Divemedic

War Warning

There is a high probability that Russia will conduct open combat operations against Ukraine within the next 30 days, and possibly much sooner. The likelihood that the United States will be involved in hostilities is slim, but

If that occurs, widespread cyber attacks may take place against NATO countries to disrupt C3 networks. This will likely involve internet and telecommunications networks worldwide, as well as potential power grid attacks in Europe.

The American Redoubt Radio Operators Network is reporting:

In Donetsk region, the SMM recorded 1,463 ceasefire violations, including 142 explosions. In the previous reporting period, it recorded 815 ceasefire violations in the region.

In Luhansk region, the Mission recorded 161 ceasefire violations, including 97 explosions. In the previous reporting period, it recorded 32 ceasefire violations in the region.

Members of the armed formations denied the SMM passage near Zolote and Molodizhne, Luhansk region, and delayed its passage for more than two hours near Olenivka, Donetsk region.*

The Mission continued monitoring the disengagement areas near Stanytsia Luhanska, Zolote and Petrivske.

The SMM facilitated and monitored the operation of and repairs to critical civilian infrastructure.

The Mission continued following up on the situation of civilians, including at three entry-exit checkpoints and the corresponding checkpoints of the armed formations in Luhansk region.

The Mission’s freedom of movement continued to be restricted, including at two checkpoints of the armed formations in Donetsk region. Its unmanned aerial vehicles encountered instances of GPS signal interference, assessed as caused by probable jamming.

Make sure that you have alternate means of communications with friends and family. Understand that credit cards, banking, and ATMs may not function without communications networks.

By Divemedic, ago

Sunday Afternoon in the shop

My rifle Project- “Kyle” is currently at a standstill.

The upper is mostly done. The barrel is installed in a slick side upper, as is is the gas system and forend. The rest of the upper is on hold because JP rifles is out of LMOS enhanced bolts. Mine has been on backorder for several weeks. I know there are other LMOS BCG’s out there, but I have good luck with JP rifles, so we will just shelve the upper for a bit. Once that BCG arrives, I will install it, the dust cover, then check the headspace and call the upper complete.

I am not going to even start machining the lower yet. That is because I am waiting for a Larue trigger. The machine work only takes about an hour, so until the trigger arrives, there is no point in continuing. If I get impatient, I will just get a Geisselle SSA and complete the project. The Geisselle is a better trigger, but I am trying to hold costs down a bit.

Still, I had some time to play in the shop, so I went ahead and completed the lower for Project Gaston. This is my first 80% pistol build. I decided to go with a polymer 80, so I wound up selecting the GST-9 from 80 percent Arms. Here is an overview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r80Ggw4BlfM

The next post will detail what I did to complete this pistol. I will say that I hit a couple of snags, but a bit of ingenuity enabled be to overcome them pretty easily. More on that later.

By Divemedic, ago

History Fail

An Orlando TV station did a report about how some residents found and removed a street paving brick that had “KKK” engraved into it. Here is the quote that stuck out at me:

“There was ignorance in the past here. Remember this is the South, so that’s one of the things that you’re living with when you come into the South,” Jenkins said.

Sheehan and her friend are both potters. With their artistic eye, they do not think the etching is new.

“These bricks have to be fired to a really high temperature. And they’ve been there for hundreds of years,”

Impossible.

The media is full of shit.

By Divemedic, ago

Water Gun= Deadly Weapon

A water gun is a deadly weapon, according to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Department, who arrested a 14 year old boy for shooting a 12 year old girl with one. He is facing a felony charge of “shooting a weapon/missile in a public or private building that could cause death or great bodily harm.”

So now the boy’s family will have legal bills in the $100,000 range, or they will be forced to take a plea deal. This is ridiculous.

By Divemedic, ago

Certification

Licensure is where a governmental agency grants a person legal permission to carry out an act. Licensure frequently, but not always, involves certification. Once a license exists for a certain activity, it usually becomes illegal to carry out that activity without having that license.

Certification is a process whereby some agency declares that a person, an item, or process meets some set of standards. Sometimes a certifying agency is the government, sometimes it is a private company. A certification is only worth anything if everyone can believe that the standards are actually being enforced.

When a person graduates from high school, they receive a diploma. A diploma is a certification from the school board that declares the person whose name appears on that diploma has met the standards of a high school graduate. When a person shows you a high school diploma, it is supposed to mean that the person can do certain things: read, write, perform mathematical calculations to a certain level, those sorts of things.

