Rant

The only clear correlation we can find in education is this: as spending goes up, student results go down.

Our local school system just had its budget rejected for the second time in five years. They’re already talking about “what to cut,” as if the budget was slashed. It wasn’t. They simply didn’t get the increase they wanted. This happens every time the public pushes back.

Meanwhile, our high school has a math competency rate of 15 to 30 percent. At best, only three out of ten kids are performing at grade level in math. Reading is better but still unacceptable. For comparison, my old high school currently posts 90% in math and 95% in reading. The difference is night and day.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The education industry has largely stopped functioning as an education system. When you ask them “What is it that you do?”, you get soft, nebulous answers that mean nothing. They’ve become expensive, glorified babysitters who speak in jargon and resist any attempt to pin them down on results.

Look at how they train teachers. I sat through some of my wife’s online education courses. The instructors treated grown adults — many with advanced degrees — like children. The lectures were repetitive and shallow. Any reasonably intelligent person could ace them without much effort. We are not training teachers to teach. We are training them to manage classrooms.

The system has also abandoned fundamentals. I remember the first time I was told homework was useless. The kids who didn’t need it got penalized for not doing it, while the kids who needed it most had parents doing it for them. Some of those parents were getting failing grades themselves.

We desperately need to start over. Forget last year’s budget. This year we should build the budget from the ground up with one simple question: *What is it we do?*

The answer should be clear: Teach kids to read, write, and do math. Everything else comes after. If they can’t read the textbook, they can’t learn science. If they can’t do basic math, they’ll never manage a household budget. Yet we have people claiming it costs more to shop and cook at home than ordering Uber Eats.

I don’t know if this can still be fixed. This may be the first generation to graduate high school less skilled and more ignorant than their parents. We might have crossed the tipping point.

But if we’re going to try, we start with the basics. No more vague mission statements. No more throwing money at failure. When someone can’t explain what they do in clear terms, they shouldn’t be running our schools.

That’s what Elon did when he took over Twitter. He asked, “What is it that you do?” Some good people got fired by mistake and he hired them back at higher pay. But the ones who couldn’t explain their job stayed gone. Schools need the same clarity of purpose.

We owe our kids at least that much.

Per a variety of studies, young Americans are worse off than their parents on several levels. This is the first time children have been worse off “as a whole” since the 1800s, I believe. These aren’t the only metrics being judged, either. I saw a study yesterday, but can’t find it now, that showed Gen Alpha (our current batch of high school kids) are just plain dumber. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth.

The local high school as an English proficiency score of about 48%. Their math proficiency score is about 20%. Science is about 26%. Those are all well below state levels… and yet they recently won an award, which is proudly displayed on the front lawn of the school, the “NH Excellence in Education” award. I can’t make this shit up. They won an award for excellence in education with a proficiency rate below 50%. Yay team?

Since we began tracking the current metrics, the local high school has gone down most years (the exceptions were 2010-11 and 2012-13, when testing changed and no one can tell what the LARGE rise in proficiency was due to). Whatever is being done, it’s not working. It’s “not working” so well that our kids are drifting into third world shithole territory. And I can’t really see a way out of it.

A lot of studies show that young adults today are earning less than their parents did by about $4200 a year, despite the rising costs. The problem is, none of those studies take into account that the young adults decided to get degrees in advanced underwater basket weaving, and are now working at McDonald’s or equivalent. They’re saddled with huge debt because someone, somewhere, convinced them that they should go to university. There, they didn’t do great, or did but in such a niche category that the degree is useless, and now they can’t pay it off.

Add to that the problem that young adults currently have with food, housing, and work hours. By that, I mean that they aren’t learning efficient ways to use/get those things. For example, I cannot tell you how many times I have had some mental infant explain to me that they simply don’t have time to make food from scratch, because they work for a living (at 32 hours a week), and I couldn’t understand that. You know, because I worked 40+ hours a week, plus did all the cooking, cleaning, child care… yeah. I’ve been told flat out that it’s cheaper for young people to order out than to buy food, because it’s too expensive… and then they show me that they’d have to spend $40 for a single meal because they don’t own staples that should be standard in any home. They want their starter homes to have four bedrooms, 2.5 baths, central A/C, and heated floors. And they simply won’t work 40+ hours in a week, and throw tantrums at anything over 35. Yet they complain bitterly that they aren’t getting paid what I got paid for doing the same job years ago.

