George Rebane

When there’s a problem, government is guilty until proven innocent.

Today is HD19 for the Rebanes.  We started hunkering down on 8 March 2020, and finally risked it all this morning by showing up at our local Safeway at 7am, the advertised ‘old folks shopping time’.  Apparently the younger people had not gotten the word, and the store was full with a lot of couples like Jo Ann and me pushing two carts.  Most of us wore gloves, a few had on masks, and all of us social distanced as much as possible.  But what we saw was dismal; something you’d experience in a socialist second or third world country – ‘miles’ of empty shelves of the stuff that everyone really wanted to buy.  Still, we all filled our baskets with what there was and substituted a lot of PlanB items.

What surprised me was that today the younger generation of managers have no knowledge, let alone experience, of the buying patterns during times of emergency and need.  With all signs of the coming hunker down time apparent more than a month ago, no one, starting with FEMA, advised the supply system to put the pedal to the metal on obvious staples and sanitary items.  There was no anticipative ‘push’ in the pipeline.  Everything appeared to have continued on with the JIT (just in time) scheme that works so well during happy days.  The makers and distributers are making do with the JIT schema in spite of the enormous consumer ‘pull’ of empty shelves.

Yes, you can’t flip a switch and triple your output and distribution of hand sanitizers overnight, but you can do it over several weeks if there were any foresight in the system – which there isn’t.  Today we are still in some kind of supply paralysis, which hopefully is being remedied across a country that once had Americans who could literally repurpose overnight everything from small manufactories, machine shops, and big factories to output gazillions of cans of spam, bread flour, paper goods, and a B-24 every 64 minutes.  Not today, at our merchants JIT has turned into TAT – ‘try again tomorrow’.

Elsewhere in these pages we document and discuss what our corps of clowns, idiots, and scumbags are doing in the highest levels of governments to impose policies that do everything from misconstruing risk, ignoring existential realities, to stuffing needed enabling legislation with their long-term pork and ideological agenda shopping list that has nothing to do with helping us come out of the Covid19 pandemic.  There are too many candidates for Exhibit A that support this assessment.  A particularly good one is how our feds, led by the now revealed incompetent CDC and NIH, had two decades to prepare stores of emergency pandemic supplies, medicines, and medical equipments, and did nothing.  And all this after we had several bouts of contagious disease epidemics (SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1, …) since 2000. (example here and here)

Ten years ago during the H1N1 scare, I was on our county’s Large Scale Emergency planning committee sponsored by our Office of Emergency Services.  We were able to lay out the public reaction scenarios, required government agencies’ responses, identify obvious existing shortcomings, etc.  And through state emergency coordinating bodies we heard of other counties doing similar assessments and planning.  The result? – a statewide communications and control exercise (in the military known as COMEX) to sort out who talks to whom when the time comes.  After doing a bunch of telecons, text messages, faxes, and emails everybody declared victory, patted each other on the back, and went back to their daily same ol’ same ol’.  No one thought to stockpile any of the obvious things for a pandemic that everyone in the emergency response business knew was coming. (here is a current example)

Alright, let me offer an Exhibit A – chloroquine.  We discovered 20 years ago that this common and classic (since the mid-1940s) anti-malarial drug was effective against corona viruses.  Our response – nothing.  Now we have to hear from other countries about its benefits and have re-epiphanies that President Trump puts out against the strong opposition of the anti-American media and leftwing politicians whose game plan requires the country’s economic collapse for their political success.  But this kind of medicine, in combination with others, has been known by the pharmacological industry for years.  And we do understand why big pharma has not stepped up and manufactured a large national stash of the stuff, because there is little profit to be gained.  (more here with a H/T to reader).

But this is where a properly functioning government steps in and commissions private industry to do what is perceived as an obvious preparation for the common good.  If government fails in such fundamental functions, then truly we all can and should ask, ‘what good is government?’ – where were the CDC and NIH when we needed them?  It turns out that we know how the corporatists, progressives, and embedded bureaucratic socialists have repurposed government agencies ranging from NASA to the mentioned health security mavens.  Their main missions are now being hobbled and/or redirected, not by need and merit, but by ‘woke’ objectives such as diversity, identity politics, and social/racial justice.

Coming full circle, perhaps we will soon see full shelves after we put the country back in gear again, albeit a more prudent one that recognizes that Covid19 is still among us.  My hope is that the administration is not swayed by today’s short-sighted paeans to risk aversion put forth by politicians and talking heads who depend on or are ignorant of the real long term damage and suffering in store for us if we destroy America’s spirit, and our country’s ability to carry on in its noble quest with its unique ability to generate wealth, the distribution of which makes all other things possible, and without which we will have unimagined destitution and death.

[27mar20 update] Dead and dying on the streets of Wuhan.  Here is a leaked video from Wuhan of how the Covid19 virus takes you down when you don't hunker down, ignore symptoms, and continue with your daily round.  These are pretty gruesome smartphone videos taken by Wuhan residents of their fellow citizens dead on the streets, shopping malls, stores, transportation hubs, … .  The disturbing part starts at about 35:00 minutes.  It’s worthy to note that the CCP has permitted no mention of such wholesale death in the public forum, and our politically correct YouTube (aka Google) removed this video from its catalog because it had “offensive content”.   With out managed and fake news we truly are isheeple, the sheeple of the so-called information age.  In addition to these gruesome street deaths, there is also wide scale rioting in the most affected areas as the government prevents people from leaving.  We have no idea as to the extent of all this.  That our political leadership does not publicly recognize these happenings is disturbing.  Given all this, how are we to interpret the Wuhan virus pandemic data from China?  As a betting man I would put down a passel of quatloos that today China's known infected number more than 5 million, and their body count is well north of a million.  (H/T to reader)

Here are the relevant Twitter URLs which don't link through TypePad, so just copy and paste them into your browsers.  It's very likely they will soon be removed by our politically correct betters.

https://twitter.com/fiteray/status/1243457907976364033

https://twitter.com/i/status/1243457907976364033

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