I just finished over a year doing registry work all over SoCal. Last year was my 25th year in medical arts on purpose, my 20th year as an RN, and my 15th year in the ED. And despite that, I'm probably going to be forced by circumstances to continue my medical education.
And I finally have some free time for this, and for that.
So if I'm going to be tortured with more formal schooling, I'm dragging anyone listening along for the ride, not least of which because the best way to learn something is to teach it.
And blog boredom has overtaken me, so along with the other topics, it's probably time to download some of a fair lifetime-sized chunk of medical wisdom and experience.
I have a nagging feeling some of you out there are going to need it, and sooner rather than later. This isn't the first time I've done this here, and it won't be the last.
As a few dozen prior missives here would document.
So let's start with the Welcome To New Students.
For whatever reason, boredom, necessity, local or regional disaster, zombie apocalypse, fascination with the idea, or simply being the only one not all f**ked up by present circumstances, you're embarking on the care of others.
1) Thanks, from your patients and their significant others, if you do it right.
2) Woe unto you, from same, and their lawyers, if you don't.
3) Are you sure you're up to the task? Really sure??
4) Attendance at these lectures conveys no license to practice.
4a) Nota bene: Protestations contrary to #4 from anyone will be greeted with derision, and mocked mercilessly, including if called to testify in open court.
5) Actual attendance at certified institutions and passing actual examinations does.
6) Do 5, with all due haste and diligence.
7) You really sure you want to do this stuff?
8) Those of us in the field are not necessarily impressed, but we'll see how you do, and if you're still here after s**t gets real for you, we'll be much more impressed, and actually inclined to share and help you out. Pinky swear.
9) Nothing you've ever seen, anywhere, in any movie or TV, is probably anything like how it really is.
10) Your first homework assignment is to write #9 above in your head, 100 times, until you can repeat it from memory.
11) Sometimes, accidentally, it can come close. But by the time you can tell, you don't need anyone else to tell you when they're getting it right.
My intention is not to tell you everything. I don't know everything. There's neither the time, nor the room in my head, for all that. But what I do know, I know pretty damn well. I've been a first responder, EMT, registered nurse, medical instructor and educator, for pretty much half my life. That and five bucks gets me a large cup of whatever at Starbucks. I've worked with some pretty stellar physician assistants, physicians, and surgeons, and a whole lot of awesomely incredible nurses and medical techs. I have fought and bled to save people's lives, and gotten to the point that other people I respect think I know WTF I'm doing, most days and times. And that's worth more than 25 feet of diplomas and certificates. (I have those too. Big whoop.)
I am not a trauma surgeon, or a former 18D. But I promise you I've had my arms up to the elbows in more open chests of other people than you probably have, and curiously, at that point, no one usually asks you for your license and certifications.
Before we start, you may wish to reconsider bothering. Feel free to bypass these little features if you decide you don't need them, or simply don't care.
You would also do well to take a peek back in time and look up my prior offerings.
They are not graven on stone, but I think they'll help most reasonably intelligent people.
I am not infallible, and I have a far dimmer opinion of myself and my skills, based on actual experience, than anything you can pass along here, so if you think I have it all wrong, or I'm being too harsh about anything, I sincerely and humbly urge you to get over it.
That's all for now.
Get a good rest.
Lectures will be most every day, and weekly at minimum, because otherwise my procrastination-fu will probably keep me from ever getting this going, or continuing it.
Class starts tomorrow.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Current College Grads = Functional Morons
It's far worse than you thought:
Proof, if you needed it, that over 50% of college students shouldn't even be there, and that far more than 50% of college faculty (probably upwards of 80% outside the hard sciences) are incapable of educating anyone on anything, being functional morons themselves, albeit with advanced degrees.
This is stuff that a junior or senior in high school would have been expected to rattle off less than a generation ago, and information not unknown to any number of brighter middle school students.
Apparently, out of pity, they didn't administer the survey in question to actual tenured college faculty, at least not knowingly.
A college diploma has become the ultimate Participation Trophy in the educational Olympics. It got this way because for at least two generations, parents, students, alleged educators, and government busybodies have learned entirely the wrong lesson from the Scarecrow's tale in L. Frank Baum's beloved Wizard Of Oz.
The cost and benefit inflation that's invaded post-secondary education via Big Government has undeniably reached the point where the bubble has to burst; letting government pay for college has merely caused tuition to rise at orders of magnitude faster than outside inflation, saddling students with debt they'll never pay off in most cases, thus legalizing indentured servitude, and provided full employment for a generation of retarded hippies at thousands of unneeded and essentially worthless institutions of non-learning. And the difference between pay-for-play diploma mills and Harvard or Stanford is not really measurable with existing instrumentation. If you or anyone you know is college-bound despite these facts, at least plead with them to get their credits cut-rate, at the local community junior college "13th Grade", rather than buying them retail for upwards of $40K/year. There's no sense whatsoever in buying your BS gold-plated, at full mark-up.
Clearly, sheepskins from anywhere would be more valuable these days if they were printed on actual sheepskin. And the current ones, even from top colleges, would be more useful if they were printed on perforated sheets of Charmin.
But with these results, it's doubtful a plurality of college graduates know what to do with a roll of toilet paper if you handed it to them.
Nearly 10% of college graduates surveyed in a poll believe Judith Sheindlin, aka "Judge Judy," serves on the Supreme Court.CNN link
It also found that almost 60% of college graduates couldn't correctly identify a requirement for ratifying a constitutional amendment and 40% of college graduates didn't know that Congress has the power to declare war.Additionally, the poll revealed that less than 50% of college graduates surveyed know that presidential impeachments are tried before the U.S. Senate.
Proof, if you needed it, that over 50% of college students shouldn't even be there, and that far more than 50% of college faculty (probably upwards of 80% outside the hard sciences) are incapable of educating anyone on anything, being functional morons themselves, albeit with advanced degrees.
This is stuff that a junior or senior in high school would have been expected to rattle off less than a generation ago, and information not unknown to any number of brighter middle school students.
Apparently, out of pity, they didn't administer the survey in question to actual tenured college faculty, at least not knowingly.
A college diploma has become the ultimate Participation Trophy in the educational Olympics. It got this way because for at least two generations, parents, students, alleged educators, and government busybodies have learned entirely the wrong lesson from the Scarecrow's tale in L. Frank Baum's beloved Wizard Of Oz.
The cost and benefit inflation that's invaded post-secondary education via Big Government has undeniably reached the point where the bubble has to burst; letting government pay for college has merely caused tuition to rise at orders of magnitude faster than outside inflation, saddling students with debt they'll never pay off in most cases, thus legalizing indentured servitude, and provided full employment for a generation of retarded hippies at thousands of unneeded and essentially worthless institutions of non-learning. And the difference between pay-for-play diploma mills and Harvard or Stanford is not really measurable with existing instrumentation. If you or anyone you know is college-bound despite these facts, at least plead with them to get their credits cut-rate, at the local community junior college "13th Grade", rather than buying them retail for upwards of $40K/year. There's no sense whatsoever in buying your BS gold-plated, at full mark-up.
Clearly, sheepskins from anywhere would be more valuable these days if they were printed on actual sheepskin. And the current ones, even from top colleges, would be more useful if they were printed on perforated sheets of Charmin.
But with these results, it's doubtful a plurality of college graduates know what to do with a roll of toilet paper if you handed it to them.
Friday, January 15, 2016
The Revenant
After yesterday's thoroughly enjoyable flick experience, I was hoping to write another one today for this pic.
I was also hoping to win the Powerball and become a billionaire.
Both hopes turned out about the same.
Despite this being Leonardo DiCaprio, I hoped that he'd finally settled down to start making the movies I think he's probably capable of doing, with some years and seasoning under his belt. Evidently, he thinks he does his best work when near freezing to death.
He is mistaken, as was I.
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's would-be epic tale of survival in the frozen frontier of early 1800's America (and after all, who better to helm such a story than someone from the frozen wilderness of...Mexico? WTF??) is Leo, and a thoroughly unmemorable cast of redshirts, who mainly die off in droves to add some sense of urgency to this Hollywoodized tale of life and brutality in the wilderness.
The villain, some forgettable piece of porkchop who in both the real life 1800s, and five minutes into the movie, would have been picking his teeth off of someone's rifle butt, plays his role as an unredeemable douchebag to the hilt, which is also how he finally goes out, albeit 2 hours too late to suit me. Surprising me not a whit, he has no notion of wound care lore from no harder to find mention than the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, some 1800 years prior, but he does manage to drag God into his excuse for every shitty and villainous act he performs in the flick. Why the studio didn't just make him a child-molesting Catholic priest or a huckstering Protestant con man, and get it over with, is beyond me, but I'll bet someone in Tinseltown is kicking himself right this minute for not going there.
In fact, I've made no secret of the fact that in the utterly shitworthy flick Gravity, by 10 minutes into the movie at most, I was rooting for the debris to kill the entire cast. This movie is Gravity set in the Rockies in the early 1800s.
In true Hollywood fashion, the white men are all worthless, land-raping, Indian-hating, baby killers, while the native tribespeople are all just humble misunderstood noble savages, practicing sustainable living and low-impact low-carbon-footprint subsistence living in harmony with Mother Earth and Father Sky.
The token couple of decent white people are inept, while the Indians are ninja masters of stealth and Chris Kyle-esque archers, and the slob trappers only capable of laying around getting drunk, raping Indians and the wilderness, but bereft of such wilderness rudiments as map-reading, wayfinding, hunting for food, or basic care for injuries.
If he wasn't Leonardo DiCaprio, the Glass character would certainly have died from the collection of dogshit, buffalo chips, mud, piss, and other concoctions slathered on his wounds, sustained by a notable CGI-palooza of a grizzly bear attack, which underlines the salient point that .50BMG is not too much gun for such an encounter. Fortunately, when he's too weak to carry on, burning with fever from infected grizzly wounds after his mauling, and liable to die, his companions helpfully bump, bang, and clatter him all over hell and gone with naught but the bear's skinned hide to protect him from freezing temperatures. No one feeds him or gives him drink (they even leave a gaping hole in his throat to make such care impossible until he thoughtfully adds gunpowder wounds to the hole in his throat (because charred flesh always heals better than a clean cut, right?), but even after being abandoned by his companions (including the Villain - who could ever have seen that clever plot twist coming from Minute 5 of the movie? Okay, every swinging Richard in the theatre, we'll grant you... But Suspension of Disbelief, right? Right??) he helpfully crawls some miles on his belly, navigates down a 500 ft cliff, and then is helpfully revived by bouncing over rapids and rocks after a hasty immersion in 33-degree snowmelt to escape the avenging Indians.
Then he builds a wicked-clever textbook rock fishtrap, but has to resort to catching them with his hands instead of say, using a sharp pointy stick amidst lush forests, and eats them raw rather than slog the 10 feet to his campfire to cook them, because, fuck, I dunno...Gollum...??
Then, fat on trout or salmon, let alone motion picture craft service, he is forced to drag his raw-fish-eating ass to beg for food from a helpfully provided friendly Indian feasting on a convenient wolf-killed buffalo. Which same ravenous wolves somehow managed not to notice Leo's sleeping and injured ass 20 yards away. Evidently Leo didn't smell as bad in the wilderness as the writing does in this steaming pile.
