EMS worker attacks

Back on Halloween, I reported on the epidemic of violence against this nation’s EMS workers. It came as no surprise to me when I saw this article about the nurse that was beaten unconscious by her patient.

This ties in with comments I recently made on a local story about the ‘popcorn’ theater shooting. There were commenters on the local version of the story that were blaming the NRA, saying that if all weapons were removed from society, that things like the shooting would not happen. Setting aside for the moment the obvious fact that there is no way to remove firearms from public when anyone can make one with hand tools and supplies bought at a local hardware store, or that the shooter in that case was a retired police officer and would be exempt from such a law, I pointed out that people would still be armed with hands or feet, and that a 45 year old man could easily have killed a 71 year old opponent.

When I pointed this out, I was told that I was wrong, but no facts were cited to back up the claim. This article is proof that a person can kill with only hands and feet. What firearms do is place the 70 year old elderly nurse on an equal footing with the 40 year old deranged attacker. It is a well known fact that predators in nature only attack the weak. If a predator knows that its intended victim is capable of defending itself, the attack never occurs. So I ask you, would a person attack an elderly woman if they knew that the potential victim was capable of killing them? I would say that the odds of such an attack would be decreased dramatically.

Data Security Breach

I have a major problem. All of my data that is in the cloud has been compromised. When the ex and I broke up, I changed the passwords on my social media accounts, financial accounts, and on my email accounts. She had access to them and the passwords for them while she was in my house, so I wanted to make sure I was secure. That, as it turns out, is probably not good enough. I have had a massive data breach.

It all started on Monday, when I noticed that there was a ‘recognized device’ that was logged into my Facebook account from Atlanta since January 28. The way that Facebook mobile works, is that once the device recognized, it is allowed to log into Facebook, even if the password is changed by the user.

The ex that just broke up with me and was cheating on me is from Georgia. So, I deauthorized the device, and checked to see who had been logged into my email accounts. According to Gmail, there were no logins that were not from my IP. I felt safer, until this morning, that is.

I was looking at the IMAP settings for my Gmail account, when I noticed that someone had set up automatic forwarding, so that every email was being forwarded to a yahoo address, and was also being left as unread in the Gmail inbox. The only way that this could have happened, is if someone with the password set it up. There is only one person that had access to my Gmail password other than me, and I will give you two guesses as to who that was.

That means that she has had the ability to read every email I have gotten up to this morning, and was reading my Facebook until Monday.

She has been trying to contact me by telephone, text message, and email for weeks. She has been contacting my friends and asking them to pass messages on to me. I finally had to pay my cell carrier $5 a month to block phone calls and texts from her number, and from numbers that do not provide their caller ID. I am running out of options, but I don’t know what else to do. What she is doing is illegal, but I cannot prove it was her.

Infrastructure vulnerability

Peter posts about the vulnerabilities that the infrastructure of our nation faces from terror attacks. It is much, much worse than he fears. 

When I was in college earning one of my college degrees, I had to take a class titled “Contemporary Issues in Public Safety.” One of the assignments for the class was a paper on infrastructure vulnerability. I chose the Memphis area. I found a couple of soft targets whose loss would severely disrupt the economy of the entire nation, and could be destroyed relatively easily, by either a natural disaster or a small group of terrorists.

 The first was the I-40 bridge (the Hernando de Soto Bridge) and I 55 bridges in Memphis. Any event that would drop these bridges into the river would render the Mississippi river impassable to traffic for weeks or months. This means that no supplies would go north, and no finished goods would go south. The Mississippi River carries 60% of U.S grain shipments, 22% of oil and gas shipments, and 20% of coal. The loss of the Mississippi would mean that this cargo would all have to go by road transportation. That would be magnified by the fact that the next river crossing is the Caruthersville Bridge, 75 miles to the North, or the Greenville Bridge, 140 miles to the South.

There are nine natural gas pipelines that stretch from the Texas/Louisiana gas
fields to the industrial areas of Chicago and the Ohio valley.
Five of these major pipelines carrying natural gas, and two carrying crude oil,  cross the river in Memphis, four of them within ten miles of each other. These pipelines supply nearly half of Illinois’ natural gas, and a third of its gasoline.  The loss of them would be devastating to the entire Ohio valley.

Without killing anyone, and only using six truck bombs of the McVeigh variety, a small terror cell could bring down both bridges, and also simultaneously  blow up the four pipelines. This operation would be significantly smaller and less complex than was 9/11, but would have much more devastating effects. The gas line explosions themselves would be large enough that NASA estimates the fireball would cause a visible reflection off the moon. 

Economically, it would be the worst disaster the US has ever faced. It would bring the US economy to its knees. There would be no river traffic between the upper and lower Mississippi river. Road traffic in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Upper Louisiana, and Upper Mississippi would come to a standstill, and nearly 25% of the nation’s economy would cease to exist, due to a lack of transportation, fuel, or both. The standstill would last weeks, and the effects would be felt for months.

This is the sort of attack that will keep you up at night with worry, if you are an emergency manager.

Learning to be single again

My next task is to learn to be single again. Even though my last relationship was only a year and half long, I was not interested in dating or anything when I met her, as I was busy with school and career at the time. Before that, I was married and in a long term relationship for about eight years, so I haven’t had to do this in about ten years, meaning that I am a bit rusty as far as the dating game goes.

