Zimmerman, Penny, and Chow were all found not guilty. Had this poster just left it at Chauvin and Guyger, the argument would be more valid. Including people who were found to be innocent just makes the poster look foolish. To call it racism is simply retarded.
Then there is this mental midget:
35 years on your first offense is over sentencing. Yea there has to be a retrial. This is blatant injustice.
Karmelo Anthony was found guilty after only three hours of deliberations. Of course, there are tons of his fellow blacks out there claiming he should get a new trial because his attorney was incompetent. or that he is going to win on appeal. That isn’t how it works, but then again, they don’t understand the law any better than they understand self defense.
This is a story of a patient from a year or so ago, while I still worked for my last employer.
A patient comes in because he has had increasing shortness of breath for about two weeks. He was walking down a small hill from where he parked his motorcycle and fell, tumbling down the small incline. He fell about 10 feet or so, he says. His vitals look fine. He is a bit of an overweight guy, typical 60-something man trying to recapture his youth by riding a Harley.
So I ordered a chest x-ray, started an IV, and did his intake paperwork. No doctor is signed on to his case yet. If the x-ray shows anything significant, the technician who takes it will normally give me a heads up. He didn’t in this case. The image of the x-ray came up on my computer, I took one look at it and immediately flagged down the first passing doctor and said, “Hey, I know that you’re busy and this isn’t your patient, but you need to see this now.” Here is what it looked like:
In case you don’t know what you are looking at, the dark section on the left is a relatively normal looking lung. The heart and trachea are supposed to be on the right side of the image and are being pushed into the other side by the large amount of blood that is collapsing his left lung (which appears on the right in this image). If you look closely at the film, you can see all of the structures that are supposed to be midline are being pushed over. This is called a hemothorax, and is a life-threatening medical emergency where a massive volume of blood rapidly accumulates in the pleural space (the area between the chest wall and the lung). This buildup compresses the lung and puts dangerous pressure on the main vein bringing blood to the heart (the vena cava) and the heart, leading to cardiovascular collapse, severe respiratory distress, and shock.
The doctor took one look at this and said “Holy shit! I’m signing up for him. Get me set up for a chest tube and some conscious sedation. Call respiratory and let’s get ready to send him to a trauma center.”
The patient had a rather chubby neck with a beard so it wasn’t readily apparent, but if you put the finger of one hand on his Adam’s apple, and a finger from the other hand in his sternal notch, you could see that his windpipe was deviating to the patient’s right. He was a good sport and didn’t even mind that I brought a couple of new nurses into the room to see what a tension hemothorax looked like. Of course, he had no lung sounds on the left, and his heart tones were distinctly muffled. His pulse pressure was a bit narrow.
There were not any other nurses or respiratory technicians available to help in time, so I grabbed a nursing assistant and the three of us (doctor, myself, and aide) rapidly initiated conscious sedation and inserted a chest tube. That’s a handful for one nurse and a doctor to handle (the nurses aid is pretty much there to hold this, and hand me that and isn’t much of a help)- I had to administer sedation, monitor and maintain his airway and breathing, and chart everything. For one nurse to do all of that without help is a major safety issue, and is one of the (many) reasons why I don’t work for that hospital any longer. That place is just understaffed to the point of compromising patient safety.
Once we got the tube in place, we sent him for a CT scan, and it turns out he had 4 ribs broken in two places- a classic flail chest. If you put your hands on his rib cage, you could feel the paradoxical motion of the chest wall. This is incredible, considering that he walked in to the ED and had been walking around like this for two weeks. The video below shows you what paradoxical motion looks like, but my patient’s wasn’t quite as pronounced as the video (and was located under his left armpit).
Anyhow, I pulled about 2 liters of blood from his chest cavity before we crimped off the tube because we didn’t want him losing too much blood. A helicopter came and took him to a trauma center, and the trauma surgeon was still pissed because we took out so much blood.
Who had a Florida earthquake on their 2026 BINGO card? I know I didn’t, but we had a bit of earth shaking yesterday just after 1400, as a 6.1 Richter earthquake struck off the coast of Cuba. I was working at the time and the doctor, who was sitting next to me, said “Was that an earthquake? Did you feel that? I even saw the water in your cup shaking.” I didn’t notice, but I was preoccupied at the time. Sure enough, it was.
