No permission slip needed.
Cost: $10-20
Go shopping after your basic first aid class tomorrow.
Mission: Put together a "good enough" every day carry first aid kit, and bring it in cheap.
$10 kit, for me:
6 oz pump bottle isopropyl alcohol-based hand sanitizer
bag of 5 pr. vinyl gloves
18 benzylkonium chloride (BZK) sanitary hand/(wound) wipes
4" generic Ace wrap
3 roller gauze rolls (1",2",3")
8 sterile 2"x2" gauze dressings
1 1/3 oz. tube generic triple antibiotic ointment
6 Tylenol brand Extra Strength (500mg) tabs
40 tab btl. of generic ibuprofen (200mg)
1 roll of 1" waterproof first aid tape
That alone covers an awesome amount of simple first aid needs. The idea is a cheap kit you can keep in your car, or at work, use and replenish as necessary, and not give two hoots if you need to replace it, or items go bad or get used up. You'll be miles ahead of 95% of the population.
$20 "luxury kit", same trip:
The above, plus
1 btl of 175 standard aspirin (325 mg)
2 standard bars Dial antibacterial soap
Craft & sew kit, with seam (clothes) ripper, needles, and small safety scissors (+ thread! - for sewing, NOT suturing!)
7-LED flashlight
AAA batteries for above
Blistex lip balm
6 oz. tube of SPF 30 sunscreen
10' roll of 2" duct tape (woodland camo, dayglo pink, take your pick)
4 prs asstd. tweezers on card
1 J&J 12 item first aid kit, in small plastic case, with
2 more BZK wipes
2 more pairs of 2"x2" gauze
4 5/8" bandaids
2 1" bandaids
For another $6, I could/would have added hydrocortisone cream, generic Benadryl, generic immodium, antacid tablets, bug repellant, and individual eye drops.
I would have liked to find nitrile gloves, or even latex (I'm not allergic to it), and some generic moleskin, but vinyl is better than nothing, and duct tape can be pressed to make serve for blisters. Also as butterfly dressings, using those little scissors. And in a pinch, as a chest seal. They also didn't have single-edge razor blades, which are the shiznit for a host of uses. I can always get the gloves and razor blades at Horror Freight for not much more than a buck.
The entire thing would fit in small lunch sack, or a waist pouch.
Some of it is brand-name stuff, some of it is made-in-China, all of it is serviceable, easily replaced, and one helluva lot better than nothing whatsoever.
You can solve your own and others' minor medical emergencies, and keep others from happening.
It can also be further stripped down, taken out of original packaging (I highly recommend this anyways wherever possible), and put into Ziploc snack and sandwich baggies. For meds, go to a craft store like Michael's or Hobby Lobby, etc., or that aisle of a bigger WalMart, and get a pkg. of 100 crafter's zip bags, which come in sizes like tiny 2"x3" (for pills on blister cards, cut down to individual doses), or 3"x5" and 4"x6" for things like bandaids, gauze dressings, BZK wipes, etc. Now all your stuff is visible, waterproof, and separately accessible, with no bulky cardboard boxes to deal with. They're also good for keeping cards, papers, etc. dry and visible, and for keeping batteries from self-destructing inside things while stored, like they do.
WallyWorld also sells fairly heavy-duty zip pouches about 5"x 10" in camo and earth tones. You can fit your EDC/car/office drawer kit in one. Or, you can buy different colors, and sort supplies by purpose, i.e. red for bleeding, blue for airway items, orange for burns, green for prep/decon items, black for tools & equipment, or whatever. Then put the collection of pouches into a soft tackle box, and you've got a medic bag.
You can always upgrade the stuff later (and should). Baby steps.
Start with that kit, and keep it where you spend most of your time. Some small part should be on you just about always, or where you can get to it in a couple of minutes. You don't need to walk around wearing the Batman Belt 24/7 though. See how much you can get into one of those aluminum wallets (also $1), or into a waist cell phone pouch than won't look too goofy or "tacticool", while still getting the job done.
