Divemedic

Arrested 40 Years Later

Imagine finding out at 45 years old that you are on the missing and endangered child list, and were abducted more than 40 years ago. Even more surprising, your mother was the person who abducted you and is now under arrest for the crime.

That’s what happened when Debra Newton was arrested in The Villages, Florida this week. She stands accused of running away with her daughter, changing their names, and going into hiding back in 1983. It was confirmed by DNA testing:

You’re not who you think you are. You’re a missing person. You’re Michelle Marie Newton,

The entire thing began when Debra Newton abducted Michelle, who was three years old when she and her mother left Louisville, Kentucky to begin a new job in Georgia and prepare a new home for the family.

I know that there are those who would claim that, being the child’s mother, she can’t have abducted her. My response to that is that the Father of that child has rights, and those rights were taken from him when his wife ran off with the kid. I’m glad they finally brought him closure, and did it in a way that he isn’t getting screwed into paying child support.

By Divemedic, ago

Weed, Guns, and Prostitutes

In a move that signals just how much of a fascist tyrant he is, Trump signed an executive order reclassifying marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III on Thursday. Schedule III drugs are things like Ketamine, Testosterone, and Codeine. That sets in motion a number of things that are important. The most obvious of these is that users of medical marijuana are no longer unlawful users of the drug, which also means that those with a medical marijuana card are no longer prohibited from buying a firearm, and can now legally put no on a 4473. It also means that BATFEIEIO will have to revise and rewrite their form 4473 questions.

Republicans are incensed because police unions have long opposed such a move, as busting people for weed is a huge source of police employment and a great way to conduct warrantless searches: “I smelled weed.” As evidence to support their ire, Republicans made the following points:

  • Reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule III drug will send the wrong message to America’s children, enable drug cartels, and make our roads more dangerous
  • According to a recently published fifteen-year review of medical research, marijuana has no real medical value, and 30% of medical marijuana users have an addiction to the drug
  • Under Schedule III, pilots, truck drivers, and other safety-sensitive professions will not be tested for marijuana.
  • Marijuana is already imperiling safety: over 40% of fatal car crashes today involve THC. Rescheduling will exponentially worsen this crisis

First, let me say that I am one of the only people that I know that has never even tried the stuff. I have no interest in it, and I just never felt the need to try it. My only oppositions to marijuana are practical ones.

  1. I hate the smell when it is smoked. It reeks. I don’t care if they legalize it, as long as I don’t have to smell it. Make it an edible, or make patches. Do that, and I won’t care.
  2. Pass limits beyond which someone is considered impaired, and come up with a test that can reliably determine if someone is beyond that limit. I don’t want someone flying my plane or surgeons operating on people while they are impaired.

Now that that is out of the way, let’s address the Republican claims:

America’s children aren’t sitting there saying “Oooh, Trump said doctors can now prescribe weed. I think I will go out and smoke it now.” Ridiculous. Anyone who wants weed gets it now. I know that it’s anecdotal, but I would say that half of the people under the age of 30 who come to the ED test positive for marijuana, and probably 1 in 5 who are over 30 do as well. The patients I don’t test smell like weed a good bit of the time, too. Your policies aren’t doing shit to prevent people from using.

Half of the states (almost- it’s 24 now) have already legalized marijuana in some form or another. The Federal government is just catching up with what the states are doing, and what the citizens obviously want.

Marijuana DOES have medical uses. The fact that studies are showing that it doesn’t is a reflection of science being for sale. The government pays someone to conduct a study on marijuana to prove it has no legitimate use, and what do you know, the preexisting opinion of the study’s sponsor is confirmed. Far too much of what we call “science” is actually paid propaganda. Most “scientists” are actually whores who sell the weight of their credentials to the highest bidder.

Truck drivers, pilots, and the like can still be tested for weed as a Schedule III drug. They are tested for intoxication on things like alcohol (no scheduled at all), Schedule IV drugs like Xanax, Ativan, and Valium, as well as other Schedule III drugs like Ketamine and Codeine. This is just a stupid and downright untruthful argument that I classify as fear mongering, no different than “every traffic accident will result in a gunfight.”

In my several decades as a paramedic, I can say that nearly every traffic accident occurring after midnight involves an alcohol impaired driver, and we aren’t making alcohol illegal. If fatal accidents involve a driver with marijuana in their system 40% of the time, I ask how many people have marijuana in their systems. Correlation doesn’t imply causation. I could easily say that 60% of people who die in a traffic crash eat sandwiches, but that doesn’t make sandwiches the cause of traffic deaths. Keep in mind that current testing for marijuana doesn’t test for intoxication, it tests for presence. Because they are fat soluble, the metabolites of marijuana stay in your system for up to 90 days. That doesn’t mean that you were intoxicated at the time you were tested, which is my second point, above.

