Divemedic

The Question that Unravels Us

This morning, I saw a stary about how the Democrat party in Florida is being torn apart. The problem is this- there are two factions in the Democrat party. On the one side, you have the hardcore left. They want full on communism, they want the woke agenda- including trannies chasing after kids while wagging their dicks at them. On the other side of the party, you have the party base- they are the people who want the government to care for them without being too overbearing. They want to raise their kids. The base is largely patriotic, and even if me and my readers don’t agree with them, we really aren’t that different from one another.

The two sides don’t see the same things when they look at America, and it’s tearing the party to pieces. The hardcore left is leaving Florida because the mainstream Democratic party isn’t far enough to the left. This group is headed to Washington, California, Massachusetts, the lefty bastions.

The same thing is happening to the Republicans. The establishment Republicans, represented by the likes of McCain, Romney, and other Socialist Republicans are staying put in the lefty bastions. The more rightward leaning of the party is headed to places like Texas and Florida.

This perfectly explains what is happening to our voting patterns.

The left often says that, “If the founding fathers could have seen all of today’s crime, they never would have ratified the Second Amendment.” I hear that all of the time from the antigun side, and I agree with them.

The entire reason that the Second Amendment, or the rest of the Bill of Rights, exists is that some states refused to sign the Constitution. The early opponents of the Constitution, the “Antifederalists,” demanded that the Constitution contain a Bill of Rights that explicitly guaranteed that individual rights were protected and liberty remained with the people. The pro-Constitution “Federalists” like James Madison and George Washington viewed such a Bill of Rights as unnecessary and feared that any rights neglected might permanently deprive people of those rights.

They were both right.

Among the opponents was George Mason, a delegate from Virginia. George Mason countered that a national, consolidated government would overburden Virginians with direct taxes in addition to state taxes, and that government of an extensive territory must necessarily destroy liberty. He nailed that one.

So today, we see that the nation is polarized because the national government is no longer representative of the people that it is attempting to govern. We see it in the patterns that have emerged since 2020, the ones I pointed out, above.

This was caused by the one thing that Madison, Mason, Washington, and all of the others simply overlooked. It’s the issue that was the underlying cause of the Civil War, and one that the war didn’t really settle: Can a state, once it has been admitted to the Union, withdraw? There is no process outlined in our founding documents that states no, yet there is no process that outlines how it would be accomplished, either.

It has long been my opinion that, had the Virginia delegates known at the time that joining the Union was irrevocable, they would never have done so, and the Bill of Rights would never have existed. Instead, we are faced with the question once again, as it was never really resolved by the last Civil War.

As this nation becomes more polarized, we will once again debate the question. It will be far bloodier than the last time, unless we can agree that maybe it is time that we go our separate ways.

By Divemedic, ago

Answer to Tax Question

After being passed from one tax attorney to the other, I finally decided to talk to a CPA that I was using a few years ago. Here is what she said:

You are on the right track with wanting to preserve the appreciation without incurring tax upon eventual sale. I encourage you to get the appraisal as planned, but you do not have to go to the effort and cost of selling the home to an S corp to retain the tax exclusion. Upon conversion to a rental property, the fair market value becomes the cost basis for the rental. Later upon sale of the rental property gain will be calculated as follows: Sale Proceeds LESS Closing Costs LESS Adjusted Cost (Appraised Value when converted to rental LESS annual depreciation expensed)

So there is my answer. She may be wrong, but if the IRS disagrees, the use of a professional insulates me from any claims of tax evasion. That’s why I pay a CPA $175 an hour to do my taxes.

So it looks like we will do a quitclaim to an LLC. That makes things easier than dealing with an S corp.

By Divemedic, ago

From an Away Game

Liberal Moron: The person that owns the gun is responsible for making sure anyone that touches, or buys it, is not a criminal, and can be trusted with it, no excuses. If you supply to criminals, you get a really long time locked up getting to know lots of criminals.

I’m not absolutely for banning guns; yet am very much for making sure guns are only allowed in the hands of fit and proper people that can demonstrate they can be trusted with them. If we can’t have this then sure ban guns, though I have no hope that would ever happen

ME: If a person can’t be trusted to own a gun, they can’t be trusted to own baseball bats, knives, or gasoline and matches. If a person is so large a threat to the public that they can’t own tools that can be used to kill, then they should be locked up like animals.