You will note that I said SUPPOSED to mean. There are so many exceptions, diplomas haven’t meant anything for decades. A diploma doesn’t even mean that you were there for class for the majority of the time.

Now California has given up even pretending that a high school diploma means anything. Since they have declared that students can not receive a D or an F, every student, no matter how incompetent, will be at least a C student. A California high school diploma is worthless, and now the powers that be have admitted that.

The problem here is that colleges and employers nationwide will accept the diplomas, and the unearned grades attached to them. A high school diploma in California is now no harder to get than a fishing license.

By Divemedic, ago

Illegal as Hell

I ordered my wife a Christmas gift from Amazon. It was on sale at a ‘Black Friday’ price of $349 and a delivery date of December 6. The package was reported to me as “lost in transit” on December 9. I was told to cancel the order and reorder it, so that is what I did. The new price was $620 with a delivery date of December 17. I contacted Amazon to ask them to honor the original price. This is what I was told:

We strive to maintain low and competitive prices on everything we carry. We constantly compare Amazon’s prices to our competitors’ prices to make sure that our prices are as low or lower than all relevant competitors. As a result, we don’t offer price matching.

I explained to the guy that I was not looking for a price match, I wanted Amazon to honor the price that they originally offer it to me for, and since it was THEIR fault that it was lost in transit, they should be the ones to replace it at the original price.

The associate then told me that he could send out a replacement, but that replacement would not arrive until January 19. Checking the Amazon page, they still list the item for sale, and are still advertising a delivery date of December 15-17, with 8 more listed as being in stock.

They have put me in the position of having to buy this item at nearly double the sale price, if I want my wife to have it in time for Christmas.

In fact, this sort of thing is illegal in Florida. It is called a “bait and switch” scam, and is a violation of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Practices Act. A person who is the victim of a bait and switch can get damages plus up to $10,000.

I am going to send a certified letter to Amazon’s Registered Agent. If they don’t help me, I will contact an attorney. All I want is what I paid for at the agreed upon price.

By Divemedic, ago

Why the Ukraine is important

A comment to my recent post about the impending Russian invasion of Ukraine was:

These uSA have no business in Ukraine. The comparison with the USSR’s attempt to put missiles in Cuba is apt.

.

What is happening in the Ukraine is very important to the US and its defense. Let me explain how:

In 1994, the Soviet Union had just broken up, and one of the new nations was the Ukraine. Ukraine had on its territory the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal- an arsenal that was larger than the nuclear arsenals of Britain, France and China combined. There was a lot of concern at the time that one of these warheads would wind up in the wrong hands, and there was a lot of pressure on Ukraine for them to turn those warheads over to Russia.

To make this happen, Ukraine needed some reassurances against aggression. The Ukrainians asked for certain things, one of which was a security assurance that the United States and Russia would pay attention and respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, that there would be no use of force or threat of force against Ukraine.

Enter the Budapest Memorandum, which was signed on December 4, 1994. It now appears as though the countries who swore to honor Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons are going back on their word.

Yet another example of the US being unwilling or unable to honor its international commitments. The world is watching.

There are a list of countries that have given up their nuclear weapons: Libya, South Africa, and now the Ukraine. Each of those governments were subsequently overthrown. What message does that send to other countries with nuclear aspirations? Iran, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan.

This to me is the opening of a new, more dangerous phase of nuclear proliferation. The possibility of a nuclear weapon being used is now dependent on whichever of those governments is the LEAST stable. What this means is that North Korea or Iran is likely to use a nuclear weapon in the near future.

Couple this with a feckless US president who has the intelligence of a potato. The situation in the Ukraine makes it all the more likely that we will see a nuclear exchange within the next 4 years. It would not surprise me to see Israel and Iran trade a couple of nukes before our next Presidential election. Even more worrisome is the possibility that the US winds up catching one of them.

By Divemedic, ago

Omicron vaccine

Pfizer and BioNTech say their vaccine booster provides a high level of protection against omicron variant. Since the vaccine is, according to all the data, not preventing anyone from getting or spreading COVID, and all that it is purported to do is possibly lessen the severity of the symptoms, it begs the question:

Uh, what does that matter? COVID itself has an overall survival rate of 98.4%, and the omicron variant, according to the CDC, “the disease is mild” in almost all of the cases seen so far, with reported symptoms mainly cough, congestion and fatigue. The side effects of the vaccine are worse than the symptoms of the omicron variant.

