Government

Yet Another Bad Apple

5 days for committing felony battery, and for threatening to arrest the guy under false pretenses? His job is to prevent crime, not commit it. How can you completely violate the purpose of your job and still keep it? Become a cop, then you are above the law. You can even read the arrest reports here. This douchebag cop even tried to find a way to have the guy he punched arrested.

Even better? He is a school resource officer. This unhinged asshole is carrying a firearm around your kids. What happens the next time he loses his cool after a 15 year old kid calls him an asshole?

If I did something like this at work, I would lose my fucking job, and rightfully so. I used to be a HUGE supporter of police. No longer. They, as near as I can tell, are little more than an armed criminal gang with delusions of adequacy. Bolstered in their bravado and tyranny is the fact that cops have qualified immunity and the “thin blue line” bullshit to do whatever they wish and walk away without a concern for legal consequences.

IMO, as soon as he flashed a badge, he was depriving the victim of his rights under color of authority. There should be a law that states any time a city loses a lawsuit or pays a settlement for a cop’s bad behavior, the money to pay it should be deducted from the police pension fund. Then perhaps, with skin in the game, cops will finally clean up their own ranks, instead of covering each other’s asses.

If cops want to change my mind, and the minds of others, they need to clean up their ranks.

By Divemedic, ago

Oregon: “Minorities too stupid to learn”

The state of Oregon says that proving proficiency in reading, writing, or math is no longer required to receive a high school diploma, has required it since 2020, and won’t require it at least through 2029. This makes an Oregon High School diploma completely worthless.

A little over a year ago, I put up a post on what the terms ‘licensure’ and ‘certification’ mean.

Certification is where an entity certifies that a person meets certain standards. The entity issuing the certification can be a private business or a government. The value of the certification lies with the reputation of the entity that issues it.

A diploma is a piece of paper that certifies the person named thereon has met the requirements put in place to receive that certification. It is, in this case, a statement from an Oregon school that the high school graduate has met all of the requirements that the state says need to be met in order to receive the diploma. That way a prospective employer can see that you have graduated from high school, knowing that the person named on that diploma has certain abilities and skills.

In Oregon’s case, just what are those requirements?

Higher rates of students of color, students learning English as a second language and students with disabilities ended up having to take intensive senior-year writing and math classes to prove they deserved a diploma. That denied those students the opportunity to take an elective, despite the lack of evidence the extra academic work helped them in the workplace or at college, they said.

Where is the evidence that a high school diploma helps a graduate in the workplace or college?

Board members underscored that state-mandated standardized tests will still be administered to most Oregon high school students – they just won’t be used to determine whether a student has the skills necessary to graduate.

I know high school students. Make them take an exam that doesn’t count as a grade and isn’t required for graduation, and they will not take it seriously, rushing through it so they can get back to interacting with social media on their cell phones.

Oregon lawmakers, however, have mandated that families be told each year that they can opt their student out of taking state tests – and one third of high school juniors didn’t take the tests last spring, meaning they and their families don’t necessarily know how they measure up against statewide academic standards.

Oh, wait. They don’t even have to take them. That’s how you hide your policy failures- simply stop measuring them. So why are they doing this?

Opponents argued that pausing the requirement devalues an Oregon diploma. Giving students with low academic skills extra instruction in writing and math, which most high schools did in response to the graduation rules, helped them, they have argued.

But leaders at the Oregon Department of Education and members of the state school board said requiring all students to pass one of several standardized tests or create an in-depth assignment their teacher judged as meeting state standards was a harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students, a misuse of state tests and did not translate to meaningful improvements in students’ post high school success.

So they are saying that black and Hispanic students are too stupid to learn reading, writing, and math, but then turn around and claim that those who demand that they learn these things are the racists.

By Divemedic, ago

Workplace Safety

The leftists on Twitter are in an uproar over a 15 year old roofer who fell to his death in Alabama in 2020. They are firing off post after post, claiming that Republicans don’t want to protect children. They are, however, leaving out an important part of the story.

The missing fact? The child laborers who are being injured are illegal immigrants (referred to in this link as “migrants”). The employers in this case are already hiring them illegally and paying them less than minimum wage, so labor laws protecting children really won’t do anything in these cases.

In fact, the $100,000 fine levied against the roofing company for hiring the child labor is peanuts compared to what these companies save by hiring illegals for less than minimum wage. Go to any construction site in the US, and you are likely to find illegal immigrants- what the left euphemistically calls “migrants”- being the majority of the workforce. A roofing company that employs 10 people at $8 an hour is saving a quarter of a million dollars every year that they continue the practice in Florida.

According to salary.com, a roofer in Alabama makes around $30k a year. Now imagine that you are employing illegals for half that. A ten man crew would save you $150,000 a year in salary alone. Then there is unemployment, the Social Security match, benefits, and other costs that you don’t have to pay, even though you are breaking a dozen laws in the process.

