You Can't Silence Us

Psychotic

This video is truly terrifying. I found it while researching an entirely different and unrelated post. This cop is the scariest one I have seen. Listen to the way he talks. He is treating that man like a THING, an object. I have literally met serial killers, and he sounds just like one of them, IMO. Imagine for a moment, being his prisoner. You are in his power, he can do whatever he wants with you, and judging by the behavior of the other cops, he will get away with it. Now think about how you would act towards him while you were in his custody. You bet your ass you would do what it took to survive. Yes, sir, no, sir, I’m sorry sir. Otherwise, there is a pretty good chance that he will kill you.

I know the video is a bit long, but it’s worth your time. Truly chilling.

As one of the comments to the video said, “Cops don’t become psychopaths, but there are plenty of psychopaths who become cops.”

In this case, the FBI actually investigated and prosecuted him. I don’t know why, because I don’t have access to the trial, but a jury found the cop not guilty of wrongdoing.

The other thing that really disturbs me, is that the other cops (both at the scene and in the jail) just stood there as this guy did this. As far as I am concerned, that makes each and every one of them “bad cops.” If anyone wants to tell me that I shouldn’t say that since the jury found him not guilty, then I don’t want to hear a word when some criminal walks on a technicality or because a jury found them not guilty.

I saw the video shot by the police officers’ own body cams, and I can judge for myself when I see wrongdoing. I don’t need a jury to tell me it’s OK.

When I was in the military, I once had a commanding officer (Captain, O-6 type) who told us that if he had 100 enlisted men with 100 video cameras who said a junior officer had committed a criminal act, but the officer denied it, the Captain would have no choice but to trust in his officer and assume that the enlisted men and their video recordings were wrong.

I disagreed with that statement then, and I disagreed with it in 2023.

In August of ’23, a handful of coworkers and I watched as a cop tortured one of the patients in our emergency room. After we jointly filed a complaint, we were all told that the supervisor had investigated, and the officer involved said that it didn’t happen that way. All of us, we were told, must have misunderstood what we all saw, because we don’t understand police procedure. Besides, the dude who was tortured was not a nice guy, even though he was in jail for a misdemeanor and had an otherwise spotless record. I was so disturbed by this, that I wrote a post about it.

That’s how cops investigate. Cops investigate themselves and find they committed no wrongdoing. It happens all of the time. I have seen it on more than one occasion. In my profession, I meet and see a lot of cops, a lot of scummy people, and a Venn diagram of the two groups would have a good amount of overlap. The prosecutors, judges, and the rest of the legal system need cops in order to keep their jobs. My guess is that the entire system is playing team politics: half of them on one side, half on the other. Justice is lost somewhere in the middle.

I don’t know why the jury let him walk. Maybe they didn’t see the video. Maybe it was heavily redacted. Maybe the prosecutor deliberately tanked the case, I don’t know. I do know what I saw.

I know that some cops try to go right. I also know that, put on the spot, a cop will nearly always side with other cops, even over and above their own families. That makes all of them bad to one extent or another. I get it- you can’t expect a cop to arrest his mother or wife, they’re human with human weaknesses. That’s all the more reason why we can’t treat them as if they are above the law.

Let me close with a funny meme.

People who have read this post: 155
By Divemedic, ago

Musk

Musk has been claiming AI and robotics will ensure no one needs a job, we will need to hand everyone money in the form of UBI, but everyone will live in a penthouse. Those claims span a range from unlikely to impossible for reasons I would hope we don’t need to elaborate.

I’m going to assume that Musk isn’t an idiot and is aware of this as well. The only reasonable explanation is he is lying. Musk is well known for pump and dump schemes.

AI is nowhere near ready to take over anything. AI isn’t intelligent at all-it’s simply a search engine designed to interact with the user to sound human. The program is still limited by the personality, biases, and thought processes of the people who wrote the program.

I’ve seen the claims and studies: AI is correct more often than human doctors. Why this isn’t the big gotcha everyone assumes it is, is that AI is correct on standardized patients more often than doctors. A standardized patient is one where all of the symptoms are there for a diagnosis to be made. It’s essentially like a test question, because it is. Standardized patients don’t present like real patients: they don’t lie, they don’t have too many distracting symptoms, they are perfect patients. Not real world. In the real world, patients lie about symptoms they have, they add symptoms they don’t have, and sometimes they don’t fit the mold of what their condition should look like. All of this complicates diagnosis.

One of the things we have in the hospital is cardiac and vital signs monitoring. It seems like a straightforward thing- if the patient has vital signs outside the norm, if their heart rhythm isn’t correct, sound an alarm. The computer gets that wrong more times than it is correct. A patient will scratch an itch, and an alarm will sound, saying he is in a lethal heart rhythm. Nail polish of the wrong color, and the machine claims hypoxia. Heart rate high, and the alarm sounds- even though it isn’t a medical condition that caused the heart rate, it’s something benign. That’s why it’s only an alarm that sounds to get someone’s attention- these things still require the judgement of a human to decide whether or not intervention is required.

