My last day at work, I was the response nurse. In that position, you are the nurse that isn’t assigned to any patients, and instead spending your day helping the other nurses in the ED with anything that happens requiring a spare set of skilled hands. You spend your day getting difficult IVs, helping with complicated drug administration, and assisting with difficult patients. As it turns out, it was one of those days where a lot of weird stuff happens.
We had three cardiac arrests. One of them was REALLY ill when he came in. He was completely out of his head, and would only yell his sister’s name (he lived with her) and that we were trying to kill him. He had a Lactic Acid of 15, a Hemoglobin of 5.2, Troponin of 500, and a rectal temperature of 91.5f. Two hours later, he was dead. When I notified his sister, she was hysterical, telling me that he was all she had left in the world. She was heart broken that he had been calling for her and she wasn’t there. Heart wrenching.
Then there were the two heart attacks that went directly to the cath lab. One of them died on the operating table.
The woman who was being arrested for her 19th felony and started complaining of chest pain. A clear case of incarceritis.. She was agitated and combative. I wanted to give her Ativan, but there is a nationwide shortage. Ten milligrams of Valium later, she took a nap. When she woke up, she went to jail.
A woman who has been coming in for weeks complaining that she keeps falling, but we can never find anything. Right after she got in the ED, her blood pressure dropped to 72/42. Problem found.
A list of other alerts: Sepsis, Respiratory, Seizures, and a couple of falls with associated broken hips.
The oddest one was a Baker Act that came in. It was a young woman who would talk completely normally for a while. Then she began speaking Latin in a very low pitched, gravelly voice. Then she would switch back to her normal voice, and claim to not remember a thing about what just happened. The family told me that this was odd, because she doesn’t know Latin. The girl’s family asked me what she was saying. It took a bit, because my Latin is not very good. We eventually figured it out. What she was saying was that “The girl is gone. I am Satan.” While she was acting like that, she would look at you with the creepiest expression on her face. Bone chilling.
That is some freaky shit. Her head CT showed a rather large tumor in her brain. Still, I am not playing with that shit, even though I am not religious in the least. That was some next level, spooky stuff.
She got sent to a mental health facility. It was an emotionally draining day, and I am sleeping in. I am typing this and going to back to bed. I didn’t sleep well after that horrible trainwreck of a shift.
Colonel Sheyla Baez Ramirez. Ramirez assumed command of the Fort McCoy Garrison in Wisconsin in 2024. Ramirez is a left wing political activist who refuses to display the official photographs of the Secretary of Defense, President, and the Vice President.
There is a growing movement in the US military of Commissioned officers who are refusing to display the photos of the President, Vice President, and SecDef. Many of them are being relieved of command. The left is claiming that the Free Speech rights of these officers is being violated to soothe Trump’s ego.
They are wrong. Military personnel are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Article 88 has this to say:
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
This is important, because the US military MUST be subservient to civilian control. Allowing officers to oppose that civilian control carries with it a large risk of military coup. Seldom is it seen for Generals to engage in military coups. Usually, it is colonels who do those sorts of things.
olonel Reza Khan’s 1921 coup that brought the Pahlavi dynasty to power in Iran
The 1931 coup attempts by the Japanese Army (led by Lieutenant Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto)
The 1967 coup by a group of colonels in Greece that established the military junta
The 1969 Libyan coup d’état in which Colonel Muammar Gaddafi took power
The successful coup in Mali by Colonel Assimi Goita
Generals are inherently political creatures, and they are therefore close to the existing power structure the coup intends to overthrow. They got their position through connections, potentially through patronage, and they themselves enjoy powers of patronage and influence. In this case, many of the officers who oppose Trump are there because Biden put them there through DEI programs. They remain loyal to the left.
An example needs to be made of a couple of these mutinous assholes. Start an Article 31 investigation and court martial a couple of them. Reduce them in rank to the lowest you can get away with, toss them in jail for a year or so, and give them a BCD.
I have decided to begin doing some testing of ammo and posting my results here at Sector Ocho. I have recently procured a Garmin Xero C1 Pro chronograph. I will start doing some real world testing at the range, using actual EDC handguns to obtain muzzle velocity and bullet data, as well as shooting into ballistic gelatin to measure terminal performance.
This just tickles my data driven side. I love data, and this will give me plenty of it.
The chrono uses radar to measure bullet speed, and I am looking forward to playing with it. Expect an article on defense ammo to be coming soon. I am thinking that this will spark some interesting caliber/brand wars.
Black dude died in the Bahamas after spitting at someone. The parents claim he was beaten to death. I don’t know why the parents are upset. The new rule is that you can stab someone in the chest if they touch you or your stuff.
