"I have studied the psychological effects of pandemics – and even a few weeks of isolation can cause lasting anxiety."

This makes it especially important to get some people we know to use free software to talk with us, and soon. Make sure that the place they retreat to from future anxiety has room for free software.

An emission of CO2 comparable to what humans are expected to emit in this century, due to the giant volcanism that ended the Triassic period, caused extinction of half the species of life on Earth.

That emission took 500 years. We humans are doing it even faster, which means even less time for life to adapt.

Many governments around the world are grabbing total power in the name of protecting people from Covid-19.

Republicans are profiting from it, too, using it as an excuse to prevent protests, almost eliminate opposition campaigning and fund-raising, and hamper voting.

*As Coronavirus Looms in Federal Prisons, People Inside Denied Constitutional Right to Speak With Lawyers.*

They test hardly any of the coughing prisoners, then count everyone not tested as not infected. Anyone who makes, or believes, that argument must be looking for an excuse to falsify the facts.

But stopping prisoners from consulting their lawyers is far worse, as it prejudices their cases in many ways that the article explains.

Stiglitz: many poor countries are going to default on their debts this year, unless they are rescued.

To truly rescue them would require forgiving those debts, or lending them again at very low interest. Stiglitz proposes something along those lines.

However, I expect the plutocrats of the world to see in this crisis an opportunity for disaster capitalism — to buy all the valuable assets, including farmland, to convert the governments of those countries into debt collectors, and to treat the inhabitants, for all time, like unauthorized immigrants from nowhere.