Divemedic

Panay Incident

I’ve alluded to the Panay Incident in past posts. It’s a story of what happens when a strong central government falls apart and leaves behind a power vacuum. I think history in this case illustrates what will happen in our near future and is an interesting story. Let’s tell the story now, on the 86th anniversary of the incident.

The US had a large presence of Americans in China in the form of Standard Oil and its refineries, wells, and subsequent employees, so they bought and maintained a fleet of oil tankers and several gunboats for their defense. The gunboats were part of the American naval operation called the Yangtze Patrol, which began following the joint British, French, and American victory in The Second Opium War, in 1918.

The US had maintained a naval presence there since 1854 with the gunboat USS Susquehanna. The naval personnel stationed on the Yangtze river called themselves the “River Rats.” As the last of China’s Dynasties lost its grip on the country, the Asiatic fleet found itself in more and more armed conflict with warring factions that were left behind in the power vacuum. The US was one of those factions, and US companies were making money by picking over the corpse of what had been the Chinese dynasties.

During the following decades, warlordism was becoming a full-blown civil war between Mao Zedong’s Red Army and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army, and this conflict would continue until the communists’ 1949 victory that established the ChiCom government we are all familiar with today.

In 1937, Japan entered the contest and invaded China, soon thereafter beginning the Nanking massacre. During the invasion of Nanking, Standard Oil was attempting to evacuate its employees, a mix of Chinese and US citizens. The evacuation was being carried out by one of those gunboats of the Yangtze Patrol, the USS Panay, and three of those oil tankers. The oil tankers were loaded with refugees, and all four vessels were prominently flying US flags, with the Panay even having a large flag painted on its topmost deck, for visibility from the air. The US Asiatic fleet had notified the Japanese army of their location and mission on the day before the incident.

While anchored upstream from Nanking, Panay and the three Standard Oil tankers were attacked by Japanese naval aircraft. The Panay was struck by two 130 pound bombs and was strafed by six fighters before sinking. Once the ship had gone to the bottom, the three Standard Oil tankers were also bombed and destroyed.

That wasn’t the end of the incident. While the Panay was sinking, Japanese aircraft, supported by gunboats of the Japanese Army, continued pouring fire into the boat and its lifeboats. Then the Japanese also fired upon and strafed the lifeboats and survivors who were trying to make it to shore.

As a result of the attack, three American sailors, the Captain of one of the oil tankers, dozens of Chinese Standard Oil employees, and an Italian journalist were killed. Another 43 sailors and 5 civilians were wounded.

Two US journalists, Norman Alley of Universal News and Eric Mayell of Movietone News, filmed part of the attack as well as the sinking of the ship in the middle of the river.

The Japanese claimed that they did not see the US flags being flown by the vessels, but that is not supported by the facts, and seemed to be a coordinated attack, as several other US and British vessels in the area were fired upon by shore batteries, aircraft, and gunboats of the Japanese armed forces on the same day.

Navy cryptographers had intercepted and decrypted traffic relating to the attacking planes which clearly indicated that they were under orders during the attack and that it had not been a mistake of any kind. This information was not released at the time because it would have revealed that the United States had broken Japanese Naval codes.

Fon Huffman, the last survivor of the incident, died in 2008. The last surviving Japanese pilot who participated in the attack was Kaname Harada, who died in 2016.

The entire incident was the result of world powers dividing up the riches of the collapsing Chinese dynasty. Expect the same thing to happen to a collapsing United States.

By Divemedic, ago

Cleaning Up the Mess

As all of you know, my mother passed away recently. There are many details that need to be handled:

  • Does she want to be buried or cremated?
  • Where to place her remains?
  • Who gets her belongings? Her money?
  • Who is to take care of her demented husband?
  • Where are my uncle’s ashes?

All of this could have been handled through a will, but she didn’t leave one. That leaves all of us to handle the mess that she left behind. Here is the mess:

We don’t know how much money she had, how many debts that she had, or where all of her belongings are located. I’m doing my best to honor her wishes while at the same time being fair to all involved, but it is a minefield.

First, all three of us siblings, as well as my brother’s wife (my SIL) remember her saying that she wanted to be cremated. Done. But what to do with the ashes?

