Gun Free Zone

From the New York Post:

We didn’t have to have ventilator shortage — leaders chose not to prep for pandemic

Hospitals in New York are running short. To his credit, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is doing his best, but he admits “you can’t find available ventilators no matter how much you’re willing to pay right now, because there is literally a global run on ventilators.”

It’s a little late. Several years ago, after learning that the Empire State’s stockpile of medical equipment had 16,000 fewer ventilators than the 18,000 New Yorkers would need in a severe pandemic, state public-health leaders came to a fork in the road.

They could have chosen to buy more ventilators to back up the supplies hospitals maintain. ­Instead, the health commissioner, Howard Zucker, assembled a task force for rationing the ventilators they already had.

In 2015, the state could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece, or a total of $576 million. It’s a lot of money, but in hindsight, spending half a percent of the budget to prepare for pandemic was the right thing to do.

Holy shit.

See, we preppers* get made fun of all the time by the Left (and sometimes the Right) for being ready in case of an emergency.  We are told we are paranoid kooks.  We are told that when disaster strikes, the government will be there to rescue us.

Then we find out that the government had the chance to and were recommended to prepare for this disaster because of the precedent set by the last foreign origin lethal respiratory virus, and they chose not to.

Apparently prepping for disaster is so paranoid and ridicule-worthy that even the government we are supposed to trust won’t do it.

This news falls on the heels of the news that the Obama administration used up the national stockpile of N95 respirators and didn’t replenish the stockpile.

Following the 2009 H1N1 swine flu crisis, US leaders realized how desperately larger reserves of medical supplies were needed in hospitals.

A health security document discussing the lessons learned from the emergency said: “A major difficulty during the response to 2009 H1N1 influenza was being able to project supply and demand for N95 respirators and facemasks because of the uncertainty of the pandemic and the complexity of the supply chain system.”

According to the LA Times, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks be replenished.

This nation went through this once before in my adult lifetime, back in 2009, and the government reacted by saying “getting ready for the next one will be too expensive, so fuck it, we’ll just come up with a better system of deciding who dies.”

What did they choose to spend the money on?  Who the fuck knows, but I guarantee it wasn’t anything useful.

No wonder the Democrats are doing their very best to blame Trump for the Coronavirus outbreak.  They are trying to get ahead of being asked why they bumblefucked the government preparation after the H1N1 outbreak.

When this is over, these people need to have their feet held to the fire.  I honestly wouldn’t be opposed to some sort to Nuremberg like trial for all of these politicians as to why they dropped the ball so fucking hard.

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*Addendum:

We need to take back the word prepper as something positive.

It conjures up the mental image of a kooky hermit in surplus BDUs with a bunker made out of a buried shipping container in the woods with 10 years worth of freeze-dried food.

Maybe this was because of the guys who thought Y2K would be the end of the world and the media latched onto that idea and ran with it.

But as I’ve said before, you can take the boy out of Florida but you can’t take the Florida out of the boy.  I live my life with hurricane preparedness in the back of my mind.  I have one to two weeks worth of everything I need (food, paper products, etc) on a storage rack or in a freezer in my garage.  New stuff comes in and older stuff makes it way out of inventory.

I keep my power tool batteries charged, at least one pickup truck full of gas, and god knows how much ammo and batteries.  Not to mention a tote full of flashlights.

This served me well in South Dakota when a blizzard could shut down the town and trucks from coming in on the highway.

You don’t need to be a kooky guy with a buried bunker to be a prepper.  You just need to be a guy with enough foresight to have what you need for a reasonable period of time onhand in case a bunch of assholes buy out the grocery store and your weekly grocery run is a bust.

An awful sudden thing. If you all could be so kind,  go over his blog and offer a couple of words, I’d appreciate it.

I am not into the decorative/themed guns, but I was a kid who was a fan of the Apollo program, this here is a thing of sheer beauty.

