Government

They Know

On Saturday, we talked about how you are being followed on the internet, even if you think you aren’t. Yes, I know there are plenty of people out there who claim they can’t be tracked because of their elite computer skills. All evidence says they are wrong, but I won’t be able to convince them otherwise, so I won’t try. A great example is how I replaced my electronic locks on my safe with mechanical locks. That step makes it more difficult to get in, but not impossible. Sure, there are things I can do to make it harder to get in, but I can never make it impossible.

It gets worse than that- you are being followed in meat space, as well, whether you realize it or not, and it isn’t just license plate readers. As you travel, the things that travel with you are constantly emitting electronic signals unique to you, and those are being used to monitor your every move.

Your Bluetooth earbuds, your cell phone, even the tire pressure monitors in your car (which have been required in every car made in the past 25 years), are constantly sending out electronic signals that can and are being used to track your movements. They are even using the chips embedded in your pets to keep track of your location. It’s pervasive, and there is no hiding from it. Defense contractor Leonardo is promoting a new technology called SignalTrace that will package plate cameras with sensors that can scrape unique identifiers tied to your smart devices and make that data available to law enforcement:

SignalTrace works by linking devices that regularly travel together, correlating them to license plates, then using them to track where you are. We’ve all been aware for years how cameras could track a car’s whereabouts at any given time. Throw in personal identifiers, and the job of tying an individual or multiple people to that vehicle becomes trivial, and not something anyone can simply opt out of. Now they know where you are, and how you got there. Like Flock is already doing, if the company’s tracking systems decide you are acting suspiciously, they report their findings to the government.

The company claims to “capture device frequencies emitted into the air” and “does not decrypt or capture the contents of the devices or their communications.” Which is how these firms are able to evade culpability for the surveillance they enable. Whether they’re cracking encryption or not, the results are the same: they know where you go, who you associate with, and combined with your internet habits, what you are doing there.

The companies are using the camera network not just to investigate based on suspicion, but to generate suspicion itself- it’s a way for police to make an end run around Constitutional protections. The company isn’t subject to protections against search and seizure, so they scoop up all of this information, then present it to the police, and there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it.

How difficult is it to track someone’s entire life? I can match your car, your earbuds, your cell phone, and every other piece of electronics you own. This allows me to match your online life with your physical one. This is why the people who were conspiring with Trump left all electronics at home and communicated only through 2 meter HAM radios. Once the powers that be know who you are, they can read all of your traffic. The Feds have been tapping the phones of the Portland Antifa crowd. Well, not exactly tapping. They cloned the SIM cards of protesters that they came in contact with, and then were able to intercept calls made to that device. The fact that none of them have been arrested makes one wonder, but that’s off topic for this post.

Predictably, the police are already misusing this technology. In Orlando, a woman was jailed for 13 days when vehicle tracking said she was the one who caused a deadly accident before fleeing the scene. All the cops did was scan the database for every car matching the description of the one fleeing the scene, and Lindsay Isaacs’ black Dodge Durango had recently driven through the area, so police found and arrested her. It turns out that her car had driven through 2 minutes before the accident, and she had no idea that a deadly crash had even occurred. When FHP caught up with her, there was no damage to her car, but that didn’t matter, the cops merely lied and claimed there was. It took her a month to clear her name. It turns out, the vehicle actually involved in the crash was a maroon Durango. She is suing the FHP.

“I feel there’s really no way of fixing what they did to me. It will always hurt me. My reputation was ruined. I’m still receiving death threats and hate. It’s very hard,” Isaacs said.

Alisa Lee Montalvo, 47, of Deltona, was arrested and charged with 9 crimes for that crash, including three counts of vehicular homicide, three counts of leaving the scene of a crash with death, leaving the scene of a crash involving serious bodily injury, reckless driving, and tampering with evidence. (As an aside, in my opinion, there is a good chance she will walk. If I were her attorney, I would introduce to the jury evidence that the police lied to arrest someone else for this crash, then I would attempt to convince the jury that, if they lied in this case once and manufactured evidence, what’s to say they aren’t doing so now? Reasonable doubt all day.)

There are even those who say it’s no big deal, because their shopping habits are benign, the equivalent of “If you have nothing to hide, you should let the police search your home,” but the troubling part isn’t the technology itself or whether or not you value privacy—it’s the complete absence of meaningful limits on how it is being deployed. Every year brings new ways to collect, store, and analyze information about ordinary people, while the legal protections meant to restrain government surveillance continue to erode.

