Divemedic

I have spent the four years since I retired largely without health insurance. Since I was paying as I went, I only saw a doctor when I had a problem. I finally got a full time job that offers insurance, and I paid for the best plan they had, which costs me $40 a month by payroll deduction. I went to see a doctor. I had some complaints that I needed addressed, the largest of which was my high blood pressure. Over the past few years, I had been going to Mexico and buying blood pressure medication over the counter there, because it is cheaper to do so than seeing a doctor here.

I had also noticed, over the past six months some odd things with my health, and I thought I knew what the problem was, but needed a doctor to confirm it. It turns out that I was correct: I am now a diabetic. What this means is that I have to watch my diet, and I am going to be taking about 11 pills a day for the rest of my life. Failure to do so will result in my losing finger, toes, vision, kidneys, and finally having a heart attack. I would rather take the pills, thank you.

Diabetes can be managed, and it isn’t the death sentence that it once was. However, it reminds you that you are mortal. 50 years old is just around the corner, and I am closer to 60 years old than I am to 35. It seems like just a few weeks ago that I was in my 20s.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

As to the insane cost of health care and medication:

I blame the insurance companies and the government for this. Why? Because every time I went for a checkup, the doctor wanted to do $500 worth of blood work. The fact that most people have insurance contributes to the cost of this blood work because this divorces the person receiving the service (the patient) from the person providing the service (the lab and the doctor) and the person paying for the service (the insurance company or the government, in the case of Medicare).

This distorts the supply/demand curve, as increasing prices do not reduce demand. What you get then, is people demanding for a product, cost be damned. When it isn’t your money, it is easy to claim that money is no object. Once that happens, there is no market force to prevent costs from going up, but lots of demand for products and services, which drives prices through the roof. The other force that reduces supply, thus increasing cost, is government licensing of health professionals, but that is a post for another day.

Wanna find a way to reduce costs? The purchaser and the user HAVE to be the same person. In a government run healthcare system, the government is the purchaser AND the payer, and you as the patient get whatever services that the purchaser decides you get. In a private system, the user is the purchaser and payer.

Three years ago, I opened an account at Prosper. I opened the account with $50 as a test of the company. I loaned $50 for 60 months at 23.96%. the borrower had requested 25,000, and I supplied $50 of that.

The borrower made timely payments for about three years, and I rolled over the $35 that had been repaid to me into a 36 month loan at 16.90%.

Both borrowers have since defaulted. I wound up getting $20.12 of my original $50 investment back. In other words, I lost 59% of my investment.

Then I ran across this article about how the big banks have taken over peer to peer lending.

I have decided that I do better in the casino than I do investing. I played in the stock market, and lost more than half of my money when the market crashed in 2008.

I tried peer to peer, where I lost 60% of my money.

I tried real estate when I bought a house in 2007, only to see it lose half its value two years later.

I am actually on the plus side from playing Craps in the casino.

The anti gunners keep saying that they want a reasonable discussion about gun control.

Here is how a recent discussion that I had with an anti gunner went:

Anti gunner:

A strong majority of gun owners and non gun owners support stronger restrictions on firearms, according to a national survey conducted by Johns Hopkins University.

Divemedic:

You know that reading a news story about a study is not the same thing as seeing the study, right? Let me look at the study and see what it says. I have been searching the databases, but can’t seem to find the study anywhere.Would you happen to know the author or the title of the study?

Antigunner:

I really don’t care. I think Most NRA member lie though their teeth. Their a bunch of sick evil people in my book. I compare them to being members of some demonic church of the gun. Feeding on the Blood of the Innocent.

So much for reasonable discussion. That is what they think of you.


Another anti gunner on the same site came out with the “we should treat cars like guns” meme, and I countered with LawDog’s theory on why that isn’t REALLY what they want. My post was deleted. Reasonable discussion, indeed.

When I was in school, we were all taught that the period of time between the collapse of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Italian Renaissance was called the Dark Age. The reason it was referred to as such, was there was a general collapse of society, resulting in a loss of knowledge, a decline in the arts, and great societal upheaval. Of course, there are now historians who are attempting to deny those ideas, and since I am no historian, nor was I there, I cannot say either way.

