Formerly Great Britain: At least it is not because of Gun Violence
London authorities are hoping to literally stem the bleeding in response to a knife crime epidemic that’s plaguing England and Wales.
The City of London Police announced Monday that hundreds of bars and nightclubs across the city will be soon be outfitted with specialized medical equipment meant to treat catastrophic bleeding from stab wounds.
A total of 320 “bleed control kits” will be supplied to late-night venues in London’s financial district over the next few weeks, and follows a pilot program earlier this year in Birmingham.
Other than an admission that Real Violence is out of control and that the dumb Knife Bins are a failure, there is not much more to comment. I have no idea what their 999 response time is and I am not gonna crap on having the proper life-saving tools available for a right-this-frigging-minute emergency.
Also, I have no idea if our Cousin’s laws have a Good amaritan proviso. Last thing you want to do is use the kit, save a life and end up in prison for practicing medicine without a license. Now that would render the kits useless.
And once again, Christmas is coming and a kit like this is always a great gift. I will probably repost the Oh Sh**! kit and give you other ideas for kits to stop bleedings.
Hat Tip Roger G.
A New Yorker leaves her bubble and is overwhelmed by what the other 300 million Americans find normal
On Saturday I wrote a post about a woman who moved from New York City to Texas to clutch her pearls at Texas gun culture.
One of my faithful and valued readers linked another article by this woman in his comment, and it was too good to pass up.
The writer is Isobella Jade, and if you want to understand this woman, just look at her Wikipedia page. It is among the most obscenely self-lauding thing I have ever read. Her claim to fame is writing a biography at 25 years old about being a petite model, which she self-published through Amazon, and wrote entirely on display laptops at the Apple Store having not bought an Apple computer.
She became known as one of the first people to do something notable inside an Apple store, typing her first draft of her manuscript Almost 5’4”, a modeling memoir, at the Apple Store on Prince Street in SoHo in New York City.
What I’ve learned is that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cruel joke of nature. I can’t imagine having the ego to write an autobiography at 25 or to be a motivational speaker unless I did something monumental like create the next Facebook or climb Mt. Everest with no legs. Then someone like this writes a book about herself and becomes a syndicated author.
But I digress. On to her other article:
Devoted to the Manhattan Subway, a Transplant Learns to Drive in Houston
When I moved to the Houston area from Manhattan right before the summer of 2016 started, the sweltering heat was no bother, the moving truck being two weeks late was only a temporary sigh, because nothing could beat the anxiety and annoyance in the pit of my stomach of having to learn to drive here and finally get my driver’s license.
I’m already done. This woman was born in 1982. She would have been 34 years old when she first got her driver’s license.
I hear all the time how “New Yorkers are tough.” That is horseshit. Growing up in Florida, every kid I knew was chomping at the bit at 16 to learn to drive. At more than twice that age, this woman was terrified of what everyone outside the NYC bubble things of as normal.
My husband, originally from Houston, had tried to swoon me into the thought with a used BMW X3 from the Manhattan dealership. It had good mileage (because no one drives in New York City, I thought to myself), with a dark leather interior and leather steering wheel, at first glance from his text message photo it was stunning, but after packing for Houston, I started to feel tense and uptight thinking about this SUV, my first car.
Humblebrag some more about your luxury SUV, why don’t you?
We had the X3 shipped down to Texas, and when it arrived I had never driven it before. I hadn’t stepped on the gas or tried to in over 15 years, back in high school when I had practiced driving for a few weeks in my mother’s compact Mazda, but then I moved to Manhattan for college, where there was no need for a car.
I hope that move was a corporate move paid for by her husband’s employer because otherwise, he spent way more buying and shipping a used car from NY than buying a new one in Texas. So maybe the whole family is made up of idiots.
There is no evangelical like a convert. One would think that someone who grew up in Syracuse would have no fear of driving. I have spent a bit of time in the stretch between Syracuse and Albany, you absolutely need a car up there. But she moved to Manhattan and became a Manhattanite, eschewing all vehicular self-reliance.
As I practiced parallel parking that first summer in the Houston area, I wasn’t ecstatic for this new freedom, I didn’t want it, and felt ridiculous watching the teenagers nail it. I was probably the oldest one in America at 33 without a driver’s license and everyone was staring.
She is, they are, and she needs to learn how the rest of America works.
I had been fine waving down a taxi or as a passenger on the MTA subway lines in New York City.
Livestock transport for human cattle.
