We don’t have enough PPE for our front line healthcare workers not because of greedy hospital administrators, but, rather, because of the orange underwear skidmark that claims to be “President”

Nurses are complaining they are screening possible COVID-19 patients in the emergency room and being sent into COVID-19 patients’ rooms without proper personal protective equipment. The problem is, there isn’t enough personal protective equipment. And why that is so basically boils down to two things: The normal operation of the supply chain, and the orange underwear skid mark.

It’s not a problem of short-sighted administrators not buying PPE. PPE is in short supply for the same reason that toilet paper is in short supply — the supply chain isn’t capable of meeting the demand. Nobody keeps a six month supply of PPE in their supply closet in case of a pandemic, just as nobody keeps a six month supply of TP in their bathroom closet in case of a pandemic — it just won’t *fit*. Hospitals have at most a month’s supply of PPE under *normal* usage, because it’s bulky, has a short lifespan, and has a reliable supply chain where every week they order their usual amount, and a few days later it arrives with the rest of their shipment from their local medical supplies vendor.

Until it doesn’t, because demand for it has basically quadrupled while the supply… hasn’t.

At this point it doesn’t matter how much money administrators want to spend, they can’t get it. The supply chain will at most deliver their “usual” amount, because that’s all the supply chain is *capable* of delivering right now, because no government entity intervened to ramp up the production and stockpiling of PPE months ago despite lack of orders from hospitals for PPE months ago because they had no place in their store rooms to put more PPE. And attempts by suppliers to increase their supplies of PPE are being impacted by the pandemic because much of the economy is shut down and we are finding out just how interrelated the parts of the economy are, as critical things needed to get new PPE factories running turn out to be in as short of supply as PPE.

In January 1942, less than a month after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Production Board comprised of the CEO’s of the biggest manufacturing companies in America to devise a plan to produce all of the weapons needed to win the war. By March 1 2020, over a month after being warned that we had a pandemic that was going to require more supplies than were available in the supply chain, the response of the Trump administration was… [crickets]. That, in the end, is the problem. Not only do we not have the PPE, we don’t even have a *plan* to get the PPE, other than to beg the Chinese for it, which isn’t a plan, it’s an abdication.

One last thing: Should governors have been stocking up on personal protective equipment in February?

Answer: Not really. Look at the supply chain I described above. It’s basically a just-in-time supply chain. The manufacturers make what the distributors order, with as little slack above that as possible because slack resources aren’t making them money. The distributors order what the hospitals order, because keeping large warehouses of PPE around doesn’t make them money, either. And the hospitals order what they can fit into their supply closets, which generally is going to be what they usually use in a month. Unlike the Federal Government with its Defense Production Act, states don’t have the authority to order manufacturers to open up more production of PPE and doesn’t have authority to order distributors to warehouse larger amounts of PPE. The only thing states could have done by attempting to stock up in February would have been to take PPE away from hospitals that needed it, because there wasn’t any more PPE being made than what hospitals already needed. And manufacturers aren’t going to voluntarily add capacity to manufacture more PPE just for a short time use. It takes a lot of money to build a factory, and if the pandemic is only going to last six months or so, that’s not enough time to amortize the cost.

What was needed was a President, a President willing to invoke the Defense Proeduction Act and force manufacturers to act back in January, even, a President willing to declare a state of emergency and order the production of everything needed to fight this thing. What we got was an orange charlatan.

– Badtux the Manufacturing(*) Penguin

* Yes, I’ve been a manufacturing engineer before.

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A journal of the plague times, March 24, 2020

I’d feel better about having a flexible schedule if the weather wasn’t so damned gloomy. It’s been cloudy and drizzling on and off every day since I started “sheltering in place” on March 13. My yard is starting to look like a jungle, but it’s too wet here in the Newark Swamp to do any kind of yard work unless I want to use my rubber boots. Yeesh.

I say this as water drips off my roof and falls to the ground. It’s drizzling *again*! Ugh, what’s the use of being at home if you can’t even get some daylight?!

