You Can't Silence Us

Probable Cause

Imagine that you are in a car wash. A coworker comes up and you exchange greetings, then both of you continue washing your vehicles. An off duty cop claims that he saw the two of you make an exchange of a “significant” amount of a white substance in a baggie, whether pills or some powder, he doesn’t know, but he saw it. The cop claims that is probable cause (meaning that what he saw is probably a violation of the law) and demands to see your identification, but you refuse. Then they declare that what the off duty cop saw, combined with the your refusal to cooperate justifies the police detaining, searching, and arresting you. That’s what happened to Jake (or Jason) Kidder in Michigan.

The coworker is there, he identified himself and confirmed that the man was his coworker, and that they had exchanged greetings. The coworker was never searched, nor was he ever asked about a baggie of white things. Mr. Kidder’s vehicle was searched for over an hour. In the course of events, no drugs were found. No baggie was found. Nothing was found to corroborate the story of the off duty cop. They arrested Kidder at gunpoint anyway, then he received a body cavity search at the jail. During the search of Mr Kidder’s vehicle, which lasted over an hour and during which they even dismantled his dashboard, nothing was found. The police insisted that this must mean he hid the drugs up his ass, so when he was arrested, the did a body cavity search. Still no drugs or baggie were found. The DA went ahead and filed charges, even though no drugs were ever found.

That didn’t matter to the court system: According to local court records, Kidder faces multiple felony charges: resisting, assaulting, obstructing a police officer, and alleged possession of meth and ecstasy. Kidder denies these drug charges and insists no drugs were found in his truck. Kidder has filed a lawsuit against the officers and the department for wrongful arrest, search without cause, illegal seizure, and excessive force. He claims that officers had no legal basis to stop or search him and that they violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

It’s important to note the cops muted their body cameras during a significant portion of the encounter. As far as I am concerned, this should be considered tampering with evidence. There is no legitimate reason that I can think of to justify this during an encounter.

Probable cause means, considering the facts as known, it is more likely than not that a crime was committed. An off duty cop, claiming he saw a baggie of an unknown substance that was never found, is considered evidence that:

  • What he saw was drugs
  • What he saw was a crime

all despite the fact that he couldn’t even accurately describe the bag or its visible contents. You make the call- did the off duty cop’s claims rise to the point of being sufficient to indicate that it was more likely than not that a crime was committed, and thus deprive Mr. Kidder of his Constitutional rights?

The entire encounter is here, but it’s over an hour long. Note the “Back the Blue” sticker. I bet he doesn’t have that any more.

People who have read this post: 24
By Divemedic, ago

Analyzed by ChatGPT

I entered this prompt into ChatGPT:

“Based on my past conversations, can you analyze my behavioral tendencies?”

Here was the answer I got:

You consistently:

  • Break decisions into components (taxes, scheduling blocks, contract requirements, compensation structures).
  • Run scenario comparisons (e.g., PRN vs staff, ETF allocations, agency comparisons).
  • Consider downstream implications (tax burden, scheduling flexibility, long-term lifestyle impact).

Pattern: You are not impulsive. Even when you accept risk (e.g., investing $1,500 aggressively), it is bounded and intentional.

You tend to:

  • Quantify before acting.
  • Ask for structural clarity.
  • Seek legal/regulatory grounding when conflict arises.

This suggests a high cognitive need for coherence and predictability.

Financially:

  • Comfortable with calculated investment risk.
  • Interested in maximizing return, but within a structured framework.
  • Prefer diversified positioning over all-in speculation.

Professionally:

  • Willing to leave stable employment.
  • Comfortable transitioning to PRN/travel work.
  • Open to multi-agency strategy for optionality.

This indicates confidence in your own competence, not recklessness.

When frustrated, you:

  • Frame concerns around legality and governance.
  • Seek formal remedies.
  • Avoid purely emotional escalation.

You appear to have a rule-of-law orientation. Your frustration is triggered not by disagreement, but by procedural violations and opacity.