Learning to drive meant tucking my Metro card away as a keepsake, and letting go of the grid streets of Manhattan that I had walked miles on every day since I was 19. It meant putting on flat shoes for more stability when using the brakes in my SUV and swallowing my biggest fear of driving, instead of the convenience of grabbing my heels and hitting the pavement toward the 4 train on the East Side of Manhattan, the wind at my back, zipping and dodging through foot traffic, the journey from one side of the city to another was never a chore.
I have taken the NYC subway a few times. Chore does not begin to describe it. A stygian excursion through the bowels of hell is more like it.
If I were to create an app to guide tourists through the NYC subway system, I’d name it Virgil and make the download cost two cents.
Also, I call bullshit on any woman crossing NYC on foot and by subway in heels.
When my Texas driver’s license card came in the mail I wasn’t excited; life officially was driving in unknown territory alone, and being patient with this southern way of taking forever to get anywhere, coupled by the Waze navigation app.
You mean the southern way of getting wherever you want whenever you want because you control the car, instead of being tied to subway schedules and routes? I’m sorry that freedom was too much for her.
The worst day driving was in northwest Houston, on FM 1960 when I backed up into someone. I was crossing an intersection near Willowbrook Mall with the yellow light and felt I couldn’t make it, so I stopped, reversed quickly and didn’t look at my rear mirror. I bumped right into a humongous Texas truck. I rushed out of my car and blunted out a million sorries. And the sweet older man simply said, “That’s what those things are for,” he was talking about the truck’s bumper. I knew it could’ve gone much worse. I’ll never forget those boys selling water on the street corner who yelled that I was so lucky that man had been so nice. I swore to myself that I hated Texas, hated Houston, hated driving, missed Manhattan, shouldn’t be here, wanted to leave, and I was a terrible driver.
Why did this woman move to Texas? At this point, if I were her husband I think the alimony would be worth the convenience of leaving her in her happy Manhattan bubble of ignorance.
But there is no quitting driving in the Houston area. Besides backing into that truck, another shocking moment was when I was driving on FM 2920 and my contact popped out of my eye, I pulled into a gas station and thankfully had a spare in my purse. Another time I got lucky was when I left one of my car doors open at a retail store parking lot for over an hour and nothing was stolen.
She left her door open? What is wrong with this woman?
Perhaps the biggest shock was my first experience of “Pay it Forward,” with the car in front of me paying for my coffee in the drive-thru line, just a few weeks ago.
People in the South (and most of “flyover country” too) are nice. New York City is where people randomly curse or jabber nonsensically for making eye contact on public transportation.
I think she’d feel more at home if people walked up to her and told her to “go fuck yourself.”
In the past two years I’ve mastered eating Whataburger with one hand and although moving here has meant driving in a completely new direction, I want to believe I get braver each day.
Am I missing where it is some Herculean Labor to eat a fast-food burger?
If she can finish a Double-Double and parallel park, she deserves a fucking Silver Start. Screw those soldiers who charge entrenched enemy positions, outnumbered and outgunned. Getting someone from Manhattan to do the most pedestrian of Texan tasks is the sort of thing troubadours penned epic odes about.
When I-45 is slow, I really don’t mind, because the pause in my car allows me some solitude to take in this new landscape of Texas and think about what’s ahead. Sitting there, one of many in the jam of different lives and different cars on this Houston highway, I get to think about how this move has made me face my fears and welcome change even when it’s been nerve-wracking.
Until she starts to bitch at her neighbors about their guns and the concealed carry permit holders that pose no threat to anyone or anything but her delicate sensibilities.
And while waiting to move forward, I’ll wonder if the truck behind me will notice that the frame around my license plate reads: Manhattan.
What a fucking bitch.
I bet he has, and I bet it’s entirely out of Southern hospitality he hasn’t run her off the road with his lifted Powerstroke.
Between this article and the last one of hers that I covered, it’s time to go all Escape From New York on that city and isolate it from the rest of America. I think we’ll all be happier. They can live inside their bubble, believing in their own superiority even though they are incapable of doing the most banal of Flyover State tasks.
Also, I need to figure out how to get one of these paid freelance writing gigs, because if this woman can make money humblebragging about her own incompetence, I should be able to make bank on actually accomplishing something.
LA Times publishes victim narrative that has to be taken with a whole salt mine
I feel very bad for any parent that loses a child, especially in a school shooting.
I have two children and I love them. I cannot imagine the grief that would come from losing one and the sense of betrayal that would come from one being murdered in school, where they are supposed to be safe.
