You Can't Silence Us

Poll

Take a look at this:

My thought is this is sexual battery, or at least an attempted one. One of my duties is to protect my wife from this sort of attack. I will use force to do so.

Some in comments to that video have said the husband will go to jail for using excessive force.

  • So do you think the law requires a husband to stand there and allow someone to caress his wife’s ass?
  • If no, what level of force is appropriate?
  • Did this husband’s use of force exceed that?

Others say that the husband deserves to have his head stomped in.

Is this force used by the husband excessive? Discuss.

People who have read this post: 48
By Divemedic, ago

Property Taxes

The standard argument about getting rid of property taxes is always “Who will pay for Fire Dept, Police, Schools, Roads?”

Even so, the proposed law would cut non-school ad valorem taxes for homestead property. Schools won’t be touched, as they are exempt. How about the other services?

Let’s use Daytona Beach as an example. You will see why I chose Daytona shortly. Daytona Beach has adopted a $379.8 million budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year (beginning Oct. 1, 2025), a 4.1% increase in property tax revenue driven by rising property values. The budget holds the millage rate at 5.9300 ($5.93 per $1,000 of taxable value). About a third of the city budget is from ad valorem (property) taxes. However, only a third of ad valorem taxes are from homestead property. The vast majority of property taxes are paid on commercial property like hotels, stores, and rental property. Overall, the loss of homestead ad valorem taxes would only cut city revenues by about 12%.

In Daytona, police and fire take up 55%, roads are about 15%, and schools take up 0% of the city budget. That means expenses that aren’t fire dept, police, schools, or roads comprise 30% of the city budget. In other words, the 70% of the budget for the police, fire, schools, and roads wouldn’t be touched if property taxes on owner occupied homes.

Especially if you consider that those departments are filled with waste, fraud, and corruption. One firefighter in Daytona blew the whistle on the department cooking the books and wasting damned near a million bucks a year. What did he get for his efforts? He was terminated. What’s going to happen there is he will sue the county and will likely get a huge paycheck because it is illegal to take action against a whistleblower. Somehow, my tax dollars will pay for the corruption, and will also pay for the lawsuits resulting from that corruption.

People who have read this post: 65
By Divemedic, ago

More Info, the Manifesto

Fifteen minutes ago, the Washington Post released what they are calling the shooter’s “manifesto.” It was reportedly sent to family ten minutes before shots were fired, so I would class it more as a suicide note. Here is the full text:

Hello everybody!

So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused.

I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.”

I apologize to my colleagues and students for saying I had a personal emergency (by the time anyone reads this, I probably most certainly DO need to go to the ER, but can hardly call that not a self-inflicted status.)

I apologize to all of the people I traveled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage, and all the other non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near.

I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.

I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it. Again, my sincere apologies.

On to why I did any of this:

I am a citizen of the United States of America.

What my representatives do reflects on me.

And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)

While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)

Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest

Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t*

Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)

Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security

National Guard: same as Hotel Security

Hotel Employees: not targets at all

Guests: not targets at all

In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)

I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

Rebuttals to objections:

Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.

Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.

Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

Objection 2: This is not a convenient time for you to do this.

Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim?

This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with.

Objection 3: You didn’t get them all.

Rebuttal: Gotta start somewhere.

Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.

Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack

Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

I would also like to extend my appreciation to a great many people since I will not be likely to be able to talk with them again (unless the Secret Service is *astoundingly* incompetent.)

Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.

Thank you to my friends, for your companionship over many years.

Thank you to my colleagues over many jobs, for your positivity and professionalism.

Thank you to my students for your enthusiasm and love of learning.

Thank you to the many acquaintances I’ve met, in person and online, for short interactions and long-term relationships, for your perspectives and inspiration.

Thank you all for everything.

Sincerely,

Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen

PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.

Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.

What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.

No damn security.

Not in transport.

Not in the hotel.

Not in the event.

Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.

I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.

The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.

Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.

Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.

Actually insane.

Oh and if anyone is curious is how doing something like feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.

Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.

This guy is clearly sane, clearly leftist, and clearly planned this out. He’s a smart guy. CalTech isn’t a school for idiots. The insanity defense isn’t going to work here. His biggest flaw, and IMO the reason his plan failed, is real life isn’t like a first person shooter video game. He expected to sail through level after level of increasingly serious opponents until he faced down and defeated the “big boss.”

Look, the Secret Service has a limited budget. They can’t search everyone and their hotel rooms. This is still the US and people still have civil rights. Instead, they layer security. He made it through the outer layer, which was staffed by hotel staff and local police. He got to the first layer staffed by Secret Service personnel, and decided to run through the checkpoint. He didn’t make it. Had he, there would have been more and heavier opposition, but there was no way he would have made it all the way to the room where a gaggle of protectees was sitting.

