Divemedic

When I was in the Navy, there was a scandal that happened at the Tailhook convention. There was a lot of drunken debauchery, including a contest where females allowed men to shave their bikini lines, and allowed men to judge the efforts by running their tongues across the area.
In 1992, one of the participants in the shaving contest, a young Navy lieutenant named Paula Coughlin, said she had been sexually assaulted at the 35th Annual Tailhook Symposium in Las Vegas. It turns out that she lied for much of her testimony. She picked officers out of a photo lineup, claiming that they sexually assaulted her, but they were able to prove that they were not even AT the convention. The Navy ran with the accusations, and ruined the careers of 300 officers. Coughlin did all right for herself, cleaning up $5.4 million from the Tailhook Assn. and Hilton Hotels Corporation.
As a result of this scandal, the entire Navy was required to undergo a standown that included sexual sensitivity and harassment training. The thing is, officers were not required to attend, at least not in my command. For those of you who are not military, let me tell you why that is significant: ALL Navy pilots are officers, meaning that the people who were alleged to have done these acts were the very people who were not required to attend the training.
The Navy has always been more about protecting its image than in true justice. That is why I am not surprised by this announcement.

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous
crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in
cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in
actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be
subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or
limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness
against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use,
without just compensation.

More specifically, the self incrimination clause, the part that reads “nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness
against himself,” is the part that I want to talk about today. This particular clause has been variously interpreted by the court. On the one hand, we have decisions like Haynes v. US, where the Supreme Court held that a criminal cannot be forced to register his guns, because the act of registering an item that he cannot legally own is tantamount to an admission of guilt, and violates the self incrimination clause.
In the other extreme, that same Supreme Court held in 1927, in US v Sullivan that a person must fill out a tax form, even if in so doing he admits to illegal activity. In contradiction to this, the Supreme court also held in Garner v United States (1976) that a person who answers the tax form does so voluntarily, and therefore was not compelled to be a witness against himself when the information is used against him.

That is why it comes as no surprise to me that the Supreme Court just held that a person who refuses to answer when asked if he broke the law can have the fact that he refused to answer used against him as evidence that he broke the law. According to the Supreme Court, your constitutional rights do not count until the police read you your Miranda warning. Whether or not, and when, you have constitutional rights depends entirely on whether or not and when the police SAY you have those rights, which makes them not rights at all.

In other words, if a cop asks you a question, there are only three possible answers:
1 Admit guilt, in which case you will be thrown in jail.
2 Claim innocence: which of course can be used against you as “obstruction”
3 Refuse to answer: which will be used as an admission of guilt.

The police state gets more restrictive every day.

This review is full of spoilers. I would suggest not reading it until you have seen the movie, if you want to be surprised at how it goes. This movie was bad. Awful. read on to see why.

So the basic facts of the movie are that violence and unemployment was destroying society, so the powers that be came up with an idea: allow people one night per year where few laws were enforced for a 12 hour period. This would give people an opportunity to get their natural desire to be criminals out of their system. Under this rule, the only laws enforced were: no weapon above “class 4” (whatever that means) were allowed, and no government officials above “grade 10” could be harmed. This night would be called “the purge.” Then the picture went on to explain how crime, violence, and unemployment are virtually nonexistent because of the purge.

There were quite a few problems with the film. It was your typical class warfare tripe, where the rich were demonized for having more than the poor. The film focuses on a family, whose patriarch is a salesman for security systems. He has sold systems to virtually every home in the neighborhood, and become rich as a result. The neighbors hate him for “getting rich off of their fears and misfortune.” The entire movie centers around this have versus have not editorial.

From a tactical standpoint, the man was foolish. The security system that he has in his home consists of metal shutters that close over the doors and windows after being activated from an upstairs control room by entering a PIN code. A code that his young son knows, which turns out to be a problem.  The system begins to break down when the boyfriend of the man’s daughter hides inside the home before it is activated, and then waits until the beginning of the purge to approach and shoot at the man.

