Divemedic

Grift

Emily Brown is a government contractor. For the past 18 years, she has made a living working part time, billing the government $3700 a month. For 2025, she had three contracts lined up that would have totaled $63,000. What does she do for them?

Her contracts have her traveling to Albania and Ghana to “conduct research on the barriers that girls, women, persons with disabilities, and others face in accessing secondary education in Timor Leste and Gambia.” In other words, she was performing bullshit make-work.

We have entire school districts here in the US where not one student demonstrates reading comprehension. Reading comprehension and literacy in the US is at an all time low. There is no need to go to other countries to study that phenomenon.

This entire article is supposed to make us feel sorry for her and angry at Trump for putting a stop to the wasted tax dollars like this. This is what I voted for, to stop this stupid bullshit.

By Divemedic, ago

Liars

I read this story about a former firefighter in the Keys who has been accused of making bombs. The cops found him with what they called an unregistered short barreled rifle. I don’t trust cops to know a machine gun from a shoestring, so there is that. Maybe it was a pistol AR with a brace. Because they could see part of the rifle in his backseat, they arrested him for open carry. So much for the incidental exposure part of the law, eh?

They used the short barreled rifle as an example of a threat to the public to get a red flag order, which they they used to get a search warrant for his house. Inside, they found “dozens of firearms” and more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition. They also claim to have found bombmaking materials.

This sort of breathless fearmongering sets off my bullshit detector. We all know the ATF lies to make headlines. Read about this Navy guy who got 20 years for possessing unregistered NFA items when the ATF was able to replace the firing mechanism for some replica devices with the firing mechanism from real devices, which enabled them to fire them.

Now ask yourself if someone could take all of the items in your house and spin a tale of you being a danger to society. Do you have lamp timers? Pipe? Gunpowder? Fertilizer? Constructive possession, in the eyes of the ATF.

By Divemedic, ago

Teens

A pair of 19 year old high school freshmen – read that again- 19 year old high school freshmen decided that they didn’t like something that their teacher told them and decided to ambush and beat him.

It happened in Broward county, which is one of the most left leaning counties in Florida, the site of a lot of election shenanigans. Of course it was the usual suspects, Amish Norwegian teens, in a Democrat stronghold, demonstrating that you can’t stop certain demographics from doing what they do.

When his defense attempted to ask for a reduced bond because McClover was on track to graduate and his mother would be unable to afford his bond, the judge had some harsh words.

“Counsel, he and another individual, without any provocation, walked up and started punching a teacher in the face, beating him,” the judge said. “He’s a danger to the community. $15,000 bond. Have a good day.”

By Divemedic, ago

Conversations

I recently had in depth conversations with a couple of my patients. They were quite topical. The first one was a conversation that I had with a retired Army Warrant Officer whose job it was to fly Blackhawk helicopters. One of his postings was to the same unit that the helicopter that was involved in the recent collision between an Army helicopter and a civilian airliner.

His thoughts were that the crew was wearing NODs while flying the aircraft. If you have ever worn those devices, you know two things- you lose depth perception, and any lights you see tend to look like any other lights that you see. This area, according to him, is very busy airspace with a lot of things going on, lots of lights on the ground, and lots of aircraft with lights flying around. The helicopter was flying higher than it was supposed to, and for these reasons, the oncoming airliner’s lights likely blended into the background.

My thoughts on this, is that if this airspace is that dangerous, the military either needs to no longer be permitted to fly in that area, or if it is determined that national security requires them to still fly there, then the airport needs to be shut down so civilians no longer fly in the area. It’s the only way to be sure this won’t happen again.

The second person I spoke with is a poultry farmer from Kentucky who told me that he hasn’t had any problems with avian flu. He has over 20,000 egg laying birds, and not one case of any sickness.

My opinion here is that this was a problem created by the outgoing Biden administration to screw with Trump. This is another fake pandemic.

By Divemedic, ago

Rent

When I got divorced in 1997, I was making $1000 every two weeks. I lost $280 in taxes, leaving me $720 every two weeks. Following the state law formula, the court ordered that I pay $348 to my ex wife, nominally for child support, leaving me with $720 per month to live on ($372 every two weeks). The support was taken from my check before I even saw it so I wouldn’t be a ‘deadbeat dad.’ The rent on my apartment was $600 for a small one bedroom, making my rent more than 80 percent of my take home pay.  I was soon homeless and without a car, moving from couch to couch at the homes of friends. 

I understand feeling down when this happens:

The difference is that I didn’t stand in my kitchen, filming myself crying before posting it to social media. Instead, I did what a man does- I figured out a way to deal with it. In this guy’s case, he set up the camera, set the scene, then cried on cue. This isn’t genuine emotion, this is a man child looking for someone else to come and take care of his problems.

