You Can't Silence Us

Frustrated

A comedian at the NY Trump rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. The left is going nuts, calling the comment, and by extension the entire rally, “racist.”

  • Puerto Rican isn’t a race.
  • Puerto Rico IS an island of garbage. I have been there- and it is indistinguishable from a third world shithole. That has nothing to do with the race or ethnicity of the people there. They could be as white as Norwegians, and I would still say that the place looking like that would still look like a shithole floating island of garbage.

From my post of 2022:

Puerto Rico is a socialist disaster of a state, and if we are being honest, the entire island more closely represents a third world shithole than it does the US. I’m talking politically and visually. The tax rates are high, with a corporate rate of 37.5%, a personal income tax at 33%, and 11.5% sales taxes. On top of all of that, residents also pay US Social Security taxes, but not Federal Income taxes. In exchange, the US pays about $40 billion a year to Puerto Rico. In all, the government of Puerto Rico takes in about $12 billion in taxes, plus the $40 billion in US Federal money for a population of about 3.6 million, or about $14,400 per capita.

I would like to see the place get cut loose to become its own country. I just don’t see the benefit that the island gives the US.

Trivia fact: 1 in every 4 people who reside in Florida are originally from New York, Puerto Rico, or are illegals from Central and South America. As Wilkow says: “You can’t bring there to here without here becoming there.”

I am frustrated listening to, and arguing with, morons.

People who have read this post: 216
By Divemedic, ago

Just a Criminal Gang at This Point

In April of 2023, a Kissimmee Police officer illegally and without a warrant entered the home of a man. The cop claims that he saw the man push his father, so the cop attempted to arrest the man, using force by kneeing the man in the face and shooting him with a Taser more than 7 times. The force used did extensive damage to the man’s face, breaking his nose and requiring dental work.

When questioned about the incident, the chief of police had this to say:

The video was surprising because the knee spikes went against training. However, she said the repeated use of the taser was within what’s considered proper use to gain compliance.

“I couldn’t see it on the video, but I will take Officer Baseggio’s word that he saw what he thought was a battery,” Holland said. “And so with that being said, he doesn’t know if he was going to go arm himself.”

As a result, the cop got an 8 hour suspension. That is the end of it. Or so it seems. It turns out that there was much more to the story.

It turns out that the cop lied on his incident report, as well as intimidating witnesses to tell the story of the incident in a way that was favorable to the officer and his actions. As a result of that, he was indicted by a grand jury on charges of felony battery, misdemeanor battery, official misconduct, solicitation for perjury and two counts of tampering with a witness. He was fired as a result.

Still, that isn’t the entire story. It turns out that while the AG’s office was investigating the rogue cop, they were questioning his fellow officers, and 11 of them lied in official statements in order to protect and cover for him. Those 11 cops were also indicted, and as a result both the chief and deputy chief of police were terminated.

As I have said before, the bad cops lie, abuse their power, cheat, and steal. The so-called “good” cops will lie and cover for them, which makes them all bad cops. At this point, the only difference between most police and a criminal gang is that the cops have badges and immunity.

I repeat what I have said before- we as citizens need to demand one of two things:

  • Eliminate qualified immunity and force police to get malpractice insurance
  • Pass a law that any lawsuit against police for unlawful behavior against citizens be paid directly from the police pension fund.

Make cops have skin in the game.

People who have read this post: 158
By Divemedic, ago

Not the Same

An NFL player gave an interview while wearing a MAGA hat. Now the left is losing it:

The problem isn’t that Kaepernick was presenting a political opinion. What he did was take a knee during the National Anthem, thereby disrespecting the flag, and by extension, the country. When called on it, all he and his followers had to say was “It’s just a piece of cloth. Get over it.”

Well, it isn’t just a piece of cloth. Until you understand nuance and see that there is a difference between disagreement and disrespect, you don’t have the ability to engage in a productive discussion on this. So instead, you resort to throwing down the race card. I refuse to play that stupid game.

People who have read this post: 265
By Divemedic, ago

Mailbag

This week in comments and in email responses to this blog, I have received no fewer than 12 threats to my career, my life, or other rants about how they are going to “get me.”

I’ve been called a “boomer halfwit,” despite the fact that I am not a boomer. You see, to everyone that is currently under 25 years old, everyone over the age of 30 is a boomer, because they are too ignorant to understand that boomer is a slang term for “baby boomer,” which is the term for the generation of people born between 1946 and 1964.

  • The greatest generation was the one who won WW2. They were born from 1901- 1924.
  • The silent generation were those born between 1925 and 1945.
  • Gen X (for the tenth generation, from the Roman numeral X. Kids, ask your parents) were born from 1965 to 1980.
  • Millenials are those born from 1981 to 1996.
  • You babies who were born from 1997 to 2012 are called Gen Z, because this generation spent more time learning about trannies than they did Roman numerals.

Who is the halfwit? The person who claims I was raised by a member of the greatest generation? Or the dumbass who doesn’t know how wrong they are?

