Rant

Well said. I felt the need to share it. Well worth watching in its entirety.

I know the term “weaponized incompetence” and have used it to describe actions of others before. But when I did, it was for stuff like the kids “not knowing” how to clean a bathroom or do the dishes, or a friend’s husband who would scream at her because he “didn’t know how to make dinner for himself” and therefore she couldn’t ever be out at dinner time.

I’ve talked about the exhaustion of dealing with Leftists… I know YOU all know that, and are likely a lot more exhausted than I am. I hadn’t realized that it was yet another iteration of weaponized incompetence, though. And that knowledge gives me ideas on how to change my interactions.

“But why…” Well Karen, do you think it’s okay for a kiddie diddler to be hanging around the playground at your kid’s school? If you say yes, then you need to be put on a 72 hour hold because you are not well. If you say no, then that’s the answer to “but why?”

But I don’t believe I’ll even bother with that much. “Are you telling me that you cannot understand why ICE is in our city, when there are thousands of social media reports on it every day? Are you really that uneducated?”

We have all had the unfortunate issue of having to deal with ignorant and incompetent people. For most of us, this is frustrating.

One of my personal weaknesses is the more I respect someone, the harder it is for me to accept incompetence or ignorance from them.

But what is “ignorance”?

Ignorance is not dumb. It is not stupid. Ignorance is not knowing.

Ally is a cookbook author. She is about to publish her third cookbook. We couldn’t be more proud of her and her accomplishments.

Over the Christmas holidays, she decided to try baking, something she isn’t good at yet.

She pulled out one of our older cookbooks, from the early 1950s, and followed the recipe, or she thought she did. The recipe called for 3 cups of flour, sifted.

Being good at English, she read that to mean, “Measure out three cups of flour, then sift it.” What it actually meant was, “Sift a few cups of flour, then measure out 3 cups of that sifted flour.”

The reason is density. Just like we measure gunpowders by weight, we should measure flour by weight. The density of the powders or flour can change; the mass does not. 1950s cookbooks created flour with a known density by sifting it.

Ally didn’t know this; she was ignorant of this. She is not stupid; she just did not know.

Ignorance is correctable; you can learn what you are ignorant about or decide it is beyond you. Even if it is beyond you, you will know that it is beyond you.

There are many things I’m ignorant about. I’m told I’m unusual because I don’t stay ignorant about subjects that are even remotely interesting to me. And according to some, I quickly become competent in areas that I was ignorant about just a short time ago.

This makes it difficult for me to claim ignorance about subjects. I consider myself ignorant about processing animal hides. Yet I know more about it than most people. I’ve yet to succeed at tanning a hide, but I know I don’t know. I know it is not beyond me; I know that I can become educated in the subject and become reasonably competent in the subject.

Recently it was pointed out to me, in this blog, that I was ignorant in reading or understanding technical drawings. I have no formal training and I need to do more. I’m doing my best without doing a deep dive.

Weaponized Ignorance

This is when a person is willfully ignorant. It takes an effort to be willfully ignorant, but for some, it is easier than actually thinking about what they are doing or saying.

When a person is willfully ignorant, refuses to learn, yet continues to opine on matters in which they are ignorant, then they have weaponized their ignorance.

The left is calling for laws and regulations to force “bad” law enforcement officers to not wear masks and to have their identification prominently displayed.

According to them, if they aren’t doing anything wrong, then there is no reason to be masked.

They are willfully ignorant of what happens when an agent is unmasked. They are doxed, and then bad things do happen to some of them.

The wife and I are watching a BritBox show called Blue Lights which takes place in Dublin, Ireland. Our introduction to one of the lead characters is when she is checking her car for bombs. As far as I know, this is true. They know that they will be targeted if the “bad guys” learn where they live and who they are.

These ignorant malcontents know what will happen if our officers are unmasked: they will be attacked. If not physically, then socially.

The left calls detentions and arrests by ICE and other federal law enforcement “Kidnappings”. They know that these are not kidnappings. Or they are willfully ignorant.

They scream about “due process” without ever realizing that these criminals have been given due process. Ten minutes of research would enable them to learn that there are immigration courts that do nothing but oversee migration cases. These courts can, and do, issue final removal orders and warrants.

They are screaming at ICE officers that they aren’t real cops and don’t have arrest powers. Of course they have arrest powers. Do even a bit of research, and you will find that most federal agencies have some sort of internal police force with arrest powers.

