Government

This Makes Me Happy

A Federal Judge in Illinois ruled that outlawing particularly dangerous weapons, high capacity magazines, and dangerous weapons accords with US history and tradition, meaning that the state of Illinois lawfully exercised their authority to control their possession, transfer, sale and manufacture by enacting a ban on commercial sales, which comports with the Second Amendment.

I love this decision because it doesn’t set court precedent, but is almost guaranteed to be overturned on appeal, which WILL have precedential meaning.

By Divemedic, ago

If you see something, keep it to yourself

A man was brought to our hospital while unresponsive. He was a possible drug overdose case. When one of the technicians was stripping his clothes off, he found a baggie containing almost 100 grams of what looked like crystal meth in the patient’s pocket. The technician turned it over to the charge nurse, who immediately called the local gendarmes.

By the time a cop arrived, the patient was awake and denied that the drugs were his. The police took photos, fingerprints, and ID from the technician and the charge nurse. According to the cops, since the the nurse and technician admitted to having possession and control of the drugs, they just admitted to felony possession of methamphetamines with intent to distribute.

Since the two voluntarily called the cops, they said that no arrest would be made on the spot, but claimed that they will be turning the information and evidence over to the State’s attorney for possible prosecution.

There is an important lesson there: Don’t fucking talk to the cops, no matter what. They aren’t your friends. They aren’t there to help you. They are there to make a case to arrest someone, and they will get the arrest that requires them to do the least amount of work they can. They get to pad their stats and look good for getting a felony collar without having to do any police work at all.

The tech told me that if there is a next time, he is flushing that shit down the toilet.

Congratulations, cops. You just pissed off an entire ED full of the doctors and nurses you depend on every day, turning them from coworkers of a sort into a department full of people that no longer like or trust cops. Even if the charges don’t stick, people remember stuff like that. Nice move, idiots.

By Divemedic, ago

Teaching Pigs to Sing

A report has come out, showing that math and reading proficiency dropped nationwide during the COVID lockdowns. Maryland students have the lowest test scores in reading and math of any US state or territory, with only 19 percent of Maryland students performing math that is appropriate for their grade level. Some schools in Baltimore had NO students who were proficient in math.

It doesn’t take long to figure out why. The scores are available online. It isn’t that the test is too hard or that teachers in general aren’t doing their jobs- there are schools in Maryland that had 91% of students proficient in math. In general, whites and Asians score higher on standardized tests than do other races, and the more affluent a student is, the higher the test scores.

The 5 cities with the best scores (racial makeup, median household income) were:

  • Bethesda: 88 percent white and Asian, $173K
  • Ellicott City: 83 percent white and Asian, $136K
  • Clarksville: 87 percent white and Asian, $161K
  • Rockville 68 percent white and Asian, $116K
  • Glenelg 88 percent white and Asian $181K

Some would see that and think that there was racism involved. That is what “equity” is all about- looking at outcomes, then trying to make them the same, but that is simply saying that correlation means causation. Instead, let’s look at the correlation and see if we can find the causation.

Parents who make more money do so because they value education, hard work, or some other trait. That doesn’t always mean college- it can mean trade school, learning to run a business, something. Those parents are also clever or intelligent, which is inheritable. The point is, parents who make money tend to impart the values that made them successful upon their children. Parents who are not successful pass their traits on as well. So children in affluent households tend to be successful. The children in poor households tend to be less successful.

How do you fix this? School and teachers can’t. Teachers who are with a student for less than 1100 hours a year can’t fix 18 years bad parenting coupled with the handicap of losing the genetic lottery. All of the programs in the world won’t turn a student with a 75 IQ and no motivation into a scholastically successful person. In that case, you are doing nothing more than trying to teach a pig to sing.

The other thing that I would like to point out is that the response to COVID had an effect on an entire generation of students, who lost learning opportunities that will hurt them in lost learning gains, thereby affecting them for their entire lives. The knowledge gap that they have as a result of missing a year or more of school will cause them to play catchup for years.

By Divemedic, ago

Ripple Effect

This kid found out his teacher needed a car before starting a fundraiser to get him one. Officials tell the kid that it’s illegal for students or their parents to give a teacher a gift worth more than $25.

One could argue that the car isn’t a gift from students or their parents. It’s from the anonymous donors who gave to GoFundMe. I wonder if there is a Montana attorney that would have donated some assistance…

Back when I worked for the fire department, the mayor of our city was caught taking season floor seats to the Orlando Magic in exchange for awarding city contracts to a particular company. The city then put a rule in place that no employee was permitted to accept any gift whatsoever from any business within the city, not even a cup of coffee or a discount on soda.

