Uncategorized

So with the local news reporting that Zimmerman had head injuries, including a broken nose, and Martin had a gunshot wound and injured knuckles, it is apparent to me that Zimmerman’s account which claimed that Martin was the aggressor and was shot in self defense is the most plausible story, considering the evidence.

I recently had a conversation that shows how little some people understand about self defense and the law. Here is the conversation that I recently had:

Woman: but still Zimmerman was the one who followed Martin

DM:  Not illegal, and someone following someone is not a legal reason to begin beating on them.

Woman: no, but how do you know who “started it”? Martin had to fight harder, all he had was candy, Zimmerman had a gun.

DM:  One
man has head injuries, the other has no other injury than the gunshot
wound and bruised knuckles. This supports Zimmerman’s statement that he
was attacked by Martin. Since the state has to prove that Zimmerman is
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, unless
there is some other evidence here that changes the story, there is a
real possibility that Zimmerman is telling the truth. As long as that
possibility exists, there is reasonable doubt, which means that
Zimmerman is not guilty.

Saying that Zimmerman had a
gun is meaningless. It doesn’t mean that Zimmerman was looking for
trouble, simply because he carried a gun, any more than having car
insurance means that you are looking to have a car accident. I have
carried a gun every day for over 20 years, and not once have I started a
fight while carrying it.

 Woman: No response.

My homeowner’s insurance cost $1,200 a year. My insurance on my two automobiles costs $1,500 per year. I have been with the same insurance company for 7 years, and I have never filed a claim. In that time, they have collected nearly $20,000 from me in profit, without a single dollar in losses.

I called them this morning, because I was registering a vehicle that I bought in Missouri. Since I was moving the title and registration from Missouri to Florida, I had to provide proof of insurance. That was when they gave me the bad news: For the last two weeks, I have had no insurance. Apparently, they did a routine check of my file, and discovered that my credit score had dropped since the last time they checked, and they say that makes me uninsurable. They didn’t even bother to send me a letter or make a telephone call to tell me that I was not insured. If I had not called, the first hint that I would have had would have been if I got in an accident. They didn’t even refund the premiums that I paid for the year in advance.

If it weren’t for the government demanding that I carry car insurance, I wouldn’t. I am not sure about other states, but the law in Florida is that a vehicle owner must have insurance that pays the owners and occupants of other vehicles in the event that an accident occurs that is the insured driver’s fault. In other words, you insure everyone except yourself. To insure your own vehicle costs extra. Here in Florida, there are so many drivers ignoring the law and driving without insurance, coverage for uninsured motorists is important.

I say that the law should be rewritten, so that I insure me and mine, and if you don’t want insurance, then don’t get any. Your loss.

As I said in yesterday’s post, I met a guy while I was in Belize City who was telling me how he was making a living by playing the handout game. I let him go on and on about how great he had it, because I wanted to get a feel for how America and Americans were perceived in that part of the world.

One of the things he told me was that Belize had a health care system that was better than the US model, because all health care was free or subsidized. He then went on to tell me that he was surprised that the US didn’t have free care as well. While researching some things for yesterday’s post, I discovered why that is: Because the US is the majority of the health care system for Belize, at least the portions that require anything more complex than a simple office visit.

A portion of Belize’s system is to subsidize travel to the US for patients that need:advanced care. Even at that, a significant portion of the funding for the health care system comes from the US, UN, Britain, and other countries, as well as volunteer health workers from other nations like the US.

PAP smears, C sections, cancer treatment, CT scans, chemotherapy, radiation therapy are performed in the US. MRI, nuclear medicine is simply not available. All doctors in Belize are educated elsewhere (5 out of every 7 are educated in Cuba) and are employees of the government and receive a salary of US$30,400 (BZ$60,800) a year (PDF alert). Many doctors, clinics, and hospitals will stay open after hours and treat the richer residents (and American expats) for cash, so that they can make some money on the side. All dental work, other than tooth
extractions, is done within this private system after normal business hours.

This is not a free health care system, it is a triage and transport system with a black market way for people with money to actually get care. Since we here in the US do not have anyone to send our sick people to, we cannot have a system like this.

About three years ago, I traveled to Belize City, located in a nation where the average wage is less than $3,500 a year. While I was there, I met a 34 year old guy who came to the United States and worked here for 8 years as an illegal immigrant, bagging groceries in New York City. He explained to me how it is easy to live the good life.