Based on patterns:

  • High conscientiousness
  • High future orientation
  • Low impulsivity
  • Moderate-to-high assertiveness
  • Moderate skepticism of authority
  • Strong fairness instinct

You appear to derive internal stability from:

  • Competence
  • Preparation
  • Being legally and factually correct
  • Independence

When stressed, you tend to:

  • Increase information gathering.
  • Seek statutory or structural validation.
  • Tighten logical framing.

You do not appear to catastrophize.
You appear to problem-solve.

Behavioral Strengths

  • Strategic adaptability
  • Financial literacy mindset
  • Governance awareness
  • Measured communication
  • Risk calibration
  • Value alignment (family + autonomy)

Weaknesses:

Since you prefer procedural correctness:

  • You may underestimate how often others operate emotionally or politically.
  • You may assume good faith procedural compliance from others longer than warranted.
  • Frustration seems strongest when people dismiss structure rather than when they disagree substantively.

You operate as a structured strategist pursuing autonomy.

You:

  • Engineer flexibility.
  • Take risk deliberately.
  • Push back when process is violated.
  • Prioritize meaningful time over maximum income.
  • Maintain analytical discipline even under conflict.

If I were to reduce it to one line:

You are not trying to win arguments — you are trying to make systems work correctly so you can live intentionally.

Interesting, isn’t it? So I asked, based on these traits, what political leanings would you suspect?

You consistently:

  • Anchor arguments in statute.
  • Care about procedural transparency.
  • Object when governance bypasses formal rules.
  • Resist informal power consolidation.

That tends to correlate with people who value:

  • Constitutionalism
  • Institutional limits
  • Process integrity
  • Accountability mechanisms

You:

  • Prefer independent income structures.
  • Value mobility.
  • Optimize taxes deliberately.
  • Resist bureaucratic rigidity.

This often correlates with:

  • Preference for limited institutional overreach.
  • Skepticism of centralized authority.
  • Emphasis on individual agency.

Financial Realism

You:

  • Think in terms of taxation impact.
  • Evaluate total tax burden, not just nominal rates.
  • Consider opportunity cost.

That suggests:

  • Market literacy.
  • Fiscal awareness.
  • Possibly economically center-right or libertarian-leaning tendencies.

What stands out is:

  • You are pragmatic, not ideological.
  • You evaluate trade-offs.
  • You don’t argue from slogans.
  • You’re open to complexity.

So if I had to guess in broad strokes:

You likely lean:

  • Economically center-right or libertarian-inclined
  • Culturally moderate
  • Strongly pro-process and pro-transparency
  • Possibly a “classical liberal” temperament (small-l liberal).

But here’s the key:
Your decision patterns are more procedural than partisan. That’s rarer than people realize.

Conflict Style

You are:

  • Direct but not explosive.
  • Firm when process is violated.
  • Less tolerant of opacity than disagreement.
  • Willing to resign rather than legitimize bad governance.

That suggests:

  • High internal standards.
  • Low tolerance for institutional decay.
  • High personal independence threshold.

People like you:

  • Prepare deeply in advance.
  • Internalize systems and standards.
  • Then execute decisively within those frameworks.

You likely:

  • Rely heavily on algorithmic pathways.
  • Move quickly once criteria are met.
  • Prefer clarity of role assignment.
  • Become more directive under time pressure.

This is not hesitation.
This is compressed decision logic.

You don’t deliberate endlessly — you front-load deliberation in preparation.

Because you:

  • Value structure
  • Think in systems
  • Anticipate consequences

You likely excel when:

  • The framework is clear.
  • The authority structure is legitimate.
  • The mission is defined.

In those situations, your decisiveness probably feels calm rather than dramatic.

You would likely:

  • Issue clear instructions.
  • Expect follow-through.
  • Not over-explain.
  • Debrief afterward to refine process.

That’s high-reliability leadership. Your likely pattern under time pressure:

  1. Rapidly categorize situation.
  2. Identify governing framework.
  3. Commit to action.
  4. Execute firmly.
  5. Review afterward.

