Wednesday, June 29, 2016

A Few Thousand Words On Istanbul

Enjoy.
(Unless you're a terrorist from the Religion Of Pieces{tm}, in which case have a bacon and dick burger, on the house.)







Since 9/11/01 until now, there have been about 12 actual days in the world with no deaths from Muslim terrorists.
There is no such thing as "moderate" Islam. The Wahabists are the mainstream.
So-called "moderates" are what practicing Muslims call apostates.
And this @$$hole wants to import a few hundred thousand more here:


Let us know how that works out for you.
Sleep tight.


Thought For The Day





"Lying to pollsters is obedience to comedy." - T. Jefferson




Friday, June 24, 2016

Britain, Great Or Otherwise




So, apparently, the old girl still has barely detectable pulse, and a stiffening upper lip.
We heartily cheer and raise a glass to that.

Short-term, the pound is in free-fall, but no longer finding itself tied to future failed states like Greece, Italy, etc., Britain and its economics should sort itself out in due course.

Winners:
Every British subject, like it or not, particularly those who actually are British.
England and Wales, which carried "Leave" to victory on their own backs.
And their children and succeeding generations, who may yet recoup some of their former glory.
UKIP in general, and Nigel Farage in particular, the latter being the closest thing that entire island has come to spawning another Winston Churchill there since, roughly, Winston Churchill.
The Dutch and any/many other nations' folk who may elect to take a powder from the EU as well, in the days and months to come.

Losers:
Maddened crowds of socialist rent-seekers and government teat-suckers there.
Any number of future would-be jihadis among the Britistani imports over the last 40 years.
The Conservative Party, and in particular, David Sodding Cameron, who having tied "Remain" about his own and the Tories' necks, will soon be to British and Conservative Party history what Gorbachev is to Soviet Russia. He has, at this point, elected to Brexit as well. Douchebaggery has consequences, Davey. Maybe you can hire out to drive a cab for some Pakistani entrepreneur.
Scotland and Ireland, who voted predominantly to remain in the EU, clearly just a bunch of socialist suck-ups, from whom manifestly the best part emigrated therefrom some decades to centuries past. Not being there, I can't tell if their motivation springs from inbred love for the monstrous EU teat, or simple reflexive disdain for anything English, based purely on a thousand years of poisoned history, or some amalgamation of both. Perhaps cooler heads will surface, and they'll both realize they're physically closer - and/or inseparable from - Britain, and notice that the latter may tolerate some local autonomy, but not outright open hostility. People have friends, nations have interests. So it behooves the Remainers in Northern Ireland and Scotland to temper their enthusiasm a bit, while still pushing for more complete autonomy. They may wish to learn Arabic and Pakistani as well as their native Gaelic dialects.
Red Angela, who's Merkeled her own country and countrymen up the ass so hard that she's simultaneously cemented her shot at UN leadership, while probably never being able to return to German soil without being greeted by a pitchfork and torch-waving mob behind a helpfully empty tumbrel cart, en route to a hastily erected gibbet and some rope. (They may not even wait for her to leave and return to accord her that special honor. Be still, my beating heart.)
The "Syrian" "refugees" throughout Europe (two monstrous lies for the price of one, since by actual tally, something like 98.7% are not Syrian, and 100% are not seeking refuge, rather instead seeking generous payouts from socialist welfare state coffers, and new bases to re-institute the Caliphate north of the gates of Vienna.) Brexit, once implemented, should be the death knell to their further emigration there, and in short order in greater Europe, once the locals decide whether they want to simply round them up, or begin the largest pogrom the world has ever seen to expunge them from European soil. (I'm betting that "A" will lead inevitably to "B", especially after another couple of attacks/incidents from the Usual Suspects from The Religion Of Peace{tm}, as is their wont the same way pigs root in filth and beetles in Egypt roll dungballs).
The New World Order monkeys on this side of the Atlantic, who are witnessing not only the utter failure of socialism and open borders over there, but the prospect of their own pending unemployment and disenfranchisement over here, (and perhaps, if God loves us, their pending imprisonment), for all such are consumations devoutly to be wished.