It’s frustrating. I moved to America because Canada was turning into a second world shithole. I love it here. This is the country of my heart; it is my home. I am an American, even if I was not born on this soil. I’ve fought hard to assimilate, and to learn, and to be as American as I can. And now, this country that I love is going exactly the same way. It’s circling the drain. It would not surprise me if, in 50 years or so, women were all wearing burkas. I’m just hoping that it doesn’t happen until after I’m dead.

So once again, I apologize to you all for how I may have posted or acted prior to drifting Right. I’m exhausted all the time. I’m so tired of everyone and everything. I got nothin’.

Are there things to write about? Yeah, tons. There are so many cases of people doing stupid stuff that I can’t even pick among them. But they’re all … stupid. Why would I write about it?

Here’s the thing. I believe that life is like a car. When you drive a car, you want to look where you want the car to go (also helps you anticipate stuff before it happens). Look at your passenger? That’s where the car is going to go, so don’t do it. Life goes where you’re looking, too. So if I spend all my time looking at the stupid people doing the stupid things, then I’m destined to go back that way. And I simply don’t want to.

A long time ago, probably back when I still had TDS, Chris was whinging on about some Leftist doing a Leftist Thing. I can’t remember what it was; doesn’t matter what it was. And I just looked at him, and I asked him… what else did you expect them to do? And that’s it, really, isn’t it? Why would we expect them to do anything else, other than act the fools they are? If we do, we’re being stupid ourselves. If we don’t, then why are we even the least bit concerned about what “they” (pick whoever you want “they” to be) are doing?

I look at the voter turn outs for Jaffrey. So apparently we have about 5300 voters in our town. Out of those, only 1009 showed up to vote yesterday. Less than 1/5 of the people bothered to vote. And what are they teaching their children, their friends, their coworkers? They’re teaching them that there’s no point to voting. Use whatever excuse. “It’s only a small election.” That was this month’s excuse.

I ask you… How else does change ever truly happen? Trump is changing things from the top, but frankly, that’s an abnormal thing to be happening. What he’s doing is so new, no one knows what the hell to do in response. Real change, sustainable change, HAS to happen at the local level. If it doesn’t happen here, there’s no hope at all that it’ll stick at the higher levels.

When we can’t get even 1/5 of our voters out to vote, what have we become? A group of apathy ridden idiots who can’t even be bothered to govern themselves at all, never mind well.

I really give up, guys. I’ve done everything in my power to get people out to the vote. But 1/5 is just an insult. That means that any petty tyrant with a good advertising budget and the ability to badly write articles can get in and do damage. And that’s just what’s happening. I don’t think anyone ran opposed at our local level. No one can be bothered.

In the 2024 election, Trump won because 64% of eligible voters in the country voted (Pew Research). That is considered a high number. People refer to it as “unprecedented.” Rivaled only by the 2020 turn out of 66%. We’re excited because a little over half of eligible voters bothered to vote. Half.

Do you remember in 2014 or so, when Iraqis finally had a democratic election? The proud women (all huddled in their burqas, but still) holding up their purple fingers? I remember that. I remember crying happy tears, that they were finally being permitted to vote again. Of course, that didn’t last long. The last several years have seen those gains reversed, and then some. Not as bad as Iran, but close. In October or November 2025, they held another election, and this one appears to have snipped away at the extremists’ power… but who knows? When people threaten to shoot you if you vote, it makes you not really want to vote.

As an aside, I believe that’s what the Leftists want their people to think, when they go to vote. They want their base to believe, 100% believe, that any ICE officers are there to shoot people who don’t vote “correctly.” That’s the kind of story they’re likely to put out (though I haven’t seen one yet). That’s certainly the feeling I get. They want their base full of fear.