If the loss of a child motivates you to make changes and engage in politics, that is completely fair.
What I have a hard time with is other parents using that grief to lecture those not responsible for their child’s death.
We’ve seen this countless times, where the parents of school shootings victims don’t work for safer schools but attack law-abiding gun owners and the NRA.
The LA Times published such an opinion. That’s not a shocker.
It was the person who wrote the opinion and the line of attack they chose that pissed me off.
Opinion: I sent my daughter to study in America. Your gun culture killed her
A foreigner not familiar with America’s gun culture is going to attack American’s gun culture.
Where is this parent from that doesn’t have a gun culture? The UK? Australia? Japan?
Karachi, Pakistan
Fuck you.
When we sent our daughter Sabika to study in the United States from Pakistan, we were not fully aware of the gun culture there. That’s not something the exchange program warned us about. We thought she would be safe.
Instead, a few days before she was scheduled to return from her year abroad in Houston, Texas, she was one of 10 people shot and killed by a classmate in the Santa Fe High School shooting in May of 2018. We were devastated.
It’s not as if we don’t have violence in Pakistan. In 2014 we had a horrific school shooting in Peshawar. A total of 141 students and faculty were massacred in what was, for me, the darkest moment in my country’s history. But all of the shooters were foreign terrorists, and since then, heightened security and restricted access to guns has helped ensure that nothing like that has happened again.
I’m going to stop you right there.
The terrorist cell that attacked the Peshawar school was Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistani branch of the Taliban. So while the attackers might have been foreign nationals, they were part of the Pakistani terrorist group that is trying to impose radical Islamist control on the country.
As for Pakistani gun control and everything else in she is about to say, let me retort.
First of all, while Pakistan might not have the school shootings that we do, they have far more Islamic terrorist bombings with much higher body counts than we do.
But bombings are just the tip of the Pakistani cultural differences iceberg.
From Deutsche Welle:
Violence against women on the rise in Pakistan
Pakistan ranks as the sixth most dangerous country in the world for women, with cases of sexual crimes and domestic violence recording a rapid rise. Activists blame society’s patriarchal attitudes for the problem
From The Express Tribune:
‘93% of Pakistani women experience sexual violence’
KARACHI: Pakistan is among those countries where 70% women and girls experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime by their intimate partners and 93% women experience some form of sexual violence in public places in their lifetime.
From Newsweek:
HONOR KILLINGS, RAPE, ACID ATTACKS AND CHILD ABUSE RAMPANT IN PAKISTAN, REPORTS CLAIM
More than 100,000 cases of human rights violations have been reported across Pakistan over the past five years, according to the country’s National Police Bureau. The crimes include murders, honor killing, sexual assault, acid attacks and violence against women and children.
The data was collected by Pakistan’s Ministry of Human Rights and police officials, according to reports released Tuesday. The numbers reflect only crimes that were reported and investigated by the police, and it is likely that these numbers paint an incomplete picture of the crimes taking place in Pakistan.
The data was released shortly after the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl in the city of Kasur sparked a national debate about sexual assault and violence in the country. Zainab Ansari, a child whose body was discovered in a garbage dump in January, was killed by a sexual predator who allegedly had a history of child abuse. Analysts say the case called attention to a culture of silence around sexual abuse in the country.
There is an Oscar-winning documentary, available on YouTube, that follows a plastic surgeon that has done helped more than 150 women who were disfigured in acid attacks in Pakistan.
According to the Human Rights Watch World Report for 2019:
Violence against women and girls—including rape, so-called honor killings, acid attacks, domestic violence, and forced marriage—remains a serious problem. Pakistani activists estimate that there are about 1,000 “honor” killings every year.
In June, the murder of 19-year-old Mahwish Arshad in Faisalabad district, Punjab, for refusing a marriage proposal gained national attention. According to media reports, at least 66 women were murdered in Faisalabad district in the first six months of 2018, the majority in the name of “honor.”
Back to the LA Times OpEd:
Earlier this year, my husband and I visited Houston with our three remaining children to see the school she had loved and meet her host families. It was a difficult trip. During a layover in Istanbul on our way to Texas, one of our children begged us to abandon our plans and go back to Karachi.
Because Texas is much more dangerous than Pakistan…
On our flight from Houston, Sania sat next to an older passenger and started talking to her. She shared the story of Sabika’s death, and this woman told her that she lost her 44-year-old son to gun violence, leaving her three grandchildren with no father. My daughter and this complete stranger began crying together. She told Sania that more measures need to be taken to limit access to guns. I can’t understand why more Americans don’t see that need.
