Island Time Means Never Showing Up To Work

So apparently, things are so bad in the banana republic territory of Puerto Rico, that people have noticed it's worse than normal.

So with USAF planes landing supplies, navy ships in the waters offshore, and tons of relief cargo being unloaded at the Port of San Juan, how are they handling things?

Well, the D- student of the pledge class, the PR National Guard, currently boasts that around 50% of guard members called up for service during the emergency have actually shown up. FTR, those are criminal counts of AWOL, chargeable under the UCMJ, and probably under federal and territorial law as well. And these are the honormen of the class.

Posting a 20% score, for a solid F, are truck drivers. The Teamsters there are on strike, and refusing to deliver supplies, or even show up to transport them, until they extort a favorable contract out of TPTB. That little stunt should be the reason that the president declares martial law, nationalizes the drivers, and tells them failure to muster for driving duty will be a federal felony, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. All of which is both legal under federal law, and proper under the circumstances.

But the star pupil? Posting a 0% attendance rating?

Oh, that would be Heronner, above, Miss Chiquita Banana Republic postergirl herself, Carmen Yellin' Yulin Cruz, bitchmeister meisterburgher of the quaint little hellhole fiefdom of San Juan, PR. She's been invited to multiple FEMA meetings, but apparently due to her endless commitments for TV spots to decry the overwhelming federal response to the disaster, she's been unable to attend every planning meeting she's been invited to at FEMA HQ.

As tweeted by ABCNews WH correspondent Katherine Faulders, and shared at Gateway Pundit, reporterette Faulders asked a WH official if POTUS would meet with Cruz when he visits on this coming Tuesday's trip there. The WH answer:

"Not sure. She has been invited to FEMA command center several times to see operations and be part of efforts but so far has refused to come, maybe too busy doing tv?"

That's just want you want in a public servant; with supplies stacking up all around the port, drivers and guardsmen no shows, and plenty of planning and co-ordination to be done. Because what you really need is some incompetent yackass like Cruz grandstanding about the crisis, rather than acting like a mayor of the capitol city, digging in, and getting work done, instead of being a partisan harpy trying to score cheap points while claiming "People are dying here!"

Hey, well played loserbitch, and that'll be 200 points from the Democrats at Slytherin.

Hopefully some of the good people of Puerto Rico, (either one of them) will helpfully put the mayor in a position to do the most good: which, at this point, would involve a stout rope, a handy lightpole, and assembling the two to Cruz's yappy neck, with some gravity-defying bodily levitation involved.

The people there are indeed fortunate have such a shepherd as this. Especially in time of crisis.

As I said in comments earlier, Trump should show up, tell everyone federal to pack up and head home now, seal emigration to the US from there, and tell the officials in charge that come next July 4th, Puerto Rico will be granted unconditional independence, and wish them well in their future banana republic endeavors.

They've clearly got a 119 year head start on that.

Murderer, Crook And Probably Going Right Back To Jail

Douchebag Simpson, due to be released from 9 years in a NV prison for robbery and kidnapping, has undisclosed offshore accounts, and a $100M legal judgment pending against him.

The revelation came from an audio recording stemming from the crime that got him finally put away a decade ago: 

OJ Simpson secretly hid his money in offshore bank accounts prior to being jailed for kidnapping and armed robbery, a bombshell audio recording obtained by DailyMailTV reveals.

And lawyers for the family of Ron Goldman, the friend of Nicole Brown Simpson who was murdered along with OJ's ex in 1994, believe the disgraced NFL star could have millions of dollars tucked away ready for his release on as soon as Monday. 

Simpson was famously acquitted of the double murder of Nicole and Goldman in 1995, but a civil court jury in 1997 found Simpson liable for their deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5million in damages to their families.

Enforcement lawyer David Cook, who represents Ron's father Fred Goldman, has been unsuccessfully trying to access the former star's assets ever since.

The audio tape sheds doubt on whether the 70-year-old nicknamed 'The Juice' has been truthful about his financial situation over the years.

Criminal fraud will likely land OJ straight back in jail, awaiting trial, if he ever sees free sunshine again. And criminal fraud charges could be enough to get his parole yanked, and transfer him right back to prison while this is investigated.

Boo frickin' hoo.

They should have shot his murdering ass when he ran in the first place.
Once a crook, always a crook.

Chutzpah Alert

 

Mayor of San Juan:

“I’m mad as hell because my people’s lives are at stake… We are dying, and you (Trump) are killing us with inefficiency.”

President Trump:

"Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 federal workers  now on island doing a fantastic job."

Apparently, the stacks of containers sitting undistributed on the docks at San Juan are the president's fault because he hasn't come down to hand out the water bottles personally, and the Puerto Ricans can't be bothered to distribute literal cargo containers of supplies themselves.

No doubt it's also Trump's fault that the island's government is bankrupt, short $74 billion in bonds since May, and another $49B in unfunded pension liability, having squandered billions of dollars, including FEMA grants, for a decade, without spending any of it on hardening and improving the island's decrepit infrastructure, despite the fact that PR gets hit by hurricanes nearly every year since forever, and instead blowing the money on failed social programs.