Damage
I don’t know if it was related or not, but I returned home to find my closet system had fallen off the wall. It looks like one of the screws pulled out of the wall, and this caused a cascading failure of the other screws, which caused an entire wall of the system to fall to the ground. There was some damage to it, forcing me to order $500 worth of parts. I am going to reinstall a 3/4″ plywood backer board this time. That way, I can use more screws when I secure it to the wall. The parts won’t be here until next Monday, so I will spend the day today taking the old one apart and reclaiming any undamaged parts I can find.
Network Upgrades
The network hardware is installed. I setup a few VLANs, which allows me to split the home network into segments:
Infrastructure
IOT devices
Servers
Guests
Surveillance
Once that was done, I created rules that allow me to control traffic. As an example, the guest network can’t do anything but access the Internet and a printer. The cameras are in the surveillance network, and they can only contact the server that’s running the surveillance software. IOT devices can’t do anything but contact the Internet.
As time goes on, I will tighten up the rules to make things as secure as possible. For now, the system works and I have tested it to make sure the rules are operating as intended. Starting later this week, I will begin installing security cameras. There will be a post on that.
So at reader request, we are going to take a closer look at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Let’s just consider it to be a great example of what is happening all over the state. I did a deep dive into budget and demographic information, and
2015
The city had a population 10,018 in 2015 and had 25 sworn police officers. The annual budget of the city was $22 million, with $18 million in general fund spending, and another $5 million or so for infrastructure projects.
2025
The city had a population of 9,987, or essentially the same population. The city had had 0 sworn police officers, none, nada, zip. The annual budget of the city was up to $40 million, with $22 million in general fund spending and another $15 million or so for infrastructure projects. That’s a 6.2% per year increase.
The claim is that roads, city buildings, and stormwater improvements were the majority of those costs.
The police department no longer exists, as the city is paying Brevard county $8 million a year to provide police, fire, code enforcement, and EMS services to the city. Sure, this saves money, but if I were a Cape Canaveral taxpayer, I would be asking if this was something I was willing to be taxed for. I am left to wonder why they even have a city, if the county is providing all of the services. After all, if there was no city, the county would still provide those services- and likely at a lower cost.
The median homeowner in the city pays $2,727/year in property taxes. Estimated breakdown of Cape Canaveral median property-tax bill:
Recipient
Estimated Annual Amount
Share of Bill
Brevard Public Schools
~$1,309
48.0%
Brevard County & countywide services
~$746
27.3%
City of Cape Canaveral
~$672
24.7%
Total
$2,727
100%
What the city’s ~$672 portion pays for
The city’s millage supports municipal services such as:
$6.8 million per year for police, fire, and EMS ($3.8 to the Sheriff, $3 million to the fire department)
$3.5 million Public works
$1.8 million Parks and recreation
$1 million Planning and code enforcement
$1.6 million General administration
$90,000 Library support
In other words, for a typical homeowner:
About $5/year supports library services.
About $219/year supports policing and related public-safety functions.
About $197/year supports roads, drainage, and other public-works activities.
About $104/year supports parks and recreation.
About $90/year supports city administration.
About $57/year supports planning and code enforcement.
2026
The 2026 budget for the city shows an increase in ad valorem taxes of 26% for the city. Now count the other ad valorem taxes. In all, the median tax bill is going to increase by $450 for each homeowner, if you include county and school taxes. That is an overall 16.5% tax increase.
So yeah, maybe essential services DO need themselves some budget cuts.
This is why we are trying to get rid of homestead property taxes. It’s a sham.
The left is going nuts because Florida governor DeSantis is proposing to phase out property taxes on homestead property. They are claiming the counties and cities will need to cut essentials like police, fire, roads, and schools. They say that there isn’t enough waste, fraud, and abuse to be found, and those essentials will be forced to face cuts. Let me show you why they are wrong.
The city of Cape Canaveral in Brevard County has a population of about 10,000 people and encompasses about 2 square miles. In the year 2000, population in the city was about 8,900 people, and it was about 8,000 people in 1990. That’s a growth rate of 0.5% per year over the past 36 years. <—Important stat, so keep this in mind as we look at the rest of this.