You can definitely go bigger, better, and more expensive.
But you'll have a tough time getting this much for this little.
Friday, January 29, 2016
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Getting Set
Today we'll cover pre-requisites.
As plainly as I can state it: if you haven't taken, or will shortly at your soonest opportunity, at the barest minimum, the Red Cross Basic First Aid, CPR, and AED class, offered at 500 Red Cross chapters about every week from coast to coast - and even online in some cases - which is usually one stupid-easy Saturday or a couple of 4-hour weeknights for about $70-$100, giving you the barest basics on first aid, do not f**king bother me further. Go sit in Slobovia until you get serious.
You're an irredeemable poser until you cross that hurdle, which is about as hard as stepping over a toothpick.
Srsly.
While that's the barest minimum ante to play this game, what you should do is go beyond that.
Take at least the Wilderness and Remote First Aid class, and CPR For The Professional Rescuer.
The latter can also be obtained from the American Heart Association.
Sixteen hours for the first class, and one all-day for the second one.
And ideally, you should aim to find and take whatever your state's basic EMT class is, which is approximately 110 hours of field medical training (plus lab), and usually includes or requires CPR:Pro Rescuer.
I don't care if you take the local state test, or ever work in the field, you should have this class, and be able to demonstrate this level of knowledge and basic care. Period. If I were Emperor for a day, it would be impossible to graduate high school in this country or even get your GED without it, unless you were certified to have an IQ two standard deviations below the mean, went to the zoo a lot on the short bus, and could tell us what the windows on that bus tasted like. Everyone else, do the class, if you haven't already done so. (And if it was 20 years ago, and you don't keep up, get the text below, and bone up!)
Look for it from local community colleges, or extension training for same. It may also be offered privately. Ask around, and get the best course for the least money: they all have to meet basic federal minimum standards and guidelines.
Realistically, with a job and kids, it may be hard to knock out. Do it anyways.
I know active-duty military members who manage, despite multiple frequent deployments. So if they can do it, you can. Assuming you're serious.
If you can knock out paramedic school, nursing school, PA or medical school, or already have, well hot damn. Those are, as a rule, intended for people who plan to actually work in the biz, for money, for some period of time, but there's nothing wrong with the knowledge. I don't expect anyone would undertake them just for preparedness sake.
But I will tell you that starting out with something as basic as an advanced first aid or basic EMT class can lead to an unexpected career change. Ask me how I know.
And if you already had basic first aid in the military, or Boy Scouts, or whatever, or add things like wilderness EMT, ski patroller, lifeguard, dive medic, ad infinitum, good on you. All this stuff piles on, and there's no such thing as knowing too much. And there's no limit how far you can take this. But remember, for most of you, probably 99%, you just want to get as prepared in this area as you can be soon, not become a board-certified cardiac surgeon or emergency physician. EMT is where you want to start.
And for those of you who'll do the minimum to get by, and honestly really and truly can't afford the time, money, etc. to get more learning anytime soon the old-fashioned way, in a class, the acme text for any basic first responder who's aspiring to one day learn more is this one:
Emergency Care & Transportation Of the Sick and Injured, 10th Ed., Amer. Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons
AKA "The Orange Book" unsurprisingly, because it's orange, and even more unsurprisingly, tells you everything you need to know about emergency care and transportation of the sick and injured, and has been the standard best reference in the field for 40 years.
Get the student workbook too.
Brand spanking new for both, about $200. Used, significantly less. Caveat emptor.
Get a hard copy, not just the e-book (because books require only light, not power) and expect to refer to it again and again.
We'll talk about textbooks for your library later on (don't get ahead here), but that's enough for now.
Getting to know the Orange Book inside and out will take you anywhere from a couple of weeks, if you read like I do, to several months, once you add on practical hands-on applications, and you could do nothing further in life for the rest of your life but apply it, and do very well for more than 50% of all medical emergencies.