And being ignorant allows them to scream “Why!?” like a two-year-old toddler being put down for a nap. They would know why if they bothered to learn about the subject they are opining on.

Listen to Ketanji Brown Jackson asking questions from the Supreme Court bench, “I don’t understand.” “Explain it to me.” And most famously:

• Blackburn: Can you provide a definition for the word “woman”?
• Jackson: Can I provide a definition?
• Blackburn; Mhmm, yeah.
• Jacson: No, I can’t. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.

Willfully ignorant.

Weaponized Incompetence

This is a step further than willful ignorance. This is when a person refuses to learn something so they don’t have to do it.

The husband who refuses to learn how to cook anything, forcing his wife to cook every meal or to eat out. My dad didn’t know how to cook; from the time Mom died until he was in care, he ate very poorly, mostly hotdogs. This was his choice.

This is the person who tosses the colored in with the whites, leading to the whites not being white anymore. Who is going to ask that person to do the laundry, knowing that their incompetence could destroy entire loads of clothing?

In the same way, what husband or boyfriend doesn’t panic when he sees his wife with a hammer and saw?

Hey, we were all ignorant and incompetent once. I have a picture of my brother and me cutting a piece of wood with saws. I’m using Grandpa’s panel saw, not a bad choice. My brother is using a hacksaw with 24 or more teeth per inch. Today I know that my brother would have been lucky to get a 1/4 inch into a piece of hardwood with that saw.

Now hold me to the same standard. I had a 16 tpi blade on my horizontal bandsaw. It would cut anything, but slow? Oh my goodness. I was using it because the rules say to have at least 2 teeth engaged in the cut at all times, and I was using it to cut 1/8-inch stock. I’ve upgraded to an 8 tpi blade. I can’t cut 1/8-inch stock the narrow way, but I can lay it down, and it cuts just as fast, if not faster. And I can actually cut larger stock at 3 or 4 times the speed of that other blade.

A leftist can’t safely handle a gun. Because they are incompetent, you and I have to store our firearms where they are useless to us but a child can’t access them.

The intentional ignorance and incompetence is draining. It hurts to watch them. It hurts to listen to them. They are so ignorant that they don’t know what they don’t know, but they are damn sure they are right and I am wrong.

It has been more than 24 hours since a paid agitator received the “Find Out” part of “FAFO”. Some things have become clear.

First, she is not married. She was living with a female partner raising children.

Her job was to be a paid agitator. She had taken professional development courses to further her career as a paid agitator.

Her partner was also a paid agitator.

She attacked a federal law enforcement officer with a deadly weapon. As such he does not need to wait to be lethally hit or severely injured before acting to stop the threat.

But the lie has entered the gestalt of the left.

She was an innocent woman attempting to flee an encounter with evil Trump minions, afraid for her life, when she was murdered for no reason at all.

I remember the anger I felt when I saw the video of Saint George Floyd being murdered by a police officer in full view of the world.

I remember how I was glad I was not there. Not knowing how I would have reacted to a cop attempting murder. Would I have killed the cop to save the life of that black man?

And it was all a lie.

That didn’t stop massive riots, the burning of cities, and the death of multiple people. All because the left and the media couldn’t stop lying.

It is my belief that the only reason we are not seeing massive riots already is the temperature is too low. It is too cold for a good riot.

If the weather changes for the better, it is likely we will see riots. If it doesn’t, it would not surprise me even a little that the media keeps things at a low simmer until it is warm enough for the riots to happen.

DefCon 3 right now, people. As it warms up, DefCon 2.

Keep strapped, keep your head on a swivel, stay away from stupid places, stupid people. Nothing good happens after midnight.

There are times when I wish I had entered the Computer Science world a few years earlier.

My mentor was born four years before I was. He went through the computer science program four years before I did at a prestigious university.

His academics took place as electrical engineering was morphing into computer science. Which meant that he was taught circuit design at a lower level than we were taught. He was taught how to design transistors and to build the hardware.

My class was taught bits, bytes, and words. We built on what his generation was learning as computers advanced.

A bit is the smallest amount of data that a computer can store. In fact, it is the only type of data that a computer can store.

Bits are grouped into bytes and words. Today, a byte is 8 bits long; in past years, it could be larger or smaller than that. I’ve worked on machines where a byte was defined as 12 bits.

