Divemedic

Winning Hearts and Minds

One of the most frequent criticisms that I have heard from the right about Charlie Kirk is that he was too moderate, he was Milquetoast, all he wanted to do is talk, etc. I have a news bulletin for people who say that-

The struggle between the US and the Commies of the left isn’t going to be won by guns.

The left’s strength is young voters. For decades, the left has gotten young people on board with the message that the older folks are out of touch. The reason that young people are poor, the left tells them, is that those old farts over there are cheating the system and keeping you down.

It just isn’t about violence. It’s going to be won by convincing the people of this nation that the left is nuts. That their ideas are unworkable. You don’t change people’s minds by shooting at others. You can’t shoot enough people to change the minds of an entire nation. On paper, Kamala Harris won more than 75 million votes. Even if half of those votes were fake, there are 37 million people in the left’s camp. It isn’t practical to shoot and kill 10% of the nation.

Those of you who think that a Civil War is just going to be you running around engaging in some fantasy where you shoot people in your spare time and simply go back to work on Monday while leaving Saturday evenings free to take the wife to dinner and play with the kids is a fantasy.

What Mr. Kirk did was connect with college students in a way that none of the people who read this blog can: He spawned a movement that got young adults involved in the conservative movement, because he was one of them. He started Turning Point USA when he was 18 years old. He was, in large part, the reason why Trump won the last election. Let me illustrate:

Read that chart- There was a 16 point shift to the right in young men, and a 5 point shift in young women. What Mr Kirk was doing was beating the left where it hurt them the most- their most powerful demographic: young, college educated whites.

He did it without violence, but with reason, debate, and discussion. His mantra was “Let’s talk, let’s compare ideas,” and he was damned effective. He won over hundreds of thousands of people through merely showing them that the right weren’t fascists that wanted to kill brown people. Instead, showed these young adults that those on the right were not ignorant moron racists- he won them over with reason and debate.

The left murdered him for it.

If you think that you will be more effective than Mr. Kirk was, tell me how you and your rifle are going to change 100,000 people’s opinion. Tell me what the nation will look like if you “win.” Do you think that the US will be better after this civil war than before it? Do you think that those who are left of the 70 million or more Democrats are going to just love you and your ideas because you shot a lot of people? Or do you really think that you are going to walk off into the sunset without knowing loss at the end of what will assuredly be a long a bloody affair?

We need the Charlie Kirks of the world. They are the ones who are the path to winning over in the land of ideas. The biggest problem isn’t that he isn’t violent- it’s that the left is.

Once dialog breaks down, violence is guaranteed. With the killing of Charlie Kirk, the left has signaled that they can’t be reasoned with. That’s the reason why this blog may have to go if a bunch of people on my watch list are killed- it signals that talking and dialog are a thing of the past.

That’s a scary, dangerous thing.

I am sure that there are readers who are reading this and thinking that I am being a pussy. There are a couple I can think of right now. To those people, if you REALLY believe that, why aren’t you out there stacking bodies instead of trying to demand that others do it for you? Are you a Fed that is trying to goad people into being the FBI’s next patsy? Or are you a fool that thinks you are going to go all John Rambo and kill everyone who displeases you?

EDITED TO ADD

If we have entered a phase where people who talk are being silenced through assassination, the time for talk is over. The blog has to go, and it will be time for other tactics. If people aren’t having discussions, they are fighting. That was the message that Charlie Kirk was spreading.

The left, as I have pointed out more than a few times on this blog, sees speech with which they disagree as being violent and has also said that whatever it is that they disagree with is “hate speech” that deserves no Constitutional protection. At first, it was petitions, then canceling, then it was “follow people and outshout them with megaphones,” then it was riots, now it is just blatant assassination. The left has been escalating the violence for over a decade.

Once we get to the point where those who speak are murdered, then there is no longer any point to speaking.

By Divemedic, ago

Warning Sign

Until the killing of Charlie Kirk, I had a post laid out for this spot. I am not going to talk about the assassination, the killer, or anything to do with the actual events from Utah yesterday. Instead, I want to remark on the cosmic shift that this killing has signaled.

I was at work when the news broke. One of the nurses there began grinning and said “I will just keep my thoughts to myself on this one.” Then laughed. Leftists are just evil.

I have been saying since 2020 that one of the signs that a revolution is nearing its completion is the disappearance of people who can make trouble for the revolution. It’s a sign that the revolution is beginning to eliminate those who can make trouble for them. As I have been saying:

You bet your ass that I am closely watching the lists of Republican donors and prominent political figures. If the disappearances begin, you will know that its time to disappear before you hear the knock at your own door.

I have a list of prominent conservative figures- political, journalism, and donors. When they begin disappearing, it means that we are in real trouble. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is one of them. He was one of the prominent figures on my list.

I will be closely monitoring the rest of that list. If this becomes a pattern, it may very well mean that this blog will have to be shut down.

