Divemedic

Clean Up Your Ranks

In the last 22 years, I have had 9 interactions with with the police:

  • In 2000, my car was broken into, and my stereo, radar detector, cash, and other items totaling about $600 was stolen from it. The crime scene investigator came out and took fingerprints. They got a hit, gave me the name of the person, and asked me to sign a paper saying that this man did not have permission to be in my vehicle. A month later, I was told that the criminal would not be arrested because the crime was too minor to waste resources on.
  • In 2001, I was pulled over for running a red light. I let the cop know I was carrying, even though Florida law doesn’t require me to. He then threatened to kill me. I don’t inform any more.
  • Same year, I got a traffic ticket for $184, which I paid. Eleven years later, the court sent me a letter saying that they miscalculated the fine for the ticket, and I owe them another $32. I refused to pay it because the statute of limitations had passed and there was nothing that they could do about it.
  • In 2004, a cop told my girlfriend how to use the courts to steal my stuff by claiming that I had committed domestic violence. It took me months to get it straightened out. (I foolishly told this story to a GF in 2012 and that one copied the scheme)
  • In 2005, I had someone steal a check for over $200 from my mailbox, forge my name and deposit the money into his bank account. The number of the account that the check was deposited into was printed on the back of the check. I went to the station to report the crime. I had a copy of the check. All the cop had to do was go to the bank, get the name of the account owner, and make the arrest. Anyone could have done it, it wasn’t a hard crime to solve. The cops told me that they didn’t have the manpower to solve a crime for such a small amount of money. On the way home from the police station, I passed 6 cops with cars pulled over, writing traffic tickets.
  • As a paramedic in 2010, I ran a call on a report of man who was unconscious and slumped over the wheel at an intersection. When I got there, he was obviously drunk, so I reached in and took the keys out of the ignition and put them on the vehicle’s roof. When the cops got there, they let the man call his girlfriend and let her give him a ride home. They said that they couldn’t prove that he was behind the wheel. I told them I would testify, but then the cop told me that his shift was over soon, and he didn’t want to stay late to do the paperwork. I found out later he was a friend of one of the cops.
  • In 2016, I had to draw a gun on someone who then fled the scene. I called the cops and the one who showed up didn’t even take a report. Exactly zero effort was made to catch the guy.
  • In 2018, I had a police supervisor tell me that silencers and machine guns were illegal. I offered to bring in NFA items with the proper paperwork, so the cops could be trained to recognize the proper forms and know the law. They refused, and told me “Keep that stuff out of my town or you will be arrested.”
  • Also in 2018, an armed man was burglarizing cars in my neighborhood. He was caught on my security cameras. The cops used my footage to catch the burglar, but he reached a plea deal that included expunging his record. All he got was probation, even though he broke into four vehicles, stealing one of them.

I am giving the good cops some advice: clean up your ranks. I don’t think you can, because I believe that the bad cops far outnumber the good ones. The police have become just another group of criminals who prey on the people in this nation who actually produce wealth. They are a street gang with badges and qualified immunity.

By Divemedic, ago

Priceless

I was selected for a random drug test for work. I was given 24 hours to go to a third party lab for testing.

The lab had me empty my pockets into a lock box for the drug test. When I pulled out a gun and put it in the box, the look on that woman’s face was priceless.

By Divemedic, ago

This is Why People Hate Cops

A deputy in Columbia County, FL stops a blind man for having a folding cane in his back pocket, claiming that she thought it was a firearm. EDITED TO ADD: It’s obvious that the deputy didn’t REALLY believe that the folded walking stick in his back pocket was a firearm, judging by her demeanor when he reached back and pulled it from his pocket. She invented the firearm story because she wanted an excuse to stop and harass him. I believe that she stopped him because she had already decided to harass him and find a reason to arrest him. END EDIT

It is quickly established that her reasonable, articulable suspicion was incorrect. At this point, her legal justification for the stop is over. There is no RAS that a crime was being committed, therefore there is no reason to detain this man. Instead, she then demands that he produce identification and he refuses because he apparently understands the law better than this cop and her sergeant.

After they run his ID, the female deputy asks “Was that so hard?” The man replies, “It’s gonna be. I want your names and badge numbers,” to which the sergeant replies, “You know what, put him in jail for resisting.”

Resisting what? There was no legal reason to put him in handcuffs or demand his ID.

This is the kind of shit that makes me dislike police. The deputies know the charges will be dropped but are using the process to punish people because they know that they will inconvenience you, costing you legal fees, and retaliate by putting you into the system. We should change the law to establish citizen review committees that review police actions and give these committees the power to strip individual officers of their qualified immunity so that they can be personally held accountable when deliberately using the law as a weapon to satisfy personal vendettas.

This kind of stuff makes my blood boil.