They can paint a pretty accurate picture of your entire life by knowing what you read, your shopping habits, your political opinions, and your whereabouts at any time of the day, and given the time and access, the powers that be can find a law you’ve broken. That’s a certainty.

Each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over one million pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12 by reading 50 pages per day, by age 67 you would have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws and 28 years of reading to your quest while you were busy reading. s of the year 2000 (the last time it was counted) there were nearly 1.7 million regulatory crimes that a person could commit in this country.

If you are spraying insect killer on some ants using a bug spray that says spray from 6 inches away, but you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal, because failure to follow label instructions is a Federal crime. If you are buying a gun and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.

Why is this happening? Ayn Rand gives us an insight into this:

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Truer words were never spoken. More laws equals more crimes, which equals more criminals, which equals more power for those enforcing the laws.

The result is a system where everyone is monitored, everyone is cataloged, and anyone can become a suspect based on flawed data, bad assumptions, or outright misconduct. History has repeatedly shown that powers granted in the name of public safety rarely remain confined to their original purpose. Once a surveillance system is built, the pressure is always to expand it, not dismantle it. The question is no longer whether the government can track your movements and associations in near real time; it is whether there will be any meaningful safeguards left when that power is inevitably abused.

The answer to that is, of course, there aren’t, nor will there be.

There is only one destination for the path we are on: tyranny, enslavement, and the complete control of everything. That will eventually lead to revolution. Whether or not that will happen in my productive lifetime is anyone’s guess.

By Divemedic, ago

Confirmed

Thanks to Tulsi Gabbard releasing formerly classified documents, we now know all of the conspiracy theories surrounding COVID were in fact true. We now know why so many people had to receive pardons from President Autopen on the way out. They massacred millions of people:

Back in 2022, researchers discovered that the COVID 19 virus was a bioengineered virus. It had a genetic sequence that only had a one in three trillion chance of happening naturally. COVID is the only coronavirus to carry 12 unique letters that allow its spike protein to be activated by a common enzyme called furin, which allows it to spread between human lung cells with ease. In fact, the virus appears to have been engineered using genetic material that was patented by Moderna, which would explain how a vaccine was ready for market within months.

Of course, the FBI had known that since at least 2021, and the papers released by Gabbard show that Fauci was working with the Chinese since at least 2016 to develop bioweapons. It’s likely the same thing was happening in Ukraine. This was a concerted, worldwide effort by the US government to circumvent US laws prohibiting research into biological warfare. You’ll remember that the US government had already tested biological warfare agents by deliberately releasing them in Florida during the 1960s (project 112), with releases in:

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

The press isn’t saying shit about this. All I know, is that had I been one of those who lost a loved on to COVID, I would be looking for some vengeance. It’s the only way that Fauci will EVER face anything like justice after murdering millions of people worldwide through biological warfare. This is the largest holocaust since WW2, and the US government was behind it.

I have come to the conclusion that our government is truly evil.

By Divemedic, ago

Only Ones

Here are a couple of cops who were arrested for billing a neighborhood for security service they didn’t perform. One of the officers ripped them off for over $15k. I’ve long had a problem with cops working as security.

They wear their department issued uniform, carry a department issued firearm and radio while driving a department issued patrol car. They reimburse the agency they work for for the use of those items, then are free to rent themselves out. Depending on the situation, they are considered to be security guards or police.

If they want to search you but don’t have a warrant or probable cause, they are security guards. If they ask you a question and you lie, they are then cops and you have broken the law. If you resist them in any way, they are cops. They get to have things however it works out best for them. As this great grandmother found out, when Disney security searched her bags as a part of a security check and she was arrested for having CBD oil. The charges were later dropped, but this illustrates the problem I have with cops as security. They can search you, and you have no constitutional protections. But let them find something illegal, and they instantly can use the fruits of what would otherwise be an unconstitutional search and arrest you.

Oh, and should that cop have to use any sort of force, you can bet your ass that they will be fully covered by magic police immunity.

This entire practice is also a clear conflict of interest. There are quite a few Orlando Police who work for Universal Studios. I once watched a famous singer use a shit load of drugs while backstage at a concert at Universal Studios, right in front of uniformed OPD officers working off duty security. Those cops didn’t do shit, because they know that pissing off their employer (the Studios) by arresting performers will ensure that their cushy and lucrative off duty gig will go away. In some cases, they make more working as security than they do as police officers. They aren’t going to let anything like the oath they took to the law and the constitution get in the way of that.

