Government

What is Rural?

Reader Jonathan asks if I live in a suburb because he lives 200 miles from the nearest town. I guess that depends on your definition of a suburb. Miriam Webster defines a suburb as a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city.

So what is a reasonable commuting distance? In wide open country, 50 miles is an hour’s drive. In more densely populated areas, it isn’t unusual for it to take an hour to drive 10 miles. Using the IRS definition of commuting distance of 50 miles, there is no place that you can live in the entire state of Florida that is more than 50 miles from a city. Why is that? Because the entire state is only 140 miles wide from beach to beach, with cities on both coasts and in the center of the state, so it’s rather difficult to be more than 50 miles from anything. That would make the entire state either city or suburb, but that is demonstrably not the case.

A great example of this could be southern Osceola county and the town of Yeehaw Junction. This is an area of chicken farms and cattle ranches. The entire town has a population of 240 people. Technically a part of the Orlando-Kissimmee Metropolitan Statistical Area, it is located less than 50 miles from the nearest city.

The Turnpike exit at Yeehaw Junction is notable for being the only exit on a nearly 90-mile stretch of the Turnpike, being located at the southern end of the longest stretch of limited-access highway without an exit in the United States (the next interchange to the north being 48.9 miles away at Kissimmee/St. Cloud) and the northern end of the second-longest such stretch, the next exit to the south being 40.5 miles away at Fort Pierce. It is about as remote as you can get in Florida. Get in any sort of trouble in this area, and you are screwed. Police, fire, and EMS help is 30 minutes or more away, and the nearest hospital is an hour’s journey from there. Yeehaw Junction is considered remote enough that in 1968 the government purposely released biological warfare agents over the town without the knowledge of town residents, although the entire experiment was kept a secret until 2002. The project was called Project 112

Project 112 was supposed to be conducted outside of the US, but it has since come to light during a Congressional investigation in 2002 that there were experiments conducted all over Florida, including:

  • Avon Park
  • Boca Raton
  • Eglin Air Force Base
  • Fort Pierce
  • Panama City
  • Yeehaw Junction

It’s hard to imagine that Fort Pierce and Boca Raton are considered rural, but the CIA and the military were perfectly fine with using Bio weapons on US citizens just so they could see what would happen.

Even then, the CIA won’t release many details about the operation, not even to Congressional oversight committees. The entire project was approved by agencies that eventually would become the FDC and the CDC, so don’t think that the government is above conducting experiments on the US public.

The US government, in concert with the UK, Canada, and other nations actually committed what would be a war crime, yet they want us to believe that COVID was an accident, because they would NEVER release biological warfare agents as a test.

Our government is evil, and it is long past time that it collapse.

By Divemedic, ago

“Scientists”

A group of scientists have declared that lobsters, shrimp, and cuttlefish are sentient and conscious. The specialties of the scientists?

A review of the signatories on this declaration indicates most of the expertise is in philosophy, psychology, and environmental studies.

They are no more qualified to comment on this than I am on any number of random subjects. By using the term “scientists,” they attempt to claim an expertise that they do not possess. It’s like that time a bunch of Doctors expounded on gun control.

Just because you have expertise in one field doesn’t mean that you have been granted any special wisdom in any other.

By Divemedic, ago

Our Politicians are Criminals

One of the Democrat Senators from Minnesota, Nicole Mitchell, was arrested inside of her stepmother’s house during what appeared to be an attempted burglary. When caught, her statement was “Clearly, I am not good at this.” Below is a copy of the probable cause affidavit:

Because of the recent history with my mother and her husband, I can sympathize with her, even if I don’t agree with how she handled it. However, she didn’t just take stuff that belonged to her deceased father. She was stealing other things like laptop computers, and that is where my sympathy ends.

By Divemedic, ago

Your Money

This man racked up $250,000 in student loans going to college getting a Masters Degree in Music, Violin Performance. Then he chose to live a life pursing music as a professional meditation musician, but it didn’t pay him enough to make the payments on his student loans. In his own words he did not want to give up his dream of being a musician to get a job that would allow him to pay off his loans. (This is the perfect example of a useless college degree.) Here is his Linked In description of his job:

I am a meditator, musician, and web developer that is interested in finding ways these things can be combined and applied to make people’s lives more peaceful and fulfilling. My work in music technology and longterm cultural outreach has taught me just how great an impact opening perceived barriers to knowledge can have on individual lives and communities. It is meditation and this impact that motivate all of my work.

His “web developer” credentials, as posted on Linked In? He attended a single 18 week web developer boot camp. His job as a musician is for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in NYC:

I develop chamber music focused classes for public school children that introduce general musical concepts and highlight its contemporary relevance.

He also gives private violin lessons to kids that want to be just as successful as he is.

His student loan debt was just wiped clean by Joe Biden. With your tax dollars.

Now he is planning a sabbatical to study with his meditation teacher in India. It’s amazing what a $250,000 gift from the taxpayers of this country will enable a spoiled New Yorker to do with this spare time.

Charles Cook from the National Review summed this up for me, and I can’t say it any better:

This year, though, I feel unusually great about paying my taxes, and for that I have to thank a 49-year-old American named Joel Lambdin, who, thanks to President Biden’s remarkable generosity with other people’s money, was recently given $250,000 from the Treasury as a reward for being a financially illiterate dilettante. As Business Insider reports, Lambdin left graduate school in 1998, but, since then, he has chosen to make almost no money. “The only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans,” Business Insider notes, “was by switching careers.” Lambdin “didn’t want to do that because he loved working in music.” So he didn’t.