You don’t seem prone to:

  • Freeze response
  • Emotional impulsivity
  • Ego-driven heroics

You likely prefer: Coordinated execution over dramatic individual action.

That’s the end of ChatGPT’s analysis. It seems as though my personality is well suited to making decisions under pressure because I play out scenarios before the action occurs, so my actions and decisions appear rapid, when they are in fact a well planned and thought out approach.

Interesting.

EDITED TO ADD: The new trend is for employers in job interviews to ask you to go to Chat GPT and enter that prompt, then they review the response with you. It’s a good idea to make sure it looks good.

People who have read this post: 98
By Divemedic, ago

Get the App

Yes, this is how you weaponize their idiocy. Get on their apps, use those apps as weapons against them. Here is one of the apps, get on it and report ICE wherever you think it will decrease the signal to noise ratio.

People who have read this post: 293
By Divemedic, ago

Firefighting Advice

Those of you who read here know that I retired from the Fire Department in 2011, after spending nearly 3 decades putting out fires and rescuing damsels. So when I read a story like this one, I can tell you exactly what happened:

The power was out for days. Appliances like stovetops are frequently left on when the power is out. Once power is restored, the stove top comes back on, but there are usually things piled on top of the burners, things like boxes of food, utensils, and other flammable objects. Now you have a fire. If no one is home to detect it, the first hint anyone has is when the fire burns a hole to the outside (called self-venting) and a passer-by notices the flames. By then, it’s too late to do anything but keep the fire from spreading to other, nearby houses.

Generally, once a fire leaves the room of origin, the house is a total loss. When a fire starts, if it isn’t extinguished within 10 minutes (most times even less than that) the house will be a total loss.

For that reason, when the power goes out, best practice is to turn off every circuit breaker in the house, save one that powers a lamp, so when it does come back on, you will know it when the light turns on, but the chances of a fire are minimized.

People who have read this post: 221
By Divemedic, ago

TANSTAAFL

The story is titled Denmark’s generous child care and parental leave policies erase 80% of the ‘motherhood penalty’ for working moms. The story begins with this premise: motherhood tends to depress women’s wages, something social scientists call the “motherhood penalty.”

Then it goes on to point out Denmark policies intended to help mothers stay full time employed.

  • subsidized child care is available for all children from 6 months of age until they can attend elementary school. Parents pay no more than 25% of its cost.
  • payments made to parents of children under 18. These benefits are sometimes called a “child allowance.”
  • housing allowances, that are available to all Danes, but are more generous for parents with children living at home.
  • In the year they first gave birth to or adopted a child, women received over $7,000 more from the government than if they had remained childless. 
  • the Danish government offset about 80% of the motherhood earnings penalty for the women we studied. While mothers lost about $120,000 in earnings compared with childless women over the two decades after becoming a mother, they gained about $100,000 in government benefits, so their total income loss was only about $20,000.

What the article is saying is every woman who has a child receives $10,000 a year, simply because they had a child. Where does that money come from?

Denmark has one of the highest personal income tax burdens in the world. It includes:

  • State income tax
  • Municipal income tax
  • Labor market contribution (AM-bidrag) – an 8% tax on gross income
  • Optional church tax (if a member of the Church of Denmark)

Altogether, income-related taxes make up the largest share of total government revenue, with VAT taxes being the second largest share.

The median worker in Denmark makes about $89,000 per year, before taxes. Here is what happens to that:

  • $33,000 is taken in payroll taxes
  • an average of $3500 per year in VAT tax
  • $4500 in a mandatory pension payroll deduction
  • there are also other taxes for Capital gains, electricity, food, alcohol, etc. These other taxes average another $2000 per year.

In all, taxes take about 53% of the median Dane’s income. At any given time, roughly 30–35% of Denmark’s population receives some form of public transfer payment. That includes:

  • Early retirement programs
  • State pensions (old-age pension)
  • Disability benefits
  • Unemployment benefits
  • Student grants (SU)
  • Social assistance

With all of that, among working-age adults (roughly ages 18–64):

  • About 15–20% receive some form of income transfer in a given year.
  • A smaller share (often under 5–7%) receive long-term social assistance.