  • Mom’s husband wants her ashes to be placed somewhere that they can be interred together.
  • My brother wants her ashes to be placed in the burial plot next to dad because mom paid for it, and even has her name and photo on the headstone.
  • My sister wants some of the ashes to be placed in lockets that she and her kids can wear.
  • My SIL says that mom told her that she didn’t want to be buried next to dad.
  • My response to all of this, is that if mom had strong feelings one way or the other, she should have had a will made up that would tell us what she wanted. In the absence of a will, we are left to do what we think is best.

Financially, we have found a credit card with her name on it that has an outstanding balance of $350, and a checking account that has less than $1,000. We don’t know where the rest of her money is, or even if there IS any more money. So how that gets distributed is a mystery. The three of us kids decided to just give the husband the money.

Then there is the fact that my brother and I are paying for the funeral arrangements because the husband can’t. The daughter won’t be able to take care of him. She doesn’t believe this, even though I tried to explain to her how much care is required for a person in their 80s who has dementia. She thinks that they are going to move in together so she can keep an eye on him. That isn’t going to work.

That means he will wind up in a nursing home or memory care center. The way that those work is that they are so expensive, the home takes every asset that the patient has- their home, social security benefits, savings, all of it. The only way to save those assets from being taken by the nursing home is to put any assets that they have in a trust. The daughter wants all of mom’s assets to be put in a trust to pay for the long term care of her widower, but the daughter wants us to name her as the trustee.

I don’t mind the husband getting most of that stuff, but in those scenarios, the nursing home or his daughter are the ones who get everything. None of it will actually benefit mom’s husband.

Mom also owned a car. The husband wants that car because the car he owns has a Blue Book value of $7500, but he still owes $10,000. The problem there is that he isn’t supposed to be driving because just a month ago, he was the subject of a search when he went to the store and was missing for hours because of his dementia.

Complicating all of this is the fact that Mom’s husband is obviously deep in the grips of dementia. He hasn’t yet been diagnosed with it because he refuses to go to the doctor, but he is worse than Joe Biden in the mental faculties department. What this means is that normally the husband would be the one to make these decisions as her next of kin, but he is in no position to pay for any of this, or to make any informed decisions. His daughter has stepped forward and claimed that, since he can’t make the decisions, it all falls on her because she is HIS next of kin.

As to who will take care of my mother’s husband, I was in my 50’s when my Mom married this guy. I don’t know him, nor do I owe him anything. Taking care of him is his daughter’s responsibility.

Even more complicated is that my aunt (mom’s younger sister) died back in March. My uncle (the aunt’s husband) died about a year ago. Mom wound up with the ashes of both of them. We found my aunt’s ashes. We haven’t found my uncle’s. My mom couldn’t stand his ass- she downright hated him. Mom had mentioned to my sister that she was planning on flushing “that no-good sonuvabitch’s” ashes down the toilet in the nastiest, dirtiest gas station bathroom that she could find. (Yes, Mom could hold a grudge) The issue there is that his family wants his ashes returned to them. We can’t find them, and well, I think I know where they went.

It’s a mess, and the three of us (me, my brother, and my sister) are left to try and navigate this mess. I’m trying to be as fair and objective as possible, but this is far more difficult than I thought it would be.

By Divemedic, ago

Booty Patrol

A guy driving a truck marked like a Border Patrol vehicle with “Booty Patrol” emblazoned on the sides was given a ticket for $115 because it had red and blue lights on it. He paid it. Then police found his website, one where he was trying to get social media fame, then arrested him for impersonating an officer.

Now we all know that I am not a lawyer, but I of course have an opinion on the matter.

  • He was already convicted of the offence and paid his fine because of the red and blue lights. Arresting and charging him again for that is double jeopardy.
  • Unless there is a “Booty Patrol” police office, he isn’t impersonating any cops with those markings. A green strip isn’t enough for impersonation charges. These charges are bullshit.
  • To publicly admit that you only charged him after you saw his social media page should be admissible in court, as it is evidence that they are trying to infringe on his First Amendment rights.

Don’t forget the Florida case where a man was arrested for having an “I eat ass” sticker on his truck. A police officer saw it and demanded that he remove it. The man refused, and was arrested for resisting an officer and obscene writing on a vehicle. The charges were dropped, but so was the man’s lawsuit, with the judge citing “qualified immunity.”

