Divemedic

Wish list

In a recent online debate about crime, a poster stated that I should support “reasonable gun control” to eliminate crime. I asked what he considered “reasonable” and this is the list he came up with:

– No automatic or semi-automatic weapons (i.e. only manually operated actions allowed – e.g. break, block, bolt, pump or lever action)
– No external magazines or clips (these are too easily re-loaded)
– No speed strips or loaders
– No ammunition capacity greater than five rounds (give the poor deer a chance)
– No expanding (e.g. hollow-tip or soft point) or +P ammunition (hollow-tips are banned by the Geneva Convention)
– No steel core or tipped ammunition (can penetrate Law Enforcement vests)
– No lead bullets or shot (too harmful to the environment)
– No bimetallic jacketed or tracer bullets (can cause forest fires)
– No bayonet lugs
– No handgun capable of muzzle energy greater than 250 ft-lbs
– No long gun capable of muzzle energy greater than 850 ft-lbs
– No handgun with a barrel shorter than 5 inches
– No plastic or “polymer” framed firearms (can defeat metal detectors)
– No rifle or shotgun with a barrel shorter than 20 inches
– No rifle or shotgun with a pistol style grip or retractable/folding stock
– No silencers, flash suppressors, muzzle breaks, compensators or threaded barrels
– No laser or night sights
– No pistol “stabilizing braces”
– All firearms must be stored and transported unloaded
– 100% registration of all firearms (with serial number & ballistic print on file)
– A 10 business day waiting period on all firearm sales
– No concealed or open carry
– Background checks and fees for all ammunition sales or transfers
– No sales of firearms or ammunition through the mail
– No sale or possession of more than 100 rounds of a particular cartridge type
– Gun locks required for firearm transport and in homes with minors under the age of 21
– Limit gun purchases to 1 per month / 2 per year / 4 maximum
– A 80% sales tariff on all gun and ammunition sales
– No private assembly of ammunition or reloading of spent cases
– All gun owners required to perform inventory inspections every 10 days and report all missing firearms
– All gun owners required to purchase mandatory liability insurance
– Federal annual permit required for all gun ownership… includes safety training, fingerprinting, photo, drug testing and mental health evaluation
Don’t let anyone tell you that they don’t want your guns…
By Divemedic, ago

Wheels coming off?

In this video, we have a crowd of people who attack a police officer and the citizen who was assisting him in making an arrest. (I tried to embed it, but it wouldn’t work.)

Now we have people who are attacking police nationwide. There is a pattern forming here, and it doesn’t look good. If the trend gets worse, will we have calls for a national police force? Think of how quickly the TSA was formed in response to 9/11.

Obama  has been stirring emotions against the police since the Beer Summit, then the Zimmerman case, then Michael Brown, and on and on. Never let a crisis go to waste, especially if you are the one who caused it.

By Divemedic, ago

Government logic

Let’s say that you are the government agency charged with keeping track of the economy. Let’s say that the data shows that the economy is not doing so well. What do you do? Why, change the way that you ‘adjust’ the data, of course!
Problem solved! The economy is great again!
This works for all sorts of data: unemployment figures, global warming, inflation, why it works with nearly anything!
Now we take you back to dancing with the Hell’s Kitchen Shores.

By Divemedic, ago

Ten years

Ten years ago this evening, I was in bed at 11 o’clock at night when my phone rang. It was a Friday. As soon as I answered the phone, I could hear it was my mother, and I could hear that she was crying. She sounded scared.

I was instantly awake.
Her words to me were, “It’s your Father. They are doing CPR on him. I think it was his heart.”
They got pulses back. My dad spend the next ten days in the hospital, never waking again, and then passed away.
I still miss him.

I reprint this tribute to him and to my son.

Like any boy, I loved my father. A boy’s love for his father is not the affection you show for a lover, nor is it even remotely like the love of a mother for her children. You see, boys have a need to seek the approval of their fathers. They are driven by an overwhelming need to grow into even a fraction of the man that they perceive their fathers to be. Most of all, they want to earn the respect of their Dad.

I fought in a war. I gave him grandchildren. I became the first person in my family tree to graduate from college. I have delivered babies, I have held others as the life slipped from their bodies. I have pulled dying people out of burning buildings, I jumped in a lake to save a drowning man from an alligator. When my dad had a heart attack, I was the medic who worked on him. I have filled sandbags in Missouri to save flooding homes, sifted through ruined homes looking for the dead in disasters, and fed the survivors. All of these things I did, trying to be half the man I perceived him to be. I began to teach classes on medical procedures, hoping to teach the next generation of providers. Again, for him.