The second disaster is when the man’s son sees a homeless man fleeing people attempting to kill him, and uses the PIN to disable the system and allow the homeless man in. The people who were hunting the homeless man then go on the warpath because they were denied. The rest of the movie consists of the people in the house trying to stay secure, and the ones outside trying to get in.

I noted during the movie that for a man who made a fortune selling security systems, he didn’t know jack about security. He had no way of engaging anyone outside. Some firing ports, a moat with crocodiles, boiling oil on the roof, or even land mines would have made the place safer. Simply locking yourself in a house with sealed windows and doors isn’t going to work. To compound this, he secured a standard home by putting shutters over the doors and windows. Anyone with an axe would have found it easier to enter through the roof. He also had no fallback position in the event that his barricaded windows failed. Why not turn the basement into a saferoom, and hole up down there?

As for the bad guys: They got in by pulling the steel door and window
covers off the house using a pickup truck. What did they hook the chains
to? Also, how did they simultaneously pull off every window and door
using one truck?

How hard is it to defend your home one night a year, when you know the time and the date that it will occur? If this were happening today, this would be my favorite holiday of the year. One year, I would defend my home with land mines. The next year, it may be boiling oil. Each year, the challenge would be to use something different. It wouldn’t be about simply defending the house, it would be about defending it with creativity and style.

This movie was painful to watch.

I want to address a comment left by a reader on Tips. Why is it that a server feels like they were ‘screwed’ when they get paid $50 for what represents an hour’s worth of their time? Servers get their noses out of joint when they get a $10 tip on an $80 dinner bill. Who decided that you should get 15%? I went out to eat for fathers’ day, and the three of us were there for an hour, and the bill came to $84. We were just one of four tables assigned to that server. Assuming that the $84 was representative of the checks for those four tables, a ten percent tip nets that server $38.77 an hour. I can’t see how that is ‘screwing’ anyone.

Sorry, but being a waitress is not a high tech job that requires any special knowledge or education.

Many people refer to the Third amendment as useless, by claiming that no one in this day and age has to worry about your home being turned into a training barracks. I think that statements like this miss the point of the Third Amendment.

This amendment was considered important enough to be the third listed
protection in the bill of rights, right after the freedom to associate
with other citizens, speak out against abuse, and to keep arms to resist
tyranny. In the colonial era, the practice of billeting British troops in
private homes was a widespread. One of the complaints against King
George III in the Declaration of Independence was “for quartering large
bodies of armed troops among us.”

Why do you suppose King George III did this, and why do you suppose the
colonists were so upset about it?  It is a fairly effective form of
intimidation: putting an agent of the State inside the houses of people
whom the State considers “troublesome.” Having an agent of the State
live with the troublemakers has an absolutely chilling effect, and most
especially when the agents start abusing the power—”pushing the
envelope,” as such agents so often do. This would have been known to
the authors of the Bill of Rights. The Third Amendment was put there to
prevent just this sort of thing.

It was impossible for the founders to foresee the advent of
electronics, video cameras, microphone “bugs” and the like, but the
fact remains the same: the presence of agents of the State present in
people’s homes, intimidating them by their very presence, and by their
presence also enforcing the State’s policies, as well as reporting any opposition towards the State has a chilling effect on the liberties that we hold so dear, whether the government agent is present, or is merely “virtually” present.

The news that the government has been listening to our communications comes as no real surprise to anyone that has been paying attention: they have been eroding our freedoms for decades.

Today is the ninth father’s day that I have spent without being able to thank my dad for all he did for me. I leave you with a post that I wrote 6 years ago:

Dealing with life and death issues as often as I do, I really felt like I
knew what was coming when I learned of my father’s passing. I was wrong.

Like
any boy, I loved my father. A boy’s love for his father is not the
affection you show for a lover, nor is it even remotely like the love of
a mother for her children. You see, boys have a need to seek the
approval of their fathers. They are driven by an overwhelming need to
grow into even a fraction of the man that they perceive their fathers to
be. Most of all, they want to earn the respect of their Dad.

