Divemedic

Quarter of a Century

A quarter of a Century, and I still remember that morning in more detail than all but of a few of the mornings that have come since. The sky was a beautiful blue, the sun was warm, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A typical Central Florida day. My shift, C shift, had just started our 24 hour workday.

I was driving Engine 2 that morning. Dennis was riding in the seat next to me as the Lieutenant, and Justin was the back seat firefighter. Our shift had begun at 7:30 that morning as it always did. We did our morning routine as we always do. At 8:30, we left the station to do annual flow testing of fire hydrants.

By 8:45, we were behind the Winn Dixie and just about to test our first hydrant. Our Battalion Chief called us and told us to return to the station and turn on the TV. I remember jokingly asking Dennis who the guy on the radio was and what they had done to the Chief, since he would never tell us to watch TV during the workday.

We arrived back in the station just in time to see the second plane hit the south tower. I remember watching Fox news and seeing them switch to the DC bureau, where reporters said they could see a column of smoke. Things were happening so fast, I couldn’t figure out what that smoke was coming from. I commented “There is no way that the smoke from NYC is visible in Washington.” It was then that a fellow firefighter told me that the Pentagon had been hit.

The chief called us to disclose the plans for the remainder of the day. While I was on the phone with him, the first tower fell. The chief said to me, “Oh my God. 30,000 people just died.” I remember being stunned that so many people could be in a building.

By noon, we had an armed SWAT officer with an MP-5 riding along with us on all of our calls “for security.”

For weeks, we firefighters were stunned at the loss of 343 firefighters. I had friends who were in New York and in DC that day- military, firefighters, and paramedics who I’ve known for years. I felt a sense of awe and respect for the guys who went into that second tower after watching the first tower fall. They went into that building knowing that they would never come out of the second tower. What was going through their minds? I asked myself if I was capable of making the same choice if I knew that I would not come out?

We all wanted to be able to say yes. It isn’t the same thing when you go into an ordinary fire. Firefighters are a cocky, professional bunch. When we run into a burning building, we tell ourselves that we are trained and experienced enough that it will not happen to us. Not so with those guys in the towers. They went in KNOWING that they wouldn’t come out. That is a time that you don’t know what you would do until the moment of truth comes.

I just hoped that I would have the fortitude to make the choice that needed to be made, to have the courage to choose duty and honor over self preservation and the fortune to never be placed in that position. I hoped that I would never have to make that choice.

I spent the majority of my adult life in one uniform or another, dedicated to the protection of American lives and values. I spent six years in the Navy, doing two combat tours in the Persian gulf. I wasn’t a big hero or anything. I, like millions of others, did my job. After that, I spent two decades in a firefighter’s uniform. In that time, I ran into hundreds of burning buildings, jumped into a dozen lakes, thousands of medical scenes, and traveled to 22 natural disasters. I was injured three times in the line of duty. I saw a couple of thousand dead bodies, dozens of shootings and stabbings, and saved more than a few lives.

In 2011, I retired. I had seen enough death, misery, and blood for one lifetime. In the intervening years, many changes have come about. Dennis is dead. Justin is dead. I thought that the time of risking life and limb for the good of this nation and its people was over. I had given enough. I deserved to be left alone to grow old and enjoy the rest of my life in as much peace as I could manage.

What we should be mourning today is the death of a free nation. The terrorists killed it that morning. The Patriot Act, TSA’s warrantless searches at airports, shopping malls, sporting events, and even on the highways, the NSA spying, the establishment of secret prisons, secret courts, and secret searches of people’s homes all began on that day. Sure, there were people who had sought these powers before that day, but it was people’s fears of further attacks that were used to destroy the freedoms that made America what it was.