I don’t think the general practice of off duty security should be legal.

By Divemedic, ago

Cape Canaveral, the breakdown

So at reader request, we are going to take a closer look at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Let’s just consider it to be a great example of what is happening all over the state. I did a deep dive into budget and demographic information, and

2015

The city had a population 10,018 in 2015 and had 25 sworn police officers. The annual budget of the city was $22 million, with $18 million in general fund spending, and another $5 million or so for infrastructure projects.

2025

The city had a population of 9,987, or essentially the same population. The city had had 0 sworn police officers, none, nada, zip. The annual budget of the city was up to $40 million, with $22 million in general fund spending and another $15 million or so for infrastructure projects. That’s a 6.2% per year increase.

The claim is that roads, city buildings, and stormwater improvements were the majority of those costs.

The police department no longer exists, as the city is paying Brevard county $8 million a year to provide police, fire, code enforcement, and EMS services to the city. Sure, this saves money, but if I were a Cape Canaveral taxpayer, I would be asking if this was something I was willing to be taxed for. I am left to wonder why they even have a city, if the county is providing all of the services. After all, if there was no city, the county would still provide those services- and likely at a lower cost.

The median homeowner in the city pays $2,727/year in property taxes. Estimated breakdown of Cape Canaveral median property-tax bill:

RecipientEstimated Annual AmountShare of Bill
Brevard Public Schools~$1,30948.0%
Brevard County & countywide services~$74627.3%
City of Cape Canaveral~$67224.7%
Total$2,727100%

What the city’s ~$672 portion pays for

The city’s millage supports municipal services such as:

  • $6.8 million per year for police, fire, and EMS ($3.8 to the Sheriff, $3 million to the fire department)
  • $3.5 million Public works
  • $1.8 million Parks and recreation
  • $1 million Planning and code enforcement
  • $1.6 million General administration
  • $90,000 Library support

In other words, for a typical homeowner:

  • About $5/year supports library services.
  • About $219/year supports policing and related public-safety functions.
  • About $197/year supports roads, drainage, and other public-works activities.
  • About $104/year supports parks and recreation.
  • About $90/year supports city administration.
  • About $57/year supports planning and code enforcement.

2026

The 2026 budget for the city shows an increase in ad valorem taxes of 26% for the city. Now count the other ad valorem taxes. In all, the median tax bill is going to increase by $450 for each homeowner, if you include county and school taxes. That is an overall 16.5% tax increase.

So yeah, maybe essential services DO need themselves some budget cuts.

This is why we are trying to get rid of homestead property taxes. It’s a sham.

By Divemedic, ago

Cape Canaveral

The left is going nuts because Florida governor DeSantis is proposing to phase out property taxes on homestead property. They are claiming the counties and cities will need to cut essentials like police, fire, roads, and schools. They say that there isn’t enough waste, fraud, and abuse to be found, and those essentials will be forced to face cuts. Let me show you why they are wrong.

The city of Cape Canaveral in Brevard County has a population of about 10,000 people and encompasses about 2 square miles. In the year 2000, population in the city was about 8,900 people, and it was about 8,000 people in 1990. That’s a growth rate of 0.5% per year over the past 36 years. <—Important stat, so keep this in mind as we look at the rest of this.

The city hall was built in the 1960s, and was about 3200 square feet. It looked like this:

In 2015, construction was begun on a new, 18,000 square foot city hall at a cost of $5.5 million. That number was close to what the city spent that year in its entire budget.

Now explain to me why they needed to build this giant edifice that costs more to build and to maintain than the building it replaced? Population was only 25% larger than it was in 1980, but the city hall building needed to be five times larger to accommodate all of the extra bureaucratic employees that are now working there.

The city’s budget is now $70 million, despite the fact that the city contains the same number of residents as it did ten years ago when the budget was $5.5 million. They built a larger city hall, then filled that space with more employees. Five times the building at twelve times the cost.

Why are so many more employees needed? The cost of government was $3 million per year in 1980, or about $11 million in 2025 dollars. Why does government need to be 7 times larger than it was in 1980, even though population is only 25% larger?

This is the waste, fraud, and abuse I am talking about. Maybe essential services NEED to be cut. That’s an insane amount of growth.

