Uncategorized

A lot of cash

I haven’t mentioned this on over a year, but I want to take a look at the US debt. As of today, we are $14.9 trillion in debt, according to the US treasury.

When Obama took office, that amount was $11.9 trillion. An increase of $3 trillion (or 140%)  in just 33 months.

When GW Bush took office, we had a national debt of $5.7 trillion. The debt increased $4.7 trillion in 8 years. This means that the Obama administration is just $400 billion shy of borrowing in 3 years what it took his predecessor 8 years to borrow.

Not like I am really happy with Bush’s spending, either. Or Clinton’s.

By Divemedic, ago

D day minus 82 days

Packing, and not the fun kind. I am busy trying to pare down all of my stuff for the upcoming move. Trying to pare down the contents of a three bedroom house into a one bedroom apartment is a chore. I have rented a storage facility for the things that I am not taking, and the remainder of my things are going into the trash, or are being sold.

One of the things that I cannot take is my suppressor, as it is illegal in the state where I am going. I am trying to find a buyer. Meanwhile, storing over 20,000 rounds of ammo, 8 cases of MREs, 30 cans of freeze dried Mountain House food, about 2,200 books, and all of the other assorted items is giving me a backache.

It is a busy time. I need to complete all of the paperwork for admission to the school, rent an apartment, get the services hooked up, rent a U Haul trailer, ensure my shots are up to date, pack, finish my classes, work my two jobs (I am leaving one at the end of November, the other two weeks later), and do the move.

To make things worse, I noticed today that the windshield of  my truck has a foot long crack in it. I have to get that fixed, as well as all of the other chores. Busy, busy. There are 82 days until I go.

By Divemedic, ago

So long EMS, and thanks for all the fish

I applied for, and was accepted to, a Master’s degree program that will allow me to become a Physician Assistant upon completion. This means that I will be retiring from my current job and moving several states away to attend the school. For the first time in 22 years, I will not be associated with prehospital EMS. It is a big step, and a bit scary, but exciting at the same time. I am giving up security for a chance to have a better career.

What first planted the seeds of my desire to leave was an apparent lack of medical standards in my agency, and the way that it was ignored by the administration. I wanted to maybe find a job at another local agency, but there weren’t many hiring at the time who would pay me what I was already making, and besides, I know people who work for other agencies in the area, and they didn’t seem much better, nor did the idiots at some of the local hospitals. I decided to stay put.

Then the TEA party came around, and I had to listen to them drone on and on about how I am a parasite and how I and my benefits are a drain on the system. My pension and my health care are costing the taxpayers too much money, even though they are a mere 4% of the state budget. Free lunches for poor kids in school add up to more than what it costs to run the pensions of state employees.

Meanwhile, I am hauling a Medicare patient to the hospital for the third time this week, this time for knee pain times two weeks. Knowing that Medicare is 30% of the state budget makes me realize that the TEA party is politics, not solutions.

Anyway, all of that came to a head when I began working for a theme park doing BLS first aid for $12.75 an hour, and got a raise at my 90 day point to $17.50 an hour. You see, when I was hired by my original agency 15 years ago, my starting pay was $8.45 an hour. In fifteen years, I made it to $19.27 an hour, and that includes two promotions.

That was when I realized that I was no longer happy working in EMS. I love the medicine, I just don’t like all of the politics and the games that go along with the job. I still feel like I have more to offer patients and I want to stay in medicine. Becoming a PA will help me do just that.

No hard feelings to the TEA party, or to the public. You decided to pay less, and as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. The people who are skilled and able to leave will do so. If you are willing to accept a lower level of service, then so be it. As for me, it is time to move up to bigger and better things.

By Divemedic, ago

The Soviets were free

There are an estimated 800,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the United States: 120,000 Federal and 620,000 State and local.

That breaks down to 1 Fed for every 2,500 citizens, and one cop for every 375 citizens. Contrast that with this article about the Stasi and Gestapo:

The Soviet Union’s KGB employed about 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million, which means there was one agent per 5,830 citizens. Using Wiesenthal’s figures for the Nazi Gestapo, there was one officer for 2,000 people. The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. 

(even though the math for the Soviets is incorrect)
We have ratios of police versus citizens that is more than that of the Soviet communists, and rivals that of  the Gestapo.

But we don’t live in a police state. This is a free country, after all.

By Divemedic, ago

Just lucky, I guess

According to some douchebag named Tim Wise, I am the recipient of 12 to 13 years of institutionalized affirmative action as a result of my attending public school, and this is why I, as a member of the white establishment, am so fortunate.

