Divemedic

Paywalls

I don’t do paywalls. When I see a news outlet or story that is behind a paywall, I simply don’t read it. The same information or opinion, or one just like it, is likely to appear somewhere else. It is rare for me to see online information that is worth paying for, unless that information is directly related to my profession or business.

With that in mind, I have been seeing that there is a trend for bloggers to put their blogs behind a paywall. I just won’t do that. I actually began the server with the idea that I have some things that I would like to say, and I felt that others might like to read them. I am not looking to make money, so I won’t accept any paid advertisements, nor will I put this blog behind a paywall. You will also note that I keep moderation to a minimum.

I also knew that a blog isn’t very resource intensive, but resources cost money. Running an offshore server isn’t cheap. That is how the idea of sharing a server came to me. Bloggers need to have a space that is protected from censorship while being affordable. Blogs can share a server, splitting the costs, and making it affordable to have a voice.

So I began to offer server space to anyone who would like to have their own blog, which would allow blogs to be free speech zones. Anyone who shares server space with this blog has little worry that they will be censored for what they say. The only rule that I have is: no porn sites. I am not interested in having porn on my site for two reasons: they are resource hogs (both storage space and bandwidth) and I don’t feel like having to expend my own time and energy defending porn distributors.

With that being said, you can have your own blog space on this server for the affordable price of $25 per month, payable on a quarterly or monthly basis. There are a few ways we can make this happen, and there are a number of bloggers who happily have taken me up on this offer.

Even if you don’t contact me, find an alternative server now, or your blogs and podcasts may be gone forever. An XML backup is no longer sufficient, as Blogger and WordPress no longer support migration by XML. If your blog is cancelled, there may be no way to recover it.

By Divemedic, ago

July 11, 2007

This blog is fifteen years old today. It wasn’t always here at AreaOcho. This blog began over at blogger those fifteen years ago as a way for me to vent about things from my job as a fire medic. The first post was about one of my patients getting his penis stuck on a keyring. In the past fifteen years, there have been more than 4,500 posts, over 10,000 comments on those posts, and I don’t know how many people have read what I have written over the years because I didn’t count them for the first decade or so. There have been nearly a million views in the past year, so there is that.

So many things have changed for me in the past fifteen years. When I started this blog, the death of my father was still fresh on my mind. Since that time I have been married, divorced, and then married again. Employed, retired, then employed again. I declared bankruptcy and then became a millionaire. The last decade and a half have been busy:
In 2008 I got married.
In 2009 the bottom dropped out of the housing market, my pay was cut by 30% and, faced with a depreciating asset, I declared bankruptcy with the intent of giving my house back to the bank.
In 2010 My bankruptcy was discharged.

Before the bank could get the paperwork done to repossess the house, they were caught lying to the court. It turns out that they lied in court and hadn’t been the mortgage holder of my house for years. They were forced to pay me nearly $10,000 in damages.

A year later, they tried to repossess the house again and their lawyer was caught forging mortgage paperwork in my case and several dozen others. Their lawyer was disbarred and the bank had to pay me more than $25,000 in damages. He disappeared with a pile of his clients’ money and I have no idea where he went.

The FTC stepped in and filed a class action against the same bank, and I got paid another $4,000 as my part of the settlement.

In 2011 My wife announced to me (during the week of my birthday, no less) that she wanted a divorce. That divorce became final in June. In November, I retired from my career as a firemedic and began school to be a physician assistant.
In 2012 I decided to leave school, moved back to Florida, and began teaching adult education while remaining mostly retired.
In 2014, I met my current wife. I also applied for my teacher’s license and became a high school science teacher.

In the spring of 2015, my daughter made me a grandfather.

In the spring of 2016, my daughter made me a grandfather for the second time. By the end of that year, I was married again.

In 2017, my new bride and I took a 51 day road trip across the nation, spending two weeks in Alaska in the process.
In 2018, I finally had a net worth of over a million dollars. Not bad for being insolvent less than a decade earlier. We celebrated by spending the summer in Europe.

