Left of Siren Risk Mitigating the Med Law Industrial Complex TPS-0025

The temperatures have been getting close to high points during the day around 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm doing everything I can to stay cool, hydrated, keep my body temperature in a safe range. It's ceremonial, that's for sure.

There are only a couple few hours in the early morning around sunrise where I can move around get some things done, take care of the garden, have breakfast, prepare lunch so I don't have to do anything when it's hot.

I'm eating very small portions given that I'm not able to really do much movement. A little bit of computing before the peak heat of the day, but once that heat kicks off, I pretty much have to just stop moving and lay down in the shade. Moisten fabrics as needed. Use a spray bottle and some little 12 volt fans, it's the most stripped down form of air conditioning imaginable.

I sleep basically on towels, on top of cushions, a mattress made of cushions but covered by these large beach towels.

So between sweating and using moisture and damp cloths and spray bottles to continue that evaporative cooling effect directly off the skin...It is kind of like continuously bathing, so I don't really stink the linens aren't really getting funky.

They're not turning into what I might have expected, which would be some kind of like gym bag or socks.

It seems like the fact that there's airflow and the fact that there's constant evaporation cycling through it it, it's managed to just really not get gnarly, not get really funky, but every couple days I will hang them out to dry.

It's a welcomed, pleasant surprise that this could be a sustained process for the extreme temperatures and I don't have to spend a lot of extra water washing.

I don't yet have the ecological systems installed to feel good about a lot of gray water, that eventually can can be installed.

So that routine forces me to be laid up and debilitated for a number of hours.

I like to feel this is my opportunity, what I've been waiting for, for a very long time. It's not exactly as climate controlled as I would have hoped for to have that four hour work week lifestyle or whatever you wanna call it. BMW, below minimum wage lifestyle, but on your terms and for me, on my land, really not having to answer to anybody, and doing whatever I feel like within some pretty austere and extreme conditions.

But I have wanted to backfill a lot of the gaps in my education. Even if it's not accredited, even if I'm not getting course credit for the studies I'm catching up on., I'm just very grateful that, thanks to all the generosity of the individuals and educational institutions online.

If you have the time and interest you can find with the right keyword, searching, you can really find those full courses that are designed to push students through everything, all the lectures they would need to get some sort of certificate, whether it's a degree.

It may be trade specific or something more technical. I've just been binging a lot of Yale, MIT and Harvard stuff, and not limited to that, but it's kind of fun being a fly on the wall of recorded courses.

I take good notes and really try to process it as best I can. Here on my show, I'm able to kind of recap some of the stuff I've been learning. I try to do a decent job of that.

I really find a lot of value in the idea that, even if not credited, I'm basically doing what's called auditing the course. You could sit in. My girlfriend went to Ivy League type college, and I would get to go with her to class and hang out and audit the courses.

Obviously it's great to not have to do the homework, but to just have a priming with the frameworks, the outlines, the 101…

Consciously and subconsciously, allowing that new information in through the eyes and the ears, it is going to interact with everything else I've learned, and it's going to find some shelf to live on.

Doesn't make me an expert, doesn't give me any qualification whatsoever.

It's just really amazing that now it's possible to really get immersed in pretty much any field of study you might be interested in. So I definitely recommend it.

Based on what I've been looking at recently, I wanna step up more into being my own first responder. I did the community emergency response team training ten years ago, and had a food handlers permit training course card, and first aid certification.

All those have expired, and I'm not doing a lot of interfacing with the outside world right now. So best I can do, given that I am in austere settings, and I will be administering, and have been administering a hundred percent of my own first aid...

Given the distance from a hospital and various other factors, I'm gonna wanna continue to walk this path of medical preparedness to where I'm in-sourcing more and more within reason.

It's hard to have a lot of practical experience administering advanced emergency responder medical techniques. I can do what I can as I need to. I can practice as much as I can on myself.

I'm also really interested in building out those ethical frameworks, those legal frameworks and the procedural aspects.

I'm studying this on EMS based EMT training course. I have profound respect for all of these folks and they're very high stress and high liability jobs.

It makes me think a lot about the average citizen's lack of real deep knowledge of what the people who are on the other side of that 911 are doing through. The system of teams within teams within teams, how much care goes into their duty of care. A little would go a long way for average citizens to prepare more and be trained to in emergency situations be able to really help them do their job.

I really wish I would have been exposed to this material as part of a standard curriculum in K-12, not necessarily as part of a vocational opportunities training. But more that it is your civic duty to be aware of some the procedures that they're following so that you can be less confused, so you can be more helpful.