When I graduated from high school, the school I graduated from was one of two in the entire county. Everyone from the east side went to one school, everyone from the west side of the county went to the other. We all attended the same classes, taught by the same teachers. I can’t see how there is any difference.

After high school, I joined the military and did six years there. When I got out, I was broke, but willing to work. I tried making it for a couple of years as a business owner, but we were soon technically homeless. My family and I lived in the storeroom of my business and we bathed in a 48 quart ice chest.

I took what little money we managed to scrape together and used it to rent a UHaul, then moved back to Florida. When I got there, I took a job in residential construction that paid $7.45 an hour. I spent 8 hours a day in the Florida summer heat, running electrical wire through roughed-out houses, taking home $950 a month to support a family of four. Our rent was $350 a month. The government told us that we wouldn’t qualify for public assistance as long as we were still married, so we got none.

Over the next 5 years, I moved jobs every time there was an opportunity to make more money: I  worked at the airport repairing ground support equipment, at Disney repairing the electronic control systems on dancing chickens, at Sherwin Williams on paint manufacturing equipment, and at a stainless steel mill repairing stainless steel pipe manufacturing equipment. There were ups and downs. A few times, they hired me as a maintenance worker because they had a lot of broken equipment and then fired me as soon as I fixed everything that was broken. Still, I didn’t give up.

Each time I changed jobs, it was for more money. Over that 5 year period, I went from $7.50 an hour to $12 an hour, and finally to a salary of $30,000 a year. Then Bill Clinton signed a “most favored nation” treaty with China, flooding the market with cheap stainless steel, making it cheaper to import stainless steel products than it was to manufacture them, which put my employer out of business. 

Finally tired of being laid off, and decided to take my volunteer firefighting occupation full time. I went to school, by working odd jobs during the day, and going to school at night. I graduated the fire academy and got hired. While I was in school, my wife and I got a divorce. Divorce is financially devastating, and the child support added up to about two thirds of my take home pay.

This was the poorest time in my life. I lost my car in the divorce, so I was running to work for a month before I could save enough for a bicycle. I lost 40 pounds that summer. After six more months of saving, I managed to buy a car at a buy here/pay here place. Now that I had a car, I was able to get a second job as a janitor, and then a third job as a lifeguard, to make ends meet.

Since then, I have earned 4 college degrees and I am getting ready to begin my masters degree. I did it without handouts, I did it without Pell grants, welfare, food stamps, or anything that I didn’t work for myself.

But hey, none of that was due to hard work and perseverance. It was all luck and ‘white privilege’ that got me here.

By Divemedic, ago

A peek into police culture

I was recently required to go to a class on the incident management system. The class was comprised of about 60% police supervisors and 40% fire supervisors. The class gave me an opportunity for some insight into the way that cops (especially the supervisors) view the world.

The class presented the supervisors with a few scenarios, and challenged those supervisors to set up a command structure that would adequately manage the situation. Since this was a class attended mostly by cops and was being taught by cops, the scenarios and the conversations were mostly cop-centric. It was a learning experience, but perhaps not in the way that was intended.

The first scenario was that a child services worker was doing a well being check on a home, after receiving a tip that one of the children in the home was being sexually molested by the father. When she arrived at the home, she found that the father was home alone with 3 children, ages 9 through 14, and he was intoxicated. The social worker told the father that she was removing the children from the home, because the only adult was intoxicated. The father refused, an argument ensued, and the social worker was asked to leave. Social worker attempts to take the youngest child with her, and is shot in the stomach by the father. Socail worker staggers outside and 911 is called.

The cops said that this is an active shooter situation, and their primary objective is to enter the home as soon as they have three officers present, and “take out the bad guy.” I am betting that they were not talking about shooting the social worker.

After this first scenario, we took our first break. The topic of discussion during the break was how the “new NRA law” was stupid and creating problems for police. One of the cops said that they tried to work with the NRA, but that the “gun nuts” were being uncooperative and would not give an inch. Another used an example (paraphrasing, my memory isn’t perfect)
“There is this guy who has been “Baker Acted” several times, and has even fired shots at police officers. We were at his house, and he has guns. Now normally, I would just take the guns, and he would never see them again. Thanks to this new law, this guy keeps the guns. Now I am forced to risk leaving the guns there and getting sued when he shoots someone, or taking the guns, and getting sued by the NRA.”
Third cop says: “The odds of being sued by the NRA are low. I’m still going to take them.”

There are a number of false assumptions there, but it seems to me that if a person has shot at cops, wouldn’t he be convicted of at least one felony and thus be prohibited from firearm possession?
If he was found to be a danger to himself or others after being Baker Acted, wouldn’t a court have found him incompetent, and wouldn’t he then be prohibited from owning firearms?
Why does a cop think that he has the power to confiscate private property, simply because he thinks he is the “only one” that is trained and competent to handle firearms?

