I’m going to go ahead and assume hegseth can’t grow a decent beard.

Every veteran I know who can grow a full beard did so pretty much immediately after getting out of the service.

And most of the rest are at least rocking a mustache or goatee if they’re able to.

There’s some valid reasons to not allow certain styles of facial hair in the military, like they can effect the seal of a gal mask, if you were to find yourself fighting someone hand-to-hand, a longer beard is one more place they could grab ahold of you, maybe a fire hazard in some conditions, or harder to decontaminate if chemical or bio weapons are used, etc.

But this doesn’t feel like it’s about that, I think he just doesn’t like beards and I think it’s because he’s jealous.

I mean, Erasmus is a pretty well-known historical figure (and where, I assume, that programme gets its name)

That’s where my mind went first.

Turns out we’re both wrong and it’s just OP’s name like he said in the other comment, but I’m curious how you made that connection? Not passing any judgement on it, just curious since your brain reached a different conclusion than mine and I’m curious how you got there.

I’m a little unclear on how this whole vote by mail process works, I’ve always voted in-person because I haven’t trusted Republicans to not pull shit like this to fuck with my vote.

But how exactly does the postal service have the ability to do this? They’re not the ones tallying the votes, they’re just delivering mail. You put something in the box with correct postage and they take it to the address on the envelope. I don’t really get where they have the discretion to say “no” to doing that.

And hypothetically, let’s say they do refuse to deliver what looks like election mail. What’s to stop you from taking your mail-in ballot envelope, stuffing it into another plain, nondescript envelope addressed to wherever your ballot is supposed to go and mailing it that way? I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to be opening up mail to see what’s inside.

Genuinely asking and trying to understand.

I luckily haven’t been on-scene with a lot of EMS calls, I work from a bunker that’s usually miles away from where the action is taking place, so take thoughts on this for what they’re worth, I’m a bit outside of my area of expertise, and I don’t have a lot of details to go on so I don’t really want to speculate here, but I’ll leave some thoughts.

Also, just to reiterate, the class 1,2,3,4,5 terminology is what my agency uses, things can vary a lot from one place to another, and I certainly can’t speak for the policies and training and such that are in place anywhere else.

But an unconscious person is basically always going class 1 or 2 unless they were already a vegetable and it’s normal for them to be unconscious, but honestly even then it would probably be class 2 unless they really just need an ambulance to move them from point a to b and there’s not actually any other medical issues going on. They’re going to be going with some sense of urgency and leaving with lights and sirens.

If he was, in fact in cardiac arrest that is absolutely class 1 material. They’d be doing CPR on him or shocking him with a defibrillator as they’re going, he’d probably be intubated and they’d be ventilating him with a bag, I assume EMS in whatever town he lives in probably have some pretty good equipment so they’d probably have a LUCAS device to do chest compressions for them, etc.

I was actually on-scene with a cardiac arrest after a motorcycle accident once, helped perform CPR on someone until the ambulance arrived. I don’t think EMS was on-scene for 5 minutes before they were speeding off with the guy with lights and sirens going and a LUCAS strapped to his chest. I never looked up the call, but I would bet good money that that guy didn’t make it, but it was still fresh enough that there was a tiny chance and so he went class 1.

Hypothetically if they were able to restore a normal pulse with a defibrillator or whatever else they might have in their bag of tricks these days, it might go class 2, but that would still be high priority.

I can’t imagine any situation where they’re taking a patient who is unconscious and normally isn’t any less than a class 2 unless they’re dead.

From the short clip, and based off of the descriptions, it’s hard for me to say much. They’re certainly not running with the stretcher, but that could just be them being calm and professional, you don’t really want to be jolting the patient around after all, and they’re not exactly pussy-footing around, but still I don’t know if I’m seeing the kind of urgency I’d expect. If they did in fact leave without sirens, that’s really not jiving with the class 1 or 2 I’d expect for an unconscious patient, that sounds like 3, 4, or 5. It could be that they turned them on once they left the neighborhood, that’s not unheard of to avoid disturbing neighbors and causing a scene if there’s no traffic in the neighborhood for them to have to get through.

I work in 911 dispatch, different areas and agencies may handle things a little differently but where I work we give our incidents a priority from 1-5, with 1 being the highest

For EMS, priority 1 is things like cardiac arrests, shootings, stuff where the person has a very real chance of dying any second.

2 is most of the things you’d expect people to call an ambulance for, they do need to be seen in a hospital for and relatively quickly, but you’re not immediately in danger of expiring.

3 is the stuff that you probably could have called around to a couple friends for a ride or called an Uber or something for or maybe driven yourself to urgent care. Like sure, you probably want to see a doctor about that, but it’s not really that urgent, if you waited until tomorrow you’d probably be no worse off than you are today and in some cases you probably could have slept it off.

4 is basically for psych issues. You’re basically completely physically healthy and stable, you’re just cuckoo for coco puffs. The only way you’re going to die on the ambulance ride over is if it gets T-boned by a semi truck, or you annoy the crew so much that they throw you out the back of the ambulance while doing 70mph down the highway.

Which brings us to class 5. You’re dead. You’re obviously dead and no amount of life-saving measures are going to bring you back. Usually they’re not even going to actually take you away in an ambulance, they’re just going to say someone with medical training can go “yep, that’s a corpse” in case the cops on-scene are even dumber than usual and didn’t see you breathing, they’re going to throw a white sheet over you and let the coroner come around later to scrape you up. Unless you’re Mitch McConnell apparently.

I’m an eagle scout, and I’ve been following this story.

I’m going to be returning my medal as soon as I find a good mailing address that gives it the best chance of it landing on Roger Krone’s desk.

I’ve been in touch with every eagle I know. A good handful of them are on-board with sending their medals back as well. Most of the rest of them are at least going to be writing letters and doing whatever else they can to draw some attention to this.

Look, in the grand scheme of things, the changes they’ve agreed to change little to nothing about the scout program.

But if they caved once, that just means that hegseth is just going to try again, and they’ll probably cave in next time too. And the next time.

I’m not doing it lightly, I’m damn proud of my eagle scout award, that goofy little medal ranks among my most priced possessions.

But after a couple more rounds of this bullshit, they’re going to twist scouting into something I’d no longer want to identify with, so one way or another my days of being proud of that medal are coming to an end.