Divemedic

Pardon me

When the bomb went off at the Boston marathon this past week, the films of the event showed many bystanders fleeing the danger, and responders running towards the bomb site to render aid. Every responder in the country has had to attend terrorism awareness classes, and are all aware that a common tactic is for bombers to use a secondary device that detonates a few minutes later, in an attempt to injure responders. Yet, time and again, you see the people that are our first responders running towards the danger.

There were more than a few reporters and commentators that took note of this. Borepatch even shows the crowd at a Bruins game singing the national anthem and showing respect to the responders of Boston.

I’m not impressed.

I remember that exact show of national pride and support for responders in the days after 9/11. It was nice to feel like people knew about the sacrifices that we as responders make every day. It isn’t just the big events like 9/11 or Boston. It isn’t about the exploding fertilizer plants, or the idiots that ambush and shoot responders. It is the every day dangers that they face. Nearly 300 responders a year lose their lives in the protection of others.

Within 6 months of 9/11, the signs of respect stopped. By 2008, I was hearing about how we were the greedy people who got overpaid and under worked and were ripping off the taxpayer. They cut our pay, our pensions, and there is even a bill that would keep my family from receiving death benefits if I am killed in the line of duty.

So excuse me if I am not impressed with your show of support. I know it will fade in about six months, and you will go back to watching Kim Kardashian make $80,000 a week and complaining how firefighters, police, and paramedics are overpaid.

By Divemedic, ago

Authoritah

So a cop that I know posted this video to Facebook:

With this comment attached:

I think this cop didn’t know what to do because he spit out some legal crap.

Here are the replies from the posters fellow officers:

1:  I agree..he had probable cause for the stop….the 911 call for a man with a gun…duh….

2:  And he wouldn’t have gotten that gun back till he proved he could legally carry it…for ya know…public safety. ..lol…

3:  your walking around with a gun….. we are going to stop you dumbass get used to it. smh

4:  Time to cuff and stuff!

5:  some stick time and a ride will solve that problem 

6: The cop should have arrested him for disturbing the peace

7: Stupid law students 

Not one cop posted in favor of the gun owner.



Let’s start out with probable cause. The term probable cause means that the officer has reason to believe that more likely that not, the person is guilty of a crime. A 911 call that a man has a gun is not probable cause to believe that a man has committed a crime, if it is not a crime to have a gun.

Taking a person’s property without a legal reason to do so is a crime. The only problem is that the cops (in many cases, correctly) believe that they are above the law.

The obvious disregard for people’s rights and the law makes me fear the cops more than the criminals. They are just a legalized street gang. It is things like this that make me begin to think that anarchy could not be much worse.

By Divemedic, ago

Cheats

While we were busy watching the long, drawn out debates on Obamacare, the economy, and gun control, we all missed that Congress legalized insider trading for themselves. It was easy to do, though. They only debated and voted on the bill for 30 seconds.When Obama signed the new law, the announcement was only one sentence long.
So now a Congressman can legally profit from upcoming legislation. No conflict of interest there.

By Divemedic, ago

Communications

A proper survival plan includes things like water, food, and light. One important thing that should be a part of your plan is communications. During the recent events in Boston, cellular communications were inoperable for hours. There is some question as to whether they were turned off by authorities, or if the heavy traffic overloaded the system, but the end result was the same: no phone communications were happening throughout most of the Boston area.
I have portable, handheld radios in the 2 meter band. There are 9 repeaters that are within 40 miles of my house, and each of these can be reached by the radios that I have on hand. This allows me to communicate across the majority of Central Florida with a large level of redundancy. In the event that all of those repeaters are non functional, we can go direct radio to radio on any one of hundreds of frequencies. These radios can be had for as little as $40.
If hundreds of available frequencies isn’t enough, you can get a dual band radio that also works in the 70 cm band. That band is less crowded than the 2m band, and adds thousands of available channels to the possibilities.
Set up a communications plan: “If anything happens, we will contact each other on the 146.22MHz repeater at the top of the hour, and on the 145.52MHz repeater at the bottom of the hour. If both repeaters are down, we will try 433.62 MHz., additionally, we will monitor 146.52 MHz.”

 The HAM license costs just $15, and no morse code test is required. Then you don’t have to worry about the cell phone repeaters.

By Divemedic, ago

It isn’t the guns

A homeless man sets another man on fire in California by throwing a Molotov cocktail into the victim’s car. We have a problem in this country, and it isn’t guns. We are in the middle of what Heinlein called “the crazy years.”
Making gasoline illegal, restricting high octane gasoline, restricting container size, or requiring a background check in order to buy gasoline, wouldn’t fix this any more than the same restriction on guns will fix spree shooting.
It used to be that insane asylums and jails were for keeping dangerous people away from the rest of society. Now we use the jails to lock up people for owning the wrong plant, and we abolished the asylums.

By Divemedic, ago

Found in a parking lot

Here is a food receipt recently found in a parking lot by a friend, and emailed to me:

5 cases of diet Mountain Dew, 8 lobster tails, 2 Porterhouse Steaks, total grocery bill of $142. All paid with an EBT card.

About 100 million people in the United States are receiving some sort of government money. At the beginning of this year, only four of the 80-plus federal welfare
programs had work requirements; the Obama Administration has now
suspended the work requirements in two of these. After the Obama
Administration suspended the work requirement from the food stamp
program in 2009, the number of people on food stamps doubled. In fact, if you take the trillion dollars spent on welfare programs and divide it by the number of people receiving them (100 million), it comes to $100,000 spent for each person receiving aid.

Welfare pays more than an $8 an hour job in 40 out of the 50 states, and this figure doesn’t include food stamps and Medicaid. The government spends an average of $168 for each person on welfare.

Welfare now surpasses the government’s biggest traditional money pit, the Pentagon. “By 2022, there will be $2.33 in federal and state welfare spending for every $1 spent on national defense.” Our National debt, as listed by the treasury, is $6.5 trillion higher than it was when Obama took office.Our debt has been doubling about every 8-10 years for every president except Clinton. Clinton added 140% to the debt.

It gets even worse: Much of the spending and borrowing is being paid for by monetizing the debt. The Federal Reserve is busy buying US treasuries. This is called monetizing the debt.This will eventually begin to hurt the value of the dollar. The only reason that this hasn’t already begun is that so many commodities (like oil) are pegged to the dollar, because the dollar is the reserve currency. One that changes (and it will) the days of runaway inflation will arrive.

By Divemedic, ago