…….

(1200 words)

Great question. For the medical questions gear questions, we can hope that one of our medical professionals responds. Otherwise, I’m going to hope that Dive Medic answers on his blog. Which I will then steal and put here.

Our family has a two tier system of medical goods. The first is the Boo Boo kits. We use them. They get restocked constantly. Now, some of the things in the boo boo kits don’t get used regularly, so they get rotated out about once per year.

Think imodium. When you have the runs, you need it. If you don’t have the runs, it just sits there. The shelf life for that stuff is much longer than a year.

For the small kits, we use single dose packages. These are more expensive than buying a bottle over the counter, but they are well-marked, waterproof, small, and well labeled. Just what I want in a boo boo kit. My other option would be to use aluminum pill bottles.

There is a problem with those aluminum pill bottles. As the wife of a friend found out, luckily, not in the hard way. Her husband was prescribed nitroglycerin for because he had a bad heart. In the event of a cardiac event, he was supposed to put a tablet under his tongue.

He carried his emergency nitro in a small aluminum pill bottle around his neck. One day, his wife decided to check on it. Just for grins. What she found was powdered nitro. Over the course of a few years, the pills had ground themselves into powder.

She now replaces those pills twice a year.

For the single doses, I’ll pay for the packaging and keep the bottles for larger kits.

The single biggest thing you can do to keep your boo boo kits stocked and up-to-date is to use it. If you are using it, you will see that the band-aids need to be replaced. You’ll notice that some of the meds are getting low. If you use a single dose of anything, when you get to home base, replace it.

I’ve watched people run to the house to get medical supplies rather than use their first aid kit because it was too hard to replace anything in the kit. So the kit was for “emergencies” which never happen.

Get in the habit of using your first aid kits. It will help you in the bigger emergencies. And you will have a better idea of how to use those things.

Which takes us to blowout kits, or stop the bleed kits. In my opinion, these kits should be shelf stable for at least a decade. Your C.A.T. or Soft-T or SWAT-T or whatever its brand is tourniquet should be good for at least a decade. The only thing in your blowout kits that should have expiration dates will be your clotting agents. Celox or Quik-Clot, for example.

If so, they have to be replaced on a regular interval.

As some of you know, I recently got back into photography. One of the things I found was that my expensive SpeedLight was a near write-off. I never “stopped” doing photography, I just wasn’t doing it. The batteries had leaked inside my SpeedLight, and it took me a good three hours of work to rescue it.

What this means to you is CHANGE YOUR BATTERIES! McThag’s blog has a post where he talks about his yearly battery changes. He goes through all of his gear and replaces batteries, or at the very least tests them all. These are the batteries in radios, lights, optics, and anything else that you depend on.

For me, I don’t replace the batteries on my light. I have a spare battery for each of them. I also have batteries that are single use for some of them, rather than rechargeable.

For my kit, I do have batteries in the kit. Those batteries are rotated into the gear that needs to be updated. Then new backup batteries are put into the kit.

When I’m doing the battery replacements, I am checking expiration dates on all the medical gear in that kit.

In general, this is a single weekend of laying hands on every piece of kit, verifying it is in working order, doing any PM required, restocking and putting things back.

The same way, I do a once per year inventory of my firearms. It isn’t enough to know I have it or to know it is in that safe/cabinet. I have to lay hands on each piece.

The other strong method is technology.

In Number Of The Beast Heinlein talks about packing Gay Deceiver, their vehicle. The gist was that you can pack more into a given space if you are not attempting to organize the packing. It might be harder to pack a pair of shoes together, but there might be two corners where a single shoe would fit. Thus, denser packing.

As Heinlein described it, anytime you needed something, you “just” asked the car, and she would tell you where those things were stashed. Easy.

And impractical. You need to be able to find things.

Technology can help if you can make yourself obey technology. As an example, my computer tells me to check Supreme Court cases every Monday. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. The technology doesn’t fail, I do.

If you have a document which tells you when you have to replace things in each kit, and you use it religiously, that might work for you.

If you have a document that just tells you when it is time to inventory and replenish each kit, that might work for you.

Regardless, make a plan to check your gear at least once per year. You will be amazed at what you find.

Friday was the first time I’ve driven further than the end of my driveway with a trailer. I had to take my lady to fetch said trailer. It was under a pile of garbage that smelled as bad as you think.

Took it home, got it loaded, well, my lady got it loaded, I was working. Drove to the other side of the state, helped her unload and dropped the trailer there. Drove home.

I got home just in time to get a call from my lady that she had forgotten some important supplies, food for 200+ people for Saturday’s lunch. Daughter was willing to drive it out to my lady, but she’s under the weather, and it was already late.

That meant I had to do another long trip out to my lady to deliver the missing food stuffs.

I’m exhausted. I wanted to write about Judge St. Benitez.