Not to worry though, because after being the only effing one in the entire Great White North to know how to build a brush shelter during a blizzard, the friendly Indian gets whacked by more eeeeeeeeevil white men, the same ones who've kidnapped the Indian girl to serially rape for entertainment while trading with the Indians who killed the American white men because they were looking for the ones who stole the Indian woman who...oh, sweet suffering shit, White Men Bad, Red Men Noble, I get it! Quit beating the audience over the fucking head with that club in every scene, for fuck's sake!
Mind you, you can't take your eyes off the scenes. Because the director and the director of photography are co-conspirators in shoving the camera lens so far up the actor's asses you can see the lens fog when they fart. Apparently they only had 2 lenses, one a wide angle used to get panoramic shots of whereverinhell they shot the wilderness scenes, and one a 2000mm telephoto so they could show you the paramecium crawling on Leo's nose hairs in half the movie, during which he utters no actual dialogue more substantial than grunts of impotent and infirm rage and pain as he struggles to survive to the next page of script, while the audience struggles to find a reason for living.
By the end of this movie, the audience still awake has survived an ordeal far more grueling than anything seen on screen, and the entire cast is so one-dimensional and uninvolving you just want the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt and engulf them all in a well-deserved flaming apocalyptic conflagration.
Then the movie ends, and you wish the same fate would befall the entire chain of jackholes who inflicted this gargantuan pile of offal on the screen, as just punishment. And you envy the bear for being dead, and missing most of the whole saga.
I had hopes that this would be a worthy successor to iconic masterpiece movies like The Big Sky, Jeremiah Johnson, The Outlaw Josey Wales, or Dances With Wolves.
Alas, it is instead kin with movies like Barry Lyndon, Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, and Waterworld.
Maybe they should have just gone with it, and named it Plan 9 From Outer Montana.
Don't see this in the theatre. Don't watch it on cable. Don't even wait for the DVD/BD, or even catch it on Netflix. Buy it bootleg from China for 50 cents, or better yet, wait for it to be on sale in the bargain bin at BigLots! or the 99 Cent Store, and use the discs to make shiny hanging bird-scaring devices for your wife's herb garden.
I won't even go into everything wrong with this beyond that, save this brief catalog of howlers:
No one builds any fire not large enough to roast half a buffalo in; even the Schmohawk Indians here build monstrous huge White Man fires.
Savvy trappers mount no watch. Ever. And can't hunt or fish to save their lives.
Keep showing the map, but keep repeating that only Leo knows how to get us back home. Then, inexplicably, get back without his help.
No one has the slightest clue how to treat wounds, despite such lore, miles from the glories of 19th century medicine, being rather acutely needful on a daily basis.
Indian arrows fly flat and straight, and punch through flesh like crossbow bolts, hitting targets from beyond human sight.
There's no need, camping and trapping among savages, to do anything important like watch a perimeter, pre-load your gear, or do much besides laze around 5-ft tall campfires wondering where room service is.
No one, white or indian, can track even Leo's wounded dragging ass as he crawls along the ground for miles and days, but the indians can miraculously find the evil White Men time after time, apparently by trusting The Force, or using Indian GPS, or some other magical plot device, because Screenwriters.
The Indians will track down an encampment of fifty white men with guns in the middle of nowhere, but when just twenty white men set out to find Leo, the Indians are nowhere around, because Magic Torches.
Indian Strategy: If we just kill enough White men, we'll find the Missing Indian Maiden.
Leo Strategy: if I make it through 37 Unbelievable Ways To Die, I find the Indian Maiden (by accident, because Foreshadowing) and Help, and The Villain, because Screenwriting x Top Billing = Had To Happen, Given 2 1/2 Hours.
When you can't write anything believable, have your star gurgle and sputter and drool, because Method Acting. For Two Solid Hours.
White Man Bad, Red Man Noble. 100 times on the blackboard, lest ye forget. Despite the fact that at the time of Beethoven, railroads, and steamboats, the equivalent Indian civilization "deserved" the land, having successfully slaughtered, raped, and enslaved each other in an endless Stone Age cultural gang-bang going back to the first pre-Eskimoes to navigate across the Bering Sea in prehistory, unencumberd by anything closer than 10,000 years to equivalent Western culture. Because hysterical Historical Revisionism.
My rating: This movie left me totally cold.
And don't bitch to me about spoilers.
This POS was spoiled when it came out of the package.
All I did was give it a sniff.
I was also hoping to win the Powerball and become a billionaire.
Both hopes turned out about the same.
Despite this being Leonardo DiCaprio, I hoped that he'd finally settled down to start making the movies I think he's probably capable of doing, with some years and seasoning under his belt. Evidently, he thinks he does his best work when near freezing to death.
He is mistaken, as was I.
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's would-be epic tale of survival in the frozen frontier of early 1800's America (and after all, who better to helm such a story than someone from the frozen wilderness of...Mexico? WTF??) is Leo, and a thoroughly unmemorable cast of redshirts, who mainly die off in droves to add some sense of urgency to this Hollywoodized tale of life and brutality in the wilderness.
The villain, some forgettable piece of porkchop who in both the real life 1800s, and five minutes into the movie, would have been picking his teeth off of someone's rifle butt, plays his role as an unredeemable douchebag to the hilt, which is also how he finally goes out, albeit 2 hours too late to suit me. Surprising me not a whit, he has no notion of wound care lore from no harder to find mention than the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, some 1800 years prior, but he does manage to drag God into his excuse for every shitty and villainous act he performs in the flick. Why the studio didn't just make him a child-molesting Catholic priest or a huckstering Protestant con man, and get it over with, is beyond me, but I'll bet someone in Tinseltown is kicking himself right this minute for not going there.
In fact, I've made no secret of the fact that in the utterly shitworthy flick Gravity, by 10 minutes into the movie at most, I was rooting for the debris to kill the entire cast. This movie is Gravity set in the Rockies in the early 1800s.
In true Hollywood fashion, the white men are all worthless, land-raping, Indian-hating, baby killers, while the native tribespeople are all just humble misunderstood noble savages, practicing sustainable living and low-impact low-carbon-footprint subsistence living in harmony with Mother Earth and Father Sky.
The token couple of decent white people are inept, while the Indians are ninja masters of stealth and Chris Kyle-esque archers, and the slob trappers only capable of laying around getting drunk, raping Indians and the wilderness, but bereft of such wilderness rudiments as map-reading, wayfinding, hunting for food, or basic care for injuries.
If he wasn't Leonardo DiCaprio, the Glass character would certainly have died from the collection of dogshit, buffalo chips, mud, piss, and other concoctions slathered on his wounds, sustained by a notable CGI-palooza of a grizzly bear attack, which underlines the salient point that .50BMG is not too much gun for such an encounter. Fortunately, when he's too weak to carry on, burning with fever from infected grizzly wounds after his mauling, and liable to die, his companions helpfully bump, bang, and clatter him all over hell and gone with naught but the bear's skinned hide to protect him from freezing temperatures. No one feeds him or gives him drink (they even leave a gaping hole in his throat to make such care impossible until he thoughtfully adds gunpowder wounds to the hole in his throat (because charred flesh always heals better than a clean cut, right?), but even after being abandoned by his companions (including the Villain - who could ever have seen that clever plot twist coming from Minute 5 of the movie? Okay, every swinging Richard in the theatre, we'll grant you... But Suspension of Disbelief, right? Right??) he helpfully crawls some miles on his belly, navigates down a 500 ft cliff, and then is helpfully revived by bouncing over rapids and rocks after a hasty immersion in 33-degree snowmelt to escape the avenging Indians.
Then he builds a wicked-clever textbook rock fishtrap, but has to resort to catching them with his hands instead of say, using a sharp pointy stick amidst lush forests, and eats them raw rather than slog the 10 feet to his campfire to cook them, because, fuck, I dunno...Gollum...??
Then, fat on trout or salmon, let alone motion picture craft service, he is forced to drag his raw-fish-eating ass to beg for food from a helpfully provided friendly Indian feasting on a convenient wolf-killed buffalo. Which same ravenous wolves somehow managed not to notice Leo's sleeping and injured ass 20 yards away. Evidently Leo didn't smell as bad in the wilderness as the writing does in this steaming pile.
Not to worry though, because after being the only effing one in the entire Great White North to know how to build a brush shelter during a blizzard, the friendly Indian gets whacked by more eeeeeeeeevil white men, the same ones who've kidnapped the Indian girl to serially rape for entertainment while trading with the Indians who killed the American white men because they were looking for the ones who stole the Indian woman who...oh, sweet suffering shit, White Men Bad, Red Men Noble, I get it! Quit beating the audience over the fucking head with that club in every scene, for fuck's sake!
Mind you, you can't take your eyes off the scenes. Because the director and the director of photography are co-conspirators in shoving the camera lens so far up the actor's asses you can see the lens fog when they fart. Apparently they only had 2 lenses, one a wide angle used to get panoramic shots of whereverinhell they shot the wilderness scenes, and one a 2000mm telephoto so they could show you the paramecium crawling on Leo's nose hairs in half the movie, during which he utters no actual dialogue more substantial than grunts of impotent and infirm rage and pain as he struggles to survive to the next page of script, while the audience struggles to find a reason for living.
By the end of this movie, the audience still awake has survived an ordeal far more grueling than anything seen on screen, and the entire cast is so one-dimensional and uninvolving you just want the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt and engulf them all in a well-deserved flaming apocalyptic conflagration.
Then the movie ends, and you wish the same fate would befall the entire chain of jackholes who inflicted this gargantuan pile of offal on the screen, as just punishment. And you envy the bear for being dead, and missing most of the whole saga.
I had hopes that this would be a worthy successor to iconic masterpiece movies like The Big Sky, Jeremiah Johnson, The Outlaw Josey Wales, or Dances With Wolves.
Alas, it is instead kin with movies like Barry Lyndon, Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, and Waterworld.
Maybe they should have just gone with it, and named it Plan 9 From Outer Montana.
Don't see this in the theatre. Don't watch it on cable. Don't even wait for the DVD/BD, or even catch it on Netflix. Buy it bootleg from China for 50 cents, or better yet, wait for it to be on sale in the bargain bin at BigLots! or the 99 Cent Store, and use the discs to make shiny hanging bird-scaring devices for your wife's herb garden.
I won't even go into everything wrong with this beyond that, save this brief catalog of howlers:
No one builds any fire not large enough to roast half a buffalo in; even the Schmohawk Indians here build monstrous huge White Man fires.
Savvy trappers mount no watch. Ever. And can't hunt or fish to save their lives.
Keep showing the map, but keep repeating that only Leo knows how to get us back home. Then, inexplicably, get back without his help.
No one has the slightest clue how to treat wounds, despite such lore, miles from the glories of 19th century medicine, being rather acutely needful on a daily basis.
Indian arrows fly flat and straight, and punch through flesh like crossbow bolts, hitting targets from beyond human sight.
There's no need, camping and trapping among savages, to do anything important like watch a perimeter, pre-load your gear, or do much besides laze around 5-ft tall campfires wondering where room service is.
No one, white or indian, can track even Leo's wounded dragging ass as he crawls along the ground for miles and days, but the indians can miraculously find the evil White Men time after time, apparently by trusting The Force, or using Indian GPS, or some other magical plot device, because Screenwriters.
The Indians will track down an encampment of fifty white men with guns in the middle of nowhere, but when just twenty white men set out to find Leo, the Indians are nowhere around, because Magic Torches.
Indian Strategy: If we just kill enough White men, we'll find the Missing Indian Maiden.
Leo Strategy: if I make it through 37 Unbelievable Ways To Die, I find the Indian Maiden (by accident, because Foreshadowing) and Help, and The Villain, because Screenwriting x Top Billing = Had To Happen, Given 2 1/2 Hours.