Bits, by themselves, have no meaning. A programmer assigns meaning to a sequence of bits. Let’s take a byte of 8 bits, for example. The byte we will be looking at has a sequence of bits like this 0011 0001.

Again, this is meaningless until we assign meaning to it. If we say that it is an unsigned tiny integer, then a byte represents a value between 0 and 255, while our byte represents the integer 49. 0*128 + 0*64 + 1*32 + 1*16 + 0*8 + 0*4 + 0*2 + 1*1 = 49 base 10. We can also express that integer in base 16 as 0x31 or in base 8 as 061.

We could define it as a signed tiny integer; then a byte represents a value between -127 and 128. But one of the most magical ways of looking at the byte is as a character. In this format we have a table of values to glyphs or characters. The value 0x31, 49, 061, 0011 0001 is interpreted as the character “1”. In the same way, the value 0x41, 65, 101, 0100 0001 is interpreted as the character “A”.

In other words, a bit pattern doesn’t have meaning until we define what the value means.

Primitive Types

The CPU in a computer has several registers. Each register holds a bit pattern of a given size. The CPU can then manipulate registers with a fixed set of instructions. Those instructions define the meaning of the register for that instant. If we use the integer add operation, then the two registers are treated as integers with the result being stored in a third register. If we use floating point operations, then we treat the registers as 32 or 64 bit floating point numbers. Doubles are 128 or 64 bits. We can treat the registers as containing one byte or character or a multiple characters. Or, we can treat each bit as a boolean.

For languages, we normally have integer, unsigned integer, float, double, character, and string. These are all referred to as primitives.

While we have defined the type, we have not defined the meaning. For example, 1234.70 is a floating point number. But what does it mean.

It could be a price, a quantity, a physical measurement. If it is a physical measurement, then it is expressing units.

It is the meaning we give values that allows humans to interact with the data.

Formatting

Let’s say we are working with a basic product object. Each product has a SKU, price, description, and quantity in stock. We will call these “labels”. We give a primitive type to each. SKU=>string, price=>float, description=>string, quantity=>integer.

This is a good start, but we also define how we will format these values when we display the product for a user. We can say that SKU and description will be left-aligned, price will be formatted as currency ($x,xxx.xx) right-aligned, while quantity will be formatted as an integer (x,xxx) right-aligned. This formatting is encoded in the knowledge of the meaning of the labeled data.

Formatting is not part of the data; it is associated with the label. The label allows us to assign meaning to the data.

Viewing Data

Humans have a difficult time applying meaning to bit patterns, so each primitive type has a standard text format. This allows us to see the values of the data.

For example, we say that strings are input and displayed as quoted strings, “This is an example string”. Integers are input and displayed as an optional negative sign followed by a sequence of digits, 1-9 as the first character followed by 0 or more 0-9 characters. Or it can be a 0. This defines a base 10 integer. If integer starts with 0x, then what follows the x is an integer in base 16. if the first character after the sign is a 0, then it is octal.

Simple.

These rules for displaying and inputting values are well defined.

Information Interchange

This is a gigantic subject. We are going to barely touch on it. To transfer information in a meaningful way, we have to define the meaning of each datum that is exchanged.

There are specific tools for doing this. XML, JSON, YAML, SOAP, and others are designed specifically for this process.

Unfortunately, there are de facto “rules” for exchanging data. Rules that must be followed but that the people using them do not understand.

Excel, Word, and Other MicroSoft Monstrosities

The default for most people when exchanging a table of information is an Excel file, an xls file. How I hate this.

An Excel file gives labels to values and adds formatting but does not add meaning. Meaning comes from external sources.

So, we might have a two cells we are looking at; B1 has a value of “Price”. It is formatted as bold text, centered. B2 has a value of 7.50. It is formatted as text, so it displays as “$7.50”. If the cell was formatted as “number” or “general” it would display as 7.5.

It is the user who applies these formatting rules. It is the user who provides meaning to these values.

If you have an application that can read and display Excel sheets, then all is good.

But Excel sheets are not a great way to exchange data. As a matter of fact, they suck. Each cell must contain both formatting and values. There are linkages between cells and a hundred other things that can be added. They are painful to create programmatically.

The Savior of Data Interchange, CSV

It doesn’t get any simpler than a comma-separated values file. They use the well-defined primitive type display rules; they are easy to generate, they are row independent, and they can be read by a simple text editor.

