Divemedic

Liberal Viewpoint

there are no “illegals.” That’s a word the Republikkkans use to dehumanize and demonize. People who are here without documentation, without legal permission, that’s a civil offense, not a criminal one. Crossing the border outside a checkpoint is misdemeanor trespass. They can claim asylum from anywhere in the U.S and whether you like it or not they have as much right to be here as you MAGAats do. Most of them are workers with families just like you. Once they have been there for over decades, they are protected by the statute of limitations.- Rando Lefty talking points

This ties in with my statement on Due Process. Read the clause again:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

So lets assume that you are right- illegally entering the country isn’t a crime. OK. What is the penalty? You get sent back to the nation that you came from. That isn’t depriving you of life, liberty, or property, so you aren’t entitled to due process.

If the government DID want to charge you with a crime, the law used would be 8 USC 1325: Improper entry by alien. The law reads:

Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.

In other words, it’s a misdemeanor the first time, a felony each subsequent time.

Saying the word “asylum” isn’t a magic word that gets you a free pass. First, asylum is for fleeing your home country because your life is in danger if you stay. Second, once you have left your home country, the threat is gone, and you are done fleeing. That means you can’t pass through 8 nations on the way to the US in order to claim asylum. That’s not how it works.

Also, sneaking into the country and staying here for a decade in violation of the law doesn’t mean that you can claim asylum after being caught.

The statute of limitations don’t apply in the event of a crime that continues every day. If I were to make an illegal machine gun, but I own it for 20 years, that doesn’t mean ATF can’t charge me with it. That also isn’t how crimes work.

By Divemedic, ago

Peaceful Protest Season

The left is lining up to complain that Trump didn’t need to call out the National Guard for what they view as “peaceful protests.” Let’s take a look at some of those protests:

Yeah, that looks peaceful. The press claims that it is “unclear” what caused police to fire crowd control munitions into the “mostly peaceful” crowd of protesters. You have a crowd of foreign nationals, waving foreign flags while they burn and destroy property, all while being supported and shielded by California state and local officials.

“We had individuals shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers. That can kill you.” – LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell

Meanwhile, the President of Mexico is threatening to mobilize against the US, if the US institutes a tax on remittances from illegal immigrants to Mexico. This is a foreign invasion, and wars have begun over much less. So-called “sanctuary states” are in a state of rebellion.

By Divemedic, ago

It’s Their Culture

Two people were killed when a shooting happened in Las Vegas last night, right in front of the Bellagio Fountains. It appears to have been one Social Media “influencer”, who runs a channel called the Sin City Family Channel:

Got into an altercation with another influencer, pulled a gun and fired shots. One of the victims is reported to be this “influencer”:

If blacks don’t want to be stereotyped, they should stop acting in a stereotypical manner. Contrast that with the behavior of the white guy with his arm around his girl to the left of the screen. As soon as he hears shots, he takes her down to the ground and shields her with his body.

Rumor has it that the fight was caused because the two channels were engaged in reporting each other in an attempt to get the other channel enough strikes to be shut down by Youtube. The day before, the shooter had posted to social media that he was going to track down his rival.

By Divemedic, ago

Missing

I will admit that I have been a bit MIA around here lately. That’s because of the pool project. We contracted the building of the pool, deck, and birdcage to a company. The landscaping and irrigation were our responsibility. We went through a 57 day delay because we had problems getting a building permit.

Once we finally got our permit, the pool company was here the next day, and the pool was complete 57 days later. We couldn’t be happier with the progress. There is a 30 day wait between getting the pool done and the final inspection. What we didn’t know was that irrigation, grading, and landscaping is part of that inspection. That means we are in a bit of a crunch to get it all done.

I rented a trencher and dug trenches for drainage and irrigation. That was the part that put me in the hospital because I tried to do it all in a single day to save some cash on the renal charges. I learned my lesson there. When we get hot, we take a break and sit in the pool for an hour or so.

Then I installed underground drainage lines to direct rain runoff from the gutters away from the house. I really like those, because they run about 30 feet away from the house to an automatic valve that opens when it’s raining.

Then I ran 4 zones of irrigation lines, planting 40 sprinkler heads so that everything within 35 feet of the house and pool gets irrigated, especially the plants we are putting around the pool.

Then the barrier lines for the robotic lawnmower went in around the edges of the back of the property. I don’t like mowing the backyard because it’s so large, so it was that or a riding mower. The cost was the same, only I don’t have to mow now.

Once those were in, I put edgers around the house to create a 2 foot barrier between the lawn and the house, so that the weedeater won’t damage the paint. Then the plants got put in, with some of them being large enough to keep nosy people from seeing us in the pool.

I also had to replace the tree in the front of the house, a 12 foot tall Crepe Myrtle.

After all of that was done, we put down 2200 pounds of mulch in all of the planter beds. We finally finished all of that today. Now we are waiting on sod.

I am paying a crew to come in and lay the sod, because that is hot, backbreaking labor, and it wasn’t that much more money than buying the sod and doing it ourselves.

While all of this was going on, I attended 3 days of classes, worked three days a week, and interviewed for two different jobs, as my contract with my current employer is ending soon, making me an at will employee.