When you can't write anything believable, have your star gurgle and sputter and drool, because Method Acting. For Two Solid Hours.
White Man Bad, Red Man Noble. 100 times on the blackboard, lest ye forget. Despite the fact that at the time of Beethoven, railroads, and steamboats, the equivalent Indian civilization "deserved" the land, having successfully slaughtered, raped, and enslaved each other in an endless Stone Age cultural gang-bang going back to the first pre-Eskimoes to navigate across the Bering Sea in prehistory, unencumberd by anything closer than 10,000 years to equivalent Western culture. Because hysterical Historical Revisionism.
My rating: This movie left me totally cold.
And don't bitch to me about spoilers.
This POS was spoiled when it came out of the package.
All I did was give it a sniff.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
13 Hours
This is a damned good flick.
The last time you saw something done this well was Blackhawk Down by Ridley Scott (funny how most American military misadventures always seem to have a Clinton's sticky fingerprints somewhere around the body count).
Michael Bay avoids going completely over the top with effects, and restrains himself with making what is simply an outstanding men-under-fire study. Shot in Malta, which provides a great stand-in for Libya without any of the ISIS problems, it feels right and looks right. And former Seal/associate producer Harry Humphries kept things from going too Hollywood.
Bay doesn't pull any punches, but he also didn't trot out and club you to death with shots of HopeyDopey nodding off during his intel briefing, or Shrillary saying "F--- 'em!" in the WH Sit Room as our guys died, but he doesn't have to: characters noting that the Pentagon had the same video they had in real time, JSOC ninjas sitting on the ground in Italy, and American F-16s sitting idle on the ramp told a thousand words of that story with single pictures.
You won't see this one up for any Oscars next year, because it damns all the wrong sorts of people, and upholds all the right virtues.
But this 2 hours and 20 minutes of cinema will do as much to put the final nail into Shrillary's presidential aspirations as the multi-count indictments will.
Even aside from that, you should go see this movie for its own sake, because it's that good, and not just to rub Hollywood's nose in what it should have been doing onscreen for the last 20 years, by supporting movies that set liberal jackholes' teeth on edge. That'll just be icing on the cake.
Buying a ticket to see this one is like getting a coupon for one free hippie punch.
The last time you saw something done this well was Blackhawk Down by Ridley Scott (funny how most American military misadventures always seem to have a Clinton's sticky fingerprints somewhere around the body count).
Michael Bay avoids going completely over the top with effects, and restrains himself with making what is simply an outstanding men-under-fire study. Shot in Malta, which provides a great stand-in for Libya without any of the ISIS problems, it feels right and looks right. And former Seal/associate producer Harry Humphries kept things from going too Hollywood.
Bay doesn't pull any punches, but he also didn't trot out and club you to death with shots of HopeyDopey nodding off during his intel briefing, or Shrillary saying "F--- 'em!" in the WH Sit Room as our guys died, but he doesn't have to: characters noting that the Pentagon had the same video they had in real time, JSOC ninjas sitting on the ground in Italy, and American F-16s sitting idle on the ramp told a thousand words of that story with single pictures.
You won't see this one up for any Oscars next year, because it damns all the wrong sorts of people, and upholds all the right virtues.
But this 2 hours and 20 minutes of cinema will do as much to put the final nail into Shrillary's presidential aspirations as the multi-count indictments will.
Even aside from that, you should go see this movie for its own sake, because it's that good, and not just to rub Hollywood's nose in what it should have been doing onscreen for the last 20 years, by supporting movies that set liberal jackholes' teeth on edge. That'll just be icing on the cake.
Buying a ticket to see this one is like getting a coupon for one free hippie punch.
Monday, January 4, 2016
The Farce Awakens - Spoilerpalooza
I tried not to write this review, but there isn't enough Zofran in the world to contain the nausea this disasterpiece engenders.
Caveats:
1) I can be as geeky as the next ubergeeky person over the Star Wars franchise given sufficient provocation; at the tender age of (mumblemumble) I stood with my baby brother in a line that stretched around the entire theatre and down the block to see it when it opened, at the then-unheard of luxurious two-screen movie theatre in the 'burbs of Los Angeles. (It's a Crate & Barrel now). I probably saw it five times that spring/summer alone. It was pure unequalled iconic big-screen magic. I had the soundtrack album. Blah blah blah. My geek flag is at full mast, and my bona fides secure.
2) They had TEN EFFING YEARS to write and make this sequel; they had ONE job...
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I feel something terrible has happened.
My Review: It's an irredeemable piece of shit.
Pray, let me elucidate.
It has ample effects, two generations more advanced that the humble matte painting and rotoscoping of the original in 1977.
It is digitized and sound-rich beyond even George Lucas THX-fueled imagination.
But that's icing. And not nearly enough to save this mega-whale of craptacity, this hippopotamus of horseshit, this sub-continent of putrescence.
Because the original was a scrappy indie-feeling movie of gifted nobodies and solid professionals that captured lightning in a bottle, where story, craft, music, effects, locations, dialogue, and the Campbell-esque Journey Of The Hero combined to give the entire world a brand new widescreen epic story we'd known all our lives.
This outing looks like a herd of buffalo ate the original film, shat it out their ample haunches, trampled and pissed upon it, and then J.J. Abrams scraped it together and spliced it into something so horrible, the like hasn't been seen since, oops, actually since Star Trek: Into Dorkness circled the bowl a couple of short years ago.
This movie didn't pay homage to the original Star Wars, it aped it, except badly, classlessly, and with less talent everywhere on the call sheet.
We open with a silhouette of a giant Imperial cruiser swooping down on a helpless desert planet. (Those of you who remember the first Star Wars before they started numbering the crawls, stop me if you've seen this somewhere before...)
Then, we have the epitome of evil evilly slaughtering innocents in an epic evil mismatch. (Again, stop me if you've seen this somewhere before.)
Then Ultimate Evil Bad Guy storms onto the scene, looking for a droid carrying the Empire's secret plans for an All New, Even Bigger Death Star being smuggled to the rebellion.
(Stop me if you've seen this somewhere before.)
Then His Cosmic Badness throttles some petty redshirt bit player, and takes a captive aboard his ship to question. (I'll simply abbreviate this to "SMIYSTSB..." from here on out.)
Then we cut to said droid bopping along alone on said desert planet. SMIYSTSB.
It happenstantially blunders into a plucky but Force-strong bumpkin on said desert planet. SMIYSTSB.
Then, in a blinding leap to a new ideaDenzel Washington Will Smith Chris Rock Martin Lawrence (oops, forgot Billie Dee Williams) Sumdoodyou'veneverfrickingheardofbefore decides to bail out of Whitey's Gestapo, because puppies, unicorns, and reasons, because ticking off plot points, and as luck would have it, needs the greatest starship pilot evah to escape the Imperial clutches. SMIYSTSB.
And then tens of thousands of trained troops armed to the teeth, and a starship the size of Florida are no match for their plucky escape from His Evil Badness. SMIYSTSB.
And they escape to the desert planet. While His Evil Badness vows to swoop down and reclaim his prey, and save the Empire from rebel scum. SMIYSTSB.
After bowing to Big Giant Head, deformed with the scars that only come from being the Evil Genius of the Dark Side. SMIYSTSB.
I could go on, endlessly (like the movie) stumbling from every exact scene stolen from the first three movies, and every script idea and plot point from the first three movies, and all done with less panache, originality, or necessity than the first three movies, but - exactly like this movie - to what end?
Then, inevitably, there are the gazillion "Everything Wrong With This Movie" stumbles, bumbles, and outright fuckups.
1) WTF? Doesn't anybody in theEmpire First Order have a copy of where Darth and Palpatine went off the rails on a shelf somewhere?
2) The whole thing that made Darth Evil Incarnate was the black skull mask, which he only pulled off five seconds before he died, after a lead-in of THREE FUCKING MOVIES. This guy can't last 2 hours before whipping his off. Imagine seeing the entire shark in Jaws in every scene for an hour, rather than halfway through the movie. Or giving Anthony Perkins away in the opening shot of Psycho. Blistering fuck, someone send J.J. a screenwriting book or something.
3) While we're at it, the original took the imposing size of Anthony Prowse and the Ultimate Voice Of All Time to personify Vader. The guy in this flick looks like someone so goofy looking and unimposingly dorkish that Peter Jackson couldn't even find a part for him in Lord Of The Rings or The Hobbit. But if Andy Sirkis and Jerry Seinfeld ever had a gay test tube love child, this guy is it. Like the PC ersatz Blofeld in the last retchworthy Bond flick, this guy is out-eviled in the looks department by Mini-Me.
4) Luke and Leia wiped out the Emperor, reclaimed Darth, and wiped the Empire off the map. So WTF is it doing back, bigger and badder than ever?
5) HTF does Junior Vader have the ability to stop blaster energy bolts in midair and suspend people in the air with a wave of his Sith hand? Even Palpatine couldn't do that shit, and Vader had to resort to physically cracking necks from time to time. The only explanation that works is that the new Sith are 'roided up on synthetic mitichlorions or something.
6) It took Luke three movies, and training by Obi Wan and Yoda to become a full Jedi, but Plucky Orphan Chick can pull that shit off in less than half a movie? Calling BS there too.
7) The Empire stand-in just happens to build a convenient weak point into the New Mega-Death Ball? SMIYSTSB
That requires ships to fly into it and blow up the core? SMIYSTSB
While a small rebel force infiltrates the shield generator on the surface? SMIYSTSB
Fuck me for noticing, but the only way to telegraph this from farther back than 1977 would have been if the entire crew of the damned thing was made up of Oompa Loompahs.
8) Seeing Karen Allen in the last Indiana Jones And The Temple Of What The Fuck is enough to make any male fan of the original movie turn gay, after one look at her in her senior-citizen prime. Merciful heavens, she was cute enough in the original movie, and Animal House, and Starman, to never ruin that by showing her to us trying to be an ingénue in Depends.
So what effing genius thought torturing Carrie Fisher into dropping 30 pounds just to drag her ancient ass onto the screen in this one was worth the effort?? I almost barfed out an entire bag of pocorn with that reveal in this flick. I remember where I saw Fisher looking like this: she was one of the mummies in the first Indiana Jones.
Shades of Cryptkeeper.
9) Harrison Ford clearly paid big bucks to get shanked like such a bitch in this flick. We haven't seen this monumental a betrayal of a character since Samuel Jackson took it in the pants in the prequels. But to get him out of any more of these outings, it was either this, or like Alec Guiness and Denholm Eliot, actually die to avoid the sequels.
Even at 70, Han still would've shot first, you effing pussy screenwriting wannabes.
Where is the real Captain Solo, and what have they done with him?
I'll stop there, with the prediction that the YouTube version of Everything Wrong With The Force Awakens In Five Minutes will be retitled Everything Wrong With The Force Awakens In One Hundred Thirty Six Minutes, and simply provide a link to the complete film online.
Abrams proved, with the reboot of Star Trek, that he could pull this kind of thing off, with a little magic, and a whole lot of lens flare.
With Star Trek: Into Dorkness and this festering pile of hog dung, he also proved that was a one-time fluke. There is no cinematic immunity for this level of crimes against humanity.
(And I'm 98% certain at this point that J.J. stands for Jar Jar.)
Please, someone, yank this franchise away from him, before he Sam Mendes' in his pants, and all over the entire franchise, and pay any price, bear any burden, to get the only guy in Hollywood to master sequels well enough to ace three tentpole franchise movies in a row: Peter Jackson. (Something that even Coppola couldn't do with Godfather movies.)