Calling it an island of lazy dumbasses run by a Democrat kleptocracy isn't racial profiling, it's predictive modeling based on decades of experience.

The main thing Puerto Rico brings to the table is the ability to make the District of Columbia, or Venezuela, look like well-run entities by contrast.

But after the actual well-run states like Texas and Florida were able to cope with disastrous hurricanes without any sniveling, trust the Fake News Machine at ABCNNBCBS to go into overdrive at the merest whiff of suggestion that somehow the response in Puerto Rico shows any sort of federal incompetence by contrast.

(BTW, why didn't Miami or Houston need a massive military airlift, aircraft carriers, and a hospital ship to cope with the same problems? Anyone? Beuller?...Ferris Bueller?)

UPDATE: Maybe because the local Teamsters weren't on strike, and using the hurricane relief effort as leverage to get a better contract, like they are in P.R. It would probably also have helped if over 50% of the called-up National Guard in Puerto Rico wasn't AWOL after the hurricane call-up.
Way to go, Leftard mediaholes. You might want to pick your pants up from around your ankles. And maybe wipe the derp off your face.

Saturday Puttering

 

 

Fire And Prosecute Jackbooted Thugs XXX

Now You Know Why Antifa Has Been Classified As A Terrorist Group...

 

Steven Crowder and his producer on Louder With Crowder infiltrated the Salt Lake City Antifa-tards, caught them on video planning to stab and shoot people, and turned it over to the police there, getting arrests prior to Ben Shapiro's speech there on Wednesday (SLCPD apparently taking a day off from beating up nurses), but when they showed the video to every news organization there, including ABC Nightline, they couldn't get them interested in the slightest.

 

 

Once More, With Feeling...

 

Shocking news: Rx meds cause drug abuse like legal gun owners cause crime sprees.

Yet another nail in the coffin of the attempts to blame Big Pharma and prescription-happy doctors for fueling a non-existent opioid problem is a great article yesterday by (medical) Dr. Jeffrey Singer (Misdiagnosing The Opioid Crisis) noting that what America has is not an Rx problem, it's a smack-shooting junkie problem:
 

While raids on black market drug dealers continue to net hauls from a seemingly endless sea of diverted, smuggled or counterfeit prescription opioids and heroin, policymakers can’t shake free of the myth that the opioid crisis is caused by doctors prescribing opioids to their patients in pain. 

The numbers show that isn’t the case. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in July that prescriptions of opioids by health care practitioners have continued their steady decline since 2010. The Drug Enforcement Administration has ordered cutbacks in the production of opioids by pharmaceutical companies — 25 percent last year and an additional 20 percent this year, for example. 

Since the late 1990s states have established prescription drug monitoring boards that maintain surveillance on providers and patients and have a chilling effect on prescribers. All 50 states have them today, and recent studies have shown they have had no effect on the overdose rate but may be driving desperate pain patients to the black market in search of relief. 

For example, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State University reported in May, prescription drug monitoring boards “were not associated with reductions in drug overdose mortality rates and may be related to increased mortality from illicit drugs and other, unspecified drugs.” 

Meanwhile, while this full-court-press on doctors and patients continues unabated, the overdose death rate from opioids hit a record high of 33,000 in 2015 — but the majority of deaths were from heroin, and deaths from fentanyl doubled over the previous year. Overdoses from prescription opioids, however, are stabilizing or even receding. 

Evidence suggests this may be happening because the crackdown on prescription opioids has made heroin cheaper and easier for non-medical users to obtain. In fact, the CDC director claimed in 2015 that heroin sells for one-fifth the street price of prescription opioids.

More proof, if you needed it, that government effs up everything it touches, in this case, by driving people off of Rx meds, and onto street drugs, where they can get way more bang for the buck, all the way to deader than canned tuna. Which they do.
(Yet again, some say "crisis"; I say Darwinism in action.)

And nota bene, I reject the good doctor's conclusion at the end of his essay, because all it amounts to is a way for government to multiply the problem by orders of magnitude yet again, and tax the enterprise, while shifting the profits from drug cartels to Big Pharma (and then to Congress via lobbyists, QED). This is not least because we have neither the country, the health care model, nor the citizenry we had over 100 years ago, before the Food and Drug Act. But the doctor's facts, excerpted above, are unassailable.

And this also underlines that while I don't know everything about everything, what I do know I generally know with near papal infallibility, including wee things like items well within the wheelhouse of my primary profession for the last 25 years. Like, say, who's coming in the ambulance bay doors after ODing since anytime after the Reagan administration.

But for some reason, neither Bitch McConjob's nor Quisling Ryan's office will take my calls.
Funny, I know.

Electric Vehicles Are A Tax On Stupid People

Based on the figures provided, much like the lottery, buying and operating an electric vehicle is clearly a tax on people too stupid to be able to do basic math.
Old NFO breaks it down for you at his blog.

According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity.  It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery.  The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned.  If you pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $0.36 per kwh. 16 kwh x $0.36 per kwh = $5.76 to charge the battery.  $5.76 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.23 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery.  Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg.  $3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile. 

