Last April, I posted about an armed carjacking in Orlando. Within two days, I also posted that the woman was likely acting as a drug mule for her husband.
What do you know? It turns out that I was right- she was a courier delivering $170k in drug money, when one of the parties involved in the deal decided to rip her off. It’s an interesting story, reading like something out of a movie.
My wife sent me the following picture with the caption: This is your finance lesson of the day
The lowest 5 are:
Being a female dominated profession, nursing has quite a few new mothers. A couple of them are abusing the law to their advantage. The PUMP Act states that women must be permitted breaks so that they can be milked like a cow, and boy are some of them milking it.
While at work, I was instructed to cover one of these women’s patients while she went to go pump. She was gone for 2 hours. When she returned, she was only back for half an hour before she took a lunch break. After returning from that, she went to go pump again for another hour and a half. In all, she was off the floor for over 5 hours out of her 12 hour shift. When we told her that we thought she was taking too long, with even another woman telling her that it doesn’t take that long to pump, she replied that she can go as often and for as long as she deems necessary.
So we went to supervision to complain. They explained to us that there is nothing that they can do. Apparently, they had spoken to her about it, only to get a phone call from her lawyer the next day. So hands off. It’s so bad, that they are now afraid of her:
Last week, while I was covering her patients, I walked into the room of one of them to find a woman covered in blood, with large blood clots on the bed. She had a pulse of 120 and was complaining of belly pain. She had been lying there for over 2 hours like that. I intervened and went to the doctor. Turns out it was coming from her bladder, and I measured more than a liter of blood loss.
I got the patient straightened out before the nurse returned. About an hour later, I noticed on the telemetry board that the patient had a blood pressure of 80/50 and a heart rate of 120. I spoke to her and she told me that the patient would be fine. I went over her head to the charge nurse. Yeah, I dropped a dime on her.
The woman was taken to emergency surgery. The nurse? Nothing happened to her.
The very next day, same nurse had placed a patient on 2 liters of oxygen. The patient was in obvious distress with an O2 saturation of 78%. Another nurse saw this, took over care, called respiratory, and had the patient placed on BiPAP. Again, no repercussions for nurse slacker’s complete lack of anything competent.
I have told the charge nurse that I will not be placing my name anywhere on that nurse’s chart and refuse to watch over her patients while she is off the floor. I am not risking my medical license for that incompetent, lazy slacker of a nurse. You can’t make me assume care for someone else’s patients, especially when I already have 3 or 4 patients of my own.
If you are on social media, you have likely seen the video of the Philadelphia Eagles fan confronting a woman wearing Packers gear. He called a woman a cunt on video, seemingly because she was a fan of the opposing team.
Taken at face value, what the guy did and said was crass and deserved punishment. having been to sporting events with Philly fans, I can tell you that no matter what the sport, the fans from that city are just like this guy. The woman’s husband, had he done something, would have gotten his ass kicked by the rest of the nearby Philly fans.
Still, Internet lynch mobs are a thing, and this guy was soon identified by Social Media busybodies. The league banned him from all future NFL events, and I really feel that justice was served at that point. The punishment fit the crime, so to speak.
Still, that isn’t enough to satisfy the Internet busybodies. They don’t stop until a person has been destroyed. They also identified his employer and went after his career, successfully, I might add.
It also turns out that there is likely much more to this story. It seems that the woman and her soon to be husband who were the target of this verbal abuse are so-called “influencers.” The pair specialize in starting conflict and then filming the resulting chaos.
Fans have discovered that the fiance of the woman abused by Caldwell, Alexander Basara, is actually a content creator with close to 60,000 subscribers on YouTube.
And to add to the suspicion, Basara and his other half only attended Sunday’s game after he created a GoFundMe page asking for donations to help get him there – despite claiming to live an hour away from Lincoln Financial Field.
Knowing this, it is entirely possible that the guy and his woman provoked Caldwell so they could get his reaction on film.
That’s the issue with cancel culture- the Internet lynch mobs gather and destroy people’s lives without a thought as to whether or not they should. This very blog was targeted by a Cancel Culture warrior who wanted to get me fired and deplatformed. It was my readers who shot back and got her fired.