On a larger note, the left has declared war on the nation. Read social media for a bit. I do, and what the left wants for us is no less than a full on communist utopia, with themselves as sitting around writing poetry, painting pictures, and playing video games while the rest of us toil in the factories, fields, and gulags. That’s why they hate the electoral college- they don’t think those of us who live in flyover America deserve a say, because we are all uneducated racist rednecks who are busy fornicating with our sisters.

It’s coming. Keep stocking up on supplies.

People who have read this post: 493
By Divemedic, ago

More Information

As usual, in the immediate aftermath of any event, things reported as facts are just wrong. Even eyewitnesses claim to have seen things that it later turns out they could not possibly have seen. Call it the fog of war, it’s like playing telephone as a kid. As I wake up this morning, the reports now are that the suspect is a 31 year old teacher named Cole Tomas Allen. He graduated from CalTech and was known to have donated to the Harris campaign in October of 2024. No other political activity has been reported at this time. He lived in Torrance, CA with his parents in a home they moved into six months ago. He was a guest at the hotel, and charged the first security checkpoint armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives.

Security camera footage released by Trump on social media shortly after the incident shows the suspect running past security officers who appear to be disassembling the metal detectors. Once the president was seated in the ballroom, additional attendees were not permitted to enter the secured area, which is why they were taking them down.

It appears that the shooter was able to be captured without being shot because the moron tripped and fell as he ran through the checkpoint.

One witness, Erin Thielman, a military veteran, left the ballroom to call her son and said she had heard three loud bangs that she believed to be gunfire. She saw a man fall flat right in front of her and said he was carrying what appeared to be a rifle and magazines.

Videos of National Guard troops and agents running around, weapons bared, screaming “Blue, blue!” to prevent blue on blue incidents. Democrats are claiming that this is staged, because real Secret Service have radios and don’t need to yell. When I tried pointing out yelling blue on a radio doesn’t work for that purpose, because the person in your radio earpiece can be miles away, so doing that is just stepping on radio transmissions for no reason, but yelling lets the people in front of you know who is who, I was told by these experts in firearms, shooting, and law enforcement who all graduated from the Dunning Krueger school of all knowledge, that I don’t know what I am talking about.

Of course the left is busy screaming that this entire thing is a false flag, just as they do after every assassination attempt on Trump’s life, even as many Democrats call for his death. That is stupid, for the same reason Alex Jones’ claims about Sandy Hook were stupid. You can’t get thousands of people to all tell a fake story like that, and not have at least one of them decide to come clean in order to be famous. In case you are keeping a count, this is the fourth time in the past two years that someone has attempted to murder Donald Trump. The score is two would-be assassins dead, one serving life in prison, and one in custody awaiting trial.

If I recall, Alex Jones was sued and ordered to pay a billion dollars for claiming the Sandy Hook shooting was false. So why isn’t someone suing the left for the same thing? Probably because the ones saying this don’t have jobs or money, and are posting that from their mom’s basement.

As to videos of the shooting itself, I am always fascinated at how the Secret Service does their job when an incident like this occurs.

That’s all I have for now.

EDITED TO ADD:

The press is claiming this to be the third attempt, but I don’t think they are counting the guy who attempted to enter Mar a Lago with the shotgun, because Trump wasn’t there at the time. I still count that one, because it was an attempt. I didn’t say it was a good one, just that it was an attempt. None of these idiots are any good at trying to assassinate the President. They aren’t good at a whole lot of anything- who charges a secret service detail with a shotgun, after all?

It turns out that I was not counting all of them. In all, there have been 18 security incidents involving President Trump. Nine of them have been what I would call attempts at assassination, and 5 of those have happened in the past two years.

  1. On June 18, 2016, Michael Steven Sandford attempted to grab a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officer’s pistol and expressed his desire to murder Trump.
  2. On September 6, 2017 Gregory Lee Leingang stole a forklift and attempted to drive it toward the presidential motorcade and admitted his intent to murder the president by flipping the presidential limousine with the stolen forklift.
  3. On August 10, 2020, Trump was escorted from a press briefing by a Secret Service agent after an armed suspect was shot outside the White House fencing.
  4. On September 20, 2020, Pascale Cécile Véronique Ferrier wrote a ricin-laced letter to Trump.
  5. On July 13, 2024, Thomas Crooks fired eight shots from an AR-15–style rifle at Trump near Butler, Pennsylvania.
  6. On September 15, 2024, Ryan Routh waited for Trump at a golf course while armed with a rifle in West Palm Beach, Florida, later admitting he was trying to kill the President and had at least one accomplice
  7. On November 8, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Farhad Shakeri, an Afghani citizen, along with Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt (whom Shakeri had met in a U.S. prison) in connection with another murder-for-hire plot to kill the President at the request of Iran
  8. On February 22, 2026, the United States Secret Service shot and killed Austin Tucker Martin, a 21-year-old man from Cameron, North Carolina, who was reportedly carrying a shotgun and gas canister onto the grounds of Mar-a-Lago
  9. and now last night’s attempt.
People who have read this post: 333
By Divemedic, ago