What made America special was the fact that we were, each of us, free individuals that were fiercely protective if individual liberties. The last of that spirit died when those towers fell. Now we are neither free, nor are we safe, except we are now using our military to protect the very organization that slaughtered our countrymen and our freedom. We stand in line to be searched at the airport, when we go to public gatherings, and when we drive on the highway. Our electronic communications are monitored, and our homes searched at the whim of authorities, without even the benefit of a warrant. Our police organizations are more heavily armed than many nations’ military forces.

Yet today, the mayor of New York has given a ceremonial pen to one of the associates of the very people who carried out that attack. Our President gave billions of dollars in weapons, ammunition, and other military supplies to the same people who were part of that.

By Divemedic, ago

3, 2, 1…

Now that it’s known the lone juror with the large testicles on the Clancy jury was a black man, the left will quietly drop the entire narrative of attacking him rather quickly. This will disappear from the news cycle and from social media by Monday morning.

The defense attorney has filed a motion for a forced “not guilty” verdict because he claims the jury got it wrong.

By Divemedic, ago

Violence

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue—and thoroughly immoral—doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.- Robert Heinlein

Once you threaten me with violence, I will take you at your word. If the police aren’t willing to do something to protect me and my family by taking you into custody, then I must do it myself.

That’s why we have police- to ensure those who are accused of a crime receive a fair trial, rather than a beatdown from their alleged victims.

By Divemedic, ago

New York

When the mayor of New York City signed executive orders designating the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks a citywide day of remembrance, the ceremonial pen he used was given as a gift.

To an Al Qaeda lawyer and relative of one of the hijackers.

I was still working for the fire department on that day. There was so much support for us, for the citizens of New York, and an upwelling of support.

For the voters of New York City to support this shit just saddens me. I have no words. The Global War on Terror was fought, and the terrorists won. All of the lives lost that day and since were wasted.

By Divemedic, ago

Another One Bites The Dust

On Tuesday, Big Country asked that his blog be closed. He was the first to share the server that this blog is on. The reasons were shared on his blog, and if you were a reader of his, you know why. I was planning on leaving his stuff up and online, but he requested that I nuke his blog today.

That’s what I did this morning. His domain registration is paid until the end of the year, and if he wishes to return, he just has to contact me.

As for me, that is why I attempt to remain anonymous. I don’t need someone trying to come after me IRL.

By Divemedic, ago

Failing Society

People come in to the emergency room every day who are 80, 100, or even 200 pounds overweight. They have been eating garbage, they have a blood alcohol that’s over 200, cholesterol over 300, and their urine is positive for barbiturates, or cannabinoids. Then they demand we fix them with a pill or something.

They come in with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome and you tell them the only way they will stop this, is to stop smoking weed. They call you a liar, complain loudly about the “healthcare system” and its failings, then leave. Two days later, they are back again. Same complaint.

Then there is the guy who comes in showing all the signs and symptoms of an acute appendicitis. We tell him he needs surgery. He signs out against medical advice because he has things to do that afternoon. Stupid, but whatever. What’s incredible about this, is he comes back at 8 am the next morning saying he is ready for surgery, but we need to do it and have him out by noon, because he is busy and doesn’t have time to waste.

People don’t have to take responsibility for anything.

We are in a society that has abandoned objective reality and reason. We each have our own truth- men can be women, Lindsay was a good mother who just snapped and killed her children but it wasn’t her fault because the health care system failed her. In that kind of a society, there can be no choice between what is good or what is evil, because in such a society, there can be no truth, only subjective reality.

As the nation slides farther and farther from the foundations mooring it to reality, it will become more and more insane. If you don’t like what is real, simply substitute your own reality for the inconvenient one. There is no such thing as the golden rule, no such thing as right or wrong. There is only you. Each person gets to decide what it is THEY want, without regard for what society wants or even needs.

In such a scenario, you get anarchy.

Yet anarchy can’t exist for long. Sooner or later, usually sooner, someone comes along and brings order to what is now chaos. The unfortunate fact is the person who brings order is usually a tyrant.

