Divemedic

In the majority opinion of the Heller case, the Supreme court said:

“We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms.
Miller
(an earlier case) said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons
protected were those “in common use at the time”. We think that
limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of
prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ” 

This has been called the “common use” test. This can be a dangerous precedent, because what is not in common use today may be the best thing tomorrow. Case in point:

 A doctor in London thinks that he can use psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, to treat depression. However, the problem is that the drug is a class I controlled substance, meaning that it is highly addictive and has no recognized medical use. For that reason, scientists and doctors cannot even use the drug in studies to investigate whether or not it has a medical use. In other words, since it is not in common use, no one may use it, even to find out if it CAN be useful. That is the problem with “common use” tests.

This line of reasoning means that the founding fathers meant for the Constitution to only protect muskets, as they were all that was in common use at the time of ratification. I cannot believe that the founders could possibly be so short sighted. If this were the case, the First Amendment would not protect your right to speech on the internet, over the telephone, or on the radio.

Here in the US, the Republican party is all for drug prohibition and fully supports this application of the common use test. Marijuana is itself a class 1 controlled substance, and the Republicans refuse to admit that it has, or ever can have, a legitimate medical use. The Republicans: for smaller, less intrusive government. Unless it involves drugs. Or sex. Or marriage. Or forcing people to learn about religion in school. Or making alcohol off limits during the hours that church is in session. Or…

This anti-gun screed is so full of fail, it is sickening. Drop by and give him your opinion.

I read an article yesterday that claims the rate of inflation in the US is 1.3 percent, and 10 year treasury yields are holding at 1.69 percent. The two are tied together, and they are both being manipulated.

The official inflation numbers are being massaged. They exclude energy and food, which is a major part of our expenses. Let’s take a look at what energy and food are doing. This website began tracking the prices of 30 grocery items, plus a gallon of gasoline in 2008. What they found was the cost of these items was:

$54.11 in 2008.
$70.37 in March of 2011, an inflation rate of about 9%.
$76.86 in August of 2011, meaning an annual inflation rate of about 18%.
$79.28, in September of 2012, a 3% inflation rate.

The only thing that has slowed down inflation is the cost of housing from 2008-2009, with the crash of the housing market. That has since corrected itself. Look at the prices here.

Interestingly, average wages in the US are 20 times higher than they were in 1930.
A new house is 62 times more expensive
A new car is 47 times more expensive.
Gasoline is 21 times as much.
Bread 31 times.
Beef 33 times as much as 1930.

In terms of real purchasing power, this is the poorest generation in over 100 years.

Sidney Crosby, known as “Sid the Kid” was a rising star player for the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins. In his first season in the NHL, he was the sixth most productive scorer in the league. In his second, he was the number one most productive scorer. His future was bright. Until the fifth season, when he took blows to the head twice within a four day period. He began showing unspecified “concussion-like symptoms,” missed the rest of that season, the playoffs, and the first quarter of the following season. All from taking two blows to the head while wearing a helmet. Sid eventually recovered and is playing again, but remember that that head injury took nearly a year to recover from.

How is this related to guns? Dr. Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health claimed on January 13 that:

The gun is a great equalizer because it makes wimps as dangerous as
people who really have skill and bravery and so I’d like to have this
notion that anyone using a gun is a wuss. They aren’t anybody to be
looked up to. They’re somebody to look down at because they couldn’t
defend themselves or couldn’t protect others without using a gun.

Now some of you may see where I am going with this, and others will think that I am advocating that hockey players should shoot opposing players with handguns.

The reason I bring up Sidney Crosby is simple: There is this attitude in the United States that when a person attacks you, you should try to engage in some sort of boxing match, and if you are unable to adequately defend yourself from a larger, faster, or more skilled opponent, you should “take your ass whipping like a man.” This comes mainly from the Hollywood fallacy that people can take a hit to the head that is sufficient to knock them unconscious and wake up with nothing worse to show for it than a headache. The fact is: ANY blow to the head is potentially fatal, as this article describes.  

The fact is that fists and feet are the murder weapons in over 700 murders a year. In fact, in 2011, an 11 year old girl killed a classmate with her bare hands. Taking away the ability for that homosexual to defend himself from the teens that want to beat him up, the woman who is the intended victim of a rapist, the senior citizen from the violent Burger King employee, or the man in a wheelchair from his attacker doesn’t make us manlier, it makes us more of a “survival of the fittest” Darwinian society and society fails. For isn’t the point of society to protect those who are unable to protect themselves?