LM: All those other things exist for purposes other than killing, a gun does not have any other purpose. It is an extra step for someone to take what is for one everyday purpose and turn it to another, that extra step can be enough to make many untrustworthy person to pause and not do this. (I consider knives that are purpose made to be used as weapons to be killing weapons.)

Yet as guns have only one purpose and are owned and carried with the intent of that purpose, then there is already an established decision to use it to kill with. For those that are untrustworthy the pausing and considering has already been done and has been set aside, the decision to kill has already been made, they only thing needed is what or who, to kill and when to kill.

Trustworthy people have not made up their mind about this, that is the first reason why they are trustworthy.

ME: Funny. I have owned multiple guns for decades and I have never used them to kill anyone. I have used them to target shoot, for recreation, and in competition. For the same reason that I can be trusted to own bats, knives, and gasoline, I can be trusted to own firearms.

Still, how about this-
Every person who has not been convicted of anything that would prohibit firearm ownership has an emblem placed on his state ID. drivers license. Say, a picture of a thumbs up in the corner. That way, anyone who wants to sell them a gun can simply look at their license. Now you know they are good to go.

By Divemedic, ago

Update with Me

I am grateful to all who assisted with my grandson, from those who offered prayers and positive thoughts to those who were personally involved. All of your efforts are appreciated. I want to thank everyone from those who offered prayers, to those who helped in his care.

The hospital and its staff were over the top with their support of my family during the entire ordeal. It was enough to make me want to be part of an organization like that. That’s why I decided to sign a two year employment contract with the hospital chain that cared for my grandson. The money is great, the sign on bonus was a good one in the 5 figure range, and the working conditions are super. My start date is mid June. As an additional plus, I told them I was referred by the daughter’s boyfriend, so he gets a rather large referral bonus.

In other related news, we go to the builder this month to pick our options like flooring, fixtures, etc. We have paid the earnest money and are now waiting for loan approval. I know interest rates are up, but we are still 8 to 9 months from closing, and I am hoping they will stabilize a bit before we are locked in to anything.

Now there will be so much to do. We have to pack up ten years worth of clutter. Arrange for movers. Accountants, title transfers, movers, and all of the things associated with a move and with multiple real estate transactions.

By Divemedic, ago

Hahaha

It probably isn’t constitutional and most likely won’t pass, but Republicans in the Florida Senate have proposed a bill that would outlaw any political party that actively had a platform supporting slavery. The only party in Florida that supported slavery is the Democrat party.

It’s obvious that this is nothing more than a ploy to make sure people know that the Democratic party is the party of slavery and the KKK. It’s also pretty damned funny.

By Divemedic, ago

Strange

Shooting at the range with one of my 80% homemade ARs. This one is a gorgeous rifle. Anyhow, this rando comes over and asks to see it. Not unusual, so I show it off. Then he asks me to sell it to him.

Uh, it’s a homemade rifle with no serial number. Not for sale.

He keeps trying to pressure me. I finally had to get firm with him.

My paranoid side says “Fed” or possibly “informant.”

By Divemedic, ago

The Physics of Manslaughter

Today’s post comes from the UK, and I try not to talk about legal issues in other countries because I just don’t understand the laws in other nations, and don’t want to stick my nose in them. The difference here is that the case involves some technical issues of SCUBA diving and of dive medicine, areas where I feel like I have some level of mastery. This is a technical post, so for those of you who are not interested in physiology and physics of SCUBA, this may or may not be interesting.

A diving instructor in the UK was teaching an experienced recreational diver a course on deep diving. The dive that they did was to 115 feet.

On this dive, they were diving at around 4.5 atmospheres, and this requires some level of care. I don’t see in this account where the instructor messed up, with the exception that I wouldn’t have had a student doing a check dive like this with an 80 cuFt cylinder (which is what the Europeans call 12 liter).

In this case, however, the government brought in a diver from the UK Navy as their expert witness. He testified that the instructor was wrong in three ways- the dive violated the rule of thirds, they were down longer than the dive tables dictated for that depth, and he held his struggling student underwater when the student was attempting to get to the surface, causing his death by drowning.