The short of it is that in 2017 Judge Benitez created freedom week. A whole week in which the people of California could buy modern ammunition feeding devices. The state asked for a stay pending appeal. That was granted. End of freedom week for the people of California. A 3 judge panel of the Ninth Circuit heard the appeal and ruled for The People, upholding Benitez’s ruling. The state appealed to the full Ninth Circuit and was granted an en banc hearing. There they found for the state and stayed the injunction.

Duncan appealed to the Supreme Court, where it sat in limbo until July 2022. The Supreme Court then Granted cert, Vacated the ruling of the Ninth Circuit, and Remanded the case back to the Ninth. The short form of this is GVR.

The Ninth, instead of saying “yes boss” and vacating their bad ruling, instead sent the case back to the district court. For more “fact finding under the new Bruen status.”. One of the dissenting judges noted that the Ninth should have just made the ruling because there is no way the case wouldn’t end up back at the Ninth.

Noon of September 22nd, 2023, Judge Roger T. Benitez entered his decision finding for the plaintiffs (good guys). I’ll write about his opinion shortly.

4.5 hours later, the state had their appeal before the Ninth.

The injunction is stayed for 10 days, so the state has until the first or second week of October to get the Ninth to issue a stay pending appeal.

For the gun banners, the best possible course of action would be for the Ninth to deny the appeal. That would leave this as a district level ruling and not binding case law for the Ninth.

(2000 words)

For a long time, I attempted to split the baby. I wanted our Second Amendment protected rights to be free from infringement. At the same time, I could see that there were certain common-sense restrictions on certain people owning guns.

My ability to accept “common-sense gun restrictions” evaporated when the term “common-sense” was usurped by the gun control extremists.

It then became, “Gun control means being able to hit your target, every time.”

At this point in my life, I’m a Second Amendment absolutists. “What part of ‘shall not infringe’ don’t you understand?”
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The first shipments should go out early next week. Just the Velcro backing. Those come from my supplies. J.Kb. will start shipping the actual patches sometime after the 28th.

We are looking at all the other options. We just have to make sure we break even or make a bit of profit on these things.

I did a quick count on Monday and was tracking some 51 different cases. That number is now 54.

Feel free to give us your feedback, we deserve it.

This popped on my feed yesterday, I made a note to pass it on to you.

This famous experiment was conducted in August 1971. The researcher had placed an ad in the Palo Alto City newspaper.

70 people replied and were brought in for interviews. According to Zimbardo, the lead researcher, these were “diagnostic interviews”. The term “diagnostic interview” was understood to mean looking for mental instability or particular sadistic tendencies in the respondents. The interviews were also used to eliminate respondents with “medical disability or history of crime or drug abuse”.

After the interviews, they were left with 24 participants.

This is the very first point of contention. There are many articles that discuss how these elimination interviews were not screening for the right psychological indicators. This is an open question because different people can have different opinions on what are disqualifying indicators.

One article question if the diagnostic interviews tested for BDSM tendencies. As shown about, the understanding was that sadistic tendencies were tested for, but the actual description by Zimbardo does not explicitly state that exclusion.

Also note, there are many articles that reference or discuss the SPE, there are books and movies about it. What I was unable to find is the original peer reviewed publication. The quotes I am using come from a 1975-slide show that Zimbardo prepared.

The way the experiment began, again according to Zimbardo, was:

Blindfolds are not part of normal police procedures. Before the victim even arrives at the mock prison, they have already been treated outside the normal practices.

One of the things to note is that Zimbardo was a prison reform activist. To set up his mock prison, he “called upon the services of experienced consultants”. His primary consultant was Carlo Prescott, a convicted felon with seventeen years in San Quentin, Soledad, Folsom and other prison.

His other consultants came from a pool of other ex-convicts and correctional personnel.

This would be the equivalent of somebody wanting to find out how access to guns effects people, and then hiring Giffords as their lead consultant. With their other consultants being experts recommended by Giffords, such as Brady, March for Our Lives, and Everytown.

As part of their mock prison, they created a punishment cell, called “The Hole”. It was a 2×2 closet. If you read The Gulag Archipelago: An experiment in Literary Investigation you will find a section where Solzhenitsyn talks about prisoners being tortured by being placed in an out building about 2 by 2 with countless bugs.

It makes me think that maybe Zimbardo might have heard some speeches by Solzhenitsyn and decided to implement parts of that narrative as part of his mock representation of an American prison.

From the point the prisoners are brought into the mock prison, they are treated in a manner to break them.

The prisoners were issued a smock, no underclothes, a pair of rubber sandals, a hair cap. They were fitted with a chain to their ankle.

Again, not at all normal.

I’m disgusted at what I’m reading. More so because Zimbardo is proud of his work.

He used this work to try to change people’s opinion of prison life. To imply that all prison personal were petty, sadistic, dictators.

In 2019, Thibault Le Texier published his paper “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment”

In other words, as a commentor pointed out on my article about Ordinary Men, there is a strong likelihood that the SPE is bad science.