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.
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.
A leftie made an appearance in the comments section here at Sector Ocho. He made some claims that I want to address. This post is an attempt to educate, not engage in personal attacks. Perhaps this poor, misguided leftist has good motives, but simply isn’t aware that he is mistaken. This will either set him straight, or prove that he is a partisan hack. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt for now, and simply assume that his is uninformed, rather than being willfully deceptive. His claims will be in red. So here they are, along with my response:
Or the riots that occurred in New York, Seattle, DC, and Portland during Trump’s 2017 inauguration. In DC alone, over 200 people were arrested for taking part in the violence. According to CNN, “Bursts of chaos erupted on 12th and K streets as black-clad “antifascist” protesters smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police lined up in an eastbound crosswalk.”
In February, leftist protesters started a violent clash while opposing Milo Yiannopoulos making an appearance at US Berkeley, doing more than $100,000 in damage. Two Young Republicans were severely beaten and had to be hospitalized. The attackers, who were not affiliated with the university, were taken into custody by UC Berkeley police.
Black-clad protesters wearing masks threw commercial-grade fireworks and rocks at police. Some even hurled Molotov cocktails that ignited fires. They also smashed windows of the student union center on the Berkeley campus where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.
At least six people were injured. Some were attacked by the agitators – who are a part of an anarchist group known as the “Black Bloc” that has been causing problems in Oakland for years, said Dan Mogulof, UC Berkeley spokesman.
March saw more leftist initiated violence. Again in Berkeley, the Black Bloc again attacked people attending a Trump rally. A group of self described Antifascists were responsible.
The #Trump rally in Berkeley has broken out in violence four minutes before the march is supposed to start. pic.twitter.com/NJ4HWjh06P
It happened in April, again in Berkeley. Antifa again attacked Trump supporters.
A May Day rally in Portland, Oregon, descended into chaos when the “anti-fascists” showed up, attacking police officers and setting fires. The same day, police in Olympia, Wash., say they were confronted with a “mob” of masked and violent protesters who threw rocks and used slingshots to target officers.
And their response was to ‘take a peaceful tour of the Capitol’, right?
No less peaceful than the “peaceful protests” of the summer of 2020.
Most (not all) of the violence has been performed by your side.
I think that the selected violence from 2017 that I have illustrated in this post shows that you are mistaken. In addition, don’t forget the 400 or so armed leftists that occupied a city block in Portland, using force and refusing to obey court order to vacate a house when the tenants refused to leave the property.
There is also CHAZ (CHOP), AFAC, and numerous other armed groups that have openly declared war on the right.
If the Left begins the next ‘Civil War’, as you call it, I would dare say it was instigated by the Right.
I would argue that the Civil War has already begun, and it was started by violent acts perpetrated by those on the left. It could be argued that the first shots in the second American Civil War have been fired, but that will be a question better left for the historians in some future decade.
It’s just that the right hasn’t gotten sufficiently pissed off to fight back yet. Remember that the right owns 400 million or so firearms, along with several billion rounds of ammunition. We go out on the weekends and shoot at stuff because we think it is fun to see how accurate we can be, how far away we can still punch holes in things. There are those on the right who can hit man sized targets at over a mile. I don’t consider myself to be an exceptionally good shot, and I can reliably hit man sized targets at several hundred yards. We just aren’t pissed off enough yet.
About yesterday’s post. It’s been a trying week. At work in the ED, I had a guy with a serious heart attack (STEMI alert), some COVID patients, and more. The one that took the cake was the woman who was a mother of 3 kids. She was in the middle of a miscarriage and was bleeding to death. Her pulse was 120, her blood pressure was 72/42 and a MAP of 52. Her ER bad looked like a movie murder scene. Watching her fight to save her own life as well as the life of her unborn child, while at the same time watching other people literally fight to kill others. It made for a tough day at work. Emotionally draining.
On top of that, I am trying to complete my CEN certification while at the same time completing my BSN, all while working PRN in the emergency department. This will mean completing my 6th college degree. Lots going on that was physically tiring. Oh, did I mention that I am on the HOA board, my wife is dealing with some (minor) health issues, and I also had to do some minor repairs on the rental?
There are times when the cup is empty, when you are simply out of the energy that you need to do all of the things, and yesterday was one of them.
Today will be better, once I am done with today’s scheduled 3 hour class. I expect to be back to my usual opinionated self this afternoon. Thanks for listening to my venting.
For nearly fifteen years, I have been writing this blog. For decades before that, I was active on all sorts of websites and in person, trying to convince and debate Natural Rights: Locke’s theories on rights in general, and RKBA specifically. Even the old Packing.org There are some times in that you just get tired. You feel like the people you debate are true believers, and it doesn’t matter what you say, they aren’t prone to logic.
Seeing the cheating on elections, the violent protests, the other violent behaviors makes you think that talking is pointless. You see that a violent conflict is coming and wonder if those who are rushing us to a seemingly inevitable civil war will come to their senses.
It makes one tired. Couple that with my incredibly busy workweek, and there are times when it is hard to string words together. Don’t worry, I am not shutting down the blog, but there are times when it is hard to find words to say that haven’t already been said.
How do you research Antifa? I want to do a similar profile in my area.
I think that XXX is wrong in your post.
Where did you hear about XXX, because I can’t find it.
Every single thing I post here I research to the best of my ability. Whenever possible, I link to my sources so readers can judge the information for themselves. Many manuals and books can be found on the training manuals page on this very site.
I also have pretty good research and search engine skills. For example, I started the Florida Antifa Intel report by searching Google for “Florida Antifa”
Then I just followed the different search results and mined them for information. It took a few hours and a lot of note taking, but I was able to get quite a bit of information. You can also look for Social Media pages and get info that way.
The amount of Spam comments to this site is getting ridiculous. The amount of Ivermectin, Cialis, and Porn advertisements disguised as comments are over the top. There are days when I get dozens of spam comments.
I have already tried putting filters in, and they have largely been successful, but a few legitimate comments are getting caught in the filters like dolphins in a tuna can. This requires that I peruse the filters to authorize those legitimate comments. It’s getting time intensive.
Since I really don’t want to force people to set up accounts in order to comment, I think I will have to implement an IP ban that will hopefully filter some of it out. So at least for now, anyone with an IP of 5.188.210.XXX is being banned from posting comments on this page.
I could make all sorts of excuses as to why my post count is down this week: I have been watching the Rittenhouse trial every minute that I can, even while at work. I have also been working quite a few hours. I have several projects going on, etc.
But the fact of the matter is that I just haven’t felt like writing a whole lot. Maybe tomorrow.