Let’s start by addressing each of these in turn. The rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is a rule that says you use one third of your air supply to get into the dive, one third coming out, and hold one third in reserve. This rule is generally only used when you are “diving in the overhead,” meaning that there is either a physical or physiological barrier that would prevent you from surfacing. A physical barrier would be diving in a cave, a shipwreck, or diving so deep for so long that you cannot surface because you have a decompression obligation to work through before you can surface. Neither of those was the case here. In that case, the rule is to ensure that you surface with at least 500 psi of gas left in your tank.

The second argument, that the dive tables’ “no decompression” limits for that depth had been exceeded is ridiculous. When you are a new open water diver, you are taught to use tables, but no one, and I mean no one, follows them. The invention of dive computers has rendered them obsolete. The reason for this is that the dive tables assume that you descend at the maximum safe rate from the surface to the maximum depth, then ascend at the maximum safe rate to the safety stop. This is called a “square profile” and no one dives like this in real life. A dive computer monitors your depth every 30 seconds or so, and gives you “credit” for time spent at shallower depths. This has the effect of more than doubling your permissible dive time. Everyone today “dives their computer.”

A great example of this is the standard dive on Florida’s coral reefs. Off the coast of West Palm Beach, there are several reef lines. The most interesting one from a SCUBA perspective is about a mile or so offshore, in 60-100 feet of water. If you were to dive the top of that reef, the tables say that you can spend a maximum of 40 minutes at 70 feet of depth before exceeding the no decompression limit. Most divers will spend a minute or two at that 70 feet, maybe 5 or 10 minutes at 65 feet, then more time at 55 or 60 feet, etc. The result is that divers with computers might well spend 55 to 65 minutes and still not exceed decompression limits. The Commander would have known this, himself being a certified PADI divemaster.

Instead, he contends that the “out of air” situation was so dire that the diver should have been permitted to make an unrestricted surfacing, despite the fact that the student was breathing on the instructor’s plentiful air source. Ridiculous.

I actually did this exact dive here in the states when I got my own extended diving certification some years ago. It is standard practice at the end of any dive that is deeper than 40 feet to stop at a depth between 15 and 20 feet for three minutes. This is called a “safety stop” and is intended to give any gases that have been absorbed in the blood time to diffuse out of the blood and prevent hyperbaric injuries. It’s recommended by each of the three big certification agencies. (NAUI, PADI, and SSI)

Another protocol that some divers follow is to stop for one minute at half of your current depth. So if you had been at 120 feet, a one minute stop at 60 feet is followed by a one minute stop at 30 feet, followed by a one minute stop at 15 feet. No matter how you do it, coming up as slowly as you can is how you avoid hyperbaric injury.

In fact, three of the dive accidents that resulted in injury, and the only diving fatality I have ever been present for was related to a diver ascending too quickly. The physics and physiology of breathing pressurized gases is technically demanding, especially so when diving to depths below 99 feet. Safety stops are VERY important, especially when you are diving at pressures higher than 4 atmospheres of pressure (99 feet).

I myself have had four diving emergencies that required either emergency surfacing or my buddy’s intervention. Three of them were due to equipment failure, and one because I was a moron. One of them required sharing air. We still had time to do our safety stop.

Even so, it’s obvious that the prosecution wanted to railroad this guy. The student in question had a history of high blood pressure, and the autopsy showed that he had alcohol and cocaine in his system. None of this was known to the instructor at the time of the dive.

In this case, the signs of immersive pulmonary edema were there. For those of you who may dive, or who may work in the medical field, pay attention. Immersive pulmonary edema is very similar to the flash pulmonary edema seen with heart failure patients who are suddenly taken off of CPAP. It’s complicated by the changes in pressure caused by depth changes messing with the Renin-Angiotensin-Aldosterone System (RAAS), which regulates blood pressure. Also adding to the complications is the creation of nitric oxide that occurs with sudden pressure changes in SCUBA diving. In patients with hypertension, heart problems, or kidney problems, this combination can be life threatening.

