A Journal of the Plague Times, March 25-26

I said goodbye to my sourdough starter, Fergie, yesterday. I realized that my kitchen is too small and I’m way too impatient for me to be baking sourdough bread. Tortillas are more my speed.

The Cat Patio Cafe continues to be a hit amongst the local ferals. I’ve added cat beds to the cafe’ so they can nap after their meals. Here, Oreo is eating (well, actually looking backwards because another cat is in the distance), Patches had curled up in one of the cat beds…. and Snowy climbed in right on top of Patches!

Cat-on-cat action

Snowy and Patches are quite the pair. Snowy is of course all white and a spayed female. Patches is gray and white and a neutered male. They sleep together in one of the cat beds for most of the day and night, and hang out together when they’re doing cat things in the morning and evening.

It has rained for every single day since I declared quarantine at home four days before the rest of the SF Bay Area joined me. Almost like the weather is trying to tell me something.

The Atlantic asks, what happens if health-care workers stop coming to work?. I worry about something more fundamental: What happens if grocery store workers stop coming to work? I’m probably better situated than most in that I have at least 30 days of food in the house at all times. I’m restocking regularly so I don’t have to touch my supply of canned and dry foods. I have a suspicion things will get rough pretty quickly if the grocery store workers stop showing up for work.

We’re #1! Yep, the United States is now #1 in the world in COVID-19 cases. It’s at the point now where China is closing their borders to foreigners to keep COVID-19 out, since they’ve had only a single local COVID-19 case in the last few days that wasn’t fresh off an airplane from somewhere else. It took a harsh quarantine regimen for them to bring COVID-19 under control, but I suppose that’s one advantage of being a brutal dictatorship — you don’t have to get the agreement of quarrelsome legislators and local governments in order to get things done.

BTW, Fuck Governor Cuomo. I don’t understand why the networks and “serious people” are salivating over him, to the point where he has been suggested as a replacement for Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. He should have done like Governor Gavin Newsom and declared a shelter-in-place quarantine when there were less than a dozen deaths in his state. Instead he did nothing until it was too late to prevent the current situation in New York City, which is so desperate that doctors have even resorted to measures like splitting the tubing for ventilators to put more than one patient on a ventilator, which for many technical reasons is a horribly bad idea. But the other idea — letting people die without even trying any treatment — is equally horrible. So. Fuck Governor Cuomo. These deaths are on his hands.

Finally: A Christian pastor who expressed public opinions that COVID-19 was just “mass hysteria” was one of the first to die from COVID-19 in Virginia. Oops! It was a message from God, I guess. I mean, for these folks, everything is a message from God. It just wasn’t the message he was expecting, I suspect.

Now if every other blovinating fool who whined that COVID-19 was “just the flu” gets a similar message from God, maybe we can start whipping COVID ass again. Yeesh.

Oh yeah: It’d be horrible if people died of COVID-19, but it’s even more horrible that people can’t get their hair and nails done. The horror! Why, they might have to go to their death needing a haircut and nail job! Yep, what you’d expect from the sociopathic lizard people at Faux News. This blond bimbo doesn’t even understand why people are horrified by what she just said, because as a cold blooded lizard person, she lacks all humanity, all conscience, all awareness that anything exists other than her own needs. Yeesh.

And finally: The CDC’s response to COVID-19 has been all sorts of fucked up since the beginning. I don’t know what the solution is, but I know that the CDC as it currently exists is broken, and needs fixing badly. Good luck on that with the orange underwear skidmark as President though.

– Badtux the Quarantine Penguin

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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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When Nazis start putting innocent people into concentration camps without trial, the time for talking is over.

By 1939 the Nazis had opened multiple concentration camps and were filling them with political opponents and ethnic minorities such as Jews and Roma. And Republicans were whining that FDR was being mean to those Nazis, that if we only tried to reach out to them and meet them halfway, we could resolve all this unpleasantness between us.

To which I say: Bullshit. Once a party starts putting people into concentration camps, the time for talking is over. The time to remove them from power begins.

As it was then, so it is now. There are those who say we should reach out to the people who are putting innocent kids into concentration camps without trial (remember, in the US system, innocent until proven guilty, and lack of a trial means they’re innocent). Bullshit. Trying to reach out to the kind of people who put kids into concentration camps is pointless. They have already shown that they have no moral compass and that any attempt to appeal to their moral center will fail. At this point the only thing to is the same thing that was done in 1941-1945 with that other group of people who put innocents into concentration camps without trial: Remove them from power.

Luckily, here in the USA we have this thing called the *vote* which hopefully results in less bloodshed than the last time we had to do this….

