Divemedic

Governments, like people, have needs. Unlike people, they have almost unlimited credit card limits.

This is in response to this comment by CCBPC:

Just after the Japanese tsunami in 2011, Gilbert Godfried tweeted the following jokes:

I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, “They’ll be another one floating by any minute now.”

My Japanese doctor advised me that to stay healthy I need 50 million gallons of water a day.
What do Japanese Jews like to eat? Hebrew National Tsunami.
What does every Japanese person have in their apartment? Flood lights.
I asked a girl in Japan to have sex with me. She said, “Ok, but you have to sleep in the wet spot.”

His jokes were insensitive, crude, and in poor taste. He was fired as spokesman for AFLAC because his comments reflected poorly on his employer.

Jim Zumbo made statements that alienated the owners of the most popular rifle sold in America. He was fired by most of his employers for expressing that opinion.

What
if Jack Hanna gave an interview in which he said that whales don’t
belong in captivity? Sea World would likely fire him the next day, and
that would be their right.

Phil Robertson made a statement to the press that alienated many in the public. Just as any other person who makes a statement to the press, he must be prepared for the backlash when his employer decides that they no longer want to employ him. This is not a constitutional issue.

It wasn’t just that he made anti-gay statements. He went after all of it: race, homosexuality, and others.He said this of Blacks: “I’m with the Blacks, because we’re white trash.” He also said that Blacks were happy during the days of segregation, and said that segregation was not mistreatment of Blacks.


When you are in the public eye, you have to watch what you say, or you may lose your
job. Robertson can say what he wants, but A&E is within their
rights to fire him if his words hurt their business. That is reality
when you are in the public eye. If he were smart, he would have just
said “no comment.” Just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean that
you have to share it, and just because you have the right to free speech
doesn’t mean that you should speak, nor does it mean that your employer
has to keep paying you.

No one is demanding that you Christians accept anything. They are demanding that you leave them alone to live their lives. Not everyone believes that there is an invisible man in the sky that runs our lives, but the rest of us tolerate your beliefs and expect you to do the same. To say that the Christian church has even pretended to play by the “live and let live” policy is laughable.

Asking you to refrain from screaming “faggot” at a gay couple for holding hands, and demanding that they have the same right to marriage that you are, is not forcing you to accept anything. Two men getting married or holding hands is none of your business, and doesn’t hurt you a bit.

I will do the same to defend you from the homosexuals: I disagree that the Christian bakery should be forced to make a cake for a gay wedding.

To claim that homosexuality should be illegal because it does not result in procreation is absurd. I am sterile and cannot have children. Does that mean that I should be prohibited by law from having sex? How about post menopausal women? Should they be prohibited from getting married or having sex? After all, they cannot have children, either.

Boycott A&E all you want; it will have the same effect that your silly boycott against Disney over Gay Days has had: exactly none. In this country, you are free to be a hateful, religious fruitcake all you want: we are free to ignore you. Even if you are somehow able to resolve this situation, you are on the losing side on this one. In the end, homosexual marriage is going to happen, whether you like it or not. Just like interracial marriage did, over the same tired old objections from the same tired old church. Same song, different verse.

You want to know why the Republicans can’t accomplish anything? This is why: The Republican obsession with treating people with scorn and hate because they are not like you is literally driving people to the Democrats and to the Libertarians. Every election that you lose is your own fault. I would rather have a gay neighbor than a Bible thumping, hate filled
asshole for a neighbor any day, and I certainly don’t want to elect a politician that
thinks that it is just fine and dandy to legislate where I put my penis.

On top of that, Robertson is everything that I despise about stereotypical southerners: He is an uneducated, bigoted, redneck idiot. He makes all of us here in the South look bad, and validates every bad opinion that the northerners have of us. I, for one, do not mourn his firing.

Utah brags that they are solving the problem of homelessness by giving people free places to live. That is the liberal answer to every problem: solve it by stealing someone else’s money and giving it to someone else.

If you are a person who is worried about homelessness, then I have the following questions for you:

1 How many homeless people are you allowing to live in your home?
2 How much of your own money are you giving to homeless people?

