You Can't Silence Us

Suspicious

The man who was shot dead by Secret Service agents after entering Mar a Lago armed with a shotgun at 0130 this morning had been reported missing by has family less than 12 hours earlier, and local police had notified the FBI.

Twelve hours isn’t even long enough for a missing person report, much less FBI notification. What else was known that made this necessary? Did he leave a manifesto or something?

Now all of the news stories I found from when he went missing have been scrubbed. The left is already claiming it to be a false flag designed to boost Trump’s numbers.

Too many more Trump assassination attempts, and i will have to create a blog category specifically for this.

People who have read this post: 166
By Divemedic, ago

Terrorism

Terrorism defined: the premeditated, unlawful use of violence or threat of violence against civilians, governments, or property to induce fear, intimidate, or coerce, with the goal of advancing political, social, religious, or ideological objectives.

Now read about the sabotage of the Kennedy center and tell me what you think…

These fanatics won’t hesitate to come after you. They want you to submit or die.

People who have read this post: 215
By Divemedic, ago

Police Shooting

Today, I came across a 2023 incident in San Bernardino involving a shootout between a deputy and a criminal. The action begins at the 10:00 mark.

The lesson here is stay in the fight, even after being wounded.

People who have read this post: 214
By Divemedic, ago

51 Days

Mayor of New York Mamdani was elected with Socialist promises of free ice cream and a socialist utopia, with a solemn promise of making the rich pay for it. It only took 51 days for him to float the first tax increase on people who aren’t rich.

“This would effectively be a tax on working and middle class New Yorkers, who have a median income of $122,000,” he said

That amount of money is not much in New York. The people making $122k isn’t a lot of money. The proposed tax hike? A 9.5% increase in property taxes. This is why I keep saying New Yorkers need to stay there, and stop moving to Florida where they vote for more of the same policies that made them come here in the first place.

People who have read this post: 363
By Divemedic, ago

Shooting

A Walmart in Poinciana Florida, an unincorporated community that spans Osceola and Polk County, had been hiring off duty Sheriff’s deputies as security. One of them confronted a group of “teens” who had been shoplifting. That’s when one of the youths decided to pull a gun on the Deputy, thereby changing his crime from misdemeanor larceny into armed robbery, a forcible felony.

The Deputy conducted an impromptu ballistics test of his .45 ACP caliber Glock, which performed as expected. The crowd became a bit irate because the deputy shot a “kid,” so another off duty deputy, along with an off duty firefighter, both of whom happened to be in the store and were armed, assisted the original deputy in securing the crime scene until others could arrive. I can’t post the link to the tweet with the video, because it’s been restricted. Click on the tweet below and take a look.

People who have read this post: 369
By Divemedic, ago

Scams

A reader recently wanted to know why people make money when owning companies that don’t ever make a product. Some companies are scams, that’s how. Look at this post from Twitter/X:

Believing that a 3D printed filter can eliminate 74% of the CO2 emitted by a car’s tailpipe is ridiculous. The chemistry alone is impossible. Plants don’t just convert CO2 to O2. They are doing so because they need the carbon atoms to make other things, but discard the unnecessary oxygen. The carbon gets turned into other things: cellulose, fructose, proteins, and all of the other things the plant needs. In other words, the plant gains in mass by taking in this CO2. The formula is one that is known and taught in high school biology courses.

CO₂ + H₂O + light → biomass (carbohydrates) + O₂

What makes this impossible is the numbers involved. Burning gasoline produces about 8.9 kg CO₂ per gallon. So at 30 mpg, that’s about 0.30 kg CO₂ per mile. To reduce CO₂ by 74%, you’d need to remove roughly 0.22 kg CO₂ per mile. At 60 mph = 1 mile/min → you’d need to remove ~220 grams of CO₂ every minute. That doesn’t seem to be too bad, on its surface. So why is this impossible?

At a conservative microalgae fixation rate of 4 g/L/day, you’d need ~106,600 L of culture. At 1 g/L density, that’s ~107 kg dry algae. That’s not all- that dry algae would need a water bath in order to function. Once the water is added, that amount of algae would have a mass of 107,000 kg- more than 100 tons. Fit in a plastic tailpipe adaptor. Obviously not possible in any practical sense. It’s like discovering your dog eats dog poop, so there’ll be no more dog poop if you just get your dog to eat its own poop.

So these kids are not the first ones to run a scam like this. There is the company website at https://www.gogreenfilter.com/ and they have corporate sponsors, including T-Mobile. They are marketing and selling these things.

Back in 2018, there was a post I did about a Canadian company claiming to be able to make gasoline from CO2. This is what I said then:

This company is hoping that those watching don’t understand the First Law of Thermodynamics. Carbon dioxide is NOT energy. Taking CO2 and converting it into hydrocarbon fuel USES energy. Thanks to inefficiencies in ALL chemical reactions (First Law of Thermodynamics) it takes more energy to create the fuel than the fuel itself contains.

I thought it was a joke, it was so stupid. I thought — it’s junk science, junk commerce, nothing makes sense about it. But look how pretty it is.

