Rant

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/

Today’s stupid comes from the public, non-political sector. I participate in a variety of prepper and off-grid living groups on Facebook and elsewhere. Yesterday, one of the groups highlighted a set of stairs basically like the ones Chris made for our shed. They fold up against the wall. I liked the post, and was going to move on, but stupidly decided to check the comments. I ran into a guy, Todd, who said, and I quote, “Don’t weigh more than 150 lbs max for those stairs.” (I cleaned it up. His grammar was so atrocious I couldn’t do a direct quote.)

I patiently explained that it’s entirely possible to make stairs that will hold heavier weights, and that I know it’s so because a) math and b) hubby actually built some and he weights quite a bit more than 150 lbs (as do I) and he goes up and down the stairs just fine.

The response? “How ’bout a picture? I don’t believe you.” I kind of stared at it for a while, but then I responded to him. I basically said, well, I had facts on my side, but he was welcome to not believe those facts… however they were still facts. *shrug* Chris then responded by asking if the dude knew the type of wood, the type of hinges, the ratings for the screws, etc etc, and if not, then you couldn’t judge how much weight could go on the stairs. Basically, what I’d said… *math*.

There’s stupid on all sides of me these days.

I had someone from the “new poor” group who woefully explained that a single person cannot eat healthily on $30 a week. I sat down and made a delicious week’s menu for two people, two whole grown-ass people, for $30 a week. Well, $32 actually. But for TWO people, not one. I got told I was unrealistic for expecting people to… *gasp* cook. Because people on welfare don’t have time to cook, because now they’re burdened with “working” for 20 hours a week.

I didn’t bother explaining how I’d been working 40+ hour weeks for most of my life, and still managed to cook meals from scratch every night. Sometimes it meant careful planning and cooking on the weekend, then judicial use of the crockpot or microwave during the week, but I had food on the table, hot, delicious, healthy, and as far from processed as I could manage. Every. Single. Day. For years, folks.

There is a subset of people who are actively choosing to be willfully ignorant. They go out of their way to complain about things, especially online but occasionally in person, and then will not even glance at a fix for their problem. If you try to spoon feed it to them, the result is a tantrum that would look poor on a 2 year old, never mind a grown-ass adult. And while I do agree that the majority of them do appear to be on the Left, there are some doozies on the Right as well, and it bothers me.

I can’t help someone who actively WANTS to be poor, ignorant, hurt, or damaged. There’s this wonderful trend right now where people are claiming to be “triggered” over pretty much anything. That is, and I say this with no remorse whatsoever, weaponizing trauma, and it’s a VILE habit.

Some of us lived through real trauma. You can tell, because we’re the ones helping the OTHER ones with trauma, while telling people “what I went through wasn’t that bad, not as bad as Ms. X here.” We’re not using our trauma as an excuse. We might occasionally have to ask for grace, but we don’t use it as an excuse. And we never stop trying to get over it, to fix it, to repair it, to patch it, to soothe it.

“Ohh… but I’m triggered!” Yeah honey? So am I, but I’m still out here helping others, taking care of myself and my family, doing my best to earn a living and get shit done. Your trauma can be real but that doesn’t mean it’s a reason to not work, or do whatever you need to be doing. Get off your ass and go get shit done.

We have some good delivery drivers, but my goodness, some are horrible.

I’ve had a half dozen packages delivered to my “porch or front door”. With pictures of boxes, or packages in a white garbage bag sitting in a pile of snow under my mailbox. 2 feet from where the melt puddle forms.

On Saturday they promised a delivery. They then told me they couldn’t deliver because of severe weather.

The cause? They didn’t want to go up the driveway.

Sunday they delivered up the same driveway with no changes.

I’m sad to say that USPS does a better job of package delivery. Amazon drivers will flat-out lie.

That’s nto to say we don’t have some good ones, Saturday and Sunday drivers are bad, in general.

In May of 1963, there were mass protests in Birmingham, AL. Blacks were protesting racist laws, passed by Democrats, and enforced by Democrats.

The laws were bad. The leaders were bad. The cops and other enforcers were bad.

That isn’t to say there wasn’t more than a bit of propaganda going around.

A motel manager was told to get the blacks out of the motel pool. His orders were ignored. The police were being ignored.

The law was bad. The people enforcing it were bad. The hotel manager? We don’t know, but he was painted as bad.

