Stretching the Truth

The headline:

Shots fired near DeLaSalle Education Center graduation Saturday

The reality:

The shots fired incident did not involve the graduation, and no injuries were reported in the incident

No mention of how “near” the shots were. A mile away? Half a mile? This headline is a misleading nothingburger, but the left will claim it as another “school shooting.”

I Should Know Better

News6 in Orlando has their panties in a twist over 17 people statewide who died after being sedated in Florida over the past decade. Every time I try to comment on an article on this website, it gets censored for violating community standards, because lefties have to be protected from facts.

You have a violent psychotic person that is a danger to themselves and everyone around them. Now explain how you get that violent person under control. There are only a few ways to stop someone who is out of their minds in a violent rampage:

  • You can shoot them.
  • You can sedate them.
  • You can beat them into submission.

Which of those is the least likely to cause lasting harm? The ones who died are being killed because they are using some sort of illegal drug, whose effects can’t be predicted because criminal drug dealers can’t be bothered with things like quality control. The drug user, who already likely has mental issues BEFORE becoming an addict, then becomes violent, delusional, and psychotic.

So an EMS crew administers a sedative. Those sedatives are safe and effective, and get used thousands of times every day in the state of Florida without incident. (Just yesterday, I gave Versed to a 5 year old. She did fine, and all that happened to her was she took a nap) The problem here is that the sedative interacts with the unknown substances that the violent drug abuser is using, and the results are unpredictable, and sadly, sometimes fatal.

Of course they are given without consent. A person who is out of their minds while under the influence of drugs can’t legally give consent, any more than a person in cardiac arrest can. That statement is enough for me to realize that this entire article is clickbait.

Just yesterday, I gave Narcan, Fentanyl, Versed, Morphine, and Dilaudid to patients- some of them without consent. They all lived, because most of them weren’t drug fueled psychotics.

“Scientists”

A group of scientists have declared that lobsters, shrimp, and cuttlefish are sentient and conscious. The specialties of the scientists?

A review of the signatories on this declaration indicates most of the expertise is in philosophy, psychology, and environmental studies.

They are no more qualified to comment on this than I am on any number of random subjects. By using the term “scientists,” they attempt to claim an expertise that they do not possess. It’s like that time a bunch of Doctors expounded on gun control.

Just because you have expertise in one field doesn’t mean that you have been granted any special wisdom in any other.

Myth Busted

The climate change hucksters are claiming that March of 2024 was the warmest on record. I thought this year was rather cool, so I did a little checking.

I have a personal weather station on the roof of my (old) house. It recorded the temperature of March for years. This year, there were 11 days where the high temperature never went above 79 degrees, last year there were 8. In 2024, the high temperature was not above 90 degrees on any day of the month. In 2023, the mercury rose above 90 degrees three times.

There were 5 days in 2023 where the low temperature was below 50 degrees. There were 9 such days in 2024. The coldest morning of March 2024 was 42 degrees, on the 20th. In 2023, the thermometer showed that we hit 42 degrees twice, and 41 was the low for the month, on the 21st.

In other words, it was cooler this year than it was last year, but not by much. Still, that means this March was certainly not the hottest ever. Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me that it’s raining.

American Dream

From wirecutter, we see yet another article lamenting the loss of the American dream and how it isn’t possible for a family to live in a home with only one breadwinner. I call bullshit.

I hear this all of the time, and I have to say that I disagree with it. Americans don’t want to have the lifestyle of their grandparents, they want to live a life of unbelievably expensive leisure and luxury.

Degradation of the Family

The idea of a basic family: The Father, Mother, and 2.4 children is no longer the case in America. The share of one-parent families with children under the age of 18 has grown from 7.4% of all families in 1950 to 34.3% of all families today. It’s harder for a family to make it when there is only one adult taking care of what used to be taken care of by two adults.

