Divemedic

Here comes the media, claiming that the brother of the terrorist from San Barnardino is a Navy veteran, decorated for his role in the war on terror. They make it seem as though he was out killing terrorists with his bare hands, but the NY Daily News lists his awards:

Good conduct medal
Serve four years without getting in trouble, and you get this one.

National Defense Service Medal: 
Everyone in the military since 9/11 gets this one.

Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal:
This one is given to the members of any unit that was within the theater of operations.

Global War on Terror Service Medal
All military who deploy to the Middle East get this one.

Sea Service Deployment Ribbon
This one means his ship was away from its home port for 90 days or more. Pretty much everyone in the Navy who is assigned to a ship gets this one.

He served from 2003 to 2007. His awards were the equivalent of a participation trophy. The first two are give to pretty much everyone, and the last three were because the ship he was assigned to (the USS Enterprise) went to the Persian Gulf in 2004. He got those medals along with the other 10,000 people on the ships in that battle group. This is not some set of awards for heroic actions. He was never within a thousand miles of a terrorist, with the exception of his brother.

This is spin by the media to distract us from what his brother did, and to make us all believe that this was not the act of terrorist Muslims.

The press and the President are actually helping pro gun forces this week. You see, they all have been busy trying to spin the terror incident in California as “workplace violence” instead of the terrorist act that everyone knows it to be.  Even the people who are trying to sell this as a workplace shooting don’t believe what they are peddling.

Last month, in the week after the Paris shootings, the sales of guns set a new record. For the sixth month in a row. Each month sees a new all time high in gun sales. Americans are arming themselves like never before. In fact, Americans have bought nearly 20 million firearms so far this year, and I am predicting that December will see even more sales than the previous six record setting months. My prediction is that the year will end with over 22 million NICS checks.

Why? Because EVERYONE senses the problems that are coming, and this ISIS terrorist attack is going to accelerate the trend.

So how does this add up to the press doing us a favor? Because even people who are uninformed on the issue are beginning to see the light. Gun free zones are a lie. Gun laws don’t protect you. They are scared, and they aren’t buying into the anti gun rhetoric any more.

The emperor has no clothes, and everyone is beginning to see.

Orangepizza:

#GreedosLifeMatters

Followed by Purpleraindrop:

Hans up, don’t shoot!

Seen as a comment to this.

More than a few times, I have discussed so-called “free” health care on this blog. The fact that giving someone a product or service at no cost to them means that someone else must provide that product or service for reduced wages or free. In this case of health care, that means that doctors become what are essentially slave workers who earn less than cab drivers.

We constantly hear about how Great Britain has such a great system, and how much better the NHS is that the system we have in the US. The doctors in the UK disagree. Junior doctors, who represent 50% of the physicians in the UK, are going on strike. Why? Doctors there make only US$34,000 per year to start, and top out at US$45,000 per year. Doctors in the UK work 90 to  100 hours a week. There are laws in the EU to prevent doctors from working more than 48 hours a week, but they are encouraged to waive that right and work more. Assuming an 80 hour workweek, a junior doctor in the UK makes between $8.17 and $10.62 an hour.

How does that compare to other professions? There are cab drivers in London who make US$100,000 per year. Accountants make US$45,000 per year to start, and attorneys make US$60,000 to start. Doctors, being upset about this state of affairs, are threatening to strike. The government is going to press charges against any doctor whose refusal to work long hours for low pay results in risking patient’s health.

That is called slavery.

Even with all of that, there are waitlists of more than a year for medical treatment for some, and the average wait for a surgical procedure is 18 weeks.

Tell me again how we want to emulate that system.

I spent Thanksgiving day as a volunteer: I was helping prepare and serve meals to 170 elderly people who have no family or friends to spend the Holiday with. The meal consisted of ham, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, corn, rolls, and pumpkin pie. The meal, which cost $12 per person, was prepared and served entirely by Veterans of the US military, who volunteered to serve yet again. It gave those people a place to go on Thanksgiving.