The biggest thing to understand is that CSV exchanges values. The meaning of those values is up to the receiver.

Which is why expectations and Excel suck.

It’s Bad Data, No! It’s Being Displayed Wrong!

When a normal user receives a CSV file, they want to open the file and view it. On Microsoft platforms, the program tasked to do this is Excel. On many Linux platforms, the tool is LibreOffice. For Solaris it was OpenOffice.

These tools import the CSV file. That import process can break things, badly.

By default, a comma separates each field. If a comma is part of the value, it must be escaped. Quotes are used to provide escaping. Quotes within quoted strings must also be properly handled.

So we end up with client bug reports like this: “Data is misaligned throughout”.

What does this mean? It means that the client hasn’t properly defined the type and formatting for the column. In this case, the SKU sometimes consists of just digits. When this happens, Excel treats the value as an integer type. By default, integers are displayed right justified. If the value has characters in it, then it is displayed as a left justified character string.

Once you tell Excel that the SKU column only contains text, then the alignment issue goes away.

“The price column is missing dollar signs” means that values are being displayed as floating point numbers, not as currency. Change the format to currency, and it all just works.

“There are symbols instead of letters.” means they get what they put in. The value stored in the database has an accent in it. Like résumé.

The problem happens when Excel imports a word with accents on their Microsoft platform. My browser and LibreOffice both use the same font set, so I see résumé. Their Excel on their Microsoft platform displays the accent as something like a copyright symbol, ©.

They see what they put into the database, but they are unhappy that Excel is doing exactly what they asked it to do.

It has been a difficult couple of weeks here.

My mother-in-law is in an abusive marriage. When I met her suitor after my father-in-law passed, I was concerned that he was going to swindle her.

His words, actions, and use of money were all indicators of something not quite right.

As is normal, nobody on that side of the family listened to me. Her suitor wined and dined her. Took her to expensive places and, in general, did all the right things in public. But what I was hearing about the private interactions was not good.

My wife flew out to bring her mother home. Her mother got scared of what her husband would do. Decided not to come back. Wife canceled her mother’s flight back.

Mother-in-law and her husband had a loud, angry, abusive yelling match on Thursday, and Mother-in-law changed her mind and decided she needed to escape.

Since the plane ticket was gone, they packed up, got in her car, and drove here.

Mother-in-law is staying at a good friend’s house; she doesn’t like the mess that is my house.

I get one night with my wife. Then we go to breakfast; we have good conversation. Wife and MIL decide they are going to a local city to catch a movie. All good.

MIL changes her mind, which of course causes my wife to do exactly what her mother wants. They go back to the friend’s house where something went down.

Instead of figuring out options, MIL decides she needs to go home.

My wife talks to me. We agree that we need to have time to work this all out. She goes out and talks to her mother. Mother begs to go back home to her home in a state far away.

My wife can’t say “no” so instead she rushes home, grabs the suitcase she hasn’t unpacked yet, and she and my MIL are on the road.

From the time of the incident to the time my wife and MIL are back on the road, something like 45 minutes.

So my wife is a 1000+ miles away, again. My MIL has gone back to her house and her abusive husband.

You can’t save people who don’t want to be saved.

Brown University is in Rhode Island, one of the anti-gun states. There are no guns allowed on campus.

It is a gun free zone within a gun free city within a gun free state. Yet all of those things failed.

To provide a sense of security, the college webpage has a section on security cameras. They list some 800 security cameras and where each is located and their field of view.

Which is precisely the sort of information a bad guy would want to know because it shows not only the areas that are under surveillance but also the blind spots. Which the shooter took advantage of.

Which brings up the experiment done by a news organization several years ago to “prove” that guns don’t save lives. They told the selected “protector” that they were the only person with a gun in the room. That there was going to be a mass shooting event, simulated, and they were to stop the shooter.

Everybody except for the protector was in on the experiment, unbeknownst to the protector. Many of the protectors bragged to their “student” neighbors about being the protector.

Of course, when the bad guy entered the room, the protector never successfully stopped them. The entire experiment was set up for failure.

This was compared to a similar experiment set up in Texas. In the Texas experiment, the protectors were chosen at random; the level of experience the different protectors had varied from none to significant. They used simunation (blue guns that shoot nasty little pellets).