Though it was supposed to shield government officials only from lawsuits without merit, it instead shields them from ones with merit, including the two-dozen cops who blew up an innocent man’s home during a SWAT raid on the wrong residence, a cop who conducted an illegal search and ruined a man’s car, and cops who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

By Divemedic, ago

Stunt Double

Ear lobes being attached or not is a genetic, inheritable trait. I used to use it as an example in the Biology class I taught. We are looking at Joe Biden’s right earlobe. Take a close look at this picture of Joe Biden as a younger man, in 1987.

Here is a picture of Joe Biden receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January of 2017:

Here is a picture of Vice-President Joe Biden from an official White House photo in 2013:

Official portrait of Vice President Joe Biden in his West Wing Office at the White House, Jan. 10, 2013.

Here he is in a story from September of 2019:

Now take a look at this picture of Joe Biden from March of this year:

Any picture that I could find from before 2019, he has free earlobes. In any picture from 2019 or later, he doesn’t. Until recently. The last time I posted this, there were people who commented, claiming that Biden had gotten facelift as a way to explain this away. So I ask you- what if this article contained a picture of Biden with his earlobes unattached from just three months ago? Would that change your opinion?

What in the hell is going on?

By Divemedic, ago

Cell Jammers

Back in September, I reported that US thieves are beginning to use cell phone jammers. Well, it’s apparently becoming more common.

A couple of thoughts.

  • I have a HAM radio. It can reach help in various frequencies in the 70cm, 1.25 meter, 2 meter, 6 meter, and 10 meter bands. I can also use CB (11 meter), GMRS, and others. Besides, those portable jammers only put out 20 watts or less, for the most part. I am pushing out far more than that. There is no way that any man portable jammer can hit every frequency that I can possibly select from. I can still call for help.
  • With that being said, I have body armor, weapons, night vision, and enough ammo to make this into one hell of a firefight. I am not foolish enough to think that my home can’t be overrun, but it will be expensive, and the thieves can’t want what’s in my house badly enough to take serious casualties. The thieves might get me and my stuff, but there will be fewer of them at the end than there were at the beginning. You think that jammer means that I can’t call for help? Neither can you.
  • Look for the guy with the backpack that has all of the antennas poking out, shooting him and his backpack first will fix the comms problem pretty quickly.

By Divemedic, ago

It’s a Big Family That You Aren’t Part Of

Barack Obama is related to 5 other Presidents from the past century: Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, making six of the last fourteen Presidents all of the same family. That isn’t even the most stunning part. The scary part is how many connections there are between the occupants of the Oval Office and the CIA.

Barak Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, is a cousin of George W Bush. Dunham was an intelligence officer with the 9th Air Force during World War 2, and was living in Lebanon just after the war. According to his official biography, Dunham worked as a furniture salesman for the Standard-Grunbaum Furniture Company, which led to his frequent travel and family moves. Independent researchers believe, however, that this job was a cover for his work as an intelligence agent, who surveilled radical groups, or military or Air Force production facilities, which is what brought him to Hawaii. He specialized in starting anti-government coups.

In the early 1960s, Stanley Dunham was part of a group photo taken with Barack Obama, Sr., on his departure from the University of Hawaii. Obama Sr. had been part of a State Department/CIA exchange financed in part by the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation that brought future African leaders to the U.S. who were being groomed to serve U.S. interests in the Cold War.

The photo would suggest that Dunham was one of the coordinators of the exchange, indicating work for the State Department or CIA. Dunham’s favorite bar in Honolulu, to which he brought young Barry, perhaps not coincidentally was owned by William J. Lederer, a known CIA agent who wrote the Cold War classic, The Ugly American.

Far-fetched as it sounds, Obama Sr. may not have been Obama’s real father. Obama Sr. and Ann never lived together or had a real wedding, and Obama Sr. had no contact with his son, except for a short two-week visit to Hawaii when Obama was ten, which may have been for the purpose of securing Obama a spot in the coveted Punahou Prep School.

It’s even more twisted. Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was a Russian language expert that taught English at the American Embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations in Surabaya in eastern Java and Medan on Sumatra.

Dunham also worked for the Indonesian-American Friendship Institute in Jakarta, a suspected CIA front. One of her closest colleagues, Adi Sasono, had been the leader of the Muslim students during the overthrow of Sukarno. Dunham’s boss in Indonesia, Dr. Donald Gordon Jr., author of Credit for Small Farmers in Developing Countries for USAID (1976), was identified in Julius Mader’s 1968 book, Who Who’s in the CIA, as a CIA agent.

