Month: March 2013

Excuse me while I yawn, and attempt to stay awake long enough to write this post.

Yes, it’s that time of year (at least, in the great USofA) when the idiot politicians decree the clocks shall be wound forward an hour, so we’ll all lose sleep and arrive in work on Monday morning with matchsticks propping our eyelids open.

“No, I wasn’t out clubbing till the early hours, Mister Boss man, the bloody clock gained an hour in the middle of the night.”

“We must do it,” is the plaintive response of those who uphold this ancient and crazy tradition, “or the little kiddies will be standing in the dark every morning waiting for the school bus.”

Simple solution: let the schools start an hour later in winter, or, put the damned clocks to DST and leave them there permanently!

It’s no good. I can’t stay awake any longer. Here’s a short video by C G P Grey explaining how stupid it all is…zzzzz…zzzzz…

Close the door quietly on your way out.

This morning, by chance, the TV was set on the Weather Channel. Turning it on, I noted the phrase highlighted on the set behind the anchor was, “Climate Change”.

Interested, I upped the volume, just in time to hear the anchor state that some US university had just reported that 2012 was the warmest on record for X,000 years.

“Oh, good,” I thought, “at last the US media is beginning to recognize climate change as relevant.”

The anchor then went on to postulate that the northern hemisphere had been heading, in 2000 – 3000 years, towards another ice age. However, thanks to the increase in greenhouse gases and corporate pollution, this would not now occur.

I guess we all owe an immense debt of gratitude to our corporate leaders, for their foresight in saving us from freezing to death in 4013. Instead, we’ll all be fried by 2113.

Thank you to the owners of the Weather Channel – NBC Universal, Bain Capital, and the Blackstone Group (or, should we just call you by your real name – Lehman Bros!). Oh, no, sorry, Lehman Bros went bankrupt in 2008 due to it’s involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis which precipitated the depression from which we are only now beginning to recover.

Strange, that the two principle figures behind Lehman Bros, Peter Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman, should now be running the Blackstone group. One of their ventures is to cheaply acquire thousands of foreclosed homes and rent them to single parent families who can’t afford to buy.

Or, to put it another way, Peterson and Schwarzman are another pair of shits increasing their already vast wealth by creaming money off the poorest in society.

But, we can bow down and kiss their feet for saving us all from a life in igloos 2,000 years from now.

Moral: don’t believe a bloody thing you hear on the Weather Channel.

PS: Besides the Weather Channel, Bain Capital owns: AMC Entertainment, Aspen Education Group, Brookstone, Burger King, Burlington Coat Factory, Clear Channel Communications, Domino’s Pizza, DoubleClick, Dunkin’ Donuts, D&M Holdings, Guitar Center, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), Sealy, The Sports Authority, Staples, Toys “R” Us, and the Warner Music Group.

Blackstone own: Tele-Denmark Communications, Equity Office Properties, Freescale Semiconductor, Michaels Stores, Nielsen Company, Travelport (Orbitz), United Biscuits, Biomet, and the Hilton Hotels Corporation.

All told, that lot should ensure we don’t freeze to death in the next two thousand years.

Yet again we find the American media gripped by a non-event. Every day thousands of old people collapse and die. While it may appear strange to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and Fox, old people dying is actually incredibly natural.

So when 87 year-old Lorraine Bayless keeled over at the independent living community of Glenwood Gardens in Bakersfield, California, and the staff on hand called the emergency services, it was unlikely she would survive for very long, and she didn’t.

The subsequent furore – headline national news, the internet swamped by half-baked pseudo-experts sounding off at the staff of the facility for refusing the woman cardiopulmonary resuscitation, (though I bet many of those who yelled the loudest hadn’t a clue what the acronym ‘CPR’ stood for), has pushed most of the day’s genuine news into obscurity.

I know nothing of the policies of this Glenwood Gardens facility, but it has been stressed that the woman was in the ‘independent living’ part of the complex, and was aware that emergency help would be restricted to summoning the emergency services.

To the uneducated American viewer it would, no doubt, appear callous in the extreme for staff to refuse this poor woman CPR. Either the national media were similarly ignorant, or they were playing on the lack of their audience’s knowledge to ‘heat up’ a dumb story.

CPR can be highly injurious, even when carried out by a trained person. On a frail 87-year-old it could prove fatally so. Apart from fractured ribs, complications include bleeding in the lining of the pleura, serious damage to the liver and spleen, and pulmonary problems. Unless she was in remarkably robust condition for her age, CPR was as likely to kill her as keep her alive.

Despite the fictions of TV soaps and Hollywood, CPR does not ‘bring you back’ to life. At best, all it can do is keep the body’s tissue from deteriorating from lack of oxygen until professional assistance (usually in the form of a defibrillator) is available. If that fails to start the heart then the patient is already dead and CPR was a waste of everyone’s time.

Glenwood Garden’s policy of non-intervention was probably determined by fear of legal repercussions. The idea that such an issue could result in someone losing their life is horrific to most of us. So, blame the lawyers. In Lorraine Bayliss’s case her death was almost certainly inevitable.

The woman’s daughter, herself a nurse, stated she was totally satisfied with the care her mother had received. Obviously, she was more aware of the best nursing approach to her mother’s condition than were the idiot news broadcasters, and those factions of the US public stupid enough to assume their media is actually feeding them something newsworthy.