That’s where we are right now, so each of us needs to harden our hearts and be prepared for what is to come. Things will continue to get worse as the society that was once these United States begins to slide down the cliff into the abyss of history.

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

By Divemedic, ago

Stolen Valor

I was at work the other day, and a patient told me he had a history of PTSD because he was in 9/11. He is 71 years old, meaning he was in his mid-40s on that day. Making conversation, I asked him how he was there, thinking he may have been in one of the buildings.

Nope, he replied he was a Navy SEAL and was helping search the pile for several weeks. To the best of my knowledge, there were no SEALs doing that work. So I asked a follow up: “What BUD/S class were you in?”

He replied that he was in class 100 with a SEAL named Jim Weber. Then he went on to tell me he was an Electrician’s mate and attended Nuclear Power School in Orlando in 1971.

For some reason, the people who participate in stolen valor always claim to be SEALS or some other badass occupation. No one ever says “I was a cook.”

There are only about 7,000 former (i.e. non-serving) Navy SEALs scattered among our nation’s population of 313+MILLION. That’s approximately one (1) former Navy SEAL for every 45 THOUSAND citizens
You have far greater chance of meeting a former NFL football player than you have of ever encountering a real Navy SEAL. With that said, the FBI estimates that there are 300 SEAL Imposters for every living Navy SEAL.

His claims are bullshit for the following reasons:

  • BUD/S Class 100 graduated in 1979 (Class 102 graduated in May 1979, and Class 101/103 also took place in 1979). If he was in Nuclear Power School in 1971, there is a massive, unexplained 8-year gap before he graduated from BUD/S. While not strictly impossible if someone cross-rated later in their career, it is highly unusual given the strict age cut-offs for SEAL training (usually 28 and under).
  • He entered the Navy around 1970 and was still active duty on September 11, 2001. He was in the Navy for 30 years, and retired as an E6? Under the military’s strict “Up or Out” high-year tenure (HYT) laws, an enlisted sailor cannot remain on active duty for 30 years without reaching the rank of Master Chief Petty Officer (E-9).
  • Navy Nuclear Power school was not in Orlando until 1976. A person who was in the nuclear power pipeline in 1971 would have attended the school in either Bainbridge, Maryland or Mare Island, California.
  • With him being 71 years old now, he would have been 15 or 16 years old when he attended Power School in 1971.

I run into people who claim to have served all the time. One of the worst was this loser named John who was my boss many years ago. He claimed to everyone that he knew that he had been in Vietnam as the door gunner in a Chinook, his helicopter was shot down, and he spent years (I can’t remember how many) as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton. The story of the chopper being shot down was my first clue- he said the pilot was killed, and described reaching over the pilot’s shoulder from his door gunning position and tried to prevent the crash. It seemed far-fetched.

That just didn’t seem likely to me, so I wrote to the POW/MIA association and inquired if a person by his name was ever a POW in Vietnam. The answer was no, he was not.

Stolen valor is a real issue. There are a lot of losers out there who try to steal military coolness for themselves. When people ask me what I did in the military, I either give them the real story (I was an electrician) or I make a joke and tell them I killed over 200 men. When they say, “Wow! Were you like a SEAL or something?” I reply that I was either an aircraft mechanic or a cook. I recently was working with a Lt. Colonel in the reserves (a Doctor) and he instantly laughed when I said cook, and replied with “No shit.”

By Divemedic, ago

Young and Dumb

I’ve told you all that I have had a lot of jobs, including working as a lifeguard, and how I was fired from being a lifeguard. As interesting as that story is, the story on how I became a lifeguard is even better.

I had just divorced from my first wife a year or more earlier. I think this was in the winter or spring of 2000. I was living in my car and homeless until just a couple of months earlier. To make ends meet and get off the street, in addition to my main job working for the Fire Department, I also worked for a company that did medical standbys for sporting events. As a certified rescue diver and public safety diver, I did things like rescue swimmer for offshore powerboat racing, things like that. It was infrequent, some times only working one or two days a month. Hey, you do what you have to do to not be homeless.