The signs were there: The student was easily winded with mild exertion, he couldn’t perform underwater navigation while at depth (indicating possible mental status changes from hypoxia), and was complaining that he wasn’t getting any air, even though everything was working perfectly ( a sign of shortness of breath). If he was taking an ACE inhibitor for his high blood pressure, this could even make this condition worse.

So how do you treat this? While diving, adopt the rules that I have always followed:

  • Any diver on any given dive can terminate the dive for any reason. This is done by giving any diver in your group a “thumbs up” sign, and is called “thumbing a dive.”
  • Any diver having apparent confusion, disorientation, or an equipment problem should cause the thumbing of the dive.
  • Any diver having shortness of breath should be placed on oxygen as soon as they are on the surface.
  • On the way down, take a few seconds at 65 feet or so to get organized. Look each other in the eye and make sure everyone gives you the “OK” sign.
  • At any dive below 60 feet, make sure that you do your safety stops.
  • Follow other safe practices like ascent rate, NDL limits, and make sure that everyone is diving within the limits of their training and experience.

My Qualifications

My Internet handle has been Divemedic for more than two decades for good reason. I am a certified Master diver, deep diver, mixed gas diver, public safety diver, and Rescue diver. I am certified by all three of the big US recreational SCUBA training agencies at one level or another: NAUI, PADI, and SSI. I have been SCUBA diving for about 30 years. I used to be on a professional dive rescue team. I have been employed at various times as a rescue and salvage diver and had more than 2,000 dives in my logbook, representing more than 900 hours underwater before I stopped bothering to log them, 16 years ago. Enough dives that I have literally worn out a few sets of equipment. I have been present for half a dozen dive casualties, one a fatality. So I understand many of the issues. With that being said, let’s get into the post.

By Divemedic, ago

Annual Pistol Competition

The folks over at GunFreeZone post about cops who don’t take well when losing IDPA matches. Let me add my own stories to that.

About 20 years ago, I was competing in IDPA matches. I went on a vacation to Mexico, and it just happened that an employee of the Public Works Department and the head of the police Department’s SWAT team in the city where I was employed as a firefighter were on the same trip. Some smack talking ensued, and the cops decided to set up a pistol competition. The police, fire, and public works departments would all compete, and any revenue would go to charity. It was billed as the First Annual City Pistol Competition.

The cops really screwed the pooch when they didn’t do their homework. The deputy fire chief was a Master level IDPA shooter and placed in a couple of state level matches, and the director of Public Works was the President of the Florida Cowboy Pistol Shooter’s Association. I was a decent shooter as a Sharpshooter that had one a couple of local matches, and I barely made the team for the FD. There were some really good shooters on the Public Works and Fire Department teams. I felt outclassed.

The results of the match were embarrassing for the cops. Public works walked away with it, the fire department came in second, and the cops were a distant last.

The rules were modified by the cops to heavily favor their elite SWAT skills. For example, the cops didn’t have to conceal, but everyone else did. A reflection of Florida law, they claimed. Also, there was no ten round magazine restriction. One stage in particular was tough because it required multiple reloads, even with the larger magazines.

There was one stage that was setup to look like the inside of a church with about 40 IDPA targets inside. I think 8 were painted blue, 8 painted red, and the remainder not painted at all. At the beginning of the stage as you entered the church, the RSO would hold up a paper plate that was either red or blue. The color of the plate was the one you weren’t supposed to shoot. It was a mess of a stage, because there were so many non-threats in there. It was way easy to plug a hole in one by accident.

When I did that stage, I shot it clean. As the RSO held up a red plate, I yelled out “RED IS MY FRIEND” over and over again, so I wouldn’t screw it up. I managed to engage every blue target while missing every red and unpainted one. As I remember, I got a decent score. Not the best, but not bad.

The SWAT team’s sniper (we will call him Darryl) was next. As he entered, the RSO held up a blue plate. That dumb sonofabitch went in there and drilled every single blue target. Twice. It took them forever to calculate all of the penalties for engaging all of those non-threats, and probably involved some calculus. I even saw one of the cops take off his shoes so he could count higher. Darryl wound up finishing dead last in the entire match. Since we were friends, I gave him no mercy at all for months about that one. Holy hell, it was hilarious.

Darryl still doesn’t find it funny. I do. It turned out that the First Annual City Pistol Competition was also the Last.

By Divemedic, ago