Rant

This is where your right to privacy is protected. This protects you from needing to “show your papers.” There is no place in the United States that I know where you are required to have “your papers.”

If you choose to drive on public roads, if you are stopped for cause, you can be required to identify yourself. Driving on private land? No need for ID.

If you choose to enter a secured, private location, you can be required to show identification. For example, entering a military post/base.

So what happens if the cops show up at your doorstep and “demand” to see ID?

The first thing you need to do is realize that what you hear as a demand might not legally be a demand or order.

Police officers are trained to ask questions in such a way as to give the impression that they are ordering you to do something when they are not authorized to make that demand or give that order. “What’s your name?” is just a question. Under the Fifth Amendment, you are not required to answer that question.

You are not required to answer questions. You can choose to answer questions.

“Hello, we got a report of shots being fired. Were you shooting?” You are not required to answer. It doesn’t matter what they say until they make that magic statement, “You are required to answer.” If they do say you are required to answer, they might end up in a lawsuit.

Here is another magic one: “Do you have ID?” Many people will automatically reach for their ID when they hear this question, even though the cop didn’t even ask to see it. You assumed they took advantage of you.

When I’m presenting to 4th and 5th grade-aged children, I will sometimes ask, “Can I have your name?” or “Will you give me your name?”

When they say their name, I will thank them and then say, “My name is now *the name they gave*. What should we call you?” Many (most) get it. It one of my ways of teaching to listen to the question that is actually asked.

Can A Cop Walk Onto Your Property

The answer is a qualified “yes.” If they have a warrant to search the location, then they absolutely can enter. If they have a warrant to arrest somebody, they can enter under limitations, which I don’t remember. Lacking a warrant, they can only enter as far as the public is allowed.

This means that they can drive into your driveway, park, get out, knock on your door, and ask you questions.

On the other hand, if there is a gate or some other indicator with proper signage to stop the public, then they must stop there as well. They can park in front of your gate and yell at you, but they can’t enter without your permission.

If you are sitting on your doorstep smoking a cigar, they can come up to talk to you. In some areas, Ally says D.C. is one, your doorsteps are considered part of the “public space,” and there are regulations forbidding smoking or drinking in public.

Because you are breaking the law by smoking in a public space, the cops now have a reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime being committed. This broadens their authority to ask questions.

The regulations I found for D.C. indicate that failure to identify yourself is not an arrestable crime. It is a crime, but it cannot be used to justify an arrest nor to escalate the level of suspicion the cop has. I.e. If he suspects you of doing bad things, your refusing to identify yourself cannot be used to justify his suspicion of you doing bad things.

Consentual Contact

If you walk into the police station and ask to talk to a police officer, you are initiating a consensual contact. You are free to end that contact at any time and walk away. Likewise, It is possible that your talking to the police officer has moved this from you having a consensual contact to you being detained.

Consider the situation where a child has gone missing. The police request help from the public. You saw something suspicious, and you called the tip line. A day or so later you get a call from the detectives asking you to come in to speak with them. You do so.

While you are talking to them, you say something that confirms their suspicions that you are the person that done did it. They are not required to tell you when that happens. They are free to let you keep babbling.

You get tired of their stupid questions and accusations, stand, and ask, “Am I free to go?” If the answer is no, you are being detained. If the detention lasts more than a reasonable time, that detention turns into an arrest.

If the cops flashing lights are on behind you when you are pulled over, you are detained. If you are in handcuffs, you are detained. There are times when you should know you are detained even if the cops haven’t told you.

Reasonable articulable suspicion

Reasonable suspicion is a legal standard used to determine if the cops can legally search you.

If an officer stops someone to search them, the courts require that the officer have either a search warrant, probable cause to search, or a reasonable suspicion to search.

Reasonable articulable suspicion is the legal standard that empowers cops to conduct an investigation without a warrant.

This is a balancing act. We are balancing the need of the authorities to perform their police work with the Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections of The People. Without the power to investigate suspicious behavior, cops would not be able to deal with crimes in progress.

Consider the following: the cops are driving by, they hear shots fired, and they see a man wearing a ski mask exit the bank with a gun in his hand and a heavy bag in the other.

If the cops have a reasonable suspicion that this person has just committed a crime. They can articulate that suspicion.

Now consider this version: a call has gone out that the bank two blocks over has just been robbed. The cops see a man running down the road. He’s wearing a ski mask in 90-degree heat. They still have reasonable suspicion.

Or this: The call of a bank robbery has gone out. The cops see a black man walking down the sidewalk. That is not reasonable suspicion.

Once law enforcement has that reasonable suspicion, they can investigate. The articulable requirement means that they have to be able to put that suspicion into words. If they can’t put it into words, it is not good enough.