Overall, I think this issue is a loser for Republicans, and I support the action Trump took here. I just wish I didn’t have to smell that stuff everywhere I go.

By Divemedic, ago

Dangers of Imagination

A middle school in the Orlando area was placed on lockdown after a student was seen carrying a clarinet by an automated weapons detection system, which decided the child’s clarinet was actually a gun. My thoughts here are that your automated weapons detection system sucks. That isn’t how the principal of the school saw it, however.

A student was walking in the hallway, holding a musical instrument as if it were a weapon, which triggered the Code Red to activate. While there was no threat to campus, I’d like to ask you to speak with your student about the dangers of pretending to have a weapon on a school campus.

What danger was there, actually? None. No one was hurt. No one could be hurt. The real danger was that your system doesn’t work correctly, and it caused unnecessary panic. Not only that, but just like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, it creates alarm fatigue in that people will be less likely to believe future calls for lockdowns when they remember all of the times that they were forced to hide because of stupid nonsense like this.

By Divemedic, ago

Divide

What we have here is a sharp divide. On the right, there are those who want immigration laws enforced.

On the left, there are those who want open borders and unlimited money giveaways, just not their own money.

This is nothing new. America has been sharply divided many times before: Vietnam, civil rights, women’s suffrage, the temperance movement, and the trade war that brought about the civil war.

What makes today a problem that’s as serious as 1860 is the the judiciary is just as polarized and perfectly willing to twist the law and the constitution to fit their own views.

Thats evident in the Trump kangaroo courts, and in many immigration hearings. Read this one for an example.

When this illegal couple was approached by ICE, they attempted to flee to a local police station in the belief that the cops would rescue them from the Feds.

By Divemedic, ago

Job Search

I have been applying to various hospitals as I see jobs I am interested in. I had never tried job search companies before, so I signed up for Monster, Indeed, and Zip recruiter. That turns out to have been a mistake on my part.

My phone won’t stop ringing with calls and text messages, and my email box is inundated with recruiters trying to offer me jobs that I am not interested in, with many of them being jobs I am not qualified for. Most of the people sending them have Indian names. It goes like this: “I just reviewed your impressive resume, and I have a job I think perfectly suits you. One of my clients is looking for” then the job title is totally inappropriate- things like Physician, Neuro Surgeon, Physician Assistant. There are also the offers for night shift jobs in Indiana or New Mexico. I have gotten calls to sell insurance on commission, and even to be a night shift janitorial supervisor. Why are they wasting my time and their own?

It’s a pain in the ass. Avoid those three companies like the plague.

By Divemedic, ago

Trillion a Year

This article in Fortune correctly states that the $1 trillion in interest payments is problematic, but I think they understate the scope of the problem. The Federal government collects about $5 trillion a year in taxes. That’s a lot of money, but it isn’t enough. For decades, the government has spent an average of $1.45 for every dollar it collects in taxes.

The majority of it goes to so-called ‘mandatory spending’ and interest on the money that we have already borrowed. Mandatory spending includes entitlements like Medicare, Social Security, VA benefits, etc., which are REQUIRED by law to be paid. Interest on the debt must also be paid. Entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) accounts for about two-thirds of the federal budget, and interest on the debt that we already owe brings that to just over 83% of the budget. Entitlements are mandatory spending, meaning they’re on “autopilot,” growing automatically based on eligibility rules set by Congress, unlike discretionary spending.

All of the other spending: Welfare, Food Stamps, the Military, the Courts, jails, etc., account for the other $2.3 trillion of Federal outlays.

It’s just unsustainable, and anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.

By Divemedic, ago

WOW. That Sucks

Last month, I finished my MBA. I talked to my supervisor and told them that I wanted to move into management. I was told that there were no positions available. Rich W said in comments to the post that I had just placed a target on my back.

I think you have run up against a problem of being a threat to those that interviewing you. Any time you apply for a position where the interviewing group is less qualified than you, they will see you as a threat to their position. 

It turns out that he was correct. Instead of being used for my talents and efforts, management has apparently decided that I am a threat. I was written up this week for a couple of items. This is my first time being disciplined on the job (any job) in 10 years. (The last time being when I was attacked at work)What did I do?

  • I made a charting error by listing a patient’s current medication at home as an allergy. I spotted the error and changed it less than 30 minutes later. Then, on the same patient, I didn’t give an ordered medication (a laxative called “Golytely”) until three hours after it was ordered. They didn’t even ask why I delayed it. Had they asked, I would have pointed out that I couldn’t give him the medication because he spent two hours of that time in surgery, then had to remain lying flat for an hour, thus being unable to drink the laxative. Hence, the three hour delay.
  • The second item on the discipline was that, four months ago, I was ordered to perform an EKG on a patient and company policy says EKGs need to be done within 10 minutes of the order, but I didn’t do it for almost 45 minutes. This was used, the discipline said, as evidence that my not following orders in a timely manner is a pattern. I can’t tell you what happened there, because this was the first I heard of it. My annual evaluation in September made no mention of it, and I have no emails or other documents that I can see that mention it, either.