And as an added bonus, probably never get hopelessly caught stupid in an emergency.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Get Ready
Taking care of people is hard work. Hard mentally, and hard physically. If I was physically disabled, I'd be unemployed, unless I could leverage what I know into making a living. That would take years, assuming under the circumstances it was even an option.
So as people like John Mosby keep telling folks:
Do your daily PT.
Lose excess weight.
Build muscle.
And stamina.
Lift weights.
Do cardio.
Walk, run, and hike.
With loads. And up hills.
Faster.
Longer and farther each week.
Eat right.
And not too much.
Ditch the junk food.
Get your rest.
Quit smoking.
Cut way the hell back on alcohol.
Take your vitamins.
Get a check-up.
Get your teeth fixed.
Take any prescriptions. Squirrel away a rainy day supply.
Get your eye prescriptions up to date, and get spares.
A day doesn't go by that I'm not moving patients, physically. And mine even come helpfully pre-deposited on a gurney most times. (There are the occasional ones who crumple in the lobby.) Think of the biggest person in your family, friends, group of Like-Minded Individuals, or among your co-workers. Whether you want 'em or not, those are your tribes, if crap happens and it's come as you are.
Now imagine moving that person when all the walk has gone out of them. A human body absent functional control is, on average, 100-300 pounds of hamburger, with the rigidity of Jell-O. Ask me how I know this. And if you're not up to the task, you can add a knot on their head or broken bones to their list of problems, when you drop them. You're supposed to be able to help them, and move them safely. Even if that means "assisting them to the floor" slowly and gently, versus doing an Ole' Catch, and watching them hit the deck. And bounce.
You won't be able to do that if you don't do the things on the "do" list above.
If you can't see because you need better glasses, or lost yours and don't have a spare pair, what good are you?
How well will you be able to help if you've got a splitting headache because you're more afraid of the dentist than you are of an abscessed tooth?
The work to learn medical care is hard, and the work of medical care is hard. And when you're dragging ass, beat down, and short on sleep, it's a special bonus of no fun.
Half-day shifts for those of us in the biz are the norm. Imagine how long you'll be on call after a tornado/hurricane/earthquake/etc. Physical stamina gives you an edge nothing else can provide. You can literally leverage health into better mental performance.
Not least of which because healthy people survive better in the first place, all things being equal.
And as studies have shown, if you're tired, you lose IQ points. And basic co-ordination sharpness and fine motor skills. Don't be the shaky stupid clodhopper trying to treat people. Military units, esp. combat units, do everything they can to baby the doc. It's basic common sense. Doc gets a little extra sleep, enough chow, and so on, he might have just that little bit extra reserve to pull your butt to safety when you're broken.
So figure out all the ways you're screwing that up, and get on fixing them.
(And don't kid yourself: you're screwing a lot of them up, probably pretty regularly.)
Make a list of what you should do, and keep doing, and do that.
You're no good to anyone if you can't function.
If you're in rough shape, or infirm, do any and everything in consultation with your doctor and their recommendations. You don't have to pass the Navy Seal Indoc PT test or any such. But you need a basic level of fitness.
You're either fit, or fat. There's no gray area. Nor levels of acceptable fluffiness.
This is your daily assignment for the rest of your life.
There will be a practical exam.
You don't know when that will be.
Weekly/Monthly/Annual quiz (self-graded):
What do you weigh?
What's your percentage of body fat?
What's your resting pulse rate?
What's your resting BP?
What's your Target Heart Rate during exercise, based on your age? (Hint: Look it up.)
How fast can you walk a mile?
How fast can you run a mile?
With a ruck/B.O.B.?
How much can you deadlift?
Can you drag a given load over rough ground?
How far?
How fast?
Can you do it with a notional human-sized 150# load, minimum?
Can you carry a 150# load for any distance at all?
If so, how far?
If not, how much can you carry?
How far?
Can you function afterwards for any of the above rather than becoming a casualty yourself?
How much have you improved/worsened since the last time you took this quiz?
What are you prepared to do about that?
