September 2020

 The left is in a real quandary. What is responsible for COVID? Is it climate change, or is it systemic racism? Well, according to the CDC, minorities are being affected by COVID because of racism. This is largely due to the fallacy that anything that adversely affects a minority MUST be due to racism. This is because they demand equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. 

 The violence and arson that occurred during protests in Lancaster over the weekend previously placed that area in Zone 1. However, the government has announced that the people who were violent were “white nationalists” with the only evidence offered to substantiate this claim being the race of the people committing the violence:

Any time officers were pelted with rocks or bottles Sunday, it came from Caucasian men in the crowd, police Chief Jarrad Berkihiser said at the news conference.

There were between five and 15 agitators, all white men in their late 20s and early 30s, according to Mayor Danene Sorace, who said video footage is being put into a state police system to identify the agitators.

Using race as the only evidence that the violence is not due to BLM is disingenuous. According to this live of thought, only black people can belong to BLM. That is, of course, ridiculous. It appears to me that this is deliberate deflection and an attempt to continue the “police are using force against mostly peaceful protesters” trope. 

Since government capitulation and collaboration is one of the aggravating factors that increases violence to a higher zone, Lancaster is now placed in Zone 2. 

EDITED TO ADD: 

Berkihiser has been chief since May 2018

 The Police Chief and Mayor released this statement the same day as Floyd’s death

The police chief made the same claims in June:

“We have seen with our own eyes the agitators that were in the crowd.”

Police Chief Jarrad Berkihiser said police have “definite evidence” that white nationalist groups were among the crowds of people who demonstrated over the weekend in response to the death of George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis. He said some were wearing body armor and carrying handguns.

Berkihiser said “Caucasian individuals” threw rocks and bottles containing cayenne pepper at police.

 NBA team buses trying to ferry players to games were blocked by BLM protesters for not caring enough. You can never be woke enough. 

 My brother owns a couple of businesses. One of them is a store that sells sporting goods. A couple of people came into the store while my nephew was running the register. It was two black males, one skinny, one heavy set. They told my nephew that they wanted the store to carry BLM merchandise, and take a percentage of sales. 

My brother refused. Now he is having trouble with toughs hanging out in the area and trying to intimidate them. I will update if I hear any more. 

 In 1998, Florida had the worst wildfire season in its history. Those fires were burning everywhere. You couldn’t go outside without coughing on the smoke. 

The undergrowth, what we call fuel load, was immense. Years of putting out wildfires meant that there were layers of dead undergrowth, with new growth on top. Normally, nature periodically has a wildfire caused by lightning or some other natural source that gets rid of the dead undergrowth and provides nutrients for new growth. For years, firefighters had been putting out these natural fires, and there was an enormous amount of fuel lying about. 

I remember that year. It began in February with a killer tornado outbreak. A dozen tornadoes killed 42 people. We were finding bodies for over a week. I was the operations officer for the Moonbeam Mobile Home park for the first night of that disaster. We recovered half a dozen bodies, including a baby. Those storms kicked off a weeks of almost daily rain. 

In March, it stopped raining. By May, the entire state was tinder dry. Air warmed by the sun heated ground would begin to rise at about 10 am. Cooler, moisture laden air would rush in from the ocean. That sea breeze causes thunderstorms. This is a normal weather pattern in Florida. It happens every day. 

Except in 1998, there was little rain, these storms were flush with lightning, but didn’t drop nearly enough rain. The dry brush would be ignited by lightning and other sources. Mostly lightning, sometimes people, mostly by accident. A carelessly discarded cigarette butt, a hot muffler in tall grass, an unattended fire, or even arson. Stoked by a brisk sea breeze, the fires would grow quickly. The fuel load was so heavy, the brush was so dry, this time there was no stopping the fires. I spent two weeks on the fire line. Always the same: the fires would grow with the sea breeze, get larger, and we would begin our day. 

Cut fire lines with the assistance of forestry service fire plows, backed up by brush tankers. A brush tanker is a great invention. Take a surplus military 5 ton 6×6 truck. Put a gasoline powered pump, a foam proportioner, and a supply tank onboard. The tank contains two compartments: a 500 gallon one for water, and a 25 gallon compartment for class A foam. This leaves a walkway for a firefighter to stand, and we covered that walkway in black paint mixed with sand to make a nonskid surface for firefighter boots to find purchase on the foam slicked surface. 

As I said, two weeks on the fire line. We would get up and eat breakfast at 6 am, check the gear, and get ready. The fires would kick up at about 10 am, and we would lay down a layer of water and foam on top of a fire break cut by a plow. A pair of brush tankers with a crew of three each follow the fire plow as it cuts a break, spraying the area with foam. A crew of ten follows that, and makes sure the break doesn’t get jumped by the fire. Since you are directly in the fire’s path, it is hot, dangerous work. You have to keep an eye out to make sure the fire doesn’t cut you off, and that it remains far enough away to keep you out of danger. It takes about half an hour to run out of water, if used judiciously. Fill at the nearest pond (It IS Florida. There is swamp everywhere) Every two hours, go to the supply point, refuel the pump, grab some water, head back to the line. Every two fuel breaks, you got a box with a sandwich and a bag of chips. By 11 pm, the sea breeze dies down enough that the fires start to lose steam. By about 1 am, the fires would die down and almost go out. Crews would take turns watching the day’s fire lines, while the rest of the crews found a field to lie down in and get some sleep. A single one hour watch plus four hours of sleep each night. Second watch was the worst: an hour of sleep, an hour of watch, three hours of sleep. 