The gallon of acid he poured into that pool would not have done a damn thing to anybody in the pool. Unless it was poured on somebody, it was so diluted b the time it entered the pool that it did not and could not cause harm.

He used fear and ignorance to drive the blacks from his pool, because he was ordered to do so.

Not every person in the South was racist. Not every person was bad. Enough of them were to paint an entire section of our country as evil racists.

64 years later, conservatives are still being painted as racist using these images of Democrats enforcing Democrat-passed laws.

The problem with dealing with people in the spur of the moment is that “bad” or “evil” is not visible in the moment. It takes time.

I still remember the first time I saw the George Floyd video. I was enraged. I was glad I didn’t have to choose between watching a cop kill a black man or shooting the cop and spending the rest of my life in jail.

It turned out that every single thing told to me by that video was a lie. And my country burned.

The evil that is the modern (and historic) Democrat came to the forefront. They held “protests” that turned into riot after riot after riot.

They attacked federal buildings for weeks on end. They took over parts of cities and refused to allow people free travel through their city.

And they lied to us. The entire memo of “mostly peaceful” comes from a reporter telling us that the “protest” was mostly peaceful while the rioters set fires in the background.

When Kyle showed up to defend a commercial property, because the Minneapolis police wouldn’t or couldn’t, he ended up being chased by a convicted felon. When that felon attempted to take Kyle’s rifle from him, Kyle shot him, and made a good communist out of him.

A little later, another man became known as Lefty. He was carrying concealed. He attempted a sneak attack on Kyle, when Kyle pointed his rifle at Lefty, Lefty stopped, then continued his attack, quickly losing the use of his right arm.

Lefty was not legally carrying, by the laws of Minnesota. His permit to carry had expired.

He absolutely had the right to carry. The Second Amendment protects the right of every person to armed self-defense, and more. The law that made it illegal for Lefty to carry was unconstitutional. It might not have been found such, yet, but it is.

I will stand up to anyone to clearly, loudly state that Lefty had the right to carry.

He did not have the right to misuse his gun. When his gun came out of its holster to threaten Kyle, he was no longer on Second Amendment protected grounds.

You have the right to carry. You have the right to defend yourself. You don’t have the right to use your gun for criminal acts.

We need to be aware that rights are not situational. Your right to carry doesn’t end when you go to protest. Your right to carry doesn’t end when you go to a restaurant that serves beer. Your right to carry doesn’t end because somebody else is scared.

The Fifth Amendment does NOTend when a person is accused. That would make it worthless.

Your rights are not situational.

I don’t like losing. I hate losing. I don’t want to lose.

In war, if you are not cheating, you’re not playing to win.

The Democrats and the Leftists of my Nation have declared war on me and mine decades ago. They hid it. They disguised it. They cheated.

They knew they were at war, and they were willing to do anything to win.

We saw this in gay marriage. They fought battle after battle, losing every time. They put forth a referendum in California, of all places. And the people of California soundly defeated the drive for gay marriage. The people of California amended their state constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

The left then found an activist judge to rule that the amended constitution was unconstitutional under the state constitution. What BS.

This led to a Supreme Court decision. And suddenly, gay marriage is the law of the land, against the wishes of the people.

And now I’m told I must accept it forever and ever, amen.

The left took over education, from K-12 to higher education. They won.

They attacked the truth through their constant lies on TV and later “main stream media”. They won.

At every step, they won.

And my side let them. Because we were too polite. Because we took the high road. Because “it was the right thing to do.”

After Sandy Hook, I got in a discussion on Facebook with a liberal. She wanted assault weapons banned. She cared for the little children.

I went on the attack. I threw every argument that had ever been tossed at me, at us. I told her that she hated children because she didn’t want people to defend them. That she wasn’t willing to sacrifice for the children.

For three days I hammered on her. I wasn’t giving an inch until her niece, a good friend, asked me to stop. It turned out that this liberal anti-gun was a teacher who had dedicated her life to children. She couldn’t understand why she was being accused of such heinous thoughts and deeds by a stranger.

I took the high road and stopped. No longer.

We, The People, attempted to stand up to the thieves who stole 2020. The result was that people were thrown in prison, denied their rights, lied about, socially destroyed, and financially destroyed.

To this day, the left lies about what happened. None of the people responsible for that travesty of justice have been punished.

I want them punished!

I don’t want my enemies armed. Not with knowledge, not with training, and certainly not with firearms.

They have exposed themselves to the world as animals. Unwilling to be active members of our societal contract. I want them to suffer.