Or go get Joss Wheedon to do it, since we're never going to get anything more of Firefly out of him, and cross the streams of geekness between Browncoats and Star Wars groupies (like they aren't mostly the exact same people anyway). Hell, let him have fun with it: Mal, Zoe, Wash, Jayne, Kaylee, and the gang couldn't possibly have made any bigger hash of things than this POS did. And Ron Glass would make one hell of an updated Jedi Master.
The worst thing is that if you've never seen the earlier movies, you can't watch this movie.
And if you have seen the earlier movies, you can't watch this movie. Without screaming.
But now that they've made their pile off of us hopelessly gullibly optimistic fans, if you haven't seen it yet, don't. Proving that Disney's check for $6 B-b-b-b-billion has cleared, even Himself, George Lucas, creator of the whole shebang, and who knows raping his own franchise when hedoes it himself sees it, has called this thing out for the monumental douchiness it brings to life in living color. When Shakespeare tells you that your version of Hamlet sucks, it sucks.
There is one bright silver lining in this entire fiasco:
Seth Green and the wonderful folks at Robot Chicken will be able to make a living ripping the guts out of this one in Claymation genius for decades, just off this one atrocious misadventure.
Given the comedy gold of their prior work, that is no small consolation.
Like many of you, I'll still hope they somehow pull their heads out for the last two, but after seeing this one, I will hope that with about as much likelihood as I have of ever having James Cameron feature Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn awake from the hypersleep of Aliens, and say "Damn, I had the worst nightmares...!" and then pretend everything cinematically before then never happened.
Which was how I felt after I walked out of the theatre for this one.
Caveats:
1) I can be as geeky as the next ubergeeky person over the Star Wars franchise given sufficient provocation; at the tender age of (mumblemumble) I stood with my baby brother in a line that stretched around the entire theatre and down the block to see it when it opened, at the then-unheard of luxurious two-screen movie theatre in the 'burbs of Los Angeles. (It's a Crate & Barrel now). I probably saw it five times that spring/summer alone. It was pure unequalled iconic big-screen magic. I had the soundtrack album. Blah blah blah. My geek flag is at full mast, and my bona fides secure.
2) They had TEN EFFING YEARS to write and make this sequel; they had ONE job...
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I feel something terrible has happened.
My Review: It's an irredeemable piece of shit.
Pray, let me elucidate.
It has ample effects, two generations more advanced that the humble matte painting and rotoscoping of the original in 1977.
It is digitized and sound-rich beyond even George Lucas THX-fueled imagination.
But that's icing. And not nearly enough to save this mega-whale of craptacity, this hippopotamus of horseshit, this sub-continent of putrescence.
Because the original was a scrappy indie-feeling movie of gifted nobodies and solid professionals that captured lightning in a bottle, where story, craft, music, effects, locations, dialogue, and the Campbell-esque Journey Of The Hero combined to give the entire world a brand new widescreen epic story we'd known all our lives.
This outing looks like a herd of buffalo ate the original film, shat it out their ample haunches, trampled and pissed upon it, and then J.J. Abrams scraped it together and spliced it into something so horrible, the like hasn't been seen since, oops, actually since Star Trek: Into Dorkness circled the bowl a couple of short years ago.
This movie didn't pay homage to the original Star Wars, it aped it, except badly, classlessly, and with less talent everywhere on the call sheet.
We open with a silhouette of a giant Imperial cruiser swooping down on a helpless desert planet. (Those of you who remember the first Star Wars before they started numbering the crawls, stop me if you've seen this somewhere before...)
Then, we have the epitome of evil evilly slaughtering innocents in an epic evil mismatch. (Again, stop me if you've seen this somewhere before.)
Then Ultimate Evil Bad Guy storms onto the scene, looking for a droid carrying the Empire's secret plans for an All New, Even Bigger Death Star being smuggled to the rebellion.
(Stop me if you've seen this somewhere before.)
Then His Cosmic Badness throttles some petty redshirt bit player, and takes a captive aboard his ship to question. (I'll simply abbreviate this to "SMIYSTSB..." from here on out.)
Then we cut to said droid bopping along alone on said desert planet. SMIYSTSB.
It happenstantially blunders into a plucky but Force-strong bumpkin on said desert planet. SMIYSTSB.
Then, in a blinding leap to a new idea
And then tens of thousands of trained troops armed to the teeth, and a starship the size of Florida are no match for their plucky escape from His Evil Badness. SMIYSTSB.
And they escape to the desert planet. While His Evil Badness vows to swoop down and reclaim his prey, and save the Empire from rebel scum. SMIYSTSB.
After bowing to Big Giant Head, deformed with the scars that only come from being the Evil Genius of the Dark Side. SMIYSTSB.
I could go on, endlessly (like the movie) stumbling from every exact scene stolen from the first three movies, and every script idea and plot point from the first three movies, and all done with less panache, originality, or necessity than the first three movies, but - exactly like this movie - to what end?
Then, inevitably, there are the gazillion "Everything Wrong With This Movie" stumbles, bumbles, and outright fuckups.
1) WTF? Doesn't anybody in the
2) The whole thing that made Darth Evil Incarnate was the black skull mask, which he only pulled off five seconds before he died, after a lead-in of THREE FUCKING MOVIES. This guy can't last 2 hours before whipping his off. Imagine seeing the entire shark in Jaws in every scene for an hour, rather than halfway through the movie. Or giving Anthony Perkins away in the opening shot of Psycho. Blistering fuck, someone send J.J. a screenwriting book or something.
3) While we're at it, the original took the imposing size of Anthony Prowse and the Ultimate Voice Of All Time to personify Vader. The guy in this flick looks like someone so goofy looking and unimposingly dorkish that Peter Jackson couldn't even find a part for him in Lord Of The Rings or The Hobbit. But if Andy Sirkis and Jerry Seinfeld ever had a gay test tube love child, this guy is it. Like the PC ersatz Blofeld in the last retchworthy Bond flick, this guy is out-eviled in the looks department by Mini-Me.
4) Luke and Leia wiped out the Emperor, reclaimed Darth, and wiped the Empire off the map. So WTF is it doing back, bigger and badder than ever?
5) HTF does Junior Vader have the ability to stop blaster energy bolts in midair and suspend people in the air with a wave of his Sith hand? Even Palpatine couldn't do that shit, and Vader had to resort to physically cracking necks from time to time. The only explanation that works is that the new Sith are 'roided up on synthetic mitichlorions or something.
6) It took Luke three movies, and training by Obi Wan and Yoda to become a full Jedi, but Plucky Orphan Chick can pull that shit off in less than half a movie? Calling BS there too.
7) The Empire stand-in just happens to build a convenient weak point into the New Mega-Death Ball? SMIYSTSB
That requires ships to fly into it and blow up the core? SMIYSTSB
While a small rebel force infiltrates the shield generator on the surface? SMIYSTSB
Fuck me for noticing, but the only way to telegraph this from farther back than 1977 would have been if the entire crew of the damned thing was made up of Oompa Loompahs.
8) Seeing Karen Allen in the last Indiana Jones And The Temple Of What The Fuck is enough to make any male fan of the original movie turn gay, after one look at her in her senior-citizen prime. Merciful heavens, she was cute enough in the original movie, and Animal House, and Starman, to never ruin that by showing her to us trying to be an ingénue in Depends.
So what effing genius thought torturing Carrie Fisher into dropping 30 pounds just to drag her ancient ass onto the screen in this one was worth the effort?? I almost barfed out an entire bag of pocorn with that reveal in this flick. I remember where I saw Fisher looking like this: she was one of the mummies in the first Indiana Jones.
Shades of Cryptkeeper.
9) Harrison Ford clearly paid big bucks to get shanked like such a bitch in this flick. We haven't seen this monumental a betrayal of a character since Samuel Jackson took it in the pants in the prequels. But to get him out of any more of these outings, it was either this, or like Alec Guiness and Denholm Eliot, actually die to avoid the sequels.
Even at 70, Han still would've shot first, you effing pussy screenwriting wannabes.
Where is the real Captain Solo, and what have they done with him?
I'll stop there, with the prediction that the YouTube version of Everything Wrong With The Force Awakens In Five Minutes will be retitled Everything Wrong With The Force Awakens In One Hundred Thirty Six Minutes, and simply provide a link to the complete film online.
Abrams proved, with the reboot of Star Trek, that he could pull this kind of thing off, with a little magic, and a whole lot of lens flare.
With Star Trek: Into Dorkness and this festering pile of hog dung, he also proved that was a one-time fluke. There is no cinematic immunity for this level of crimes against humanity.
(And I'm 98% certain at this point that J.J. stands for Jar Jar.)
Please, someone, yank this franchise away from him, before he Sam Mendes' in his pants, and all over the entire franchise, and pay any price, bear any burden, to get the only guy in Hollywood to master sequels well enough to ace three tentpole franchise movies in a row: Peter Jackson. (Something that even Coppola couldn't do with Godfather movies.)
Or go get Joss Wheedon to do it, since we're never going to get anything more of Firefly out of him, and cross the streams of geekness between Browncoats and Star Wars groupies (like they aren't mostly the exact same people anyway). Hell, let him have fun with it: Mal, Zoe, Wash, Jayne, Kaylee, and the gang couldn't possibly have made any bigger hash of things than this POS did. And Ron Glass would make one hell of an updated Jedi Master.
The worst thing is that if you've never seen the earlier movies, you can't watch this movie.
And if you have seen the earlier movies, you can't watch this movie. Without screaming.
But now that they've made their pile off of us hopelessly gullibly optimistic fans, if you haven't seen it yet, don't. Proving that Disney's check for $6 B-b-b-b-billion has cleared, even Himself, George Lucas, creator of the whole shebang, and who knows raping his own franchise when he
There is one bright silver lining in this entire fiasco:
Seth Green and the wonderful folks at Robot Chicken will be able to make a living ripping the guts out of this one in Claymation genius for decades, just off this one atrocious misadventure.
Given the comedy gold of their prior work, that is no small consolation.
Like many of you, I'll still hope they somehow pull their heads out for the last two, but after seeing this one, I will hope that with about as much likelihood as I have of ever having James Cameron feature Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn awake from the hypersleep of Aliens, and say "Damn, I had the worst nightmares...!" and then pretend everything cinematically before then never happened.
Which was how I felt after I walked out of the theatre for this one.
Friday, December 11, 2015
Quackery
Ars Technica link: Like science, but stupider: The XSTAT30.
It’s a wonder product that can almost instantaneously stop bleeding from gunshot wounds. It does not heal the wound, but it plugs it temporarily to avoid significant blood loss until the wound is treated. The device looks like a syringe full of tablet-sized sponges that expand after injection to the wound. Within 20 seconds, the expanded sponge then fills the cut, preventing blood loss and giving the patient a higher chance of survival. Each sponge last for up to four hours and absorbs up to a pint of blood. . . XSTAT 30 is manufactured by RevMedX, Inc., in Wilsonville, Oregon.
If the article got it right (which is far from certain given general and specialist media obtuseness) it's a wagonload of bullshit.
If it isn't cleared for use in "certain" parts of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, WTF good is it? Jack and shit.
You're making a device that will be applied by 110-hr wondermedics with basic EMT certs, or at best by 6-month paramedics, and you're going to have them play "Do we or won't we?" games with the exact parts of the anatomy where tourniquets don't work?
Which have unhelpfully been blown open by bullets??
