Divemedic

I am registered as an independent voter. I have not considered myself a Republican for years, mostly due to the fact that there is no functional difference between the two major parties. For that reason, I have to stake in the Trump versus Cruz, versus whoever race that the Republicans are so busy destroying their party over.

What I *do* have a stake in, is in deciding which candidate will get my vote, come November. My choice is apparently going to be Trump or Clinton. I really have little idea as where Trump truly stands on the issues, but I do know a few things:

1 Clinton is directly opposed to me and my political views in EVERY single case where I have an opinion.

2 Clinton and her supporters absolutely HATE Trump. they hate him so much that they are willing to commit violence to stop him.

3 Mexico has committed what is, in my opinion, an act of war in meddling in the internal affairs of this nation. This should be dealt with using sanctions and other means, if not by the current President, then by Trump himself, should he win the election.

While it is true that someone being an enemy of your enemy is not proof that they are your friend, it is also true that your enemy *is* your enemy, and it is better to vote for a temporary ally than it is your enemy. Anyone who is hated THAT much by the Republican establishment that brought us Romney and Christie, the Clintons, the BLM movement, the Press, and other assorted idiots cannot be ALL bad.

For that reason, I will gladly select Trump over Clinton, even without knowing how he will act once in office.

This is what it is like to be a teacher in many of our schools. Behold the state of American public schools:

Why do teachers have to put up with this? Why aren’t these ne’er do wells being expelled? What are the odds that this violent child will become a doctor?

Last February 28th, there were 1,374,341 concealed weapons permits in the state of Florida. A year later, there are now 1,529,132 Florida concealed weapons permits. That is an eleven percent increase from just a year ago. The wait for a new permit is longer than the 90 days permitted by Florida law, but the backlog is due to the large numbers of applications that are being processed. One in 10.3 adults in the state of Florida have a concealed weapons permit.

My own permit expires this June, and I am going in to the licensing office this week to renew it.

This right here is why voters are selecting Trump. When the Republican party cannot even oppose a lame duck President’s election year SCOTUS appointment of a liberal anti-gunner, they have become indistinguishable from the Democrats.

Voters are fed up, and they are preparing to nuke the site from orbit.

It’s the only way to be sure.

In Florida, there were no Presidential primaries before 1972. The turnout in primaries has been spotty at best, with voter turnout not being more than 45% since 1980, the year that Reagan was in the race. In fact, the last primary where there were candidates running in both parties was 2008, with a turnout of 42%.
This year, turnout is estimated to have been 46%. That is more remarkable, considering that Republican turnout was 103,288 in Orange County, putting Republican turnout at 51.3%. Democrat turnout was 104,441, putting Democrat turnout at only 35.8%.
Trump seems to be energizing the Republican base. Hillary does not.

According to psychologists, scents are the most powerful of triggers for memory. This happens due to the anatomy of the brain: the olfactory bulb, which processes scents in the brain, is located right next to the amygdala and hippocampus, which are the parts of the brain that control emotion and memory. There are no other senses whose signals pass through these  parts of the brain. This means that the memories the we have that are attached to a particular scent are the most emotionally powerful memories that we have.

I have known this for years, but I got to experience it for the first time today. My fiance and I were shopping to buy me some new after shave, and she had me smelling different ones that had been sprayed on sample cards. I smelled one, and I had an immediate flashback. It was the most powerful and stunning memory that I have ever experienced.

A true out of body experience. In an instant, I was no longer standing in the store. I was standing in my boyhood home, I was 12 years old, and I was hugging my father. The smell of my father tickled my nose. The experience was complete: the smell, the sounds, the sights. I was once again a 12 year old boy who was hugging his father. My father has been dead for more than a decade.

I looked to my right at where I knew my fiance was standing, and I remember croaking out, “It’s my father.” Then I was back. the flashback was over, and it had only lasted for 2 or 3 seconds, but it was emotionally stunning. I broke out into tears, and it took me a minute or two to come to my senses and realize that it was not really happening. I left the store shaking.

This flashback was by far the most powerful memory that I have ever experienced, and it was all triggered by the smell of an aftershave. My fiance asked me if I wanted that one, and I told her no. I will be sure to avoid that one in the future.

