Divemedic

More Sellouts

The Republican party is in the middle of a giant sellout. First it was one. Now there is a rush to be part of the group that fellates the Democrat party. Maybe if you suck up to the left, they will keep you around.

We KNOW the election was rigged. The left knows it too. Time magazine even bragged about it while daring America do do anything about it.

What is worrying to me is that politicians are good at one thing: knowing how to suck up to power so they can retain the power they have, and perhaps even gain more. The right rushing to sell out their voters KNOWING that the Biden administration is as unpopular as their 33% approval ratings show is a pretty good indication that the Republican party knows where the power is, and it is no longer located at the ballot box.

The list of those who are selling out is getting longer: Mitch McConnell, Kevin Cramer, John Thune, and a few others. They are abandoning their base to follow those who they believe will allow them to remain in office. A president with a 33 percent approval rating normally doesn’t have much clout on Capitol Hill. This one does, because his party owns the ballot box, and they all know it.

So many people claim that “we can just vote them all out at the next election.” As if there is going to be a next election.

By Divemedic, ago

SCOTUS Incenses Left

This morning’s article in Slate illustrates just how pissed off the left is over the SCOTUS decision to strike down Biden’s vaccine mandate. Here is why they are pissed:

COVID is undoubtedly a “grave danger” and a “new hazard” to workers, this broad language is not enough, because it does not “plainly authorize” the mandate. Why not? 

A grave danger? For people under 60 years old, there is less than a 0.1% fatality rate. It certainly isn’t a “new hazard.” COVID first came about in February 2020, but the vaccine mandate wasn’t enacted until November 2021, nearly two years later.

Congress is the country’s legislative body. Had congress wanted there to be a vaccine mandate, they would have passed one by now. In fact, the majority of the Senate voted AGAINST mandating a vaccine. When the legislature specifically rejects passing a law, it isn’t the prerogative of the executive to simply ignore the will of that legislature and issue edicts. That isn’t how the “democracy” that Biden claims to be defending works.

The Biden administration even admitted that his edict was a “workaround” of the will of congress.

Don’t even get me started on the mental gymnastics that SCOTUS will go through to approve a leftist wishlist. Remember the Obamacare fine that wasn’t a fine? That partisan moron Sotomayor denied that the vaccine mandate was actually a mandate, because workers had the option of weekly testing instead.

By Divemedic, ago

COMSEC

J6 participants are being charged with crimes, and supposedly encrypted communications are being used as evidence against them.

Either participants in the conversation are informants, or the Fed’s are reading encrypted mail.

  • Assume that all communications methods are compromised. Don’t discuss sensitive issues in the clear, even on an encrypted network. Use code words and phrases.
  • Any code can be broken, given enough money and computer power.
  • The easiest way to break a code is to break someone with the decryption key. Everyone has a weakness and this weakness WILL be used to break them.
  • In any organization, the chances of an informant increase exponentially with the size of that organization. Keep things small, close knit, and organized in cells of no more than 8 people. That way, potential informants only compromise the members of their cell.

Big brother is watching. For now, those who fail to learn go to jail. Soon, slow learners will be killed by government agents.

By Divemedic, ago

Free Markets?

Twitter restricts a person’s ability to post something that the company disagrees with, so Twitter censors it. A company sells a product that Amazon web hosting doesn’t like, so the company finds out that its webhosting has been shut down. Many companies take punitive actions against their customers because they CAN. This can be done as a form of political or social engineering, or it can be done as a form of manipulating the marketplace to maximize profitability. No matter why it is done, one thing that you always hear is “If you don’t like it, you can start your own company. That’s capitalism.”

No it isn’t. Let me explain why. What a person means when they say “that’s capitalism” is actually referring to a free market where private parties own the means of production and commerce, and market forces dictate what happens in the marketplace. That isn’t what we have here.

Let me use my recent experience with my LGS as an example. Let’s say that I decide that I am so unhappy with how they do business that I want to open my own gun store with a shooting range. What would it take to make that happen?

  • I need to get a license from the Federal Government to sell firearms
  • I need to get a permit from the state to collect sales tax
  • I need to get zoning approval
  • I need to get building permits
  • In order to have an indoor range, I need special ventilation in order to meet indoor air quality regulations
  • I need a business license.

In all, I need permission from more than 10 Federal, state, and local government entities in order to run my business. On top of that, I have banks, credit card processors, shipping companies, and other suppliers of services to deal with. All it takes is for your competitor (that existing LGS) to have friends at one of those entities, and your quest to open your own gun range just got exponentially harder and more expensive.

That isn’t a free market. This is why someone can’t simply “Start their own YouTube” or go out and build whatever business they want. I own three different businesses. The regulatory hoops are incredible, and don’t just come from government. You can’t be a lawyer without being a member of the bar association, for instance. (The bar isn’t a government agency, but they decide who can be a lawyer, and by extension, a judge.)

An example: One business that I own is a travel agency. I have memberships in industry organizations like CLIA, ATA, and IATA. Many hotels, cruise lines, resorts, and other entities that I do business with won’t talk to you unless you are a member of one or more of these organizations at a cost of thousands of dollars per year. If you don’t kiss their rings, you won’t have a travel business. They decide who sells travel and who doesn’t. That isn’t free market.

Amazon is another example. Amazon is the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to Internet commerce. As many conservative businesses are discovering, it is difficult to have a significant Internet presence if Amazon is opposed to it. That is one reason why I started this blog on its own server, a server that is located outside of the country. It’s why I share that server with other blogs. For being an entity that makes no money, it’s expensive, but it is the only way to be free to say what we want.

One thing I have learned from running a business- this country isn’t even close to having a free market.

On a side note- donations are always appreciated to keep the lights on here. I pay out of pocket to keep this place open, and any help is appreciated. I have a Patreon, the link is below.

By Divemedic, ago

Discounting the Enemy

Many of us on the right are discounting the enemy, creating memes, and generally chest thumping. The claim is, “just you wait until we actually get involved in the fight. Those leftys won’t last a week.” The claims are usually accompanied by pictures like these, intended to be proof that the insurgents are not manly enough:

I think that we are grossly underestimating their preparedness, training, and subsequently, the threat that they pose. They have training manuals, they are organized, and are being backed by our own government. They are winning by the only metric that matters: they are out doing it, while the right is sitting around talking about it on the Internet.

For all intents and purposes, the communist insurgents own the entire I-5 corridor from the Canadian border down to Eugene, Oregon. They own a virtual lock on I-94 from St Cloud east to Milwaukee. They are in control of cities in California, some of the DC suburbs, as well as areas around the country.

There is talk of mandatory, forced vaccinations in Washington state.

The voting rights act will probably be passed in the next few weeks. Our nation is about to be taken over, permanently. Stop thinking that they aren’t manly enough, and begin taking a good, hard look at what they are accomplishing. I have been warning of this for nearly two years, and have had many of those on the right laugh at me. They haven’t been laughing as much since the election. It’s long past time for people to wake up and realize that we are losing.

By Divemedic, ago