What they found was that the total number of victims was reduced in all cases. That in some situations the attack was stopped shortly after it began. There were no false shootings.

One of the interesting sequences was when the bad guy came into the room with the good guy. The good guy put multiple rounds on target before being “killed”. During the debrief, they asked why he only took body shots after noticing the body armor.

His reply, “I’ve been shot with those things; I wasn’t going to shoot somebody in the face with them.”

The point of this rambling is that guns save lives. This was another example of a gun free zone creating a victim pending zone.

Keep your head on a swivel, things are not getting better.

Way too many years ago, I went to an interfaith seminary, and trained to be an interfaith minister. It’s one accomplishment I’m very proud of, though I also think I learned as much or more by interning with a UCC minister friend for a year. We studied many different faiths, and how they interact. While I, myself, am quite pagan, I do understand different faiths call to different people. I rather like the idea that various gods have “their” people. G-d (the Jewish deity) called the Jews to be his people, and gave them Commandments, instructions, and information… much of which they didn’t pay as much attention to as they should have. A lot of their rituals and celebrations honor the folks who got them out of messes that their religious indiscretions got them into.

Hanukkah is not a big religious festival for the Jews. It was a minor one, until Christmas became so commercialized and messed with the Jewish kids. So now Jewish kids get presents as well as gelt, and some of the more pagan aspects of Christmas have snuck into Hanukkah celebrations. It’s all good. Winter is a time of darkness, and whether you celebrate the Birth of the Sun, the Birth of the Son, or the Miracle of the Lights, it’s all about warding off the darkness (albeit in very different ways).

This Hanukkah is different, though. Way too many of my Jewish friends (and I have a surprising number of them) are afraid this year. They have watched too many of their fellow Jews be slaughtered, and very few criminals being brought to justice. They’ve heard too many people on the Left calling for their extermination, or celebrating those who harm Israel. They’re not celebrating Hanukkah this year. They’re lighting those eight lights over eight nights because it’s a mitzvah, a … “a helping.” They are putting the light back into the world, in whatever way they can. Lighting the Hanukkiah and singing Ma’oz Tzur are acts of peace, but also acts of rebellion against the violence they are seeing.

For those who may not know, the history of Hanukkah, in short:

Hanukkah’s history centers on the 2nd century BCE Maccabean Revolt, where Jewish fighters led by Judah Maccabee reclaimed Jerusalem’s Second Temple from Greek-Syrian oppressors who had desecrated it. After retaking the Temple, they cleansed it and rededicated it, but found only a tiny cruse of oil, which miraculously burned for eight days instead of one. This “miracle of the oil” established the eight-day “Festival of Lights,” celebrating Jewish perseverance, religious freedom, and divine presence. — Grok

My family and I have celebrated Hanukkah every year since I was in seminary. The act of lighting the candles, sitting quietly in the dark, being a family… these have become important to us, even though we’re not Jewish.

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It is my belief that Trump was a reluctant president. In 2016 he ran almost as a joke. His goal seemed more to disrupt the normal Republican party politics than to actually become president.

The Democrats certainly thought he was a joke. They did everything in their power to make him the Republican nominee. The amount of free publicity he received from the mainstream media was astonishing. Everybody loved him. At least among the people who counted.

He was a brass man who said what many of us had been thinking. He called out the press for lying. He stood up to the people handing him gotcha questions. He put forth the image of a powerful leader that could lead our country in the right direction.

He was not the man I wanted for my president. I went to bed knowing the next four years were going to be horrible under the evil, selfish, egotistical control of Hillary Clinton.

I woke to the surprising news that Hillary had lost. I didn’t see it as Trump winning but more as Hillary wasn’t going to be the president.

He then stepped on the rake. TDS struck everybody who hadn’t voted for Trump. The entire “not my president” shit started up. Bush, the evil, was held up as a wonderful example of a “good” president. And the deep state took it upon themselves to thwart the will of the democratically elected president of the United States.

His agenda was stopped in its tracks. But one thing moved forward. And that was the retaking of the courts.

Our courts had become another legislative branch. If the left didn’t control the country via the ballot box, they controlled it via corrupted judges.

Trump’s first legacy was in getting so many originalists onto the courts. Instead of a zero chance of getting an originalist panel in the Ninth Circuit, it became almost 50/50. There was even a chance of getting an originalist en banc panel.