My mother made most of our clothes, and what store bought clothing we did have wasn’t expensive designer stuff. For jeans, we wore Sears Toughskins because my mother claimed that they lasted longer than the stuff she made at home. I was lucky, being the oldest. My younger brother wound up wearing all of the stuff that I handed down after it no longer fit. My brother and I owned two pairs of shoes at a time- tennis shoes for general wear, and dress shoes for church and other “nice clothes” events.

Mom cooked all of the meals. We almost never ate out. When there were dinners out, it was Mom and Dad going out and we got a babysitter.

Owning a home

The average home built in 2023 is 2657 square feet. Just 50 years ago in 1973, the average new home in the US was 1660 square feet. Seventy five years ago, in 1948, the average size of a new single family home was 983 square feet. In 1938, new homes were slightly larger at 1173 square feet, but it was also more common to have multigenerational households then, with grandparents, parents, and children all living under the same roof.
Children shared a bedroom. I remember when I finally got my own room- I was a teenager and thought we had become rich. My parents bought a new house, and my brother and we finally got our own rooms. Looking back, I remember thinking how large that house is. Built in the late 70’s, it’s a four bedroom house that is only 1854 square feet, small by today’s standards.

Materialism

Technology has played a role as well. Everyone in the family now has a smart phone with a data plan that permits them to be online 24/7. Multiple televisions in a house, something virtually unheard of in 1973, are the norm.

The stay at home mom didn’t sit around all day and watch TV 50 years ago. No, the woman of the house cooked, cleaned, took care of the kids, made her own and the children’s clothes, and all of the other household chores.

Back then, Dad had the only car, and the upper middle class families had a second, family car. If one of the kids wanted their own car, they paid for it themselves by getting a job.

School

In 1970, only half of Americans graduated from high school, less than 10 percent went to college. When you were 15 or 16, you went out and got a job. You didn’t spend your whole life in school majoring in smoking weed and getting laid while studying gender roles of non-binary sexual predators. No, you became a mechanic, a farmer, or a factory worker. You did something productive with your life and didn’t waste it making TikTok videos about sex toys.

If you want to live like Americans did in the 50s through the 70s, it is still attainable.

Lies

The left is ramping up their propaganda for election season.

Of course, that isn’t the price of insulin. Not even close. I give people Insulin in the ED every single day. Here is the cost: less than $40, and that is for a 30 day supply. That includes Novalog, Lantus, and others. The cost is slightly more than a dollar a day, which is nowhere near the $1,300 a month being claimed.

Even if a drug was more than a person can afford, all they have to do is go to the ED. The hospital will give it to them while they are a patient.

The entire post above is a lie. It didn’t happen, or at least not the way that the person creating it wants you to believe that it happened, and that’s before we get into how a restaurant manager only made $35k a year.

I had to left align this picture.

Propaganda Piece

The ATF gets a puff piece on Face The Nation. One of the key moments in the video that just tipped my “that’s stupid” radar was at 16:40, when they are looking at a Cartel pistol, the woman reporter gets all flustered when the ATF tells her that you can get the Virgin Mary encrusted diamond grips for your pistol, because they are not regulated. Um, why does that matter? What do diamonds on your pistol grip do to make a handgun more deadly?

The ATF’s firearms “expert” doesn’t know how to disassemble a Glock, nor does he know the difference between a clip and a magazine. Then at 19:30, he makes the claim that anyone who walks into a gun store and puts down $12,000 for a Barrett must be a criminal member of a drug cartel, because that’s the only reason why someone would do that, so dealers should automatically refuse to sell it. There is also a SAW on the table, not because people have them, but because it looks scary for the Infomercial they are filming. That’s what this is- it isn’t journalism, it’s a paid Informercial for the ATF and gun control. See for yourself:

The press in this country are nothing more than mouthpieces for the leftists.

The News

The news media outlets aren’t in business to sell facts. Their entire business model is to sell ad space by attracting more viewers. The more viewers they have, the more valuable that advertising space is. Whatever gets their target audience to watch increases the value of that ad space.

Consumers of the news, the viewers, are the product being sold. The businesses paying for that advertising space are the customers. You, as a consumer of news, are simply a product, a means to an end. The facts are immaterial and only get in the way.

