Tom Walkom writes that Stephen Harper doesn’t get the new world economy. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, the creature he helped create has run amok and is trashing his home. If we have had some good fortune, Harper has had nothing to do with it: The secret truth of this recession
Continue readingBlunt Objects Blog: Super Thursday By-Elections: Winners & Losers
Last night’s five provincial by-elections were a wild right, with a couple of surprises and three more-or-less expected results in five suburban ridings all held previously by Liberal bigwigs which, while at once all relatively similar, were very different in their scope and results. You can check out the results
Continue readingZorg Report: Home Alarms Killing Innocent Victims?
Joel Matlin’s Home Alarms Killing Innocent People? Having a heart-attack? A grease fire? A hard time getting up after being crushed by a vehicle whilst on your bike? Don’t worry—emergency services are on the way. Unless any of these calamities happened during a thunderstorm. Then maybe you’re gonna have to
Continue readingZorg Report: Home Alarms Killing Innocent Victims?
Having a heart-attack? A grease fire? A hard time getting up after being crushed by a vehicle whilst on your bike? Don’t worry—emergency services are on the way. Unless any of these calamities happened during a thunderstorm. Then maybe you’re gonna have to kinda tough it out for a bit.
Yes, almost any city-dweller, we’re all familiar with it. The moment there’s a thunderclap, immediately the ululating, wailing symphony of “first responders”’s sirens begins. And then, of course, anyone within earshot is instantly vulnerable, for if anyone has a real emergency, “emergency responder” staff might be just too busy, just too depleted to “respond.”
Remember when you were a kid and you heard sirens? You knew something bad might be happening. It’s one of the first unforgettable sounds most people know. Your thoughts or attitudes on hearing the sirens may change over time, but their sound never loses its urgent importance.
Or does it? Now, the minute there’s a thunderstorm, the sirens fire up, the personnel are scrambled, the slick, dangerous roads are ablaze with emergency vehicles tasked with . . . finding a way to turn off home alarms that have gone off. I’m getting so sick of this, and every time there’s a thunderclap and the sirens start up, all I can think of is of people—victims, if you like—who may be experiencing genuine emergencies as “first responders” rush to empty urban semi-detacheds or to calm and comfort distraught homeowners traumatized by having their alarm go off for no pressing reason while others, maybe, die.
Obviously, for many and variable reasons, it just isn’t in the interests of “first responders,” or governments, or home alarm peddlers to let us know just how many useless “responses” are being made, nor how “response” time during periods of atmospheric instability are being lengthened, nor how many people who, under duress from, say, a heart attack or stroke, have had their lives irrevocably altered for the worse—or worst—by delayed response times owing to squadrons of “first responders” being deployed to placid wet lawns or private business parking lots, there to congregate and mull over how to shut off the alarm. Or those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and DIED, while emergency personnel were rushing to the scene of a home alarm. I imagine there must be lots of lawsuits out there, but for now my concern is really just with the victims, as our politicians like to say. When I was a kid and I heard a siren, I just thought something bad was happening and I was a little frightened. As I aged and I heard those urgent wails, I thought of people possibly hurt or in life-threatening circumstances and a kind of vicarious empathy and concern emoted from me. Now, when it rains, I just hope to Christ someone, somewhere, isn’t really experiencing a crisis, because all the “first responders” are tearing off to pointless destinations.
And of course “first responders” will never want to take action to do something—like reducing false calls—that will be bad for business, even if it is good for public safety. One of the surest routines one can find these days are notes that crime rates are dropping, but then the exclusively right-wing media reporting and “first responders” and their Conservative government patrons stating, evidence-free, that crime is actually soaring, particularly that once unremarked but now pervasive most heinous of crime types, “unreported crime.” If you’d like citations on this, I will provide them, but I think we all know where to go to find government and “first responders” telling us that all pandemonium is breaking out when neither scholars nor statisticians nor just everyday people walking down the street can see it.
(If you’re getting sick and tired of me putting “first responders” in quotations, I am, too. But it’s my way of registering a moral objection. The “first responders” in most cases are family and friends and neighbours and passersby. They are NOT emergency personnel. There is no such thing as emergency personnel unless there is a “first responder” first—get it? And a lot of us have training and have given the blood the “first responders” use.)
3
) Of course, in many jurisdictions, any EMSresponse already comes with huge costs to the victim. Say I’m a landscaper in a remote place and my buddy has gone home for the day. I fall out of a tree and I break my arm. My arm is clearly broken, and the pain is hellacious. I know it, but I also know that if I call a paramedic, it’s going to cost me hundreds of dollars I might not have. There’s a good chance I’ll elect to get in my truck and, at danger to others, try to get to a hospital so I won’t have to confront my EMS bill a couple weeks later. Spoiler alert: the joke’s already on the landscaper, because if he parked at a hospital long enough to get his arm set, he’d probably already be out 100s of dollars. But now let’s turn to the home-alarm owners. Every time emergency personnel are called out for pointless errands when others might be suffering life-threatening crises, those home-alarm owners should be responsible for _at least_ 75% of the massive costs involved in bringing out “emergency services.”
4) Because home or business owners who use private security systems that sound off during a rainstorm and drive up EMSresponses for everyone, those owners should pay a special surtax for the pre-public protection they choose to buy, but in the end are not responsible for. Conversely, those who do not choose, or cannot choose, to buy home alarm systems and the like, should be offered a tax rebate for not drawing out, or being able to draw out, EMS pointlessly (or pointfully), and also as a kind of weak sop to them for allowing themselves to die of heart attacks and the like while EMS vigorously pursues phantom home invaders at dwellings with home alarms. Call it “victims’ rights lite.”
If the first duty of a government is to protect its citizens, then here’s an opportunity.
–zr
Zorg Report: Home Alarms Killing Innocent Victims?
Joel Matlin’s Home Alarms Killing Innocent People? Having a heart-attack? A grease fire? A hard time getting up after being crushed by a vehicle whilst on your bike? Don’t worry—emergency services are on the way. Unless any of these calamities happened during a thunderstorm. Then maybe you’re gonna have to
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Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: The tragedy of Canada’s environmental denial
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