Certainly, if you're calling 911 on someone else's behalf, you would have more intelligent questions. I don't think that's too much to ask. I don't think that would make you a crazy prepper.

I'm starting to collect a lot of the forms that they use and really study them. This mindset of heightened awareness of seemingly infinite minutia of things that you have to be totally accountable to, all the paperwork, all these very fine grain details of ethical legal responsibility and conduct, so many dimensions of risk.

I wish I'd have done this work much earlier in life in my, in my very reckless partying years, not as reckless as some people, but reckless enough. I would have been a lot more safe and responsible.

It's just such a blessing and a miracle that worse outcomes haven't occurred under my watch or in parties or or events that I have hosted or organized and tours that have been on with bands.

The more I study this material, this EMS EMT responder material, the more I realize just how egregious most Friday and Saturday night activities are in the world.

I feel ashamed of that, I'm not gonna beat myself up over it, but I will definitely take time to feel extreme gratitude for the miracle that worse outcomes, accidents and injuries were avoided.

It makes me flash back to a lot of times where I've seen people do really dumb things and get really hurt in the context of mindless drug and alcohol use, intoxicated, partying in the music scenes that I've been in.

I'm looking at these legal doctrines, I realize this is stuff that they're forced to use on a daily basis for pretty much every call that they go on, they've got to be doing all kinds of paperwork.

There's certain paperwork that's necessary to to fill out, and it can end your career, you can lose your freedom, go to jail or be sued if you do it wrong.

Now I honestly feel, since I've had this break from the status quo of society for almost since February of 2020...in one sense, I didn't realize how easy it was to be totally misanthropic and not miss people very much. But I don't wanna be that cynical, and I don't really feel that negative about people, but I do feel I'm enjoying a break from a lot of the asinine behavior that occurs in public that you just have to get used to. You just have to tolerate it. Belligerent behavior, aggressive behavior. Soliciting behavior, sleazy behavior, marketing, just bad attitudes.

That's just life among strangers, a sea of strangers in urban environments.

Depending on where you are, it may be a culture of unkindness versus a culture of kindness. I think you probably do better in small towns if you're not a victim of bigotry. But it's tough out there, and you gotta armor up and get really calloused.

So for me, to have this time to decompress and to shed some of that urban armoring...

The time that I spend with people in person from this new paradigm that I'm coming from, I'm gonna treat it as extremely precious because it's gonna be rare, it will be very honored and intentional time spent with people.



Now having done more medical first response research that I can't unlearn, I can't convince myself that I don't know better about a lot of these reasonable, duty of care type legal doctrines. Like it or not, good samaritan or not, trained emergency medical first responder or not, if you happen to be within the scope of your training, whatever standard of care that you are trained up to and accountable to legally...Just being out there in the world where there is risk of insult and injury to other people...

It's a soup of liability and legalese that compounds on top of every moment, every juncture of human interaction, it just stacks up and stacks up and stacks up.

Most people are running at such a fast pace, unless their lawyers and doctors and law enforcement, people who live and breathe the courtroom and understand the minutia of what it looks like to see someone get prosecuted for this invisible matrix of laws...

At their best the laws create some sort of standardized recourse for negligence and for harmful intent, but it's interesting to be alone on private property and realize that 99.9 % of all of that soup of liability and matrix of legalese, all of that in meshment, it really drops off completely once that line is crossed.

So long as I am being responsible on my side of that line and I don't invite the public to cross that line…

I'm looking into all that stuff and researching the duty to warn about hazards, natural and artificial on private property. There's literally a matrix, a table to use as the legal standard test, to find out whether or not you need to post signs, or whether or not you need to declare to it this type of trespasser versus that type of trespasser.

These are things that nobody is gonna ever learn about until it's too late.

So I feel it's real shame, a real tragedy that all of these common law sort of doctrines and standards and tests, layer upon layer of precedents set, you would just never know about them until it's too late. How would you have known some of this nuance.

There are cultures where you pay the doctor to keep you well versus waiting to get sick, then they have to take an arm and a leg while they take an arm and a leg.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Who has lawyers on retainer to just walk through every dimension of their life, their business, their workplace, their family's activities, and do a legal audit on everything.

On a good day, even if you are a lawyer, you're generally specializing in an area, to the exclusion of a lot of other areas that may be required. It would require a number of firms, and each firm has a number of people who take on the nuance within a certain sub field.