So anyhow, my sourdough starter is bubbling away as I feed it twice per day. I’m having trouble regulating its temperature, the oven gets too warm when I put the light on and the starter gets overactive, then it gets too cool when I turn the light off. I’m thinking maybe open the oven door slightly while the light is on? Because of the cold damp weather outside, the house is usually pretty cool even during the daytime, much less at night when it gets down in the lower to mid 60’s inside. Too cool for yeast to do its job, anyhow.

I used some of the starter for pancakes this morning. They weren’t bad pancakes, but they were a bit tougher than I wanted too. I think the flour I’m using for the starter is a bit higher in gluten than the flour in the pancake mix I usually use, and I’ll need to add more egg to make it fluffier. Oh well.

About 40% of those hospitalized for COVID-19 are between ages 20 and 54. All these young fools out there partying like they can’t get COVID-19? Fucking #covidiots , that’s what they are. Not only are they spreading the virus, but they’re also getting sick themselves.

Nancy Pelosi unveils a $2.5 trillion dollar COVID-19 stimulus package aimed at bailing out ordinary Americans, not giant corporations. Which of course means it can’t happen. SIGH.

Trump suggests that we allow 8.5 million Americans to die in order to protect the stock market. This a day after Texas’s Republican Lt. Governor suggested that let’s kill granny in order to save the economy At this point the only difference between Republicans and Nazis is branding. Mass deaths are fine as long as they make money off of them. WTF?!

Of course, the problem is that 8.5 million sick old people in need of hospitalization, of whom 850,000 need ventilators would utterly overwhelm our healthcare system. We have around 825,000 beds total in our entire healthcare system, and on the average day around 750,000 of those are full. We have around 80,000 total ICU beds in the United states, and on the average day around 60,000 of those are full. We normally have around 62,000 ventilators of which normally around 50,000 are in use, and can surge maybe that many more older models if needed for around 130,000 ventilators total. So…. we’re talking about people on blankets in the streets outside of hospital doors because there isn’t even room on the floors to put more patients into the hospitals. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people gasping their last breaths like fish out of water because there’s no ventilators. And not all of these would be COVID-19 patients. If you’re in an auto accident and need emergency surgery to stay alive? Forget it. All the supplies, all the doctors, all the facilities are overwhelmed by people in front of you. So you just die. Have a stroke and need emergency surgery to put a stent in your brain to prevent further brain damage? Sorry, no doctors, no hospital beds, no supplies, you die. And so forth.

In other words, the Republican death cult wants to not only kill 8.5 million old people (who, remember, are their base, for fuck’s sake, it’s not that these Nazi-admiring motherfuckers are evil, it’s that they’re stupid evil who don’t even do evil that benefits them!), but they also want to kill hundreds of thousands of other people who need life-saving interventions on any given day. This is deranged. This is just fucking deranged. And evil. Let’s not forget evil. But hey, it’d save on Social Security and Medicare expenses in the future, right?

And that’s all for now. I’m going to go eat the last of the pulled pork and some brownies from the batch I baked on Sunday, then feed my sourdough starter, then go back to work. Tomorrow, eh?

– Badtux the Overeating Penguin

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A journal of the plague times, March 19, 2020

You’ll notice that I didn’t post one of these yesterday because I was hip deep in computer parts. Here is my rack now.

My home office data center

From top to bottom: KVM switch, NAS/virtualization, SAS2 JBOD cabinet, new virtualization server. Then some spare disks and a spare 10 gigabit Ethernet switch.

So yesterday I put a SAS2 backplane into the antique SAS1 JBOD cabinet to convert it to SAS2, then put a SAS2 card and a 10 gigabit Etherent card into the new virtualization server. I tried moving the NAS disks to the JBOD and then standing up the virtualization server as an all-in-one connected to the JBOD with the unit on top then recommissioned as a part-time VMware virtualization server (since I only need it when I’m developing software during the day), but my Windows 2019 Essentials virtual machine that handles my video surveillance network refused to come up. I moved the disks back into the NAS/virtualization server and stood up the other server as ESXi only (necessary because I’m developing virtual appliances for the vSphere environment), and all is well again. The NAS is running Centos 7 Linux and serves as the data store for the VMware via a NFS file share. The ESXi box on the bottom is running ESXi 6.0 and has a fleet of virtual appliances running on it that I’m developing for work.