It's going to take something like months to years to work out all the details of disentangling Britain from the hair of the Medusa that is the EU, starting with Parliament repealing the monstrous act that committed them to the EU lunacy back in 1974, but to quote the great man himself, Brexit may not be the beginning of the end for the eclipse of Europe, but at least it's the end of the beginning.

So Britain may yet become Great again. Splendid news from a special ally this week, and sincere best wises to a people across the pond that aren't quite finished yet, if only just in the nick of time.

Now all we need to do is heave the shitbirds on this side of the pond over the rail, and get back to setting our own national affairs in order.

And a note to our well-wishers there: John has a long moustache.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Semper F*cked



From Marine Corps Times:

Right now, (LtCol) Coleman said he is training the officers and staff noncommissioned officers who will facilitate these discussions. The trainers often ask him why the service is opening all combat jobs to women if mixed-gender teams did not perform as well as their all-male counterparts during the service's Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force experiment.
“We tell them that, yes, the majority of the tasks they performed at a lower level; however, their performance was not unsatisfactory,” Coleman said. “Their performance and the attacks that they executed were not failures. They just were potentially slower, maybe it was less accurate – whatever the metric that was being used for that particular task.
"It may have been a little bit off from what the males were, but they were still meeting what we have in our training readiness manuals as the standards.”
So, in short, screw excellence. The new Marine Corps standard is "slow, but not unsatisfactory." Imagine Recruit Dipstick giving that answer as his excuse to his drill instructor anytime in the last 100 years, and tell me what the response would have been in the real Marine Corps, instead of the New Sugarcoated Pansy Corps of today. Chesty Puller and thousands of Marines buried on three continents must be spinning in their graves fast enough to trigger seismographs at Caltech.

Doubtless they'll be awarding personal decorations for Marines who were "not unsatisfactory" in doing something that only gets half their squad, platoon, or company killed, because "half-assed" is the new "outstanding".

And there isn't a single butt-kissing general officer in the entire Marine Corps, let alone officer or SNCO, willing to tell the entire goddamned Emperor's Parade that HopeyDopey and his peter-puffing SecNav have fixed it such that America's sons and daughters will fill body bags to make the Rainbow Warriors Diversity Protective Association happy.

Good luck with accepting third-rate as the new normal, especially as the rest of the world tunes up to eat our lunch. Combat Barbie is going to get ass-rapped, literally, and G.I Joe is going to be cannon fodder picking up her slack. Particularly by those enemies, both current and yet-to-appear, who didn't get the memo that "readiness manual standards" are as good as they'll perform when they take us on. Look up how that outlook worked out at Little Big Horn or Corregidor, and get back to us. And better issue your recruits buttlube along with bullets.

Try, if you can, to explain how this is anything but a calculated attempt to hamstring and disarm the United States' military, in broad daylight and plain sight, and the fruit of an absolutely treasonous plan to assure that we never win any conflict from here on out.

Back when we had an actual military worth the name, turning in this kind of craptastic performance as an officer or SNCO would get your career cancelled.
Now they'll be handing out cupcakes and Navy Achievment Medals for this sort of "slower, but not unsatisfactory" half-assery disguised as actual performance.

So much for "standards won't be compromised". Riiiiiight. We'll just strive for the bottom end of them, rather than trying to excel.

I guess after 240 1/2 years, it was just too good to last.

All-male ground combat teams outperformed their mixed-gender counterparts in nearly every capacity during a recent infantry integration test, Marine Corps officials revealed Thursday.
Data collected during a months-long experiment showed Marine teams with female members performed at lower overall levels, completed tasks more slowly and fired weapons with less accuracy than their all-male counterparts. In addition, female Marines sustained significantly higher injury rates and demonstrated lower levels of physical performance capacity overall, officials said.
The troubling findings come as Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford prepares to make a crucial decision regarding the integration of female troops into closed combat roles. Faced with a Defense Department-wide mandate that will open all jobs to women by Jan. 1, he must decide whether to ask for specific exceptions to the mandate in order to preserve combat readiness. Officials said Dunford had met with Navy Secretary Ray Mabus about the decision but had yet to issue his recommendations.