Police Investigations

If the police are talking to you, they are likely doing an investigation. Anything you say can be held against you in a court of law.

The cops walk up to you as you sit in your front yard; they are investigating something. If they do not have that reasonable suspicion, they can ask questions in an attempt to gain reasonable suspicion.

Consider this scenario: you are driving 60 mph in a 45 mph zone. The flashing blue and whites come on and you pull over. The very polite officer walks up and asks, “Do you know how fast you were going?”

You respond, “I was doing 50 or so.”

You have just admitted to the crime of speeding. The officer now has all the justification needed to continue his investigation.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” Same thing. You don’t have to answer the question.

They walk up to you in your lawn chair, “How are you doing, sir?” “What’s going on?”

These are questions designed to elicit a response. They hope that the response will lead their investigation someplace. “Did you know smoking in a public space is prohibited?”

Answer that one, and you are answering mens rea questions.

In general, don’t answer questions. Furthermore, don’t be me; don’t be an asshole.

What it really looks like

There is a social experiment where an employer goes to his employees and hands them each a bonus. Jim gets $500, Bill gets $500, Jill gets $500, and Karen gets $400.

Everybody is talking about how wonderful the boss is for giving them bonuses. Karen is delighted, and so are Jim, Bill, and Jill.

A few days go by, and Karen finds out that Jill got $500 and she only got $400.

Now, a good person says, “Thank you , boss; I wasn’t expecting a bonus.” A normal person might then sulk about not getting the extra $100.

Unfortunately, the most common response was for Karen to bitch to her boss and the world that she got cheated out of $100. She deserved it just as much as the others.

She loses sight of the extra $400 in her pocket and instead focuses on what she didn’t get.

The bosses are unlikely to give out bonuses in the future. Or everybody is going to get the same amount. That amount will be lower.

The actual experiment used amounts ranging from around $100 to around $10,000.

This experiment was done at a place where I was employed. We were all handed envelopes with cash in them as bonuses at the same time. We were told that the amounts might not be the same. We were told not to share how much we got.

When I had seen the amount, I went to my boss and said, “Thank you very much.” After I did, the rest did the same.

Of all the employees, only one, V, tried to find out what the others got. He is the same guy who demanded a pay raise when he found out how rich our boss was.

He was envious of what others got. He lost sight of what he had received and was more focused on what he had not gotten or might not have gotten.

As I said, my boss was wealthy. I was able to listen as he explained to the person selling him a new airplane that he didn’t give a flying f. If the plane wasn’t finished with its repaint and new interior and at the local airport by the end of the week, he was going to cancel.

Canceling would have cost him around $150,000. But he would rather cancel than put up with more shit.

Did my boss being able to buy million-dollar (or more) planes keep me from buying a plane or getting flying lessons? No. Did his owning multiple cars keep me from owning the car I wanted? No. Did his owning and flying a helicopter keep me from owning and flying a helicopter? Absolutely not.

As a matter of fact, him being wealthy allowed me to buy my machine shop. If he had not been wealthy, then I would not have had a job that allowed me to purchase that shop. My boss didn’t own a Bridgeport, South Bend, and all the rest. Was he jealous of me?

Our economy is not a fixed pie. There isn’t a fixed amount of wealth. You can always add to the wealth of our economy and make something and profit from what you make or provide.

Last weekend, the Indian encamped next to Ally was frying up venison steak on a soapstone griddle. It looked incredible, and according to Ally, smelled even better. I wish I could have eaten some of that venison. I love venison.

I could have been envious; instead, I am looking forward to harvesting a deer or two this season.

Why do people feel envious? Because they feel they are not getting what others are.

When wealthy, spoiled man-children descended on Wall Street demanding that they be raised up to the wealth of the traders of Wall Street, they looked like petulant children.

They were complaining about the “1%.” They were part of the “0.1%.”

Americans are the wealthiest people in the world. There are people that live below the poverty line in America who are wealthier than 99% of the rest of the world.

But those spoiled children were more focused on what they didn’t have rather than what they did have. Tweeting about how downtrodden they were from their $1000 cell phones while sipping $10 coffees from Starbucks.

Somebody was talking about the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security. As it was set up, the goal was to never pay out any money.

Retirement age was set to where the government expected most to be dead. Or to only live for a few more years.

My parents lived decades past retirement age.

So the young of today are paying into social security money that goes right back out the door to pay the people who already paid in.

I’ve been watching the market recently. I invested the money they inherited from my parents into money market funds. Both children have earned nearly $3k this summer from that money.

If the money the government took from me during my youth had gone into an investment, rather than lending it to the government, then that investment would measure in the millions, and the interest would easily support me.