Of course, there’s some of that on the Right, too. It’s different, of course. There’s fear of governmental powers (both about the government having too much power, and the people taking away the government’s power). There’s fear of changes (not unwarranted, in my opinion) like piercings, tattoos, hair colors, orientations. And then there’s the people going on about the Reptilians taking over the government, the Flat Earth folks (all around the globe), and the uber extreme xtians (I won’t give them the “nice” title) who are so interested in judging and blaming others that they refuse to look at themselves. Are there less on the Right? I think so. But they’re there. And it’s real.

I think we’ve gone too far. I don’t think there’s any coming back. I think we’re doomed. I don’t even mean doomed to civil war. I mean that I don’t think we can recover from the level of apathy and self denial that has crept into every corner of our society. We’re done. It wasn’t even all that good of a run.

I’m sure that many of you have heard this dilemma asked. As a baby, Hitler was innocent. He remained innocent through his youth, through World War I, and beyond.

At some point, he became evil.

I would not kill baby Hitler. My world is what it is today because of WWII. Would it be better if Hitler had never been the leader of Germany? I don’t know, and neither do you.

We know the results, and we are where we are today because of our history, good and bad.

In 1989 or so I was interviewing with Cray Research. They gave me two options: I could work at an Army site, or I could work at NASA Langley.

I knew where Langley, VA, was. It was in the heart of the swamp. I couldn’t afford to live in that area, and I would hate the city life. Everything about living in Langley, VA, sucked for me.

I accepted the job offer for the Army site. It turned out that I got to work on the bleeding edge of computer graphics. I got to do stuff with amazing computers. I found a mentor that taught me more than I had learned in years. It took me through two bad marriages and into a great one.

It turns out that NASA Langley is located in Newport News, VA. About 20 miles from where I graduated from high school. It was in a part of the country I love. If I had known that NASA Langley was not located in Langley, VA, I would have taken that offer.

Would I change that decision if I could? No.

This is my world.

We live with the consequences of choices—both the ones we make and the ones we refuse to make. Today the same people who claim they would kill baby Hitler are screaming that Trump had no right to stop the Iranian regime before it could build its own final solution.

We hear from the better educated elites about how horrible it is that Trump attacked Iran without permission or provocation.

Let’s get some facts very clear. Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979. When the “students” deposed the Shah, they installed the current theocracy—at least until last week. They declared, “Death to America”. They declared war on us.

Except for the time when Iran and Iraq were busy killing each other’s child soldiers, Iran has been actively attacking the United States.

The bombing of the USS Cole? Iran. The mining of the Strait of Hormuz? Iran. The mine almost sinking the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf? Iran. The first bombing of the World Trade Center? Iran. The arming of Hamas and Hezbollah? Iran.

If you look at any Muslim terrorist action, you can trace it back to Iran. (And if you aren’t covering for the the media’s beloved Obama, you can see the money he sent them funding those operations.)

Now I called them “students,” because in 1979 that was how they were labeled by the lying media. They were communist-trained revolutionaries—the same militant radical instigators we find on US college campuses today.

Over the last 3 months, somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 people were murdered in Iran by the regime. This makes Chicago’s murder rate pale in comparison. And it wasn’t black on black violence.

The media mostly ignored it. They ignored women risking their lives by baring their hair. They ignored it when the Revolutionary Guard fired into the crowds.

They ignored the deaths of those screaming, begging, and pleading for freedom. For the United States to help.

This is compared to how upset they are over 160-some being killed by an Iranian missile falling on a girl’s school. Or six servicemen losing their lives for the cause of freedom.

Trump killed baby Hitler. He decapitated the Iranian regime before they could detonate a nuclear device on Israel or on US soil.

It was the right thing to do.

Because this is history being made, not history being changed.

According to Ally, I spent over 6 hours in calls today. None of them particularly pleasant.

The goal is to get different issues worked on in priority order without losing anything.

We will be using two different aspects of Gitea. The issue (ticket) system and the project management system.

