July 2012

Roger Ebert says that the recent shootings at the Cinemark Theater prove that concealed carry doesn’t help prevent crime, because no one at the theater took out the shooter. That is a major disconnect with logic. That is like saying that a building that has a fire proves that fire extinguishers don’t work. By that same logic, police don’t prevent shootings either, so we should get rid of police.

Ebert also overlooks that Cinemark Theaters have had a long standing policy of posting their property as off limits to legal concealed carry since at least 2004. Here is an encounter that happened in 2009. Here is another that occured in 2004.

Here is a picture of the signs that are posted today. As of last month, the Cinemark closest to my house was posted as not allowing carry.

Signs demanding that guns not be brought into a store only guarantee that a killer will not be facing armed resistance. After all, if he is willing to commit murder, a sign isn’t going to stop him.

The BioLite camp stove appears to be a handy little piece of gear. This is a stove that has a heat powered, forced air fan that allows you to burn any twigs you find, and also provides enough electricity to charge small USB devices. I don’t have on yet, but I am planning on buying one as soon as possible.

Ego. That is what you get when you get a room full of paramedics together. Needing CEUs, I was sitting in an advanced airway class today. During an in-class discussion, the subject of intubation came up, and I remarked that I often use airways like the King tube for intubation, because it allows a provider to manage the airway of a cardiac arrest victim without stopping chest compressions, and there is no worry about missed intubations. This increases survival rates.

A medic in the row in front of me said that he gets enough intubations that he isn’t concerned about that, because he is confident in his abilities. He also told me that he performs RSI in his agency, and he feels like he is good enough that he doesn’t usually bother to prepare a back up airway in the event that he cannot secure a tube. Later in the day, during a break, I asked him how many intubations he gets.
He replied, “Three or four.”
I asked: “A month?”
He says, “No, a year.”

How do you think that you are proficient in performing a very complex skill that takes 30 seconds, and that you perform once every three months? You are so confident that you will give a drug to a patient that makes it impossible for that patient to breathe on his own, without making sure that you have a back up plan in place, in the event that your primary attempt fails to secure the airway?

Later in the afternoon, we had the opportunity to intubate a METI man. (This is a computerized high fidelity mannikin that reacts to medical procedures like a human would.) This medic and his partner were given a scenario where the patient stopped breathing, and were expected to intubate the patient before he desaturated to the point where his heart began to malfunction.

They failed, because they spent over three minutes trying to intubate, and were not ventilating the patient. He blamed the other paramedic that he was partnered with for the failure.

This is pretty funny. This is where Amazon and their shipping policies will inevitably take us:

A man in the UK died while waiting for an ambulance, because the closest crew was on a government required lunch break. We are told that this is the health care system is the one that we want to emulate, but is this really what we want?

EMAS chief executive Phil Milligan said: “Our practice on meal breaks comply, as they must, with the national NHS Agenda for Change employee terms and conditions, which require staff to be given a 30-minute undisturbed break.”

Andto those who think that EMS and fire, being public employees, should be treated like every other employee, remember that this is what you get when you want them to be like everybody else- when you need them, they might be out to lunch…

like everybody else.

All of the cool kids are doing it.

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I actually met an honest to goodness communist. This guy was hard core. He was trying to tell me how the Soviets had found the perfect form of government. We had a discussion, and I kept it civil, mostly because I was fascinated at his grasp on alternate reality.

I pointed out the many flaws of communism, and he actually said to me that communism will work, it just hasn’t because no one that is smart enough has tried it, yet. When I asked him how he would keep people working, once they realized that they got a share of the wealth, whether they worked or not, he said that people should work for the common good, not for personal gain. He said that those who refuse are traitors to the peole and should be imprisoned or killed.