This didn’t stop the cops from getting free apartments, because many apartment complexes give cops a free apartment in exchange for the cop agreeing to be the on site security guard. Of course the apartment was always right in front of the office, so people would see the officer’s take home patrol car parked in front.

Anyhow, it all came to a head back in 1998, when the state of Florida was struck by a drought. The wildfires that happened as a result caused 10,000 firefighters from all of the country to spend weeks putting out fires. I know I was out there for a week and a half at a time, sleeping on the ground in the woods. I actually enjoyed it.

As a result of these fires, Florida businesses decided that firefighters would be appreciated through various discounts. Disney offered free one-day tickets, Sea World and Bush Gardens were giving free annual passes to firefighters, local restaurants were giving discounted meals, those sorts of things. Our city manager prohibited us from accepting any of it, on penalty of immediate termination. Even though Disney was in our back yard, firefighters from Illinois who didn’t even participate in putting out the fires were enjoying free days there, while we were stuck without. This made a few guys angry. Disney wasn’t within the city limits, so we couldn’t possibly do them any illegal favors, it was just the city manager being petty, as far as some guys were concerned.

So one of our firefighters called a local news radio station. The station called the city manager on the air, and the dumbass actually said, “I saw one of our firefighters towing a boat behind his pickup truck the other day. If they can afford boats and new trucks, they make enough money to buy their own Disney tickets.”

The radio DJ’s then said, “How is it any of your business what they buy? Is that how you decide what your employees make? You decide what they should be able to buy, then pay them accordingly?” It all blew up, and the resulting PR storm eventually saw the firefighters being allowed to accept the discounts. The city manager took it out on the fire department for the next few years by giving the rest of the city employees raises, but not the fire department.

After 4 or 5 years of that kind of treatment, the firefighters voted to become a union department. That is how my department went union. All because of a boat, a truck, and a mouse.

On a side note, those fires changed the way Florida’s firefighters handled wildfires. Up to that point, firefighters in the state put out every wildland fire. This caused there to be fewer fires, and allowed debris like dead bushes and trees to pile up in the woods. Naturally, lightning caused fires usually burn this dead material off periodically and clean up the woods. Wildfires, it turns out, are a big part of nature. Some plants and animals count on those fires as a part of the life cycle. (For example, there is a species of pine tree that requires a wildfire in order to reproduce)

We were disrupting the normal cycle of life. So now, firefighters allow these fires to burn, as long as no structures are in danger. In addition, the forestry department occasionally does prescribed burns of areas of state land that haven’t had a fire in awhile. Now the woods aren’t filled with large fuel loads of unburned debris.

By Divemedic, ago

Why is the Answer Always College?

The latest trend in the press thinking that they are experts in all things, is the claim that US police training needs to be more like police training in Europe. They claim that police in other countries receive more training than the 6 months that is typical in the US.

police recruits in Japan get between 15 and 21 months of training. Police in Germany get 2.5 years of training. And in Finland, police education takes three years to complete.

So they want to make police training a 4 year degree? What will that cost? I do agree with them that police training is too much like military boot camp. If you train your police like soldiers, you can expect that your police will act like soldiers. I don’t think that the problem is in how long the training is, I think the problem is in the institutional mindset- “War on crime,” the “War on drugs,” that sort of thing. When you think of criminal justice as warfare, you get police who act as if they are on a battlefield.

That’s where my agreement with them ends. The next claim simply tells me that they have never dealt with someone who needs to be taken somewhere, but isn’t going to go. You are assuming that the people who police contact are rational.

As a street medic, and even in the ED, we encounter people who can’t be reasoned with, yet still need to go somewhere or do something. Whether it’s due to mental illness or simply because they are assholes, some people just need to be forced into compliance. Talking only works on people who are rational.

Imagine negotiating with a spree shooter. Someone who believes in what they are doing so strongly that they are willing to gun down a dozen or more people isn’t going to be negotiated out of their act.

You can tell that some people have juts never had to deal with those kinds of people.

By Divemedic, ago

Regarding the Balloon…

Many have suggested that the Air Force should have just shot down the balloon using a laser or bullets to pop the Chinese balloon, instead of a missile. The reason that the fly boys used a missile is because popping a rogue balloon has been tried before, and it doesn’t work.

It was 25 years ago when the Canadians shot a balloon full of 1,000 holes and they found that this didn’t pop it, because the pressure inside of a balloon at that altitude isn’t high enough to burst the balloon.

Now you know…

On a side note, I was surprised that an AIM-9, which is a heat seeking missile, was capable of locking on to something like a helium balloon.