The city hall was built in the 1960s, and was about 3200 square feet. It looked like this:
Now explain to me why they needed to build this giant edifice that costs more to build and to maintain than the building it replaced? Population was only 25% larger than it was in 1980, but the city hall building needed to be five times larger to accommodate all of the extra bureaucratic employees that are now working there.
The city’s budget is now $70 million, despite the fact that the city contains the same number of residents as it did ten years ago when the budget was $5.5 million. They built a larger city hall, then filled that space with more employees. Five times the building at twelve times the cost.
Why are so many more employees needed? The cost of government was $3 million per year in 1980, or about $11 million in 2025 dollars. Why does government need to be 7 times larger than it was in 1980, even though population is only 25% larger?
This is the waste, fraud, and abuse I am talking about. Maybe essential services NEED to be cut. That’s an insane amount of growth.
The democratic protests are all being funded– with the protests in Newark taking in over $800 million a year. That’s just one set of protests in one city. Multiply those amounts times the number of cities where it’s happening, and you can see that we are looking at billions. More than a couple of billion. Every election year. That’s how we always get unrest every election year.
Now think about that for a moment. How much is money has been spent on these “protests” in the past six years? $20 billion? 40? More? That isn’t grassroots. It isn’t the Democrats- they raise less than $200 million most years, and couldn’t afford the billions that is being spent here. They couldn’t afford to fund the protests in Newark, let alone an entire nationwide movement. That isn’t even large private donors. There is only one class of donor that can sustain that level of funding.
The entire 2020 George Floyd protest playbook was nearly identical to the CIA insurgency manual. I wrote about that extensively during the 2020-2022 timeframe.
The US government is one of the few who could fund and organize this sort of operation. The list is short because a general campaign to do this is expensive, labor intensive, and has little benefit for the cost.
Unless you are trying to destabilize the US. Think about that, and what the implications of that are. It will keep you up at night.
For those of you who are IT nerds, some of this stuff will seem basic- my apologies, I am still learning, and I assume that a good number of the people who read this blog are as well.
IoT devices are notoriously insecure because manufacturers frequently prioritize low costs and rapid production over robust security. These devices often suffer from weak default credentials, a lack of encryption, and limited hardware capacity for security software, making them easy targets for hackers to hijack and form botnets or even to spy on you and sell your information to others.
Using VLANs can help with that. A virtual network, or VLAN, allows you to maintain separate, distinct networks within your physical network. These virtual networks are like tiny virtual containers that cannot talk to or even see each other, but can be configured to communicate as much or as little information between each other as you desire. That’s where the security comes in.
By creating different ‘trust’ levels within your home network, you can create a system whereby those who are inside of your guest VLAN can only communicate with the Internet or your printer, but nothing else. This prevents a guest from snooping through your files, accessing your router controls, or other mistakes. Placing all of your IoT devices in another VLAN will keep them isolated from other parts of your network and allow you to control where and how much information they can send or receive. Trusted devices such as your cell phone or laptop can be configured to have no restrictions.
In short, it increases security by giving devices “need to know” access without giving them access to things they shouldn’t be accessing. That’s what this new system I am installing does. I setup a few different VLANs:
Trusted. Devices within this VLAN will have IP addresses ending in 20.xx
IoT devices. Devices within this VLAN will have IP addresses ending in 30.xx
Storage. Devices within this VLAN will have IP addresses ending in 40.xx
Guest. Devices within this VLAN will have IP addresses ending in 50.xx
Cameras. Devices within this VLAN will have IP addresses ending in 60.xx
Each IP range can then be assigned any number of permissions. For example, IP addresses ending in 50.xx are setup to only be able to access the Internet and a printer. Guests will therefore be allowed to print or surf the Internet, but that is all.
So that is the plan for our network security here at the Ocho. Will it stand up to determined hacking or the NSA peeping at my stuff? Of course not. Is it better and more robust than what I have had in the past? Certainly. Perhaps it will cause those devices and people with nefarious intent to look elsewhere for lower hanging fruit.
Now if you will excuse me, today is going to be a pleasant, breezy 84 degrees, so I am going to go mow the lawn.