– Badtux the “Can’t argue morality with immoral people” Penguin

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CBP — Child Border Perverts — kidnaps another child, a US citizen who had to be rescued by the Mexican embassy

Julia Isabel Amparo Medina was 9 years old, presented a valid U.S. passport card to cross the border to go to school, and was detained by the Child Border Perverts because she gave “inconsistent information” when interrogated. She was detained for 36 hours as she was interrogated by multiple strangers who threatened her and lied to her. She had to be rescued by the Mexican embassy after CBP refused to release her to her mother. That’s right, an American had to be rescued from the Child Border Perverts by the Mexicans.

WTF? Apparently none of these Border Patrol agents ever had a sister or a 9 year old daughter of their own. Expecting a 9 year old to give consistent answers when being subjected to deliberately manipulative questioning and false statements from investigators is idiotic and indefensible. A 9 year old girl simply isn’t developmentally capable of handling that situation, period, and shouldn’t be saying *anything* to law enforcement — only their parent should be talking to law enforcement. This is disgusting, racist, and perverted. Great job, child abusers at the CBP, I bet you were stroking yourself in the bathroom afterwards too at that hot 9 year old action.

But hey, she’s *brown*, so that makes it okay. Right? Right?! GRR.

— Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

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A gulag for children: Stalin would be so envious.

Stalin’s Soviet Union was a vicious place, where at any moment the secret police could arrest you and send you off to the gulag concentration camps. Children under the age of 2 got sent with their families, while children above the age of 2 went to relatives or state-run orphanages. One thing that was *not* done was to rip children away from their families and send them to separate concentration camps just for children. Granted, the orphanages weren’t exactly cushy places. But they weren’t concentration camps. Unlike this:

This is a detention center for unaccompanied children. It is set up in an abandoned Walmart store. But this is a cushy detention center. Why, they’re given mattresses to sleep on, instead of being required to sleep on the raw concrete! That at least makes it better than the detention cages on the border:

The cages on the border are where the children are kept for one to three days before they can be shipped off to the “cushy” detention center. They’re not given food during that time, and are not given a mattress or blankets. Because it is a “temporary” holding facility, Homeland Security claims they don’t need to provide any of that.

Note that this photograph dates to 2014, during the Obama regime. Which shows that the Republican lie of Obama not being “tough on immigration” was utterly false. Obama was no friend of immigrants, just as the black community, as a whole, is no friend of immigrants, who they view as having come into America and taken “their” jobs. And so the cycle of viciousness towards our fellow man goes on, despite everything that God says:

Hell, even the Southern Baptists, who are as regressive as you can get without being a total Bircher, are rather queasy about the whole be-mean-to-immigrants thing:

God commands His people to treat immigrants with the same respect and dignity as those native born … we desire to see immigration reform include an emphasis on securing our borders and providing a pathway to legal status with appropriate restitutionary measures, maintaining the priority of family unity, resulting in an efficient immigration system that honors the value and dignity of those seeking a better life for themselves and their families … any form of nativism, mistreatment, or exploitation is inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What is especially hypocritical is people like Vice President Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions who claim to be Christian advocating treating immigrants badly, even to the point of wanting to send migrant kids to tent cities in the fierce Texas summer heat, something would have made Stalin chortle with delight since he did the same thing with adults when he sent them to the frozen Siberian north. But Stalin never claimed to be Christian. I mean, if you claim to be Christian, shouldn’t you, like, obey the word of Christ? Isn’t that, like, the whole point of being Christian? But I guess their Christianity stops when they exit the churchyard door.

And so we continue treating children in ways that would make Stalin envious in their utter cruelty….

– Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

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Of moral equivalencies

Hamas is a terrorist organization.

There, I said it. They’re a terrorist organization.

What makes them a terrorist organization? Simple: They target unarmed civilians. That is what makes them a terrorist organization.

So a friend of mine posted a photograph on her Facebook page of Razan al-Najjar, the 21 year old paramedic who was targeted and killed by an Israeli sniper from close to 300 yards away while helping people who had been injured. And an Israel defender said: “Why don’t you post Israeli victims of Hamas?” I.e., the Israeli government isn’t doing anything that Hamas doesn’t do.

So he was saying that a terrorist organization targeting civilians is exactly equivalent to the Israeli government targeting civilians so we should post photos of both?

Well, I suppose we could. But the tens of thousands of unarmed civilians killed by Israel far outnumber the hundreds of unarmed civilians killed by Hamas, so we’d mostly be posting photos of Palestinian civilian faces anyhow.

Besides, I thought the Israeli government wasn’t supposed to be a terrorist organization. Even though they’re killing unarmed civilians, unarmed medical personnel even, which is exactly what terrorist organizations do.

But this person apparently believes that because Hamas is a terrorist organization, the fact that Israel’s government is behaving like a terrorist organization is fine and dandy.