***EDITED TO ADD: I am a Science teacher, and we are required to give students a certain number of literacy assignments each year, so that the kids can practice their writing and reading skills. In this assignment, they had to discuss a science topic of their choice, describing the facts and science behind their subject, and providing evidence for their statements using valid, peer reviewed references. END EDIT *****

What I can say is that we are seeing the dawn of a “Dark Age” of our own. Perhaps we can call it “the Great Unlearning.” As a teacher, I can say that the children who are making it to High School  are functional idiots in many cases. Let me show you an excerpt of a paper that I received this week. This paper was written by a High School Senior, and I looked at his grades from the first three years of English class, and they are all B’s. This year in Senior English, his average is currently a 93%. Read on, and see the language skills that net you a 93%:

Next there is many emotions related to music, their can be high alerting if the tone of a song or pitch is high or low in a song. According to songs with positivity, this will put a high amount of good emotion on a person who was in a bad mood.  If someone listens to “Eye of  The Tiger” by Savior, they are going to be put into a better mood because there is a positive message involved with this song. Your brain is effected by your emotions when you listen to certain music such as mellow tunes, or heavy metal.

Now I know what you are thinking: You think that this cannot be typical, and I can understand where that comes from. Let’s look at another student’s work. This student is a Senior who, according to her father, is leaving next fall for college as a pre-med student. She has 2 A’s and a B for her previous three English classes, and is currently earning a 91% in her Senior English class:

Plants are very important for us to live. The oxygen that is made for millions of dollars, they give us for free. Plants have some requirements in order to sustain life, stay health, and green. Every living thing on earth has some requirements to live. For example, alligators need fish for survival, hens need insects for survival, fish need water for survival and tiger need meat for the survival. Every living thing in the world has different requirements for the survival and if one of their requirements is not met, they will have some kind of loss.

One more sample of what I have been dealing with. This student is a Sophomore, and he earned a 79% for his final grade in English last year. He currently has a 78% in English this year.

If you were to listen to music while working. Which music genre way to help you focus more. This project will come in handy for teachers that allow students to listen to music so they can prefer what the student will listen too.
First Off, It would help us in many ways such as stops us from talking and also let us focus and finish our work quicker. During class say you have headphones on and keeping your brain focus on schoolwork you would be focus and not be able to get distracted by friends and people sitting around you. Also while listening music it helps you get your work done Quicker so you’re not stranded during class and also it will keep you out of trouble from talking and interrupting the teacher.

The following is a list of the law enforcement agencies with a presence in Washington, DC:

First, there are the Feds. There are over 6,000 Federal Law enforcement agents and police in DC, but no one outside of high level government officials is sure how many more than 6,000 there are, because that is classified:
The US Secret Service
US Park Police (1,800 officers in the park police alone)
FBI Special Investigations
US Marshals
Armed Forces Retirement Home Police
National Zoological Park Police
US Capitol Police
US Supreme Court Police
Smithsonian Police
US State Department Diplomatic Security Service
US Naval Criminal Investigative Service
US Army Criminal Investigative Service
US Air Force Office of Special Investigations
US Coast Guard Criminal Investigative Service
US Pentagon Police
US Department of Defense Police
US Mint Police
Bureau of Engraving and Printing Police
US Postal Police
Homeland Security Investigations
FBI Police (uniformed division)
Federal Protective Service
Government Printing Office Police
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives
Federal Bureau of Prisons Police
Drug Enforcement Administration
US Department of Veterans Affairs Police
Amtrak Police
US Army Military Police Corps
US Federal Reserve Police

Second are the Municipal police agencies, with a total of more than 5,200 sworn officers:
District of Columbia Metropolitan Police
District of Columbia Protective Services Police
District of Columbia Department of Corrections
District of Columbia Public Library Police
District of Columbia Public Schools Police
District of Columbia Housing Authority Police

Then there are the college campus police, representing more than 1,000 more law enforcement officers:
American University Police Department
Catholic University Department of Public Safety
Gallaudet University Department of Public Safety
George Washington University Police Department
Georgetown University Police Department
Howard University Campus Police
University of the District of Columbia Police Department

In all, there are more than 12,000 law enforcement personnel in the DC area, meaning that there are more than 2,000 law enforcement officers for every 100,000 residents. This makes Washington DC the most heavily policed city in the world.