All of the outlets on the left (CNN, MSNBC, etc) and on the right (Fox, Newsmax, etc) are there to report whatever ‘facts’ will get them the viewership they need in order to be profitable through selling advertisement time and space to their customers. So they play to their viewers by reporting ‘facts’ that will attract enough viewers, and the veracity of those facts is immaterial to the news organizations’ goal of selling more advertisement space.

Have you ever wondered why the local news never does reports on crooked car dealers? Because the local news channel knows that car dealers are the largest purchasers of advertising space, and the producers of the news shows don’t want to risk losing the advertising sales of those businesses.

News outlets aren’t reporters of facts, they are entertainment companies whose business model rests on reporting things that attract more viewers. The truth is immaterial to that goal.

Stupidity

A woman is claiming that her child’s Easy Bake Oven gave her family carbon monoxide poisoning. This is why people shouldn’t use Google to self diagnose medical problems. The Easy Bake oven uses a lightbulb to generate heat. There is no open flame, thus no combustion. Since carbon monoxide is a product of incomplete combustion, this isn’t the culprit.

The second issue here is that a pulse oximeter allegedly showed 89 percent. This is not caused by CO for technical reasons. See, a pulse oximeter works because hemoglobin that is bound to another molecule absorbs certain frequencies of red light, while hemoglobin that is not bound to another molecule does not. The pulse oximeter shines two frequencies of red light through the body, and measures how much one is absorbed over the other. The result is used to calculate the proportion of bound hemoglobin versus unbound that is passing through the beam.

Carbon monoxide poisoning is caused because CO binds to hemoglobin 200 times more readily than does oxygen. This causes the hemoglobin to form carboxyhemoglobin, which absorbs that red light as readily as oxyhemoglobin, which is formed when oxygen binds to hemoglobin. This means that the pulse oximeter will show the same number whether it is carboxyhemoglobin or oxyhemoglobin. This phenomenon is called the pulse oximetry gap and makes a pulse oximeter useless for diagnosing CO poisoning.

There is a linear decline in O2Hb (oxyhemoglobin) saturation as COHb (carboxyhemoglobin) saturation increases. This decline is not detected by pulse oximetry, which therefore overestimates O2Hb saturation in patients with increased COHb levels. The pulse oximetry gap increases with higher levels of COHb and approximates the COHb level. In patients with possible CO poisoning, pulse oximetry must be considered unreliable and interpreted with caution until the COHb level has been measured. [Bozeman WP, Myers RAM, Barish RA: Confirmation of the pulse oximetry gap in carbon monoxide poisoning. Ann Emerg Med November 1997;30:608-611.]

The fire department found no signs of CO in the apartment, but the couple claims that this was due to the oven having been unplugged 8 hours before.

This entire story is stupidity, and newspapers should be sued for publishing garbage like this with no corroboration other than some moron’s Google search. If you are going to make a claim like this, at least do a little research. Layers of editorial research my hairy ass.


Because I am getting used to providing evidence based resources:

Barker SJ, Tremper KK, The effect of carbon monoxide inhalation on pulse oximetry and transcutaneous PO2. Anesthesiology. 1987; 66: 677-679Gonzalez A

Buckley RG, Aks SE, Eshom JL, et al. The pulse oximetry gap in carbon monoxide intoxication. Ann Emerg Med. 1994; 24: 252-255

Gomez-Arnau J, Pensado A, Carboxyhemoglobin and pulse oximetry.Anesthesiology. 1990; 73: 57

Not Conflict Resolution

The author of this piece is Dr. Tom Hastings, the conflict resolution coordinator at Portland State University. Portland. Enough said, but let’s look closer at his nonsense anyhow.

It is long past time to repeal the Second Amendment.

Why?

To strengthen democracy.

I don’t want democracy. With democracy, 50.1 percent of the voters would be able to legalize slavery. The voters could easily vote to euthanize everyone over the age of 65, or even confiscate the property of everyone who has a net worth of more than $500,000 so that it can be redistributed. The beauty of our system of government is that, while they are democratically elected, our representatives can’t violate the rights of the individual.

