Divemedic

Useless Men

I read this over at Gunfreezone, and I am reminded of some things that happened around my own house.

A few years ago, when my wife still had a Nissan Altima, I was out on the driveway replacing its sway bar, which had snapped while she was driving it. The neighbor lady was at the end of the driveway while out walking the dog and said, “I always see you out here, fixing one thing or another. I wish my husband was handy. He doesn’t know how to fix anything.”

The husband of my tenants can’t fix a thing. He calls me over to do everything, even stuff that isn’t part of my responsibilities as landlord. He called me once because the sink in the kids’ bathroom wasn’t working. It turns out that one of the kids had turned off the water at the valve below the sink.

My electric recliner quit working when one of my grandkids was sitting in it. Investigation found that one of the wires had been cut in half by the mechanical workings of the chair. I soldered it back together and sealed it with electrical shrink wrap, good as new. One of my grandkids, who I let help me by holding the flashlight and handing me the tools, said: “That was cool. My dad doesn’t know how to fix stuff like that.”

It’s important to teach kids, especially young men, how to fix things. Don’t raise useless, soy sipping, video game obsessed, beta males. Don’t raise girls who are dependent on men for everything. The simple act of handing you tools and holding the flashlight when they are young teaches them a lot.

Raising children is more than just sitting them in front of a video screen. Be a parent, a dad, a mom. Actually PARENT your children.

By Divemedic, ago

Thousands of Rounds?

ATF should be called Agents That Fib. They are on the record as claiming someone with a Glock switch is capable of firing ‘thousands of rounds per minute’ from a Glock handgun. Anyone with gun knowledge knows that they are talking about cyclic rate when they say that a gun is firing 1,200 rounds per minute. That would require a weapon to have an unlimited supply of ammunition. It’s an attempt at dishonest manipulation of soccer moms.

“It turns a semi-automatic firearm into, essentially, a machine gun,” explained [ATF Agent] Estevan. “So, instead of one round being discharged from a firearm with the single pull of the trigger, when the switch is installed onto a firearm, you’re looking at 1,200 rounds with the single pull of the trigger within a minute.”

If you have to lie in order to make your point, perhaps your point isn’t worth making.

By Divemedic, ago

Pushing Back

The communists in this country have been reeducating our children into their dogma for decades. Florida’s Governor is out to change that. The NAACP is furious that he isn’t letting the College Board teach a course in African American studies that covers such weighty topics as Black Queer studies and Reparations. They are demanding that the College Board not allow any AP courses to be taught in the state until DeSantis caves. I don’t think that they realize just how many students in Florida there are, and how much money is at stake. Enough that the College Board is rewriting the course to remove some of the objectionable material.

Who cares what the NAACP thinks? They are a communist front, disguised as a racial movement. They might as well call it Negroes About Advocating Communist Propaganda.

The left also forgets that state colleges receiving funding from the taxpayers of Florida are run by trustees who are appointed by the Governor. The trustees of the most liberal state college in Florida, so liberal that it doesn’t give grades or even require attendance, have been replaced by ultra conservatives.

Times, they are a changin’, at least in Florida, and the left can’t stand it. DeSantis is playing the same game that the left has been playing for years.

By Divemedic, ago

Accommodations, Certifications, and Standards

A diploma, whether it is for high school, medical school, or barber college, is a certification from the school that issued it. That diploma states that the school is certifying that the person thereupon named has met the standards for that diploma. Or have they?

Nowadays, that isn’t what a diploma means. It was decided years ago, with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that it was unfair and discriminatory to treat students with intellectual disabilities (what used to be referred to as retarded) the same as other students. So this law was passed to make things more equitable. (Not equal, which is the same standard, but equitable, meaning that they have the same outcome.)

In order to make students with disabilities more likely to have the same outcome, they are granted accommodations. These accommodations can vary. It can mean that they are granted extra time, or are allowed to test in a private room with no one watching them, or that they are even give multiple choice tests with one or more of the wrong choices eliminated. Furthermore, the law goes on to say that there can be no mention of the accommodations on the student’s transcript, diploma, or other certifications. Don’t want them having the stigma of people thinking they had it easier than other students, you see.

As a result, not every student is being evaluated by the same standard. This means that a diploma is no longer a certification, as there is no guarantee that two students who have received that diploma were measured against the same yardstick. Remember that next time you are having your hair cut or being treated by a healthcare professional.

There was a student in my nursing class who received the accommodation of testing in a private room, and was also allowed to have her cell phone in the room with her. She graduated with a 94% test average, the highest in the class. I wonder why. No one on staff could challenge her on it, or she would scream about IDEA and racial discrimination.

The same happened when I was a teacher. All a student needed was a letter from a physician, saying that a student had a learning disability, and the student got all kinds of accommodations. There were some families who had 4 or 5 kids, all with extensive accommodations. It’s the newest way to get your kid that high GPA they’ve always wanted.

It doesn’t just extend to the classroom. Even licensing exams are given with accommodations. The implications are obvious. Your doctor or nurse might be wholly unable to provide you with competent care, but at least we didn’t hurt their feelings by making them seem inadequate.

This also makes licensure and the certification that goes with it wholly worthless.

By Divemedic, ago

If the Test Were Valid…

A group of 25 people were caught forging transcripts from shuttered south Florida nursing schools. They were using the forged transcripts in a scheme to show eligibility to sit for nursing licensing exams.

