Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. OzarkHillbilly says:
   Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 07:23

   This being an open forum, I thought I’d start things off by raising your blood pressure into the danger zone.

   Colorado sheriff honors deputy after he killed man who mistakenly got in wrong car

   Charles McWhorter earned the Pueblo county sheriff’s office’s purple heart award for purportedly enduring injuries to his nose, forefinger, back, knee and neck as he shot Richard Ward three times at close range and killed him on 22 February 2022. McWhorter received the purple heart medal during a sheriff’s office award ceremony on 17 February, four days before Ward’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against him and his agency.

   The equivalent of breaking McWhorter’s hand with his face.

   On the day he was killed, Ward accompanied his mother and her boyfriend to pick up his younger brother from a local middle school. Ward took a walk as they waited and – after getting back – opened the door of another car that looked like his mother’s.

   Ward had realized his mistake, had apologized to the driver and had gone back to his mother’s car when deputies including McWhorter showed up to investigate a call about a suspicious person in the area.

   McWhorter approached Ward, who – while being questioned – said he was uncomfortable around law enforcement officers because he claimed some had used excessive force against him, according to deputy body camera footage that Killmer’s office released.

   Ward also explained what happened when he opened the wrong car’s door, and he emptied his pockets when McWhorter asked him for his identification. He also said he might have a pocketknife on him, though it turned out he didn’t have any weapons at all.

   Then, he took out a prescription anti-anxiety pill and put it in his mouth and the tone of the encounter changed palpably.

   McWhorter asked Ward, “What did you just stick in your mouth?” Then, without letting Ward answer, McWhorter wrestled Ward out of the car and threw him on the ground.

   “It was a pill!” Ward said. After a struggle of a few seconds that drew in another deputy, three muffled gunshots erupted, according to the video. McWhorter had shot Ward in the chest at point-blank range, the wrongful death lawsuit filed against the deputy asserts.

   “Is my son shot?” Stamp yelled from the car, the video shows. “He doesn’t have a weapon!”

   Ward was pronounced dead at the scene. McWhorter later claimed that he feared Ward was trying to reach for his gun. And local prosecutors ultimately deemed McWhorter’s killing of Ward as justified.

   Because a cop can shoot anybody at any time for whatever cockamamie reason they can dream up afterwards.

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2. CSK says:
   Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 08:46

   @OzarkHillbilly:

   Bloodcurdling. I’ve done this once or twice myself. Nice to know I could have been executed for the offense.
3. Sleeping Dog says:
   Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 09:17

   A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline

   Ah yes, god will take care of us and we will be free of that pesky government. FREEDOM! Until the hospital bill isn’t paid and the grifters have run off with the cash.

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4. CSK says:
   Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 09:25

   Welcome to the funhouse:

   http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/26/cpac-2023-washington-republican-presidential-primary-trump-haley-desantis
5. OzarkHillbilly says:
   Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 09:45

   And now a little something to give you the creepy crawlies:

   Medieval medicine: the return to maggots and leeches to treat ailments

   Meet the new medicine – same as the old medicine. In an age where robots can perform hip replacements and livers can be repaired with lab-grown cells, why are ancient practices coming back into favour? Who are the doctors, farmers, professors and patients who have kept our ancestors’ practices alive? And are there more retired remedies hiding in the archives, ready to be revived?

   “There is a taboo that gets in the way of people using the technique,” says Sherman of maggot therapy. “But for many practitioners, once they try their first case – even if it’s a last resort – they see what it can do.” Studies have found that maggots reduce a wound’s surface area and promote healing faster than conventional dressings. Following Sherman’s work and the concurrent work of British doctor Steve Thomas, the NHS accepted the use of maggot therapy in 2004. In 2005, a private company spun out from the Welsh NHS Trust where Thomas worked – ZooBiotic, now BioMonde – a sterile maggot-production facility in Wales that is currently home to 24,000 flies.

   Vicky Phillips, a clinical support manager at BioMonde, educates clinicians about the benefits of maggot therapy. “The larvae will only eat dead tissue,” she explains. BioMonde’s maggots are shipped out in aseptic polyester nets known as BioBags, each one made to order with a patient in mind, the larvae bagged in the morning and shipped in the afternoon in insulated boxes.
   ………………
   So what exactly does maggot therapy feel like? Susan Barnard, a type 1 diabetic who had maggots applied to a foot wound in 2016, says “to begin with, it doesn’t feel like anything, really.” The 48-year-old from Holywood, Northern Ireland, compares BioBags to teabags and says the maggots inside look like grains of rice. But as the maggots fed on Barnard’s wound, they grew, and then she started to feel “a crawling, like how your skin crawls but without the shivers”. Still, she didn’t feel squeamish about the treatment – she was simply amazed, and “actually felt really guilty” that the maggots had to die after they’d eaten her flesh.
   ……………………….
   “What is actually quite novel is to have this collaboration between scientists and people in the arts,” says Lee, an English professor who researches Anglo-Saxon notions of health and disease. Lee stresses that the AncientBiotics team’s work is not about alternative medicine or cooking up lotions and potions to try yourself at home. Instead, it’s about looking for scientifically sound remedies that could inspire modern drug discovery.