That’s correct. The social security fund is only allowed to invest in “special” government bonds, treasury bonds. The “reason” for this is that treasury bonds are “guaranteed” a fixed rate of return.

The problem is that treasury bonds are how the government borrows money. If the government borrows $100 from SS, it promises to pay back $143 in 10 years. The same $100 invested at 4.31% APR compounded monthly over 10 years returns a total of $153.

SS is a scam at all levels. My money went to pay for my parents and grandparents generations. My parents went to their parents.

You might be unhappy that your money is going to pay for the current generation of SS users. I’m part of you in that.

Regardless, when one of these children looks at me and says, “You own a house, you have wealth, you have passive income, you shouldn’t get Social Security,” they are showing their envy and greed.

I have paid into SS my entire working life. My very first paycheck had SS taken out. As a self-employed person, I pay double what you do because I pay for both my personal portion as well as the employer’s portion.

A couple of years ago, I was visiting a friend, and they were telling me about how hard it was to find a house. They then proceeded to tell me how awful it was that this person they knew had purchased a plot of land to keep it from being developed.

Ok, that’s an opinion. If I could buy land around me, I would, because I love to hunt and I love the forest near my home.

But my friend went on. He started complaining about how this person was talking about how much he spent for this plot of land and why he did it. Specifically to stop development. He then says, “He was so clueless. He knew I was looking for a house. He knew how tight things are for me right now. Damn it, just read the fucking room.”

I waited for him to wind down. It took a while, and there were other conversations.

We were standing in a garage with two cars and multiple heavy duty gun safes. His wife was with her car; his truck and sports car were in the driveway. He had been complaining about only having a little left over after paying rent. Yet, his wife and kids were on their second vacation of the year.

I looked him in the eye and said, “What a way to read the room. I’m driving a 12-year-old truck I bought used. I struggle to pay our heating bill in the winter. Often choosing to buck fallen trees and split them by hand. You spend more on your vacations, while I haven’t had a vacation in 15 years. Yet you didn’t even notice.”

“You didn’t notice because my wealth and income aren’t what define me. What defines me is my family and my passions, not envy.”

I ran into this tripe a little more than a year ago. This week it is showing up everywhere.

People are whining on X and Reddit about how hard it is today. How the “boomers” took all the wealth. How they don’t want you to be able to afford a home.

My parents grew up during the Great Depression and WWII. My maternal grandfather tried to volunteer for the army but was not allowed, as he was a critical worker in railroads. My paternal grandfather was busy being a scientist for Goodyear. Family history says that he helped develop the tires that were using synthetic rubber.

My grandparents worked hard to earn what they held. They died owning a houses.

My maternal grandparents bought their house in the 30s or 40s. Grandpa built the garage himself. He did all the work around the house. Before he started working for the railroad, the SooLine, he was a machinist and a carpenter/woodworker. His hands were calloused from working his entire life.

He bought his house for under $2k, it is currently valued at $145k.

My grandfather also worked most of his life. He was a scientist who worked with cotton. His house was worth much more when my grandmother passed because of California. Likely near enough to a million dollars for a little house.

When my parents started, Dad was an ensign in the Navy. It wasn’t until a LT that they could afford their first house.

They purchased an OLD house in Norfolk. Dad took the test to be a certified electrician because he needed to rewire that house. They couldn’t afford to have somebody else do any work. Dad fixed that house up.

When he was transferred, they couldn’t sell the house for what they had in it, so they rented it out until they could. That allowed them to buy another house. A little nicer, a little better.

It wasn’t until I was in 6th grade that I had a room to myself. There was no “spare” bedroom. It wasn’t until high school that the house was big enough for there to be a shared office for Mom and Dad.

That house now lists for $550k. I do not know how much they purchased it for.

When they passed, their house was worth around $360k.

Their houses and their wealth went up as they invested money they had earned and saved.

My first house was a “three”-bedroom, one-bath house. With 870 sq. feet. I could barely afford it with my $35k/year salary. I think we paid around $50k for it. It now sells for $242k. I quote three because it was actually two bedrooms with an extra room tacked on the back, through the second bedroom. So it was three bedrooms and a laundry room, craft room, kids room.

I stuffed 5 kids and a wife into that house, and we made it work.

But here’s the thing: the house I thought I could afford was a $30k fixer-upper. I was going into that house knowing I would have to rip up every floor and put new floors back in. That every wall had to be stripped and painted. And likely, I would have to redo the roof. And I expected to do all the work myself.

I made no money on that house. The bank repossessed it because I was unable to make child support payments AND house payments.

I have a house today because my wife makes good money and I get bursts of money. We were able to afford it only because my parents helped and the house had been foreclosed.

It is worth almost 4 times what we paid for it. Not a bad investment.