By Divemedic, ago

They Hate You

The left hates you and wants you dead. They think mass killings are funny, a game. The lawyers defending the Parkland shooter flipped off the families of their client’s mass shooting and then laughed about it with their confessed, mass murdering client.

The families of those victims were pissed and responded by pointing out how the defense counselors would feel if their own children were killed. The defense tried to get the judge to issue a warning to them. The judge told them to sit down. So now the defense wants the judge to be impeached.

Flip me off during the trial of my child’s murderer while you are defending him and see what happens to you. Remember that police and trials exist so lynchings don’t.

By Divemedic, ago

A Word on Free Speech

After I wrote my last post on government censorship, they went and tried to do it harder. Biden is screaming about Twitter. Hillary is demanding that the EU, who has no Constitution protecting free speech, pass laws to force Twitter into censorship.

I planned for this. My server is outside of US or EU control. I’m not saying that this website can’t be silenced if the US is determined, just that it won’t be easy.

I agree with Aesop on this one: I just don’t see these wholesale tyrants giving up power voluntarily. There will be bloodshed.

Some have suggested that I switch this blog to an email service if free voices on the Internet are finally silenced. I don’t think I will do that. Should that come to pass, I think we can agree that at that point, the time for talking is over.

There are other ways to be heard, and we won’t be silenced.

By Divemedic, ago

Propaganda Warfare

Back in June, I wrote about the Biden administration establishing a Ministry of Truth to police anyone online that would distribute facts that the government finds objectionable. This is one of the reasons why my server isn’t in the US. Anyway, the idea isn’t dead. A leaked document from DHS (pdf Alert) details how the Feds are going to police wrongthink and limit what people have to say. The Office of the Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security is endeavoring to stop “dangerous” ideas from spreading on the internet. They claim that they won’t be preventing free speech, but I don’t trust that any further than I do a promise from Obama that I can keep my doctor.

The Global War on Terror has effectively ended. Terror won, in case you didn’t know. The US got its ass kicked, and the Afghanistan airlift proved that to the world. Anyway, all of those Federal Employees have to find something else to do in order to mark time and fulfill budgets until they can retire, so the war on freedom inconvenient facts disinformation is just the ticket. The Intercept reports:

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.

That is why my server is in another country. In fact, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media meet on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives . The meetings between the private sector and government are for representatives of those government agencies to dictate how firms would handle what the government calls ‘misinformation’ being distributed over media- including social media.

Just months before the 2020 election, the FBI and other agencies met with large media companies to discuss how the election results would be reported. Why would you need to discuss them? Just report the results. The answer, of course, is that the results and their dissemination would have to be “handled” and “spun” so that the people would accept what they were being told.

During the March 2022 meeting, an FBI official warned that statements made on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. According to senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase who were in attendance in that meeting, the FBI stressed that we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable. In other words, the FBI is attempting to turn our media, including social media, into official information outlets of the state.

The FBI even has a special portal that they use to “request” that Facebook censor or throttle certain statements or information. The DHS division that is in charge of managing this is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The CISA has an advisory committee that includes the former Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety- none other than Vijaya Gadde, who was fired this week by Elon Musk.

That committee drafted a report calling for the CISA to remake the “information ecosystem.” This would involve the CISA closely monitoring “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, ‘hyper partisan’ media, talk radio and other online resources.” The committee made the case that the government needed to take steps to halt the “spread of false and misleading information,” with a focus on information that undermines “key democratic institutions, such as the courts, the financial system, or public health measures.”

When business and government merge in order to forward the aims of the government to control the population is Mussolini Fascism.

“The Fascist conception of life,” Mussolini wrote, “stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.” Sound familiar? To me, it sounds like the very platform of the Democrats today.

Gizmodo is getting onboard with this:

Gullible people eat up a gross diet of disinfo and loosely-factually-vetted, ideology-soaked infotainment, then run off to cause chaos in the real world. Who knows how bad things could get now with Elon on the loose

The odd thing about all of this is that the leftist media is screaming about how Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the ones spreading disinformation, but they aren’t the ones in charge of the government, now are they? The left is trying to insinuate that the appointees of Donald Trump are still in government and trying to sow disinformation, but I am not sure that anyone with half a brain thinks that DJT was ever in charge of the bureaucratic branches of the swamp.

The government is expanding its efforts to control the media. That same inspector general report details how the Customs and Border Protection determines whether information spread through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are accurate. The report also lists how agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement determine whether social media accounts are bots or humans, and how the mayhem caused by bots affects behavior. The Secret Service has reportedly also expanded their purview to include disinformation.

Keep in mind that President Biden has said that MAGA Republicans are the enemy of the state, and now you see how the war on those who would oppose the left is proceeding. Be ready.

By Divemedic, ago