So there you have it, straight from an Israel defender: Israel’s government is a terrorist organization. Hey, he said it first — though he apparently didn’t realize what it was that he was saying!

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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These people have no shame: Republican reaction to school shooting veers off into insane conspiracy theories, blame-passing

Republican lawmaker’s office and major Republican propaganda outlets claim that there was no school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and that all the kids being shown on TV are crisis actors.

Yeah, Anthony Borges sure is one helluva crisis actor. So much so that he got shot with 5 actual bullets.

“But these kids are too articulate!” shout the conspiracy theory pushers. Well duh. The TV folks naturally are going to focus on the articulate kids, not the average half-illiterate high school kid who would just stammer and stammer. These kids are no more articulate than the best kids were back in my day, which was admittedly before Raygun was president.

You can validate that these young people actually exist. You can go down to the high school in question, if you’re willing to leave your cloistered home, and validate that there’s a high school there, and there was really a school shooting there, you can stop high school students going in and out of the school and ask them “do you know so-and-so who was on the news the other day?” and they’ll say they’ve seen them in the hall…

Yet these Republican lawmakers and Republican propaganda tools would rather create ridiculous conspiracy theories than face up to the fact that, well, high school kids don’t like getting shot at in their own high school, and can be articulate in their distaste for being shot at in their own high school. What kind of MONSTER would do something like that, creating a conspiracy theory where it’s easy to check what actually happened?

Oh yeah, right. REPUBLICAN lawmakers and propaganda tools.

Finally, the governor of Florida called on the FBI director to resign for not doing anything about Nikolas Cruz. What, exactly, is the FBI supposed to have done? Until he shot up a high school (thus violating the federal Gun Free Schools Act), he hadn’t broken any Federal laws. Refer him to local law enforcement? Local law enforcement knew Cruz intimately already — the Sheriff’s office had already been called about Cruz’s behavior twenty times before the shooting — and other local law enforcement had already visited him another 19 times. What, exactly, was the FBI supposed to do when Florida law enforcement had already visited Cruz 39 times? Extradite him to Gitmo? Uhm, it doesn’t work like that, peeps. They couldn’t do anything about Cruz because he was angry, not crazy, and angry isn’t a mental illness (see prior post). They couldn’t do anything because he was exercising his 1st Amendment free speech rights and hadn’t stepped beyond free speech into the realm of terrorist threats (see prior post). So anyhow, apparently Florida law authorities during Governor Medicare Cheat’s term of office knew about Cruz, and did nothing. And so Scott’s flunkies are passing the buck to the FBI? For realz?

These people have no shame.

But they’re Republicans. So I guess we already knew that.

– Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

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The tabloid President gets the tabloid treatment, and he is *pissed*.

Trump and his cronies are freaking out about a tabloid book about a tabloid president, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. And incidentally have turned what would likely have been yet another ignored book on Trump into a best seller.

Cheetoh Mussolini’s lawyer threatened to sue the publisher. In response, the publisher released the book four days early and the publisher’s lawyer eviscerates the President’s lawyer in a public letter. BRUTAL.
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Trump surrogate Miller had to be escorted off of CNN property by security after he started ranting at Jake Tapper.

Cheeto Mussolini whines that he can’t sue author of tabloid book for libel, claims new libel laws would make that possible. Except he’ll need a new Supreme Court too, to overturn the actual malice standard set for public figures by the 1st Amendment freedom of press right to cover news.

Steve Bannon fired from Breitbart by the Koch brothers because they’re upset that Bannon said of the Trump kids’ meeting with Russian spies in Trump Tower that it was “treasonous”.

Herr Twitler himself calls Wolff a “loser” and his book “boring”. And boasts about how he fired Steve Bannon, the man who made him President, for being “sloppy”.

All this fire and fury because the book tells us something we already knew: Trump is an unstable and incompetent president who has no business holding the office he didn’t really want all that much anyway. Duh. It’s not like the book tells us anything we didn’t already know. It just slings tabloid sleaze upon a tabloid President. And thus is perfect for this era: a tabloid book, for a tabloid president.

– Badtux the Amused Penguin

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When you vote for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces party, what do you expect?

RE: The Medicare cuts forced by the new Republican tax bill:

There are people who vote for the “Leopards Eating Faces” party then are surprised that the leopards actually ate their faces. But they’re outnumbered by far by the delusional morons who claim that no, the leopards did *not* eat their faces (as the blood from the raw meat of their ripped-off faces drip onto the carpet). Or who claim that no, it wasn’t the “Leopards Eating Faces” party that ripped off their faces, it was that woman, over there, who isn’t an elected official and holds no government position of any sort, who actually ripped off their faces. NOT the members of the “Leopards Eating Faces” party.