By Divemedic, ago

Taxation for Profit

Ever since DeSantis came out with his proposal to virtually eliminate property taxes, by social media feeds have been absolutely overrun with people screaming about how towns will go bankrupt and have to shut down police, fire, and roads. It is so pervasive and widespread, it’s like a chorus. They are also being misleading.

I want to use my town as an example. For a reminder on how Florida does property taxes, you can read this old post from a year ago. Where I live is a town with 3500 people living in about 900 households. Our only commercial property consists of a convenience store and a single diner. Of those households, nearly a quarter of them (18%) pay less than $200 a year in non-school taxes.

Town revenue breaks down like this:

  • 29% of revenue is from ad valorem taxes, with almost half of it (14% of the total revenue) being from ad valorem taxes on homestead property.
  • 29% of revenue comes from fees for services (fees for water, sewer, trash, and other city services)
  • 20% from state and federal funding
  • 10% from shared taxes with the county
  • 10% from utility taxes
  • 2% miscellaneous sources

Keep in mind that the town LOVES my neighborhood, because the people in it comprise only 1/10 of the town’s population, but pay about 25% of all ad valorem taxes. Another 18% pay nothing, or nearly so. The governor’s plan would increase homestead exemptions to $250,000 (from $50,000 currently) in the first year, then to $500,000 the second year, meaning no one would pay taxes on any home until its value was more than $500,000, except for school taxes, which would remain unaffected. A complete loss of ad valorem taxes on homestead property would mean the city would face a loss of 14% of their revenues. What would have to be cut? Let’s look at the town budget. This is where the town budget goes:

  • 33% to the Police department
  • 29% to Administration, Finance, Legal, Legislative, and Planning
  • 22% to Public Works and solid waste
  • 10% to the library
  • 2% to Code Enforcement
  • 3% to Historical Preservation, Cemetaries, and Special Events
  • 1% to parks and recreation

It seems to me that the town is pretty top heavy in administration, the library is an extravagance, and I would argue that a town of 3500 people doesn’t need 15 police officers. I would cut the library, and I would cut the police and admin budgets by 10% each. That takes care of most of the cuts you need right there.

  • Will a small town with almost zero crime miss a single cop being cut from the budget? Likely not.
  • Likewise, the library just isn’t as important as it used to be in the age of the Internet. Certainly not important enough to take money from residents, and taking the homes of those who won’t pay.
  • and seriously, a third of the city budget being administrative overhead?

The town has 50 employees, with 15 being law enforcement officers. Granted, 20 of the town’s employees are seasonal or part time, but that seems like a heavy dead load for a town of 3500, where a fifth of them aren’t paying any taxes at all.

Since 2020, the town’s total revenue has increased 250%, but the population has only increased by 6%.

Losing ad valorem taxes on homestead property isn’t just doable, it’s the only way to curb the bloat. Towns are treating these massive windfalls from taxation like a teenager who just found his dad’s credit cards.

By Divemedic, ago

Men and Women

We have been having a lively conversation about child support and paternity. A comment here made me want to write a complete post as a story and possible warning from my own past:

The one thing that I have always been poor at, is in romantic relationships with women. I did have a girlfriend once who told me that it was because I am a professional rescuer in every sense of the word, and she told me that because I feel the need to rescue everyone, some women will take advantage of that. I’m not sure if she is right, but a string of failed relationships does tell a compelling story.

One of those relationships was as big of a mess as you could ever imagine. This one was the one and only time that I dated a woman who had children. She had two of them, and about 3 months after we began dating, I let her move in with me because she and her two kids had nowhere else to go. I helped her out in a lot of ways. I let her use my second car, I provided her with a cell phone on my account, and treated her children properly. A few months later, we broke up, but she kept my car and my cell phone. Then she sued me for child support.

So it turns out that we had dated for a year and a couple of days before breaking up, and there is a law that says if a man acts like a father to children that aren’t his for a year or more, but that man is the only father figure these children know, the court can consider what is in the best interests of the children and can compel him to visit, spend time with, and pay child support for the children. The theory is called parentage by estoppel. Under the doctrine of parentage by estoppel, a court can order a non-biological man to pay child support if:

  • He knew he was not the biological father.
  • He held himself out or acted as if her were the child’s father
  • The child relied on that representation, forming a parental bond and treating him as a father.

This is applied in narrow circumstances, often in stepparent or long-term partner situations. A year or more of acting as the only father figure can support such a finding. Once established as a legal or equitable parent, support obligations can follow even after separation. So that’s what she tried to do.