We have set up the project management system as a Kanban board. “Backlog”, “ToDo”, “In Progress,” “Done.” I now have to train the account manager on how to manage projects.

My biggest problem is how they want to use the tickets. Tickets are there to track a an issue, task or project. Every comment on the ticket should move the ticket forward in some way.

This is not an email chain. You don’t quote the previous comment in your comment unless it makes sense.

If your comment is wrong, edit it to make it correct. When somebody else comes to the ticket and they are scrolling down, they are going to stop at the first comment that answers their question/need. They are not going to read to the bottom of the ticket to find a different comment that says “Oh, disregard the comment above; THIS is the real information”

Currently, I have a ticket with 3 comments referencing the same image with three different image names. The first comment was from the account manager, who wrote, “Client confirms X, see attached.”

No comment should ever read “See attached”. You attached it. You know what the image is. You know why you attached it. Having everybody else on the project look at the image and GUESS at why you put it there is wasteful of their time and resources.

In this case, the attached image had nothing to do with the confirmation. They were two separate issues.

Somehow he couldn’t cut and paste images into the ticket. So all the images were being saved as attachments, not inline. When asked if I could edit his comment to inline his images, he refused.

It is verboten to edit his comments. So I now have to get him to fix his comments when he makes a mistake…

Oh my, this is a rant, and it isn’t getting any better.

I hope you are having a great day. I’m 6 hours behind in the project and will be coding most of the day.

(Oh, when I took the stovepipe off to clean it, running the chimney pipe brush through the 8 inch stovepipe caused the pipe to come apart at the seam and for holes to show up. That required a trip to the hardware store to get more stovepipe.)

As some astute readers might have noted, Jimmy Carter is, in my not so humble opinion, the worst president to ever serve.

His utter spinelessness on the world stage led to the Middle East exploding with violence. His inability to trust the military lead to the deaths of soldiers in a sandstorm in Iran.

His sanctimonious platitudes let the Muslim world know that the United States was morally weak and unwilling to stand up for what was right.

His actions after the “students” took the US Embassy the first time led to the marines being disarmed when the “students” attacked and took the Embassy and held US citizens hostage for over a year.

I hope he is frying in Hell for what he did to my country and the world.

Side note, the day after the students took the Embassy the second time the skies over my home were free of navy aircraft for the first time ever. A couple of weeks later, one of my friends, a Tomcat driver, explained to me that he had been flying around us and for those two weeks was in flying on the other side of the ocean. The military was ready to take action within 24 hours of the Embassy being taken. Their commander in chief decided to sit with his thumb where the sun doesn’t shine.

Since that day, every Muslim terrorist attack can be traced back to that time of weakness. Reagan made them back down but everybody on the world stage knows that when there is a Democrat sitting in the Oval Office, the United States is weak.

Yesterday Iran got to Find Out. The president of the United States, using the authority given to him by Congress, acting with the Israelis, took out the Iranian regime.

Thank you Trump.

So here in NH we have something called Town Meeting Day, March 10th (it moves around a bit to avoid weekends). It’s been a “thing” for about 400 years.

On Facebook, a group called WE the People NH posted this today:

So Town Meeting Day is coming up. March 10. A day notoriously devoid of conservative voters – who then complain about ever increasing property taxes. My town has on the ballot a $5 million track for the local high school unanimously recommended by the school board and if things go the way they normally do, our town, which voted for Trump, will have a minuscule percentage of voters made up of a majority of progressive voters vote to rubber-stamp all the spending. I did a search of town meeting day in NH and the first thing that popped up was from the progressive Granite Post. The next thing that came up was Amplify NH. We truly need conservatives to get out and do this extremely simple thing – vote down the constant spending, vote out the entrenched officials who advocate increased spending every year. I would like to see a push by this group and other conservative groups to focus on NH – change starts locally.

I will say, I have seen a lot of conservative voters deciding not to vote on “little things” over the last 20 years. Too many conservatives. That is literally how we got to where we are today. Trump has helped, by stirring up the flyover country to vote, but it’s just not enough.