Other things that happened yesterday: An ER nurse says goodbye to her family, because due to lack of preparation she is almost certain to die.

We needed to start emergency production of PPE gear two months ago — and now it’s too late. She knows she’s going to be infected. She knows everybody else in her ER is going to be infected. Because there just isn’t any protective gear, yet they are the kind of people who can’t just let people die. There’s people who run towards fires, and people who run away from them. For all you emergency responders out there, thank you for what you do. And fuck Trump. May his orange asshole self get COVID-19 and infect every other stupid asshole in his idiotic regime who did absolutely nothing while China was warning us that shit was about to burn.

And finally, Governor Newsome said that with over half of Californians projected to get the COVID-19 virus over the next 8 weeks, he had no choice other than to issue a statewide stay home order to try to keep the hospitals from being utterly overwhelmed. As I mentioned before, California hospitals are required to have contingency plans for natural disasters. But nobody planned for an epidemic, because epidemics are so…. 20th century.

– Batdut the Geek Nerd Penguin

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A journal of the plague times, March 18, 2020

So, looks like Chewy.com is crumbling under the weight of people ordering large quantities of pet supplies from them. Since the pet store where I buy cat litter is closed, I decided to order my second-choice cat litter from them. Nope. Sold out. So found a second choice they still had in stock, and put two 40 pound bags into my cart, then went to add some cat food to meet the “free shipping” criteria. First choice: Sold out. Second choice: Sold out. Third choice — yep, my cats will eat that one, so added it to the cart. If this goes on, things are going to get grim for cat owners, maybe to the point where they have to make their cats into indoor-outdoor cats. At least I can still get cat food in large 40 pound bags locally, at least until Costco runs out.

One of the interesting things locally has been what has happened to our local Nextdoor group. This is generally a bunch of angry white people who post messages about suspicious people walking down the street (suspicious people who seem to always be brown), suspicious cars (driven by brown people, duh), omg I saw a snake in my backyard is it poisonous (answer: no, we don’t have any poisonous snakes in our city, rattlesnakes don’t like swamps), and so forth. But now there is a lot of people who are offering to help the older members with shopping and who are filling us in on what stores are open and what items they have so that people don’t need to drive all over to find what they need, as well as restaurants we should be supporting by ordering take-out, and so forth. It’s more like what was always envisioned for Nextdoor, neighbors helping neighbors.

The Giant Orange Underwear Shitstain hit the markets hard today with yet another incoherent babbling speech that did more harm than good but that his moron supporters undoubtedly ate up like chocolate ice cream despite the fact that, except for color, his bullshit shares nothing in common with chocolate ice cream. Meanwhile, the most honest man in the NIH, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases which is already testing a vaccine and a treatment, has been sidelined for, well, being honest. Despite the fact that his organization is the only one in the whole shitstain that is the Trump Administration that has actually responded quickly and competently to the crisis. Because competence is not rewarded in the Trump Administration. Loyalty is. Thus my new bumper sticker that came in yesterday:

Any Functioning Adult 2020

Mostly people seem to be complying with the shelter in place quarantine orders. The exception is Elon Musk’s Tesla, because building electric luxury cars for rich people is apparently an essential business in his eyes. Gotta meet those quarterly production numbers, y’know. Elon Musk now becomes a trope, the corrupt evil corporate executive. I bet those of you who were worshipping Musk a few years ago feel silly now, eh?

Food-wise, I finished up the hot dogs for lunch. With pickle relish, mustard, and ‘kraut, of course. I ate fish and baked potatoes for supper. I haven’t even touched the canned food in my pantry yet.

I haven’t ventured out of the house today other than to fetch the newspaper and feed the ferals that appear to be living on my back patio now, they’re sleeping in the cat beds and hanging around most of the day. It’s all been virtual interactions. We are well on the way to the world of the Newsflesh Trilogy, where people don’t interact with each other in person because anybody could be carrying the virus and turn into a ravenous zombie at any moment, everything’s done via the Internet or remote delivery into sterilization chambers. The governor has stated that school is probably cancelled for the rest of this school year, and has cancelled standardized testing since you can’t really test what hasn’t been taught because the schools are cancelled. People are setting up study groups and virtual schools on the Internet but that isn’t really a substitute for school, regardless of what the “unschooling” advocates believe.