All in all, it was a harder project than I thought, but it did save us quite a bit of money. It would have cost us about $10,000. All of that wound up costing about $4,000, with the biggest two expenses being 2,200 pounds of mulch and having 4 pallets of sod laid.

By Divemedic, ago

Fake Cops

A Florida man was robbed at gunpoint after being pulled over by a fake cop. The victim told law enforcement that while driving to work around 5 a.m., the car pulled onto the roadway behind him and activated flashing blue lights inside the car. The sedan driver quickly exited the car and approached his window. The victim described the driver as a black man, around 6 feet tall, wearing dark clothing and a ski mask. He pressed a handgun to the victim’s head and demanded his money and phone.

This is why there needs to be a law that only vehicles with obvious, contrasting police markings with uniformed law enforcement can initiate traffic stops. Still, keep an eye out- if you are pulled over by a car with a dash light, and the driver is in regular clothes with a face mask, you should be ready to drive away while calling 911. Better to let your lawyer defend your actions in court than wind up dead at a robber’s hand.

By Divemedic, ago

Just As We Expected

For years, many of us have known, or at least suspected, that the government cooks the books on statistics to make things look rosier than they are. Tons of government data is either known, or at least suspected to be, unreliable. A great example is the now widespread knowledge that Joe Biden’s mental decline was hidden by government officials and their accomplices in the MSM. A report is out by the Walls Street Journal, indicating that economic data published by the government can no longer be relied upon for its accuracy. There is no pravda in Isvestia, and there is no isvestia in Pravda. Of course, the government workers are blaming Trump and his budget cuts, claiming that they don’t have enough personnel to do their jobs.

A great example of realistic stats was the website shadowstats.com. I don’t know if they still publish. I like to use the Denny’s grand slam breakfast as my marker. Why? That breakfast has 2 strips of bacon, two link sausages, two eggs, and two pancakes. A good cross section of food products. The best thing is that I have been using the price of this breakfast in the same Denny’s location since 1997 as an indication of costs.

  • In 1997, that breakfast cost $1.99
  • In 2009, it cost $4.99
  • In 2021, it cost $9.29
  • Just a year later in 2022, it was $11.59
  • In 2023, the rate slowed a bit. The breakfast was $11.99 in April
  • By November of 2023, the price was up again, to $12.99
  • Here we are in 2025, and the cost of that breakfast is now $14.19.

I don’t know how long we can continue to use this bellwether, since Denny’s filed bankruptcy earlier this year.

By Divemedic, ago

Pensions

JimmyPx makes a comment on my last post that I would like to address.

The first part is the statement that Social Security isn’t an entitlement. This is a common feeling, because many people seem to think that the term “entitlement” means free handout. That’s actually not what the term means. An entitlement is a government program guaranteeing access to some benefit, such as to welfare benefits or tax incentives, by members of a specific group and based on established rights. In other words, it’s called an entitlement because the recipient is entitled to it by law.

The second is his point that pensions are some kind of giveaway. Pensions, at least for fire personnel, I cannot speak for others, were intended as a bargain made to firefighters in lieu of pay. Back in the years following the Carter administration, fire departments were seeing lots of people leave for higher paying jobs in a private sector that was booming from the Reagan economy.

The problem is that the average hourly wage for a starting firefighter in Florida is somewhere around $17 an hour, not much more than the state’s minimum wage. Similar professions with similar education requirements get over $30 an hour. To solve this, the state kicked the can down the road by telling these employees that they could get a pension at the end of their career. This deferred the costs of higher pay.

It costs about 20% of payroll to supply a pension. This raised effective cost to about $20.40, which was still less than the cost of paying a competitive wage. The issue is that elected officials, not knowing much about economics, didn’t properly fund the pensions when they cut budgets so they could fund food pantries for illegal immigrant unwed mothers of anchor babies, as well other electoral baubles. This resulted in shortfalls that had to be made up by kicking the can down the road- just like the shortfall seen with Social Security.

So now you have people who continued working for you, even though the pay was lower, because they were looking forward to that pension. Twenty years later, they are ready to collect, and the city then tells them that they want to cut the pension because it’s too expensive. It’s akin to driving a car until it’s broken, then telling the dealer that you aren’t going to pay for it.

In my case, they took 3% of my gross pay in addition to the fact that I was paid less than my private sector counterparts. When I was approaching retirement age, they told me that they were changing the pension system. The biggest change was going to be that overtime would no longer be part of the calculation of your pension, even though they were still going to take 3% of my overtime pay. Since overtime was almost a third of what I was making, I decided to retire before the changes could take effect, even though it meant that I would get a lower pension amount. I now work as a nurse for a good deal more than I was making as a fire medic.

So we know that cutting pensions and Social Security are just ripping people off. We don’t want to cut the military. There are tons of things that the government does that one could make a good case against cutting them.

It doesn’t matter.

We are at the point where it is inevitable that the nation will collapse. All of those things will be unaffordable. They will all have to go.

It won’t happen until the collapse comes. When the checks don’t come, people will be PISSED. They will DEMAND that the government do something. History says that the something that they will wind up doing is some version of martial law.

By Divemedic, ago