… but on the other hand, I also don’t know how significant it is. Just passing it along.
Friend TSO said that, at the large post office where his brother works, the postmaster read a memo this morning that made two points: first, that all USPS employees should start using direct deposit because of potential “communications disruptions”; second, that they should begin carrying their work IDs at all times because if and when the nation goes on lockdown, “only law enforcement, postal service, and medical professionals will be able to travel to and from their homes.”
TSO verified the news with another contact of his, and I just partially verified it with our local postmaster (she couldn’t verify the direct deposit business). She put it simply in terms of being notified that postal workers are classified as essential. On the Living Freedom forums a poster noted several days ago that a relative who works for a railroad in the midwest had also been notified of her “essential” status and been given permission to travel.
Keep in mind that this is an IF, not necessarily a WHEN, thing. But clearly multiple “authorities” are preparing for draconian measures up to and including nationwide martial law.
I also find it odd that the postal memo was both so specific and so narrow in its information on who would be “allowed” to travel. Note that it excludes travel by food and medicine wholesalers or delivery services, and excludes travel by people needing to buy food or medicine. The implication is that the rest of us can starve in our homes. Or wait for always-dubious aid from those “essential” government-approved travelers.
Now, I DO NOT believe this will ever be the case. Those exclusions were very likely some bureaucrat’s unthinking idiocy. Tyranny we’re going to get (and are getting already). Willful economic destruction is already upon us. Depression of unprecedented scale is likely. Stalin-style starvation, not so likely. But because this information is credible and verified, and because it implies truly draconian thinking by policymakers, I’m passing it along. FWIW.
I remember this after Sandy. After being barred from getting to my family’s house for 3 weeks after the storm, we had to present proof of property ownership then surrender our driver licenses to get on the bus to be taken onto the island for 2 hours. My family’s home was 100′ from the township dividing line, where the Nat Guard has set up barricades with “No Passage” orders. They refused to allow anyone to cross the line, even denying 2 State Troopers request to let a contractor come to the home of a former acting governor. NG made camp in the parking lot of a Sotheby’s real estate.
No citizen was allowed to stay overnight. After the first trip, we were allowed back every third day for 4-6 hours (bayside, between the roads and oceanside in rotating days) You could not cross into the other zones, there were cops from everywhere making sure.
One experience from it that few will ever have, we missed curfew by 45 minutes and being the last house before the barricades, when we left we the absolute last car in a 9 mile traffic jam.
If they want to start getting government employees shot, this is how to make that happen.
When you read the lock-down orders in the states that have issued them, not passed but issued by decree, they list essential services that can stay open and a person can travel to and from, I notice that liquor stores and cannabis stores are included, makes me smell a rat, if this were really the black death would such retailers be really essential?
Strikes me like that’s just the circuses
The bread is gone from many stores, and already were hearing accounts of “hording” (AKA planning ahead) and driving out of town to buy stuff where it’s plentiful and selling it at a profit in areas here it’s scarce, (AKA Supply and demand, the free market) needless to say these things are being portrayed as bad.
Already in some states (California for one) defying the lock-don can get you a fine and a year in jail (though its been a crime to defy a public health order for years)
Will this go national? who knows. TPTB often take power during a crisis, real or created that they don’t use right away.
And as I write this your government planning a socialist takeover, er excuse, me I meant a bailout of the economy, or as a allegedly freedomista friend insisted the other day it’s no socialism, it’s societal cation administered through the government, to assist those in need.
If he says so.
My state recently announced a lockdown that’s supposed to start tomorrow. The list of “essential services” that are allowed to continue is pretty long, and includes hardware stores, farms, and grocery stores, among other things.
all USPS employees should start using direct deposit because of potential “communications disruptions”
Now that is weird.
First off, AFAIK, going on direct deposit is pretty much expected when you work for the government, particularly the feds. As I remember, we were paid by DD when I worked for the Census in 2010. (But that was 10 years ago, and I might be misremembering.) But I know it was true when I worked for the VA back in the 1980s.
Second, “communications disruptions” would seem to have more effect on DD than on “here’s your check” operations.
We just put out another issue of the newspaper we work for. My wife wrote a feature on one of our local florists, who has a shop full of flowers for cancelled social events. Talk about hurting.
Oh, and if you die during this “emergency,” you aren’t getting much of a funeral.
Another article concerned a concerned local woman who has recruited some friends to make “protective” masks, so the N95 masks can go to hospitals. There are many patterns available on the internet. Cotton masks are supposed to offer “almost the same protection” as a real one.
If you want to know where people have Covid:
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
Besides total cases, you can select for active cases.
Oh, and if you can’t get TP or paper towels, OfficeMax has 20 percent off on copy paper. 😉
“We the Living” provides a stark reminded of what may lie ahead.