I think this might be a little skewed, maybe high, but it still doesn’t take into account the hydrocarbons, etc. used to make the electricity. IMHO, the only ‘fair’ way to calculate the ‘carbon tax’, if you will, would be to also factor in the amount of hydrocarbons used to make the electricity vs. the hydrocarbons burned by a gas or diesel engine. And there are small diesel engines now getting 70mpg in Europe. I drove a little Mercedes with one.

 The gasoline powered car costs about $20,000 while the Volt costs $46,000-plus.  It looks like the “Greenies” in the American Government want loyal Americans NOT to do the math, but simply pay three times as much for a car, that costs more than seven times as much to run, and takes three times longer to drive across the country. 

RTWT

Why in blistering f*** anyone would pay twice to thrice the price of a new gasoline econo-box for a vehicle that delivers a 25 mile actual range is a subject best left to psychiatrists studying the insane.

You could by a new 4-cylinder car for that, and invest the rest in gasoline storage, and start out with only about a 200,000 mile improvement in range over a fully-charged Volt (which name has to be a Teutonic or somesuch approximation of "dolt", if we're talking about the prospective owners.)

I could see living with an electric car that got 200ish miles, if you charged it with solar panels and battery-stored energy daily, which would functionally decouple you from the grid for a quarter-century.

But 25 mile range, and at 3X the price and 7X the upkeep?
You'd literally have to have $#!^ for brains to even suggest, let alone consider seriously, adopting such an asinine option. It's the screen-door-on-a-submarine kind of stupid.

And The Turdball Gains Momentum

h/t Daily Sheeple

 

Apparently the Oakland Traitors' offensive line decided to punish their white QB for not kneeling before the game, allowing him to be sacked, snapping the ball on the wrong count, and receivers dropping easy catches to throw the game.

A new report from The Armstrong and Getty Radio Show has sent shockwaves throughout the sports world after it was claimed that members of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders may have purposefully allowed their star quarterback to get sacked multiple times after he refused to kneel during the National Anthem. 

If true, this would essentially mean that an NFL football game was illegally thrown over anger that one of the teams star white players did not believe that kneeling during the nations anthem was the correct way to protest supposed racial injustice in America. In other words, an epic level scandal.

Fixing a game gets into the territory where there are outside criminal investigations, because teams have owners, and sabotaging the product (the team's performance) becomes a criminal conspiracy.

Add to that news that NFL game ticket sales plummeted an extra 7% more than the same time last year, in a year when Colon Paperdick's first-year virtue-signaling antics were already killing interest in the games.

If we've reached this point, the entire wagonload of manure is now gloriously aflame, the driver has leapt to safety, and it's now careening for the precipice out of control.

Hey, spineless team owners, is it time to fire Goodell, shitcan the ringleaders, and suspend all participants yet?
Or do you want to wait for this to become all winter's congressional grandstanding investigation, on TV 24/7 for weeks on end?

Fire And Prosecute Jackbooted Thugs XXIX

Bandaging: Toys And Tools

Minimum requirements:

One pair EMT/trauma shears
You'll need them to cut away clothing to expose wounds, and they're also useful for constructing bandages, slings, etc. from ad hoc materials.

One pair Lister-style bandage scissors (5.5" or 7")
These are shaped like a small hockey stick, and have a blunt-tipped bottom blade, to slide under bandages to cut through them without cutting the patient.
Bigger ones give you more leverage, but they weigh more and take up more room in a kit, pocket, etc.

One really sharp set of pointed tissue scissors
Cleaning wounds and prepping them for bandaging may require small pieces of non-vital tissue to be trimmed away. Or in extremely horrible cases, finishing the job of amputation when a limb etc. is hanging on by naught but a shred of flesh.

One pair of tweezers/forceps
The types and varieties are endless. I have a small assortment on me every day on duty in the ER, no less than four in my movie medic kit, and a small surgery's worth in my home assortment.

Additional items you should have on hand:

Straight needles
Assorted sizes of straight needles.
For digging out small, superficial embedded splinters and other FBs (foreign bodies).
Not for doing sutures.

Safety pins, brass and stainless
For maybe $10-20, you could go to a craft or sewing store, and have dozens of these things, in sizes from micro to big enough to pin elephants' ears. And that's exactly the size range you should have, in stainless, and in brass. If you notice sets in black, they won't go amiss either. You should have, literally, about a 1# coffee can's worth of them, bagged in small ziplok craft bags, by size and material. Their utility is incredible, the size and weight negligible, and in a pinch, you're only going to have what you have.
In a local disaster, or SHTF, they will be worth their weight in gold.