If you care so much for what you consider to be a problem that you are not willing to spend your own money, then why on earth do you think that means that you can spend someone else’s money?

So there is a big kerfluffle going on about Robertson saying that he disagrees with homosexuality. There are many Christians running around, shouting about how God hates fags. They base this opinion on Leviticus 20:13, which says:

If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination

and they then claim that, being Christians, they have to follow the Bible. “Ok,” I say, “then you must also follow Leviticus 20:20, which says:”

If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbour, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.

Or how about Leviticus20:9:

All who curse father or mother shall be put to death; having cursed father or mother, their blood is upon them. 

So how many adulterers have you killed? How many smart mouthed children? The Bible is the basis for your religion, and I get that. But if you are going to demand that everyone else has to follow what your Bible says, then you need to accept ALL of it, and let the chips fall where they may.

If instead, you agree that maybe killing people for adultery is a bit harsh, then you must also admit that your entire religion is based on a document with which you do not agree, and you can choose to ignore parts of it. Which you have done, or there would be piles of dead adulterers and smart mouthed children lying about.

See, the Christians who are doing this are simply attempting to use their religion as an excuse to practice hatred and to control the lives of other people.
I don’t like cherry flavored food. Ice cream, candy, nothing with cherry flavoring. That doesn’t mean that I am going to go around criticizing people who do. That also doesn’t mean that I am going to get in people’s faces and demand that they refrain from eating cherries around me.
On the flip side, you homosexuals need to back off a bit, too. The reason why there is so much backlash against homosexuality is that you keep trying to force people to like you.
All of us need to live and let live. You do your thing, and I will do mine.

The following is a work of fiction. I wrote it because it was in my head, and I needed to let it out.

I fundamentally changed America. Well, not me by myself, but I set in motion a chain of events that exposed the nation’s weakness, and destroyed what was left of the American economy. Let me tell you how.

The turn of a century is a time of foolishness. It was at the turn of the last century that we believed that industry, man’s cleverness, could overcome all obstacles. Man’s folly was in assuming that he had thought of everything. The sinking of the Titanic was the entire folly, wrapped in a single tragedy.

A single ship had been built, and it was declared unsinkable. When that ship went to the bottom, it was due to a basic ignorance of the limits of man’s power and ability to overcome obstacles.

The cycle repeated itself at the turn of the following century. We had entered an age where we thought we could legislate away all of the problems that had plagued mankind. We could ensure that everyone was prosperous by simply passing a law.

So we passed the Patriot Act to keep us all safe.
Then, we passed the Affordable Care Act, to keep us all healthy.
After that, we increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour, to keep us all prosperous.

And with that law, my story begins…

I had a bit of money and wanted to open a restaurant. A burger joint. The problem was that the costs of hiring an employee were astronomical. Between providing health insurance and a $15 an hour wage, there was no way for a restaurant owner to make money. I calculated that it cost about $28 an hour to hire a single worker for minimum wage. Factoring in other costs like food, taxes, buildings, etc., my per unit cost for hamburgers would  have been about $7. No one wants to buy an $8 hamburger.

 So I decided that I would be the first novelty restaurant that would have almost no labor costs. I would built an automated hamburger joint. So I bought some automated hamburger machines from a company in California, and opened the country’s first fully automated restaurant. Each location only had two employees: The day manager, and the night manager. They had to fill the machines, keep the eating area clean, and call an 800 number if anything broke.

The ordering and cashier stations? Automated. Cooking? Automated. Since the kitchen was automated, there was almost no cleaning needed.

That isn’t to say that I employed no one. There was regional maintenance teams, food delivery teams, and the like. The point is that I ran each location with only 20% of the staff of a conventional fast food place. The customers loved it. I was selling fast food at less than half the cost of my competitors, and the initial novelty of watching robots make your food hit America by storm.

It wasn’t long before other chains followed suit: McDonald’s, Checkers, Burger King, all of them. It seemed like overnight, tens of thousands of fast food workers lost their jobs. Soon the trend expanded to other industries. It was stunning, in less than three years, unemployment within the pool of unskilled labor jumped from 14% to over 70%.