Do y’all want a blue wave? Because let me tell you, I do not. If you live in NH, and your town is having a vote, get your ass out and VOTE! It is quite literally your civic duty.

I’m going to lay this out here: if you don’t vote, then you are telling everyone around you that you don’t care what happens to your property taxes, your school system, your local police, your fire house, your roads, and a zillion other things. More importantly, in my very snooty opinion, you are teaching your children that there’s no reason to go out and vote.

Eh, it’s just a little election. Doesn’t really matter.

Yes, Ken, it does. Every vote in every election matters.

Imagine, if you will, what our country would look like if everyone was encouraged (both positively and negatively) to go out and vote. If we presented voting as a necessity, something everyone could and should do, every single time, how different would our economy be? How much more educated would our voters be?

Why don’t we have people teaching classes on what the local issues are? I’m not talking some politician (local or otherwise) stumping for their party. I mean third party people not involved in the voting who are simply subject matter experts. Is your county or town voting on spending for the year? Have an accountant come talk about what’s important and what isn’t. Are you discussing whether you have to dump art or sports from schools in order to afford to feed kids free lunch? Get in someone who’s an expert in that stuff to talk about it. Or more than one person. Teach me!

Our children are watching us, folks. They’re watching everyone of us who ditches on a piddly local election. They’re watching as we add up the numbers on the screen and decide it “isn’t worth voting because we’re going blue/red anyhow.” It’s not a fricking sports team, people! Voting is something that NEEDS to be hammered into every single student, every single year, with parents going out and voting and being encouraged to take their kids along to see how it is done. When a young adult walks into their first polling station for a local, state, or federal vote on something, it should be familiar, not scary!

Tuesday’s State of the Union address had so many disgusting moments that my stomach is still churning.

They used to say that a broken clock is right twice a day. Or even an idiot gets it right, once in a while.

The Democrats were just wrong.

Back when I watched NFL, when the Packers took the field, I would cheer. They were my team.

My mom died a Packer Backer. Today, my only interest in football comes in the form of Google giving me updates about Packer games. I have no emotional investment in their game.

The Democrats treat politics, and life, like a team sport. You never cheer for the other team; you always cheer for your team.

That’s ok, you don’t have to cheer for the other team, for my team. You do have to show respect.

When Joe Wilson called out Obama for his lies, by shouting, “You lie!” when Obama was lying, he was punished by the House for “unsportsman like behavior.”

Every Democrat at the State of the Union was disrespectful; some stepped over the line into “unsportsman like behavior”, I’m looking at the Muslim twins and Al Green, but there were more.

But what is truly and fully disgusting is the behavior of the Democrats to the country. You don’t have to cheer and clap for my team, but you should darn well stand up and show respect and pride when the USA Gold Medal Hockey team walks into the chamber. You stand up when heroes are given their awards. You stand up when asked if you support Americans or illegal aliens.

The Democrats are consumed with so much hate that they can’t show any love for our country.

Joe Biden was my president. Obama was my president. Bill Clinton was my president. Even that horrible, weak, nation- and world destroying Jimmy Carter was my president.

I still stood for our flag. I was still respectful of the office.

It was once explained to me that you salute the position, not the man. Just like the guards at the entrance to the base didn’t salute Mom or me when we drove the bus onto the base, they saluted the officer’s tag on the bumper. They were saluting Dad, even if he wasn’t in the car.

The next time there is a Democrat as president, I know I will be hearing about how I need to respect the office of the president. That I shouldn’t say disrespectful things about the person who occupies the Oval Office. And when I point out how they treated President Trump and then President Vance, they will tell me “That’s different.”

We are having a snow event. So are the people of New York City.

The difference is that here nobody is concerned. We have dry wood inside waiting to go in the stove. We have the snowblower ready to run. We have gasoline to run the blower. We have propane and a gas stove.

Worse case, the internal computers are down and Internet service goes to shit.

NYC is not nearly as prepared.

The socialist in charge has run out of other people’s money but still needs the city cleared of snow.

His answer is to hire people to shovel snow for the city.

If you want to do this, all you need to do is apply bring two official photo IDs and your social security card.