In the spirit of our ongoing discussion about the ATF classification of AOW, and largely because I am bored because I cannot watch the news for fear of hearing election news, I wanted to touch base on some of the more outrageous rules that will have you run afoul of the NFA, mostly because ATF rulings can be confusing and arbitrary, to say the least.

There was a case where a man was accused of illegal possession of a machine gun for having an M-14 rifle that had been modified to make it into a semiautomatic rifle. The ATF agent testified that he was able to readily convert the rifle into a machine gun. Read on:

I examined (the firearm) and determined that it was originally manufactured as a machinegun by the Winchester Company in New Haven, Connecticut. (The rifle) can accept machinegun components and has machinegun components installed, but the engagement surface of the sear release has been removed, and the sear release has been welded to the selector shaft. In this condition, (the rifle) is functional as a semi-automatic firearm, but the machinegun parts have been locked in place by the welded sear release/selector shaft.
To determine if (the rifle) could be readily restored to shoot in an automatic manner, I used a multipurpose rotary tool with a cutting wheel to cut through the sear release. I then removed the sear release, selector shaft, and selector-shaft lock from (the rifle) and installed a sear release, selector shaft, selector spring, and selector from an M-14 machinegun.
The technician did not modify the receiver during all of reassembly, and then fired the gun to see if it would fire full auto. At that point, he wrote, “I discovered that the sear … did not have an engagement surface for the sear release.” So, he replaced the trigger group of the rifle with another trigger group which contained the sear with an engagement surface and eventually got the rifle to fire three rounds with a single press of the trigger.

The jury disagreed that replacing the entire fire control group fit the definition of “readily convertible” and found the man not guilty.The man’s name was Albert K. Kwan

Now that I am safely in my new job as a physics and chemistry teacher, I can share a few more facts about my old employer. I am still somewhat restricted for other reasons, but let me share:

 My old school has a very high turnover rate in the core subjects: Science, English, and Math.

There are 22 teachers in those subjects.

• There are nine science teaching positions. In the two years since I was hired there, those nine positions have been filled with 17 different teachers. 
• There are six math positions. During those same two years, those six positions have been filled with eight different teachers. 
• There are seven English positions. During the past two years, there have been nine different teachers.  

22 classrooms filled with 34 teachers in the past two years. That equates to an annual turnover rate of 40% for core subjects, and a whopping 100% annual turnover rate in the Science department. There has not been a single Science teacher who has been there longer than 5 years and the average is less than two years.

Florida has a big problem retaining teachers. Average teacher turnover in the nation is 20 percent, with this school doubling that in the core subjects. Reading the link you can see that students getting teachers fired is not a problem that is unique to my previous employer.

High turnover is expensive. One study claimed that taxpayers in Florida paid out $130 million in additional costs due to the teacher retention problem.

As for me and my new job, I have my work cut out for me. My students have been with substitutes for the past two months, and are woefully behind. There are 60 school days left in the year, and I will be spending them trying to get my students caught up to where they should be and having to make up for them losing nearly a quarter of the school year’s instructional time.

I posted the other day, asking if the Cell phone gun is an AOW. SiliconeGrayBeard asks this:

 I don’t see why it would be an AOW. The bizarre shape? Foldable grip? I don’t see why that’s different than guns like the North American holster grip 22/22Magnum.

I seem to have misplaced my copy of those rules, though.

The rules are arbitrary and stupid, as I posted about in this post here. The difference is that the North American Holster Grip pistol leaves the action and barrel exposed. In other words, it is obviously a handgun. What earns you a classification as an AOW is manufacturing a firearm that doesn’t LOOK like a firearm. This is why Cane guns, pen guns, and previous cell phone guns have been declared to be AOWs.

When contacted, the company claims that it is not an AOW, and that they have classified the weapon as a pistol with a folding grip. The problem is that they do not have anything from the ATF stating that they agree with the manufacturer.

Some claims I read in comments made by the company on their Facebook page:

* working prototype expected in May 2016
* production hopefully begins July 2016, sales shortly after
* was originally conceived as a 3-barrel .22WMR, then changed to .32, then ultimately, .380 acp, which is what the production model will be
* they classify this as a pistol with a folding grip, which they say keeps it out of AOW territory

I think I’d like to see the ATF agree before dropping any money on one of these. I would hate to get a visit from the ATF after buying one.