I got a second job, picking up garbage after the Shamu show at Sea World. I walked, rode a bike, and took the bus. I wouldn’t eat for several days at a time. I lost 30 pounds that summer. Two months later, I bought a car at a “buy here, pay here” place. I wound up living in that car for another few months. I was eventually able to get an apartment by moving in with several roommates.

There are different ways to deal with disappointment. You can sit around and cry about it while asking daddy government to come and fix it, or you can fix it yourself. It’s OK to bitch and complain a bit, but at the end of the day, your problems are yours to fix.

Most of us were poor at some point. Get roommates. Get a second job. Get a cheaper apartment.

By Divemedic, ago

What Could Go Wrong?

Take 6 black men, a Muslim, a Black woman, and Asian woman, and a white woman. Put them in an isolated research station on Antarctica. What could go wrong?

That’s right- violent crime is up 100% across the entire continent. The only white woman within thousands of miles has been raped and is calling for help that can’t arrive for another six months. There have been assaults, death threats, and there is even a report that someone’s bike has been stolen. (OK, maybe not the last one.)

By Divemedic, ago

Barbary, Islam, and Jizya

Let me lay out a few thoughts with regard to the current conflict in the Red Sea.

The Quasi War

The very first test of the new United States was just a decade after the ratification of the Constitution. France was at war with England, as it seems they have been more often than not. When the Republic of France went to war with Great Britain and the European coalition in 1792, the United States declared its neutrality, and the French didn’t like the fact that the new nation was neutral.

This was made worse from the French point of view when the US signed the Jay treaty with Britain, opening trade between the new nation and the British colonies in the Carribbean. As a matter of policy, France began permitting privateering against US shipping. This sparked the formation of a new US Navy to take on French privateers in a conflict called the Quasi War. In the beginning, merchant ships were converted to Naval service while the US built its first six frigates. The conflict ended in 1800. This is an important conflict because it was waged by President George Washington until he retired in 1799 and Congress never declared war.

Jizya

It should be well known to my readers that non-Muslims living in areas controlled by Muslim rule are referred to as dhimmi. The term dhimmi means “one whose responsibility has been taken” and refers to those who must be ruled over by those of the Muslim faith. Muslims believe that dhimmi must convert to Islam, serve Muslims as laborers or in their military, or pay tribute referred to as jizya.

This was the premise behind the Barbary pirates. The Barbary states were a collection of Muslim nations on the north coast of Africa: Morocco was an independent kingdom, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli owed a loose allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. The naval forces of the Barbary states were capturing US ships and holding the crews for ransom, some for more than a decade. They were doing this because they were Muslim and were demanding the US pay jizya in exchange for their ships being protected from the Barbary states themselves.

As we have posted above, and in previous posts, the practice of state-supported piracy and ransoming of captives was not wholly unusual at the time. International law said that pirates could be executed on sight. Granting a letter of marque made a pirate a legitimate member of a nation’s policy and not a pirate. This is where the Constitutional clause allowing letters of Marque came from.

Since the US was busy fighting off the French privateers at the time, they decided that it was cheaper to pay the jizya to the Barbary states than it was to fight them as well as the French. That’s what they did until 1801, when the Pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Qaramanli, citing late payments of tribute, demanded additional tribute and declared war on the United States. The US chose to stop paying the jizya and instead sent their new Navy. The Marines still sing about the resulting military action to this day. The US negotiated a halt to the raids in 1817, but they continued raiding shipping of other nations until the French finally invaded Algiers and leveled the place.

Continued Problems

What we are seeing in the Red Sea is a continuation of the Muslim desire to force everyone to either convert or pay tribute. That is why piracy is a problem in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden. The Muslims in Yemen and Iran have decided that people either pay tribute or serve them in their desires. Those morons wouldn’t be able to do anything if it weren’t for the Iranians supplying them weapons. Note that European nations’ shipping is being left alone. I wonder what that is…

The US has long taken the position that the open ocean is free for navigation. We can either try to fight another forever war of insurgency against Yemen, or we can cut their weapons off at the source- tell Iran to stop supplying missiles to terrorists or else. No need to engage in a long war- tell them to stop selling weapons to them. If the weapons continue to flow, then take out the Iranian navy. If they want to continue after that, we can bomb the missile factories. If we don’t want to do it, all we have to do is tell Israel that we will no longer hold them back from doing it themselves.

By Divemedic, ago

Hypocrisy

All of the pearl clutching about how Trump is evil for ignoring the judges orders opposing his executive actions is complete partisan bull hockey. Here is what AOC said two years ago when a Federal Judge in Texas suspended the approval of abortion pills:

When it comes to executive actions, I don’t believe that any low level judge has the power to overrule the President. Any order to stay or overrule a President’s executive actions can, in my opinion, only come from SCOTUS.

Why? SCOTUS is the only court that is explicitly created by the Constitution. Lower courts are established by Congress. A judge in a court created by Congress shouldn’t be able to overrule the chief executive.

By Divemedic, ago