What kind of access limitations. the Santa Fe shooter was 17, he stole his dad’s guns, he didn’t buy his own.
I don’t know what we expected from our trip, but the colorful image of life in the U.S. that Sabika always painted for us on the phone was not the world we experienced. Without her there, all we saw was black and white.
I blame myself for not knowing more about gun violence in the U.S. before I allowed Sabika to study there. But I also blame your gun culture.
America’s gun culture is overwhelmingly a culture of law-abiding citizens who enjoy shooting and hunting.
School shootings have nothing to do with gun culture and are a reflection of a new American culture of nihilism, hopeless young men, and broken families.
That is not something that the NRA or law-abiding American gun owners endorse.
I could speak about this all day, but I’m not in the mood to defend America’s gun culture from a woman who comes from a country with a culture of child abuse, rape, violence against women, and human rights violations.
I’m sorry that her daughter was shot in the United States. I really am.
But the likelihood of that happening was far, far less than the likelihood of her daughter being raped and then having her face melted off with battery acid if she tried to report her attack in her home town.
A tale about the hoarding of information
Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature.
This quote is from J. Kb’s post and made me laugh because I saw exactly the same thing in Venezuela although not with the military but with professional audio.
Before I ended up with my business partner and fellow engineer, I worked in a couple of studios in Caracas. Being a young man, trained in a good school in the U.S of A made it easy to get a job. I worked in two places and both had the same approach to information: Don’t share. Back in the age of analog tape, you needed to know certain setting of you tape machine and what was its maintenance record as it would help you detect possible problems before they happened. The same applied to the console and some of the rack-mounted effects. The more you know, the less crap you have to deal during a session.
I could not get a straight answer ever.
In fact, I could not get the manuals for the equipment! I requested them over and over and I was always told a good engineer did not need them to operate an specific model of gear. Imagine my shock coming from a culture where the frigging operating manuals for every piece of gear in the school were right there in the Control Room ready to be used at a moment’s notice.
One of my “specialties” as engineer was doing maintenance to the tape machines and it was a bit of a challenge to do so without the manuals. Also other necessary gear to perform maintenance was considered by the owners as unnecessary or too expensive and was ordered to do without. Finally I told my last employer that this was a stupid way to run a studio and why they did things like that. The answer is one some of you probably heard before: “We have been doing it for 20 years and never had a problem.” I may have responded to my last boss that indeed they had a problem: their recordings sounded like shit. I believe he did was not sorry to see me go.
I was told that another Venezuelan “gringo” like me was building a studio and I went see him. We hit it off fast and the conversation eventually landed on the gear he had for the studio. The tape machine was a Tascam 85-16B and my next question was if the manual was available. He said nothing but went into a file cabinet and produced this thick 3 ring binder.
I was home.
Once the studio was up and running, we prided ourselves of being sharers of information. I don’t think a month went by that another studio called us with a problem and we were happy about sharing possible fixes. People thought we were some sort of Audio genius that knew anything and everything, but the reality was we were collectors of information. Our repair room also held the audio library with a competent collection of audio recording books and about a decade of Pro Audio magazines we were subscribed to and read religiously. At least 2 young audio entrepreneurs decide to get into the recording studio business and they came to us asking for the How-To. It was a proud moment when they called us to say they had their first paid session and thanked us for the help.
Were we hated because we shared info? Oh shit yes. How dare we rock the boat?! They gossiped crap about us, dropped a dime about we dealing drugs from the Studio (We had long hair and wore flipflops, then again we had NRA and gun stuff all over my side of the office and a poster of an electric chair in the break room indicating our mood if you were to violate the studio rules which included ZERO DRUGS) and even a couple of daring souls came in trying to sabotage our equipment. Keyword: Tried. Let’s say we developed a “Do not fuck with” reputation after that.
To summarize a long post: The other studios were fearful that by sharing knowledge, other people would benefit and they would lose market share. They never understood that the clients want quality and delivery speed and are willing to pay for it. Once our reputation was established, we never stopped having clients, even when we shared info that lead to the creation of two other studios.
And it was never about the information but what you could do with it to give the client the best recording possible. It is not that I had the manual for the console or the tape machine or the reverb, it is that the manual provided me with not only the operations instructions but how to keep the machine properly maintained for a recording with exquisite sound.
It goes to a saying we have heard in the gun culture: “It is not the arrow but the Injun.”