I learned over more than 2 decades of service as a paramedic and firefighter that most people who frequent charity soup kitchens are poor because of their own poor choices, so I didn’t want to serve in a soup kitchen where some ungrateful welfare kings and queens would feel I owed them something.

I then spent Black Friday at home. Watching TV and reading a book. What I didn’t do was emulate those idiots who were at Wal Mart, engaging in fist fights to get a cheap TV set or vegetable steamer.

From 1989 to 2010, police seized $12.6 billion worth of property and cash through asset forfeiture. The amount seized has been growing exponentially. In 2014 alone, Federal law enforcement agencies alone managed to seize $4.5 billion worth of property and currency. State and local police are taking in another half billion or so each year, making the total seized in a given year somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 billion.

The police write about $6.2 billion in speeding tickets every year in the US. One in five US drivers will receive a ticket every year, for a total of 41 million tickets written. Each police officer writes $300,000 in traffic tickets each year. The police have admitted that traffic tickets are used as a fundraising tool.

There are 12,000 local police departments in the United States, and the combined budgets of them and Federal law enforcement come to just over $126 billion each year.

According to the FBI, there were 8.9 million property crimes for 2012 in the US, meaning that there were 4 times more traffic stops than there were thefts. Burglars managed to steal $3.9 billion in property. Larceny, the most common property crime, cost the public $4.7 billion in 2012.

In fact, the total cost of all property crime for 2012 was about $12.6 billion. That includes Auto theft, robbery, burglary, shoplifting, all of it. Everything stolen by criminals.

Let’s run the totals (all figures in billions of US dollars):
Police cost is:
Budgeted costs: 126
Asset forfeiture: 5
Traffic tickets: 6.2

Total cost of US policing: $137.2 billion per year

Property crime: $12.6 billion per year.

The conclusion here is obvious: The financial cost of police is simply too high. We are wasting our money. In fact, if police were eliminated and all crime was 10 times worse than it is now, we would still be saving money.

Does this mean that I am advocating that we eliminate police? Of course not. What it means is that we must look at how we are spending our law enforcement dollar, and realize that our police are far too focused on fundraising activities instead of preventing crime and actually catching criminals.

I  have been in a relationship for nearly two years, and she is from New York. Her attitude towards gun ownership was initially a difficult one to swallow. I got her to agree to come shooting with me. I started her on a .22 pistol- my Sig Mosquito. She got the chance to see how a firearm is a tool, nothing more. A firearm is no more dangerous than a hammer, and frankly, it is much easier to learn to shoot a firearm than it is to drive a car.

Yet another international headline that flies in the face of Obama’s declaration that mass shootings only happen in the US because of our “lax gun laws.” France has gun laws that are MUCH more strict than the US, and there are more than 150 dead in this latest attack.

A Washington Post article from last January estimates that the number of illegal guns in France is now at least twice the number of legal guns

Tell me again that gun laws work to prevent anything.

I teach 4 classes of Biology, and 2 of Chemistry. I have a total of 122 students. So far this week, they have turned in a total of 372 papers and 118 exams. The final papers are due for their science projects.

We are now 15 weeks into the school year. In the county where I am teaching high school science, each science student is required to do a science project where they perform a scientific inquiry, using sound scientific principles. I break this project into several assignments over a 16 week period, so that the students have a chance to work through the process.

Each student, and their parents, are told that the project accounts for about 30% of their grade for the semester. I have about a dozen students who decided not to do ANY of the science project. As you can imagine, they are not doing much else in class, so 8 of them are receiving an F for the semester, and the other 4 are all earning a D.

I ate dinner tonight and checked my email right after, when I noticed that 5 students emailed me to tell me that they lost their login to the system and cannot turn in their projects, and want an extension. Another student is using a typo on the class website to try and go all bedroll lawyer on me, claiming that my typo means he gets a three day extension. His father just emailed me, demanding that I answer his son’t email tonight.

I AM OFF WORK. I am not at the beck and call of parents and students at night while I am home. They will just have to wait until tomorrow.

Vent complete.