In my case, she told the court I was abusing her, so she wanted child support and also a domestic violence injunction. That way, I wouldn’t get other parental rights like visitation or joint custody, but I would still have to pay child support. It took me a year to get out of that mess. You can read about much of the case here. I resolved to never again date a woman who had a child.

I made the mistake of telling the story to another girlfriend, and she tried doing the same thing, just minus the child support. It was also a mess. The only good thing with this one is that she was stupid and I only had to deal with it for about a month. I can certainly understand the idea of men not wanting anything to do with women. Thanks to our court system, relationships with women are something that is fraught with danger.

By Divemedic, ago

Twenty Years

The community note on this tweet is wrong.

Let me explain. Child support is based upon the sum of the incomes of both parents. There is a chart and a formula. So let’s say that the father has two jobs. One where he works for the fire department, and a second job where he works as a janitor at a theme park. The mother claims to be working 20 hours per week as a bartender making $6 per hour. The child support is calculated and they take 70% of the father’s income for the couple’s two kids, but aren’t taking any of the income from his second job. The amount being taken is still less than 60% of dad’s total income, so they are below the Federal limit.

I would guess that’s what is happening here. The $163 the man is left with is the income from his first job, and he also has income from a second job. The example I used above wasn’t bullshit- that’s what happened to me when I was paying child support. It’s what actually made me homeless. The judge didn’t care. When I told him the money they were leaving me wasn’t enough to survive on because it wasn’t even enough to pay rent, the judge said “Get a second job.” When I pointed out that I already had two jobs, his reply was, “Well, get a third job, then.”

So you do that, and guess what? Now you are making more money, meaning that your child support increases again. It was impossible to get ahead. When I had one job, I was paying $700 per month in child support. I was forced to live on $700 per month. I got a second (part time) job, the wife went back to the judge, and my support went up to $900 per month. But hey, now I had $900 per month to live on.

How was my wife making it? She didn’t have a job. She had $700 per month in child support, $400 worth of food stamps, $300 in earned income credit, $200 per month in WIC, and $300 worth of welfare, plus she was getting $750 a month babysitting two children while their parents were at work. She netted a total of $2650 a month. Yeah, she got half of whatever I was making, plus she got to keep all of her money AND collected all kinds of government assistance money.  That is the equivalent of grossing over $40,000 a year. Meanwhile, I was living below the poverty level on what was left. It is easy to see why many men become “deadbeats.” The child support system is fundamentally unfair, and there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the money actually supports the child.

They take the money right out of your paycheck before you get it. Some men work under the table or drift from job to job to avoid paying. That doesn’t really work. If you try that, they take your professional licenses away. Good luck making a living at anything other than minimum wage without a license. Still, some men work at their own business or have help working under the table. Those men get their passports and driver’s licenses taken. The debt accrues and never goes away, not even in bankruptcy. Eventually, they will toss you in prison if you aren’t paying.

I always knew that my ‘child support’ was going to support their mother, not the kids. That is why things like this always make me angry, when I think about how women use their children to ride the gravy train, while their fathers get accused of being ‘deadbeat dads’ because they can’t afford to pay.

As soon as the kids turned 16, she threw them out of the house and had them live with me. First my son, and a year later, my daughter. As soon as it was no longer profitable, they were unceremoniously thrown out.

She still plays the game to get your tax dollars. Right after the first kid was thrown out, she got a job at WalMart as a cashier, and ‘injured’ her back soon thereafter. She now collects Social Security Disability and collects survivor benefits because the man she married after me passed away. To this day as far as I know, my ex-wife has never had a job her entire adult life other than that one year working at Wal Mart. Now that all three of her kids (2 from me, 1 from the dead guy who came next) are grown and out of the house, she lives in a doublewide trailer near Gainesville with her now elderly mother. Between them, they collect more than $5500 per month in SS benefits.

It’s been twenty years since I last paid child support. It still pisses me off. America’s new class of entrepreneurs are young women having children out of wedlock, or they marry a guy, have a kid, then divorce him, and collect. It may or may not even be his kid. Most people who work for a living actually make far less money than America’s new entrepreneurs. Forget college, the average college graduate only makes $44,000 a year upon graduation after 4 or more years of college. By the age of 20, a young woman can be making more than that with almost no effort, all she has to do is get pregnant a few times.

By Divemedic, ago