So now that we've seen how that question is answered, it's official.
JCS Chairman General Joseph Dunford and Commandant Robert Neller are a pair of four-star pussies.

(And when they retire, to collect blood money pensions, they'll become EX-Marines, joining the ranks of such celebrated ex-Marines as Charles Whitman, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Murtha, and Charles Rangel.) 

Consider the gauntlet thrown, shitbirds.

At your service, "generals", you unmitigated sonsofbitches.
If you'd been actual Marines, you'd have told SecNav and POTUS to piss up a rope, publicly, and told them where they could stick your pensions and retirement papers.
If you'd done that, you'd either be the next Senator from Pickastate, the next SecDef, or on the short list for Trump's VP. And then the book deal and speaking fees.
As it is, you clearly wouldn't make pimples on a good Marine's ass, and that goes for the rest of your leadership from top to bottom. The entire bunch should be melted down for fish sinkers, if not for the fact that the toxic stench would depopulate any body of water into which you were dropped. And the blood of every Marine henceforth who dies in combat will be on both of your hands, indelibly, and eternally.

Sleep tight, America.
When next the nation calls, the Marines will be at the beauty salon.
Just like the other services.
When the next jihadi sumbitch shoots up a recruiting station or military base, maybe they can throw their purses at 'em.

Everyone else is on their own from here on out.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

El WTF Nino



It doesn't rain in SoCal in June, but what with this year's El Nino, which is apparently the excuse for Mother Nature to go on a year-long Cinco de Mayo drunken rampage, it's raining today. Like it never does here in June.

Usually June can be counted on for it to be cloudy/gloomy all morning until noon, then the marine layer haze burns off, and it's still pre-summer comfortable the rest of the day.

But evidently this year's oceanic subsurface temperature surges mean "anything goes".

The good news is that helps end the multi-year drought (or it will, if some of this manages to fall as late season snow in the high Sierras). But mainly, it just loosens weeks of accumulated road goo and oil, and turns the freeways into playgrounds for morons with more horsepower than horse sense.

Just as well. Now I don't have to wash the car, and I wasn't going anywhere today anyhow.

I keep hoping I'll read that it washed most of Los Angeles away and/or buried it under mud slides, but so far, no joy there.




Friday, June 3, 2016

Chain Chain Chain...



 
 
Notice the above.
What do they have in common? They're all patient ventilators.
What else do they have in common? Not very effing much.
They're all designed to deliver oxygen and room air, under pressure, to a (usually) intubated patient.


And they make a lot of noise.
Any similarity to other machines in the sub-genre pretty much ends there.

Who cares, right?

In one of the regular features on his excellent blog, WeaponsMan includes one detailing the various ways non-firearms and an assortment of sources can conspire to end your oxygen addiction, and move you over to the Darwin Awards website, given half a chance.

Today's example was batteries, in this case, the failed ones on a ventilator in the excremental limey National Health Service (which is to actual health care as Dr. Mengele and Dr. Kevorkian are to actual physicians).

The story notes,

Despite several loud alarms designed to warn staff about the failing power supply, Jacqueline Scott passed away after the ventilator keeping her breathing shut down.
An inquest heard a nurse did not recognise the warning sound because no ventilator had ever ran out of power before.
A jury inquest at the Royal Courts of Justice heard Mrs Scott was on a ventilator plugged into a wall socket.
But the circuit providing the power had blown, meaning it was running on batteries – which eventually ran out, with several alarms ringing out before the power cut out.

Some in the succeeding comments basically took shots at the nurse involved.

My response:

Equal time for opposing views.

Caveat: I am not a nurse in the UK, I am a nurse in the USA. So policy and procedure are probably somewhat different there, as well as duties and responsibilities.

That said, the following:

1) Ventilators do, in fact, put out a cacophony of sounds. Respiratory therapists, on this side of the pond, are the ducks who are extensively trained in understanding them, and maintaining the function of said machines. Not nurses, except accidentally, ever.

