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To clear out some tabs, here are some news stories from around Central Florida:

A new Florida law will allow people to pay some bills with gold and silver coins. People who do so will not have to pay sales tax. This really doesn’t help anything. Let me explain. Silver’s melt value is $33.60, but one ounce coins cost $43.24, a 29% markup. The sales tax is only 7% to 8%, so you are losing out. On top of that, you would owe capital gains taxes to the Feds on any increase in the value of the coin between buying it and when you used it to pay a bill.

A man in Polk County, Florida was swimming in a Lake when he was bitten by an alligator. When police arrived, he grabbed a pair of garden shears and attempted to break into a police cruiser to steal a firearm before being shot by deputies.

People in Tavares are leaving guns in their unlocked cars, and thieves are stealing them. This is the time of year for car break ins, because high school students are out of school, bored, and looking for things to do. Don’t leave a gun in your vehicle, especially an unlocked one.

The local press is breathlessly posting that ride share drivers like Uber and the like are sometimes carrying guns. Note that the police ticketed and towed the car, not because of the gun, which was returned to him, but because he didn’t have permission to pick up fares at the airport. The left wing media is more concerned with a man carrying a gun with a permit and operating a ride service without a permit than they are for people entering the US illegally.

Now that the new pope is from Chicago, a few changes are coming:

• The newest TV show to be added to the Chicago lineup of Chicago PD, Chicago Fire, and Chicago Med will be Chicago Pope
• Communion wafers will henceforth be deep dish
• Mike Ditka will be canonized. Saint Mike, patron Saint of Da Bears, and Da Bulls
• It is now a mortal sin to put ketchup on a hot dog
• All parishes will now wish peace and love upon America, except for those jerks in Green Bay

All kidding aside, here are a couple of Tweets made by this man, before he was elevated to the top post in the church. His entire account seems to be an Anti-Trump woke stream of consciousness:

As usual, the head of the Catholic church is a giant hypocrite, just as all liberals are. He can change my mind by immediately allowing anyone who wishes to enter Vatican city and stay there as a “dreamer” to do so. Until then, he is just a liberal to be ignored.

Filming things for views. In this case, the range should never have allowed it. It’s this sort of attention seeking behavior that gets people hurt. They are lucky in this case that no one was.

pic.twitter.com/QNz3r6dxen

— Gun Lovers Club (@GunloverClub1) April 30, 2025

Since we are talking about religion so much this week, I was reminded of something. I mentioned that I spent several years in a Christian private school. One of the things that always fascinated me was how so many things in that book captured the human condition.

Nuclear power is the power of the stars. The Chernobyl reactor melted down in 1986. The area, even aquafers with a formation period measured in decades, was heavily contaminated with radionuclides, in some cases more than 100,000 times higher than background radiation.

There is a connection to that in the Christian bible. Let me explain:

The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water—  the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.

The Ukrainian word for the common wormwood plant (Artemisia vulgaris) is “Чорнобиль” (chornóbyl).

Striking, isn’t it?

Antifa in Portland posted flyers around the city stating that if you don’t wear a mask you are being “violent,” and suggesting that they have the right to attack you in “self-defense.”

Feminist Karen

Her boyfriend David

I am going to warn my readers that blog posts may be short and sporadic for the next couple of weeks. I am studying for a new board certification. I am looking to add a board certification in a nursing specialty. Boards are a bitch. (The title is a play on words)

I recently had in depth conversations with a couple of my patients. They were quite topical. The first one was a conversation that I had with a retired Army Warrant Officer whose job it was to fly Blackhawk helicopters. One of his postings was to the same unit that the helicopter that was involved in the recent collision between an Army helicopter and a civilian airliner.

His thoughts were that the crew was wearing NODs while flying the aircraft. If you have ever worn those devices, you know two things- you lose depth perception, and any lights you see tend to look like any other lights that you see. This area, according to him, is very busy airspace with a lot of things going on, lots of lights on the ground, and lots of aircraft with lights flying around. The helicopter was flying higher than it was supposed to, and for these reasons, the oncoming airliner’s lights likely blended into the background.

My thoughts on this, is that if this airspace is that dangerous, the military either needs to no longer be permitted to fly in that area, or if it is determined that national security requires them to still fly there, then the airport needs to be shut down so civilians no longer fly in the area. It’s the only way to be sure this won’t happen again.

The second person I spoke with is a poultry farmer from Kentucky who told me that he hasn’t had any problems with avian flu. He has over 20,000 egg laying birds, and not one case of any sickness.

My opinion here is that this was a problem created by the outgoing Biden administration to screw with Trump. This is another fake pandemic.

When I got divorced in 1997, I was making $1000 every two weeks. I lost $280 in taxes, leaving me $720 every two weeks. Following the state law formula, the court ordered that I pay $348 to my ex wife, nominally for child support, leaving me with $720 per month to live on ($372 every two weeks). The support was taken from my check before I even saw it so I wouldn’t be a ‘deadbeat dad.’ The rent on my apartment was $600 for a small one bedroom, making my rent more than 80 percent of my take home pay.  I was soon homeless and without a car, moving from couch to couch at the homes of friends. 

I understand feeling down when this happens:

American Citizen breaks down in tears as his most recent rent increase means 90% of his income now goes just to paying rent

1 bedroom apartments in some states now average $2,200 to as high as $3,900

We have a cost to rent crisis in America, we are crippling our own citizens pic.twitter.com/0Zi4uMqSY7

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) March 17, 2025

The difference is that I didn’t stand in my kitchen, filming myself crying before posting it to social media. Instead, I did what a man does- I figured out a way to deal with it. In this guy’s case, he set up the camera, set the scene, then cried on cue. This isn’t genuine emotion, this is a man child looking for someone else to come and take care of his problems.

I got a second job, picking up garbage after the Shamu show at Sea World. I walked, rode a bike, and took the bus. I wouldn’t eat for several days at a time. I lost 30 pounds that summer. Two months later, I bought a car at a “buy here, pay here” place. I wound up living in that car for another few months. I was eventually able to get an apartment by moving in with several roommates.

There are different ways to deal with disappointment. You can sit around and cry about it while asking daddy government to come and fix it, or you can fix it yourself. It’s OK to bitch and complain a bit, but at the end of the day, your problems are yours to fix.

Most of us were poor at some point. Get roommates. Get a second job. Get a cheaper apartment.

Take a look at this video. A man resists arrest and the cops use force to get him under control.

At first blush, I would say that it looks proper- you resist arrest, the cops can use force to affect the arrest. However, if you look closely, the officer is holding handcuffs in his fist, and is using them like brass knuckles to punch the man in the face. Some rando on Twitter made the point that police training allows the use of handcuffs as weapons. He even posted an excerpt of the policy to make his point.

Except he was lying. If you read the entire policy and not just one isolated sentence that was selected to try and make a point, you see that it only permits police to use the cuffs to push on pressure points like the hands or ribcage. It does not mention using them to deliver blows, especially not to the head or face.

The use of brass knuckles, especially to deliver blows to the head, is lethal force. While police CAN use force to affect an arrest, nothing this man did justified shooting him, nor did it justify repeated blows to the head with a weapon. This arrest did not rise to the level of lethal. The cop was out of line. I would have made that point there, but like a chickenshit, he made his comments and then blocked me before I could respond.

I would also point out that lying and misleading people in order to make a point usually indicates that your point didn’t need to me made.