Nice to have items, but not required

Hemostats, stainless and plastic, all sizes
The stainless $2 Pakistani ones work as well as the $10-20@ German ones. The cheaper Paki ones might rust sooner in frequent sterilization cycles, but that's a supply maintenance issue. Anything is better than nothing, and lifespan is a first-world problem, given the utility and cost parameters and being able to buy 10X as many for the same $$ outlay.
I use small "mosquito" sized clamps for extracting ingrown toenail portions prior to trimming the nails. (And yes, Virginia, an ingrown toenail produces a wound, in a wet, dirty, moist environment tailor-made to go septic, and untreated can become just as life-threatening as a bullet wound. Ask me how I know.) They're also good for grasping small FBs, pinning bandages in place while you're fiddling with tape rolls, clips, etc., clamping IV tubing, and a plethora of other uses. Ask the folks who work on electronics or tie trout flies how handy a third, forth, and fifth hand can be. I've accumulated enough, at this point, to do one complete open heart surgery, or run a small clinic forever, and those are just the discards from before they started recycling them, and stuff I pick up at swap meets, gun shows, etc.
For long-term storage, Break-Free/Rem-oil or WD-40 work great. Just clean it off and sterilize them before you move them into regular patient use.

For that matter, at some point you should probably get ahold of a decent surgical tech handbook, which explains how to clean, sterilize, store, and care for surgical instruments.

Tubular gauze frames
Tubular gauze, or stockinette, looks like solid woven tubes, in sizes ranging from baby fingers, up to big enough to go around a torso. The frames come in handy for fingers, toes, arms, and feet.
The gauze itself looks solid, like a knit sweater, but the key is it stretches into a fishnet stocking-configuration, and holds a sterile dressing against a wound with less supplies, incredible stretchiness, less likelihood of becoming an accidental tourniquet, while allowing more germ-killing UV near the injury, being less hot (imagine heavy wrapping in desert or near-tropical climates, pretty much like from California to Utah to Florida, or Hawaii), producing less sweat, not contributing to skin breakdown like repeated application and removal of adhesives, and providing less of a germ magnet than other wrappings, while also keeping dressings in place, and making it harder for delirious/confused/juvenile patients to pick and play with your handiwork.
It's pricey to get large rolls in every size, but it's worth it. When you can afford it, get it, one of each, and the frames, and learn how to use it. It's the medical definition of a killer ap.

You definitely don't need tubular gauze, but after you use it, you'll wonder why you ever did without it. But even if you get it, learn the old-school techniques, for the time or place when the best kit is replaced, of necessity, with the make-do type. Belt and suspenders, please.

Brain-Damaged F**ktards Still Don't Get It

Damage Control, Still F**king Up By The Numbers edition

For the benefit of the illiterate double-digit IQ players: any display whatsoever during the national anthem is still a me!me!me!-fest, for you attention-whoring douchebags, and just as obnoxious as the original displays, @$$holes.

Probably more so, since you have yet to apologize for the earlier virtue-signaling grandstanding, sh*tting on America, and wiping your @$$#$ with the flag, and have in fact doubled down, doing it now without the slightest bit of shame.

The national anthem isn't about you pampered sports pussies, it's about the country of US.
You want to put your hands somewhere, it's easy (unless you were born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia): your right hand goes over your heart, and your left hand goes at your side.

Linking your arms is the same middle finger to America that all your other antics have been, and we're not buying the bullsh*t.

Until you stop ALL DISPLAYS during the national anthem, other than one of humble respect for the flag and nation you live in, and under whose blessings you're all favored to be paid far more than you deserve for a pretty meager set of skills in anything but a society of bountiful plenty, you're all still just a bunch of disrespectful bums, who deserve to be kicked to the curb until you're forced to earn a real living at a real job, or fired by the spineless jellyfish who nominally run your League Of Losers.

There's no way to win this but to abandon this asinine course of action.

Until you get that through your brain-damaged thick skulls:

Go fuck yourselves.

Operation Sh*thook Broadens

What A Shock Dept.: Dr. Rasheed Hosein, Cadet Douchecanoe's mentor at USMA

So today, it turns out that future Leavenworth alum Spenser Rapone was mentored by the swarthy fellow, above, while attending the USMA, and at just about the time he became notably radicalized.

Rapone was a cadet from summer of 2012-graduation in 2016.

Hosein's bio:

Hosein began teaching at West Point in July 2011. Previously, he served as the director of Public Education for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago.
He was also Muslim Lay Chaplain at West Point, Officer in Charge of the Muslim Cadet Association, and Emeritus Facility Adviser of Phi Alpha Theta, a national history honor society of which Rapone was a member, according to a photo.

So, how's that Muslim Cadet Association working out, Army?

I'm sure it's purely coincidental, and the fact that Hosein is on "administrative leave" just now is similarly just more blazing coincidence.

I'm thinking Army CID and the FBI will be chatting up Professor Hosein, in yet another act of pure coincidence, but it leads one to wonder aloud:

Who the hell is running the United States Military Academy, and whatinblisteringf**k goes on up there when they're supposed to be training a highly dedicated American military officer corps?

Rapone is currently assigned to the 2nd BCT of 10th Mountain Division in upstate NY, just a hop, skip, and jump from USMA, and because of their winter/mountain focus, liable to be repeatedly deployed to A-stan as long as our forces are involved there. Which is also coincidentally *cough* classic espionage tradecraft *cough*. But that's something of interest to several three letter agencies, not my affair. Say, how many coincidences before something turns to "enemy action"? Checking for a friend.

So, exactly as predicted, seven years of cadets and the entire cadre during Rapone's period of attendance is going to be bending over for the Mother Of All Proctological Exams.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of co-conspirators. Like cockroaches, when you see one, there are always ten more you don't know about.