It shouldn’t be like that. It sucks that making a comment completely unrelated to work can result in the Internet gang looking to dox you so they can have you fired. Those are the rules we are being forced to live under, even if they do suck.
That guy who attacked me and a pregnant doctor last month? Less than 48 hours after making bail, he got in a loud argument with his girlfriend. A neighbor called the cops, and she asked them to help her leave because she was afraid of him. While the cops were there, the neighbors told them that he was ranting about the hospital and how he had a score to settle with one of the nurses there. (Any guesses as to who he is referring to?)
An hour later, the cops were called back to the location because he went after the neighbor for calling the cops. He was arrested again for disturbing the peace and assault. The state is actually still moving forward with the charges.
As to the threats, I am armed all of the time. I also train in Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I am about 80 pounds heavier than he is, I am armed, and I train. A condition of his bail is that he can’t come within 500 feet of me. If he wants to come after me, he is going to have a very bad day before he winds up going back to jail, the hospital, or the coroner’s office.
On a side note- why do these assholes always attack me during the Christmas holidays? Back in 2022, I was suspended for an investigation when some idiot attacked me at work.
One of the items in my discussion on the fires in LA, I posted that there are problems with building homes out of fireproof materials. Someone asked what that could be, and I would like to expand on that a bit. Let me begin by saying that I am not an engineer, so I will be giving you a firefighter’s perspective on this, meaning that my knowledge is broad but shallow on the topic.
Building homes to be entirely fireproof has long been a goal. Attempting this is how we wound up with things like Asbestos. One of the things that was tried in the wake of the Chicago fire in 1871 was to build homes with a fireproof roof. In the aftermath of that fire, a great many homes in the US were built with slate roofing tiles. It appeared as though the problem was solved. No more would fire brands land on your roof and burn down your house.
Until 1900, when a hurricane struck Galveston, Texas. The storm was estimated to be a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The winds of the storm, estimated to be over 140 miles per hour, ripped those slate tiles from the roofs of the homes, and many people were killed by these flying stone axes.
It’s difficult to find building materials that withstand all conditions, and when you do, those materials make building homes prohibitively expensive. Even were one to build homes like that, the radiant heat coming through the glass of the windows will ignite materials inside of the house.
It is still a cheaper and easier solution to manage forests, create a defensible space around your home, and take other preventative measures. The issue is that people who move to “the country” like having the woods and other plant materials growing right next to the house.
This woman here had a child that was born prematurely. That child spent a month in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The bill came to $738,360, and the mother complains that the cost is too high. There are many in the comments that agree, and it’s filled with comments about how other countries have free healthcare, which is of course false.
The bill for that child’s care is completely reasonable. Let me explain why:
Nurses work 3, 12 hour shifts per week, and NICU nurses are frequently on 1:1 care, meaning one nurse to one patient. A 30 day stay in the NICU means that your child had the undivided attention of 5 nurses for a month. An experienced nurse, (for obvious reasons NICU nurses tend to be fairly experienced, qualified, competent, and educated) aren’t cheap. The average pay for a NICU nurse in the US is about $130,000 a year. Night shift makes even more, thanks to shift differentials.
The nurses in charge of your child’s care cost the hospital $70,000 in direct compensation, plus the costs of insurance, training, and other HR expenses. In all, just the nursing care for that month in the hospital cost that hospital about $140,000. Now add in the costs of everyone involved in that from the doctors to the lab technicians, and even the janitors.
Each of those people is highly educated, even the janitor. Yes, the janitor. To comply with Federal law, that janitor has to be instructed on CPR, stroke procedures, HIPAA compliance, Medicare and Medicaid laws, sex trafficking, recognizing child abuse, disposing of medical waste, and a host of other laws. He also needs to be background and possibly drug checked, especially to work in a pediatric wing. All of this raises the cost of hiring that janitor.
Back to the nurses. It takes 3 years of schooling to become a registered nurse. Then it takes years of experience, training, and work to specialize as a NICU nurse. In all, the average NICU nurse has been a nurse for 5 years or more and has attended far more schooling than a beginning nurse. Pediatrics is a specialty. So is neonatology, as is critical care. NICU nurses have to certify as all three. That’s why they make what they make- competence costs money.