About half of the attackers called me a coward for blogging under a pseudonym, even though they posted their screed without even using a screen name. I use a pseudonym because you little asshats are constantly trying to find my employer in an attempt to get me fired, writing my registrar trying to have me deplatformed, or sending me death threats. See the skank that tried to do that last year who then complained that I doxxed her and threatened to sue me.

On the death threats front. This blog gets a death threat from a lefty about once a month. I’m armed everywhere I go. That’s all I have to say on that front.

I don’t approve such comments. Not because they disagree with my opinion, but because they violate rules 2 and 3 of this blog.

People who have read this post: 281
By Divemedic, ago

Permissive Hypertension

I am going to take this time to explain how strokes are treated in the hospital. I am going to make this understandable to the layman, so there will be some things that get simplified, or even omitted to make this easier to understand.

Strokes are the fifth leading cause of death in the US, so treating them is an absolute must. When people have signs of a stroke in the Emergency Department, the rules say that we have to get them a head CT within 10 minutes. The CT is looking for bleeding in the brain, which is called a hemorrhagic stroke. About one in eight strokes is caused by bleeding in the brain. The other seven are called ischemic strokes and are caused by blood clots.

Immediately after the CT scan is done (the patient is still in the CT imaging room), they are interviewed by a neurologist to see if they are showing signs of an ischemic stroke, meaning one caused by a blood clot cutting off oxygen to the brain. The nurse does the evaluation at the same time, and each of them come up with what is called an NIH score. They then compare scores and, if different, they discuss why. The idea is to give the score that is most advantageous to the patient. An NIH score measures the likelihood and severity of a stroke through a score that ranges from 0 to 42. The higher the score, the more severe is the stroke. A score of eight or higher means that the patient gets screened to see if they are a candidate for TPA administration.

TPA is a miracle drug. It breaks up blood clots, and allows blood to again flow, saving brain tissue from death. If administered within the first 4.5 hours of a stroke first beginning, the patient frequently leaves the hospital with no permanent disability. Sadly, many people with stroke symptoms wait too long to come in and are not candidates for this therapy.

If they are having a stroke, but are outside of that 4.5 hour window, they are admitted and we see just how much brain function they have lost. Then they are discharged to be rehabilitated and taught to live with their new disability.

In 84% of cases, patients who have just had a stroke will see their blood pressures greatly increase as the body tries to use this pressure to force blood past the clot that is cutting off blood to the brain. This process actually reduces the amount of damaged brain tissue in an ischemic stroke, reduces the amount of permanent disability, and decreases patient mortality due to ischemic brain tissue.

The risk of this is that the large increase in blood pressure greatly increases the chances that a blood vessel will rupture, causing a second, hemorrhagic stroke, and that second one is often fatal. I believe that a hemorrhagic stroke is what killed my mother last year.

Since 2019, the American Stroke Association and the American Heart Association both recommend that a patient with an ischemic stroke that isn’t a candidate for TPA administration be permitted to have high blood pressure for the first 24-72 hours after the stroke while being closely monitored. The only high blood pressure to be treated in these cases is a blood pressure higher than 220/120. In those cases, the patient should be medicated to reduce blood pressure by 15%. This is called permissive hypertension and is the current way that hypertension in stroke patients is being treated.

The problem is that this is not received well by older medical professionals, who have spent their lives thinking that “high blood pressure is bad” and want to reduce blood pressure no matter what. They just haven’t remained current in their clinical knowledge, and secure in their ignorance, will violently defend what they have always done, even when that has been shown to be the wrong thing to do.

I recently had a stroke patient with a BP of 263/152 and had formed a plan in conjunction with the doctor to lower her BP slightly to 220/110 using medication. Another nurse (who used to be a charge nurse) came over and started a loud shouting match, telling me that I was being dangerously lazy in not controlling the patient’s blood pressure. She accused me of being a shitty nurse and reported me for poor patient care.

I produced all sorts of studies showing that I was right, so I won’t be getting in trouble, even though the QA department agreed with her, trying to tell me that blood pressures of over 200 are too dangerous. They pointed out that the units on the floor have a policy of not accepting patients with a blood pressure that high. I told them that maybe the policy should be revisited in light of current literature.

Why? Because medicine is evidence based, and the evidence and current literature is on my side. I presented my nursing plan and the current literature to my department head, and she agreed that my treatment was in keeping with current AHA and ASA guidelines.

That required me writing a long dissertation to support my position. It wound up being a 460 word essay, complete with references to the AHA and ASA guidelines, as well as referencing multiple studies carried out since 2020, showing that patient outcomes are better under these guidelines.

It’s cases like this that show why good nurses make a lot of money for the level of education that they have. I’m probably going to present my case to the hospital’s clinical standards council (one of whom already spoke with me and thinks its a great idea) and try to get the policy changed. It’s a stupid policy that is likely killing people. The bonus is that, if I am successful in forcing the change, I get a raise and I also get published.

