Divemedic

Blogs I Still Miss

Saysuncle used to be a daily read for me. He began blogging shortly after he got married in 2002. He was a prolific poster, often posting a dozen or more times a day. Sadly, his wife passed away in March of 2020. The frequency of his blogging fell off shortly after, and he eventually stopped posting. A year after his wife died, his house burned to the ground and was a total loss. That’s a tough run of bad times, there. I hope things have improved for him.

Tam over at Books, Bikes, and Boomsticks was also a daily read. Then she went and got herself a job as a professional writer, and her blog quality fell sharply. AFAIK, she still posts, but I stopped reading her stuff a couple of years ago. I do miss her snark.

There are many others: The Ambulance Driver, Munchkin Wrangler, and a few others. I just can’t think of them all at this point.

This blog is now 16 years old, and I began blogging because of them. I walk in the footsteps of giants.

By Divemedic, ago

Second Place, Again

Gaige Grosskreutz was one of the three men justifiably shot by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha in 2020 was struck down in the middle of the street in a hit and run. The driver has been arrested, and it turns out that he wasn’t targeting Grosskreutz. The hit and run was due to the fact that the driver had a suspended license.

Second Place in the quick draw competition.

Second Place in the Frogger Live Action competition.

He is a violent convicted felon who admitted lying during the Rittenhouse trial, and who has now moaned about ‘right wing media’ outlets who exposed his planned subterfuge. 

By Divemedic, ago

Server Upgrade

I just upgraded the server here. Things should be a bit faster. In total, we are seeing about 14,000 visitors a day. This blog alone is getting about 6,000 of those. The extra traffic was causing a bit of a slowdown, so we did a few upgrades. More memory, a different set of IP’s, and a larger CPU. If you people keep wanting to share my server, I will just expand again.

Keep helping us preserve the First Amendment.

By Divemedic, ago

Organ donation

I got an email asking about this, so here is my take:

Whenever a person is about to die, let’s say that they are brain dead but on life support, the hospital will evaluate the patient’s record to see if they are an organ donor. Whether they are or not, the organ donation people will be contacted. That organization will then determine if the person is a candidate for donating organs (not everyone is medically capable of donating their organs.)

If the person has previously agreed to be an organ donor, the person will immediately be screened to see if they are a match for anyone on the recipient list. The transplant team in the recipient’s hospital will be contacted, and they hop on a plane to harvest the organ.

If the person hasn’t indicated either way, the organization will contact the next of kin and attempt to gain consent for organ donation.

No one is taking anyone’s organs without consent. All the organization is doing is acting as a coordinator for the process. If you don’t want to be an organ donor, make sure that you indicate your wishes in your will or living will and make sure that your next of kin is aware of your desires. It’s up to you.

With that being said: No, the hospital doesn’t change your care if you are or are not an organ donor, other than keeping a person that is brain dead on life support a bit longer before “pulling the plug” so as to preserve some of the more sensitive organs like heart or liver. No, it isn’t like signing a DNR.

They aren’t less likely to try and save you for increased profits or anything like that. Chances are, the recipient of your donated organ is hundreds of miles away in another state. As an ED nurse, I work a lot of codes. I do not know, nor do I care, what your organ donation status is before I call your code.

The only thing this is for is to save lives by giving people with defective organs a shot.

A great example of this: A guy comes into the ED by EMS and is brain dead due to some sort of accident. He isn’t savable, his brain is gone, but he is otherwise young and healthy. Why leave his organs to rot when so many people need donations? So the organ donation people get a call, and those people review the record to see if he is an organ donor. If he isn’t, they will try to gain consent of the next of kin. Either way, once they gain consent, they will send out the notifications to the appropriate recipient teams.

Nothing nefarious. It’s all consensual, and it doesn’t change the potential donor’s care one whit.

By Divemedic, ago

Bureaucratic Threats

When we last spoke about my property taxes, the tax assessor’s office was dragging their feet on my property valuation. The deadline for filing a hearing request with the Value Adjustment Board (the county magistrate that sets property values) was fast approaching, so I filed for a hearing.

This morning, I got a phone call from the director of the tax assessor’s office. They tried telling me that the sale price I would sell the house for is not the same thing as the market value. Then they said that the value as set by the appraiser that I hired was not the same thing, and besides (they said) the appraisal wasn’t the cleanest one, and that they would be attacking it in court.

The carrot:

Then they asked me if there was a value that I would be willing to drop my case for. I gave them a number, and they weren’t happy with it. Still, we aren’t that far apart, and I can defend the number I’m asking for. There isn’t a single property in this area that has sold below that in the past two years.

The stick

Then they said that they know I own multiple properties, and they would be making sure that, if I were to win my case, my non-homesteaded properties would be increased in value as well, which would increase my taxes. I took copious notes. If that shit happens, there will be a lawsuit. You can’t single me out for retribution because I exercised my rights under the law.

They told me that there are property owners who think that the market values in the area are too high, which is making taxes high. I pointed out that increasing property values wouldn’t hurt residents because the SOH tax credit limits increases to 3% per year. They responded by saying that there are some commercial property owners in the area that don’t want to see valuations go up because taxes on rental properties in the area will go up. They (the tax office) isn’t willing to take on the big companies, so they are going to oppose my request.

Translated: We the tax office are owned by the large companies, and we will fight you tooth and nail, even to the detriment of the taxpayers we are supposed to represent.

By Divemedic, ago

Steal the Vote, 2024 edition

Pennsylvania will now automatically register Pennsylvanians to vote when they obtain or renew identification cards and driver licenses. Twenty-three mostly Democrat run states and Washington, DC have enacted some form of automatic voter registration. That won’t ever be abused or used to affect an election. Biden had this to say:

To be fair, it was his PR team that said that. What Biden actually said was along the lines of:

And the question is whether or not we should be in a position where you are — why can’t the experts say we know that this is, in fact — is going to be — or, excuse me — we know why all the voters are temporarily approved, but my son Beau. That’s underway, too. I expect that to occur quickly as I used to work at the DMV in a black neighborhood. Don’t see that coming, did you, Jack?

By Divemedic, ago