I’m torn on this. If the exam were a valid measure of the knowledge and skills of the nursing profession, then why does it matter whether or not you went to a nursing school? Alternatively, if passing grades in the school were a reliable indicator of proficiency, then why have a licensing exam?

This is simply a continuation of our licensing discussion. The transcript is a certification- the school is certifying that you are proficient. With that being the case, why require an exam? Are you saying that the school’s certification isn’t reliable? Or is it the exam that isn’t reliable?

Or is this simply a money making scheme that allows colleges, testing centers, and the state to rake in thousands of dollars from each nursing candidate?

There are nursing schools that charge upwards of $50,000 for an associate’s in nursing. Many nursing programs have completion rates that are below 50 percent. That is, less than half of the nursing students who begin the program actually complete it. On top of that, less than 60 percent of those who complete nursing programs in south Florida actually pass their certification exams. That means less than a third of students who begin nursing education in south Florida wind up becoming nurses.

My own nursing school had a 45 percent completion rate and a 90 percent exam pass rate. That works out to about 40 percent, and doesn’t include those students who began the prerequisites but were never admitted to the school.

That’s why there is such a nursing shortage. For every 100 students who begin the nursing pipeline, only about 25 of them actually become nurses.

By Divemedic, ago

Changes are Coming

My wife’s job is moving. She will be working about 30 minutes farther away from the house than she is now. She wants to move closer to her new work location. I have been working on changing hospitals. If I want to do that, it would be easier if we move. If we move about 30 minutes south of where we are now, it would put us closer to my wife’s work and would make it easier for me to find a new hospital.

So we have been looking at houses. We had a few must haves, and some wants.

  • We want a one story house.
  • We need at least three bedrooms and three baths. This is so we have room to care for an aging parent if it comes to that, plus room for a guest.
  • I would like natural gas service
  • We would like a pool.
  • We need more storage space. Either a bonus room, a large garage, or room to build a storage structure on the property.

So we began looking.

The first community we looked at wanted $400k for a 2000 square foot house. Hidden costs included a $45,000 bond. A bond is an invention here in Florida that requires each owner of a residential property to pay for roads, fire stations, and other infrastructure costs that are not part of the property. In other words, it is a cost of building a neighborhood that is passed on from the builder to the buyers of the homes. This raised the cost of the house to $455k, or about $225 a square foot.

The second and third builders did not have houses and floor plans that we liked. We went to a late lunch out in the country. While we were there, I happened to see a nearby community that looked interesting, so we headed out there. They had 2950 square foot home plan that they think we can get built with custom options for $525k, and no bond. That brings the cost to $178 a square foot. Admittedly, it’s at the upper limit of what we wanted to spend, but it’s a really nice house with a large kitchen. The best part is that it is within a 30 minute drive of 5 different hospitals, which gives me a lot of flexibility in changing hospitals. It’s one of those small Florida towns that only have a population of about 2,000 people, but still have stuff nearby.

The only real catch is the current lead time for construction is 12 months, meaning that we will be in late 2023 or early 2024 before we can move. We are looking at all of the numbers and facts, but we will likely be paying earnest money within a week or two. That means when the school year starts next fall, my wife will have to commute a bit. It also means that I can start looking for new work, expecting to start somewhere in July or August. There is a hospital that is only 15 minutes from the house we are looking at that is a good place to work and is offering a $10,000 bonus to work there. By all reports, the pay is good and I hear lots of good things about them. There are other hospitals that offer larger bonuses, but there is a reason for that.

So change is coming. It will be easier working where I am, knowing that my days there are numbered.

By Divemedic, ago

The Ballot Box is Gone

The battle for the nation’s electorate is over, and the statists have won. How did they do it? By realizing that it isn’t VOTERS that are required to win elections, nor is it VOTES. No, what is required to win elections is BALLOTS. The Republicans still can’t grasp this, and are spending all of their time and efforts in trying to make sure that one person gets one vote.

That’s so old fashioned and last decade.

With their hold on the nation’s governor’s offices firmly established, having added control of the state legislatures in both Michigan and Minnesota, Democrats are going to keep changing election rules nationwide. Their wish list of proposals for 2023 includes expanding automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote, lowering the voting age to 16, granting the franchise to felons, and criminalizing anything that the left disagrees with as “disinformation.” Anyone who opposes these policies will be branded as a racist.

Look at what is happening here- by focusing on the harvesting of ballots instead of votes, the Democrats can get elected, even if and when their policies are unpopular. Automatic voter registration means that everyone is registered to vote, no questions asked. Couple that with automatic mail in balloting where each voter gets mailed a ballot, and you have millions of ballots going out to people who aren’t even aware that they are registered to vote. Why, there are ballots going out to registered voters who aren’t real, living people. Those ballots are being mailed to addresses that don’t even exist.

During the 2020 election, Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson sent out automatic voter registration forms to all eligible Michigan residents. As a result, 114,000 people were added to Michigan’s voter rolls, with many being fake registrations. By padding state voter rolls with new unlikely voters, Democrats can harvest those ballots and put their candidates over the top. There are 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations are solely dedicated to this, and we know this because of the FTX scandal.

Don’t expect that to change in 2024. Republicans are playing a losing game akin to playing Monopoly against someone who is the banker and is willing to give themselves interest free loans from the bank. The ballot box is gone. There are laws coming that intend on destroying the soap box. There aren’t all that many boxes left.

By Divemedic, ago