Of course we all know what happened in 2020, and this led to me leaving the teaching profession and returning to medical work in 2021.

My son, the man I thought would be a committed bachelor until the day he died, got married in 2021.

Fifteen years is a long time, especially for a blog. I wonder what the next few years will bring.

By Divemedic, ago

Pocket Vacancy

Proving that we are moving from a Cold Civil War to a hotter one, Shut Down DC is offering money to anyone disclosing the location of the six Conservative SCOTUS justices.

The reason for this, at least to me, is completely obvious. They WANT some looney to assassinate one or more of them. Such an act would allow Biden to name their replacement. This is nothing more than a group of people who want to commit murder but don’t have the balls to do it themselves. They know that there are people in their movement whose screws are loose, and are hoping that they can spur them into action by broadcasting the location of their desired targets.

I am willing to be that there will be a serious assassination attempt on a SCOTUS justice before the end of the year, with more copycats, and I would give you a 50% chance that at least one of those attempts will be successful before the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, the Republican baseball shooting of 2017 didn’t go far enough. This time, they are going to do something even bigger.

Now or Never is choosing to engage in direct action, it noted, because “conventional tactics are not enough” and it is “time to escalate.” 

The violence is ramping up again. If you think 2020 was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

By Divemedic, ago

Army

They claim that AR-15 owning gun owners can’t possibly hope to fight the US military. I doubt that. The US military will be too busy protesting the lack of abortion access to worry about my AR-15.

What I want to know is when the Article 15 proceedings begin. Or does that only apply to the right?

By Divemedic, ago

Phobia

This couple is so phobic about guns, they are freaking out about their daughter having a pistol safe for securing her diary from a snooping brother.

The problem: The black box turns out to be a gun safe! (A friend of my husband told us.) We’re not worried that she has a gun; she helped organize a school rally to tighten our state’s gun laws. But she refuses to give up the safe, and we don’t want it in our house. Help!

Pathological.

By Divemedic, ago

Scrapping the Constitution

One of the big talking points of the left these days is that the founders were racist, misogynistic slave owners who wrote a flawed constitution. Therefore, they claim, the entire nation needs to be rebuilt. Among their grievances (copied and pasted from a blue check):

  1. The US Constitution is profoundly out of date in key ways & flawed in others.
  2. Only the military and law enforcement should have guns (and even many in law enforcement should not.)
  3. Higher taxes for the rich and corporations.
  4. There is no place for religion in government or government agencies. It should not even be mentioned.
  5. The MAGA and far right extremists movements are in fact deplorable and beyond reasoning with.
  6. When your opponents are posing an existential threat to our society we do whatever we need to do to beat them (w/in the law.)
  7. I believe functioning democracy depends on compromise…up to a point. Every compromise with evil is a victory for evil.(note: see point 2, 5, 6, and 8)
  8. We should expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices, impose term limits, limit its jurisdiction and set and enforce ethical standards for Supreme Court justices and those who work with or influence them.

The entire list is the leftist/Communist wish list. You can see where anyone who would oppose them would be, right? You are deplorable and should be eliminated for the good of the planet, because you are evil and can’t be reasoned with.

This is why our constitution is so important. It’s also why I refuse to be disarmed.

By Divemedic, ago

Rights and Responsibilities

Yesterday, I spoke about my problem with presumptive “no carry” in businesses. Here is one way I could accept it: acknowledge that choices have consequences.

Adopt a legal path for showing that prohibiting patrons from being armed contributed to the crime that followed. Disarm me through policy, and a business is then legally responsible for providing reasonable protection from crime on that property. That includes lockers for securing my weapon, and some means of protection from armed wolves looking to feed on disarmed sheep.

The legal system of no carry (posted or presumptive) allows a business owner to use the force of law to disarm its patrons while at the same time giving them a pass on legal liability when their policy allowed an armed criminal to prey on the unarmed patrons.

The effect of this allows an end run around my constitutional rights.

By Divemedic, ago