He did the same in every circuit. One place that he succeeded was in the Third Circuit.

There is something amazing happening in our judicial system; we are seeing a circuit courts over blue states turn red. This is huge in the grand scheme of things.

There are so many constitutional questions out there that never get to the Supreme Court. They don’t get there because the lower courts manipulate the stats. They game the system.

The Supreme Court is asked to hear nearly ten thousand cases a term. They hear less than 100. Those are not good odds.

The justices meet once a week, on Friday, to discuss what cases they want to hear. If 4 justices vote to hear a case, it will be placed on the Supreme Court docket.

The justices would like to hear cases that have major implications. They don’t like trivial cases. One of the things that suggests a case will have major implications is if multiple circuit courts have reached different opinions on the question presented.

Trump’s legacy includes creating situations for circuit splits.

At this time we are looking at a circuit split regarding assault weapon bans and large capacity magazine bans. This is only because of Trump. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals is now an originalist majority court. This means that for the first time, originalists have heard cases involving these types of bans.

If the rulings come out for the Constitution and The People we will have a circuit split. Circuit split means the Supreme Court is more likely to hear the case.

Clawing Back Power

There are three branches of government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. This is laid out in our Constitution. For many years it was said that the fourth branch of government was the media. Unfortunately, we’ve learned that the media is just another branch of the Democrat party.

Democrats are the type of people that will go to bat a 100 times and swing and miss 100 times. Then on the 101 they get a piece of the ball and score a run. At that point, they claim that the people have spoken and that there will never ever be a 102-pitch.

This wasn’t working. They would pass bad bills, and the next time a conservative got in office with a congress that backed him, the bad law would be undone. So they worked to “fix” the problem.

They did this by passing laws that restricted what later congresses could do.

The biggest thing they did was they stripped power from the President.

They did this by creating commissions instead of agencies.

The Department of War, the Department of Education, The Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, and so forth are all agencies headed by a single boss. That boss works at the pleasure of the President.

Congress couldn’t tell the President he was unable to fire the heads of these agencies because it is clearly stated in the Constitution that this was part of the Article II executive branch controlled by the President.

Instead, they started setting up commissions and boards. The National Labor Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Reserve Bank. The most recent was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is not an “agency” and is “independent” of the executive branch. It is also independent of the congress because it does not get its funding from congress.

When they set up these entities headed by commissions, Congress set rules for how the commissions were selected, how long they served, and how members could be removed.

This allowed these entities to ignore the orders of the president. He can’t fire them for ignoring the policies of the democratically elected president. So they could just keep on keeping on. This stripped the president of control of parts of the executive branch.

Trump’s legacy is the destruction of these “protected” boards and commissions. The Supreme Court should be finding these restrictions on presidential authority unconstitutional before June 2026. That is a legacy worth bragging about.

Everybody Knows (and was wrong)

The left likes to argue that just because something hasn’t been found unconstitutional in the past, it is constitutional today.

For years we were all taught, and we all learned, that if you were born in the United States, you were a citizen of the United States.

The Constitution doesn’t say that. History shows that everybody knew that the 14th Amendment applied to former slaves. It didn’t apply to foreigners. Until suddenly the left said that it did.

The outcome of the birthright case will change the political landscape for years and years to come.

Conclusion

Trump’s Legacy will be felt for decades, and it is in the fundamental changes he is making to the status quo and administrative state.

For years I’ve been told that the only reason wackadoodle assholes commit mass shootings, ignoring black on black gang violence, is because I refuse to give up my guns.

Only in America, with our horrible love affair with guns do mass shootings take place.

Therefore, it is obvious that this never took place:

In 1969 a local news station in New York aired this public service announcement. It was a full admission that many children were feral and that the people who knew better knew you should have them inside, under control.

It was New York, so they might have a point. A child or minor out after 10pm was likely up to no good or was at risk. The city was much riskier then than now. So asking parents to verify the location of their children wasn’t a big deal.

Unfortunately, this spread around the country; by the mid-70s hundreds, if not thousands, of TV stations were saying the same thing every night.

The facts of the time were that children knew darn well that being in the house was bad juju.

The worst words a child could utter in most households were “I’m bored.” This was an invitation for Mom to find chores for the child to do. Many chores. There were as many chores as there were “I’m bored” utterances.

You were supposed to be outside. The exceptions were when it was too cold or it was too rainy. Other than that, a child should be outside playing, with interruptions for daily chores.