I still needed money because child support was leaving me without enough money to survive, so I had also taken a third job at Sea World as a janitor. Our job was to clean Shamu stadium between shows. We also had to send people to clean up after the Clydesdales when they paraded through in the afternoon dropping road apples all over the place, and we had to send two people to this floating platform in the middle of the pond that was in the center of the park.

Those two people had to hand out life preservers and help people use the Flamingo shaped paddleboats that were in that pond. One day, I was working on that platform with a 17 year old when one of the tourists fell in the water. His wife began screaming how the man couldn’t swim. I told my coworker to call it in, and I jumped in the water after the guy. When health services arrived, the paramedic was a coworker from the fire department who was also working there on his days off, and found me treading water with the tourist in tow, and he helped me pull the guy from the water.

A few days later, I was in the Sea World offices to pick up my paycheck. I stopped by on my way home from one of my other jobs, so I was wearing a uniform shirt with EMT, Rescue Diver, and Rescue Swimmer patches on it. The manager pulled me into his office and told me he would be writing me up for unauthorized swimming in the lake.

I replied, “But I wasn’t just swimming. I was rescuing a drowning guest.”

Manager: “That doesn’t matter. You aren’t trained to rescue people.”

Me: <looked down at uniform, then back at manager>

Manager: “You aren’t trained by Sea World.”

Me: “So what was I supposed to do, watch the guy drown?”

Manager: “No, you call for health services or run to one of the exhibits and get an animal trainer.”

Me: “Health services is not allowed in the water. The trainers can’t leave Shamu stadium because they have to watch the whales. The whale ate that guy’s dick, remember?”

Manager: “Either way, you shouldn’t have gone in the water.”

So he wrote me up, and I disputed it with the employee relations committee, or whatever they called it. The committee suggested as a compromise that I be sent to be a lifeguard over at the new water park they were opening across the street, Discovery Cove, pending me passing the swim test. When the manager told me my transfer was approved, I said “I thought I wasn’t trained to do rescues?” His reply was: “Don’t push it.”

That’s how I wound up as a lifeguard.

By Divemedic, ago

Labor Day

I recently posted that parents whose kids miss too much school should be fined. There were those who were incensed- why should THEY be fined because their little angels had an unavoidable series of absences?

A week ago, I posted that EBT is a travesty because it isn’t my responsibility to pay for someone else’s bad decisions. Nearly everyone who commented was in complete agreement.

Both topics are the same problem, couched in two different ways. The average cost for public school in the US is about $16,000 per year, per child. Since school is 180 days, it costs about $90 per day to send your kids to school. For a child to attend school from K through 12th grade costs about $200,000 in today’s money. Fining a parent $1,000 because their kid missed ten days of school is merely a refund of the money that was wasted on schooling a child whose parents couldn’t be bothered to make them attend.

That’s free money to those who have kids- free money that is taken from people who either don’t have children, or whose children have long since grown up. I pay over $3,000 per year in local school district taxes. So every day that a kid isn’t in school is my money that has been wasted, yet the parents of that child have no more skin in the game than I, a complete stranger.

The point that I was making with those two posts is this- if it is a waste to give parents free money to purchase junk food, why is it not a waste to pay money for children to attend school, only to watch the educational dollars be wasted when the child doesn’t show up?

I have to pay taxes to feed and educate the children of some fat, lazy bitch who has never had a job, only to see that money squandered and used to produce more fat, lazy criminals who will also need my tax dollars to survive.

Sixty percent of all jobs don’t require more than an 8th grade level of education. That is, they don’t require the worker to perform algebra, know world history, or be able to quote Shakespeare. The high school years are spent preparing the students to attend college, yet only about 61% of high school graduates go on to college, and the graduation rates for them are low.