Why Moving To A "Red State" Hasn't Worked For You...

First you bitched about NYFS and Califrutopia.
Then you sent generations of spineless jerkweeds to D.C.
Now it's biting you in your ass in your home state.
And you wonder why?

Men Of The West has your answer today:

Conservatives and Christians have been losing the culture since the 1960’s.  Every time there’s a new front that opens, we fall back.  Churches lose their tax exempt status if they say something that upsets a politician, and it’s just accepted, and we fall back. Abortion is shoved down our throats, and we fall back. The government taxes us to pay for abortion, and we fall back. Prayer gets thrown out of public schools and we fall back. Christmas becomes a hateful word, and we fall back. The government takes over health care, demands we pay for abortion and abortifacients, and we fall back. Marriage – a sacrament of the Church – is taken from us and perverted in ways that the Church can only consider to be heresy, and we fall back. Lets face it, our backs are to the wall. 

Barack Obama wanted to “fundamentally transform” the United States, and this is the sort of transformation he was talking about. We are looking at the very realistic possibility of a Post-Christian America, where the history that we had, that tells us who we are and where we have come from, is wiped out and the shiny new Secular Utopia comes into being. Confederate statues being wiped out, our national symbols and traditions ceasing to matter, the left is actively trying to wipe out our cultural memory so that they can reshape us into something new.And sometimes, cultures die.  Sometimes, I look around, and I certainly feel like maybe I’m just a relic of a time long since passed.  I see “Conservatives” taking shots at Donald Trump when he says something right, but just in a way that they don’t approve of, and that’s why we keep losing these fights.  “Conservatism” is dead in the United States, and it’s because it has become infested with Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys who would rather go down to a glorious and noble defeat than push back against the enemies of western civilization for risk of offending them.

RTWT

Keep falling back. When you're finally standing in the ocean up to your @$$, tell me how that's going to work out for ya.

MOTW is wrong about only one thing: Conservatism didn't get us here.
Chickenshits who've pretended to be conservatives have.
Actual conservatives are the "hard right", and always have been.

Anybody who'd rather move than fight, rather fall back and find an unsullied spot, make soothing noises lest someone take them for actual humans with spines, and those people preaching "Let's not fight this battle, here, now, or ever" are the problem.
You've been betrayed for following sheep, instead of acting like lions. See where you are because of that.

And if you've been the one making those arguments right along, don't bother checking between your legs: there's nothing there.

Culture wars, like all wars, are won by the difficult people, the rude ones, the offensive ones, the obnoxious @$$holes willing to tell somebody pushing them "Go f*** yourself!", and back it up with fists or worse come the moment. They will not be the ones with social graces, but they'll be the ones who win the battles.

The revolution will not be played by Marquis of Queensbury Rules.
It will only be fought by those willing to fight, and with no qualms about gouging out eyes and kneeing crotches, and laughing about it afterwards.

Stop looking for poster boys and homecoming queens to tell you what to do.
If something needs sorting out, just go sort it out.

Fire And Prosecute Jackbooted Thugs XXVIII

 

Better Late Than Never

Two arrests for battery and rioting in four months.

Her employer, BUSD, is "studying" the situation.

Per comments:

O, happy day!

Malignant dwarf Yvette Felarca was arrested in Berzerkeley yesterday (again!).

Felarca is being held on $20,000 bail on suspicion of three misdemeanors: rioting, obstruction and battery.

Except she's already at liberty on bail for a July arrest stemming from state and federal charges of battery and inciting a riot over a year ago, in June of 2016 in Sacramento.

One can only hope her demonstrated pattern of endangering the public will get her held without bail pending further proceedings.
She's clearly a threat to public safety, and holds no respect for the law. Just the sort of person that needs to be kept in confinement, and probably also tested for rabies.

Hey, Berzerkely Pretend Police Department: See what happens when you coddle this kind of crap? Try doing your jobs more often, from the start, and maybe nip this crap in the bud.

"About to Be Shat Upon, From A Great Height..."

Go, Army. Rangers lead the way...

Item 1) Rapone's father has expressed sadness and disappointment at his disloyal fuck son's disgusting behavior. So there'll be no Bergdahl Mommy and Daddy Team pushing for leniency in the matter.

Item 2) The Dem. congressweasel who appointed Disloyal Fuck to West Point issued a statement of unmitigated and unequivocal condemnation:

The former Democratic congressman who nominated communist 2nd Lt. Spenser Rapone to West Point is now disavowing Rapone’s recent comments, which range from attacks on Secretary of Defense James Mattis to calls for political violence.
Former Democratic Rep. Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Rapone’s long history of extremist tweets, which include calling Mattis an “evil, vile f****,” is shocking, disappointing and abhorrent.
“Several years ago, I met Spenser Rapone when he was a high school student seeking an appointment to West Point,” Altmire said. “At the time, he was an outstanding, well-rounded student who came from a good family. I have not been in touch with him in the years since the appointment, and I was shocked and extremely disappointed in the recent reports of his indefensible actions.”
“The behavior of 2nd Lieutenant Rapone is symbolic of a larger problem in our society — the epidemic of incivility in our public discourse,” Altmire continued. “While I strongly support the rights of American citizens to express their opinions, the actions of 2nd Lieutenant Rapone are abhorrent and appear to be in clear violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in addition to being inconsistent with the values of the United States Military Academy. I have no doubt that the U.S. Army will take appropriate action.”