UPDATE: A reader who wants to remain anonymous has more info on the rifle and another photo:

That rifle was produced for the Huntsville Friends of the NRA annual dinner in 2019.  It was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing.

The rifle was a project designed and implemented by a small team of engineers, industrial designers, machinists, and technicians in Remington’s R&D facility in Huntsville, Alabama.

The rifle is a Bushmaster XM-15 A3 with a 20 inch barrel, manufactured at Remington’s production facility in Huntsville.

The launchpad and gantry were designed and 3-D printed by Remington R&D, so was the engraving and Cerakote painting of the rifle.

This was a beloved project that really brought the team together to do something they were very proud of.

Additional pictures could be found here at the Huntsville Friends of the NRA Facebook page.

Or rather NOT doing.

ORLANDO, Fla. – One day after Florida’s governor issued an executive order stating that passengers who fly from New York to the Sunshine State amid the coronavirus pandemic must undergo a mandatory quarantine, there appeared to be a lack of enforcement.

Most of Tuesday — from morning into early afternoon — passengers arriving from New York to Orlando International Airport gates just walked off the plane without any screening.

Passengers arriving from New York’s LaGuardia Airport on a Frontier flight Tuesday said an airline representative met the flight, announced the governor had ordered a mandatory quarantine for all passengers, handed passengers a four-page packet from the Florida Department of Health asking for contact information and then allowed passengers to walk off the plane and out of the airport.

No screening, no enforcement of quarantine at Orlando International Airport, passengers say

It had to be House of the Mouse County. I believe the biggest concentration of idiots outside Pasco in in Orange county and Pasco has the excuse of having too much meth flowing the streets. Why is the order of the governor being ignored? Is it plain stupidity of there is a political interest in Florida being infected. Sorry for the Tin Foil Hat, but this inaction smells like partisan crap.

Do pray we don’t get hit by a hurricane this year.  We are but a month away from the beginning of the season.

Hat Tip MiniMe.

Ford announced today that it is partnering with 3M in order to manufacture powered air-purifying respirators (PAPRs) as part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These respirators are often called positive-pressure masks as they take contaminated air, pull it through a filter, then push it to the sealed mask using an air blower.

Ford will assist by providing components from their parts bin to build the respirators. The design released by Ford (top) will use 3M filters that draw air into a blower motor sourced from an F-150 and then pushed through a tube up to a mask that is sealed to the user’s face.
…
The great thing about using off-the-shelf parts is that most of the pieces needed to assemble these respirators are available in fairly large quantities. The seat blower motors can be pulled off the shelf by Ford and they can request more from their suppliers if needed. The drill battery packs use a standard interface and are available from the original equipment manufacturers as well as many aftermarket sources.

How Ford Is Using Seat Ventilation Fans to Build Thousands of Respirators

IO can almost see the technically purist in the medical field cringe with horror. But as we are fond to say: “If it looks stupid but works, it ain’t stupid.”

Kudos to Ford and the redneck engineers that came up with this.

Hat Tip Scott M.

Things just got real: Waffle House closes 365 locations across US

RUN!

As J. Kb. wrote:

Do you know what will happen the day after the mint mints two trillion dollar coins?

Toilet paper goes up to $10 a roll and stays there.  Milk is $15 a gallon instead of $1.5 a gallon, and it will cost $400 to fill up my tank.

Just as Venezuelans how much they love their fourteen-million Bolivar chickens?

The Squad apparently all studied economics abroad in Zimbabwe

Going through a purse of mom’s recently, I found this:

That is 90 Bolivares. In the heyday of booming oil income, it was the equivalent of $20.93. Right now? Go in your pocket or spare change jar and pull out a penny. Now look at the date and look at one of the digits. Do you see the fraction of the space it covers? That is the equivalent of the bills above today.

The value of the paper of this bills is worth more than the currency. The government switched to a cheaper paper  a while back because it was idiotic even under The Squad/Socialism guidelines to print currency at such a loss. And yes, the paper has minimal or no security features, but who is going to counterfeit Venezuelan Bolivares?