02 April 2020

Coronavirus Daily Information Update: 1 April 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 reports that, beyond the sturm und drang of Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM) headlines, seem to me the (other) most usefully informative Internet stories about the skyrocketing Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Because these are typically sidebars --  peripheral stories (many of which the MMPM advertisers fiercely oppose) -- they are likely to be censored by local MMPM outlets. The headlines linked below without comment are assumed to be self-explanatory. Scroll down, read whatever is relevant to you and yours, share it if you choose, skip the rest:

Informative reports we might not find elsewhere:
  General news:
Judges Block 3 States From Limiting Abortions During PandemicBut what happens when these cases are speed-appealed to the ChristoNazi majority on the Robber's Court?
Refrigeration Trucks Arrive to Hold Bodies as Prisoners Start Digging Mass Graves in New York

Social Security recipients who don’t usually file tax returns will automatically get $1,200 payments, Treasury says
Given the source of this report -- it's from Propagandamaster Bezos' daily wipe -- I'd wait to see it confirmed by other more reliable sources before I accept it as true. 
All Volunteers for Franklin Graham’s NYC COVID-19 Tent Hospital Must Be Anti-LGBTQ
More of the pandemic's skyrocketing, Trump/Pence-Regime encouraged plague of theocratic religious malevolence.
Virus outbreak creates new challenges for addiction recovery
What happens when you desperately "need a meeting" but social-distancing prohibits any such gatherings?
 Anthologies of pandemic reports (scroll for whatever is relevant to you and yours):
What you need to know today about the virus outbreak
National AP report. Probably our best single source for breaking news.
Virus Outbreak
More of AP's latest.
Black Agenda Report
In my opinion, the best, most informative, most relevant political website on the U.S. Internet. 
RT - Breaking news, shows, podcasts
Democratic (sic) Party Big Lies and Republican censorship not withstanding, this site provides what is often the most truthful reporting available to us in the United States.
TASS Russian News Agency
Just as Propagandamaster Bezos' WaPo gives us the Predatory Plutocrats' perspective, so does this site -- formerly Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (Телегра́фное аге́нтство Сове́тского Сою́за, Telegrafnoye agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza) -- give us, in English,  the often-radically different Russian government's perspective. (It's history, dating from 1904, makes interesting reading for mediaphyles.)
Xinhua
Ditto for the news agency of the People's Republic of China. It's history is here.
  On the pandemic's most obviously dire consequences:
  Indications of the pandemic's true magnitude:
  Vindictive virus-vectors (includes countermeasures):
  Censorship and disinformation (includes countermeasures):
  Pandemic-related crimes:
Wisconsin university doctor, husband victims of double homicide, officials say
I do not know if these slayings are virus-related. But considering that one of the late Dr. Potter's specialties was obstetrics, given too that she and her husband lived in what is probably the most viciously ChristoNazi state anywhere outside the former Confederacy (which also may explain why her colleagues concealed the fact she was murdered even as they praised her in memoriam
), plus two more indicative facts -- that the Madison police refuse to release any information about the motives of the perpetrator(s),  and that nearly every local police department in the United States is tainted by fascist sympathies -- I cannot but suspect this is another instance of death-squad wannabees  (most likely anti-contraception fanatics) taking maximum advantage of the pandemic's worsening chaos. (I will post additional reports as they become available.)
  Forcible disarmament (includes countermeasures):
  Specifically for Washington state readers:
Here’s How Many Landlords Are in the Washington Legislature
Note the huge number of Neoliberal Democratic (sic) landlords: no wonder all our tenant-protection proposals are invariably dead on arrival .
  Also relevant:
The Mathematics of Predicting the Course of the CoronavirusStatistical mathematicians doing the best they can despite denials of data by censorship and -- in the United States -- Neoliberalism-inflicted systemic collapse.
COVID-19 and Class Inequalities
Implicitly genocidal Neoliberal response to the pandemic (deliberately) inflicts a mentally crippling, potentially deadly burden in low-income students.
Why Cats Show You Their Butt, According to Science
They're not telling us to kiss their fundaments. 

Stuff to bear in mind:(Archived material that helps us understand what the PPs -- plutocratic predators -- are doing to us now and what they might do to us in the future.)
Goldman Sachs warns that curing patients may not be 'sustainable'
NEW: Outright acknowledgment from the deadliest Neoliberal predators that curing disease with a single treatment is bad for profits. A report from 2018 that explains what's being done to us  today, hence given knife-edged relevance by the pandemic
Average U.S. Citizens Have “Little Or No” Influence On Government Policy
Another "old" report given new relevance by what's being done to us 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 the PPs' 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 searchesand seizures and arrests." Scroll to Footnote3 to learn what atrocities could thus be inflicted on us.

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

Handling mail amid coronavirus: Low risk but wash your handsMy 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, the PPs’ 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 the PPs' 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.)
*****
Seems I'm getting a bit better with the unavoidable daily practice: the usual four hours for the research and writing, this time only six hours for the tedium and frustration of formatting by computer -- this rather than the approximately 10 minutes all these dreary chores would have taken me with a pencil and the old hot-type technology. Maybe -- even as the process rubs my nose in why computerization destroyed at least five of every seven jobs in print journalism -- I am (ever-so-slowly) learning how to do all this repugnantly dreary rote-memory clerical work inflicted on me by computer-use.
(Whatever.)
As always, may we all  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/2 April 2020 00:28 PDT
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