Item 3) Everything I told you yesterday is confirmed, and far worse on further investigation:

 Communist West Point graduate 2nd. Lt. Spenser Rapone called Secretary of Defense James Mattis the most “evil, vile f***” in the entire Trump administration.
After reports emerged tying Rapone to the Twitter account @punkproletarian on Monday, West Point issued a statement distancing itself from Rapone’s tweets, which included calling for political violence against the right, referring to Trump as a fascist, and openly promoting communism while in uniform. West Point also noted that Rapone’s chain of command had opened an investigation.
But one of the tweets which has so far escaped attention is Rapone denigrating Mattis in the most vulgar of terms.
In a tweet dated June 8, 2017, Rapone tweeted at a podcaster, stating: “Was so pumped for you to go in on Mattis on the latest ep. Definitely the most vile, evil fuck in the current administration.”

Not only that, but Rapone also attacked Vice President Mike Pence in a tweet from August: “Holy s*** what world do these people live in? “Mediocre and conservative?” Pence is a fucking medieval, cold-blooded killer.”

So he tagged POTUS, VP, and SecDef, the top three guys in every military member's chain of command, as they learn in about five minutes in boot camp.

All of the above noted his chain of command has initiated an investigation. I expect he'll be relieved, arrested, and confined within 48 hours, if not by close-of-business today.

So, if you're keeping score at home, that's three separate specifications of contemptuous statements (Art. 88), three for politicking in uniform contrary to regulations (Art. 92), one of conspiring with other service members to politic while in uniform (Art. 81), seven counts of conduct unbecoming (Art. 133), and seven more of acts contrary to good order and discipline (Art. 134). And they can still hang a specification of mutiny on him, which would be the cherry on the cake, and well within legal bounds (Art. 94).

The Army's not going to court-martial him, they're going to crucify him.

He's going to be demoted to E-1, confined at hard labor until his five-year service obligation expires, forfeit all pay and allowances, and in all probability be stripped of his diploma, degree, class ring, and ideally hung with a dishonorable discharge, and a happily non-expugnable federal felony rap sheet for life.

Which, considering he deserves to be flogged around the Army, then strung up, drawn and quartered, is actually quite an exercise in mercy.

When you're innocent, you want military justice.
When you're guilty, you want civilian justice.
When you're guilty in the military, you're so far from screwed you can't see it from where you are.
Put him in a tumbrel cart, and let the games begin.

And So It Grows

h/t Woodsterman, etc.

 

 

 

 

Call up the local MBA program, and ask how many businesses have a "Fuck our customers!" customer service model, and how long they stayed in business after adopting it.
The NFL must think it's Hollywood (oh, and ask the major studios how that plan is working out lately for them as well).

Fire And Prosecute Jackbooted Thugs XXVII

 

Your Tuesday Weekly Reader

Now that he's been back at it for several months (one hopes, to stay) Remus posts the Woodpile Report every Tuesday "or near enough".

Excerpt today:

The default model of self-suffiency survivalism is a Kains-like retreat, or more commonly, a community reminiscent of Old Order Amish except very remote and with robust defenses as espoused by Jeff Cooper, Mel Tappen and their successors. This is the base model, Mother Earth with AR-15s, orchards and cisterns, and hardy breeds of chickens. 

Off the peak of the mainstream bell curve are the warriors, partisans practicing combat and woodscraft by turns. Defense of home and country is the motive but base camps and small unit tactics, with its acronyms and stylized slang, are their community. It's the Red Dawn school of survivalism. Like all warriors they hold enemy conscripts to be targets and sources of supply, dangerous mainly for their numbers, heavy weapons and potential air support. It would be among the hardest of hard lives. 

At the far, far corner of the bell curve are the lone wolves, nomads who step away from notions of colony altogether. They're the hunter-gatherer-fishermen, the escape and evasion specialists, devotees of stone age bushcraft except with stainless steel and antibiotics. When pressed they travel by night and lay up by day. Social networking centers around trading and the extended family, the sort of "now and again" tribalism seen with fur trappers of the nineteenth century. This is the bedrock survivalism adored by makers of videos featuring debris shelters and covert trot lines and the like.

RTWT.

This week and every week. We've been favored with being featured there a couple of times, and his admiration is something we treasure. This is a kindred spirit, and a perspicacious mind, and one would do well to pay attention to his weekly assemblage of interesting items.
Go for the wisdom, stay for the art history and serendipitous side trips.

If you've got the time, go back and start with his current earliest (Issue 461ff.), the ones from this year when he rejoined the internet after a regrettable absence.

You'll be richer and wiser for it.