He had gotten an ITIN, and was paying taxes. After eight years, he claimed that he hurt his back at the age of 29, and with the help of a law firm in Miami, was able to get Social Security Disability. This disability totals nearly $700 a month, and he gets it for the rest of his life, even though he lives in Belize. This means that he is getting  $8,400 a year, two and a half times the average citizen’s wages.

Yes, there are many immigrants that are taking advantage of the giveaways and raping this country. The problem isn’t the immigrants, it is the government giving away tons of money. Stop doing that, and we can go back to the days of immigrants coming here to build a better life, and away from immigrants coming here for free money.

One of the cofounders of Facebook is renouncing his US citizenship because of high tax rates. With the tax rate rising to 40% from 33% this year, capital gains taxes rising, and foreign banks being required to report the funds of American citizens beginning Jan 1, he stands to lose nearly $2 billion in taxes this year alone.

His is a common  story: An immigrant who came to the country, made his money and then left. Simple math says that for every immigrant who becomes a billionaire, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, remain poor and on government benefits.

The Laffer curve is being proven correct, as thousands of billionaires leave this country, taking their capital with them. We in the United States are destined to be living in a third world country by the end of the century, perhaps even by 2030.

In the 1830s, the people of Missouri were angry that Mormons were living among them and practicing bigamy. The Mormons committed other sins, in that they were opposed to slavery, tended to vote in cohesive blocks, and tended to elect other Mormons. This angered the local church going politicians, and they and their constituents began raiding Mormon settlements, and the Mormons began raiding them right back. The pattern was always the same: A Mormon settlement would be attacked, and when they fought back, they were accused of being an ‘insurrection,” and were driven from the land or killed. The locals would then confiscate their property. The Mormons eventually would settle around what is now Kansas City. Mormon petitions and lawsuits demanding a return of their property failed to bring any satisfaction: the
non-Mormons refused to allow the Mormons to return to their land and
reimbursement for confiscated and damaged property was refused.

William Peniston, a candidate for the state legislature, made
disparaging statements about the Mormons, calling them “horse-thieves and robbers”,and warned them not to vote in the election. Reminding Daviess residents of the growing electoral power of the
Mormon community, Peniston made a speech in Gallatin claiming that if the Missourians “suffer such men as these [Mormons] to vote, you will soon lose your suffrage.” Around 200 non-Mormons gathered in Gallatin on election day to prevent Mormons from voting.

On October 24, 1838, a state militia marched along the crooked river and confiscated weapons from Mormon homes. After imprisoning and preparing to execute Mormons who refused to turn in weapons, a Mormon raiding party attempted a rescue, which resulted in the Battle of the Crooked River. Four people were killed in the battle, and it resulted in the Governor issuing executive order 44, ordering the state militia to wipe out the Mormons.Three days later, the Haun’s Mill massacre occured, where 19 Mormons were killed by the Militia, even though a truce was in effect at the time.

John Smith, the founder of the Mormon church was arrested and then murdered in his cell.The killers were let free.

This resulted in the Mormons fleeing to Utah under an agreement where the militia agreed to stop killing them if they left the country. Under the new church leader Brigham Young, they founded Salt Lake City in 1846.

In 1857, the United States Congress declared that Utah was a territory of the union, and President Buchanan demanded that the Mormons follow the laws on marriage, which Young refused. Buchanan sent 2,500 Federal troops, who ousted Young and replaced him with a more favorable Governor. Utah then applied for statehood under this government, and was accepted on the condition that they outlaw polygamy in their constitution.

There you have it, the tenth, first, and second amendments all violated to force marriage laws on a free people. Note that before tyranny could be carried out, the government needed a monopoly on force. It is also hard to believe people when they tell you that ‘traditional marriage’ has been the law of the land in the USA when they use that as an excuse to outlaw gay marriage, when you know that marriage as practiced in this country was enforced at the muzzle of a gun.

There is a phrase that is used in EMS called ‘cookbook medicine.’ It means that the paramedic refers to and blindly applies written protocols or algorithms without thinking about what is really going on with the patient. Any patient who does not present with a problem in a textbook fashion is therefore not treated correctly. For example, a patient who complains of shortness of breath gets Albuterol and Atrovent, even if the patient is not experiencing bronchospasm. To call a paramedic a ‘cookbook medic’ is an insult, meaning that he or she is clueless, and simply following the protocol as if it were a cookbook.