I
fought in a war. I gave him grandchildren. I became the first person in
my family tree to graduate from college. I have delivered babies, and I have
held others as the life slipped from their bodies, and felt the pain of being the last person to speak with them as they left this world and entered the next, all the while wondering if there was anything else that I could have done. I have pulled dying
people out of burning buildings. I once jumped in a lake and saved a drowning
man from an alligator. When my dad had a heart attack, I was the medic
who treated him. I have filled sandbags in Missouri to save flooding
homes, sifted through ruined homes looking for the dead after hurricanes and tornadoes, spent weeks in the woods fighting wildfires,
and fed the survivors of dozens of disasters. All of these things I did, trying to be half the
man I perceived my father to be. After his death, I began to teach classes on medical
procedures, hoping to teach the next generation of providers. Again, for
him.

Then he was gone. I carried him to his grave, and since
that time, I have carried my grief around in my heart like a lead
weight, and at times it has been nearly overpowering. I asked myself
countless times if I measured up.

This morning, my son came to me
with 2 movie tickets and asked me if I wanted to go out with him. We
spent the afternoon with each other. I am proud of my son, as he starts
his new job on Monday as a firefighter. As I looked at him on the way
home, I realized that my son was trying to be larger than life.

Just like his Dad.

I finally did it Dad, I am just like you.

and
to you, son: You have indeed earned my respect. You have fulfilled
every expectation and dream that any father has a right to hope for his
son.

There is talk of police and industry leaders wanting to put a so-called “kill switch” into the software of your phone, ostensibly to reduce the market for stolen phones. Samsung phones will have the feature beginning on July 1. I see this being used for all sorts of unannounced purposes. The most obvious of these is easily demonstrated by the market for college textbooks.

For decades, colleges and their textbook publishers have relied on the sale of textbooks to increase profits. The college goes with a certain publisher and gets a slice of the proceeds. At the same time, students reduced costs by buying and selling used books. The small scale of these sales was not a real problem for the publisher’s bottom line. Until online giants like eBay and Amazon came along. Schools tried all sorts of methods like changing the book every year by adding chapters, but that didn’t work well. Then schools and publishers found the secret to shutting off used book sales: Make the homework part of a digital, online packet, and then force used book buyers to purchase an access code. This access code often accounts for 2/3 of the original book cost, and shuts down used book sales.

The same will be true of cell phones, now. Cell phone companies already enter into contracts with phone makers, where the phone maker sells a particular phone model to the public for a greatly inflated price, say $500, and then sells that same phone to the cell company for much less, and the company then uses that lower price to trap a consumer into a multi-year contract that carries very high early termination fees.

Once the contract is over, the original owner of the phone sells it to places like Gazelle, or sells the used phone on their own. Users that want decent phones without being locked into contracts purchase the used phones for much less than the inflated prices charged by the phone maker. This causes the service provider and the manufacturer to lose money.

Now picture that a phone company activates the “kill switch” as soon as the original owner’s contract expires and they upgrade to a new model. Good bye to the secondary phone market. You could try to jailbreak the phone to remove the kill switch, but that would be a felony.

Korea gets it. Last year, that nation fined cell phone carriers and manufacturers for inflating prices, offering complicated discounts, and using the resultant confusing price structure to deceive consumers into coughing up more money. In contrast, the US government is in the pocket of big business and throws people in jail for daring to alter a product that they purchased.

There are other uses: Cops shutting down phones during protests, riots, emergencies, or any other time they feel like it. Didn’t pay your traffic ticket? Your child support? Are you a TEA party member? An election organizer for the wrong candidate? You may find that your phone shuts down when it is most needed.

If a private citizen harms a police K9, he will be charged with several felonies, including injuring a police animal, aggravated battery, and others. For all practical purposes, attacking a police dog is the same under the law as attacking a police officer.

If a person locks their own dog in a hot car, they can be charged with various charges like “animal cruelty.”

In 2012, there were 18 police K9s that were killed. 8 of them died of heat illness when their handler left them locked in a hot patrol cruiser. In fact, more police K9s died last year because of neglect or errors that their handlers made than died from any other reason.

In the past month, three police K9s died from being left in a hot patrol car in three different states: Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Ohio. Stop the double standard. These officers need to be charged with a crime.