Retirement Announcement

h/t Gateway Pundit

A shitbag is as a shitbag does:

meet imminent court-martialee and soon-to-be-former Lt. of Infantry Spenser Rapone, USA

I'm spitballing here, but this is not Ass Carter's sashaying DoD, and I doubt the current SecArmy, the CoS, or SecDef Mattis will have any qualms about court-martialing this disloyal Army fuck, and every uniformed fucktard identifiable in his other posts, and putting him and them on the street at the speed of heat. Hopefully after a suitable period of time under confinement at hard labor, "while processing their discharges".

(And if not, the American military is completely over, and you read it here.)

You can thank Obozo's administration for letting this douchecanoe past the goalie, but I doubt he even sees daylight now that every troop in his outfit and chain of command knows what a vomitous bag of dung he really is.

Welcome to the Internet, comrade. Enjoy the tar and feathering coming to you in 3, 2, ...

For the civilian world:
                   

Article 81. Conspiracy 

(a) Any person subject to this chapter who conspires with any other person to commit an offense under this chapter shall, if one or more of the conspirators does an act to effect the object of the conspiracy, be punished as a court-martial may direct. - 10 USC 881

Article 88. Contempt towards officials

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct. -10 USC 888

Article 92. Failure to obey article or regulation
Any person subject to this chapter who—

(1) violates or fails to obey any lawful general order or regulation;

(2) having knowledge of any other lawful order issued by a member of the armed forces, which it is his duty to obey, fails to obey the order; or

(3) is derelict in the performance of his duties;

shall be punished as a court-martial may direct. -10 USC 892

Article 133. Conduct unbecoming an officer
Any commissioned officer, cadet, or midshipman who is convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman shall be punished as a court-martial may direct. - 10 USC 933

Article 134. General article
Though not specifically mentioned in this chapter, all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not capital, of which persons subject to this chapter may be guilty, shall be taken cognizance of by a general, special, or summary court-martial, according to the nature and degree of the offense, and shall be punished at the discretion of that court. - 10 USC 934



And if they've really got a hard-on for this bastard:


Article 94. Mutiny and sedition
(a) Any person subject to this chapter who—

(1) with intent to usurp or override lawful military authority, refuses, in concert with any other person, to obey orders or otherwise do his duty or creates any violence or disturbance is guilty of mutiny;

(2) with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or other disturbance against that authority is guilty of sedition;

(3) fails to do his utmost to prevent and suppress a mutiny or sedition being committed in his presence, or fails to take all reasonable means to inform his superior commissioned officer or commanding officer of a mutiny or sedition which he knows or has reason to believe is taking place, is guilty of a failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition.

(b) A person who is found guilty of attempted mutiny, mutiny, sedition, or failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition shall be punished by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.

-10 USC 894

 

IANAL, and *I* could make the cases on every one of those counts, and get a conviction in an afternoon.

Social media FTW.

And just to drive the point home:

Army CID should depose under oath and investigate every member of the USMA present while Rapone was there (that'd be seven years' worth of graduates), and all cadre officers, and every member of his current and past chains of command, and every member of his current unit up to battalion level, regarding what they knew and when they knew it, with a view towards sweeping out any tolerance for this level of shitbaggery.

This is a service academy for military officers of the United States, not the effing Hudson River School For Boys, however much the Army treats it like the latter.

When communism and sedition in uniform (TeeHee!) is as funny as a real goddam heart attack, they won't have to do this again next week, for about 50 years.

A Modest Proposal

 

Sunday

 

Monday

 

Print this logo up. Stick it on products next time you're at the supermarket. Stick it on the drive up menu at McDonald's (and BTW, TacoBell and KFC are also owned by PepsiCo). Doors to businesses. Signboards outside. Share the love everywhere you visit.

Talk to managers:

"Take a knee? Take a hike!"

Show pampered sportsholes that free speech works both ways. See how funny it is for them when major corporations start dropping the league like a hot potato.

 

Tuesday

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

 

GoodbyeDay

 

 

Game Over.

Bandaging: General Principles

General Principles Of Bandaging Treatment

Handwashing/gloves are everything's first step.
Clean hands and fresh gloves will save more lives than anything else you do. Don't be stupid, and make me pull this blog over and explain to you about Pasteur and Semmelweis, or the difference in hospital death rates pre- and post-Nightingale and Barton. Learn from history so you don't repeat it. Wash your nasty hands, with soap and water, or alcohol gel if you've got nothing else, and put on non-latex barrier gloves.
Every. Single. Time.

It's not ready to bandage until it's clean.
"The solution to pollution is dilution." They beat this ditty into medical student's heads for a good reason. Clean wounds heal; dirty wounds get infected. Wash it out, betadine it sterile, rinse it again, get a nail brush or toothbrush (used solely for the purpose) if necessary, but if it wasn't there before the wound, it's got to come out first, before you seal it in place with a bandage.

High Index of Suspicion.
That's not a cut over a fracture, it's an open fracture. That's an entry hole, not a shallow puncture. And yes, it probably did The Worst Thing You Can Imagine. Those are the assumptions you're allowed to make, and be pleasantly surprised if you're wrong. Underestimate, and you'll be unpleasantly surprised, and your patient may die, or have severe complications. Pessimism saves lives.