I also believe in the right to free speech. I believe in the right to armed self-defense. I believe in the rights acknowledged and protected by our constitution.

And it is hard, really hard, to let those evil worms exercise their rights. I want to escalate their sound attacks to an extreme.

I’m reminded of the guy who mounted an aircraft carrier landing light, or something like that, in the back of his pickup truck. When somebody refused to dim their lights, he would light that thing off. Instant blinding of the person who was looking in that general direction.

That’s what I want in the sound world. They’re using a 50W Megaphone, I want to hit them with a 500W megaphone. I’d use a 5000W megaphone, but I’m not sure if I could carry that, even on a vehicle.

I’m of the opinion that ICE should be treating those insurrectionists blocking traffic as speed bumps, and I want it to be legal for you and me to treat them as speed bumps.

They have lost my empathy. They might live next to me, but they are not my neighbors. Neighbors have agreed to a social contract. These monsters have not.

They have no morals. They deserve no mercy from me.

They need to be at the strong receiving end of FO.

We all know that the Left and the media (who, though they often do things together, ARE two separate groups with two separate agendas) are not great at giving us all the facts. They post up stories like how ICE arrested a five year old child (not true; they detained the five year old because the parent was being incarcerated and they couldn’t exactly let a five year old go wandering around alone, which is the same thing DCF does when they have a parent arrested… but I digress). A few days ago, I saw a news report about an “elderly gentleman” (their words, which I find extremely offensive considering I’m 55 in 3 days and I’m not f’ing elderly, thankewvrymuch) being “dragged” out of his home in nothing but crocks, his underwear, and his 8 year old grandson’s blanket. I knew there had to be more to the story (and I was correct), but I couldn’t find anything.

Now, I am a proponent of keeping government small. (No, smaller than that. That’s still too much government. Put more back. More.) I believe the government has reverse Midas touch: everything it touches turns to shit. Therefore, unless it’s really necessary, the government should just back off. ICE is a government agency, and they are a strong-arm group. For what they’re doing, that’s an important skill, and I’m thankful they are doing as good a job as they appear to be. I mean, for all the Left is freaking out over the “deadliest year for ICE in decades” (NPR), that number of people who died over the entire year is 32. Jails lose more people in a year, by far. That number, 32, is for all of ICE detention centers… LA alone lost 22 inmates to death in 2025. You can shout about their numbers, but ICE seems to be doing a pretty good job.

That said, it’s important to watch all people in positions of power. ICE is a powerful place to be. I firmly believe that the vast majority of people working for ICE are morally upright, good people just trying to do a very difficult job, made worse by idiotic protesters and rioters. But there is always the possibility of there being a bad guy in their midst. Just as there are bad cops, there are probably bad ICE agents. It behooves us, especially those of us supporting ICE, to keep an eye on them. I don’t mean in the “citizen monitoring” way, but more in the same way we keep an eye on our politicians.

So when I heard about this elderly gentleman being dragged out of his home after they smashed his door in (in 7*F weather, I might add), I wanted to know more. That sounds bad, and I was worried we’d finally found the one bad apple in the barrel. I did what I usually do: I went looking for actual information, factual stuff.

I didn’t find it.

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It is ICE cold in my office as I write. Our basement is unheated and has zero insulation, and it leaks like a sieve. This makes the floors cold.

My big goal for the coming spring is to get some insulation into the basement.

But that’s not the type of ICE Cold I’m talking about here.

Up in the insurrectionist state of Minnesota, we had another FAFO moment.

A man who was carrying decided to interject himself with ICE agents. He got physical with them. Five agents were trying to detain or arrest him before he was shot and killed.

He was carrying his firearm in the small of his back. The video I’ve seen shows the gun in his hand before shots were fired.

He’s dead because he FA’d and found out.

Our AG and the director of the FBI both made public statements to the effect that bringing a gun to a protest means you are intending violence and is illegal and can get you shot.

I do not give up my Second Amendment protected rights when I choose to exercise my First Amendment protected rights.

Exercising a right does not even rise to “suspicion.” Merely exercising your rights does not ever give the state the authority to detain you. There must be more.

My friend from Canada was talking about guns and mentioned that carrying them into a bank was illegal. That it was a good way to end up in jail.

He was shocked to learn that I carry every time I enter a bank.

In short, Kash and Pam can go to hell for even thinking that The People must forgo their Second Amendment rights before they can exercise their First Amendment rights.