The same is true in other fields. Remember the Teslas that were slamming into trucks without hitting the brakes? Remember the 737 Max aircraft that crashed because programmers from India put in faulty code? How about the Airbus aircraft that were randomly dropping in altitude due to computer errors just three months ago?

Until they can fix that, AI isn’t ready to take over the world. It’s just not.

Anyone who thinks AI is ready to do more doesn’t understand the way this stuff works. Musk is smarter than that.

However, Musk is heavily invested in his new AI startup, xAI. (He does have an odd fetish for the letter x) His statements accomplish nothing but making people invest in AI. I wonder if that isn’t the reason for this.

People who have read this post: 130
By Divemedic, ago

Jiggity Jig

The last day of the vacation finally arrived. We got up at 7am, went to breakfast in the hotel, then caught a cab to the airport. The plane boarded at 1030 am. For crossing the Atlantic, I always try to fly first class. Why? Because the seats are large, they can lie down flat to form a bed, and it makes a long day otherwise tolerable.

They take your meal order when you get aboard. Soon after the plane took off at 11:10am, I got served the meal. I had a salad, Lasagna, and a pork loin in a tomato gravy that was really good.

Dessert was frozen yogurt with raspberry and granola topping that was outstanding.

While I ate, I watched John Wick, then after I laid my chair down and took a 3 hour nap. I woke up with about 2 hours to go, and they served us finger sandwiches with walnuts, cheese, and crackers as a pre landing snack.

We landed in Boston just after 1pm local time and began our nearly three hour layover for our Orlando flight. When we arrived in Orlando, we were picked up by family and finally got home just after 8pm, which was 2am in Paris. Despite the 3 hour nap, a 20 hour travel day was exhausting.

Our vacation lasted 21 days, spanned 4 countries and an entire ocean. The total cost of the trip was pretty high at just over $15,000, and at the same time was a great value for what we got out of it. It was a great trip and I don’t regret this first attempt at semi-retirement. A good part of it was while I was in Paris, my boss contacted me and offered me three extra days at work, and to entice me into accepting, offered me a $400 per day bonus. Hey, that’s nearly a quarter of the trip paid for.

It pays to be one of two board certified emergency nurses and one of only 5 nurses certified for ultrasound guided IV placement.

People who have read this post: 87
By Divemedic, ago

Don’t Talk to the Police, the followup

Look how well this works.

It looks like they are about to try again. They even had a brief talk about how to yank open that second door when she opens the inner door.

Don’t open the door. There are no exigent circumstances, they can’t legally enter your home without a warrant. Tell them through the doorbell cam to fuck off and come back with a warrant.

Honestly, there is a certain point when you are willing to find out if the local police have level IV plates.

People who have read this post: 440
By Divemedic, ago

Thought Experiment

First, $100k to every US citizen would cost $38 trillion, meaning a doubling the current national debt. That would also instantly insert $38 trillion into the economy. The current world wide money supply is around $150 Trillion. Adding an instant $38 trillion to that would cause an increase in the demand side of our economy, coupled with the loss of production from the idiots who quit their jobs lowering the supply side would cause inflation rates of 30-50%, collapsing the economy.

Keep in mind that the COVID stimulus and PPE loans combined were only $4.6 trillion spread over 2 years. Now take that inflation, multiply it by a factor of 15 or 20, and see what the result is.

within 18 months, it would be cheaper to wipe your ass with $100 bills than it would to buy toilet paper. The only good news is that the national debt could finally be paid off, because paying off that now $80 trillion in US debt would only require two goats, a tank of gas, and a blowjob from a toothless hooker in Georgetown.

The coolest part of all this is the opportunity to add a nearly worthless billion dollar bill to my collection of dead currency.


But let’s carry this idiotic thought through to the end.

Now every house has $100,000 in fresh money. First, every luxury item would be bought the next day, reducing the supply of gold teeth, double wide trailers, and Escalades to nothing. Now you can’t buy any at any price.

An hour later, people are hungry, but since the morons who thought they were now rich all just quit their jobs, there is no food to be had anywhere because every store and restaurant is closed for lack of employees.

To get someone to make a sandwich is going to require him to get off his ass. So now a hamburger costs $10,000.

In fact, everything is more expensive. I know people are generally too stupid to get this, but when everyone is a millionaire, being a millionaire means nothing. That’s why the COVID stimulus coupled with the COVID shutdown caused this inflation everyone is crying about.

