The left has its panties in a wad because they have just realized that people can make full-auto firearms in their own home for a comparatively small amount of money. That’s always been the case. With a couple of hundred bucks, I can walk into any well-equipped hardware store and make a submachine gun using common parts.
Antigun
Citizens vs. Subjects
One of the things that a dictator does, is ban those it intends to rule from having or using weapons. That’s been true for centuries. For example, Great Britain had the 18th century disarming acts. Scottish citizens had laws passed against weapons in 1715, 1716, 1725, and 1746.
- Disarming Act of 1715 (Highlands Services Act): Enacted after the 1715 Jacobite Rising, this act of Parliament aimed to disarm Jacobite clans in the Scottish Highlands.
- Disarming Act of 1716: Officially titled “An act for the more effectual securing the peace of the highlands in Scotland,” it outlawed specific weapons like broadswords, pistols, and guns in designated parts of Scotland.
- Disarming Act of 1725: This act was passed to more effectively enforce the previous disarming efforts, with Major-General George Wade leading efforts to confiscate weapons.
- Act of Proscription 1746: Passed after the 1745 Jacobite Rising, this act further strengthened the disarming efforts and also included the famous ban on Highland dress, such as kilts and tartans, as a way to suppress Highland culture.
In 1776, the Great Britain outlawed weapons in Massachusetts. That is why the Second Amendment exists. Technology changes, but people and despots do not. The founders were well aware of that.
Me
Quiet
I’ve been quiet for a few days. The old saying that you can’t fill someone else’s cup if your own well is dry has been true for me this week. Let me explain:
As you all know, I work three days a week. Day one, I had four rooms and a parade of really sick patients in them. One of my patients had leukemia and didn’t know. The doctor and I had to tell her. Still other patients had a host of problems- one guy had a 100% blockage in two cardiac arteries, another had lost so many fluids from a week of diarrhea that his blood pressure was only 70/42. A long day.
The second day saw me treat two coworkers: one a doctor who had a seizure at work. The second, a fellow nurse with SVT and a heart rate of over 200.
The third day was by far the worst. We had a critical incident. Let me explain. EMS brought in a woman who was in cardiac arrest. She was also 38 weeks pregnant, and had been down for about 40 minutes when she came in. I was the team leader.
When you work a cardiac arrest in the emergency department, what we call a “Code,” there are numerous jobs.
- There is the recorder, whose job it is to write down every single lifesaving act we take, drugs given, etc. That person also is the time keeper. Things like “Two minutes to the next pulse check, three minutes to the next dose of epi,” things like that. This is always an RN.
- There is at least two compressors. Their job is to perform chest compressions, and there are two so they can switch places when they get tired. Literally anyone who works in the ED can do this job.
- A Respiratory therapist, who is in charge of ventilating the patient and maintaining the patient’s patent airway.
- One nurse or paramedic who is in charge of IV access.
- A doctor, who is in charge of making all decisions.
- The team leader, who runs the defibrillator and handles all of the drugs. This is always an RN, and usually a well experienced, senior one. They work with the doctor to ensure that the patient gets the proper treatment.
One of the sights that I will never forget is what that lifeless baby looked like when they cut her mother open to rescue her. Another sight that I won’t forget is looking across the patient and seeing the nurse who was the compressor continuing to do her job as tears poured down her face. It was heart wrenching.
In total, we worked on that mother and her baby for over an hour.
We wound up getting mom’s pulse back. We lost the baby. We still had six more hours to go in our shift, and we still had patients to take care of. The most jarring thing about it was that you would walk out of a room where you just spent an hour trying to save a dead baby, only to hear your patient demand a turkey sandwich. Codes involving the death of a child are always hard. In fact, it was one such call years ago that had me seeing a shrink for a couple of years.
Emergency nurses are some of the most jaded people I have ever known. They are used to seeing tragedy on a daily basis. It isn’t unusual for us to work several codes in a shift. What is unusual is to work a code on a child or on a pregnant mother. In fact, we only do that once or twice a year. Add to that, many of our nurses are recent or expecting mothers. Adults dying? That hasn’t bothered me in years, but when a child dies, it’s like a little piece of you dies with them. It’s heart wrenching and it takes weeks to get over it.
For the rest of the day, you would enter a medication room or a storage closet to find a nurse in there crying. Two of the nurses were doing so poorly that they had to be sent home for the day.