But a child labor law will matter.

By Divemedic, ago

Trying to Sound Smart

Watch this video:

No the time it takes to travel a distance is an easy formula. It is derived from the formula for speed, where speed is equal to distance divided by time. To calculate In the video, he draws a curved line to display the relationship, and his is wrong. Displaying that formula as a graph to display how long it takes to travel a known distance looks like this:

EDIT to add: The below graph is not a good representation of my point. You can ignore it, but I am leaving it here as a monument to my error. My point still stands: his claim that driving faster doesn’t make a difference is still false. If you go 70 mph versus 60, you are travelling about 16% faster, so you will get there 16% sooner. If you are travelling 20mph instead of 15mph, you are travelling 33% faster, so you will get there 33% sooner.
He is saying that it doesn’t pay to drive faster, which is false. The benefit to driving faster is directly proportional to the increase in speed.

Note that the graph is a straight line. He is either stupid or deliberately lying. The difference between 5 mph and 10 mph will get you there in half the time, because you are travelling twice as fast. The reason why you only save a few seconds when you drive at 65 versus 60 mph is that 65 is not even ten percent faster than 60.

By Divemedic, ago

How I Would Be on the News

If I am standing on my porch more than 30 feet away from a cop that is making an arrest in my driveway, and the cop walks over to claim that I am interfering in his arrest to arrest me, we are gonna have a problem. However, that’s exactly what happened in 2019 in Vallejo, California.

First, he has a motorcyclist at gunpoint, but holsters his firearm before showing the motorcycle rider his back. I would argue that the cop never really felt that the rider was enough of a threat to justify pointing a gun at him.

Second, you come onto MY porch because I am filming your empty headed conduct from 30 feet away, then you try to arrest me? Things will not go well, and we are going to be on the news that night. Just because you are a cop doesn’t mean that you get a free pass to violate my rights in my house, and I don’t give a shit what court decisions you have that claim otherwise.

But Burrell says [the cop] told him that he would let him go because he was a veteran, thanked him for his service and let him out of the car.

Bullshit. This hotheaded cop realized that he was making a HUGE mistake and used the “you’re a veteran, so I am letting you go” as a way to try and correct his error.

Burrell said he then went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a concussion. He is still seeking treatment and says his fingers remain numb from the handcuffs.

This is 100% tyrannical bullshit. I am normally a “let’s fight it out in court” kind of guy, but once you are on my porch, that shit goes out the window. Is that a threat? You bet your sweet ass it is. Just watching this video pisses me off.

Officer David McLaughlin has also been involved in two shootings since joining Vallejo police. He and Officer Matt Komoda fired on a suspect who was allegedly driving at them before crashing into a parked car on Aug. 31, 2016. No one was injured.

If you shoot like shit, it’s not a good idea to be driving around acting like an asshole while you point guns a people. Sooner or later, someone is going to accept your challenge. He has already shot at two people in his ten years as a cop. Most cops go their entire career without shooting at anyone.

Similarly, if I wind up on a jury in a case like this, I am going to oppose whatever this miniature tyrant’s position is. In this case, the Marine veteran got paid $300,000 by the city.

By Divemedic, ago

Non-Issue

The left thinks that they have a smoking gun because the White House medical unit ordered thousands of narcotic pills during the Trump Presidency, and the Pentagon says that they were not tracked very well. It isn’t smoking, nor is it a gun.

The White House Medical unit maintains a health clinic for all of the staff members of the White House, the Naval Observatory, Air Force 1 and 2, as well as assisting the Secret Service in setting up and maintaining emergency trauma centers everywhere their protectees go. The office also maintains fully stocked pharmacies at the White House, Naval Observatory, Old Executive Office Building, and aboard Air Force 1. There are 1800 staff members of the White House alone. The WHMU also provides emergency coverage for more than 1.5 million annual visitors to the White House and guests of the President, as well as national and international Heads-of-State and diplomats when they are in Washington, DC. So the amounts ordered aren’t really that remarkable.

The same doctor has been assigned to the WHMU since1995, and has been its director since 2000- more than 24 years. He is an Air Force Brigadier General by the name of Richard Tubb.

As an ED nurse, I see between 10 and 30 patients a day, most days. On any given day, I give controlled substances like Fentanyl, Dilaudid, Morphine, Norco, Xanax, Valium, Versed, and others a dozen or more times per day, and I am not filling prescriptions like a pharmacy, I am personally administering them.

The difference here is that our medical staff at the hospital have a pharmacist who checks every medical order for safety. The doctor writes the order, the pharmacist checks to make sure it is safe, then releases it. The nurse retrieves it from the automated dispenser, then administers it to the patient after also checking to make sure it’s a safe and appropriate medication. That’s right- at least three different people check to make sure it’s safe.

