Divemedic

2 Year Old Shot

When I saw the headline that a 2 year old had been shot and killed and his father charged with manslaughter, I opened the link expecting to see an accidental shooting. Instead, I saw a story about a 22 year old man and his two year old son who were living with his parents. They got in an argument, the man pulled out a handgun and discharged it, striking the two year old.

What really struck me was not only was there no mention of race, there were no pictures of the arrestee. Click Orlando is well known for doing this, and when they do, it usually means only one thing…So I went searching. It turns out that I was correct.

No further comment

By Divemedic, ago

Inflation

Prices for April were up 4.9% year over year. That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. There were pretty big increases in food prices. Year over year increases:

  • Anything with flour is up significantly– white bread is up more than 23%, wheat bread 24%, chocolate chip cookies 24.4%
  • Ketchup prices are up 24%.
  • Mustard is up 13%
  • Relish is up 12%
  • Eggs are up 30%.
  • Meat products are up, but not as much as wheat. Poultry is up 5% year over year, pork and beef remained fairly stable.
  • Cheddar Cheese is up 5%.
  • Potatoes are up 15%
  • Strawberries are up 9%

The only good news is that lettuce is down 12%.

By Divemedic, ago

No, Just No

They tell us that we are paranoid because no one wants to take our guns.

Jane Fonda says that we need to kill all of the white men in order to save the planet. You see, according to her and the climate change religion, we only have eight years to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half, or the world is doomed. Of course, they were saying we only had eight years last year. They also said it the year before that. They also said we only had eight years in 2007, sixteen years ago.

She should have been arrested and sentenced to death for treason when she went to North Vietnam and sat on that anti-aircraft gun for a photo opportunity. I am sick of the anti-American left telling me how they are going to come after me to have me killed, fired, deplatformed, or whatever, then telling me that I am paranoid for not wanting to give up my guns.

I am not giving up my guns, I am not getting into the rail car, and if you try, my only hope is that I make the trade an expensive one.

By Divemedic, ago

When I Was Poor

A man was shot on Rivertree Circle in Orlando. This area is one of the “bad neighborhoods” in Orlando. It isn’t Pine Hills or Paramore bad, but that is mainly due to the fact that the “bad” area isn’t that large. Still, this is the Americana area, which is one of the worst areas for crime in the Orlando area:

  1. Pine Hills
  2. Paramore
  3. Washington Shores
  4. Americana Blvd
  5. Semoran Blvd
  6. Kirkman Road
  7. Metro West

Hearing about that neighborhood brings back memories.

Shortly after I was divorced 25 years ago, I was homeless for a time. Friends letting me shower at their place or sleep on the couch occasionally. The amount of child support I was paying, combined with the fact that the court ordered me to pay all of the credit card debt from when we were married meant being without much money. The child support and credit cards were automatically deducted from my pay, which only left me with $300 per month to live on. I walked everywhere and only ate on the days I was at the firehouse for work. I lost 55 pounds that summer. After two months, the small amount of money I could save enabled me to save $500 for a down payment to get a buy here/pay here car and allowed me to get a second job and live in that car.

Once my income was a bit better, I was able to split a two bedroom apartment with a roommate, and the Americana area was the only one we could afford. My half of the rent and utilities was $300 a month. I just checked- the rent in that area is much higher now. A two bedroom in that area costs about $1500 a month nowadays. For a crime ridden ghetto neighborhood.

The neighborhood was so bad that delivery drivers would refuse to deliver pizza or other meals in there, so you had to go get it as take out. Not even a pizza. One of the few places that used to deliver there was a place called “Steak Out.” They have since gone out of business in Florida, but it wasn’t that the food was bad. They delivered a complete steak dinner, the meals were decent, and the prices were reasonable. It’s just that they routinely got robbed at gun point. I was able to order from them once a month or so. It was a special treat.

I once ordered a meal from there, and just as I was biting into the salad, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to discover the delivery driver standing there, disheveled and beaten. He asked to use the phone, because he said he had just been robbed at gunpoint. I immediately drew a handgun, and his eyes grew wide as saucers, and I asked him what the guy looked like. I never found him. The critter was long gone.

In short, I was broke and had to live in a shitty, crime infested neighborhood. It was the kind of place where you didn’t go outdoors at night, unless you had a death wish. I spent a year living there, and then got out.

That was a rough time in my life, but I didn’t sit around and wait for handouts. I worked at the Fire Department, and on my days off I worked a second job as a janitor at Sea World. I went to school during what free time I had and got my paramedic. That got me a $7,000 a year raise. I also quit my janitor job and got a second job working for an ambulance company, which paid much better than janitorial work. I didn’t have to be poor any longer.

Don’t give up. Hard work and a bit of smarts can get you out of whatever situation you are in.

By Divemedic, ago

Surprised

A bunch of high school students are surprised and angered to discover that you can’t graduate from school unless you pass all of your courses.

It’s obvious that they feel merely being enrolled in a course means receiving credit for it.

“Honestly, they could still put us in the classes now,” Tripp said. “Them refusing to do that just lets us know how much they really don’t care.”

It isn’t like they could earn credit in a week.

I know that teachers and the education system catch a lot of flack, and deservedly so. However, there still are teachers out there that care, and this is an example of what happens when a teacher who cares holds students to a standard.