By Divemedic, ago

Have your cake, and others’ cake, too

One of the things that I constantly hear is how we as Americans should do “something” about a person’s pet cause, whether that cause is feeding the homeless, foreign aid, bailouts, orphaned animals, disaster relief, or any number of other causes that are considered to be “worthy” for our nation to throw money at. I consistently feel that it is not a legitimate function of government to send public money to charities. That position often ends with me being called names like “mean”, “heartless”, or worse.

I want you to do a thought exercise: Think of some worthy cause that you think we, as a people, should spend money on. I will pick one: homelessness. Now ask yourself a few simple questions:
How much of your own money do you contribute to feed and house the homeless?
If you have a spare room or couch, how many times have you invited a homeless person to stay in your home?
If you are not willing to donate to the cause that you deem worthy, then how can you morally demand through the use of government force that others do so? If you are reading this, you have probably spent some of your own money on luxuries like internet service or a computer, instead of giving that money to the homeless. How heartless you are! How dare you spend money on frivolities when people are sleeping in cardboard boxes without a meal! You must be heartless and cruel, you greedy bastard. This makes you feel guilty that you buy expensive luxuries when there are so many worthy causes, doesn’t it?

There must be a solution to this feeling of guilt that you feel. The solution is so simple! Why don’t you just vote to make other people give THEIR money to worthy causes on your behalf? That way, you can still buy those expensive luxury items, and still assuage your guilt. The plan here is that you get the government to take other people’s money away, and use THAT money to help your cause.

Of course there are as many worthy causes as there are voters, and what happens is that we eventually have more causes than we do money. At that point, the only way to handle things is to borrow the money. From China. That is a story for another day…

By Divemedic, ago

Deadbeat parents

The American court system jails thousands of parents every year for not paying child support. I read the article, and I have a couple of thoughts:

First, Article III Section 2 of the Constitution provides that crimes, except impeachment cases, must be tried before a jury, unless the defendant waivers his or her right. The court has managed to work around that by claiming that “contempt of court” cases are not crimes. Regardless, the Seventh Amendment states that in Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law. Our court simply seems to ignore the plain intent of the founders: that no one person have the power of a King, not even a judge. The jury was to be the check and balance on the court. That is no more.

Then there are the practical and moral problems. My first wife and I got divorced in 1999.Following the state law formula, the court ordered that I pay half of my take home pay to my ex wife, nominally for child support. At the time, I grossed $1000 every two weeks. After taxes, I was left with about $720 each payday. $348 in child support was taken from my check, and sent to the ex-wife, leaving me with $720 per month to live on. The rent on my apartment was $600 for a small one bedroom. I was soon homeless and without a car, moving from couch to couch at the homes of friends. I got a second job, picking up garbage after the Shamu show at Sea World. I got an apartment with three roommates. I bought a car at a “buy here, pay here.” Somehow, I made it.

Except that the ex wife didn’t have a job, meaning that the support was more for her than for the children. The children would come over for visitation wearing rags, so I would have to buy them new clothes. Then they would ask for money for field trips and school supplies. Their mother would tell them that they couldn’t have it, and that I should pay it. Not wanting to deny them, I gave them the money.

My ex-wife was collecting more than $1400 a month in child support, and because she didn’t have to claim it as income, was getting another $400 a month in food stamps. she also claimed to be making $9,000 a year babysitting children, thus qualifying for $300 a month in earned income credit and another $300 per month in welfare. That’s right- she was making $2400 per month in child support and government checks, and babysitting the neighbor’s kids for a total take home of $3100 per month, tax free. That is the equivalent of grossing over $40,000 a year. Meanwhile, I was living below the poverty level. It is easy to see why many men become “deadbeats.” The child support system is fundamentally unfair, and there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the money actually supports the child.

Twelve years later, my kids are both grown up and have been living on their own for years. The punishing child support is a distant memory. The ex-wife got a job at WalMart as a cashier, worked there for a year, and injured her back. She is on Social Security disability and welfare now. As far as I know, other than that one year working at Wal Mart, she has never had a job her entire adult life.

But if I had failed to pay even some of that money, it is me who would have gone to jail, without an attorney, without a trial. Where is the real crime here? The only good thing that I can say I got out of all of those issues is that I no longer fear poverty, for I know what poverty is. I learned what it is like to work hard, and to work long hours just to eat. To this day, I still work two jobs, even though I no longer need the money.

By Divemedic, ago