   “I was very, very critical,” Lee says of her initial reaction to testing out ancient remedies. “I thought, this is not something that works.” Yet when she and her colleagues tested out a 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon treatment for eye infections, they were amazed by the results.

   I had known of maggot treatments but there is much more of interest at the link.

   3
6. OzarkHillbilly says:
   Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 09:58

   @CSK: One time my parents came out of Powell Hall after a concert and walked back to their car. Got to it, the old man sticks the key in the door and opens it for Ma. Walks around and gets in thru the driver’s door. Sticks the key in the ignition and….

   It won’t turn. Tries it again. Still no go. Jiggles it around. Not gonna happen. After fiddling around with it for several minutes, they start noticing things in the car that did not belong to them. Slowly but surely the realization came over them, a spooky sensation akin to coming out of a time warp, that things were NOT as they should be, that it wasn’t their car. They got out, locked it back up and found their car a half block further down.

   Shit happens, innocent mistakes are made. They shouldn’t be fatal.

   3
7. CSK says:
   Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 10:17

   @OzarkHillbilly:
   And will continue to happen, as more and more cars in the lot are black or dark dray SUVs.
8. Stormy Dragon says:
   Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 11:01

   *sighs and adds Woody Harrelson to the list of celebrities who fell into the alt-right pipeline*

   Woody Harrelson under fire for sharing anti-vax conspiracy theory on Saturday Night Live

   There also seems to be a pattern now of SNL bringing people on to make alt-right rants of various sorts during the opening monologue.
9. OzarkHillbilly says:
   Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 11:17

   @Stormy Dragon: I am truly sorry to hear that.
10. steve says:
    Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 12:34

    We use maggots occasionally with good effect in wound care. Its just important to remember that maggot medicine works well. MAGAT medicine; Ivermectin, HCQ, weird vitamins, super vegetable pills, etc dont work very well.

    Steve

    6
11. gVOR08 says:
    Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 12:44

    I sometimes comment that FOX is the cause of our division. I often then note I mean FOX as the face of a larger conservative media. David French has a column at NYT today saying I’m wrong. It’s FOX.

    Fox isn’t just the news hub of right-wing America, it’s a cultural cornerstone, and its business model is so successful that it’s more accurate to think of the rest of the right-wing media universe not as a collection of competitors to Fox, but rather as imitators. From television channels to news sites, right-wing personalities aren’t so much competing with Fox as auditioning for it.

    Take, for example, the online space. Fox News is so dominant that, according to data from December, you could take the total traffic of the next 19 conservative websites combined, and still not reach half of Fox’s audience.

    2
12. Sleeping Dog says:
    Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 12:56

    @gVOR08:

    The truth is that most viewers of Faux News came to viewership holding the bigoted that they now loudly proclaim. Like the internet allowed holders of unusual kinks to find each other and build a community. Fox and RW radio talkers provide a community for racists and haters. From that perspective, French is right, Fox built a businesses model that exploited a community that already existed.

    1
13. Richard Gardner says:
    Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 14:03

    Elon Musk is getting attention from Mexican politicians eager to host a new Tesla plant, but the Avocado Tesla is clearly the best attempt.
    https://jalopnik.com/mexico-has-conflicting-yet-interesting-ideas-for-tesla-1850155961

    Same as in the USA, Mexican states are competing against each other, and Musk is traveling to Mexico to meet with AMLO.
14. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 14:28

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    In Nine Pints, Rose George goes into a great deal f detail about the use of leeches in modern medicine.

    It bears pointing out both vermin are used as part of treatment for one specific purpose, not as a cure for anything.

    In any case, my thoughts are the same: I hope I never need anything like that.
15. Just nutha ignint cracker says:
    Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 16:19

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    And local prosecutors ultimately deemed McWhorter’s killing of Ward as justified.

    Thereby explaining how these things keep happening. But sorry, my bp is just fine still. I’m not even sure that this is the most outrageous ACAB’s story that I’ve read this year (and it’s only February). 🙁
16. OzarkHillbilly says:
    Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 17:53

    @Just nutha ignint cracker: You don’t have to apologize for being so jaded this shit doesn’t even have an affect on you anymore. I wish I was in the same place.
17. Michael Reynolds says:
    Sunday, 26 February 2023 at 18:52

    If you sauté and gobble up maggots that have feasted on human flesh, are you a cannibal?

    Or just an adventurous cook?