This attitude of high school graduation being a right is one of the reasons why our nation is so ill informed.

By Divemedic, ago

I Said It

I said that landlords were the first targets. Now the Mayor of NYC wants to ignore private property rights and mandate the housing of illegals in the “spare rooms” of private homes.

By Divemedic, ago

False Flag

The more I see this kind of stuff, the more I am convinced that the entire Jan 6 thing was deliberately done by the swamp.

In the aftermath of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, new video footage has emerged on social media, showing Antifa activist John Sullivan inciting violence at the federal building under the garb of a Trump supporter.

Sullivan, who was arrested by authorities on Thursday, told Fox News in an interview last week that he was at the protest in the capacity of a video journalist and to film what was happening but did not actively participate in the attack. “It’s just recording, solely, and not being active in it,” he said.

By Divemedic, ago

Nonsense

The Oakland University in Michigan is “giving some of its land back to Native Americans.” They claim that “stealing” native land “contributed to high rates of diabetes, malnourishment, poor access to dental care and more issues Native communities face today.” Why is that?

There’s a long history of settlers in this country deciding what’s good for Native people and forcing that upon them

You mean like forcing them to use your preferred pronouns? (insert eyeroll here)

Over the course of a century, Native children were taken by U.S. government agents and sent to schools hundreds of miles away from their families. At these schools, they experienced physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse and torture…These were schools meant to, in overtly violent ways, assimilate them to a white society,

So grooming DOES happen in schools. At least we can agree on that. Then the real gobbledygook begins:

A problem with measuring success, Peiser says, is that metrics of counting are about power, while Indigenous communities place value on keeping balance — such as balanced and healthy relationships between humans, animals, plants, and the planet.

So measuring things is about power. Wait, there is more:

While the land offers the community a place to perform activities they could not otherwise, Peiser says more could be done — including getting Native students free tuition to OU, as was promised in the 1855 Treaty of Detroit, and hiring more Native faculty.

“For your Native faculty, you need to hire somebody native to that place, which means your application pool will not come from all over the country,” Peiser said. “It will come from your backyard. And you need to be willing to hire knowledge keepers that won’t have Ph.D.s because we learn our Indigenous practices from our communities, not from colonialist institutions.”

So hire faculty who is unqualified to teach, and don’t give grades or award degrees. That would be a white tradition. I am betting you that the opposition that these faculty members have to measuring things won’t apply to their paychecks, another white tradition.

By Divemedic, ago

Man Overboard

My Memorial day post on the loss of an airman reminded me of the procedures when a man went overboard. Navy ships drill for man overboard at least once a week while they are at sea. The drill goes like this:

An officer throws a mannequin dressed as a sailor into the sea. That mannequin is named “Oscar,” after the flag that is flown from a ship’s mast when they have a man overboard.

There is a watch on the rear end of the ship, called the fantail watch. On aircraft carriers, there are two sailors assigned to this watch 24/7, one one each side of the ship’s rearmost point. They are wearing headsets attached to the lookout circuit. The fantail watch sees what appears to be a sailor in the water, and tosses a smoke float into the water to mark the position of the man in the water. He also calls “man in the water, (starboard/port) fantail” over the lookout circuit. The phone watch on the bridge hears this and notifies the Officer of the Deck (OOD). The OOD immediately orders three long blasts from the ship’s horn, orders the bosun of the watch to sound “man overboard” over the ship’s announcing system (1MC) and stops the ship by reversing the engines. Once it is below a certain speed, the ship will turn around and return to the location of the smoke float (if operations and conditions permit). The navigation crew uses as position tracker called a DRT (dead reckoning tracker) to coordinate the search. (This system uses inputs from the ship’s gyro to track its location. The advantage of the DRT over GPS is that the DRT can’t be jammed.)

The announcing of “man overboard” on the 1MC causes a few automatic actions. The signal bridge will hoist the above-mentioned oscar flag. The rest of the crew begins a face to face muster. There is a phone tree setup, where each crew member reports his location to a superior, who then calls their respective Division office. The division office calls the department office, who calls the bridge with a list of missing sailors. All 6,000 members of the crew must be accounted for in less than 20 minutes. Ten minutes after the initial “man overboard” call, the names of any sailors who remain unaccounted for are called over the announcing system until everyone is accounted for, or until the names of missing sailors are known. In a drill, the training team will randomly grab a couple of sailors just before the drill starts and hold them incommunicado, to make sure that they are reported as missing as a check to make sure divisions aren’t fudging the muster.

Another thing that happens is the ship launches a helicopter if possible, or a small boat if flight operations aren’t possible. The boat or helo has a rescue swimmer in it whose job is to grab the sailor.

Once the rescuers arrive near the man in the water, another smoke float is tossed in the water near him. This is in case they lose sight of him for some reason (waves, weather, darkness). They then deploy the swimmer to pull him from the water.

We used to lose 3 to 5 guys over the side in any given year. Most of the time we would find them, sometimes we wouldn’t. During the six years I was in, I remember two or three that we never found. The one referred to on Memorial day was one of them. I remember one time, we had a helicopter crash where an entire CH-46 Sea Knight went into the water, complete with aircrew. I saw that one happen. Luckily, we rescued the entire crew. That’s a story for another time.

By Divemedic, ago