Let The Panic Begin
Okay, it’s time to panic.
Cooper’s Barbecue says “due to production storages” they are having to raise the price of their brisket box from $95 to 120.
This is some serious stuff, y’all.
Riots have started in Texas before now over barbecue shortages.
For you people from foreign states, a Cooper’s brisket (my personal favorite brisket) will serve 2 people for 8 – 10 days.
And when they say any kinda of shortage – people in Texas go buy all the toilet paper. I’m warning ya.
SCAMS, SHAMS and GRAND SLAMS!
After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators
Edit: On March 27, as emergency rooms in New York and across the country began filling with coronavirus patients struggling to breathe, President Donald Trump posted on Twitter to urge Ford and General Motors to “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!” One of the thousands of replies that the tweet attracted struck an equally urgent tone: “We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT.”
Its author was Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley. A specialist in mobile phone technology, he currently has just 75 followers on Twitter and no apparent experience in government contracting or medical devices.
Reached by telephone, Oren-Pines said “neither me nor my company is providing any comment on this,” and then hung up. He did not respond to subsequent text messages.
The money he received on March 30 was the largest single payment made by the New York Department of Health under an executive order issued by Gov. Andrew Cuomo last month that aimed to streamline the procurement process so that critical medical equipment could reach hospitals as quickly as possible.
The episode underscores the extent to which the fear of overrun hospitals prompted politicians around the country — and particularly in New York — to turn to untested and at times unqualified vendors.
“We had no choice but to overturn every rock to find ventilators and other needed equipment,” said Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to Cuomo, referring to the state’s scramble to find critical medical equipment as the pandemic overtook New York.
But three days later, New York state paid Oren-Pines $69.1 million. The payment was for 1,450 ventilators — at an astonishing $47,656 per ventilator, at least triple the standard retail price of high-end models.
Other states and government agencies also scrambled to strike deals for needed supplies. The California Department of Transportation agreed to pay $12.74 apiece for N95 masks that typically retail for as little as $1.25, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency signed a purchase order for 2 million respirator masks at $7.25 apiece — more than 10 times the price it’s paying to buy them directly from 3M — only to cancel after the vendor said it couldn’t deliver.
New York City, meanwhile, rushed over the past month to order 214.7 million pieces of personal protective equipment, including N95 masks, gloves, and face shields. S. So far only 8% — or just 17 million — of those items have arrived. – But it was the state government in Albany that proved most aggressive in its acquisitions as it struggled to deal with COVID-19.
“I need 30,000 ventilators,” Cuomo said in a press briefing on March 24. “How can you have New Yorkers possibly dying because they can’t get a ventilator?”
Three days later, the state issued the second of two payments totalling almost $116 million to a small Brooklyn company called Dome International that rents ventilators and other respiratory devices to hospitals and nursing homes. The company, which has no website, has no record of prior contracting with New York or with the federal government.
The deal was for 5,700 ventilators, according to a report by the Albany Times-Union, but the devices were never delivered. A call to Dome International’s co-owner, David Chait, was not returned.
Two payments totaling $32.3 million, meanwhile, went to a Tampa company, Premier Orthopedic Solutions, which specializes in selling devices used for rehabilitation from joint surgery. The owner, Carl Bax, played offensive line for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the NFL, but in 1990 was arrested before his second season after receiving a shipment of steroids. He pleaded guilty and his football career ended after nine more games. Bax did not respond to a request for comment.
But the contract with Oren-Pines stands out even among the motley array of vendors that struck deals with New York state over the past month. It’s unclear how he came to the attention of the White House coronavirus task force, which was established in late January and has featured daily press briefings led by President Trump. The task force also confers regularly on the state of the pandemic, including the availability of ventilators, N95 masks, gowns, and other much-needed medical supplies around the country.
fullarticle: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/after-one-tweet-to-president-trump-this-man-got-69-million
1Did you see where Pence had his wife lie for him about the mask; because you know he doesn’t lie.
2Yeah, Robert, I was just fixing to write about that. Great minds ….
3Thanks for the heads up. Just ordered one. A welcome addition to my shelf stable Coronavirus provisions. One can only live so long on tuna and peanut butter.
4It’ll give you an excuse to find out that real BBQ comes from a pig.
5He was shamed into wearing a mask at a GM plant in Kokomo, Indiana today.
And that BBQ looks ab-fab yummy!
6Miss JJ, folks in Texas rioted when Popeye’s ran out of chicken. This is going to get ugly.
Stay safe.
7Remember, Hurricane Season starts June 1st – you may want to get extra along with beer and TP!
8Question.
9My past understanding of those meat packing plants is that they are generally staffed by women, immigrants (legal and undocumented) and other ethnic minorities (Vietnamese) this information is several years out of date and I ish to know if this is still true?
If so I am disppointed that the orders for them to reopen and the ruling that anyone who does not return to the “slaughterhouse” (of workers from virus as well as animals) would lose unemployment and other gov. benefits do not raise the racist and misognic nature of these actions.
Considering the difficulty, by design, in obtaining unemployment benefits plus the past reporting of a sizable percentage of workers being undocumented, who do not qualify for unemployment, would the threat of losing benefits they cannot receive lose their force and not help to force these workers to further risk their lives under threat of losing something they do not receive?
Smitty’s in Lockhart is my favorite brisket now that Vencil Mares of the Taylor Cafe is no longer with us. I drive thirteen hours a couple of times a year to get me some. One of those trips takes place at the end of each school year.
I’m crying right about now.
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