While Ann’s recruitment as a CIA agent has never been openly acknowledged, she was among the few U.S. government employees with the language skills and access to fulfill this role effectively. In fact, President Obama—as well as his mother, father, step-father and grandmother—all were connected to the Central Intelligence Agency.

In his book, A Promised Land, Barack Obama himself neglects to mention that, after graduating Columbia University in 1983, he worked for about a year for Business International Corporation (BIC), a Manhattan-based consulting house to multinational corporations, where his job was to edit newsletters on business conditions in countries around the world. BIC is now known to have been working with the CIA. Its sub-specialty was in recruiting left-wing organizers to use as assets, and in infiltrating foreign labor unions with the goal of promoting disruptions in targeted economies.

It’s well known that George HW Bush was the Director of Central Intelligence. What a lot of people don’t know is that he worked for the CIA as early as 1960. (pdf alert) In 1960, it was Bush’s CIA job to organize the Cuban community in Miami for the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Cubans were trained as marksmen by the CIA. Bush at that time lived in Texas. Hopping from Houston to Miami weekly, Bush spent 1960 and ’61 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion. That is how he met Felix Rodriguez. (Source: The Washington Post, 7-10-90.) The code name for this operation was Operation Zapata. You may or may not know that in 1953, Bush co-founded the Zapata Petroleum Corporation, an oil company that drilled in the Permian Basin in Texas.

You may remember that Felix Rodriguez was the Iran-contra CIA agent who received the first phone call telling the world the CIA plane flown by Gene Hasenfus had crashed in Nicaragua. As soon as Rodriguez heard that the plane crashed, he called his long-time CIA supervisor, the man who was then Vice President George HW Bush. Bush denied being in the contra loop, but investigators obtained copies of Oliver North’s diary, which documents Bush’s role as a CIA supervisor of the contra supply network. The VP denied that it was him, and said “they must have me confused with some other George Bush.”

That is exactly how evidence was uncovered placing George Bush working with Felix Rodriguez when JFK was killed. A memo from FBI head J. Edgar Hoover was found, stating that, “Mr George Bush of the CIA” had been briefed on November 23rd, 1963 about the reaction of anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami to the assassination of President Kennedy. (Source: The Nation, 8-13-88)
On the day of the assassination, Bush was in Texas, but he denied knowing exactly where he was, stating that he couldn’t recall where he was when JFK was assassinated. Since he had been the supervisor for the secret Cuban teams, headed by former Cuban police commander Felix Rodriguez, since 1960, it is likely Bush was also in Dallas in 1963. Several of the Cubans he was supervising as dirty-tricks teams for Nixon, were photographed in the Zapruder film.

There you have it. Basically, 6 of the last 14 Presidents were in the same family, and most of them were in some way connected to the CIA. Think about the implications there for a moment.

Sources:

By Divemedic, ago

We Interrupt Our Mourning for This…

I wasn’t going to post for awhile, but morons sucked me in. Found on X (Formerly Twitter):

Stay safe out there folks. This is a PSA. Last night I called a Lyft ride. It was a long ride, but I talked to the driver before hand, and recommended the proper route. I live in downtown Cincinnati. Immediately, he drives into KY. My destination was in Ohio.

After 10 minutes of KY driving, assuming the best of intentions, I expressed that he was going the wrong way, and that the other way was quicker. He laughed at me.

I felt my heart sink.

At this moment, I confirmed that my location was shared with my people. I shared the ride too.

I contacted 911 through ADT in the Lyft app, & called 911 myself. I pretended like I was confirming plans for a party, & gave the dispatcher the info I could.

“Ma’am, this is 911, did you mean to call 911?” Yes sir. I did. I don’t know where I am going. At this moment I noticed that my driver had two GPS’s. One to my destination, and one mapped to somewhere 7 hours away.

In the app my arrival time was rapidly increasing. Hours being added to the time. I have never been so scared. Finally – a police officer pulled him over for speeding. They got him out of the car, and spoke to me. They let me charge my phone in one of the cruisers while they tried to figure out what had happened.

By the time he got pulled over – after I lost cell service several times – I was over 65 miles from home. Further from my destination than when I started. There were weapons in the car. I could see them.

This could’ve been so much worse. Had I not trusted my gut, had I thought I was overreacting, this could have been horrific. I’m so grateful I had the tools to do something. Who knows what could’ve happened if I didn’t.