Me, I did OK for the remainder of the shift, even though I was on the verge of tears. I held it together and went home. As soon as I saw my wife, that was when it hit me. I sobbed like it was my own child that I had lost, and did so for about 20 minutes. Then I drank some booze and went to bed. I didn’t speak very much to my wife for a couple of days. I didn’t blog, except to post some posts that I had already written and was saving for later. I ate very little.
I feel better now, but you can’t imagine how hard it is to hold a dead baby. I still see that child’s face at night. The only thing that enables me to sleep is the knowledge that we did our job well, and managed to save the mother. I can’t think of a single thing we could have done differently that would have made a difference, and that is what will enable me to go back to work.
Anti American left
Saying It Out Loud
New York City’s next mayor wants to specifically target white people for tax increases.
Blog News
Hey Miguel-
Please contact me by email or commenting to this post. I am unsure if it was you who posted a recent comment, or it was an imposter. The link in one of the comments attempted to download a file that was blocked by my antivirus because it was infected with a virus.
Anti American left
Propaganda
Here is my answer, too long for Twitter’s format:
When I graduated from high school, the school I graduated from was one of two in the entire county. Everyone from the east side went to one school, everyone from the west side of the county went to the other. We all attended the same classes, taught by the same teachers. I can’t see how there is any difference.
After high school, I joined the military and did six years there. When I got out, I was broke, but willing to work. I tried making it for a couple of years as a business owner, but we were soon technically homeless. My family and I lived in the storeroom of my business and we bathed in a 48 quart ice chest.
I took what little money we managed to scrape together and used it to rent a UHaul, then moved back to Florida. When I got there, I took a job in residential construction that paid $7.45 an hour. I spent 8 hours a day in the Florida summer heat, running electrical wire through roughed-out houses, taking home $950 a month to support a family of four. Our rent was $350 a month. The government told us that we wouldn’t qualify for public assistance as long as we were still married, so we got none.
Over the next 5 years, I moved jobs every time there was an opportunity to make more money: I worked at the airport repairing ground support equipment, at Disney repairing the electronic control systems on dancing chickens, at Sherwin Williams on paint manufacturing equipment, and at a stainless steel mill repairing stainless steel pipe manufacturing equipment. There were ups and downs. A few times, they hired me as a maintenance worker because they had a lot of broken equipment and then fired me as soon as I fixed everything that was broken. Still, I didn’t give up.
Each time I changed jobs, it was for more money. Over that 5 year period, I went from $7.50 an hour to $12 an hour, and finally to a salary of $30,000 a year. Then Bill Clinton signed a “most favored nation” treaty with China, flooding the market with cheap stainless steel, making it cheaper to import stainless steel products than it was to manufacture them, which put my employer out of business.
Finally tired of being laid off, and decided to take my volunteer firefighting occupation full time. I went to school, by working odd jobs during the day, and going to school at night. I graduated the fire academy and got hired. While I was in school, my wife and I got a divorce. Divorce is financially devastating, and the child support added up to about two thirds of my take home pay.
This was the poorest time in my life. I lost my car in the divorce, so I was running to work for a month before I could save enough for a bicycle. I lost 40 pounds that summer. After six more months of saving, I managed to buy a car at a buy here/pay here place. Now that I had a car, I was able to get a second job as a janitor, and then a third job as a lifeguard, to make ends meet.
I got a 4 year degree while I was at the fire department. I bought a house and got married for the second time. Then the mortgage failures of 2009 hit and I was soon filing bankruptcy.
Then my second wife filed for divorce. I left firefighting and became a teacher. Then I left teaching because it sucked and went back to a “bridge” program to leverage my paramedic skills into nursing. I got another Bachelor’s degree, and now I am about to finish a Masters.
But hey, none of that was due to hard work and perseverance. It was all luck and ‘white privilege’ that got me here.
Failure of Education
It’s a Game, People
It’s long been my opinion that sports need to be eliminated from school. They are little more than a distraction from the school’s mission- education. At worst, they are a profiteering money grab. Now we have high school students signing multimillion dollar deals to go to certain colleges.
Bryce Underwood, a high school quarterback from Belleville, Michigan, has reportedly received the largest high school NIL offer, with figures suggesting a four-year package worth up to $12 million. A high school kid, making $3 million a year to play football. With all of this money flying around, students and parents have forgotten about education and sportsmanship. It’s all about the money.
It’s no wonder that high school sport recruiting has become a big business. I know of schools that are buying students and their families houses in their district, so the student can attend. That’s right- if your kid is good at one of the big money sports, you get a free house in a rich neighborhood, at least until he graduates.