  • Businesses closed for two years, restricting supply
  • Landlords being forced to allow tenants to stay without paying, meaning costs need to be recouped
  • Everyone getting large stimulus checks and PEP loans, increasing demand

I honestly believe most leftists have no knowledge of economics, and the rest of them know, but are using it to keep the retards on the farm.

People who have read this post: 139
By Divemedic, ago

Paris: Day Three

To be clear, this series of posts on our European trip is meant to serve as a chronicle of a trip that we returned from 2 weeks ago. Some people seem confused on that point. For OPSEC reasons, I never discuss our travels until after we return. Don’t want anyone who doesn’t have a need to know being aware of our absence.

So this is about day three in Paris, the 20th day of our trip. Being our last day here, we did a bit of shopping, a bit of packing, and some lying around doing nothing. To be quite honest, we had both reached a point where we were just tired of being on this trip. So we went to breakfast, and I want to show some pictures of what a European (French) breakfast looks like. First, there are meats and cheeses:

Fruit:

Baked goods:

along with the Omelet I pictured in other posts.

We walked a couple of blocks to the Champs Elysees. We didn’t get much, mostly because prices were ridiculous. Here is a purse we saw

Yeah. That purse wasn’t big enough to hold $3500 worth of stuff, making the back worth more than anything you would put in it. We walked into the McDonald’s- not to eat, but to establish prices for my Big Mac index. A Big Mac in Paris costs about $10. Just the sandwich.

We stopped by a French pastry shop and bought some Eclairs (chocolate and coffee flavored, if you are interested). We also hit up the Lindt chocolate store. I bought about $150 Euros worth of chocolate. We are still snacking on it two weeks later.

Then it was dinner time and get ready for bed. Tomorrow is a travel day, so it will be a long one.

On the way back to the hotel, I saw a store with a raisable vehicle barrier to prevent smash and grabs.

People who have read this post: 94
By Divemedic, ago

Don’t Talk to the Police

First, a bit of background:

Police have two ways they can talk to someone in the public: consensual or seizure. A police consensual encounter is a voluntary, non-detention interaction where an officer approaches a person to ask questions or for identification. The person is free to leave, refuse to answer questions, or decline requests at any time- to include refusal to provide ID. It does not involve commands, force, or blocked movement. 

A seizure is where a person isn’t free to leave. Police can use force to keep you there, they can search you, demand your ID. Noncompliance with this is considered obstruction or resisting and is illegal. The person being questioned still has the ability to refuse to answer questions, or refuse to answer them without a lawyer present. This is why asking police if you are free to leave is so important. This tells you if you are in a consensual encounter or have been seized.

If the police want to talk to you, they can ask or they can seize. In order to seize, they have to have probable cause that you are or have committed a crime, or they have to have a warrant. If you are in your home, a warrant is generally required, if they don’t have exigent circumstances. Those include the belief you are destroying evidence (e.g., flushing drugs down the toilet), or there is something going on that is an emergency (say you are murdering someone in the home). Police cannot make a warrantless, non-consensual seizure inside someone’s home just because they have probable cause. They generally need an arrest warrant (unless exigent circumstances apply). This is important.

Now to the case at hand:

Two years ago, three men were involved in a fight in a bar in Saint Cloud, Florida. One of the men was reportedly armed with a handgun and had left the scene. The other two individuals who were in the fight contacted police: one of them refused to give a statement, and the other (visibly intoxicated) man did give a written statement claiming the third man displayed a handgun. Both of the men who spoke to the police at the bar were rather vague on details about the fight or what started it.

The next step you would expect an investigator to do would be to, well…investigate. You would think that the cops would contact the man, ask him to come in and answer a few questions, or perhaps even send a cop or two over there to ask. After all, he isn’t under arrest, they don’t have a warrant, and the contact at this point is consensual. Or supposed to be.

The cops immediately assembled a tactical team and had a meeting where they discussed the methods and tactics they would use to take him into custody. They surrounded the house by posting two cops at the rear of the home to prevent his escape, the cops out front had a K9, bullet shields, and NFA long guns with suppressors. They called him on the phone and asked him to step outside to answer some questions.

The Raid

What happened next was captured on body camera video, you can see the video below. They held him at gunpoint and ordered him to the ground. Even though his hands were raised, they kicked him to the ground, used the K9 to bite him because he wasn’t going down fast enough, and used quite a bit of force for a consensual encounter.

Any reasonable person would agree that they are not free to leave at this point. This is a seizure. They avoided the requirement for a warrant by luring him outside using a friendly tone and a request to just “Answer a couple of questions.” Since police tricked him to come outside specifically to avoid the warrant requirement, courts tend to scrutinize that. This trick is called constructive entry. This was never intended to be a consensual encounter, as evidenced by their own meeting and plans to take him into custody.