Not so in the WHMU. The providers are directly administering the medications without a pharmacist or nurse backstopping them. This makes errors more likely, but it doesn’t mean that the drugs are being abused.

The fact that some drugs weren’t well maintained doesn’t mean that Trump or someone on his staff was abusing them, it just means that government workers, being immune from fines for not tracking narcotics or lawsuits from improperly dosing or prescribing them don’t bother to do so. They track their controlled medications like law enforcement tracks their firearms. That is to say, not very well.

By Divemedic, ago

The IRS War on the Right

Do you remember when Obama used the IRS to target his political enemies? I do. The IRS even settled a lawsuit and apologized. So did Obama.

IRS leaks have targeted Democrats’ political enemies, such as the National Organization for Marriage, to which the IRS was obliged to pay a settlement after leaking the identities of the group’s donors in order to enable political retaliation against them. For some reason, Barack Obama’s Justice Department never got around to prosecuting that case. Or the case of the IRS director lying to Congress about targeting conservative political groups, or … well, you get the picture.

That was before the Treasury Department investigated itself and found that it did nothing wrong. So now the left is claiming that it was all fake news. Next they will say that the Russians did it because Trump asked them to.

So why am I posting about things that happened more than 7 years ago? Because it is still happening. The House Oversight Committee is looking into allegations that the IRS is selectively not enforcing its tax-exempt rules against liberal nonprofits.

By Divemedic, ago

Don’t Be a Victim

This is why I have video cameras covering my property and a video doorbell. I don’t answer the door in person, especially at night. I might be home, or I might be on a different continent. This cop mag dumped on a woman for having the audacity to be armed in her own home.

Under these circumstances, some return fire from 5.56 green tip would be appropriate. Aim for the belt buckle when you clap these assholes. You might as well take 3 or 4 of them with you.

By Divemedic, ago

Enemy of the State

Leticia James has announced that NY will confiscate all of Trump’s NY property, including Trump tower, if he doesn’t or can’t pay the $354 million fine. I don’t see how they can do that, since Trump only has a 30% stake in the building.

The interesting part here is that Trump tower contains 2.1 million square feet of floor space, with 98% of it currently leased at about $100 per square foot. Trump’s 30% stake in the tower nets him $62 million a year. So overall, the building brings in $210 million a year in rent. The judge in the case found that Trump lied about the value of the building, which Trump claimed was $806 million. The judge claims that the building is worth only $40 million. I am not a billionaire tycoon, nor am I a NY judge or a NY real estate expert, but I think that a building that brings in $210 million a year in rent is worth more than $40 million.

Similarly, the judge in the case claims that Trump’s Mar a Lago in Palm Beach is only worth between $18 million and $27 million. That’s bullshit, and I can easily prove it. Just a block away in Palm Beach is 1200 S Ocean Blvd. That house is a 12,000 square foot home located on 3.4 acres with 9 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms. The lot borders on the Atlantic ocean on the east, and A1A to the west. It’s estimated value is $110 million, or about $9,100 per square foot. Another home which just sold in 2022 for $9.5 million and located less than a mile from Mar a Lago is a 1900 square foot 3/3 home on a third of an acre that doesn’t border the water at all. It works out to $5,000 per square foot.

Contrast those two homes with Mar a Lago- a 16,500 square foot home located on 17 acres of land. If we are to believe the judge, this resort is worth 5 to 10 percent per square foot of the two homes above?

Or you can instead view it as the commercial property that it is. The Mar-a-Lago Club had $29.7 million in gross revenues in 2015, $25.1 million 2017, $22 million in 2018, and $21.4 million in 2019. So it brings in $20 to 30 million a year in revenue. Again, hard to claim that a business brings in 100% of its value each year.

As I have been saying- the left is going to destroy Trump. I don’t think that simply making him a pauper is going to be enough. He will wind up in prison, where he will be killed pour encourager les autres.

By Divemedic, ago

Facts Coming In

This is why the gun banning left tries to get the narrative going on shootings as soon as possible, before the facts are in. With regards to the shooting at the Kansas City Superbowl parade, the shooters were two juveniles and two black adult males with criminal records who got in an argument when one of them made eye contact with another, who began firing.

An account of the bloodshed pieced together from witnesses and video footage found that the violence started when Mays and a group of individuals who confronted him “began arguing about why they were staring at each other.”

Not only that, but at least one of the guns was stolen.

I’m willing to bet they were gang members, but we will never know, because now that the shooters wasn’t a white male wielding an AR-15, the lefty antigun press no longer cares. Now it’s just black dudes participating in their culture.

By Divemedic, ago