Divemedic

Use of Force

I just had the oddest experience that I have ever had in Las Vegas. It ended in a use of force incident.

My wife and I were playing Craps at Harrah’s this morning. My wife was standing to my left. We were at the end of the table and a woman walked up to the table on my right and tried to buy in with $25 cash and a slot machine ticket worth $77. The dealer told the woman that tickets were not accepted at the tables, and directed her to the cashier’s cage that was 20 feet away. The woman left the $25 in chips on the table and headed that way.

She returned 10 minutes later, and I pointed out to her that the chips she had left behind were still there. She said “I don’t care about that, it’s chump change,” then put the chips on the field. I was the shooter and rolled a 6. Her money was taken by the dealer. She asked the dealer to place another bet, the dealer asked for money, the woman again tried to use the slot machine ticket. My wife helpfully told her that she needed to use cash. She left. After she was gone, I made a joke: “That’s what happens when you legalize pot.” The entire table laughed, dealers included.

She came back a third time, about 15 minutes later. She stood so close to me that our shoulders were touching, despite the fact that no one else was at our end of the table. I slid my chips to my left, away from her and closer to my wife. It made me nervous. The woman said, pointing to my wife,”She isn’t helping me. I should just punch her.” I told the woman that this would be a bad idea and that she needed to leave. I asked the dealer to call security. I couldn’t leave, because I had about $200 in play. The woman left, and the dealer said, “She is someone else’s problem now.”

You guessed it- she was back 5 minutes later. The stupid ass tried using the slot ticket again. She said, “I don’t have any circle things (meaning chips?) to play with, so I will just take some of his.” She then reached in and grabbed a handful of my chips with her right hand.

I grabbed the offending hand HARD and twisted towards me as I stepped to my right, into her, planting my foot behind her. At the same time, I lifted her arm and pushed. Off balance, she started to fall and I was just starting to finish the move when my wife yelled “stop.” I eased up and let the woman keep her feet. Security was there pretty quickly. They removed her from the property. As they were doing so, she insisted that security get a supervisor and “fully document” the incident. She will be lucky if they don’t have her arrested.

My wife later said she was worried that I would be the one who got in trouble. She also said that she wasn’t sure that I needed to use force. I explained that the woman had already verbally signaled her willingness to get violent and was in the act of committing robbery. What I did was a clear case of the lawful use of force in self defense.

First time I have ever had to use force in my wife’s presence.

By Divemedic, ago

Las Vegas

I am in Las Vegas. Just a few minutes ago (1230 Pacific time) a pair of Blackhawk helicopters (the variant with the refueling probe on the front) flew from the west and made a left to fly north, directly above the Las Vegas strip. Altitude was less than 300 feet, as they were below the level of my hotel.

Doors were open, and personnel were seen inside. Seems kind of odd, but not the first time seeing spooky stuff here.

By Divemedic, ago

Intel

The ransomware attacks continue. There are several hospitals (at least five) that are rumored to have been attacked by ransomware in the past two weeks. They are trying to keep it quiet, but the attacks were largely successful in at least a few of the attacks. Two hospitals are known to have been without computer support for over a week. I know, because one of them is the one where I work.

Some systems were not affected because they were on different servers, but the common thread here is that all of the hospitals that were attacked used the same medical record reporting software. That may or may not be important. At any rate, the loss of this server affected everything: medical records, prescription tracking, payroll, scheduling, email, you name it, it has all been down for over a week. They can’t even make people pay for food from the cafeteria because the POS system isn’t working. No cash register means that they are letting us eat for free.

Payday is Thursday, and we are already wondering if we are going to get paid. We can’t issue new account numbers to patients, and everything is being done on paper. We are tracking patient location and status by writing on windows with dry erase markers. everything has been reduced to using pen and paper. My unit alone has three people per shift, and we are generating over 800 pieces of paper during every 12 hour shift. That works out to each of us filling out one form every 23 seconds. Every second for 12 straight hours. We aren’t administrative- we are a clinical unit. Those papers are there to document what we are doing. I don’t even know how we are getting anything done with patient care because we are so buried in paperwork.

Some people are being furloughed because their jobs are completely dependent on computer technology. Other departments (mine included) are working overtime to handle the additional workload. I suggested that it would be cheaper to send people with nothing to do up to the departments that need help with paperwork, rather than pay people overtime. That suggestion was ignored. The extra paperwork doesn’t require technical or medical training, it simply needs hands and a functioning brain. Instead, my unit is working overtime. I worked 60 hours last week, and 60 hours the week before. So yeah, I really hope that we DO get paid.

That has cut into my personal time, as well as into my blogging.

The other thing that I wonder is why are all of these ransomware attacks happening all of a sudden? In this case, the hackers are demanding $5 million from EACH hospital that has been hacked. Is it money? Some other motivation? Why now? Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. The question is: Who is the enemy? Are we at war? Is this China? Russia? Iran? Or is it the Democrats trying to sow confusion? All of those sound farfetched, but what events of the last two years haven’t seemed even more unlikely?

We have already seen a bioweapon unleashed on the world, only to find out that our own government not only knew about the virus, they instructed us on countermeasures that they KNEW were untrue, but also that the guy in charge of responding was part of the team that developed it, and that our own government sponsored it. Then a part of our government used it as cover to rig a national election. I don’t thing anything is impossible at this point.