Total hype, hokum, and horseshit.
If you shoot that thing into a head wound, and it swells with blood collected, you've produced an unreduceable hematoma in the cranial vault. Stroke, and/or pushing the brains down through the spinal foramen (the hole at the bottom of the cranium where the brainstem lives and connects to the spinal column). The only more effective way to kill someone would be to pull their brains out with a crowbar and then stomp on it.
You can't put it into the chest, because it could tamponade the heart or major vessels, and they then have an unsolvable heart attack, or a hemothorax that a needle thoracotomy won't fix.
Ditto for the neck, where it could choke off blood flow to the brain, or block airways.
Put in inside the digestive tract, and you have a bowel obstruction that won't resolve. Ditto if it ends up in the bladder.
That eliminates 85% of the human body where it can't be used.
So when you eliminate the head, neck, chest, abdomen, and pelvis ("certain parts"?? I repeat, total horseshit) you're left with the arms and legs: IOW the exact places where the CAT and SOF-T tourniquets are expressly designed to shine, and have done for near 15 years. At one-third the list price!
And on an anatomical note, the sponges (92 of them) are designed to absorb "up to a pint of blood" each. So what they've designed is a device to exsanguinate the entire body at the speed of blood loss, since you only have 10-14 pints of blood in your entire body.
So as the blood flows out the holes and into the sponges, it is removed from circulation permanently, to form a cluster of clotted sponges full of blood, and your veins and arteries are sopped entirely dry. Rapid and profound shock, coma, and death result, in short and irreversible order.
Fucking genius, that. If you're a mortician looking for a handy way to prep the body for burial.
On the spectrum from Shineola to shit, this appears to be a truckload of the latter. An utter abortion, without legs.
Absolute best case: You might could use it on groin and armpit wounds.
If the bladder/lung isn't punctured. I suppose you'd need your handy field ultrasound machine to make that call. Which no one has, because it doesn't exist.
And if the wound's so bad you can tell they are punctured without your nonexistent field ultrasound machine, you can't use it. QED
So still worthless bullshit in search of a purpose. And government and institutional dollars.
While it clogs your kit with something of dubious, if not even non-existent, utility.
That thing's a CAT or Israeli bandage you didn't bring, both of which actually work.
And priced at the DoD friendly $100@.
Comedy gold.
"Mr. Shoddy: Dewey, Cheatham, & Howe are calling about patent infringement..."
Maybe in the new gender-bender military, it could find use as a field marital aid, and ad hoc birth control device.
"Introducing the SpermStopper 2000!"
That analysis is based purely on the article, but I can't imagine where you'd usefully shove it with the restrictions stated in the article, or how they expect field medics to utilize it under such recockulous restrictions under actual conditions. (I could suggest a place for the manufacturer to shove it, which you can probably guess that without further hints, but they'd have to pull their heads out first.)
If I hear or see more about it, and the maker has a better-than-the-Underpants-Gnome explanation of its function, utility, and restrictions that makes
Comments are open.
Elucidation and explanation is welcome.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
8 USC 1182f
"Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."As Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up."
(Scroll down to Subsection f).
I am no Trump fan: as a supposed Republican conservative, he's a three-dollar bill.
But with the Open Borders/Chamber of Commerce GOP jacktards who sold the party out for 40 years missing the obvious, Trump has hit this issue out of the park, resonating with every working American, let alone those who don't want to be blown away at the mall, and the party pols are handing him the nomination, and probably the election.
And asswipes like former Veep Dick Cheney coming out and stating that Trump, by asserting a prerogative (unlike those attempted or done by the current gay Muslim racist Enabler In Chief) that is specifically and constitutionally LEGAL, is doing something "un-American", are throwing gasoline on the discussion. And beclowning themselves.
When you're up to your wedding tackle in thorns, the shortest way out is to quietly back away.
So maybe crack a friggin' book Cheney. And STFU. Dick.
(And nota bene the same wave of the hand could have been applied to all those coming here from Ebola-afflicted countries since last summer, without even breaking a constitutional sweat.)
Monday, December 7, 2015
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Just The Facts, Jim
So apparently, James Wesley, Rawles over at survivalblog decided to issue the following howler today:
Mr. Rawles, I have been a fan of your blog for some years, but you shouldn't write or opine on things of which you have no or grossly inaccurate knowledge.
Which, in this case, would be just about every "fact" regarding firearms contained in that post.
1) The long guns used in the attack are not "banned in California", neither by name nor description.
(In fact, one of them, the S&W MP-15, has only existed for a couple of years, and like most of the M-4geries sold, enjoys great sales here in CA. Duh. The other was a DPMS. Both are legally sold here.) I have owned identical models to both of them, and recently at that. And in fact, they're selling with spectacular success daily, and have done so for nearly ten-plus years, to the eternal consternation of DiFi and her toadies in Sacramento.
2) Farook, or anyone else lacking a criminal or mental health prohibition could, indeed, walk into any CA gun shop, and walk out with such weapons 10 days later, and probably he did precisely that. Just like any thousands of others have in droves, esp. since 2008.
3) Long guns less than 50 years old are not banned from private party transfers in California. They are not allowed to be transferred without federal paperwork and a waiting period, except to blood heirs, but that's another thing entirely from being verboten out of hand. Rawles is at best terribly unclear on what he meant to say, or at worst dreadfully mistaken on that entire point.
4) To legally possess the rifles in question, they merely need only possess the simple expedient of a "bullet button", a device which makes the use of a tool (as opposed to just your booger hook) necessary to change magazines. They are sold here, so equipped from the manufacturer, by the dozens every day, from San Diego to the OR border. And there is also quite a cottage industry in shipping lowers from all manner of places to stops en route (including in ID, Jimmy) where they install the CA-compliant devices for you before sending one's toys in to the Golden State. (And eliminating the need for those horrible contortionist stocks that go up, around, and over to not be "protuding pistol grips". Suffering cats, what abortions those are.)
This is basic firearms biz 101 stuff hereabouts.
The likelihood, without examining the weapons, nor having a detailed account of events, is that they may have used banned high-cap magazines (>10 rounds), and/or may have removed the installed CA-compliant "bullet buttons" from his weapon(s), and replaced them with the standard issue version, or screwed a workaround onto the mag release. They may even have acquired the weapons illegally, but there is no basis for concluding that they must have committed any such violations of law in order to obtain them. Assertions to the contrary absent documentation are entirely speculative, and fairly ridiculous.
As any of these actions would be felonies, having created the exact "assault weapon" CA imagined it was banning, the conclusions regarding the prep and time involved, and the futility of additional laws to stop such incidents are entirely valid. That the first actual felony (regarding the firearms, not the conspiracy nor the manufacturing of IEDs) was opening fire with them in the first place is why the entire encyclopedia of gun laws is asinine in the extreme. When the presenting symptom is death by bullet, a law is a poor excuse for a solution, and more than a tad late to the party.
But Farook-plus-one may, in fact, have performed no such felonious actions, and simply the pair of them opened fire, and changed legal 10-round magazines a total of as little as one - or none! - time(s) apiece, and nonetheless created the exact carnage recorded in a couple of dozen seconds. That's the takeaway point on how stupid laws regarding Gun Free Zones, magazine capacity, assault weapons, and waiting periods truly are in the real world.
At any rate, while gratuitously bashing the Califrutopian firearms laws is great fun (trust me, I live here, and I do it daily myself), if someone can't get the basic and actual facts straight on the first go, best to wait and do some simple research. Google is your friend.
I'm sure it looks easy to do color commentary on this from way up there in ID, but ignorance is no excuse on this. Doubly so for a former Californian who ought to know better, and who makes his living dealing out advice and consultation.
The truth here in CA about the gun restrictions we put up with, and the actual incident, is scary enough, without misinformation being passed by people who should know better, and from voices from whom we expect better due diligence than what we get from WaPo and the NYSlimes.
Party foul, first class, Jimmy.
"Grade: D Needs Improvement".
And next time you "just stick to the facts", maybe perhaps just stick to the facts.
The tragic events yesterday in California’s Inland Empire deserve attention. I’ll just stick to the facts:
The primary shooter, Sayeed Rizwan Farook, age 28, was American-born to parents who were from Karachi, Pakistan, and was described as “a very devout Muslim”.
These facts speak for themselves.
He recently traveled to Saudi Arabia.
According to The Daily Mail, “Farook graduated from California State University, San Bernardino with a degree in environmental health in 2009.”
The second shooter killed in the shootout was Farook’s wife Tashfeen Malik, a pharmacist, age 27, born in Pakistan but more recently a resident of Saudi Arabia, who had married Farook two years ago.
The long guns used in the attack are banned in California, both by name and by description. Farook most certainly did not just walk into a California gun shop or a gun show and buy them. ALL long guns less than 50 years old are banned from private party sales in California. To legally possess a banned semi-auto rifle in California, it would have had to have been registered to Farook on or before December 31, 1999. But he was 13 years old in 1999, so that is impossible.
The attack clearly took considerable planning and logistical preparation. It is highly unlikely that the “three crudely made bombs packed with black powder and rigged to a remote-controlled toy car” were assembled just before the attack. It also indicates that there might have been a wider conspiracy.
To call this event simply “workplace violence” would be absurd. People do not drive home, methodically don multiple magazine pouches and gather up guns and pipe bombs, in a simple fit of rage.
They dropped off their six month old baby daughter with a grandmother, before the attack. That is another sign that this was a premeditated attack.
Calling for additional “gun control ” laws in the wake of this attack is ludicrous. California’s existing gun and explosives laws were clearly flouted so passing any more laws would be useless. We have the right to arm ourselves in defense against similar terror attacks! – JWR
Mr. Rawles, I have been a fan of your blog for some years, but you shouldn't write or opine on things of which you have no or grossly inaccurate knowledge.
Which, in this case, would be just about every "fact" regarding firearms contained in that post.
1) The long guns used in the attack are not "banned in California", neither by name nor description.
(In fact, one of them, the S&W MP-15, has only existed for a couple of years, and like most of the M-4geries sold, enjoys great sales here in CA. Duh. The other was a DPMS. Both are legally sold here.) I have owned identical models to both of them, and recently at that. And in fact, they're selling with spectacular success daily, and have done so for nearly ten-plus years, to the eternal consternation of DiFi and her toadies in Sacramento.
2) Farook, or anyone else lacking a criminal or mental health prohibition could, indeed, walk into any CA gun shop, and walk out with such weapons 10 days later, and probably he did precisely that. Just like any thousands of others have in droves, esp. since 2008.
3) Long guns less than 50 years old are not banned from private party transfers in California. They are not allowed to be transferred without federal paperwork and a waiting period, except to blood heirs, but that's another thing entirely from being verboten out of hand. Rawles is at best terribly unclear on what he meant to say, or at worst dreadfully mistaken on that entire point.
4) To legally possess the rifles in question, they merely need only possess the simple expedient of a "bullet button", a device which makes the use of a tool (as opposed to just your booger hook) necessary to change magazines. They are sold here, so equipped from the manufacturer, by the dozens every day, from San Diego to the OR border. And there is also quite a cottage industry in shipping lowers from all manner of places to stops en route (including in ID, Jimmy) where they install the CA-compliant devices for you before sending one's toys in to the Golden State. (And eliminating the need for those horrible contortionist stocks that go up, around, and over to not be "protuding pistol grips". Suffering cats, what abortions those are.)
This is basic firearms biz 101 stuff hereabouts.