Talk now is that the way things are is going to continue until at least mid-summer, which is going to take a horrific toll on the economy because most stores are closed and unemployment is going to go sky-high. And Republicans are talking about sending every American a check for $2,000. Republicans. Wow. We are in bizarro world.

I don’t know what the world is going to look like after all of this is done, but I have a suspicion it’s going to look somewhat different from what it looks like today. Meanwhile, I have food and drink, I’m healthy, I still have a job (for the moment), so we’re going to have to see what happens, I guess.

– Badtux the “Interesting Times” Penguin

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We don’t have a mental health problem, we have a Nazi problem.

“It’s a mental health problem!” say the right wingers about the recent spree killers.

No. Mental health in the United States is no worse today than it’s ever been. Yet spree murders continue to rise, to the point where we had two spree killings this weekend alone.

We don’t have a mental health crisis causing spree killings. What we have is a Nazi crisis. We have a problem with young white men being radicalized with white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies in much the same way that the Middle East has a problem with young Arab men being radicalized in Islamist ideologies, with the same result — they commit terrorist acts.

Because that is what these are: terrorist attacks. They may claim these are “lone wolf” attacks, but you look at what these young white men actually believe, you’ll see that they’ve been radicalized just as much by neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies as Middle Eastern terrorists have been radicalized by Islamist ideologies. They choose to engage in spree killing rather than don a suicide vest because guns are easier to buy here than bomb-making materials are, but that’s a difference in murder technique, not a difference in motivation — which is terrorism, period.

And it doesn’t help that Hair Twitler encourages them….

– Badtux the Observant Penguin

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The week from hell

That was my week last week, thus the long delay. Yes, I’m still alive. Just very, very busy, between working long hours and writing the modern Russian novel.

It was the week from hell from the viewpoint of the country, too. President Dumpster Fire set off a trade war, apparently out of spite. Despite everybody from car makers to beer manufacturers telling him that his tariffs on aluminum will cause prices to go sky high and force them to move manufacturing out of the USA, he did it anyways — right after his close friend and former economic advisor Carl Icahn dumped his steel stocks.

This is the same Donald Trump who says he wants to be President for Life. Given his age and weight, let’s hope that life isn’t too long. Cheeto Mussolini, indeed.

Meanwhile, the Russia probe continues to swirl around the Orange Racist Russian Stooge. Former Trump Aide Sam Numberg says he’s going to defy the grand jury subpoena that he received. Hope he looks good in stripes! But in public comments on various news shows he said Trump’s close advisor Carter Page was colluding with the Russians and was a “scumbag” and a “weird dude”. And said well, he probably was going to cooperate anyhow, since he doesn’t look good in stripes. Ya think?

Meanwhile, Roy Moore says he needs donations because he spent all his money running for the Senate. Here, Roy, here’s my donation. I’m giving you back everything that you’ve given everybody else who needs money:

And, of course, conservatives have delayed a bill to prevent child marriage in Kentucky. Because being able to marry your neighbor’s 13 year old daughter that you got pregnant via rape is family values, not pedophilia. Can we just call them the Grand Old Pedophile party, now?

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President Dumpster Fire’s first anniversary present

It was so appropriate that the 366th day of his Presidency was accompanied by a government shutdown. Plus millions of women in pink pussy hats demonstrating for women’s rights. Those are both over now, but it was a fitting January 20th celebration of his ascension to the Presidency.

And while all this was going on he was upset because he was stuck indoors watching it all on Fox News, because without funding for the Secret Service, he couldn’t go golfing.

Talking about which, the Trump campaign had a complaint filed against it that the payoff to Stormy Daniels was not properly recorded as an in-kind campaign contribution by Trump’s lawyer. The argument, apparently, is that this was in aid to the Trump campaign, thus had to be recorded as a campaign contribution to the Trump campaign in their campaign filings with the FEC. LOL.

The only fun thing about Deadbeat Donny as President is that the next three years will continue to be as morbidly entertaining as the last one was. Dumpster fires are like that.

– Badtux the dumpster-fire-watchin’ Penguin

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