By Divemedic, ago

No one available

Years ago, I used to live in an apartment. I came home one night to see that my neighbor’s apartment appeared to have been broken into while he was out of town. The front door had been kicked in. I called 911. The operator told me that it was a busy night, a burglary of an unoccupied dwelling was low priority, and it would therefore be an hour or so before police would arrive.

I told them that I understood, described what I was wearing, told the operator that I would be clearing the apartment of any criminals with my firearm, and asked her to relay that to responding officers, so that I wouldn’t be shot.

Less than five minutes later, 6 officers arrived, lights and sirens on. I got the standard lecture about taking the law into my own hands. I told them that SOMEONE has to stop criminals, and since they were busy writing reports of crimes that were over, the people themselves would stop crime.

They were not amused.

It looks like the citizens of Asheville, NC will be having to do the same for themselves. Here are ten crimes that the Asheville police will stop responding to:

  • Theft under $1,000 where there is no suspect information (this does not include stolen vehicles or guns)
  • Theft from a vehicle where there is no suspect information
  • Minimal damage and/or graffiti to property where there is no suspect information
  • Non-life-threatening harassing phone calls (does not include incidents that are related to domestic violence and/or stalking)
  • Fraud, scams, or identity theft
  • Simple assaults that are reported after they have occurred
  • Reports that do not require immediate police actions and/or enforcement (information only reports)
  • Funeral escorts
  • Lost/found property
  • Trespassing where the property owner does not want to press charges
  • In addition, noise complaints made during normal business hours and after-hours may have a significant delay in response…
By Divemedic, ago

NJ socializes property

The New Jersey governor just signed a law which extends the state’s eviction moratorium to January of 2022. This means that owners of residential rental property in New Jersey have not collected rent in nearly two years. At what point is this an unconstitutional taking of private property for public use?

The only way out for these property owners is either bankruptcy, which means the state gets the property, or a mysterious fire, which gets the owner an insurance check.

By Divemedic, ago

McAfee

I bought a new laptop last year. It came with McAfee antivirus. Because I was working from home, I got an email virus from a work email. I don’t think I was the target, I think the hackers were trying to target my school district. The payload was the ech0raix malware. McAfee never detected the virus, and didn’t do a thing to clean the computer.

I lost everything. All of my data. The weakness of the virus is that it saves an encrypted version of all of your files using a randomly generated key. No one with the possible exception of the NSA can decrypt it. Then it deletes the original. That was the weakness that my IT friend was able to exploit. We got the files back, but filenames and metadata was lost. So now I have a couple of hundred thousand files without names. The only way to find out what a file is, is to open it and then rename the file. I gave up on that about 11 months ago. Tedious.

Why do I mention this now?

Because McAffee is telling me that my year subscription is up, and is asking me to renew. They have a money back guarantee that, if you get a virus and they cannot retrieve your data, they will refund you the purchase price of their software.

Being a gambler, I can tell you that this is a sucker’s bet. The overwhelming majority of their users won’t get a virus, thus making you the loser of the bet and McAfee the winner. Those who DO get the virus must send the computer in to be ‘cleaned’ and data recovered, if possible. Those who can’t be cleaned, McAfee ‘loses’ the bet, and you ‘win’ your money back- a push.

This virus software is not very good, and their “guarantee” is a sucker’s bet- a gimmick designed to take your money.

By Divemedic, ago

Child, felon, killer

News in the Orlando area about two kids, ages 14 and 12, who committed a burglary, stole some guns, then engaged in a shootout with responding police. The two kids ran away from a local foster home, the Florida United Methodist Children’s Home. The home has a history of trouble, with the police responding there as many as 200 times a year. In March, one of the foster kids residing there beat and murdered one of the home’s security guards.

The pair used a shovel, a crowbar and large rocks to break windows to break into the home, where they then used baseball bats to destroy furniture, toilets and a tub. They soon located the homeowner’s guns — an AK-47, a pump shotgun, and a handgun, along with 200 rounds of ammunition.

The older one, a girl, was recorded saying, “I’m gonna roll this down like GTA.” They fired on police for over 90 minutes while police tried to negotiate. Police finally returned fire, striking the girl in the chest. Video of parts of the shootout can be found here as well as here.

The 14 year old girl has been arrested for stealing puppies in 2018 and for setting several fires when she was at another facility in Flagler County. The 12 year old boy has been in foster care since 2016 and just a month ago threatened “to kill a student and spread his guts all over the bleachers” while at school.

Both of them now face felony charges of attempted first-degree murder of law enforcement officers and armed burglary. Sheriff Mike Chitwood has this to say about the juvenile justice system:

“The brainiacs in Tallahassee, they want to do this restorative justice stuff. They need to take a deep look and say, ‘Something’s not right here,’ because where the rubber meets the road, these kids are killers. They’re capable of killing. This juvenile citation (expletive) that you hear from these faith groups, they need to worry about what’s going on in the pulpit in their church, not worried about what’s going on on the (expletive) streets when you have 14-year-olds and 12-year-olds arming themselves,” Chitwood said.

I have layers of security. Cameras. Alarm system. Gun safe. All of it is designed to prevent amateur attempts and slow down more professional attempts. Please secure your weapons in a safe. Even a cheap gun safe would have prevented the teens from accessing the weapons, and one can be had for less than $150. If long guns won’t fit in a small safe, remove the bolts from the long guns and lock THEM in the safe.

By Divemedic, ago