19 year old Aleysha Ortiz graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in 2024. She enrolled at the University of Connecticut, who admits students without requiring SAT scores. She is suing the public school because she can’t cope with the rigors of college. That is odd to me because I found college, with a handful courses being the exception, to be easy. Why is an honor student finding it so difficult?
Because she is illiterate. That’s right- she graduated with honors, but cannot read or write.
I met my wife just after I retired from being a paramedic in 2014. I was driving her nuts because I am a high energy guy, and it was killing me to sit at home every day. She talked me into working as a teacher- meaning that our schedules would line up, and we would have time that we could spend together. I started by teaching two classes a day, then progressed to full time for my second year. I taught high school for six and a half years. During that time, I saw a lot of this. How does this happen?
The Department of Education, that’s how.
Funding is tied to benchmarks. Special Ed students don’t have to meet them. The incentive here is to make as many kids special ed as possible. It needs to be done because not only do special ed kids bring increased funding per student, but missing the testing benchmarks means less money. The law is called Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It says that it is unfair and discriminatory to treat students with intellectual disabilities (what used to be referred to as retarded) the same as other students. So this law was passed to make things more equitable. (Not equal, which is the same standard, but equitable, meaning that they have the same outcome.)
School funding for special education students says that they have to be permitted to pass, and that their diploma and transcript can’t say a thing about the fact that they were special Ed, or that they were passed without meeting benchmarks. In fact, my school district even had a policy stating that non-English speaking students couldn’t receive anything less than a C.
For all students, not just special Ed, teachers are under a microscope. I was once told that another teacher was obviously better at teaching than I was, because all of her students received A’s in her course. If more than 15% of your students received less than a C, you had to submit a written plan to school administrators on how you were going to get their grades up. If more than 15% of your students get below a C for two years in a row, you are fired. The only incentive there is to pass everyone in order to keep your job.
When I was put in charge of teaching Biology at my school, I was given 6 classes of it. The teacher who had been teaching that schedule before me had been fired. I was told that the school’s goal was to have half of the students pass the standardized test on Biology at the end of the year. They told me that they didn’t expect me to hit that goal the first year, but were hoping I could do it by year three. At the end of that first year, 67% of my students hit the benchmark. My evaluation? Meets expectations (in other words, average). Why was that? Because almost a quarter of my students had below a C. I countered by pointing out that my grades were an accurate reflection of my students’ abilities. That didn’t matter.
The goals are difficult, if not impossible. The only real incentive that students have is grades, and some don’t even have that as an incentive. If you remove any possibility of negative outcomes, many students just won’t do anything. That isn’t on the teacher.
The entire education system in this nation is broken. I know- I was teaching in it for more than 6 years. It isn’t just the teachers. Administrators don’t care about the kids who are discipline problems, so they don’t do anything about it. The parents and the teachers also play a huge role in the suckage that is our school system.
There is a liberal moron in the video above claiming that the problem is with inequality. Bullshit. The list is of reasons for the failure is long-
There are kids who never come to school. You can’t make them. More than half of my students were chronically absent (meaning out of school more than 20% of the time). More than 10% of them were absent more than half of the time. In a 180 day school year, I had more than one student who were absent over 100 days.
Their parents don’t care, and no one is prosecuted for truancy.
There are parents who claim to “home school” but don’t actually bother to teach the kids anything. Yes, it happens. I know a few.
Students who do come to school and care, largely are cheating their way through school using apps, Google searches, and other cheats. That is how the girl who is the subject of this post made it- she cheated using apps.
The truth is that not every kid is smart enough for college. Not every kid is suited for school. A school that has a student for less than 1100 hours a year can’t fix 18 years of around the clock bad parenting coupled with the handicap of losing the genetic lottery. All of the programs in the world won’t turn a student with a 75 IQ and no motivation into a scholastically successful person. In this case, the mother of the girl didn’t speak English and didn’t bother to learn- she passed her parental responsibilities on to the school district.
We waste a lot of time and effort on trying educate kids who don’t want to learn, and on students with disabilities that prevent them from ever being more than simple manual laborers. There should be an exam at the end of the year when a student turns 15 (9th grade). Those who excel go to a college prep high school, students who show aptitude for it go to vocational school, students who fail are done and can go get a job. If you or your parents want to stay in school after you have failed the exam, you can pay for it yourself and go to private school. Let’s stop wasting money trying to prove that every child has the same mental aptitude. You don’t need to know calculus to run a cash register or push a broom.
Educating a child is a partnership between the student, parents, teachers, and administrators. If any one of those links fails to do their job, the effort will fail and all of the money spent will have been wasted. Let’s stop spending gobs of money to get the end result where a child receives an honors diploma and still can’t read or write.
There is a woman in Michigan who is claiming that her neighbor, who lives 250 feet away and established his own shooting range, has made her go deaf with gunshots and T:annerite explosions.