Get on it.
Bonus Link: Heads up on how to go about it from Ryan: GMTA.
So as people like John Mosby keep telling folks:
Lose excess weight.
Build muscle.
And stamina.
Lift weights.
Do cardio.
Walk, run, and hike.
With loads. And up hills.
Faster.
Longer and farther each week.
Eat right.
And not too much.
Ditch the junk food.
Get your rest.
Quit smoking.
Cut way the hell back on alcohol.
Take your vitamins.
Get a check-up.
Get your teeth fixed.
Take any prescriptions. Squirrel away a rainy day supply.
Get your eye prescriptions up to date, and get spares.
A day doesn't go by that I'm not moving patients, physically. And mine even come helpfully pre-deposited on a gurney most times. (There are the occasional ones who crumple in the lobby.) Think of the biggest person in your family, friends, group of Like-Minded Individuals, or among your co-workers. Whether you want 'em or not, those are your tribes, if crap happens and it's come as you are.
Now imagine moving that person when all the walk has gone out of them. A human body absent functional control is, on average, 100-300 pounds of hamburger, with the rigidity of Jell-O. Ask me how I know this. And if you're not up to the task, you can add a knot on their head or broken bones to their list of problems, when you drop them. You're supposed to be able to help them, and move them safely. Even if that means "assisting them to the floor" slowly and gently, versus doing an Ole' Catch, and watching them hit the deck. And bounce.
You won't be able to do that if you don't do the things on the "do" list above.
If you can't see because you need better glasses, or lost yours and don't have a spare pair, what good are you?
How well will you be able to help if you've got a splitting headache because you're more afraid of the dentist than you are of an abscessed tooth?
The work to learn medical care is hard, and the work of medical care is hard. And when you're dragging ass, beat down, and short on sleep, it's a special bonus of no fun.
Half-day shifts for those of us in the biz are the norm. Imagine how long you'll be on call after a tornado/hurricane/earthquake/etc. Physical stamina gives you an edge nothing else can provide. You can literally leverage health into better mental performance.
Not least of which because healthy people survive better in the first place, all things being equal.
And as studies have shown, if you're tired, you lose IQ points. And basic co-ordination sharpness and fine motor skills. Don't be the shaky stupid clodhopper trying to treat people. Military units, esp. combat units, do everything they can to baby the doc. It's basic common sense. Doc gets a little extra sleep, enough chow, and so on, he might have just that little bit extra reserve to pull your butt to safety when you're broken.
So figure out all the ways you're screwing that up, and get on fixing them.
(And don't kid yourself: you're screwing a lot of them up, probably pretty regularly.)
Make a list of what you should do, and keep doing, and do that.
You're no good to anyone if you can't function.
If you're in rough shape, or infirm, do any and everything in consultation with your doctor and their recommendations. You don't have to pass the Navy Seal Indoc PT test or any such. But you need a basic level of fitness.
You're either fit, or fat. There's no gray area. Nor levels of acceptable fluffiness.
This is your daily assignment for the rest of your life.
There will be a practical exam.
You don't know when that will be.
Weekly/Monthly/Annual quiz (self-graded):
What do you weigh?
What's your percentage of body fat?
What's your resting pulse rate?
What's your resting BP?
What's your Target Heart Rate during exercise, based on your age? (Hint: Look it up.)
How fast can you walk a mile?
How fast can you run a mile?
With a ruck/B.O.B.?
How much can you deadlift?
Can you drag a given load over rough ground?
How far?
How fast?
Can you do it with a notional human-sized 150# load, minimum?
Can you carry a 150# load for any distance at all?
If so, how far?
If not, how much can you carry?
How far?
Can you function afterwards for any of the above rather than becoming a casualty yourself?
How much have you improved/worsened since the last time you took this quiz?
What are you prepared to do about that?
Get on it.
Bonus Link: Heads up on how to go about it from Ryan: GMTA.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Aesop's College Of Medical Knowledge
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.
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.
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.
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