The rule of thumb for those in suburbia was, “You should be home when the streetlights come on.”

I know I lived that way.

Stranger Danger

In general, people believed they lived in safe places. Those neighborhoods might not be safe for others, but they were safe for you and your kids. Every mom was a part of the neighborhood mom group.

If Billy needed discipline, any of the neighborhood moms would dish it out; if it required physical discipline, then that neighborhood mom would deliver Billy to his mother for instant discipline.

The children were safe.

We talk about this within the Ren Fairie circuit. Children of performers, vendors, and staff are always under the watchful eye of fairie moms and dads. Young girls always have a chaperone.

More than one girl, turning 18, has wondered where all the protection went, only to find out that they were only a loud voice away.

This was the way back then.

In 1979, Etan Patz was taken while waiting for a school bus in New York. He was nearly seven years old. His parents had agreed to let him walk to the school bus stop two blocks away on his own. He never made it to school. He never made it home. He was never seen again.

The search was massive. There was no luck in finding him. Etan became the first milk-carton kid. The case expanded to cover more than just the local area.

The police were convinced that a stranger had taken Etan. Parents’s fears skyrocketed. Leading directly to “Stranger Danger”.

“Stranger Danger” became the watchword. It was drummed into kids at schools, at Boy and Girl Scouts, on TV. The FBI and McGruff the Crime Dog all pushing it.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that it started to fade. Research indicated that most child abductions were by family members, not strangers.

The harm had been done, though. Mothers were much less likely to let their children do anything outside alone. Instead, they kept them inside next to the family or acquaintance that was much more likely to kidnap their kid.

The Electronic Babysitter

The first of the electronic babysitters was the radio. A child could listen to the radio for hours, music, and audio plays to keep the mind alive.

Many a child learned to tell time so they could be in front of the radio when the latest episode of their favorite show was aired.

TV followed. Most parents limited the amount of TV time a child got. Most children of my age had limited TV time, my family rule was 1 hour per night and Saturday morning cartoons.

This made TV Guide the most important periodical in the house. You had to know what was showing to plan correctly.

It having been more than a few years, it could have been a certain number of hours per week. With my brother and I each getting the same amount.

Visiting my grandparents was strange. Grandpa would get up and turn on the TV. The TV stayed on all day long, even if nobody was in the living room watching. It was constant noise in the background.

As a kid, it was wonderful to have unlimited TV time.

Unfortunately, for busy mothers, the TV became the babysitter. You could put a kid in front of the “boob tube” and they would be entertained for hours.

The first video games did not have the same level of lock in that today’s games do. Regardless, there were thousands and thousands of kids that got video games, which turned them into even more of a TV junkie.

We had successfully traded free-range children to couch potatoes consuming CRT rays almost constantly.

Free Range Children

What did they call organic food in the 50s and 60s?

Food.

Children were expected to be outside. To be playing. To be making games and skinning knees.

Parents might set physical boundaries, but most boundaries were set by how far you could get on foot or a bike.

Learning to ride a bike was a giant step towards freedom. To go from a mile or so radius from home to 10+ miles was freedom unlimited.

I don’t believe my children went to the movies on their own until they had cars of their own. They never had the thrill of chaining their bikes to the nearly full bike rack that every theater and mall had and choosing their movie.

There were two theaters within bike distance when I was in 8th grade. One was only 2 miles away; the other was almost 7 miles away. It was worth it on a hot summer’s day to pedal to the big theater and then enjoy popcorn, AC, and a newly released movie.

There were baseball games in the cul-de-sacs and football games in the fields. Kids exploring the deep dark woods or going fishing. Building forts, treehouses, and playing hide and seek with friends.

Squirt gun battles and digging holes. Taking the canoe out, paddling upriver for an hour to work on your own VC tunnel system in the side of the bank. Taking a bag with some food and soda and a paperback book. Just living outside.

Those were the feral children of yesteryear. Those were the free range children of 40 years ago.

Today they are all but gone. The fears of the 70s and 80s. The electronic babysitters. The mothers that need their kids to be “engaged” constantly.

What have we taken from our children and grandchildren?

Postscript

When I was searching for the feature image for today’s post, I put in the search “bicycle boy” There was only one picture in the first 100 that didn’t have a helmet on. Most of the images were organized groups, or there was a parent involved.