With that, DC saw its 105th murder of the year in July, meaning that the city is on pace to see a murder rate of more than 16 per 100,000 for 2015. This makes DC’s murder rate more than three times higher than the national average, and the highest in the nation.

or you will go to jail.

How is that? A man named Devonte Conerly who was suspected in a hit and run incident, and was allegedly tried to disarm the police officer who was attempting to arrest him. The police officer asked the crowd nearby to help him, and no in the crowd did anything to intervene. Officers responding to the original officer’s call for help eventually subdued and handcuffed Conerly.

What did they do next? They threatened the members of the crowd with arrest under section 13A of Alabama’s legal code, which reads:

(a) A person commits the crime of refusing to aid a peace officer if, upon command by a peace officer identified to him as such, he fails or refuses to aid such peace officer in:
(1) Effecting or securing a lawful arrest; or
(2) Preventing the commission by another person of any offense.
(b) A person is not liable under this section if the failure or refusal to aid the officer was reasonable under the circumstances. The burden of injecting this issue is on the defendant, but this does not shift the burden of proof.
(c) Refusing to aid a peace officer is a Class C misdemeanor.

So you MUST, by law, assist any officer who asks for assistance. Even so, the Supreme Court has decreed that the police do not have to help YOU if you are asking. 44 of the 50 states have a similar statute.

Police have “no special duty” to aid a citizen facing an immediate lethal threat, according to the City Attorney of New York, in a successful bid to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Lozito. Lozito was nearly killed while subduing a spree killer named Maxim Gelman during a 2011 subway attack.

As Lozito placed Gelman in a chokehold, the maniac stabbed Lonzito in the head. Bleeding and struggling to retain consciousness, Lozito pleaded for help from NYPD Officer Terrance Howell, who was hiding behind a locked partition and refusing to get involved. It wasn’t until AFTER Lozito managed to pin Gelman down and disarm him that Howell emerged from his secure location, officiously telling Lozito, “You can get up now.”

Howell did nothing to detain or subdue the murderer, but he was the one photographed triumphantly escorting Gelman away from the scene in handcuffs, and was called a “hero cop” in the media. He later admitted to a member of a grand jury that he hid from the suspect out of fear for his safety — and no moral or policy consideration is more important than the sacred principle of “officer safety.”

Here is the rub: the police officer is protected by quallified immunity if it turns out that the arrest or the force used to affect it is unlawful. You do not.

In the state of Florida for the year 2012, there were a significant number of cases where prescription painkilling drugs were the cause of a person’s death.

The drug that caused the most deaths was alprazolam, commonly known as Xanax, which was responsible for 323 deaths. Xanaax is prescribed for anxiety disorders and panic attacks. No one ever died of a panic attack, and anxiety is not in itself a fatal condition. The drug that is most often used to treat it kills 323 people a year in Florida alone. Benzodiazepines, which is the family of drugs that include Xanax, killed 2,622 people in Florida in 2012.

Oxxycodone, which is prescribed by doctors as a painkiller and is sold under the name Oxycontin, kills 392 people in Florida each year. Pain is not a fatal condition, and doesn’t kill anyone.

Prescription drugs account for 80.9 percent of all drug deaths when alcohol is excluded. The CDC reports that 46 (almost 17,000 per year) people die every day from prescription painkiller overdoses.  The rate of death for prescription painkillers is 11.1 per 100,000 for Florida in 2012.

Compare that to homicide: in 2012, there were 721 homicides in which a firearm was used as the murder weapon, for a firearm murder rate of  3.8 per 100,000. (In 2014, there were 687, a rate of 3.4 per 100,000)

I am not saying that we should make prescription drugs illegal. I am saying that we should look at the issues with firearms using a bit of perspective.