To get myself back out there, I went to a singles event at an upscale bar in Orlando. (The kind of place that serves $25 Martinis. To you people in New York that are used to the $50 variety, a twenty five dollar Martini is pretty pricey for Orlando.) Things went well, and there were games and things to break the ice and give the singles there a chance to mingle and get to know each other a bit. I think

I caught the signals that this woman was throwing my way, but I have never been very good at this sort of thing, and after ten years, I am probably not any better.

We talked a bit, she was friendly, leaning into me while touching me on the arm as we were speaking. She was exhibiting all the signs, she touched her hair, made frequent eye contact, and we exchanged numbers.

After the party, some female friends approached her, and I excused myself to leave. That was when she grabbed my arm and asked me not to go just yet. We talked for another 45 minutes. I joked about her possibly giving me a fake number, and she texted me with “See? Real number”

We have texted three conversations since, one of them initiated by her.

The only thing I can’t seem to do is close the deal to get that first date. She is busy this weekend with work, and next weekend is planning to go with her best friend to visit the best friend’s mother in Miami. Still, now I remember why I hate being single.

Recovery

This post is here to help me clear my head and organize my thoughts. It is not likely to be interesting to most of my regular readers, so feel free to ignore it and move on.

One of the things that I have been doing is talking to the females that are a part of my past, and trying to figure out why relationships always seem to end for me the way that they do. I always say that you should look for the common denominator when you have problems, and the common denominator seems to be me.

One of the women that I have spoken with is a woman who broke up with me fifteen years ago, and had many of the same complaints as the latest one. She is married and lives in Arizona now, and we have slowly begun speaking over the past few years, via email and social media.

Fifteen years is a long time, and long enough that there is no longer any raw emotion or hard feelings that will get in the way of honest discussion. I have been hoping to get some answers that way.

The largest complaint that she had at the time was that I made her feel stupid. She now tells me that our intelligent conversations are what she misses the most about our time together. I remember when we were together, we used to lie in bed and talk for hours, until one of us fell asleep. We talked about everything and we talked about nothing, sometimes until the sun came up. I agree with her, I miss that. She said that she doesn’t get intelligent conversation from her current construction worker husband (he calls her a nerd), and that they are always short on money, but she is happy with him.

She told me now, that looking back on it, she thought t the time that I was trying to be jealous and controlling, and was smothering her. She said that she now sees that I was just trying to be a large part of her life, and wishes that she would have talked with me about it, rather than running away.

That got me to thinking:How can I avoid this in the future. Is it that I am not communicating effectively? I tend to not discuss my feelings very much, and maybe that is the problem. I will have to ponder on this for awhile…

This is really getting on my nerves

After hearing from my ex-girlfriend last weekend that she didn’t want any of her things back, I decided that enough was enough. I hadn’t talked to her since last Sunday, and figured that my stuff was just gone. Last night, she emailed me and said that she had changed her mind yet again, wants her stuff back, and will deliver my things to me as well.

This woman is crazy, and I don’t know what kind of games she is playing. I just want her out of my life, and I want her to leave me alone. I can’t get over this and move on with her constantly contacting me.

How can I miss you, if you won’t go away?

Idiots

So, in the wake of this week’s shooting, the Florida press is starting to make noise about why people are being permitted to carry guns at a movie theater. They are hinting that the law in Florida should bar people who have a CCW permit from carrying in public.

What the press, and the morons that they interviewed, fail to realize is that this particular shooting was perpetrated by a retired police officer. Under Federal law, a person who served as a police officer for ten years or more has nationwide authorization to carry a concealed weapon anywhere he wishes for the rest of his life, with the exception of government buildings. Sure, under the law the property owner can ask an armed cop to leave, but that just doesn’t happen, for all practical purposes.

Ryan is an ignorant tool bag

So a guy named Ryan from Garden Grove California, with an IP address of 64.203.36.# came here and decided to post the following comment to this post:

Speaking of stupid I came across your “it’s a felony to use someone’s
wi-fi” and had a good laugh, consulted with several of my friends (who
are attorneys), and they had a good laugh as well.

#1: You are an
ambulance driver, not an attorney. Please don’t pretend you know the
law until you’ve actually studied it or consulted with an actual
attorney.

#2: It is not a felony to use someone else’s wi-fi
unless you actually hack into their network and spy on their network
traffic or steal information, which would fall under a completely
different category.

#3: Your analogy of using wi-fi being
comparable to breaking into someone’s home is absolutely laughable
because: wi-fi is ubiquitous, it is everywhere, your neighbor’s wi-fi is
in your home, and your wi-fi is in your neighbor’s home, so for you to
compare it to breaking into their home, well… ironically you
overlooked the fact that their wi-fi is already in your home, and yours
is in their home.

#4: You should just make a blog of your ignorant comments, that would probably be more amusing, and more people would read it.

First, you are an ignorant ass, and your attorney friends are incompetent assholes that I wouldn’t hire to get me out of a $20 parking ticket. See, the police and the prosecutors disagree with you, and proved it when Benjamin Smith became the first man arrested in Florida for using someone’s open WiFi without permission.

You didn’t even comment on the post that you were referring to, which is found here. Nowhere in that post did I compare using WiFi without permission to be analogous to breaking into a home. However, when you use someone’s WiFi without permission, you are stealing their bandwidth. Yes, the radio waves are passing through your home, but using that logic, so are your cell phone calls, the satellite signal for HBO, and the nuclear launch codes that the Navy uses. That doesn’t make them mine to take.