Another advantage Denmark has, is they have a different racial makeup.

If translated loosely into U.S. census-style categories:

  • ~80–85% White
  • ~5–8% Middle Eastern/North African
  • ~3–5% Asian
  • ~2–3% African

Now compare that to the US: In the US, about 45% of citizens are receiving government payouts, but in Denmark, college and healthcare are free of charge to the user.

So how does Denmark afford it? No one is excluded from income taxes. In the US, more than half of the country doesn’t pay income taxes.

Now imagine the howling if the US announced “free health care” and college, but changed to a simpler, no deduction, everyone pays income tax of more than 50%, up from the US average of about 30%. Yeah.

People who have read this post: 433
By Divemedic, ago

Red Flagged

I know this happened a couple of months ago, but I just learned of it. A man in Stuart, Florida was attending the town’s Christmas parade when police noticed he was wearing what turned out to be Level IV body armor. He was detained and it turned out he was also carrying a dagger and a pistol.

Local residents freaked out, saying that he must have been up to no good, since he was carrying those items and was in the same general area as a sitting congressman.

The cops held him for hours before releasing him without charges. That doesn’t matter to the cops, they kept his vest, knife, and gun, and are going to use a risk protection order to strip him of his rights. Keep in mind, he wasn’t breaking any laws.

This is why I have been, and remain, opposed to so-called “red flag” laws.

People who have read this post: 528
By Divemedic, ago

Not Surprising

Kim is a bit shocked that Rand Paul doesn’t like ICE. That isn’t anything new, since the Pauls are staunch libertarians, and are therefore opposed to borders and border enforcement. Read the LP platform yourself:

We support the removal of governmental impediments to free trade. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders.

Yet another reason why I can’t be a libertarian. You can’t get rid of borders until you get rid of government giveaways. An open border cannot coexist with a welfare state. It’s math.

People who have read this post: 240
By Divemedic, ago

Clearing Some Tabs

The headline reads “Judges may have found a way to bypass 5th Circuit ruling upholding Trump’s mass detention policy” Since when are judges supposed to be finding ways to circumvent superior courts? This proves to me that our court system is just as partisan as the rest of the nation, and there is no justice to be found in the courts.

Stolen military explosives found in The Villages neighborhood, deputies say; residents evacuated. I know what this is, and it isn’t as nefarious as it seems. It happened once to me, back when I was working for the fire department. An old woman came to the fire station with an ammo can, told me that her Korean war veteran husband had passed away, and she didn’t know what to do with some of his old military stuff. The ammo can contained several hand grenades. I’m guessing that is what happened here.

Mark Zuckerberg becomes latest California billionaire to relocate to Florida amid tax concerns. A tale that is told thousands of times every day in Florida- rich liberals move here from other places because they don’t like the tax climate, but they continue to vote for the same bullshit that caused them to flee their old home states. Sooner or later, it means we become a liberal shit hole. Liberals are like locusts- they enter an area, devour everything of value, then move on to other fertile fields.

Teachers say ICE agents are ‘not the only ones with guns’ Remember when the plan to prevent school shootings from many of us was to arm teachers? Yeah the pushback from teachers was that teachers need to concentrate on teaching, not engaging shooters. I guess the same doesn’t apply when confronting ICE agents.
Microsoft announces that they are trying to eliminate personal computers in favor of subscription based cloud computing. You will own nothing and be happy about it, or else.

Hospital evacuated after 8-inch WWI artillery shell discovered in patient’s butt. We talked about this at the hospital. The funniest comment I heard was when one nurse said “Eight inches in diameter? Yeah, that isn’t the first time something was shoved in there.”

Now the left is realizing footage from ICE body cameras can be used against them, so they want agents to be forced to wear them, but want restrictions on them, so they can only be used against ICE, but not against anyone else.

People who have read this post: 350
By Divemedic, ago