Divemedic

According to the CDC, there are 153 confirmed cases of COVID 19 in the US, with 11 fatalities: 10 deaths in Washington state, and 1 in California. That works out to a 7% fatality rate, which represents a very large increase over the 2% rate we have been give up to this point. This means one of a few things:

1 The other nations are not reporting correct figures with respect to their cases versus fatalities.
2 This illness is far more deadly than we are being led to believe.
3 There are far more than 153 cases in the US, but we aren’t catching most of them.
4 The US strain is somehow more deadly than the one in the rest of the world.

My son is a nurse practitioner. Because he just began working for his employer within the last year, they move him from hospital to hospital to fill in where needed. We works 10 and 12 hour shifts for 7 days, and then takes two weeks off. For the next few days, he will be working at three hospitals that are closer to my house than they are to his, so rather than making the hour and a half drive back to his house, he will be staying with us.

While he was here, we got into a discussion about the corona virus. He says that for the past week, his emergency room has been seeing dozens of people each day who are displaying the symptoms of some sort of cold- what medical people refer to as Flu Like Symptoms (FLS- also known colloquially among those same medical people as “Feels Like Shit”) The problem with FLS is that these symptoms are felt by people with a lot of different illnesses- the flu, Herpes, Hepatitis, and yes, the corona virus. These people, having seen the media stories about nCOV 19, are demanding to be tested for it.

The problem is that not one of them meets the criteria for being tested. The CDC is in charge of that, and they have set very specific criteria for who is to be tested. If a patient doesn’t meet the criteria, they cannot be tested. This is done EXACTLY because if a person doesn’t meet the criteria, they don’t have corona, and the CDC doesn’t want the testing labs to be overwhelmed by people who do not have the virus.

This panic illustrates the real hazard with nCOV 19. The real hazard is fear induced panic, and the people demanding that the government (or the medical field) do something. It doesn’t matter if the something that is being done is actually effective- just that they are doing something. We see this all of the time, which is the reason why we have to suffer through the Kabuki Theater of security everywhere.

So what I decided to do is prepare my household for the possibility of widespread travel bans and quarantines. We went to the big box store today and upped our semi-perishable stores. I added 40 pounds of meat to the freezer, along with other supplies: toilet paper, canned vegetables, cleaning supplies, feminine hygiene products, and more. I now have on hand enough food for three weeks before I have to dip into the freeze dried foods. Other than that, I cannot think of anything I am missing or in need of.

So a piece of trash kills a police officer who is attempting to arrest him for murdering his girlfriend. The suspect shoots and kills the cop, and his reason is that this was self defense because the officer fired first. I am not sure that is how it works. I am sure his attorneys know this, and they are hoping to get a cop hating black person on the jury. That is the only possible reason, since one cannot claim self defense from an on duty, in uniform law enforcement officer.

This particular piece of trash has been making his trial into a circus since day 1.

The ATF is offering a $2500 reward to anyone who gives them information that leads to the recovery of a police “patrol rifle” that was stolen from an off duty police officer’s vehicle. They describe the missing rifle as “an AR type rifle with a red dot sight,” then include a picture that says it is “similar to the  stolen weapon.”

This story doesn’t add up. Since it is the most popular rifle in the country, plenty of these are stolen every day, but the ATF doesn’t do press releases with lots of exposure and a reward that is more than the value of the stolen gun. Shoot, the red dot sight costs more than an AR does these days. I am willing to bet that the missing rifle has a happy switch and the cops don’t want the public to know that they lost a machine gun.

Rounding up my police being trained with guns posts for the week:

An axe wielding man was shot several times by an off duty deputy when he broke into her home. He was treated for gun shot wounds to his extremities.

Florida homeowner shoots and kills an intruder.

Now some might take this post as criticism of the police. That would be far from the truth. This post is evidence that the police do not train often enough or for long enough to be any better at marksmanship than the average citizen, nothing more. For some reason, people tend to think of cops as firearms experts, or even self defense legal experts. That is not the case. Police are experts in police procedure.

In Florida, a teacher who wants to carry a firearm must have a concealed weapons permit, get permission from their employing school district, then must undergo 144 hours of training. Police serving as School Resource Officers only have to go through 40 hours of training. Granted, that is on top of the training they get to be a cop in the first place, but in Florida more hours of training are required to be a barber than are required to be a police officer. Most cops in Florida get 80 hours or less TOTAL of firearms training to get certified. 

In the case of teachers, they are being forced to be trained to a higher level than the cops. The guardian program is a joke. The only teachers who are being certified are those who are politically connected to the administration, school board, or superintendent. Not one classroom teacher has been certified, at least not in the six counties where I know teachers who work there.

Sometimes as gun owners, we are our own worst enemies. There are too many chest thumping internet commandos, people with no clue about the law, and others who think that owning or carrying a gun is some sort of badge of badass manhood, and that shooting people is some sort of remote controlled punch.

There is a video going around of a chef being attacked in a commercial kitchen. Another employee enters the room, draws a gun, and the bad guy turns his back and leaves. The comments to the video are insane:

Sensible guy: Why shoot??? He walked away. Your life is no longer in danger. How many of y’all that say shoot paid attention in your LTC class??