This has been the most bizarre time in my entire adult life. WTF, people? If you elect a party into office that promises to cut Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, why would you be surprised and upset when they actually do so?! Elect the “Leopards Eating Faces” party into power, and that’s what they do — they rip off people’s faces!

– Badtux the Baffled Penguin

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Well, I have good news, and bad news.

The good news is that I’m not diabetic. The bad news is that my cat is.

Poor patchy kitty

The Mighty Fang has been poked, prodded, and otherwise miserated for the past three days to determine why he was drinking and urinating by a ridiculous amount. The final verdict: His blood sugar was way high in the blood test, at a point where a human would have already ended up in the hospital. He was also spilling a lot of sugar into his urine, indicating that it wasn’t just a momentary stress high, though the blood test was so high that was pretty much out of the question anyhow. The good news is that we caught it early, before there was damage to his retinas or kidneys or liver, and before he crashed.

So besides changing his diet to a low-carb diet (accomplished by changing his cat food to canned Nutro Natural Choice, which he loves) we’re starting out with a small dose of insulin twice a day. The photo above is his breakfast after this morning’s shot, which I gave under the vet’s direction. Yeah, the vet shaved a couple of patches of his fur off to give me easier targets to shoot at. Poor baby, he’s looking so patchy! Talking about insulin, that brings us to Big Pharma conspiring to hike the price of insulin. Three drug companies control 100% of the market for insulin, and conspire with each other to hike prices in lockstep. The best insulin on the market right now is one called Lantus. It’s a long-acting insulin that is much smoother than the older insulins, your blood sugar (or your cat’s, in my case) stays steady for far longer, requiring less monitoring and fewer injections to get a stable blood sugar level. My vet warned me that it was expensive. “You’re going to pay $180, $185 a vial. The good news is that he’s a cat, so a vial will last a couple of months.”

So here is what I paid for one vial of insulin: $293.99. When I showed him that bill, my vet was like, “What? That’s insane!”

“But we don’t charge full price!” said the drug companies above. Bull fucking shit. “But we offer discounts!” Not to cat owners, they don’t. There was one $20 discount coupon I could have taken if I’d know about it. That’s *it*.

So why don’t I get a vial of that old school insulin that costs $5/vial? Well, Big Pharma isn’t charging $5/vial for it. They’re charging $80/vial for it now. And it sucks, it’s really hard to get good control with it. And the better insulin, Humulin, that was introduced in the early 80’s for $10/vial? They’re charging $237 for it now. And it’s not as good as Lantus. It’s barely better than the older pork insulin (“Vetsulin”) that is available for $80/vial. And they’re charging $237/vial for it.

How fucked up is our healthcare system that I’m seriously looking at Canadian pharmacy sites… for my CAT?!

Oh, my good news? Well, glucose levels in cats need monitoring just like in humans. It turns out you use exactly the same supplies to do it. It turned out that Walmart sells their own branded version of one of the most highly rated blood sugar testing devices on the market, it requires a tiny blood sample and is as accurate as anything else (i.e., not particularly, but good enough for cats). This evening I got back from Walmart with a boatload of diabetic measuring supplies — lancets, lancet devices, and of course the test meter and the metering sticks, which have an enzyme in them that then reacts with the glucose in blood to set up an electrolytic reaction whose resistance is measured by the device to come up with the final result. The next task was to figure out how to use them. To do that, I wasn’t going to torment my poor cat and his ears — I volunteered myself as the guinea pig instead.

It took me several attempts to figure out how to use the lancet device to prick my fingertip. Then the next attempt didn’t result in a big enough blood droplet to test. Then I realized I needed to press harder on the lancet device before hitting the button, and did so, and blood didn’t really come out well but with some stroking of blood towards the hole a nice bead happened and I touched the tip of the meter strip to it, it sucked it in, and the meter gave me a value that was totally normal. Yay, I’m not diabetic! At least not yet! Stick gauze over the hole, wait a while, done.

Okay, but how the heck do I do this with the ear of a cat?! I need to watch those videos again, grr. Because I can’t see how I can manage to prick TMF’s ear using this device, because his ears are really thin and sort of floppy. The meter works well, doesn’t require much blood at all (turned out the bead I made was way more blood than the meter needed), but the pricking looks like a real prick of a problem. It looks like I’m going to have to watch more videos, ask people on the diabetic cat forum what setting they use on the pricker for their cat’s ears, and otherwise do more research before subjecting The Mighty Fang to my unkind ministrations. Because somehow I suspect The Mighty Fang will be less tolerant of fumbling than I was myself :(.

– Badtux the Diabetic-cat-owned Penguin
Oh yeah, obligatory slam against His Fraudulency Donald the Trump — he said he’d let people import drugs from outside the country and would let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Well, it turns out that campaign promise was as fraudulent as everything else about Deadbeat Donnie. SIGH.

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