Then there is the lab work, the cost of provider that supervises those NICU nurses (usually a nurse practitioner), lab technicians, respiratory therapists, medications, medical equipment, supplies, meals, and even the guy that empties the trash. Then there are the doctors, as well as the regulatory costs of compliance.
In total, labor costs alone for that stay were probably in the neighborhood of $300,000, so I don’t think $700k is out of line once you do the math.
That isn’t even considering what procedures may have been done- if surgery was involved, you can also add anesthesia, scrub nurses, surgical nurses, and a host of other specialties and specialized equipment.
The argument that other countries offer free healthcare is false. The care isn’t free, it is paid for through taxes. Even then, there aren’t enough professionals to go around, so care is rationed, and even Canada offers to kill the patient, putting them down like a race horse with a broken leg once the cost of their care gets too expensive.
There are ways to make this sort of care cheaper, but every one of those ways involves compromising the level of care. You can increase the nurse to patient ratio, but this means that the patient is left to fend for themselves for longer periods of time. You can get away with that for an adult admitted with a broken hip, but not for an infant that is near death.
Americans demand perfect healthcare, but then complain when the bill comes due. You want good care, and you want it now? Then it won’t be cheap.
One of the things that kills me is that whenever anything hits the news, everyone on the Internet becomes an instant expert. It doesn’t matter if the subject is the use of force, medicine, fire suppression, or engineering. Whatever the big news article, the Internet has an easy solution, and since no one has implemented your solution, it must mean that there is a conspiracy of rich guys who are not doing it because reasons.
The fires in LA are no exception. The latest I have been seeing is:
I can think of half a dozen reasons why each of those ideas would fail spectacularly. I am sure that my readers can as well. The easiest and most effective answers are the ones that won’t be used. Again, I use Florida’s wildland forestry system as an example. I spent more than 25 years as a firefighter, have a degree in fire science, and a hold a Red card as a certified Federal wildland firefighter, but I clearly don’t know as much as a Liberal Arts major who works at Starbucks and spends his time solving all of the world’s problems on social media.
Try to understand what this young criminal is saying.
— POLICE | CRIME | BODYCAM (@Policecamz) January 9, 2025
I can’t understand anything. This is the level of young criminals that our schools are producing.
A few questions for this dipshit:
Now a couple of points to consider:
Lets look at a couple of relatively recent events as guidance on how this will go:
Iraq is slightly less than 170,000 square miles in area, or about the size of California. During the height of the conflict there, the insurgents numbered about 3,000. Afghanistan is about 252,000 square miles, or slightly smaller than the state of Texas. During the height of the insurgency there, the opposition numbered around 75,000, mixed in with a population of about 35 million.
So both conflicts combined saw the coalition forces facing less than 80,000 insurgents in an area the one seventh size of the contiguous states of the US. Those two conflicts lasted for decades and cost more than 25,000 dead and wounded coalition soldiers.
Now expand that area to make it seven times larger, and instead of facing 80,000 insurgents, you now have 100 million of them all looking for a piece of your ass. The little masturbatory fantasy you are describing is total war between a third of the citizens of the US and an invading army. There are 100 million gun owners in the US, and those gun owners have roughly 600 million firearms. Just one percent of them would outnumber any realistic coalition force that would be here.
To the lefties who are dreaming of this situation, I ask you this: What makes you think that you will be immune to the violence? When they drop a 500 lb JDAM on your gun owning neighbor, are you counting on not being collateral damage? What about when your gun owning neighbor decides that you are the one who dropped a dime on his brother and got him shot by a coalition soldier? Do you think that no one will come after you? From either side?
These brain dead dumbasses have no idea what they are talking about. I know a guy who was a combat engineer in the Army. I also know that he has more than a couple of bricks of composition four stored in his house. I am betting that he isn’t alone in that. Now imagine a gun owner strapping 100g or so of that to a relatively cheap DJI drone and going hunting for some red force armored vehicles.
Use your own imagination to come up with resistance scenarios, and you quickly see what an unrealistic fantasy this is, which brings me to my point.
All of the armies of the world would find it impossible to subjugate the largest armed population that the world has ever known, which is the exact point of the right to keep and bear arms. Everyone who isn’t a fucking idiot knows this to be true, which is why no one has tried to take them.