About a dozen years ago, there was another college concept where women could paint on a drug detecting nail polish that would change colors when exposed to date rape drugs. A woman could simply stir her drink with a fingertip and make sure the polish didn’t change colors. For numerous reasons this is impossible, but there are sill tons of people out there who are wanting to buy this stuff. I could swear I did a post on this years ago, but I can’t seem to find it. They were collecting funding to get the company off the ground. In other words, scamming investors.

The point is that there are tons of scams out there, and people will happily hand over their cash without bothering to check the claims of the person making them.

If you make a product while making claims about its performance, but you don’t test to make sure the product works as you claim, that is fraud or a scam. If I tell you that I have a machine that creates gold out of lead, then sell them for $10,000 each, but I never test to see if it actually works, that’s a scam. If I collect investor cash to develop this product, it’s a scam.

On the other hand, if I convince a company to fund my development of an idea for a product, or develop some technology with possible future value, that’s R&D. Sometimes R&D leads nowhere, and that is why companies have an R&D budget. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it leads to a dead end.

It’s a line to be drawn- if I tell you up front that this is research of concept, it isn’t fraud. If I tell you that I have a working prototype that I want to bring to market and I don’t, that’s a scam.

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

The Goal

They are not even hiding it any longer- schools are there to allow children access to gay porn:

People who have read this post: 246
By Divemedic, ago

Second Amendment

I’m going to chime in on the ICE shooting of Pretti. Not the shooting itself, but in the left’s sudden discovery and defense of the Second Amendment. They, along with some on the right, are saying ICE shouldn’t shoot people merely for practicing their RKBA. That isn’t what happened.

You have a right to keep and bear arms. You have a right to peaceably assemble for a redress of your grievances. What you don’t have is the right to use that weapon in furtherance of your scheme to break the law. As an example, let’s look at a recent shooting in the Central Florida area.

An Osceola County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a shoplifting suspect inside a Walmart on Thursday after the man pulled a gun and was running through the store. Does he have a right to carry a gun? Yes. Did he have a right to do so while breaking the law? No. Did it get his ass shot? It seems so.

Now apply this to Pretti. Did he have a right to carry a gun? Yes. Did he have a right to peaceably assemble? Yes. Does peaceable assembly include interfering with police activity or arrests? No. Does interfering with police activity while armed greatly increase the chances of a cop shooting you? Yes, yes it does.

The takeaway here is that, if you DO decide to break the law while armed, you have to be willing to accept this: If you are interfering with police carrying out their duties, you are no longer an observer or a protester, you are a participant. If you do so while armed, you are a combatant. Being a combatant, you no longer get to say that you are merely protesting, observing, or acting as a “medic.”

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

That Was Fun

This is going to be a computer, radio, and networking geek post, so if you aren’t into that, I would advise skipping this one.

We have been having issues with various items around the house randomly disconnecting from the network: the pool controller, some SONOS speakers, various other things. I downloaded a WiFi analyzer app for my phone, and the radio spectrum in 2.4 ghz was a royal mess. My neighbors are all running with a channel width of 40 mHz, and the spectrum was just overloaded.

I decided to do something about that. The problem is that the DECO mesh system I was running with didn’t allow channel or width selection, the system automatically picked it. You would tell the system to select a new channel, it would pick one, then the other devices in the area would change channels, and you would be right back to getting overloaded. I needed something that would allow more control. Most consumer level WiFi doesn’t allow that much control.

Enter the Omada Prosumer line by TP-Link. (Yes, I know there are others like Ubiquiti, but this is the one I went with.) I bought a new Gigabit POE switch, an OC220 controller, an indoor access point, and an outdoor one. I set up the 2.4 ghz so the indoor AP was on Channel 1, the outdoor AP on channel 11. This dodges most of the interference I was seeing.

I put the entire home network on a VPN router, then cleaned up the network while I was at it- most of the fixed devices are now on hardwired Ethernet. That required doing some attic work to run a few cables. I set up separate SSID’s for each band (2.4ghz, 5ghz, 6ghz) and a guest SSID that is blocked from interacting with anything other than Internet access.

Then I migrated all of the devices in the house to the new SSID’s. There were about 80 devices, and this is what took the longest. Cell phones, tablets, computers, and televisions are on 5 gHz or are wired, everything else is down on 2.4 gHz.

The new networking path looks like this: incoming Internet-> Mocha Filter-> Modem -> VPN Router -> POE Gigabit Switch-> APs, devices

Then I shut down the old DECO system. It turns out most of the radio interference was two of my neighbors, my two powerwalls (which each broadcast their own SSIDs), and a bunch of devices in my house, including the mesh network itself.

Now my system is clean, and I am dominating the spectrum while on my property. Inside the house, my signal is -35dB, and outside all four corners of the property are at -50dB or better. Of course, channel 1 is best inside, and channel 11 is best outside, but that’s by design.

I did a speed test on the new setup, and I am right at 500 Mbps everywhere in the house now. Overall, it took the past two days to get all of that done. There is a reunion luncheon of retired firefighters from my old department today, so I am off to go see the guys I haven’t seen in a few years. They have a luncheon every month on a Thurssday, but I haven’t been able to make it to one in since before COVID. It seems I was always working on Thursdays. Now I will be able to make time for things like that.

People who have read this post: 327
By Divemedic, ago