By Divemedic, ago

Picture This

This exchange is caught on guy’s security system:

Cop 1: We need you to step outside. One of your neighbors says that you pointed a gun at them, and you need to step outside and give us a statement to prove your innocence.

Guy: Uh, I didn’t do anything and I can answer your questions through the door just fine.

Cop 2: Why are you being so confrontational?

Guy: My entire property is on camera. I can prove I did nothing. Hang on. (closes door)

Cop 2 (says to other cop): He definitely pointed a gun. Well, it was that or a flashlight.

Cop 1: We don’t have enough to charge him.

Cop 2: I don’t care. I’m gonna charge him with something if we don’t.

If I were a juror in this case, I would vote not guilty if a defense attorney played this video in court. Watch closely:

I will repeat: Never talk to the police. They aren’t there to help you. All you can do by speaking to them is give them the evidence they need in order to arrest you. Tell them to go away. Oh, and having plenty of cameras around doesn’t hurt.

Just don’t resist them if they decide to use force. We all know that many cops can’t wait to get their violence on. Say nothing. Hire the best lawyer you can afford. Spare no expense- it’s better to go into bankruptcy than it is to spend the rest of your life in jail. Let the lawyer talk for you. But above all, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

By Divemedic, ago

Chipping Away

Granted, this ruling has no real precedential value, but a Federal judge has said that marijuana users cannot have their 2A rights taken away. Essentially ruling that marijuana is commonly used, and using it isn’t an indicator of a propensity for violence, therefore making a user of the drug into a prohibited person is a step too far, in light of Bruen. That’s the second significant case this week.

That case is the gift that keeps on giving. The best part of this ruling is that the left will be torn: Support marijuana use, or oppose guns. What to do? LOL

By Divemedic, ago

Kavanaugh Is Wrong, IMO

This past week saw a huge win for gun rights, in that SCOTUS the Fifth circuit struck down a part of the GCA that was added during the Clinton administration– making eliminating a provision of the law that prohibited persons out of people who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders. AWA over at GunFreeZone did an excellent post on the ruling, and I won’t attempt to recreate that here.

There are those who oppose that ruling and are claiming that there will be domestic abusers lining up to kill their former partners over this. I don’t think that there will be any big changes. Those who want to kill their partners just aren’t deterred by a piece of paper saying that killing someone is illegal, even if signed by a judge. The left always assumes that criminals are simply honest people who gave in to a moment’s impulse, and each of us is equally likely to give into an impulse to kill others. An interesting insight into the leftist mind, eh?

My opinion on these DV orders is that they are bullshit aimed at men in an attempt to give women another arrow in their lawfare quiver. About ten years ago, I was the subject of one of those orders. It was sought and granted without me even being present, with the initial order not even having my correct name on it, by a woman that I hadn’t even seen in months, and in that order she alleged that I did things in stalking her that were impossible because I was not even in the country when they were alleged to have happened.

David Letterman was once subject to a DV order that was obtained by a woman who lived thousands of miles away, after the woman alleged that they were in a secret affair and that Letterman was sending her secret messages using his top 10 lists as a code. Using accusations of domestic violence has become a common tactic for women who wish to win divorce and child custody cases, as well as angry girlfriends who wish to get back at former boyfriends. Men have no legal recourse against women who are proven to be lying.

 Here are the disturbing statistics:

The decision that is the subject of this post fixes some of that. That isn’t how the left, or apparently Brett Kavanaugh, sees it. Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion in the Bruen case, arguing that sometimes we have to weigh in on whether or not a law is a good idea.

That’s where he is wrong.

The Amendment says “shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t say “… unless you have a really good reason to do so.” The Supreme Court isn’t there to decide whether or not a law is a good idea. The court is there to decide whether or not a particular law comports with the Constitution. Deciding whether or not a law is a good idea is the job of Congress. All of the authority of the government derives from the Constitution. Any power or authority that the government takes upon itself that is outside of that authority is nothing more than tyranny, an unconstitutional power grab that is based upon the principle of “might makes right” that flies in the face of the principles upon which the “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” was built upon.

There are those who would try and make the case that there is some balancing act to be done, but that isn’t how our government is supposed to work. Thomas sees that. Scalia, although a pragmatic sort of man, saw that as well. Kavanaugh does not.

The left, well, they don’t see the Constitution as anything more than a piece of paper containing words that can be worked around, as long as the words are pretty enough.

Fuck them. Not one more inch. This decision is proof to me that the jury box isn’t completely dead. The war continues.

By Divemedic, ago