It's almost impossible to be an adequately legally informed, dutiful citizen out in public with a duty to care, a duty to rescue, a duty to either stand your ground or not stand your ground or stand someone else's ground.

It's very interesting reading and learning about this stuff, about how intricate the logic becomes to try to cover every foreseeable permutation of a situation. There's so much squishiness of human psychology and perception and ability.

I respect the lawyers who dedicate themselves to becoming really masterful and expert in being able to understand this stuff and interpret, speak, and write, that language.

Some people these days are saying be your own bank, well then you'll also want to consider being your own medical provider, your own legal adviser, your own everything else that comes along with being sovereign.

To take more personal medical and financial responsibility, I'm gonna be better informed. I'm gonna be a better educated personal risk manager. I'm still gonna avoid a lot of people places and things like the plague.

On a positive note, I'm not just belly aching and lamenting about the system. There are reasons for a lot of that stuff to exist. As I've said before, I think most laws on the books exist because somebody did something stupid that hurt themselves or somebody else, so a law had to be made. But if a lot of that stupid stuff didn't occur, there wouldn't need to be a law for it.

I'm not dismissing all these frameworks within the system as being frivolous. I'm acknowledging that you get mass dense populations, where alcohol is worshipped and car culture is worshipped, and machizmo is worshiped...Come on, that's what's gonna clog the emergency rooms.

That's why you have to have so much infrastructure to mitigate a lot of risky and bad behavior. I'm glad to be able to avoid it.

Though if and when I'm responsible for anyone else's health and safety, I'm going to have to snap into a mode of an escalated duty of care. I'm gonna be looking out for them more than ever before without being overbearing. I will be very subtle.

But even with the private anarchism that you get to enjoy on private property, a split second mistake can result in being forced back into the system.

When I was just a landless peasant, wandering around being on other people's properties and public property, for most of my whole life, I really didn't have a high sense of a duty of care or high sense of responsibility. That grew over time as I matured as it does for everyone usually, but I really didn't take it to the next level until having my own land.

I realize if I'm very careful about who I invite, careful about what we do, how we do it, how I maintain the property, I can really block out and eliminate so much of the fear, anxiety, and headaches of all that risk, all that liability.

So much risk can be eliminated that involves public infrastructure if I can just minimize that as much as humanly possible for the rest of my life.

Now that I'm free in a paradigm of being a landowner, and I have the skills of permaculture and survivalism to be able to bootstrap an ecosystem that can sustain me in a regenerative, resilient manner indefinitely, with minimal inputs, minimal cost. I really wanna preserve that. I really wanna take good care of that.

Anybody who sets foot on this property changes that dynamic and brings back in a huge percentage of that risk and liability and culpability.

I don't wanna be such a hermit that I'm afraid of that, I just wanna be extra prepared for it.

The more I study this stuff, the more I realize how insane it is to not have any awareness of any of this stuff.

Like to know what a first responder does throughout the course of a day, the forms that they fill out and what there exposed to in terms of risk to their safety, their health, their career, their future doing that job.

When it comes down to those oh sh**t moments where you don't know if you just crossed the line, some sort of point of no return with your own health in your own hands, and you just have to wait it out to find out if you're gonna make it through and be okay. Some of the swelling goes down, or the ache goes away, or the tingling goes away…If you're not in a position to just lean on that EMS system, you've got your books, you've got your notes, you've got your little med kits and everything.

It's one thing to expose yourself to that austerity, but it's another thing, legally and ethically, to ever involve anyone else in that.

I realize that it's not just me living out of my land doing the Mad Max thing alone. It's all the backpackers, hikers, etc.

I heard of recently, there was some kind of reality TV show shoot, they went on a hike in one of the arid Southwestern states and had to get rescued. People are cavalier, unprepared, go out in the wilderness, and mess themselves up all the time.

We owe it to ourselves to be more medically prepared. We owe it to our friends and family to be more medically prepared, and we owe it to the first responders.

We should be demanding more of ourselves and of our education system.

We'd be better off to understand how these algorithms work in approaching a scene, the checklists and the procedures that first responders go through.

I'm not saying everyone is gonna be highly skilled and highly trained to do very advanced technical administration, or rendering advanced care, but just having an awareness of these frameworks and figuring out how you can become an asset to them.

Just picking up more slack.

I can only imagine how many lives would be saved, how many less people would be maimed, how many people would avoid so much tragedy if a fraction of the energy and time and resources that go into organizing the fun camp or the party or the trip or the hike or whatever.

If a fraction of the energy that went into the study of how the world looks from the perspective of these first responders the world would be a better place.