Then, he was gone. I carried him to his grave, and since that time, I have carried my grief around in my heart like a lead weight, and at times it has been nearly overpowering. I asked myself countless times if I measured up.

This morning, my son came to me with 2 movie tickets and asked me if I wanted to go out with him. We spent the afternoon with each other. I am proud of my son, as he starts his new job on Monday as a firefighter. As I looked at him on the way home, I realized that my son was trying to be larger than life.

Just like his Dad.

I finally did it Dad, I am just like you.

and to you, son: You have indeed earned my respect. You have fulfilled every expectation and dream that any father has a right to hope for his son.


My son? He is now larger than life himself. He is a nurse who is in charge of one of the busiest emergency rooms in the state. A Flight nurse, he flies critical patients on fixed wing aircraft, taking them all over the world. He has become one hell of a good man.

By Divemedic, ago

Malware

I did an upgrade to my computer last week. I got everything up and running, all of my software installed, and all was fine.
Until this morning.

I woke up to find that I was infected with a malicious program called Startpoint. It was nasty. It high jacked my internet browser, and according to online sources, it is also a keylogger and leaves your system open to numerous exploits.

I tried quite a few tricks to rid myself of it. Following online directions didn’t work- using three different anti virus programs didn’t work. I tried editing the registry directly, that didn’t work.

Finally, I used Malware Bytes. That did the trick. It found 6 entries in the Registry that I had missed, along with two files that reinstalled the program every time it was deleted.

By Divemedic, ago

Dindo Nuffin

A woman with an extensive criminal history steals a firearm and a vehicle. When apprehended by police, she escapes and fires three shots at the officers, who return fire, killing her.

The woman’s family blames police for “killing another black person.” Says her mother:

She might have stole a car here or there, she was a wild child. She didn’t do nuthin that would deserve her to be dead.

By Divemedic, ago

Laws

Ignorance of the law, the judges and cops are fond of saying, is no excuse. In 1925, this is what a complete copy of all Federal laws looked like:

That one volume represents all of the laws that were passed by Congress in the first 150 years of this country’s existence. That Federal Law library has now expanded immensely.

What was one volume in 1925 expanded to become 22 volumes just 90 years later. That isn’t all, though. There is also the United States Code:

The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves, which include things like rape, murder, or theft. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves, such as owning a machine gun made after 1986, when owning one made in 1985 is perfectly legal.

In 1982, the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question.

So you see, even the Justice Department of the US government is not sure of how many laws there are, yet each and every one of us is responsible for knowing every one of them, along with the court cases that modify and define them, upon penalty of prison.

That isn’t all. Congress isn’t the only body that passes laws. There are also several dozen Federal bureaus, who have had the power to write laws since 1940. The laws that they write are called regulations, and they are found in the Code of Federal Regulations:

The laws passed by Congress are just the beginning. In 2013, the Code of Federal Regulations numbered over 175,000 pages. Only a fraction of those pages involved regulations based on something spelled out in legislation. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.

The result of all of this is that each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over 750,000 pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12, and you read 50 pages per day, by age 53, you would have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws, and 28 years of reading to your quest.

Remember, though: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you are spraying insect killer on some ants, and the can label says spray from 6 inches away, and you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal. If you are buying a gun, and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.

Why is this happening? Ayn  Rand gives us an insight into this:

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Truer words were never spoken.

By Divemedic, ago

Prepping tool

There is a tool set that has a hammer drill, circular saw, jig saw, table saw, drill press, scroll saw, and a hand light. It is battery powered with an 18V battery with a 1 hour charge time, but can also run off of standard 120V wall outlets. Two batteries are included as part of the set.

All of it comes in a portable carrying case that doubles as a stainless steel work surface. Weighing in at 16Kg, it is small and portable enough to be part of a cache, or in a BOV. The entire set costs $315. Now, I am not saying that this is a replacement for your home workshop, but the fact that it is in a relatively small, lightweight case, and that it is battery powered makes it ideal for working in remote conditions where electricity isn’t available.
Amazon users rated it with 4 1/2 stars. I think I am going to buy one.
I am not being compensated for this, nor do I have any relationship with the company that makes it.

By Divemedic, ago