The likelihood, without examining the weapons, nor having a detailed account of events, is that they may have used banned high-cap magazines (>10 rounds), and/or may have removed the installed CA-compliant "bullet buttons" from his weapon(s), and replaced them with the standard issue version, or screwed a workaround onto the mag release. They may even have acquired the weapons illegally, but there is no basis for concluding that they must have committed any such violations of law in order to obtain them. Assertions to the contrary absent documentation are entirely speculative, and fairly ridiculous.
As any of these actions would be felonies, having created the exact "assault weapon" CA imagined it was banning, the conclusions regarding the prep and time involved, and the futility of additional laws to stop such incidents are entirely valid. That the first actual felony (regarding the firearms, not the conspiracy nor the manufacturing of IEDs) was opening fire with them in the first place is why the entire encyclopedia of gun laws is asinine in the extreme. When the presenting symptom is death by bullet, a law is a poor excuse for a solution, and more than a tad late to the party.
But Farook-plus-one may, in fact, have performed no such felonious actions, and simply the pair of them opened fire, and changed legal 10-round magazines a total of as little as one - or none! - time(s) apiece, and nonetheless created the exact carnage recorded in a couple of dozen seconds. That's the takeaway point on how stupid laws regarding Gun Free Zones, magazine capacity, assault weapons, and waiting periods truly are in the real world.
At any rate, while gratuitously bashing the Califrutopian firearms laws is great fun (trust me, I live here, and I do it daily myself), if someone can't get the basic and actual facts straight on the first go, best to wait and do some simple research. Google is your friend.
I'm sure it looks easy to do color commentary on this from way up there in ID, but ignorance is no excuse on this. Doubly so for a former Californian who ought to know better, and who makes his living dealing out advice and consultation.
The truth here in CA about the gun restrictions we put up with, and the actual incident, is scary enough, without misinformation being passed by people who should know better, and from voices from whom we expect better due diligence than what we get from WaPo and the NYSlimes.
Party foul, first class, Jimmy.
"Grade: D Needs Improvement".
And next time you "just stick to the facts", maybe perhaps just stick to the facts.
Local Shenanigans: Allahu FUBAR
Now they're good Muslims.
The "Before" things unfolded post:
WTFever.
This was a Christmas Party for the Dept. of Public Health, at a developmentally disabled group facility.
So, I doubt this was about someone mad at retards.
Likelihoods, in descending order:
1) Allahu akbar. Nota bene it was a Christmas party.
2) Someone mad at someone at the SB DPH. These aren't the child protective services guys, they are the county inspectors, health, environmental, etc.
Somebody got their business closed because of health citations, and decided to whack the other 10-12 bystanders as cover.
3) Someone else with an axe to grind against San Berdoo officialdom.
4) Magic brownies.
Some fucktard Limey paper and other BS early squawks were reporting they were white men, in ski masks, armed with AK-47s.
WTF.
If they were wearing ski masks, unless they were otherwise butt-naked, you have no effing clue what race or skin color they were.
And this will be a combined Gun Free Zone/assault weapon/high-cap magazine/waiting period law fail.
Califrutopia fucktard politicians for the Grand Slam Of Fail!
Hint for the Demotards: Criminals don't obey laws.
And just as I was coming in and logging on, the SBSD whacked two of the m*****f*****s, one on the street, and one in an SUV, and word is they have a possible third cornered in the area, within 2 mi. of the original incident.
Apparently they had no exit strategy, and just hung around nearby.
Which tips the odds for Door #1 above way up.
We'll see, but kudos to the constabulary in San Bernardino for marksmanship far in excess of standards (word is the SUV was ventilated, in a Bonnie & Clyde sort of way). Notably, unlike the asshats from Boston PD, they did it without setting the Bill of Rights on fire and locking down half the county; and unlike the asshats from the LAPD, they apparently didn't shoot up two wrong vehicles and twenty-seven nearby houses in the melee either. It's a Christmas miracle.
Oh, and if this turns out to be two Not So Smart Bombs from The Religion Of Peace(tm), I predict open season on mosques hereabouts every Friday until the problem with that particular identity group fades apace with their dwindling demographic. Inshallah.
At any rate, it will cut down any fervor for "Syrian" refugees to be relocated here to about the same level as enthusiasm for Japanese gardeners in CA as of January 1942.
This was a Christmas Party for the Dept. of Public Health, at a developmentally disabled group facility.
So, I doubt this was about someone mad at retards.
Likelihoods, in descending order:
1) Allahu akbar. Nota bene it was a Christmas party.
2) Someone mad at someone at the SB DPH. These aren't the child protective services guys, they are the county inspectors, health, environmental, etc.
Somebody got their business closed because of health citations, and decided to whack the other 10-12 bystanders as cover.
3) Someone else with an axe to grind against San Berdoo officialdom.
4) Magic brownies.
Some fucktard Limey paper and other BS early squawks were reporting they were white men, in ski masks, armed with AK-47s.
WTF.
If they were wearing ski masks, unless they were otherwise butt-naked, you have no effing clue what race or skin color they were.
And this will be a combined Gun Free Zone/assault weapon/high-cap magazine/waiting period law fail.
Califrutopia fucktard politicians for the Grand Slam Of Fail!
Hint for the Demotards: Criminals don't obey laws.
And just as I was coming in and logging on, the SBSD whacked two of the m*****f*****s, one on the street, and one in an SUV, and word is they have a possible third cornered in the area, within 2 mi. of the original incident.
Apparently they had no exit strategy, and just hung around nearby.
Which tips the odds for Door #1 above way up.
We'll see, but kudos to the constabulary in San Bernardino for marksmanship far in excess of standards (word is the SUV was ventilated, in a Bonnie & Clyde sort of way). Notably, unlike the asshats from Boston PD, they did it without setting the Bill of Rights on fire and locking down half the county; and unlike the asshats from the LAPD, they apparently didn't shoot up two wrong vehicles and twenty-seven nearby houses in the melee either. It's a Christmas miracle.
Oh, and if this turns out to be two Not So Smart Bombs from The Religion Of Peace(tm), I predict open season on mosques hereabouts every Friday until the problem with that particular identity group fades apace with their dwindling demographic. Inshallah.
At any rate, it will cut down any fervor for "Syrian" refugees to be relocated here to about the same level as enthusiasm for Japanese gardeners in CA as of January 1942.
The "After" Post:
So the shooter was Sayeed Farouk Imawannajihad, and the
other shooter was his towelhead main squeeze/fiancée/fellow-douchecanoe,
Tashfeen Malouk Imawannajihad.
Farouk Imawannajihad was an employee of the agency holding the party, who went there, returned with his bitch, this time both armed with Californicated M-4geries (one by DPMS, and one M&P-15, if you're keeping track at home), two semi auto pistols (Llama, and S&W; thanks for asking), body armor, black clothes and ski masks, and, oh yeah, three previously prepared IEDs left salted at the scene, and later disarmed by authorities before they could go off.
MSNBC and President Barack Hussein FuckYourselfSidewaysWithARustyChainsaw Obomber are puzzled and perplexed at what possible motive could be the culprit here.
This is Aesop's Total Lack Of Surprise that the Imawannajihads were victims of Sudden Jihadi Syndrome, and decided to go out by trying to take out 30+ people celebrating an office Christmas party. Part of the 90% of Islam that gives the other 10% a bad rep. (Anyone inclined to bitch about that summary can give a holler when they have a Reformation, and renounce jihad by sending us the heads of those who preach it, proactively.)
Farouk Imawannajihad was an employee of the agency holding the party, who went there, returned with his bitch, this time both armed with Californicated M-4geries (one by DPMS, and one M&P-15, if you're keeping track at home), two semi auto pistols (Llama, and S&W; thanks for asking), body armor, black clothes and ski masks, and, oh yeah, three previously prepared IEDs left salted at the scene, and later disarmed by authorities before they could go off.
MSNBC and President Barack Hussein FuckYourselfSidewaysWithARustyChainsaw Obomber are puzzled and perplexed at what possible motive could be the culprit here.
This is Aesop's Total Lack Of Surprise that the Imawannajihads were victims of Sudden Jihadi Syndrome, and decided to go out by trying to take out 30+ people celebrating an office Christmas party. Part of the 90% of Islam that gives the other 10% a bad rep. (Anyone inclined to bitch about that summary can give a holler when they have a Reformation, and renounce jihad by sending us the heads of those who preach it, proactively.)
We stopped playing Crusades vs. Jihad in the late 1500s.
Apparently, the other side would like to revisit that agreement, and thinks the lemon is worth the squeeze. Best rethink that.
The last group of fucktard suicidal religious zealots who kept messing with our way of life now have shadows of some of their people permanently etched into the concrete of their streets. We know how to deal with this sort of thing; there's an app for it. And we won't have a gay racist Muslim in the White House forever to give the other side cover.
And on a smaller scale, when random members of The Religion Of Peace(tm) start showing up with their throats accidentally cut, wearing hog's heads like Halloween masks, and with their tiny dicks inserted in their rigor mortised jaws, rest assured I will give out candy to my friends, and have an ironclad alibi.
Hear me, God.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
This Is The Future They Promised Us
Back when I grew up hoping for a jet pack and a flying car someday, this is the kind of stuff NASA was supposed to be working towards.
(h/t Solomon at SNAFU )
Now, if you want to see the NASA that isn't, you have to watch The Martian.
If you want to go to space, you'll be flying with Blue Origin, Virgin, or SpaceX.
Surprising no one, private industry is drinking NASA's milkshake.
And near-space tourism is going to bankroll the steps beyond Tranquility Base.
I hope I live long enough to see it happen.
And if I can swing it, I'm going to space on one of those rides.
F*** Six Flags. This is the real deal.
Now, if you want to see the NASA that isn't, you have to watch The Martian.
If you want to go to space, you'll be flying with Blue Origin, Virgin, or SpaceX.
Surprising no one, private industry is drinking NASA's milkshake.
And near-space tourism is going to bankroll the steps beyond Tranquility Base.
I hope I live long enough to see it happen.
And if I can swing it, I'm going to space on one of those rides.
F*** Six Flags. This is the real deal.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
SPECTRE
Call the ASPCA.
Somewhere in Hollywood, there's a pooch who
should be submitting a rape kit, because it was well and truly screwed.
Sam Mendes has done what even Roger Moore playing the part in his 60s couldn't accomplish: he made 007 boring, and turned him into a blooming metrosexual in the process. If it gets any worse in subsequent outings, Q will have to start supplying 007 with tampons for his mangina.
Sam Mendes has done what even Roger Moore playing the part in his 60s couldn't accomplish: he made 007 boring, and turned him into a blooming metrosexual in the process. If it gets any worse in subsequent outings, Q will have to start supplying 007 with tampons for his mangina.
It's many of the locales, some of
the toys, a few of the cars, and all the set pieces you'd expect. And all done
so predictably, so lackluster, so abjectly suspenseless, so just plain
yawnworthy, that at 148 minutes long, you wonder why they didn't just turn the
cameras on and leave everything in, because the outtakes would have been at
least as entertaining as the actual movie. Two villians got away lucky: one had
his eyes poked out, and another had them eaten by ravens. I would trade places
with either one if you told me I had to sit through this flick again.
An hour
in, I was wishing they'd go back and play some of the pre-movie trailers
again.
Two hours in, I was wondering what was playing on the Oxygen Channel. And wishing I'd brought a sleep mask and a set of ear plugs to the movie.
The only bright shining moment of the entire flick was after the interminable credits, the promise in the final seconds that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN".
Which will be great compared to this time, just for the change.