This phenomenon is not limited to paramedics, and I have often taken medical providers to task for this way of practicing medicine. This is where we begin today’s post, and is also the reason behind the lack of posts over the past week and a half:

As regular readers of this blog know, in November I retired from my job as a fire medic so that I could move to Missouri and attend graduate school, so that I could become a physician assistant. We were taking seven classes in the first semester: Radiology, Anatomy (with cadaver dissection), Behavioral Medicine, Molecular Pathophysiology, Clinical Assessment, Physiology, and Problem Based Learning. There were problems within the first month.

Don’t get me wrong, my grades were good. I had an A in pathophysiology, a C in anatomy, and a B in the remainder of the courses. I will use several examples, but please understand that this is not a comprehensive list:

We were being taught to ask questions of the patient from a long list of questions, then we were to use software to search for diseases that match the abnormal responses in order to reach a diagnosis. Staff members would play the part of patients, and the students were literally reading questions right from their notes, without even knowing what they were asking. For example, a woman having epigastric pain radiating to her shoulder that is elicited by eating fatty food (obviously gall stones) was being asked about whether or not she had pertussis vaccinations as a child. I was not up for paying $50,000 to learn how to use WebMD.

Then there was the cluelessness of the faculty, one of whom insisted that all arrhythmia were caused by a malfunctioning SA node. I pointed out that AV blocks, VT, and AVNRT all occur in the presence of a normally functioning SA node. He told me I was wrong. I showed him evidence, including texts and studies. He still told me I was wrong. Another professor (who teaches cardiology) agreed with me. He still insisted that I was wrong.

Strike three was behavioral medicine. Our syllabus was a list of political topics, instead of medical ones and belonged in the poli sci department, not the medical. Here are some of the lectures we got:
Week 1: Using the musical arts in patient care: This was a guest lecturer that showed us how playing harp music would make patients happier
Week 2: “Stress, disease, and the AIDS pandemic” How Reagan and other white males are in a conspiracy to kill gays and discriminate against women. This is not an exaggeration. This is what the professor said.
Week 3: “Let me down easy” this was a video of a one woman play, a liberal look at healthcare and how unfair it is that the rich get better care
Week 4: “Domestic Violence: Vulnerable patients” This was a lecture on how men victimize women and children.
The class was separated into 6 groups, and each group was assigned a topic to research and present to the class as a lecture. Examples of the topics covered: Theories of personality development: male Hetero versus homosexual; Theories of personality development: Female hetero versus homosexual development; Working with and caring for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender patients.

So I decided that one semester was enough. I didn’t think that I was getting my money’s worth. I am back in Orlando, and I have some job interviews this week.

The cops here in Florida ignore the same laws that they enforce upon the rest of us. They (correctly) believe that they are above the law. The press here is on the case, and has been for months:
CBS news
Sun Sentinel part one, part two, part three
Miami area Blogs are on it
Orlando area blogs, as well

There are a lot of dishonest, criminal cops out there. I say criminal, because like a criminal gang, they engage in intimidation and retaliation when honest people come forward to make things right. An FDLE investigator recently concluded an investigation in a crash that killed 11 people on the Florida Turnpike, concluding that the Highway Patrolmen were at fault. The tires on his personal car were slashed at his home, and a copy of his report was left under his windshield wiper. It is obvious that this was done by cops, because the home address of law enforcement are kept secret from mere mortals, meaning that the only people who would have had access to this information are other cops.

Thin blue line, indeed.

So this group of people carries weapons, intimidates law enforcement and witnesses, engages in illegal acts, and takes millions of dollars from people. Sounds like a gang to me.

This is scary. You use your firearm in self defense, and not only do you have to defend yourself from the attack, and then defend yourself from the legal ramifications of the shooting, but you also must defend anything that you have ever done or said. This guy is having to defend a myspace page from when he was only 20 years old? Who among us could withstand that level of scrutiny?

What is really interesting here is the statement by Zimmerman’s attorney that “inviting public scrutiny of the contents of this social media account
invites scrutiny of the social media accounts of all parties involved,”which would seem to indicate that Travon Martin’s social media accounts will also be fair game, including the ones that indicate drug and gang activity.