2) Most of the time, a patient on a vent is attached to a machine making more noise than R2-D2 on the electronic version of crack, for any one of dozens of reasons. It occurs virtually every minute the patient is attached, to the point far beyond sensory overload.

3) The display of information varies among every machine, from every maker, to the point that without intensive and specific training, anyone not a respiratory therapist would not readily grasp, nor be able to prioritize, what each note in the cacophony is intended to convey. Absent an actual trained member of the respiratory therapy department, the nearest equivalent is installing a pipe organ in the room, and assigning a capuchin monkey tethered to said organ to prance about the keys to the point of exhaustion. It isn't, for example, as if the machine would helpfully have been standardized among any number of makers, models, or what have you, or that knowing a bit about one machine, you could easily take the time to try and troubleshoot any other of the breed.

4) Respiratory therapists are eternally in short supply, everywhere and at all times, in every hospital I've ever been in, seen, or heard of, even under a medical care system here and not as thoroughly socialized (yet) as the abortion of care known as the UK National Health Service.

So in aviation terms, you had a device that looked about as intuitive as the engineer's panel on a B-29,

except labeled in Greek, with no such engineer anywhere handy, and with all the lights and bells sounding constantly, and thus conveying essentially zero useful information, to a person neither trained nor experienced in rapidly troubleshooting any of the plethora of alarms and noises.

And the ground power to said panel, which normally did not, failed, and the batteries, which normally did not, also failed, followed by which the patient asphyxiated.

If the nurse, doctor, nor anyone else handy didn't also have the patient on telemetry, didn't know nor notice, amidst the endless calliope of the ventilator's death throes, that the actual patient - the point of the exercise - was breathing less frequently, and also getting concurrently less oxygen in their bloodstream than what is normally found when everything's operating normally, then you could make a case that they should have noticed that - if the patient was attached to the requisite telemetry, if there was the equipment there to manually bag-ventilate the patient and deliver supplemental oxygen, and if the nurse wasn't simultaneously assigned care of a number of actually "sicker" patients whose care she could temporarily abandon to step in and non-stop do the work of the failed ventilator, to breathe for the patient, while waiting for an RT with a fresh machine, if either said technician and equipment was, in fact, readily available.

But I don't know what patient:staff ratios are or might have been at the incident or department of the hospital in question, or any of the other answers, and absent that information, trying to make this sound like nurse error is Stevie Wonder leading a backpacking trip through the Grand Canyon. Fun to watch, but joining, not so much.

Why aren't respiratory machines and their displays as standard as a car's dash panel?
Why are there eleventy-six noises and alarms, none of which can be shut off, to prioritize critical information from routine?
Where was the requisite expert in the operation and interpretation of such specialized machinery?
Was there any telemetry delivering basic patient information attached?
Why was a plug failed, with no one capable of fixing it, or red-tagging it until such was done, and no one aware of that condition?
Why did the back-up batteries fail?
Those are just the first six most obvious culprits here.

As in most aviation accidents, hospital deaths frequently involve a lengthy chain of errors and mistakes, and blaming the last person standing closest, in this case the nurse, is about like blaming all aviation disasters on "pilot error":
easy, convenient, self-serving for everyone but the accused, and generally a monumental load of horse cobblers.

If it were in my power, everything in my world that honks, squawks, beeps, clangs, and whistles, to include family members, would be cheerfully beaten to death at the first moment they offended my ears, every shift, and the person(s) who inflicted and designed them, after a proper crotch-punching. I would love to be able to prioritize the things that make noise to the one to three things that actually matter, so that if they did go off, I'd know
a) what it was, and
b) that it was important, and then be able to set about fixing it.

Unfortunately, no one, from the assholes who mis-design the offending hardware, to hospital purchasers of such horseshit, the administrators and clinical co-ordinators that implement it, nor anyone else, ever asks, let alone listens, to any input from end-users. Not once, ever, in a career.

So you and yours are taken care of by entirely non-standardized machines, that emit an ongoing cacophony of worthless sensory overload, delivered in an under-staffed care model, with safe levels of both enough and the right skills sets of the requisite personnel purely a forlorn fantasy, in an increasingly mechanized system, and then the entire thing falls on its ass, and your granny dies.