The sad part was noting that he made no noticeable appearance in this film.
Stay home, wait for Netflix, or even wait for this to show up on cable.
Which, if word of mouth has anything to do with things, should be the day after Thanksgiving.
My rating: Jiggle the handle on this one, and light a candle to St. Fartius, and hope neither the solid evidence nor the smell from this flick lingers.
But somewhere, Michael Apted is happy: With the release of SPECTRE, he no longer holds the bottom rung of the Bond-verse with The World Is Not Enough. But it was close. The last time I felt this bad after seeing a movie I expected to like was after Star Trek: Nemesis.
Two hours in, I was wondering what was playing on the Oxygen Channel. And wishing I'd brought a sleep mask and a set of ear plugs to the movie.
The only bright shining moment of the entire flick was after the interminable credits, the promise in the final seconds that "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN".
Which will be great compared to this time, just for the change.
The sad part was noting that he made no noticeable appearance in this film.
Stay home, wait for Netflix, or even wait for this to show up on cable.
Which, if word of mouth has anything to do with things, should be the day after Thanksgiving.
My rating: Jiggle the handle on this one, and light a candle to St. Fartius, and hope neither the solid evidence nor the smell from this flick lingers.
But somewhere, Michael Apted is happy: With the release of SPECTRE, he no longer holds the bottom rung of the Bond-verse with The World Is Not Enough. But it was close. The last time I felt this bad after seeing a movie I expected to like was after Star Trek: Nemesis.
Sam Mendes did that POS Jarhead. Now he's plopped this pantload out. If there's a fund to stop him from making any more movies, put me down for a month's pay.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Turns Out He Can't Do Stand Up Comedy Either
What we heard on the internet yesterday:
What we saw in our mind's eye when we heard it:
Inside word has it that President Liston is not amused, and the cleat wounds into his own wedding tackle may take some weeks to heal properly.
Dr. Carson is rumored to have offered him some salt to apply topically.
What we saw in our mind's eye when we heard it:
Inside word has it that President Liston is not amused, and the cleat wounds into his own wedding tackle may take some weeks to heal properly.
Dr. Carson is rumored to have offered him some salt to apply topically.
Beep beep, President Hopey Dopey.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Internet Balance Is Restored
A couple weeks ago, American Mercenary called it quits, and scrubbed his entire blog off the 'net.
Now, in perhaps some cosmic restoration of harmony, the long-dormant Lizard Farmer has returned.
Yay.
Now, in perhaps some cosmic restoration of harmony, the long-dormant Lizard Farmer has returned.
Yay.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
CRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUZ!
Republican Debate 10/29/15 - Cruz pwns jacktard "moderators"
Cruz FTW.
As expected.
As expected.
It's long past time to stop
these charade dog & pony show debates with at least 10 people who shouldn't
even be onstage, fire the media once and for all, and have real debates on real
issues with candidates who matter, with questions on point, delivered by people
who don't need cheat sheets to understand the issues. Moderated by George Will,
Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, Ann
Coulter, Ben Stein, and Bill Whittle.* Go around the networks and cable
completely, and simply post them in their entirety on social media, and upend
ABCNNBCBS once and for all.
Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube et al will cackle all the way to the bank.
And Cruz just knocked that one out of the park.
*(And if anything like that happens before pigs fly unassisted, that should also be, respectively, the next White House Press Secretary, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of Homeland Security, Attorney General, Secretary of Labor, and National Security Advisor. You're welcome.)
Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube et al will cackle all the way to the bank.
And Cruz just knocked that one out of the park.
*(And if anything like that happens before pigs fly unassisted, that should also be, respectively, the next White House Press Secretary, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of Homeland Security, Attorney General, Secretary of Labor, and National Security Advisor. You're welcome.)
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Less Bread, More Circus, Lots of Cowbell
Gaffe-A-Matic himself, VP Joe Biden, announced today he's out.
By the numbers:
1) Both parties are left with unelectable jackasses as their current front-runners, despised by the majority of each party:
Trump for Repubs, and Sanders for the Dems.
2) Any hope of Biden weakening Shrillary enough to knock her off the block, and let The Anointed One help select the (D) nominee at a brokered election are now abysmally dim.
3) Hopey Dopey is thus left with either backing the person he despises, despite her obvious criminal conduct, and praying they can brazen it out and get her into his chair next, or letting the leash slip on the FBI once and for all, seeing her and the Dumocrat Party brand go down in flames for the next 4-8 years.
4) The Benghazi hearings and the ensuing likelihood of either a Special Prosecutor, vs. stonewalling, followed by torches, pitchforks, and a tumbrel cart on the front lawn of the White House, just got a whole lot more interesting.
5) Sanders doubling down on Shrillary's criminal conduct in Dem Debate I, and attempting to give her a pass on everything by royal fiat has essentially put him and the entire party all-in on her criminal shenanigans from here on out.
Shrillary getting indicted or not is now the litmus test for whether we have any bare shred of a republic left to us, or have permanently transitioned to just the banana version of one.
Smart money: Go deep on beans, band-aids, and bullets.
And if you were wondering when the next round of ammo- and gun-buying madness would start, I think I just heard the opening whistle on that.
And if you were wondering when the next round of ammo- and gun-buying madness would start, I think I just heard the opening whistle on that.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
And Another One Bids Adieu
From American Mercenary's blog, 5 hours ago:
My sincere best wishes to AM.
We wrangled a time or three, but his perspective on most subjects was well-thought out, and at least reasoned to, rather than ever being knee-jerk.
The number of thoughtful and rational people on the Internet is never "Too Many", and his absence will be noted.
I hope he survives the current ongoing Army purges, and makes it to field grade, but wherever he goes, I wish him well.
It's been fun. If you want anything grab it before it's gone.And it's gone.
My sincere best wishes to AM.
We wrangled a time or three, but his perspective on most subjects was well-thought out, and at least reasoned to, rather than ever being knee-jerk.
The number of thoughtful and rational people on the Internet is never "Too Many", and his absence will be noted.
I hope he survives the current ongoing Army purges, and makes it to field grade, but wherever he goes, I wish him well.
Friday, October 2, 2015
Thoughts On The Latest (And Every Other) School Shooting
Gun banners, call your office. Your policies are working exactly as planned.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Trauma Is Never Pretty
I've been working trauma cases professionally since the early 1990s. (Before that was simply happenstance.) And while all trauma is the same after the first 500 times, no two are ever exactly alike.
Something you have to know, in a way most of you hopefully will never learn from bitter experience, is that some wounds are non-fixable. Whether you're working with a victim of a car accident or someone attacked by a mob, or simply one dedicated assailant, you have to know going in that you will not fix certain things, and that in many cases, no one can.
Not even if the injury in question happened inside a trauma surgical suite, with the doctors and team prepped and ready to go, even if you had 20 units of O-negative blood hanging ready to transfuse.
HIPPA and concern for a certain family prevent me from getting detailed at this point.
But suffice it to say that sometimes, a gunshot or blade will create more damage than can be fixed, and that person is simply going to die, rapidly.
There's a scene at the beginning of the plane crash in The Grey, when Liam Neeson's character is surveying the injured and dead, and he finds a guy with traumatic abdominal bleeding, and he tells the man, in his final moments, that yes, he is indeed going to die, right there, and rather quickly, which he then proceeds to do on screen.
That was truth: it works just like that in the real world too. When someone pumps out all their lifeblood in ten or twenty pumps, like they will, that's it. Getting an IV won't work, you aren't going to cut them open and crossclamp their aorta, and an IV or five isn't going to save them, because there's no hemoglobin in normal saline.
That means you can start IVs, even IO lines (that's an IV in your bones for the laymen in the audience), and pump in liter after liter of fluid, even with whole blood, and it ain't gonna do anything but come out the hole(s) you can't fix. And run all over the place outside. They'll still get no oxygen in their vital organs, and they'll simply be warm and dead and white as a ghost when you're finished, and that truth is ordained before you ever lay hands on your patient.
That's going to be true in a disaster, or even a trauma unit. In the latter, you do every damned thing you can, especially on a young healthy victim, because they have the best chance. Best being relative when the absolute odds are close to absolutely zero.
In a disaster or worse scenario, you aren't - and probably shouldn't - do all that. At that point, you're simply wasting precious supplies to feel better about someone dying that you couldn't save. Which is both wasteful and unwise.
God help you and your conscience if you haven't wrapped your head around that reality long before the day you get there. Even knowing the truth, the moments will hang around in your head for a good long time.
If you're going to do this, yeah, you save the ones you can.
But you have to know in your bones that there will be plenty you can't save, and you have to let them go. Physically, mentally, and emotionally.
And I can't even begin to tell someone how to do that when it's someone you know, or care for deeply.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
You've seen this material before
"Where are you?" - Anonymous
I'm minding my own business.
Chasing down every Ebola story is currently rather pointless.
Consider this my Generic Ebola Response Post until further notice.
1) Ebola hasn't gone away this time, in any way, whatsoever.
Only the media's coverage of the phenomenon has disappeared.
Best described thusly:
2) What's keeping it away now is the simple fact that 99.9999% of the poor bastards in West Africa can't afford a plane ticket out. (A bus ticket to Capetown, Nairobi, or Cairo is another thing entirely).
Except for all the do-gooder doctors, nurses, aid workers, and NGO folks.
(If you're keeping score at home, that would be every non-African case of Ebola except Duncan, last year.) So nothing to worry about, because TPTB at the CDC
a) swear Ebola will never get to the U.S.
b) assure us that if it does, U.S. medical superiority will ensure that no one else could ever get it, because
c) the CDC is from the government, and they're here to help us.
3) With no media attention on their activities, the kleptocracies currently infested with the disease show no signs of ever getting a handle on it, it continues to whack people at a notable rate (viewed in historical perspective), only there's no media attention/scrutiny of their reported cases, no hordes of international help forthcoming, and a notable dearth of doctors, nurses, and assorted other necessary personnel, due to the health care worker casualties from last year's original outbreak.
4) This makes its eventual escape from Shitholia and into the larger world population a virtual certainty, the primary question becoming a game of "When?", not "If...".
5) There are still a sum total of 11 Ebola beds in wards capable of adequately caring for those with the disease, in the U.S. And 3 of those are permanently reserved for CDC and military bio-casualties, in perpetuity. So, 8 beds. Period.
6) The CDC's plan is to ensure the spread to all available health care staff members and the greater population via other patients let regional hospitals bear the brunt of caring for any additional cases by utilizing their vast expertise in dealing with pandemics, coupled with throwing hordes of untrained and unequipped staff members at the problem, until they all die or quit in droves, probably in about an exact 50/50 ratio, within 3 weeks of any U.S. outbreak greater than 2-5 cases in the same city/region.
7) Given the above, make prudent preparations, because TS is going to HTF sooner or later, given the single-minded determination to keep pointing the Titanic at a metaphorical asteroid field of icebergs at full speed, with the captain blindfolded, until one gets lucky.
Each of these things is just like the other.
In each case, the winning strategy is to be somewhere else, and stay there.
These jackasses pretend not to know any better.
You do.
Next topic.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Dewey Defeats Truman
From the fishwrap of record:
MONROVIA, Liberia — More than a month after Liberia was declared free of Ebola, at least two new cases have emerged, the first discovered when the body of a 17-year-old boy tested positive for the virus, officials said Tuesday.