From Jon Gutmacher comes an excellent example of how it isn’t guns that are the problem.

As an aside to Graybeard’s interesting post on encrypting communications: As I was reading the post, it reminded me of some court decisions that have come down the road concerning encryption and criminal evidence.

The first one is over a child porn case here in Florida, where law enforcement agents pursuing a child pornography investigation
tracked a man suspected of sharing child porn. After obtaining a search warrant, they raided the
room, seizing computers and hard drives with nearly five terabytes of
total storage capacity. However, they soon hit a roadblock: Portions of
the hard drives had been encrypted and were unreadable without a
password. The suspect refused to decrypt the drives, and a federal
district court in Florida held him in contempt and ordered him
incarcerated.An appeals court overturned the conviction, claiming that forcing him to provide his password violated his fifth amendment rights.

So the court instead pulls a fast one: they require you to turn over the unencrypted files. Failure to comply means that you stay in jail indefinitely: you don’t get out until you give them what they want.

This places you in a quandry, if you have been accused of a crime and the evidence of that crime is encrypted on your computer: you can rot in jail forever, or you can turn over the evidence and rot in jail for the rest of your life.

Of course, the judge cannot hold a person in contempt if the owner attempts to comply, but for some reason the drive or its encryption is corrupted and cannot be decrypted or read.

Animals will also flee to avoid other animals that are higher in the
food chain. As long as prey remains plentiful, the predators will not
give chase; they will focus on the prey that remains, what with it being
easier to catch and all. Organisms tend to overpopulate: as long as food is plentiful, they will breed and multiply until they use up local resources to the point where it is more effective to migrate to an area where food is more plentiful than it is to forage locally for more food. At that point, the original locale is used up, food is hard to find, and the prey expands the hunting grounds.

This is happening nationwide in the terms of economics. The parasites of society have made it so difficult to live in places where taxes are high and socialist policies abound, that many people with money began to flee those places for states with low tax burdens: Leaving New York for Florida, Tennessee, and leaving California for Colorado, etc. This is not a secret: here in Florida, all we hear is an endless parade of New Yorkers telling us dumb southern inbreeders how we should be doing things, and how that isn’t how you do things in New York. Fleeing the high cost of living in New York that is caused by high taxes, New Yorkers flood Florida with large amounts of cash from selling overpriced homes and collecting high pensions from lucrative government jobs, so that they can use the cash to pay too much for coastal homes.

As a result, the coast of Florida, especially around Miami, has made a steady march towards liberalism. As soon as they get here, those folks who fled New York do their best to make their new home just like the last, never seeing that their policies are the exact reason why their old home required fleeing. So as a result, Colorado gets new gun laws. Florida residents fight new gun laws. The infection spreads.

As people flee Europe and its financial meltdown, the same thing will happen on a global scale. The world will slide further down the road to collapse. Why? It is easier to move to new hunting grounds than it is to stay and fight. Once you get there to those new territories, it is easier to vote for government benefits than it is to work for your money.

Here in America, we have passed the tipping point: There are more people on the government dole than there are working and paying the bills. There is no longer an escape. The slide towards financial collapse has begun. Once the powers that be see this, they will try to avoid the anarchy that happens when the free money machine stops, and there will be a massive crackdown.

It is mathematically certain.

After spending over two decades in the fire service, I can tell you that many firefighters are out of control. It is frequently a good old boy’s club, with many having attitudes that were more at home in the 50s and 60s. This video, originally found over at Statter911, and commented on by AD, illustrates part of what I’m talking about.

This is sort of a respect my authoritah attitude. There are many firefighters that I call friends who have no problem with the actions of this Captain. Heck, I’ve seen some firefighters act just like this.

They treat their own the same way. We had one company officer that wouldn’t allow female firefighters on his truck, and a Battalion shift who did all in his power to ensure that there were no women working for him. The Captain in the above video will get no punishment, and the powers that be will circle the wagons. This has turned into an “us versus them” situation, with the public on one side, and government employees on the other.

The actions of the fire officer in this video are embarrassing to the entire profession.