I kind of felt bad for her until I saw this sentence:
LaRoe said she found a shell casing in her yard and points to a piece of tape over a small round hole in a window
There is no way that a shell casing is going to be 100 yards from a shooting range. So I decided to do some math.
The Occupational and Health Administration says that any instant sound (as opposed to a continuous one) that is above 120 decibels can cause hearing loss. Thanks to the inverse square law, in order to damage her hearing from 250 feet away, the source sound would have to be somewhere around 180 decibels. That makes his shooting range even louder than a SpaceX launch, which varies between 145 and 161 decibels.
Hearing protection only reduces sound by about 15-30 db. If it was loud enough to deafen her from 100 yards away, the guy who owns the shooting range would be deaf as well, hearing protection or not.
She and the neighbors are trying to get Tannerite regulated like an explosive, claiming that it is no different than dynamite.
I saw this story in the New York Times and was amazed that there was a prepper movement that I hadn’t heard of, that it appears to be centered on Central Florida, and also that a branch of the MSM would do a positive story about prepping.
I wonder how many Feds are associated with the two groups in the story. Remember, the Fed is the one urging you to do something illegal.
I slam cops when they are wrong, but let me flip to the other side and support them on this one. I was loosely involved with the events here. Be aware, the details are a bit disturbing.
Years ago, we had a teacher at the local school that was molesting a young child. This teacher was well liked, the students, his fellow staff, and the parents all loved him. The scores that his students received were at the top of the scale. I believe he was even teacher of the year a couple of times. No one suspected a thing.
I can’t remember for sure, but I think the victim who came forward was in Kindergarten or first grade. Like I said, this was years ago. Probably more like 20 years ago. This teacher would play a game with this young girl that he called the “finger game.” In this game, he would have her stand with her back to him and put her hands behind her back. The teacher would then put one or more fingers in her hand and she would have to tell him how many fingers were there. The game eventually changed, and it wasn’t fingers that he was putting in her hand. Yeah, disgusting shit.
The child told her parents, who reported the incident to the school. The principal investigated and decided that the accusation was unfounded. The accusations went away. Six months later, another parent came forward and was dismissed the same way, only this time the parent didn’t let it lie: they went to the police. The cops investigated and arrested the teacher. During the investigation, it was discovered that this teacher had molested more than half a dozen students over at least one school year. There may have been more victims, it’s impossible to know at that age. It also turned out that there were at least three school officials who knew about the accusations but didn’t take action because they didn’t find any evidence that they were true. The record in court painted a different story. I am including statements from one of the trials so you can read it for yourself, but I have made some slight edits to remove names.
The father told the Principal that he liked the teacher and did not want to get him in trouble, but the father wanted the game to stop. The Principal talked to two of the students, and they confirmed that this game had taken place after school while they were waiting to be picked up. One of the girls used the term “wiener” in describing the game, and one said she heard a sound like a zipper during the game. After interviewing these two students, at approximately 2:00 p.m. that day, the Principal called the Human Resources (“HR”) Department and told the Director of HR that he had received a complaint from a parent about the teacher that involved a game being played after dismissal that the father thought seemed unconventional.
Instead of notifying law enforcement, the school district’s HR department decided to investigate for themselves. They investigated for a week before finally calling the police.
The police went to the school, arrested the principal and a few other school staff members. You see, teachers are mandatory reporters- they are required to report all suspected child abuse to law enforcement and/or children and family services. It isn’t the job of school officials to investigate crimes- they are required to report them.
The press at the time was busy reporting about how the teachers were being unfairly accused of sex crimes by an overzealous police department that was out of control.
The principal was even more popular than was the teacher, and a large group of parents and teachers went to the next meeting of the local government, demanding that the charges be dropped and the police involved be fired for daring to arrest this principal, teacher, and other school staff members. The school district superintendent released a statement saying that he was fully supporting the school officials, and that they wouldn’t be fired.
The teacher was charged with multiple counts of child abuse and of lewd and lascivious molestation of children under the age of 12. He reached a plea deal and pled guilty to one count of child abuse. He received a sentence of 8 days in jail, with credit of 8 days for time served, 5 years of probation during which he could not work with children, and a fine of less than $400. His teaching license was revoked. Pretty light penalty, I would say.
The school staff all had their charges dropped. They sued the city and the police officers involved. The case was settled. I can’t find a record for what happened to the teacher. He seemingly vanished. I am guessing that he changed his name. Of the school staff members, one wound up as a groundskeeper, one died a couple of years later, and the third now works for Publix supermarkets.
I sometimes wonder how those children are coping. They are now in their late 20s and some likely have school aged children of their own.
I am going to warn my readers that blog posts may be short and sporadic for the next couple of weeks. I am studying for a new board certification. I am looking to add a board certification in a nursing specialty. Boards are a bitch. (The title is a play on words)