He loved working in music so much, he didn’t want to pay his bills. Now that he has no bills, music can go fuck itself, he’s going meditating in India.

By Divemedic, ago

Lessons from History

About 20 years ago, I was sent to participate in an anti-terrorism exercise at the Disney Resort complex. The idea was that they used off duty personnel to respond to a simulated terrorist attack at one of the Disney resorts. Some of the people were there as responders, and some were chosen to be the terrorists. They had government employees who had been voluntold to be resort guests and serve as victims.

I was chosen to staff the one ambulance that they had for “real world” injuries, in the event that someone really got hurt, so they wouldn’t have to stop the exercise. It was great, because I got to stand around and learn, without having to worry about doing anything.

It started with a mass shooting. The initial response went well. Initial officers arrived, then SWAT, and SWAT began clearing the area. No shooter had yet been found. Then the command team got there and began coordinating everything. All was going smoothly, and according to procedure.

An hour into it, the exercise had to be stopped and then restarted because the OPFOR had figured out where the command post was likely to be (the parking lot where there were few cars) and placed a command detonated IED there. It wiped out most of the command post. The two guys who had command detonated the device (a car bomb) then strolled through the command post and shot every single person who was left.

The incident commander complained that it was unrealistic for terrorists to know where his CP was going to be, so they started over.

That entire thing reminded me of the tabletop exercise that the Japanese had carried out in May of 1942, where the Japanese Navy was wargaming out the Midway attacks. Admiral Yamamoto hosted the exercise and invited all of the senior commanders involved in the Midway operation to participate.

His chief of staff ran the game and served as the chief umpire. The purpose of the exercise was to fight out the battle on paper first and expose any flaws in the Japanese plan so they could be corrected before launching the actual operation. The game was treated as a formality, and not a serious tool.

The player controlling the U.S. forces sent a flight of land-based bombers from Midway to attack the carriers. The game umpire rolled a pair of dice to determine how many hits were scored. The result of nine was enough to sink two carriers, Akagi and Kaga. The chief umpire did not believe the Americans would be so aggressive. Even if they were, he was confident the Japanese carriers would be up to the task of defending themselves, so he overruled the umpire and reduced the result to just three hits, meaning that Akagi was still afloat.

Every operation carried out by the Japanese Navy from the invasion of Midway and the Aleutians, down to the assault on Johnston and Hawaii, was carried out in the games without the slightest difficulty. The Imperial Navy handily won every engagement in these tabletop games. This was due to the conduct of Yamamoto’s Chief of Staff, Rear Admiral Ugaki, who was the chief umpire and who frequently intervened to set aside rulings made by the umpires.

How can we apply those lessons to the current day? I leave that to your own imaginations.

By Divemedic, ago

The Real Crime

Below, you will see the deposition of a Brevard County Deputy who arrested a man for trespassing and obstruction. The man was in a parking lot, filming a cop who was on a road 35 feet away, conducting a traffic stop. The officer here being deposed arrived on the scene and told the man that he was being trespassed, ordered him to get in his vehicle and leave.

The man walked away, and immediately left the property. He was arrested for trespassing and obstruction. The law of trespassing is where a person refuses to leave private property after being told to leave. It says nothing of leaving your vehicle and wife behind. The cop even admits that leaving your vehicle behind isn’t a crime, but leaving it behind after a cop orders you not to, is.

The case here is one that is literally “respect mah authoritay” when the man didn’t do exactly as the cop told him to, the law be damned.

It is long past time for police to lose qualified immunity.

By Divemedic, ago

Militarization of the IRS

The IRS has spent tax week training new agents in “dynamic entry” of suburban homes.

They are not doing this to target drug dealers and organized crime leaders. The government is preparing an independent army of IRS agents who can work undercover, spy on citizens, and seize assets.

You don’t need machine guns to catch tax cheats, you need accountants armed with calculators and spreadsheets.

Statists: “Weapons of War do not belong on Our Streets. They are evil machines whose only purpose is to kill dozens of people at once”

Also statists: *give assault weapons to the Department of Agriculture and the IRS*

By Divemedic, ago

Being Overrun

While my new house was being built, a visit to the construction site on any given day would show you that no one on the construction crew could speak English. The refrain we get from the left is that “illegals do the jobs that Americans won’t do.” No, they do it for half price, because half price is still much more than they would earn in whatever shithole they came from. Still, the savings that are to be had by employing illegals is only realized by their employer, in this case the builder.

Working at my hospital, we are seeing signs that this area is being overrun by illegal immigrants. The ED at my hospital has tablets that automatically connect to medical interpreters by teleconference. The rule is that we are required to use them for gaining and disseminating information about a patient’s medical condition, if that patient doesn’t speak English.

There are three interpreter tablets for our entire ED. They are in nearly constant use, and it isn’t just Spanish. Just this week, I have had patients who only speak Haitian Creole, Spanish, and even Czech. I have at least one patient a day that doesn’t speak English, and that is in a rural area. Now multiply that by the 25 nurses on duty in my ED. Now imagine that you are in a large city where illegals are more concentrated.

You see the problem. We are being overrun.

By Divemedic, ago