Unless there are further developments, this will be the only post today…

By Divemedic, ago

Without Comment

Judges may have views on which policy approach is better or fairer. But judges are not appointed to make those policy calls. We merely ensure that the Executive Branch acts within the confines of the Constitution and federal statutes.

Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanaugh

Now compare that to Sotomayor:

We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.

By Divemedic, ago

Aloha Snackbar

More people from the religion of peace have murdered 6 people who were standing at a bus stop. They were stopped from doing even more damage by a student who got his a gun license about a year ago, and who shot the terrorists.

I used to carry my J frame for quick runs to the store. Not anymore. I have been only taking my 9mm Shield plus, or lately my M&P 10mm. That 10mm holds 16 .45ACP sized bullets and launches them at 9mm velocity. It’s the best of both worlds, with the only downsides being that it’s a bit tougher to conceal, and it has stiff recoil. My split times are about 10 percent slower and I have been wearing more Hawaiian shirts.

I like the ones from Tommy Bahama. They look good and the patterns both hide the gun well and bring the look of Aloha.

By Divemedic, ago

Bloat

This is a Sunday, and I am sleeping in. So I thought I would give you a repost of something that I said more than ten years ago.

Ignorance of the law, the judges and cops are fond of saying, is no excuse. In 1925, this is what a complete copy of all Federal laws looked like:

That one volume represents all of the laws that were passed by Congress in the first 150 years of this country’s existence. That Federal Law library has now expanded immensely.

What was one volume in 1925 expanded to become 22 volumes just 90 years later. That isn’t all, though. There is also the United States Code:

The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves, which include things like rape, murder, or theft. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves, such as owning a machine gun made after 1986, when owning one made in 1985 is perfectly legal.

In 1982, the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question.

So you see, even the Justice Department of the US government is not sure of how many laws there are, yet each and every one of us is responsible for knowing every one of them, along with the court cases that modify and define them, upon penalty of prison.

That isn’t all. The laws passed by Congress are just the beginning. There are also several dozen Federal bureaus that have had the power to write laws since 1940. The laws that they write are called regulations, and they are found in the Code of Federal Regulations:

In 2013, the Code of Federal Regulations numbered over 175,000 pages. Only a fraction of those pages involved regulations based on something spelled out in legislation. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.

Then there are all of the court cases that decide what these laws all mean and how they will be applied. Here is a picture of the SCOTUS cases from 1790 to 1956:

Add in all of the cases from your Federal District and Circuit, plus all state and local courts, and you have quite a bit of reading to do.

The result of all of this is that each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over 750,000 pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12 and you read 50 pages per day, by age 53, you would finally have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws, and 28 years of reading to your quest. You would spend 75 years of your life trying to understand the laws that you must obey.

Remember, though: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you are spraying insect killer on some ants, and the can label says spray from 6 inches away, but you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal. If you are buying a gun, and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.

Why is this happening? Ayn  Rand gives us an insight into this:

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Truer words were never spoken.

By Divemedic, ago

No One Knows the Cost

We talked about the high cost of healthcare. When people talk about how the US healthcare system is “broken” they are mostly complaining about cost. Getting costs down is tricky, and it’s a problem that was caused by government interference.

The Medicare Physician Fee Schedule is a 1,348-page document, and the final rule for hospital inpatient payment systems is 773 pages long. For some services, it’s impossible to know how many pages of regulations and price controls there are. For example, The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) does not condense the Medicare payment rules for ambulances into a single, definitive document. The regulations for ambulance charges are spread across multiple manuals and chapters, all of which are constantly being updated and revised. A definitive page count for the rules does not exist, because no one knows for sure what all of the rules are.

All of this adds to the cost, as medical providers have to hire entire departments just to take a guess at what they can and should charge you, and even then, they often get it wrong, because the rules are contradictory.

Every time the government steps in to fix it, they add pages and chapters to the manual, but instead of fixing things, they make it more complex with carve-outs, backdoor deals that kickback money to big donors, and the need for an even larger hospital billing department.

I do want to respond to one comment, where someone said that reading a CT scan shouldn’t cost $1500 because it only takes an experienced radiologist 30 minutes or so to do it. Remember that you aren’t just paying for the radiologist. You are also paying for his malpractice insurance, the costs of compliance with government electronic charting and recordkeeping, the costs of his staff to include the billing department, and other associated administrative overhead. That radiologist is only getting a small fraction of that money, in many cases, less than a fifth of it.

  • Malpractice insurance for a radiologist is around $25,000 per year
  • Costs for electronic health records: for a smaller practice, you are looking at around $400,000 for initial costs, plus another $50,000 per year. In the case of radiologists, it will be even more to integrate with the output of proprietary CT machines.
  • Plus staff and administrative costs
  • So a radiologist is paying $200k or so a year just to read those CT scans. If he isn’t charging that kind of money, he might as well go be a plumber.

Keep in mind that an hour’s work from a plumber costs about the same as that radiologist is going to cost you.

By Divemedic, ago