  • 52% of students seeking a Bachelor’s degree will graduate
  • A quarter of them take longer than 4 years to do so
  • 30% of those seeking Associate’s Degrees will graduate
  • 87% of those who begin high school actually graduate

Overall, 32% of those who begin high school will graduate from college with ANY degree (two or four year). It’s a pure waste of money to use high school as a college prep system when they clearly aren’t benefiting.

Here is my proposal:

At the end of the 8th grade, there will be an entrance exam for high school. Those who are in the top half of the scores will be permitted to move on to “college prep” high school at public expense. If you become a discipline, attendance, or academic problem, then you get sent down to be with the lower half.

The bottom half will attend a 2 year vocational school. They can pick between various tracks: auto mechanics, carpentry, welding, or other useful jobs. Included in the common, general curriculum will be classes in personal finance, budgeting, cooking, cleaning, and general skills needed to be a functional adult. Again, at public expense. Once they are done with that, they can enter the workforce at 16.

Kids who don’t make the cut for “college prep” can still attend, but at their own expense. You think your kid can handle it even though he failed the exam? OK, he or she can attend, but we aren’t paying for it. It will cost you $10,000 per year in tuition. If your kid becomes disruptive of the learning of other students, they can be removed and sent over to the two year vo-tech track. Any student who drops out of either program (college track or votech) will be ineligible for any public assistance of any kind until they complete a GED style votech program at their own expense.

By Divemedic, ago

Balls of Fire

This post is late because it’s concerning the Lindsay Clancy trial. I wrote and scheduled it before the mistrial was declared. I decided to postpone it so I could do some edits. This is the result.

The Lindsay Clancy case has brought the TikTok Detective bureau out of the shadows. These women, experts in everything from police procedure to medicine, psychology, forensic evidence collection, law, military tactics, and nuclear physics are on the case and have declared Lindsay to be not guilty for reasons ranging from insanity to “her husband did it.”

Of course claims she didn’t do it at all for some reason, including claims that it was her husband are demonstrably false. As evidence, we can take the word of her attorney. No, not the attorney in the current criminal trial, but her attorney from January, where she was the plaintiff in a lawsuit against her doctor. I’m posting a pdf of the notes from the case and the actual complaint filed with the Norfolk, Mass. court (pdf warning).

In that lawsuit, she made the following claim:

and this one, also from her lawsuit:

Keep in mind, she was indicted for killing those children in October 2023, yet waited to file this lawsuit until January of 2026, shortly before her criminal trial. This is part of a claim Lindsay and her attorneys are making, that she was not in control or aware of her actions at the time she killed the children.

For that reason, there is no doubt, zero, that she in fact killed those children.

Killing someone isn’t always illegal, but in those cases, the defense requires admitting to the facts. For example, if I shoot and kill someone who tried to rob me at gunpoint, claiming self defense requires that I admit to shooting and killing the person, but I have an affirmative defense in that self defense is legal. I make the claim of being in reasonable fear for my life. The prosecution then has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the shooting wasn’t in self defense.

The actual controlling Massachusetts rule is the doctrine of criminal responsibility, originating in Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case law rather than a statute specifically saying “psychosis.” The foundational case is Commonwealth v. McHoul, 352 Mass. 544, 546–547 (1967). The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s current 2026 Model Jury Instruction on Criminal Responsibility states:

A person is not criminally responsible for his conduct if he has a mental disease or defect, and, as a result of that mental disease or defect, lacks the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.

The evidence never required anyone to believe Lindsay Clancy was well. She clearly was not, as anyone who will kill their children is not mentally well. But being profoundly mentally ill and not being responsible for your actions are not the same thing. The law in this case requires the person making the insanity claim be unaware of the wrongfulness of their actions.

None of the providers who treated Lindsay Clancy diagnosed her with postpartum depression or psychosis. The evidence instead pointed toward a serious mood disorder, with multiple of them diagnosong her as bipolar.

