-defense -- especially with the Nazis' plans for weaponizing the virus and its attendant chaos. (Doubt that? Go here.) 

Also Relevant:
  From today:
Revealed: Monsanto predicted crop system would damage US farms
And yet there are still those among us who refuse to acknowledge that Capitalism is ecogenocide.
VA Privatization Leaves Veterans Waist Deep in Another Big Muddy
This as our Neoliberal masters vindictively fatten their already obscene profits by methodically destroying our last remnant of socialized (healthcare -as-a-human-right) medicine.
  Specifically for Washington state readers:
Snohomish yarn shop owner considers her business essential, turns to delivery
With pre-ordered purchases,  it's notably well-thought-out, one-stop, comfortingly minimal-contact shopping for people who need knitting and crochet supplies.

Held Over:(Archived for historical context.)
Average U.S. Citizens Have “Little Or No” Influence On Government Policy
A report from 2014 that's even more relevant today.
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 searches3 and seizures and arrests."

Useful references:(No snake-oil sales or medicine-show huckstering allowed.)

Handling mail amid coronavirus: Low risk but wash your hands(My practice is to assume everything from outside is potentially contaminated, hence I wash my hands thoroughly after handling any incoming packages and sanitize any surface upon which they might have rested or been unwrapped.)
_________________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.
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.
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. 

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

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AS I'VE SAID before, this Update remains a work in progress, but it just may be that -- amazingly enough -- I'm becoming more efficient at the use of this technology I so despise. But most of tonight's improvement in posting-time is due to the fact today's news volume is radically diminished in comparison to what I had to assemble yesterday evening and early this morning.
That said, all Dispatches readers have my very best wishes. May all of you -- all of us -- stay healthy and remain alive, which -- or so it seems -- is 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/31March 2020 22:48 PDT
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