The World Health Organization declared Liberia Ebola-free on May 9, a landmark moment in the country, which has suffered more deaths from the epidemic than any other.But on Tuesday, Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia’s deputy minister for health, announced at a news conference here in the capital that a new case had emerged.It occurred in a small town just outside Monrovia. The family of Abraham Memaigar, 17, who died over the weekend, called a burial team that took swabs of the body and sent them to a laboratory. It confirmed that the boy had been infected by the virus.On Tuesday, an Ebola response team exhumed the body and had blood drawn for a more precise swab test. That test also came back positive.Dr. Moses Massaquoi, the case manager for the response team, said the blood test was necessary because investigators could not find the source of the infection and were trying to determine whether it was an “isolated outbreak or new strain of the virus.”
Late Tuesday, a person connected to Abraham tested positive for Ebola, and tests of two other people were inconclusive, Dr. Massaquoi said.Thirty-three people who had contact with the teenager were isolated in their homes and were being monitored, he said. Three people will be sent to a treatment unit here Wednesday, he said.“The Ebola fight is not over, but we must not lose hope,” said Dr. Bernice Dahn, Liberia’s newly appointed minister of health. She contended that the quick response to Abraham’s case, including the rapid testing and confirmation that the boy had the virus, demonstrated Liberia’s preparedness to deal with another outbreak.Liberia has recorded close to 5,000 lives lost to the virus.The country reactivated an Ebola treatment unit at a time when the facilities, built with the help of the United States military, had stood empty and Liberia was beginning to close them.Mr. Nyenswah said it was not yet known whether the infection came from Guinea or Sierra Leone, West African neighbors that still have small numbers of new Ebola cases.Abraham, who sold used clothes at a local market, fell ill at his mother’s house a week before his death, experiencing fever, diarrhea and vomiting.Abraham’s father, James S. Memaigar, 49, a shoe salesman, said a local clinic had told him just three days before his son’s death that Abraham had malaria. The clinic had sent him home with a handful of tablets, Mr. Memaigar said.Abraham died Sunday in his father’s home in a community known as Smell No Taste, a few miles from his mother’s home and a short distance from Liberia’s international airport and the Firestone rubber plantation.Mr. Memaigar had contacted the burial team and dragged his son’s body out of his room on a mattress. Abraham was buried the same day by an Ebola burial team in an overgrown cemetery a short distance from the house.Dr. Dahn said investigators were trying to determine how the boy had become infected.
Points of note:
1) In a country ravaged by Ebola, and desperate to convince everyone they're free of it, with purportedly only one case to deal with, the crack Liberia medical care system missed the initial diagnosis. Until it had doubled. Perhaps multiple times. Stop me if you've heard this one...
2) The virus, certainly not a new strain, but the same one that's been rampant since December 2013 in West Africa, has done its main thing: it has already spread to at least one other person, and perhaps a dozen symptomatic ones and/or a hundred unsymptomatic soon-to-be diagnosed ones. A month or more later. Stop me if you've heard this one...
3) Liberia has proven competent to confirm two cases, now that they don't have people dying by the hundreds this year. Yet. But as far as stamping out the disease at such a low level, they are about as competent as the Iraqi Army against ISIS.
4) We have no idea how many other cases they've missed/mis-diagnosed since outside attention has waned.
5) With the uninterrupted media blackout of most all Ebola-related news, we never will, either there, nor here. It's frankly almost a miracle that the NYT even chose to publish this piece.
Don't worry, though.
Ebola will never ever get here from there, so there's no need for flight quarantines, and our superior health care system and dedicated medical practitioners would stop it in its tracks if it ever...oh, wait, nevermind.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
GSW OSh*t Contingencies, Everyday Variety
First, H/T to the always excellent blog of WeaponsMan , and in particular this post , for inspiring this follow-on riff. Read it first, or at your leisure.
A lot of us like to shoot.
Many of us realize that accidents can happen, even while shooting.
Some of us are even prepared for "B", if it happens during "A".
Please, try and make sure you and any club you patronize is in that last category.
Having a GSW OSK (O Sh*t Kit), for yourself, your friends and loved ones, or some random dumbass one lane/bay over is never a bad idea.
What to put into it is the subject of any number of posts and blogs. Visit them, do some thinking, and work it out for yourself. If you're smart enough to digest three or fourteen points of view, I'm not too worried about what you'll put inside it. If you aren't that smart, nothing else I write is really going to solve that.
But as important as what goes in the kit, is knowing WTF to do if you have to use it, including if/when you're doing so on yourself or a loved one.
So get properly trained - and no, just watching a couple of TCCC videos on YouTube isn't enough - to use whatever you decide to pack.
And because Two Is One, And One Is None, do your damnedest to make sure there are other people trained to standard and present as well, if more than one of you is going shooting. It's embarrassing when the Medic bleeds to death because he shot himself, and no one else knew WTF to do, right? It's also hard on their relatives.
And then, there needs to be a regularly updated Range Safety Plan.
Not some piece of CYA boilerplate BS known only to some insider Illuminati, but an actual explained plan known to the lowest schmuck above Raw Newbie Nevershotagunhbefore at that range on that day.
Oh, what's that, you say? Pre-paid annual range membership didn't get you that briefing, and you don't get an annual update in snail or e-mail? Then as good as your club is, it sucks balls in that respect. Bring it up with TPTB until they listen, or take your membership elsewhere. When they have an accident, you'll be able to buy them out for pennies on the dollar, sooner or later.
What it should comprise is knowing where you are, who and how to call 9-1-1, what to tell them, and how to direct them when they respond from the nearest paved road to where the bleeding body is actually located.
If that requires someone to be the "Follow Me" vehicle from the gate to Range B-23, so be it. If that requires 5 rodeo clowns to keep every other yahoo off the range road until the emergency is dealt with, so be it. Plan for the resources you have, to deal with what you might have to face.
And if possible, have/know a suitable nearby spot(s) where Lifeflight etc. could land and pick up the bleeding dumbass in a pinch, if this becomes necessary. That dumbass could be you, if some other dumbass shoots you.
DO ALL OF THIS WITH THE ADVICE AND INPUT OF THE FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD LIKELIEST FIRST RESPONDERS TO YOUR VENUE, AFTER HAVING THEM VISIT SAME IN PERSON, AND LISTEN TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO DO WITH A PURPOSE.
And if you haven't consulted adequate legal counsel in depth about all this beforehand, you're STILL doing it wrong.
And do NOT, under 99% of circumstances, half-ass some home-concocted "designated ambolance" out of Fred's flat-bed and Aunt Martha's Chicken Soup and Bedsheet Doctoring Supplies" unless you want to be taking it in the heinie from some lifer named Bubba for the five to ten years you'll get for negligent manslaughter for trying to cobble this together on your own.
If you either like the buttsecks, or have two to five school-trained and certified paramedics, trauma RNs, and an emergency or trauma physician present for duty, with a state-certified medical transport vehicle fully stocked standing by, along with a lawyer on retainer and speed dial, and a $10M liability policy that covers deliberate personal stupidity, and all your personal assets are shielded by an LLC, and your job won't mind the months you'll spend in court or prison, and your family can get along without you for those years, then by all means ignore the previous suggestions at your whim.
Bonus points: When was the last time your club, in conjunction with the likeliest 9-1-1 responder agency(ies), did a no-shit live drill of same, from incident to arrival at a Trauma Center/Emergency Department, or from incident to Lifeflight (etc.) departure from scene?
If the answer is zero in recorded history, your club probably still sucks balls on this, whereas if you've gone to the point of volunteering to provide a real-world training opportunity to one or more agencies, the only way they won't take you up on it is if their training directorate sucks balls. This is why your local politicians (who pay for those agencies) have constituent assistance lines. Just saying.
I yell because I care.
A lot of us like to shoot.
Many of us realize that accidents can happen, even while shooting.
Some of us are even prepared for "B", if it happens during "A".
Please, try and make sure you and any club you patronize is in that last category.
Having a GSW OSK (O Sh*t Kit), for yourself, your friends and loved ones, or some random dumbass one lane/bay over is never a bad idea.
What to put into it is the subject of any number of posts and blogs. Visit them, do some thinking, and work it out for yourself. If you're smart enough to digest three or fourteen points of view, I'm not too worried about what you'll put inside it. If you aren't that smart, nothing else I write is really going to solve that.
But as important as what goes in the kit, is knowing WTF to do if you have to use it, including if/when you're doing so on yourself or a loved one.
So get properly trained - and no, just watching a couple of TCCC videos on YouTube isn't enough - to use whatever you decide to pack.
And because Two Is One, And One Is None, do your damnedest to make sure there are other people trained to standard and present as well, if more than one of you is going shooting. It's embarrassing when the Medic bleeds to death because he shot himself, and no one else knew WTF to do, right? It's also hard on their relatives.
And then, there needs to be a regularly updated Range Safety Plan.
Not some piece of CYA boilerplate BS known only to some insider Illuminati, but an actual explained plan known to the lowest schmuck above Raw Newbie Nevershotagunhbefore at that range on that day.
Oh, what's that, you say? Pre-paid annual range membership didn't get you that briefing, and you don't get an annual update in snail or e-mail? Then as good as your club is, it sucks balls in that respect. Bring it up with TPTB until they listen, or take your membership elsewhere. When they have an accident, you'll be able to buy them out for pennies on the dollar, sooner or later.
What it should comprise is knowing where you are, who and how to call 9-1-1, what to tell them, and how to direct them when they respond from the nearest paved road to where the bleeding body is actually located.
If that requires someone to be the "Follow Me" vehicle from the gate to Range B-23, so be it. If that requires 5 rodeo clowns to keep every other yahoo off the range road until the emergency is dealt with, so be it. Plan for the resources you have, to deal with what you might have to face.
And if possible, have/know a suitable nearby spot(s) where Lifeflight etc. could land and pick up the bleeding dumbass in a pinch, if this becomes necessary. That dumbass could be you, if some other dumbass shoots you.
DO ALL OF THIS WITH THE ADVICE AND INPUT OF THE FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD LIKELIEST FIRST RESPONDERS TO YOUR VENUE, AFTER HAVING THEM VISIT SAME IN PERSON, AND LISTEN TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO DO WITH A PURPOSE.
And if you haven't consulted adequate legal counsel in depth about all this beforehand, you're STILL doing it wrong.
And do NOT, under 99% of circumstances, half-ass some home-concocted "designated ambolance" out of Fred's flat-bed and Aunt Martha's Chicken Soup and Bedsheet Doctoring Supplies" unless you want to be taking it in the heinie from some lifer named Bubba for the five to ten years you'll get for negligent manslaughter for trying to cobble this together on your own.
If you either like the buttsecks, or have two to five school-trained and certified paramedics, trauma RNs, and an emergency or trauma physician present for duty, with a state-certified medical transport vehicle fully stocked standing by, along with a lawyer on retainer and speed dial, and a $10M liability policy that covers deliberate personal stupidity, and all your personal assets are shielded by an LLC, and your job won't mind the months you'll spend in court or prison, and your family can get along without you for those years, then by all means ignore the previous suggestions at your whim.
Bonus points: When was the last time your club, in conjunction with the likeliest 9-1-1 responder agency(ies), did a no-shit live drill of same, from incident to arrival at a Trauma Center/Emergency Department, or from incident to Lifeflight (etc.) departure from scene?
If the answer is zero in recorded history, your club probably still sucks balls on this, whereas if you've gone to the point of volunteering to provide a real-world training opportunity to one or more agencies, the only way they won't take you up on it is if their training directorate sucks balls. This is why your local politicians (who pay for those agencies) have constituent assistance lines. Just saying.
I yell because I care.
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