I don’t think there’s a lot of rational analysis going on. Possibly even in my own head? Hard to say. I’ll agree, anyway, that the scenario outlined above is unlikely to happen. But the message seems reasonably legit in the sense that it’s not hard to believe it went out–it’s how people think. Not well, IOW.
Parenthetically, I’ve received nine emails from the company that manages the house I’m renting. They all claim to be “important information about your rental” or some such thing. What do they really say? That rent is still due on 4/1, with late penalties starting on 4/3. The rest is fluff. Bunch of obnoxious twat-waffles, sitting somewhere or other, doing something that feels like taking action, because that feels better than doing nothing. Okay then.
I mean, TP is off the shelves…because people think the stores might close? If they do, the cities are going to burn. Pretty quickly, too. I’m not sure how paper-good stockpiles help with that.
Though, yeah, it might make more sense to stock up in a rural setting. I’m just, at the moment, living in downtown San Antonio. So I think about these things.
I know I’m also not supposed to think about the obvious stuff that seems to be staring me in the face…for instance: in the aftermath of all this, if we bit the bullet and admitted things might go badly without going out of our way to make it all worse, those who survived would be likely to get a bit of an economic windfall. The old and sick are expensive. I’m not saying that’s a good thing. But it’s a thing.
Nor should I, I suppose, either notice or point out that the current epidemics of chronic disease (/inflammation/hyperinsulinemia) are largely the result of gov’t dietary recommendations & laws protecting what I think of as a medical/pharmaceutical/academic cartel. Or that the current virus (assuming a bunch of stuff that’s being bleated is actually true, for the sake of argument only) appears to kill those with the above chronic conditions far more than the otherwise healthy.
And hey, according to a paper in the BMJ a while back, the third leading cause of death in the US is medical error. And health outcomes appear, not just globally but also within the US, to be inversely proportional to dollars spent. So if the first two causes of death are also largely due to gov’t/medical/big-food interference in what people eat…hmm. It’s almost as if all these problems arise from similar/identical causes. But that way lies not going to doctors to begin with, alien mind-control laser worries, and ensuing tin-foil hats. Fun, but awkward in many social situations.
So. Forget all the above. I’m wrong. It’s way better if people just grab toilet paper and feel better. At least they did something that way. Took charge, by Crom.
And stuff.
-D
In a world where liquor and cannabis are essential yet gun stores are not.
https://www.joemygod.com/2020/03/los-angeles-county-sheriff-orders-gun-stores-to-close/
The wife came home last night with her “papers” saying she was an essential worker at the essential Home Depot.
My SIL got the same “papers” from Harbor Freight. As a “journalist,” my wife and I are also “essential.” (Not surprising; politicians like to talk, and they want the little people to get the message.)
Just got back from the grocery store. I arrived about ten minutes before it opened at 8 a.m. (Used to be 24 hour.) The line to get in was from the door, around the side, and across the back, but once the doors opened they let everyone in. Store employees were washing down cart handles before you entered. Armed private security was patrolling it, but where I live everyone was friendly and swapping jokes.
Lots of limits on certain items. No toilet paper, paper towels pretty much disappeared within 30 minutes. Lava and Ivory soap gone, and that section picked over down to the fruity brands. Canned soup was scarce, with a limit of eight, and unfortunately we need that right now.
Lots of nonsense. There were no five or three-pound chubs of ground beef and ground turkey, and a limit of two each on one-pound chubs. But about 10 feet away there was a large bin where you could get four-pound packages of ground chuck patties on special for about a nickle a pound more than the chubs of ground chuck, no limit.
Of course the “unforeseen result” of all that is people have to shop more often.
From Tam at View From the Porch :
https://booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com/2020/03/on-rumint.html
A government who can decide who is essential can also decide who is not; i.e. when there’s not enough ICU beds, Ventilators, etc who do you think will be the ones to get them?
I got my letter from my employer today as well. I work on an Air Force base as a contractor maintaining a nuclear weapons system trainer as well as a automatic test station for said weapons systems. The DOD outsourced this maintenance decades ago fo some reason. As it is right now I am playing fireman and only go in if the Air Force breaks something.
Now here’s the thing. No one is talking about any massive shutdown. The plan as of this morning is still social distancing and common sense if we have to go in and do repairs. Time will tell I guess.
Ditto on being essential. But part of my job I can (and now do) from home. I need to complain to HR about The Mrs. harassing me.
One thing I learned from a lot of years doing fraud investigations is to be leary of information that comes from “a friend of a friend, no names.” That kind of information is loaded with a high proportion of innuendo and usually a low proportion of truth.
It sounds to me like the typical self-important bs that gets issued by a bureaucrat to get the other bureaucrats in a oo-rah! mode.
This kind of stuff is in place for nuclear war, asteroid impact, or the Yellowstone Caldera eruption.
The memo is the equivalent of kids camping in the backyard.
USPS Letter Carrier here, they said at work that the dire t deposit thing was about bank branch disruptions. E.G. pain in the neck to go through drive through when lobby is closed