Students who are good at sports don’t have to worry about such mundane things like following school rules, dress codes, or even school work. Nope, they are going places, and no one will stop them. Back during the time when I was teaching high school, the Principal approached me and asked that I change a previous student’s grade from the year before, because the ‘F’ he had earned in my class was making him ineligible to play football. Student athletes get a pass when breaking rules. We can’t have them getting in trouble and winding up suspended- there is a big game this week, haven’t you heard?
That’s why it comes as no surprise that a Pennsylvania football coach resigned after he and his family received threats from parents for benching two players that had been acting in an unsportsmanlike like manner. They were only suspended for the first half of a game. When those players sat longer than they had initially been told for that game, school administrators sided with parents and suspended the coach as well as his father, who served as the team’s defensive coordinator, for two games.
Our tax dollars are paying for that shit. That’s one of the many reasons why, when I hear people complain that cutting property taxes will hurt schools, that I just don’t get excited. Here is what your tax dollars pay for:
- Buford, GA has a $62 million football stadium for its high school
- McKinley Senior High School in Canton, OH cost $175 million
- In fact, Texas has 8 of the ten most expensive high school football facilities, and to make the top 10, your school district’s taxpayers have to shell out at least $56 million.
In many places, the high school football coach is the highest paid member of the staff, making more than the principal. I just don’t think that sports should be paid for with taxpayer dollars. If you want your kid to play a sport, pay for it yourself. Many parents pay for things like gymnastics, dance, and even weekend soccer. One of my grandkids plays hockey, but his dad is paying for it. Why should I be forced to pay for your kid to play a game, under penalty of losing my home if I refuse?
Me
Lame
The training was stupid, and the instructor actually admitted that it was designed to absolve the hospital of any liability of a patient were to attack a nurse, because now we can’t sue the hospital for not providing us with training. If a violent event happens, it must be the nurse’s fault for not properly de-escalating the patient’s behavior.
Today’s class was 8 hours long. The first four hours was on how to redirect the patient’s behavior. The training said that all behavior is a form of communication, and the patient is simply trying to tell you that there is some sort of problem that the health care provider needs to address, but doesn’t have the words to be able to express it, so this manifests as “Risk Behavior.” The only proper reply to this “risk behavior” is to safely, and in a non-confrontational way, control and redirect the patient until the patient can realize that what he is doing isn’t productive. It’s called nonviolent crisis intervention, and I think it is bullshit that is designed to cover the employer’s legal ass, and who cares if employees get hurt? Healthcare systems hide behind the workers’ compensation immunity shield, so you can’t sue them if they trained you to avoid violence. They can, however be sued if one of their employees defends themselves from a violent attack using a violent response.
The next hour was all about how employees need to remain detached and not allow the patient that is in crisis to goad or bait you into engaging them.
Then we broke for lunch before returning to learn the practical skills. The first step to each one is to “take a non-threatening stance that is designed to not provoke the patient into engaging in risky behavior.” Then, if the patient tries to hit, grab, bite, or shove you, how to break free and escape to run away and call for help. The key is for the employee to avoid violence.
I was the only male there, so I got to be the one that the instructor kept using for demonstrations. One of the scenarios was how to escape a front chokehold where the patient is facing you and attempts to grab you by the throat. The instructor, was roughly my size, had us watch a 1 minute video on how to escape this and said let me demonstrate, then spun around and grabbed me by the collarbones with both hands. I swear with all of my being that I didn’t do it on purpose. He caught me by surprise because I was zoned out and not really paying attention. What happened was reflex.
I brought both hands up through the middle of his arms, then palmed his face with my left, causing him to lean backwards slightly. Once he was off balance, I stepped into him, put my right leg behind him and shoved. He landed on his ass. The entire class got to hear about how what I did was a violent response, and would get you in a discipline issue of we were ever to do that to a patient.
I don’t give a shit. I will not allow myself to be some crackhead’s punching bag and spend the rest of my life eating through a straw from my wheelchair. A couple of events from Florida this year drive that point home:
A nurse for Palms West Hospital had every bone in her face broken by a patient who attacked her. It was two months before she could walk well enough to go to a rehab center. She is still there, and hasn’t yet returned home, as far as I know. The hospital responded by designating a desk in the ED for the use of a sheriff deputy, to encourage them to hang out there. Also, that makes them a substation, which many hospitals use to declare that they are a police station, so concealed carry is off limits. Most hospitals only use unarmed security, and many times those security guards are unarmed women and old men.
A pair of nurses in Port Charlotte, FL were attacked in March. No one was arrested.