Divemedic

Penn Jillette, one of the people that I admire the most, has this to say about compassion:

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to
have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor
and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use
guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral
self-righteous bullying laziness.
People need to be fed,
medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we’re compassionate
we’ll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people
to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people,
but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

I have long held this position, and this, Mr Jillette, is why I am a fan.

Like most people who carry a firearm on a regular basis, I own a plethora of holsters. I own holsters from Andrews Leather, Brommeland, Galco, and others. This is because we are always looking to find a way to carry our handgun in a comfortable way: inside the waistband, saddle holsters, pancake holsters, 4 o’clock, small of the back, shoulder holsters, cross draw, belly bands, pocket carry, ankle carry, fanny packs, day packs, you name it, I have tried them all.

Each carry method has its drawbacks, and its benefits. Some handguns are better suited to one method than another. Some conceal better, and all require a level of discomfort and a modification of our clothing choices. Not only that, but each time we decide to buy and carry a different handgun, we have to buy new holsters.

In 1988, when I first started to carry, I began like so many others: I bought a cheap nylon holster from Uncle Mike’s for my Smith and Wesson model 59. I think it cost me somewhere around $8. Uncomfortable, not secure, and a pain, I was soon looking for something better. My S&W 4506 soon found a home in a leather fanny pack. At the time, they were ubiquitous. Everyone had a fanny pack, from Suzie Soccermom to the dad down the street. No one thought twice about seeing them. It seemed like I had found the perfect answer.

Fashions change, and soon the fanny pack was out of fashion, and wearing one just screamed “I have a gun!” I tried baggy shirts and OWB rigs, but the outline of a gun, and the fact that my shirt rode up, made that a less than optimal mode of carry. Inside the waistband is good, but is uncomfortable, means you have to have larger pants, and you usually have to wear an untucked shirt.

I have been carrying a J frame in a pocket holster for awhile now, because it is difficult to dress in a businesslike manner and still carry a pistol. I also have an ankle holster for the J frame, but ankle holsters take too long to draw from.

That is how I decided to buy an MTAC holster from Comp-Tac. The holster itself is an inside the waistband holster, and it also allows you to wear a tucked in shirt. Now even though tuckable IWB holsters have been around for awhile, this is the first one that I have bought. It has a kydex holster mounted on a leather backing. You get the comfort of leather, but also have a secure kydex holster. The beauty of it is, it only costs $85. The MaxCon V is more than twice that much. Another advantage, is that the kydex portion of the holster can be changed out, with the spares costing less than $40. The clips that go on your belt can be changed to different colors, and they can even be exchanged for different styles that are more inconspicuous.I bought mine for an M&P, and also got the spare shell for the Shield.

I tried it on with a tucked in dress shirt, and my full sized M&P40 was comfortable and didn’t show outlines of a pistol. The draw wasn’t noticeably slower than usual, and we will see how it feels when I wear it all day.

Disclaimer: I was given no payment or discounts for this review, and it was done entirely because I felt like it.

I once had a woman tell me that low carb diets can’t be healthy, because they allow you to eat bacon, but not an apple, and that was why she would never go on one. I pointed out to her that I had never seen her eat an apple, but I had seen her eat donuts and candy bars.
 
My brother owns a large vending business that operates hundreds of vending machines throughout the state. He says that customers constantly tell him that they want healthy foods in the vending machines. Every time he has stocked healthy foods, they sit in the machines and rot, while the chips, sodas, and candy continue to sell.

Grocery stores have the same problem, especially convenience stores. People generally buy foods that are easy to prepare and eat, stay fresh a long time, and taste good, and vegetables aren’t it.

Of course, that is not good enough for the city of Philadelphia. They are making the sale of certain government approved foods mandatory. If the idea is so good, people would do it without being forced. The government is saying that they know better than you, and will get you to make the right choices, by force if necessary.People should be able to make their own choices, even if that choice is one that you do not agree with.

The government doesn’t make choices based on what the facts are, they make them based on lobbying, and on money thrown around by lobbyists. Let’s face it, there is a lobby of people who advocate for fruits(pdf alert), so
they can sell more fruit. Where is the “no fruit” lobby? There isn’t
one, because no profits are there.The companies that produce foods like milk, fruits, and eggs pay government officials millions of dollars to lobby for their products. (incidentally, they also lobby in favor of illegal immigration)

In the past two years, however, groups such as the United Fresh Produce Association, the Western Growers Association, the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association and the National Potato Council started to band together. Their goal: to make sure peaches, strawberries, limes and the like get a larger slice of the federal pie. This year’s farm bill will lay out more than $700 billion over the
next 10 years on programs including food stamps and commodity-based
payments.

The Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance, a sprawling 90-member coalition,
has been asking lawmakers to add to the bill a few billion dollars a
year in benefits. It is seeking not direct payments to its growers, but
rather indirect goodies such as block grants to states to help its
farmers locally, expanded funding for scientific research and enhanced
promotion of U.S.-grown produce abroad.

The idea that fruit is automatically healthy, simply because it is “natural” has no basis in science. If you look, many fruits have high amounts of carbohydrates, which are not good for people who are insulin resistant. The banana is 23% carbohydrates by weight. The main reason for pushing bananas is that they are low fat. Insulin resistant people, being less able to burn sugar for fuel, burn fat for fuel. (Fruits like avocados, 5% carbohydrates by weight, are healthier for insulin resistant individuals)

Now I am not saying that bananas are unhealthy  for everyone, just as I am saying that they are not always healthy for everyone. I am saying that there is no answer for all, and we should allow people to decide for themselves.

My sister recently got the same news that I got less than a year ago: She is insulin resistant, and prediabetic. The doctor told her to eat the diet recommended by the American Diabetes Association: A diet low in fat, but high in carbohydrates. This is a diet that is recommending that you take in more of the substance that is killing you. Doctors are so afraid of heart disease and cholesterol, that they are recommending a diet that is increasing the incidence of diabetes, and instead prescribing medication to control the disease as it advances.

IMO, that is ridiculous. There is an excellent article that explains the situation, found here. The ADA is recommending that diabetics set four goals:

1. Normal blood glucose, blood lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides), and blood pressure — or as close as possible to these.
2. Prevention of complications associated with diabetes
3. “To address individual nutrition needs,” according to such factors as motivation and cultural preferences.
4. “To maintain the pleasure of eating by only limiting food choices when indicated by scientific evidence.”

This was the subject of my graduate study.During the data collection portion of my study, I spent a year tracking blood chemistry of a diabetic. The diabetic followed a low carb/high fat diet, and went from a BMI of 43 to a BMI of 32. During that period, fasting blood glucose fell from 120 to 102, and A1C fell from 6.7 to 5.8. Cholesterol went from 209 to 185, with triglycerides falling from 359 to 155. There was no change in HDL or LDL levels, but VLDL levels fell dramatically, from 72 to 32. What do all of these numbers mean? It means that blood glucose levels saw a significant improvement, while cholesterol levels remained relatively stable, and even showed a slight improvement.

The results I was seeing mimicked other studies that are beginning to indicate that the medical community has gotten it wrong on treating diabetes, and on the effects of diet on cholesterol and blood sugar. The problem is that there is little profit to be made by telling people to eat different foods in today’s drug pushing medical community: so we tell them to eat a balanced meal and take a pill.

Let’s hope my sister can see the improvements that I saw, instead of eating the diet the doctor is pushing.

Sandia National Laboratories have developed a laser guided .50 caliber bullet. They claim accuracy to a mile or more.

There are enough criminals getting into the zombie craze, that we need to seriously take a look at how we are going to react to people who are deliberately attacking people by biting them, as if they were actually zombies.

Story  1  Story 2 Story 3

I would think that biting a person’s flesh off is ‘serious bodily harm’ and would justify deadly force. If a person gives any indication that they are about to bite you, serious consideration needs to be given to that option.

Sebastian has a post today about judicial game playing. I have a few of my own experiences, but one in particular has always bugged me.
Several years ago, a local used car dealer sold my sister a car. She wanted to get rid of her car payments, so she traded in a new car that she was still making payments on, and applied the $4000 in equity to the purchase price of a used car, which should have paid it in full. (The car that she traded in was worth $9,000, but she owed $5,000) The dealer turned in the title application to the state, but unbeknownst to my sister, he had altered the title application to add a $50 lien to the title, saying that the purchase price was $4050, and that my sister had made a $4000 down payment, and had $50 outstanding.

Since there was a lien on the title, the state then sent the title to the lien holder (the dealer) instead of my sister. When the title arrived at the dealer, the dealer went to my sister’s job and ‘repossessed’ the car. They refused to return the car unless my sister paid more money. My sister went to my mother for help. My mother went down there in an attempt to straighten it out, and the dealer managed to con another $1,000 out of my mother in exchange for the car.