Anyway, we learned our lesson. Now Florida allows wildfires to burn a bit. We do prescribed burns. Good forestry management. The Pacific Northwest hasn’t. When their forestry people try to do a prescribed burn, the environmentalists sue. So now they are having their own fire troubles. Maybe this time they will learn. I doubt it. 

 In my post on Trauma First Aid, it was my intent to create a fast and easy guide to trauma first aid that the layperson could use without much training. In the comments, there was a reader who began a discussion on the use of QuikClot versus chitin agents, claiming that “doctors say they have to clean it out of wounds.”

I had no intention of offering a comprehensive course for medical providers in the pages of this blog. Nor do I want to spend it giving away my services for free, nor do I want to get into an intricate discussion about the pros and cons of one hemostatic agent over the other. 

Instead, I will leave you with the opinions of the Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care (CoTCCC) and the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians. They are two of the leading agencies for prehospital care of trauma victims. 

QuiikClot impregnated Combat gauze is recommended by the CoTCCC and the NAEMT as the first choice for hemostatic dressing of uncontrolled hemorrhage. Celox Gauze & ChitoGauze may be used if Combat Gauze is not available. They worked as effectively as QuikClot Combat gauze in laboratory testing, but neither ChitoGauze nor Celox Gauze have been tested in the USAISR safety model. Chitosan-based hemostatic dressings have been used in combat since 2004 with no safety issues reported.

Since the two largest bodies recommend the use of QuikClot as the first line, that is what I recommend when I conduct training. However, I do not wish to continue debating this, so I am pulling the plug on my online guide. 

I recommend that the people who want this information take a class. The company I sometimes teach for charges 

$300 for Tactical Emergency Casualty Care

$300 for Tactical Combat Casualty Care

$100 for Basic Life Support

$300 for Prehospital Trauma Life Support

I would also point out that Doctors and Nurses take these courses as well. Doctors and Nurses don’t think like prehopsital providers because they aren’t. What happens in the field is a completely different kind of medicine that what happens in a hospital. 

 This year, I am teaching nothing but Physical Science. This course is like an intro to physics and chemistry course. It takes the easier parts of both subjects, barely touches upon them, dumbs them down, and makes them into a year long course. My district wants it taught as physics for the first semester, chemistry for the second. The class is designed to be a science class for students who are euphemistically referred to as “underperforming,”  which is newspeak for the kids who struggle to pass any class, but still need a third science course to graduate. Sort of like “science for dummies.”

The first two weeks of school were “nature of science” where we review the scientific method. Our school is on a “block schedule” where I see each class every other day for 110 minutes. I spent a full block teaching them to use “significant figures” in solving math problems. 

Simply put:

The rules are simple. A digit in a number is significant if it is not a zero. If it IS a zero, it is significant under one of two conditions: it is sandwiched between other significant numbers, or it is a trailing zero in any number that contains a decimal. For example: 1001 has 4 significant digits, and 20.100 has five. 

Using significant digits to multiply or divide is easy: the answer cannot have more significant digits than the number of significant digits of any number used to calculate that answer, and you simply round off the remaining digits to zero. For example: 1111 times 22 equals 24,000. 

That’s it. 

I gave them a quiz on the concept. It was 10 questions long. 80% of the students failed. More than half of them missed every single question. The students asked to retake the test. I told them that we would retake it, then I reviewed the material with them for another hour. We then watched a Youtube video explaining the concept. They still didn’t get it, so we spend most of ANOTHER block reviewing and doing a worksheet to practice the concept.

I quizzed them again. The students complained that I gave them different questions, because the answers were different than the first quiz. 

One student told me that he didn’t even know what “significant figures” was. I said to him, “We have been studying this for 3 entire blocks. You haven’t been absent. What is the problem?”

He says: “I slept during the first one. The second one was boring me, so I zoned out.”

This student is in his third year of high school and has only completed 5.5 credits. That is less than the 6 credits a student should get for a single year. It is now mathematically impossible for this student to earn enough credits to graduate. A standard diploma requires 24 credits. There is a reduced credit option that allows a student to graduate with 18 credits, but it is no longer possible for him to hit even that lowered standard. He is currently failing 2 of his 6 classes, and it is only the third week of school. 

I am not allowed to wake students up or discipline them, because our administration is in favor of what they call restorative discipline and is attempting to combat what they call the “school to prison pipeline.”

The student is black. I mention this because I saw an article this morning about how the US education system is racist because black kids fail at a higher rate than whites. My school administrators claim that black students are suspended and disciplined at a higher rate than whites, so we are to allow them to fail if they do not want to do any work. 

This student is sitting in the same class with his white counterparts. He has the same textbook, same assignments, and hears the same lectures. The assignments are graded by computer, so no racial bias there. They either have the correct answer or do not. He is failing because he chooses to sleep in class, and when he IS awake, he admits to “zoning out” and then doesn’t learn anything. 

I don’t understand how allowing students to fail is any better than disciplining them. 

 Spikes Tactical, who is just down the street from me, is selling new Pro-Tip magazines for the AR.