As many who are bipolar do, she resisted that diagnosis, changed providers, often skipping or refusing to take medications. Lindsay was prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications over several months. That does NOT mean she was taking 13 medications simultaneously. The prosecution’s evidence indicated roughly 2–3 at a time. Then there’s the actual pill inventory presented at trial:

  • Zoloft: 30 prescribed — 23 remained
  • Ativan: 30 prescribed — 24 remained
  • Buspirone: 30 prescribed — 28 remained
  • Hydroxyzine: 30 prescribed — 27 remained
  • Buspirone refill: 30 prescribed — ALL 30 remained
  • Trazodone: 30 prescribed — 22½ remained

She hid some of her most disturbing thoughts from the people treating her because she knew it would result in her kids being taken. Above all, people with this condition are well known for resisting treatment, because they “aren’t crazy.”

Lindsay claims through her attorney that she became convinced that her brain was damaged and she would never return to her old self. She was suicidal, but her children were a tether to life, according to her claims.

Then there is the alleged voice. After months of treatment without documented psychosis, Lindsay said she heard a voice telling her to kill the children in the days and minutes before the killings. We are talking about roughly an 18-minute window where a voice commanded she kill her children. She never spoke of this voice before, or mentioned it until after the killings.

Yet during the killings and the hours preceding them, she was capable of purposeful, sequential behavior.

She created the opportunity to be alone with the children. She researched how long her husband’s trip would take and added another errand to extend that time. She killed the children one by one over a 15 minute period. When her husband called during this time, she missed his call and then made the decision to call him back. In the middle of a psychotic break so profound that it compelled her to kill her three children without realizing the gravity of her actions, she still recognized her husband had called, understood that not responding could warrant him returning early, and took affirmative action to call him back. That is difficult to reconcile with the narrative that Lindsay suddenly “snapped” and had no awareness of what she was doing.

Lindsay was profoundly mentally ill and genuinely wanted to die. But she still understood what she was doing when she killed her children. Those things are not mutually exclusive. She took steps to hide her psychosis, this alleged voice compelling her to kill, to get her husband out of the house, and to one by one kill her children.

Mental illness deserves compassion, and postpartum mental health deserves treatment, attention, and resources. However, compassion can’t replace the legal standard for criminal responsibility.

If the standard becomes, “She was a loving mother, therefore she must have snapped,” we’re no longer applying the law to the evidence. We’re creating our own definition of justice based on emotion and feelings.

In my opinion, this woman knew exactly what she was doing. She took steps to hide her behavior while she was carrying out her plan. All of this suggests cunning and a sense of guilt. You don’t hide your actions if you are unaware of the wrongness of what you are doing. In Massachusetts, the legal term for this is “consciousness of guilt.”

The legal issue to which those facts are relevant is whether the Commonwealth proved that the defendant retained substantial capacity to “appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness” of the conduct and to conform conduct to law. Massachusetts defines “appreciate” as understand, “criminality” as the legal significance of the conduct, and “wrongfulness” as its moral significance.

In this case, taking steps to prevent her plan from being foiled:

  • conceal what they intended to do
  • waited until her husband was gone
  • created a diversion to get her husband away from the scene
  • lied about what she intended to do
  • selected the time or place designed to avoid intervention
  • took steps calculated to ensure nobody discovered or stopped the act.

In my mind, that is what it boils down to: Did this woman know what she was doing was wrong, as evidenced by the fact that she took active, complex actions to ensure no one could discover or prevent her from carrying out her plan.

I think the answer is that she knew full well what she was doing. I tip my hat to the one juror who had the cajones to stand his ground in the face of the other 11 members of the jury, the judge, and the defense attorney. He stood up for those children, despite surely knowing what would happen to him in the aftermath, once his identity is discovered. The left is going to make his life miserable.

Now there are actually dumbasses out there who are calling for the elimination of the jury trial, saying we should use professional tribunals instead.

By Divemedic, ago