And to top it off, granny probably had ten bodily systems failing or in severe decline, had a chance in the single percentiles of ever having anything like recovery with any quality of life, but was being maintained on life support so that the long-neglectful family could feel better about the years of neglect of granny prior to that time, ignorance of the seriousness of her health conditions, and the utter futility of further care, and total denial of her probable end-state, despite the medical technology of the society she lived in. But that's just an anecdotal guess, based solely on 98% of the ventilated patients I've seen over two decades here. YMMV.

And then cared for in a failed socialist health care model by insufficient and overwhelmed staff, just for the cherry on top of the frosting.

So maybe the nurse was to blame.

Or maybe the health care system, the hospital, the staffing plan, the engineering department, the machine's designers and manufacturers, the family, and the actual patient, had some wee bit of the blame to chug down as well...?

Just saying.

Flail away.

Hognose's point was that dead batteries were the culprit, and the rest of the article noted that in fact
Dr. Renate Wendler, who led an investigation into the death, told the jury it was "not realistic" to expect nurses in the ward to know when power would have been interrupted to the plug sockets.
In front of the jury of six men and three women, she said: "The machine made a loud screeching alarm that no nurse had previously heard.
"This noise must have been the final battery warning.
"A lot of alarms had sounded on the machine.
"They were high priority alarms."
 Consultant anaesthetist Dr Wendler said the best nurses were looking after Mrs Scott, but that they reviewed the design of the machine and felt it was "not intuitive".
She said: "I do not think the delay in calling for help had anything to do with the outcome of Mrs Scott's case.
And finally
She added: "We looked at Mrs Scott's health and we found she was very sick and probably a pre-terminal patient when she came to the hospital.
"We found evidence of good practice and care.
"Usually if an incident happens, it is a result of a lot of factors, no single factor.
"Nurses were very busy looking after her in all sorts of ways."
 I read the details after my reply above, and lo and behold, they're just about the exact same thing (minus the gratuitous swipe at NHS, which is the rhetorical equivalent of shooting fish, in a barrel, with a Barrett M82A1).

Health care, even bad health care, is not magic nor miracle work. Handicapping caregivers with shitty equipment, let alone a shitty system, to care for a "pre-terminal patient", is a poor recipe for success, as we normally define the term.

Especially when you saddle them with a cacophony of worthless alarms, to the point that doing your job is the nightly equivalent of what Stephen Coonts described in Flight Of The Intruder, where you spend an inordinate amount of time turning the worthless clanging, dinging, buzzing, flashing, squeaking, squawking shit off, so you can get down to focusing and concentrating on doing the important parts of the job.

So as Paul Harvey always said, now you know the rest of the story...




The Daily Outrage - Illegal Alien Catch & Release Documented

h/t to WRSA


link

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents, Border Patrol sources tell Judicial Watch. The government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road.
 The OTMs are from Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala and Border Patrol officials say this week’s batch was in custody for a couple of days and ordered to call family members in the U.S. so they could purchase a bus ticket for their upcoming trip from Phoenix. Authorities didn’t bother checking the identity of the U.S. relatives or if they’re in the country legally, according to a Border Patrol official directly involved in the matter. American taxpayers pick up the fare for those who claim to have a “credible fear,” Border Patrol sources told JW. None of the OTMs were issued official court appearance documents, but were told to “promise” they’d show up for a hearing when notified, said federal agents with firsthand knowledge of the operation.
Your tax dollars at work, importing the felons non-government employee Americans won't import themselves.

This will end well. Not.
I predict a sudden uptick of border area residents helpfully adopting the shoot-shovel-shut up paradigm when dealing with all feral life forms, regardless of number of legs, or whether they speak Spanish, or wear federal badges.

And in case you didn't notice, when the federal government is importing tomorrow's angry third-world mobs to your city vanloads at a time, 24/7/365, you don't have nearly enough ammo.

Range cards prepared in advance for any number of likely spots wouldn't go amiss either.