Even though he gave them the car, he still refused to give them the title. That is when they called me for help. The police would not do anything about the case, claiming that it was a civil matter, even though we had copies of paperwork before it was altered, and could prove that the dealer had altered the title application. A clear case of fraud, and illegal in the state of Florida.
We sued him in small claims court.
On the day that we went to court, the dealer satisfied the lien, took it to a title loan establishment, and got a $500 loan on that title, thereby encumbering the title with a third party lien. The dealer, who by now had gotten the car retitled in his name, countersued us for the return of the car.
When we got to court, the judge heard the story, and declared that there was no way that he could order the dealer to hand over the title, because that would cause the title loan store (a third party) to lose their money. He also said that this was not a civil matter, it was a matter for the cops. His exact words were “I am dismissing this case. There is too much fraud going on here.” He then ordered us to return the car to the titled owner (the dealer), and ordered the dealer to return the second payment (the $1000 from my mother).
My sister was out the car that she used as a trade in, and the dealer got away with fraud.
So the cops wouldn’t prosecute the fraud, the judge wouldn’t order the dealer to return the money, and justice was never served by anyone. Hard to see how anarchy could be much worse.

A Doctor in Scottsdale, Arizona was shopping at a Barnes and Noble for some children’s books to send to his grandchildren. He was spotted as a lone male in the children’s book section, and their first though apparently was that he must be a child molester, because they escorted him from the store, and told him that lone males were not allowed in that section of the store. The store claimed that they had gotten a complaint from a female customer.
How could any business in this  day and age think that this is acceptable? Why, because many pedophiles are men? If this were allowed, then a store could feel free to exclude the Irish from the alcohol section, black men from the knife section, and no Chinese women would be allowed on car lots. When a business would suggest such actions, they would be wrong, and would never do so without being sued.
As for me, I will continue to buy as many things as I can online. The prices are better, and I don’t have to worry about being treated like a criminal.

1 A gun store employee telling a customer who wanted to buy an AR15 with a piston upper: “Those are unreliable. The piston is just one more moving part that can break. The beauty of the gas tube is that there are fewer failure points.”

2  Another employee who told me that the M&P40 cannot be converted to fire 9mm. The only calibers that the M&P40 can fire are .40S&W and .357Sig. I told him that Storm Lake and KKM both made 9mm barrels for the M&P40. He said I was wrong. I left the store.

There are many fire departments (and some ambulance services) in the United States where each employee works a 24 hour shift. Most work 24 hours on, 48 hours off. This schedule works out to 56 hours a week and requires three shifts.There are others, but this one appears to be the most prevalent. I worked this shift pattern for the last 15 years of my career. It requires you to report to work at 7:30 in the morning, and work straight through to 7:30 the next morning.

The 24 hour shift is a relic of a time when EMS was nonexistent, and firefighting wasn’t all that busy. Employers asked for and received an exemption from the 40 hour per week rule of the FSLA, using the excuse that late night fires were rare, and firefighters could sleep. This means that an employer can make a firefighter work 53 hours a week without paying overtime. The result is that the 56 hour work week costs the employer the equivalent of  57.5 hours of straight time pay.

Since the FSLA, fire departments have taken on many new roles: EMS, hazardous materials response, heavy rescue, rescue diving, and more. Call loads have been increasing steadily. In 1999, the station I was assigned to ran an average of 2,300 calls a year. By the year I retired, my station was up to 3,200 calls a year. My personal record was answering 23 calls in one day. That is not an unusual situation. The busiest fire unit in North America runs an AVERAGE of 16 calls per day. Not station, unit. There can be more than one unit in a station, which can see call loads of 50 or more calls per day. That call load is on top of all of the other duties like equipment maintenance, inspections, public education, and other routine duties.

Couple that with the staffing issues and employee burnout that causes frequent manpower shortages, and you create a large amount of mandatory overtime. For political reasons, firefighters cannot be seen sleeping during the day, so a paramedic firefighter may be 36 hours into a 48 hour shift, and be operating on no sleep. All of this means that emergency personnel are rarely as well rested as they should be, and this is aggravated by overtime.

That is why this incident comes as no surprise. You cannot expect that an employee that is 18 hours into a 24 shift to be making the same quality decisions that he did when he was just coming on shift. The IAFF, as well as many firefighters, will vigorously oppose a change to this schedule, mostly because it will cut into the 4-5 days off per week that many firefighters enjoy. Employers will fight changes, because it would mean having to hire more personnel.

However, there is no question in my mind that, as call loads and duties increase, this schedule becomes more dangerous and difficult to justify.