An officer drove me to a nearby field, and we waiting for the Lyft driver to leave the county. I then waited for a friend, alone, for an hour at a local gas station. During the ordeal I was texting my partner – he said “I have never known you to be this scared.” Because I’m never this scared. But god, was I terrified.

So there were a bunch of posts telling her to file charges. My answer was simple: For what crime? Everyone, and I mean HUNDREDS of responses slammed me, calling me stupid, claiming that this was abduction or kidnapping. As evidence:

  • He didn’t go the right way. I explained that this isn’t a crime in itself. It’s a civil matter. An airplane that is supposed to fly to NY but diverts to NJ didn’t kidnap you.
  • There were weapons. So? In OH and KY, it isn’t illegal to have a weapon in your vehicle.
  • They crossed state lines. That isn’t a crime, either.
  • Then it was “Explain why he had 2 GPS’s and why he laughed at her.”
  • They also said he was speeding, as if that is grounds for a kidnapping charge.

I explained that they were incorrect, that there was no evidence of either crime. Abduction is defined in OH as:

By force or threat, remove another from the place where the other person is found

Since she willingly got into the car, and at no time in the story did she ask to be let out of the car, it wasn’t by force. He didn’t threaten her, so this wasn’t legally an abduction. One person said, deception is enough for kidnapping, but A required element of Kidnapping requires a demand for ransom, sexual performance, or furthering a felony. There was no evidence of that, either.

That’s when the discussion degenerated, and I bowed out. I was called a pedophile, a predator, and a dick sucker. I was accused of being the driver in the story. Then they all screamed that I was stupid and said that if the guy can’t explain away what happened, that’s evidence of a crime.

I admitted that what happened was suspicious, but there isn’t enough here for charges. They guy doesn’t have to prove that he didn’t commit a crime, the cops have to prove that he did. The fact that a ride share didn’t take you where you wanted to go is not a crime.

There are holes in her story anyway. How did the GPS show that she was “hours” away from her destination without her driving into KY for hours, and it only took her friends an hour to come get her from the gas station in KY? Had they arrested this guy, a first year law student could beat the charges. This story is exactly why your mom told you not to get into strangers’ cars.

Jesus, people can be ignorant. They should use their heads for something other than a buttplug.

Nothing like a good internet argument to make you forget your troubles for a bit.

By Divemedic, ago

Not Challenged

Eighty percent of all grades at Yale are an A. Yale isn’t alone. Seventy-nine percent of grades handed out at Harvard are As. It wasn’t always like that. Ten years ago, 60 percent of students had an A.

The proportion of A-range grades given in the 2020-21 academic year varied significantly by division: 73 percent in the Arts and Humanities, 65 percent in both the Sciences and Social Sciences, and 60 percent in courses at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The percentage was higher in the African American Studies department at 82.21 percent. However, it was the Gender Students department that showed that 92.6 percent of grades were in the A range. So only 7 % of students did not receive an A in gender studies.

So the colleges are teaching woke garbage. My advice to you is this: If your doctor or lawyer graduated from Yale or Harvard in the past decade, I would ask some hard questions about their qualifications. It seems that both colleges, perhaps all of the big colleges, are padding their grades.

When I was a teacher, my feeling on the subject of grades was this:

There are standards and objectives that a teacher has to meet for the class. That is, every student has to demonstrate that they have met those objectives. If they have, they get a passing grade. However, if all of your students are getting an A, you as a teacher are not challenging them enough. In other words, you are a pushover and your class is too easy.

It seems that the problem is that the students’ reviews of teachers are what is being used to judge raises and promotions.

as one faculty member put it, external “market forces” are influencing grading, particularly as faculty rely on positive course evaluations from students for professional advancement, she said in the interview.

I will tell you that my nursing school didn’t do that. Of the students who began the cohort, 31 percent of them failed out of the program. Of the ones who completed the program, there was a 100 percent rate of passing the licensure exam. So maybe it’s just the Ivy league, or perhaps just the big schools that are padding their grades.

Still, the real value in attending Ivy League schools has never been a superior education. Those schools have always been about bragging rights and networking. That’s why Presidents Obama, Clinton, both Bush presidents, Ford, and JFK all attended an Ivy League college.

Even more telling: Barack Obama, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush are all related. Barak Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, is a cousin of George W Bush.

There is even more in a future post.

By Divemedic, ago