Already in 2022, as of Sept. 25, there have been 32,643 gun deaths in America from a variety of causes, including murder, homicide, accidents and suicides. Many of these deaths were in places that attempted strict gun control, including a ban on assault rifles, but were successfully sued by the NRA or other gun rights groups and their local or state laws vacated by rulings prompted by the Second Amendment.

Let’s start with the “gun deaths” metric. First, a “gun death” is a stupid metric. An early death is no more tragic if carried out by cancer, diabetes, being tossed out of a helicopter, or simply beaten over the head with a hammer.

Second, more than 26,000 of those “gun deaths” were actually suicides. A person intent on killing themselves could, if guns were outlawed, simply step in front of a train, leap from the window of a tall building, or overdose on sleeping pills. Getting rid of the Second Amendment would not save the lives of anyone intent on suicide. The fault in logic here is stunning- the left contends that people who wish to take their own lives would not do so if there were no guns in the home. Ridiculous and easily demonstrated as a false premise. In the United States, over 48,000 people take their own lives each year, and there is no reason to believe that things would improve with the outlawing of guns. Take Guyana as an example, where the government has passed every single dream of gun control proposed by the left.

In Guyana, Category B firearms are only available to sport shooters who hold a license to practice for at least 6 months, with a medical certificate, without a criminal conviction, and additionally require at least three shooting sessions with an instructor. Specific purchase and possession permits can then be applied for from a local police department, are valid for 5 years and can be extended. These weapons can then only be used for sport shooting in shooting ranges, never for hunting. Category B includes all assault rifles such as AK-47/AKM, AK-74 or AR-15/M16/M4, as well as all similar weapons, even if they are chambered for rimfire (.22 LR) cartridges. These can only be semi-automatic. All handguns, including those using rim ammunition, are classified as Category B. It is illegal to possess these Category B weapons after the expiry of a specific non-renewed license: the weapons must be disposed of (e.g., sold to a firearms store or otherwise destroyed).

Meanwhile, Guyana has the highest suicide rate of any nation in the world: 40.8 suicides per 100,000. That number represents a suicide rate three times that of the United States. So gun laws have no effect on suicide rates, which are more of a mental health issue than they are a firearms issue. In Guyana, the suicide problem is related closely to alcoholism, not guns.

Civilized countries enact laws that actually protect their children. Unlike every single other developed or large country in the entire world, the number one cause of death for children in the US is firearms. 

Wrong. Homicides don’t even come close to being the number one cause of death, even including homicides by all mechanisms. Unless you consider 15-24 year olds as being children.

The simple fact is that more than half of the homicides in this country are actually due to street gang activity where one gangs are resorting to violence in order to protect their drug dealing turf. I don’t need to go any further- this guy’s post is filled with enough factual deficiencies that we already know he is lying to support his agenda.

To prevent Civil War 2.0.

With approximately 400 million guns floating around US society and an armed MAGA-driven polarization met by an increasingly armed leftist radical wing, along with evermore virulent rhetoric and escalating numbers walking around open-carrying war weaponry in public, half of America believes that civil war is coming. Tossing out the Second Amendment would free legislatures and city councils to begin seriously ending such belligerent displays of combat weapons. 

During Vietnam, the left thought they were clever by asking “What if they threw a war and no one showed up?” The more important question is “What if they threw a war and only one side showed up?” The answer to that is, of course, genocide. Disarming one side allows the other side, still armed, to do with the unarmed as they please.

It’s as if he thinks that getting rid of the Second Amendment would cause the 600 million plus guns already in US hands to simply disappear. Instead, the repeal of 2A would cause many of those 600 million guns to be used against the very people who would be attempting to confiscate them, guaranteeing the onset of an American civil war.

This guy, who is supposed to be interested in conflict resolution, is advocating for the one thing that is guaranteed to cause more conflict than any other single thing that the government could do. Clueless, but the left’s ideas usually are.