Quotas

Brianna Longoria was driving in Phoenix when she was pulled over for running a red light on December 29, 2024. The officer who conducted the stop, a woman by the name of Annette Hannah, pulled her over claimed that she had red, bloodshot, glassy eyes, a sign of marijuana intoxication. Accompanied by her partner, Annette Hannah, they put her through sobriety tests, a breathalyzer, and then arrested her for DUI, saying there were signs of impairment. Brianna had just gotten married the day before, and had to cancel her honeymoon in order to use the money for her legal defense. The arrest also caused her issues with her employment as a nurse, and she lost her driver’s license for 6 months.

She blew a 0.00 breathalyzer. Later, blood tests would show no drugs or alcohol in her system. None. You can beat the charges, but you can’t beat the ride.

Later, her attorney requested body camera footage, which would show that the light was green, so there was no probable cause or RAS for the traffic stop. The officer performing the stop was assigned to the city’s DUI unit, and her body camera caught this:

Her partner, officer Mary Methany: “Triple zeros. Just like I thought.”

Hannah: “They’re going to kick me off squad if I don’t get a DUI. But I seriously pulled like so [unintelligible] …”

Metheny: “No. No. There’s nights where I don’t get any. You’re fine.”

Hannah: “But I’m like, I can’t just conjure one up. I have tried.”

Metheny: “You can. You can.”

Hannah: “I hung out on Seventh Ave., by those bars.”

While Longoria was being arrested, her husband was talking to another police officer who said even if Longoria’s blood alcohol level was 0.0, “the city can do whatever they want to do with those results.”

The police department investigated themselves and found no signs of wrongdoing, and released this statement:

The Phoenix Police Department does not have DUI quotas. DUI enforcement assignments are based on operational needs, and officers assigned to impaired‑driving enforcement are expected to take action when their observations and training lead them to believe a driver may be impaired. Officers are required to base enforcement decisions on observed driving behavior, indicators of impairment, and the totality of the circumstances.

I’ve written about this before- police departments claim not to have quotas, but a few have admitted it. Whether the department has an official, written quota or not, every cop knows that if you don’t write enough tickets, your career is in danger. She certainly wants to protect a career that is paying her $36.90 an hour, and all she has to do to keep it is lie and destroy people’s lives.

Qualified immunity needs to go. Officers need to carry malpractice insurance so the taxpayer doesn’t have to fund this sort of open corruption. Any department found to have quotas, whether they be written or defacto, should result in the lead officer of the department losing their jobs and any law enforcement licenses.

People who have read this post: 359
By Divemedic, ago

Affordability

Nearly one in four new car buyers are taking out 7 year loans in order to make the purchase affordable. One in three new car buyers make less than $100,000 in household income. The average amount financed is $44,000, meaning that the average payment is between $700 and $900 per month. Pushing it out to 7 years gets that payment below $700.

That amount is “reflective of a market that favors large, expensive vehicles,” said Erin Keating, an executive analyst for Cox Automotive.

All I see now is people claiming how unaffordable it is to own a house or save for retirement, and they blame previous generations for playing life on “easy mode.” When I was growing up, my parents didn’t buy a new car until they were in their mid-40s, and that was a stripped down model with no air conditioning and only the AM radio that came standard with the car. There were manual, hand cranked windows. The only thing powered was the steering. The transmission was a standard.

A $43,899 loan at 6.9% for 84 months would result in a monthly payment of $660 and would cost you $11,575 in interest over the full life of the loan, but a five-year loan at the same rate would mean paying $8,132 in interest over the life of the loan — $3,443 less. But the monthly payment would jump to $867…40.7% of new-vehicle purchases involving negative equity are now financed with 84-month loans

Now, people are buying far more of a car than they can afford. They have all sorts of luxuries, spending on Door Dash, Starbucks, fake nails and eyelashes, streaming services, and sneakers costing several hundred dollars. That’s why life is becoming unaffordable- people got used to low interest rates allowing them to live far beyond their means, and now that rates are near their historical average, people can’t afford to keep that lavish lifestyle.

The historical average for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in the U.S. since 1971 is approximately 7.7%. While rates peaked over 16% in 1981 and bottomed under 3% in 2021, current rates in early 2026 have stabilized around 6.23%, close to the long-term historical average, but still a bit lower than the average. I remember the mid 80s, when car dealers bragged they had auto loan rates of 9.9% and people thought that was a great deal.

Gen Z is going to have to learn to live within their means.

People who have read this post: 393
By Divemedic, ago