Keyboard Warrior 1: Before he walked away, he was within reaching distance. You don’t draw unless you are prepared to fire. Should have dropped him

Internet Commando: Shoot! SHOOT UNTIL THE CLIP IS EMPTY. If that was my family member he’d be toe-tagged. Imagine what he’d have done if that woman wasn’t armed.

Sensible guy 2: I agree with you sir. No reason to shoot over a punch.

Internet Commando:  STAND YOUR GROUND.

Confused gun owner: She shouldn’t have it pointed at him if deadly force wasn’t warranted. Didn’t you pay attention in your class. He could have charged her and took it. If it was warranted she should have shot.

Confused gun owner #2: She should have shot as soon as she pulled the gun up on him. In the ECC class they teach do not point unless you plan to shoot. Now the SOB will wait till taller or do it to someone else.

Internet Commando: everybody second guesses and cites the manual. Doesn’t work like that in real life.

Divemedic: A lot of legal misconceptions in this thread.
1 “Stand your ground” is not a license to kill people because they ‘dissed’ you.
2 If someone isn’t presenting an immediate threat of death, serious bodily injury, or a forcible felony, you can’t just shoot them. Even if they are presenting such a threat, shooting them has to be the only REASONABLE way of stopping them. Shooting someone in the back is not it.
3 You can point a gun at someone and not shoot them, even if deadly force isn’t warranted. If he charges you, he is now presenting that threat from my second point.
This isn’t quoting “the manual” – it is merely stating the law. That same law that will be used to hang you when you don’t follow it.

Internet Commando: Let me punch your wife square in the face with all my 235 pounds behind it, you will hand me flowers? You’re a spineless Liberal.

Divemedic:  LOL. No, I just understand the law. A gun is not to be used to get revenge for past wrongs. That is the path to prison. I am guessing that, since you are not in prison, you don’t go around shooting anything off except your Internet commando mouth.

Apparently understanding self defense law makes me a spineless liberal.

When nuclear weapons were new, they were pretty large. Too large for carrier based aircraft, so the Air Force was tasked with building a nuclear bomber force, with the funding to come at the expense of the Army and Navy budgets. In defense of its budgets, the Navy designed a mega carrier that would carry bombers that were capable of carrying nuclear weapons. This carrier, the USS United States (CVA-58), was a bad idea and poorly designed. It was cancelled by President Truman as being an expensive boondoggle.

The legacy of CVA-58 lived on and formed the basis for the idea of the supercarrier. At their cold war height, a carrier airwing carried over 90 aircraft. When I reported aboard the USS Eisenhower, our air wing had two squadrons of F-14 Tomcat fighters, two squadrons of A-7 Corsairs, a squadron of A-6 Intruders, a squadron of S-3 Vikings, a squadron of H-3 Sea King helicopters, a squadron of five EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare aircraft, a squadron of E-2 Hawkeye AWACS aircraft, and a couple of C-2 Greyhound cargo aircraft. More than nine squadrons.

Since then, the Navy has eliminated the submarine hunting S-3, and has combined the functions of the A-6, EA-6B, KA-6D, F-14, and A-7 into just one aircraft platform: the F-18.

Now the US Navy has downsized the carrier airwing. Now the air wing consists of just 53 aircraft, about half the number of aircraft carried 30 years ago. At $12 billion each, the question is: do we still need to be building full sized supercarriers?

The Marines think they can make LHA’s, ships less than half the size of a supercarrier, operate while carrying 13 F-35s alongside the other aircraft, helicopters, and 1700 marines– at a quarter of the cost of a super carrier. Could- or should- the Navy take a look at the feasibility of a carrier that is about the size of an LHA that would carry an air wing of 25 to 30 aircraft and do it at a third of the cost? More importantly, their smaller size would mean that these smaller ships would have half the crew, and would present a much less valuable target. A smaller and less expensive carrier would mean that we could have 20 of these carriers for less money than the 12 super carriers we currently have.

In smaller conflicts, a single carrier would be deployed. For major conflicts, 2, 3, or even 4 of them could operate together. The enemy forces would then be forced to expend the additional effort needed to attack 3 or 4 carrier battle groups instead of one.

If you work in public safety, or even if you watch cop shows on television, you will hear people caught with drugs say that the drugs do not belong to them, even if the drugs are in the person’s own pocket. It seems ridiculous, right?

A man is arrested for shoplifting at a central Florida WalMart. He is found to be in possession of a stolen Glock handgun, methamphetamine, marijuana, and Klonopin. A search of criminal records reveals that, in the past three years, he has been arrested at least 5 times for drug related offenses. Each time, the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, apparently because when he was caught with drugs in the vehicle, he stated that although the drugs were within his reach, they were not his drugs.

It doesn’t seem so ridiculous when you see how often that tactic works. I wonder if it will work for this arrest, or if the police have finally found charges that the state attorney will be willing to prosecute.

There is an old saying that half of all jobs that will exist in 20 years rely on technology that has not even been invented yet. Here is the evidence that this is happening.
A few days ago, I posted that Tesla has been disabling features on their cars and holding those features ransom, forcing people who buy their cars used to pay the manufacturer to re-enable those features.
It seems that this has spawned an entirely new market for jailbreaking those cars and activating those features.