That was when things began to go south. Workers demanded relief, and Congress gave it to them. In 2019, they passed the Employee Fairness Act, and President Clinton happily signed it. That law made it illegal for any business to fire any employee, or cut any employee’s compensation without the approval of the local employment office. The law also required that each “robot” performing a job that could affect the health or safety of the public be supervised by an employee. There could be no more than a 2:1 ratio of robots to humans in any business.

So the automated restaurants then had to pay a bunch of people $15 an hour to sit and watch the machines make hamburgers.

Prices skyrocketed. That caused the passage of the Fair Pricing in Commerce and Price Gouging Prevention Act of 2021. That law made it illegal for any business to raise prices without approval of the local State Commerce Board, and prices were rolled back to 2020 levels.

 I was ruined. Every one of my business locations were bankrupt within 3 months. There just wasn’t the money to keep them open. I declared bankruptcy, and the government took over the running of my business. They gave me a good job, though. I have health insurance, and I get $15 an hour to watch this machine make hamburgers.

There are numerous stories floating around the blogosphere about anti-gun groups having a Sandy Hook Memorial at a Catholic Church that was actually a rally for more gun laws. A pro-gun blogger showed up, and was promptly asked to leave by anti-gun representatives.
 
Churches enjoy tax exempt status because of the religious work that they do. From the IRS:

To be tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, an organization must be organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3), and none of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual. In addition, it may not be an action organization, i.e.,
it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of
its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for
or against political candidates.

 A rally where the major focus is the passage of more gun control goes far beyond the scope of a memorial for victims. As soon as you begin a blanket exclusion people of one political opinion and not the other, in my opinion, this is no longer a memorial and is now a political rally, and your church has ceased being a non partisan religious organization and has crossed the line into being a lobbying organization. You want the government to stay out of your church? Then keep your church out of the government.

Any church that uses its self as a shill for any political cause that is not directly related to the church should have its tax exempt status revoked.

There is an Ayn Rand quote that, in my opinion, illustrates where we are today with regards to the state of our nation.

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion –
when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission
from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to
those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get
richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect
you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption
being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know
that your society is doomed.

If CFL and LED light bulbs are so good, then why is buying them mandatory? The bulbs are nearly 20 times as expensive, and do not give the same light. The official line is that the cost savings are there when you take into account that the newer bulbs last longer. I recently did a 5 year test of my own, and discovered that the new bulbs do not last as long as advertised.

The fact that this was signed into law by a Republican simply illustrates what I have been saying for years: There is no functional difference between the two political parties. The only thing that they care about is maintaining political power,, and if that means that they have to take the nation down with them, so be it, as long as they are on top.

This will be used against me later if I ever have to shoot anyone, but what just happened at my house is pretty suspicious. Let me set the scene:
It is 8 o’clock at night, in a quiet suburban neighborhood of single family homes. The ungated neighborhood is posted as “No soliciting allowed.” It is raining, and has been off and on for the past few hours. The doorbell rings. When I answer it, I am armed as I usually am when there are unexpected doorbells after dark.
I open the door, and remain halfway behind it. On my porch is a black male, about 5’7″ tall, about 130 pounds, early 20’s. He is wearing a hoodie, pajama pants, and furry slippers. He is carrying an unopened umbrella, and I catch a whiff of alcohol.

He says: “Sir, I am involved in a communications project, and I have something here that I want to show you.”

He begins reaching in his pocket. Out of his line of sight behind the door, I draw my 9mm S&W Shield, and hold it next to my leg. I said in a low voice, “Keep your hands out of your pockets, please. You see that ‘No Trespassing’ sign? I’m not interested.”

He leaves, and just a few minutes later, my neighbor from across the street knocks on my door. He says that the guy was at his house just before mine, and that the guy told him that he knew me, and so my neighbor gave him $5. My neighbor is new here, and believed him. I told my neighbor that I have lived here for nearly 6 years, and I don’t know this guy. He also told my neighbor that there were two other people with him.

I called the police. Twenty minutes passed, and they now are questioning the guy two streets over. My opinion? It is a Saturday, and Christmas party season is in full swing. He was looking for homes where no one was home, for a possible burglary later.