How can you use an item from 4 months ago (August) that I was never told about or disciplined for as evidence to upgrade discipline? Only if you are trying to hang someone out to dry. See, you can’t discipline someone for a one-time error in charting or a delay in medication administration. That’s why they needed to come up with the event from August.

The odd thing is that I was just given an award in October for “exhibiting excellence in supporting the mission of quality nursing at [company].” I was also recently mentioned for kudos (last week) in having a 98% accuracy rate in carrying out tasks like medication administration and lab work.

At the same time, my employer has been editing people’s time cards, and the last time an accrediting body came to visit, management rushed to hide the hallway beds that were being used to hold patients, because that is a violation of Joint Commission rules. Is committing wage theft by editing time cards and demanding that employees attend unpaid training.

The dominant operational priority is door-to-bed time, regardless of nurse workload, intake status, or downstream care capacity.
• Admitted patients awaiting inpatient beds are frequently placed in a back hallway to free ED rooms.
• Boarding volume can range from none to 20–30 patients.
• This hallway boarding practice resulted in a Joint Commission citation and financial fine.
• Despite the citation and fine, leadership has continued the practice.
• During regulatory visits, management scrambles to hide hallway boarding to avoid detection.
• A manager explicitly stated that increased throughput generates more revenue than the cost of paying the fine.
This reflects a conscious decision to treat regulatory penalties as a cost of doing business, rather than a boundary for patient safety and ethical practice.

A critical insight from these observations is the erosion of ethical decision-making and lack of deference to Joint Commission standards:

Joint Commission guidelines are treated as obstacles to be managed, not standards to be upheld.

  • Known violations are concealed during inspections rather than corrected.
  • Financial and throughput incentives are prioritized over patient dignity, safety, and monitoring standards.
  • Leadership behavior demonstrates normalization of deviance—unsafe practices become routine when no immediate harm occurs.
  • Staff are implicitly expected to participate in practices that obscure reality (e.g., hallway boarding concealment, paper compliance).
  • Serious safety concerns (e.g., patients left unassigned and alone in rooms without monitoring for extended periods- as long as four hours) have been raised and dismissed.

I no longer believe this organization:

  • Operates in good faith with regulatory bodies
  • Prioritizes patient safety over metrics
  • Protects frontline clinicians from systemic risk
  • Aligns with my professional values

The cumulative pattern reflects cost-driven operational collapse with intentional regulatory noncompliance, erosion of ethical standards, and displacement of organizational risk onto individual clinicians. Joint Commission guidelines are treated as negotiable, fines are internalized as acceptable expenses, and frontline staff are expected to absorb the consequences.

It’s obvious to me that my time with this employer is coming to a close. It will be a race to see if I can find a job before they can find a reason to fire me. I have an interview scheduled for the week after Christmas. Let’s hope it works out.

If I have to, I can take a non-management position. The recruiters won’t leave me alone about that, but I don’t want to settle unless I absolutely have to.

By Divemedic, ago

Guns Aren’t Probable Cause

A man is pulled over by the police for a minor traffic infraction. He notifies the cop that he is carrying a firearm and hands over his concealed weapons permit. The cop said: “Once I knew he had a gun, that gave me reason to search for more contraband.” Note that the cop had no reason to believe that there was any crime being committed- after all, the man had a permit and had notified the cop that he was carrying. Still, the cop used that information to pull the man from his car, handcuff him, and leave him locked in the back seat of his patrol car for more than 30 minutes while the cop tore through and searched his vehicle.

I had a similar run in back in 2001 with an Orange county deputy in Orlando, and he threatened to kill me. That’s why I don’t tell cops shit. In this case, the victim of this roid raging idiot sued. Anyhow, here is a lawyer’s take on this case.

Some of the things that this lawyer says, and I grant that they are sensible pieces of advice, is upsetting to me. They are:

  • Keep your hands visible
  • Don’t make any sudden moves
  • Don’t reach for anything, not even your wallet

Because cops are nervous, they tend to overreact, and will assume that you are about to use a weapon.

Cops are basically scared little boys with weapons and carte blanche to use them to kill you. That’s a bad combination, and something that speaks volumes about American law and American policing. You are the enemy and a threat- despite the fact that there are 20 million traffic stops per year and only about 120 of them result in cops being shot. (That’s a 0.000006% chance that any given traffic stop will involve cops being shot.) Cops are more likely to have a heart attack on duty, yet they don’t go around shooting people that sell fatty food.

By Divemedic, ago