Of course the fact that you need two forms of ID to shovel snow but NY state has no voter ID requirement and the Democrats continue to fight the SAVE act lead to this being a trending story.

And then the explainers came in. “He’s not demanding two IDs to shovel snow, that’s so you can get paid.”

They somehow think this is a big winning argument for them.

If you are getting paid, the I-9 requires two forms of ID and your social security card. But requiring ID to get paid is not the same as requiring ID to vote.

They’re not the same.

This is my red hat. It is based on historical finds and considerations about those finds in places like Hedeby and Birka. I don’t wear it very often, because I only play at being a Viking (Scandinavian Völva from 10th century Unst) a couple of times a year, and at least one of those times it’s much to warm to wear a naalbound hat designed to get you through a night 100 miles into the Arctic Circle. This hat is incredibly thick. It doesn’t get wet, as it’s made of hand spun sheep wool. It smells a bit of lanolin, and it’s warm. In 10th century Unst, this would have been THE hat to wear at the winter holy days, because it was bright, warm, and naalbound (sort of a Viking form of knitting with one needle and a thumb). While we don’t know whether hats were popular or not (because most of what we know about the Vikings is gathered from pot scrapings, weathered carvings, grave finds, and stories written many years after the Vikings we’re talking about ceased to exist), the few writings from medieval times and the carvings we have do seem to indicate that this would have been worn. It’s definitely something that’s come down in German and Scandinavian heritage (hence the garden gnomes and the Tomten, who are sort of like garden gnomes but more demi-god and tricksy).

I wore my red hat this past weekend. It’s one of the two events I wear my Viking garb at, and it was cold at night (down in the low 20s). I was all dressed in wool, cooking happily over a fire, making meals from a Norse cookbook called Vikingars Gästabud, which is a modern book based on archaeological finds. I made green soup, and a beef stew, and a chicken stew, and barley porridge (called grot). It was a delicious weekend, though a bit smokey.

I enjoy wearing the hat. It makes me look like a garden gnome, I’ll be honest. I’m good with that. It’s fun, and it’s historical, and it starts conversations that I love having.

This year it did something else, as well. I’m a lot less happy about it.

Apparently, there are folks in Minnesota who are now wearing head gear very similar to mine, and using it as a “victory hat” of sorts. They’re protesting ICE while wearing these hats. I’m guessing it hearkens back to the red hats worn by the French during their revolution, but I really don’t know. During the course of the weekend, I had five or six people (separately) come up to me and give me a thumb’s up and call out anti ICE slogans of various types. One lady went so far as to trap me in the bathroom line and explain to me that it was AWESOME I was wearing a hat to show that I was rebelling. I explained to her about ten times that I was wearing a historically accurate Scandinavian hat, but she persisted. Like they do.

All that led to this morning’s conversation with Chris, wherein I lost my shit entirely. I found myself saying, quite loudly and irately, “My culture is not your costume!” I know that’s a leftist screed, but it’s true in this case. I love seeing kids dressing up as stuff at Halloween, or to cosplay, but being TOLD the reason for wearing what I was wearing was extremely offensive. Yes, both sides of my ancestry go back to Scandinavian “Vikings” and it’s something I’m proud of. I don’t want to give up my hat!

But I also don’t want to be mistaken for someone rioting or causing problems. Is my hat going to get leftists riled up and assuming I’m one of them? Worse, is it going to get conservatives upset, thinking I’m with the Left? Why the hell can’t I just wear my hat in peace?

I want the anti-ICE people to stop wearing my hat. I want them to stop using my symbols for their hatred and rancor. It’s not right!

But of course… they have a right to do what they want. So I have to decide whether to stop wearing it, at least until this trend is over. Because I do not want to be associated with those rioters at all. Not for one second. I was horrified this weekend. 🙁

On a nicer side, I made it into the Gardner news again:

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1Dn4BktgU9/

https://www.thegardnernews.com/picture-gallery/lifestyle/things-to-do/2026/02/16/northfolk-night-market-is-an-annual-winter-festival-that-features/88684515007/