It's always "going to be fine." Unless it's way too late for that.
Your patient is in pain, scared, and usually reverts to the mental capacity of an airhead when they're hurt. That may be shock, denial, stupidity, or all three. There's no sense scaring the shit out of them. Smile, downplay the injury, and carry on. Calm, re-assuring, and competent solves a lot of problems you don't need to deal with.
The only exception is when someone is going to die, imminently, you know it, they know it, and there's nothing possible that can be done.

The guy who wrote that scene nailed it. Or was there IRL when it happened like that.
If that isn't what's going on with your patient, remember, just like a kid who does a face plant, people see your face and use it to gauge how effed up they are. Poker face, and cool competence are required. If you lose your shit, or look at them like something that crawled out of a zombie flick, they're going to lose theirs too. Now you're going to be trying to treat a panicky patient. Trust me, that never goes well. Calm 'em down, and wrap 'em up.

What goes in, may come out. Anywhere. Find all holes.
Somebody injured, by a bullet, shrapnel, a puncture, debris flying around in a hurricane or tornado, or things during a vehicle crash may have wounds you aren't seeing. Sometimes two for the price of one. This is why you "strip and flip"; it's where that "High Index Of Suspicion" comes in. If necessary, it's what those handy paramedic penny-cutting shears are for. Nothing's fine until you've seen it all, by direct eyeball examination. Don't assume; observe. Your eyeballs are a diagnostic tool. So is your brain. Break them out of storage, and put 'em to use.

Worstest firstest.
Tourniquets before dressings, dressings before ACE wraps, ACE wraps before band-aids, band-aids before ice packs. Splints nearly always come after bandages.
The best cure for bleeding isn't IVs or transfusions (which you may not have); it's to keep the blood inside the person it belongs to. Stop the spurting, then the dribbling, then the oozing. The petty crap will clot up on its own before you get there anyways.
Of course, you'll still have to clean it out and let it do that all over again, but if it isn't pumping when you start, it can wait until last.

If you can't see all of it, don't pull it out. 
I've related in the past the story about the Miracle Boy of Sierra Vista: impaled on rebar which punctured through the right ventricle of his heart, which then went on to sever and tamponade the right subclavian artery against his collar bone. Removal of the impaled object would have killed him twice in seconds. Firefighter/paramedics cutting it off utside the body, splinting it carefully in place, and taking him to have it removed in surgery saved his life. There is no exception to this rule. Cut an object off as needed, but if it goes in beyond what you can see, leave it be, and splint it in place. 

If you can't see inside, don't stick anything in but clotting gauze.
Movies are great fun, but you don't shove things, including instruments like hemostats, blindly into holes and "trust the Force" that you'll find what you're fishing for. Way beyond your scope, unless you're a board-certified surgeon, or a disciple of Torquemada and Mengele. Their exploits are not instruction manuals. Clotting gauze, or nothing.
{And for the inevitable questioner, tampons are stupid because: they absorb blood, without stopping the flow, requiring you to pull it (and all that blood you wanted to stay in your patient's circulation) out, ripping any scabs loose, and starting the bleeding again. And don't even get me started on those asinine sponge injectors. Either stop the bleeding with a clotting agent, or use a pressure dressing on the outside. Period. You might find some use for tampons as absorbent packing on a healing wound, but not to "plug" a fresh one; you'll just make external hemorrhage into internal hemorrhage. Repeatedly.} 

Direct pressure, elevation, pressure points, tourniquet. 
Live it, love it, learn it, use it.

If it's spurting, skip to tourniquet. 
Refer to the lesson notes on TCCC; while designed for combat care, the info on tourniquets is the same for anything requiring one.

Distal to proximal. 
Distal to proximal is medicalese for wrapping from the distant part towards the trunk, i.e. fingers towards hand, hand toward shoulders, or toes toward hips, wherever you're wrapping. It stays in place better, and fits neater.

CSM before/after: Circulation, Sensation, Movement.
Bandages and splints are wonderful things. Unless you've cut off pulses without meaning too, and created an impromptu tourniquet. Or something goes numb. Or it hurts worse than the wound itself, untreated. So you check function before your work, then you recheck it after you're done. And then regularly afterwards. If a bandaged limb was warm and bloody, and it's now cold, pale, purple, and tingly, you wrapped something a little too tightly. Re-do it, until you get it right.

And lest I forget:
Dressings are always sterile, and go next to the wound.
Single use. Appropriate disposal. Failing everything else, by burning.

Bandages need only be clean, and can be washed and re-used as needed.
Cut up a set out of an old cotton bedsheet. After you replace that with fresh-packed high-tech stuff, use those as part of your permanent training set. Almost like I've done this before, huh? (Somewhere amidst the flotsam hereabouts is a full set of now 26-year-old cotton-sheet roller bandages, cravats, torso binders, etc., all carefully banded and stored in an old surplus medic bag from circa WWII.) [Oh, and hydrogen peroxide is lousy for wound cleaning, but great for getting blood out of bandages before you launder or boil them for re-use, if that's practical and/or necessary in your situation. Probably also handy for getting blood stains out of the carpet before the authorities arrive, too. Just saying.]