People who have read this post: 276
By Divemedic, ago

On the Seventh Day, He Rested

The reason that posting has been lacking a bit is that it’s been a busy week. Let me recap it for you:

There are seven days in a week, of course. Three of them were spent at work this week. The first day this week turned out being a 14.5 hour shift because of a stroke patient, a fellow nurse who used to be a supervisor trying to bulldoze me, and a little thing we will talk about in a future post called permissive hypertension.

The second day this week was a 14 hour shift because I had some relatively sick people and the nurse taking my patients was late doing so due to her trying to find a sitter for her Baker Act.

The third day, they cut me an hour early because the census was low and they didn’t want me to slide into overtime.

Then my days off wound up being filled with personal details- the house that we used to live in is now under contract. We first listed it for sale back in early March after replacing the floors and the air conditioner. We tried selling by owner, no luck, only one showing that never called us back. We tried one agent who didn’t even get us a single showing. The second agent had multiple showings, and we finally sold. Now I can use the money to get a pool, an outdoor kitchen, and pay off half of the mortgage on my current house. Speaking of mortgages-

We have been trying to refinance the house we live in, because our original loan was for 8%, and we got a refi offer for 4.8%. We close on that this week.

I have also been working on the network of the house. If you will remember, I wanted to put a UPS on the network. The one that’s in the house as built was supposed to have a 28 inch media panel. It didn’t- it had a 20 inch panel, and that was too small to fit all of the stuff I needed. So I pulled out the old one, put in a 30 inch panel, and wired the network in the house with a MOCA system. That 30 inch panel let me put in the modem, the MOCA converter, the master mesh node, a couple of network switches, and the UPS.

While installing the MOCA system, I had to use a cable tracer to see which cables went to which rooms. There are 8 cables coming into the house- one for each bedroom, one in the living room, one to the media panel, one to the bonus room upstairs, and one that I still don’t know where it goes. I put a cable tracer on the lines, and three of them were showing open circuit. I started investigating, and this is what I found:

The one in the master bedroom was hidden behind a phone jack:

The one in the upstairs bonus room was simply not connected. An inspection camera revealed that the cable was stapled to the studs above and below the box.

Still, I have it all done, and the MOCA system is now installed, so my mesh network now has an Ethernet backhaul, which increases network speed and reliability.

Then I spent a day this week going to my grandson’s soccer game.

All of those things have taken quite a bit of time, and left me quite sleep deprived. There was one night that I had to make do with only three hours’ sleep. So Sunday is a day off. I am going to get caught up on sleep, head to a diner and get a rib sticking breakfast, then spent the day with my bride doing nothing.

With all of that, there was precious little time for blogging or even reading the news. I am looking forward to vacation. I have a vacation coming up, where I am spending a week in Bimini for some well earned time off. Until then, life goes on.

People who have read this post: 243
By Divemedic, ago

Angry Rant

Xfinity can lick my taint.

I have been paying $40 per month for 300 mbps Internet since we moved in. I am lucky to get 60 mbps most of the time. So this morning, I saw a deal on their website to increase speed to 800 mbps for $60 per month. I took the plunge.

A couple of hours later, I got an email confirming that I was now on 1000 mbps for the low price of $127 per month. WTF. Even worse? I was still only getting 56 mbps. (The BS clause of “speeds of up to” means never actually hitting that speed, but you would think paying 3 times as much would get you SOME kind of speed increase)

I called the customer service number and got some middle eastern moron who couldn’t really speak English. I got up and drove 45 minutes to the nearest Xfinity location. When I got there, they told me that there was no 800 mbps plan offered, only 300, 500, or 1000. So I told them to put my account back the way it was before they did this.

They said that price is no longer available. I can have the 300 mbps for $60 a month if I sign a 2 year contract, or I can pay $80 a month without a contract. That’s it, and fuck you very much. So now I am paying DOUBLE what I was for the same shitty service. I have few choices- I can stay with Xfinity, or I can opt to pay for Tmobile 5G internet, or try Starlink. The thing that makes me leery of Starlink being my primary Internet provider, because of the service disruptions that happen during thunderstorms, which we all know happen virtually every afternoon here in Central Florida.

Here is the thing- I have proof that they sold me a plan that they had no intention of actually giving me before putting me on a different plan at double the price. I took a picture of the screen- proving that they DO offer 800 mbps.

On Monday, I am calling Florida’s Attorney General’s office to report this obvious “bait and switch” scheme.

People who have read this post: 301
By Divemedic, ago

Racist Left

The left thinks that blacks are too stupid to get on the Internet, and also think that blacks in Florida are all convicted felons and can’t vote.

But it’s the right that is racist.

People who have read this post: 431
By Divemedic, ago

On Amendment 3

Have you been to New York, Denver, or Las Vegas? The smell is absolutely pervasive. Even with only “medical” marijuana being legal here, we see a parade of people who are suffering from cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome- a malady where they smoke so much weed that they spend a good chunk of time every day throwing up, yet they won’t take our advice and smoke less weed.

People who have read this post: 275
By Divemedic, ago