The Trump Administration Paid Millions for Test Tubes — and Got Unusable Mini Soda Bottles | Talking Points Memo

I’d say sometimes you can deepen your appreciation by learning how a thing works, though. If you want a thing to remain a mystery, that’s fine, I get that, but sometimes the people who create beauty best are also hugely into learning their craft, they never stop hungering to know more.

9 Likes

Fucking Everyone Majorly Always, a division of TrumpCo.

3 Likes

There’s a big VA hospital in my county and another in downtown Philly I know about. That’s just in one little corner of one state. The government buys a ton of testing stuff, I’m sure of it. There was absolutely no reason for that much money to go to these people who didn’t have the ability to provide the proper product. Something went way wrong here and it doesn’t smell to me like an honest mistake. That’s the wrong assumption to make with this crew.

14 Likes

I get that too, but sometimes they go too far (at least, by modern standards). Take Audubon, for example: for every one of those exquisite drawings, there were dozens of dead specimen models.

3 Likes

Ah, but you stop being strictly an observer then. I need to know how everything works. But over a long period of time, I have learned to turn that off for a brief interval, and it’s kinda cool.

7 Likes

Who is in charge of FEMA these days?

And I’d just like to point out something I heard the other day. When Trump was elected, but before he was sworn in, he traveled around the country on a victory tour doing rallies. He wasn’t thinking about, nor did he have someone take control of the transition. The Trump administration had to ask several Obama appointees to remain in their jobs because Trump was too incompetent to know anyone to fill some of those positions. And national security was one area where… oops their guy Flynn got busted for lying to the FBI.

8 Likes

I also keeping thinking of that company in Texas that went to the government in Jan about getting a contract for PPE. They needed the contract so they could get a loan to re-start the machines they had mothballed to make PPE. If my memory serves me correctly this company had federal contract in the past. But mothballed their PPE machines because of production in China.
OK and that’s the other 'effing thing that pisses me off. When you find out that the stuff we’re going to need to fight a “novel” virus is all made in the country that is in the midst of fighting that “novel” virus why wouldn’t you get cracking to see who is still here in the US capable of producing what you need?
Someone pointed out that Trump is a reactive President, I guess being proactive is a foreign concept to him.

13 Likes

Peter T. Gaynor. Evidently he likes to contract with people whose MO sounds similar to his name, e.g. Profit Gainer.

1 Like

I’d call that a particular case. I’ve tried for a long time to play jazz piano, and I can stumble through a set of chord changes and not have people throw things at me. I found out in the process you can’t do it, you literally can’t do it, without getting deep into analysis and theory. By the time the bebop players got done transforming the music, you had to be able to read, to analyze, you had to know the modes of the melodic minor scale and all kinds of pretty abstruse stuff like that or you couldn’t hang. They did it deliberately, to make it their own. You need to know what intervals are consonant or dissonant, and in what degree, if you want to use that to color your melodies. There’s a subtle alchemy that transmutes it all into art, no doubt. But you have to pay your dues, as they say, and by that they mean a ton of study and practice out in the woodshed.

Sure, in appreciation just as in performance, you can’t be coldly analytical all the time, that’s hardly the idea. The third movement of Beethoven’s first piano concerto is just pure exuberant fun, you can’t not love it. It’s sheer enjoyment the whole way through.

5 Likes

As a tax payer I’m mad and horrified but as a Democrat I find this typical and yet hilarious.

7 Likes

Who owns stock in the company? Donnie? Jared? Kelly Loeffler?

4 Likes

My guitar teacher has an interesting perspective on paying too much due to the rules and standards. He’s a classical guitarist by training but makes his bread by jammin’ in jazz groups. In his decades of experience, he’s found very few classically trained, rule adhering musicians who can jam, who can groove. He says that they spend more time on technique but have very little feel for their own authentic voice. He’s currently coaching me in Asturias, but really wants me to put down the nylon and start wailin’ on the blues again. This kinda encapsulates his vibe:

4 Likes

Classical players typically can’t improvise because they never learned how. Musicians, especially jazz musicians, often talk a bunch of sappy guff about how they do what they do, but it’s knowing how. Really as simple as that.

9 Likes

The problem here is the word “honest.”

4 Likes

Have to read the article twice to grasp that someone is actually doing this for COVID-19 and the Federal government bought it.

For those who don’t know, the “test tubes” in this article are the preforms mentioned in this video. As you might guess, they are not appropriate for medical application.

10 Likes

We are still trying to identify an alternative use…

How about as Exhibit A in the fraud trial.

9 Likes

Way past time for a new Truman Commission.

8 Likes

That’s called a murmuration of starlings.

3 Likes
2 Likes

A flock of geese.
A murder of crows.
A pride of lions.
A rally of trumpwits.

6 Likes
Comments are now Members-Only
Join the discussion Free options available