Ventilators Are Expensive Until You Remember the F-35

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

28 March 20

Meanwhile, the Trump administration* uses the coronavirus crisis to ransack the EPA.

n my semi-permanent home exile, I’ve been compiling a list of people who should be president instead of the president* we have now. These range from governors—Jay Inslee, John Bel Edwards, Gavin Newsom, and Andrew Cuomo—to football coaches like Ed Orgeron of LSU, to Steph Curry, who hosted an Instagram chat with Dr. Anthony Fauci. But, thanks to KUNC in Colorado, I have a new nominee: Bill Barr, the mayor (and sole resident) of Gothic, Colorado.

Barr has tips on social distancing, but he’s the first to say they may well be entirely useless. “When I first got here, it was a relief for me to be on my own, but that's not necessarily what a healthy person does -- isolate themself,” he said. “I mean, I'm good at it and I do it because I like it, but what works for me it works for me. It quite conceivably wouldn't work for anybody else.”

His tips make sense. Get involved with a project. Keep a regular routine. Reward yourself. And my favorite:

Sometimes, Barr said, it’s kind of satisfying to be grumpy about something. “I do get sick and tired of snow but I like kidding about it. I live in an area where people live for snow, but I'm not that carried away with it,” said Barr, “So I like being grumpy about it. You get older and you start saying ‘Okay, I'm not going to necessarily be pleasant when I don't feel pleasant.’” These days, Barr is feeling especially unpleasant because of -- what else -- the coronavirus. “Ironically I have been in contact with one person in the last nine days. That was eight days ago,” he said. And then the guy got sick.

People, man. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t live without ‘em.

On Friday, The New York Times ran an infuriating story about ventilators. In the story, the Times finally found a good use for the F-35 fighter, the Flying Swiss Army Knife. Namely, as a financial metric.

The $1.5 billion price tag comes to around $18,000 a ventilator. And the overall cost, by comparison, is roughly equal to buying 18 F-35s, the Pentagon’s most advanced fighter jet.

Of course, there's no risk of ventilators decapitating their operators, so there’s that.

Meanwhile, with everybody looking elsewhere, the administration* is taking advantage of the situation to do away with government functions of which Republicans have disapproved for decades. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency. From The Hill:

The temporary policy, for which the EPA has set no end date, would allow any number of industries to skirt environmental laws, with the agency saying it will not “seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations.”...The EPA has been under pressure from a number of industries, including the oil industry, to suspend enforcement of a number of environmental regulations due to the pandemic.

“EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment, but recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement. In a 10-page letter to the EPA earlier this week, the American Petroleum Institute (API) asked for a suspension of rules that require repairing leaky equipment as well as monitoring to make sure pollution doesn’t seep into nearby water.

And the Department of Labor, re: affirmative action. (h/t to Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman on the electric Twitter machine.)

In view of the special circumstances in the national interest presented by the novel coronavirus outbreak, and consistent with agency practice relating to emergency responses, I have decided to grant a limited exemption and waiver from some of the requirements of the laws administered by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). OFCCP enforces Executive Order 11246 (EO 11246), as amended, Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act (Section 503), as amended, and Section 4212 of the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), as amended, which require that Federal contracting agencies include in all covered supply & service and construction contracts an equal opportunity clause.

Someday, I am sure, historians will puzzle over what allowing oil companies to poison groundwater and allowing companies to discriminate against minorities and veterans had to do with fighting a viral respiratory contagion. Somebody smarter than me will figure this out, I’m sure.

And this story, from NBC News, makes things infinitely worse.

The city of Detroit shut off her water late last fall because of unpaid bills and a broken plumbing valve that she couldn't afford to fix. Griffin, 55, was forced to rely on donated bottled water to drink, cook and bathe. She used space heaters to warm her home; without running water, the boiler didn't work. Then the coronavirus hit. Governors and public health officials across the country ordered people to stay in their homes and — most importantly — to wash their hands.But like millions of other people across the country who have their water shut off each year, Griffin can't easily do that — and now she worries that her life could be in danger. "I'm so stressed out. It's just despair," she said. "I'm not able to keep my sanitation level up enough for this virus. I'm not able to keep clean.”

Ms. Griffin is one of the citizens that the president* is shaking down because he doesn’t like the governor of Michigan’s tone. The reign of monsters is upon us.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “God Ain’t Blessing America” (Swamp Dogg): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans, god help it these days.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are some British schoolkids from 1932, gargling in unison to fight the flu. One child seems dubious, apparently believing there’s an injection involved in this business somewhere, as every child believes. History is so cool.

Governor Cuomo took the New York National Guard to Agincourt on Friday. He’s got some of the old man in him, after all.

I watched Star Trek: Picard all the way through, and the final episode was absolutely of a piece with the best of every other installment of the franchise. (It’s had to go wrong with Romulan Warrior Nuns.) The last 20 minutes was heartbreaking and Sir Patrick was up to every second. Also, can somebody get Michelle Hurd her own show soon? In other couch-related news, David Simon has parked The Plot Against America into the second deck. The set decoration alone deserves a parade and he once again shows a real talent at finding young actors. Blog says check it out, pace Joe Bob Briggs.

Is it a good day for dinosaurs, Reuters? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Scientists on Thursday announced the discovery of Dineobellator notohesperus, a two-legged meat-eater that was relatively small - around 7 feet (2 meters) long and 3 feet (1 meter) tall at the hip, weighing 40-50 pounds (18-22 kg). What Dineobellator lacked in size it made up for with ferocity. Dineobellator - whose name means “Navajo warrior” to honor the Native American people native to the area - was part of the same dinosaur lineage, dromaeosaurs, as the well-known Velociraptor that lived just a bit earlier in Mongolia. “It was a swift, active predator. Its claws would have been several inches long and quite formidable, although rather than slicing through meat they probably would be more useful for holding on to things,” said paleontologist Steven Jasinski of the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, who led the research published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Not as fearsome as Romulan Warrior Nuns, but awfully damn close, and I am glad that they lived then to make us happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday, because what the hell else do I have to do. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and help each other when you can.