There was no reason to rush over there and arrest him. The incident was over, and there was plenty of time to secure a warrant. There were no exigent circumstances, and therefore no exception to the requirement to get a warrant. This doesn’t look like a casual “knock-and-talk” but more like a planned arrest operation without a warrant, which courts scrutinize closely. Payton v. New York ruled that police cannot do indirectly what they’re forbidden to do directly—i.e., they can’t avoid the warrant requirement by tricking or forcing someone out of their home.

  • House surrounded by armed officers
  • Officers positioned to prevent exit
  • Suspect called and told to come out
  • Show of force (guns, numbers) suggesting no real choice
  • Use of force when subject was compliant and not offering active resistance

In my mind, there is little doubt that this man’s constitutional rights were violated, both in the arrest without warrant, and in the manner the arrest was carried out. There was no reason to use force on a man who had come out voluntarily and was offering no resistance. Not one of those cops mentioned “hey, maybe there is a better, more constitutional way to do this.” This, in my opinion, destroys the “few bad apples” trope.

To make it even worse, it turned out that this man was the victim and the two intoxicated men had attacked him. The prosecutor in the case dismissed all charges, saying that the case was “unsuitable for prosecution.” He has since filed a lawsuit against the city and its police department for violating his civil rights. The cops will almost certainly hide behind qualified immunity claims.

There is a lesson to be learned here.

Don’t talk to the police.

I’ve said this before- don’t talk to the police. Ever. There is no such thing as a friendly chat with cop. I will refer you to an old post of mine on the subject that contains a video titled “Don’t talk to the police.” Don’t talk to the cops, no matter what. They aren’t your friends. They aren’t there to help you. They are there to make a case to arrest someone, and they will get the arrest that requires them to do the least amount of work they can. At best, they are there to find reasons to take you to jail, at worst they are there to use their cool toys on you- whether that be a machine gun, a K9, or just a good old fashioned beating.

Most cops are pussies and cowards. We see that time and again- they will use overwhelming force on those who pose no threat, even going so far as to toss grenades into a baby crib, but will cower outside with their machine guns and body armor while children are being killed by an armed murderer.

A cop calls you on the phone and wants you to come out and answer questions, ask them if they have a warrant. If the answer is no, you tell them you don’t want to answer any questions or speak with them until you have an attorney. Offer to come down to the station with your attorney to answer questions, and tell them your attorney will schedule the meeting. Whatever you do, don’t open the door. You have a doorbell camera for a reason.

Open that door, and this just might happen to you. Ever since my incident in Orange County, Florida in 2001 where a Deputy Sergeant threatened to kill me when I presented him with my concealed weapons permit during a traffic stop, I don’t inform cops of shit.

The cops may not have enough to arrest someone, but you talking will give them what they need. If they DO have enough to arrest you, there is nothing you can say that will talk them out of it. Refuse to talk to them, don’t open the door, and go about the rest of your life.

People who have read this post: 317
By Divemedic, ago

Paris Day Two: The Seine

Today, we continued our bus adventures and also did a cruise on the river Seine.

The island in the middle of the river that contains both the Louvre and Notre Dame used to be a fortress where the king oof France lived. Taking this river tour really reinforced that. You can see how easily defended it was.

We visited the Louvre to see the castle, but we didn’t want to wait in the long lines, brave the crowds, and pay the high fees to enter the museum, but the castle was magnificent.

It was pretty cold. At dinner time, we encountered the first truly rude Frenchman of the entire trip. I didn’t want to drink alcohol and noted that the restaurant we were dining in had Coca Cola, so I ordered one. The waiter presented it to me like it was a bottle of wine and called it “American Champagne” then asked how I wanted my beef prepared- “burned the American way, or the French way.” Dick. It reminded me of this:

After dinner, we went to watch the Eiffel tower at night, as it was on my wife’s bucket list of things she wanted to do while in Paris.

The first 5 minutes of each hour, there are sparkling lights on the tower:

And that was our second day in Paris.

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By Divemedic, ago

Death

Anyone who reads this blog knows I am opposed to the death penalty- not in theory, but because too many in our court system are willing to lie, cheat, and right the system to get convictions whether or not the accused is innocent.

With that being said, anyone who would spend an hour raping and murdering a 7 year old little girl while she cried for her mother deserves to be killed in the most painful way that can be arranged.

This animal pled guilty, claiming he panicked after accidently hitting her with his FEDEX work van. Video showed otherwise, and audio captured after he covered the camera caught the rape and murder.

The family’s life has been torn apart. Kill him. There is no way to make him well again, but there is a way to make sure he never kills again. Society failed that little girl. Let’s no fail another.

People who have read this post: 378
By Divemedic, ago