By Divemedic, ago

Threatening to nuke Russia?

Headlines today are being made by a US Senator who, they claim, threatened to nuke Russia over a theoretical invasion of the Ukraine. I don’t have a problem with the statement. Let me explain by starting with what the Senator said:

When asked to clarify what he meant by “military action,” Wicker recounted measures ranging from the American “ships in the Black Sea” to “first-use nuclear action.”

“We don’t rule out first-use nuclear action, we don’t think it will happen but there are certain things in negotiations, if you are going to be tough, that you don’t take off the table,” the Mississippi senator added.

If the United States (or any nation) is attempting to influence another nation, that other nation doesn’t need to know what the limits of the US response are going to be. This keeps the other side from doing a cost benefit analysis and deciding that it’s worth it. If you are threatening a military response, but then go ahead and outline the limits of that response, you are weakening your own position.

It’s like dealing with an armed robber. Let’s say that the robber is in the middle of robbing a store that you are standing in. You point a gun at him and tell him to stop robbing the store, or else. He replies, “Or else what?” and then you tell him, “Or else I will send you a strongly worded letter, or perhaps I will report you to the cops, but what I won’t do is shoot you.” How do you think that will work out?

What if instead, you tell him, “If you rob this store, I will turn your head into a canoe” What would happen then?

You want the enemy to know there will be a response, you want them to know it will be painful, but you don’t want them to know that all you have in your hand is a pair of fives.

By Divemedic, ago

Overturning SCOTUS Precedent

There is a move to overturn the most important and wide ranging Supreme Court Decision ever made. Not Roe v. Wade, not Brown v. Board of Education. No, the one that the left wants to overturn is Marbury v. Madison.

Marbury was the most important decision ever made by SCOTUS, because it was that decision that gave us judicial review. That case established for the first time that federal courts had the power to overturn an act of Congress on the ground that it violated the U.S. Constitution. The left wants to do away with that, and I think that I know why, but before I explain that, let’s look at why I think this is the left’s latest target. Read from the report itself (pdf alert):

What is the category of decisions to which the Court should be more deferential? Is the concern that the Court exercises too much power just about the invalidation of Acts of Congress, or does it extend to the much more common instances in which the Court declares unconstitutional the actions of states or local
governments?

Those two forms of judicial review raise significantly different issues, but both implicate the power of the Court to overturn enactments by democratically elected bodies. In addition, the Court exercises power over the other branches of the federal government in ways apart from its constitutional holdings. The Court interprets federal statutes and can declare unlawful the actions of executive branch agencies. Though these decisions, unlike constitutional holdings, can in principle be overturned by legislation, in practice the difficulty of enacting legislation routinely means that what the Court says is the last word.
Perhaps the more fundamental question — the one that has attracted so much discussion for so long is when deference is justified and when it is not. In prominent cases, the Court has intervened to try to protect racial or religious minorities or political dissidents from the abusive actions of majorities. If the Court were to adopt a posture of across-the -board
deference, it would no longer play that role . But some critics of the Court assert that greater deference would be worth it, that the gains from those celebrated decisions are outweighed by the instances in which the Court has prevented democratically -elected branches of government from serving the nation’s interests, including by recognizing and protecting individual rights and the rights of minority and disadvantaged groups.

Page 26 of the report, emphasis added by Divemedic

Read those bolded parts. What the commission, and by extension the left, is trying to say is that they don’t want SCOTUS overruling the other branches of government. They want a government that is no longer constrained by the Constitution. Without a Supreme Court ruling that certain acts and laws are not Constitutional, the legislative and executive branches would no longer be constrained by our founding documents.

Since we all know that elections don’t mean shit and have been gamed, cutting the courts out of our government would be handing the keys of our nation over to the communist dictators that currently run the Democratic party.

Packing the court would likely be seen by Suzie Soccermom as a power grab, drawing the ire of the general public. Removing the power of the court to overturn unconstitutional edicts would be obscure enough that America’s inability to grasp legal nuance and to read a story that is more than a paragraph long would likely pass without complaint.

That is the real danger: A Democratic party unrestrained by the ballot box, the Constitution, or a Supreme Court.

By Divemedic, ago