It took me 30 years of work to be able to buy this house. I’ve never gone hungry, but I’ve eaten freezer scrapings more than once.

But today I’m told I had it easy. That my parents had it easy. That I’m greedy because I bought this house that could have been used by a large growing family,

One person complained that he couldn’t find a starter home. His definition of a starter home put him at $500K.

My house is not a “starter home.” It is my grow-old home. And it isn’t $500k.

There are 7 houses for sale within 2 miles of my town for less than $150k.

The most significant difference, in my opinion, is what luxuries we “must” have today.

My child dropped her phone in the lake. She has a new phone. My phone bill, for the family, is $250 per month. We shouldn’t be paying that much for phones. But I like having my phone. I like being able to read books in the dark. I like my Google Maps and Android Auto.

So I pay for my kids and family to have cell phones. And good ones.

I think we spend nearly $100/month on streaming services. I have not added it up, but that sounds about right.

There is money for servers, internet, VoIP service, and a dozen other things.

Our electric bill is high. People run heaters when it is cold and fans or AC when it is hot.

All these things add up.

When I was young, going out to eat was a special thing. Today, my kids eat out 4 out of 7 days of the week. The amount of money spent on drinks from Dunkin or McDonald’s blows my mind.

I feel bad for spending $35/month on good coffee. My wife will spend $2 for an iced tea from McDonald’s multiple times per month. It all just adds up.

To put it in perspective, I’ve seen my wife order takeout for us and the kids and spend nearly 10% of a mortgage payment. Taking the entire family out for dinner can easily hit 20%.

Do I feel bad for the people who are struggling to make ends meet? Yes, I do. I’ve been there. I fought through that. I drive a 15 year-old truck so I don’t have to pay $500/month on a car payment. Are they making the same types of sacrifices? Do they make the sacrifices my parents made?

Now they are not.

Stop whining, stop blaming me, get up and go do.

Two years ago I switched from the worst Internet provider to the second worst Internet provider in my area. Fidium by Consolidated Communications.

Until yesterday, when I called, I got an American-based tech support person. They were all at what I consider tier II or better. Their knowledge base was good, and they treated me with respect.

Yesterday Ally pointed out that my voice communications had gotten bad. My new client is complaining about upload speeds to their server. I’m seeing 28 KB/s upload speeds.

Before I go yelling at the client about their network, I verify my own.

Download speed: 1095.4 Mbps down. This is precisely what I pay for. 0.260 Mbps up. This is not the 1 Gbit I am paying for.

To put this into units that highlight how bad this is. I pay for 1.000000 Gigabits up and down. I got 1.09500 down and 0.000260 up.

This is an issue that needs to be resolved. I power cycle the firewall and the ONT. No change.

I call Fidium via VoIP; the representative, speaking with a strong accent, can’t hear or understand me.

I hang up, take my cell off WiFi calling, and call, making my way through the prompts to reach customer support again.

The representative I reach is also not in the US. I authenticate to her. Tell her that I have asymmetrical speeds. Give her the download and upload speeds.

“That’s the plan you’re paying for.”

“No, it is not. I’m paying for 1G up/down symetrical.”

“You called technical support. You need to talk to sales.”

“I am only getting 0.26 megabits up. This is not my plan.”

“You need to talk to sales.”

“Let me talk to somebody competent!”

More arguments from her that I’m getting exactly what I am supposed to be getting

“Let me change that, let me talk to your supervisor now.”

10 plus minutes of waiting before she comes back on and asks, “What are the speeds you are getting again?”

I tell her, and she finally starts to work towards a resolution.

I ask her where is the supervisor that I asked to speak to, “He’s in a meeting and can’t respond.”

She gets me an appointment for a technician. For today at 0800-0900. 23 hours from the time I put in the call.

I tell her this is unacceptable. She refuses to do anything. I tell her to yank her supervisor out of the meeting.

When I finally get to talk to him, I use some emotional blackmail. “My VoIP is down. This means I’ve lost e911 capabilities at my site. Tomorrow is to long. I need somebody here today.”

I’ll update this posting if they actually did get the issue fixed in a timely fashion.

Damn, I miss US-based support.

Or to put it in the jingo of my youth, sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.

In Cincinnati, a white man and a white woman were beaten badly. This wasn’t a one-on-one beatdown; it was a gang of feral hood rats attempting to murder them.

Because they are black, they are not to blame. The white folks are. They said something that justified the beatdown.

It is the white victims that need to be charged and arrested. They are responsible for 6 felonies.

When I started to babysit Cray Supercomputers it was just another step. Massive mainframe handling many users, doing many things.

But I quickly learned that there are ways of making “supercomputers” that don’t require massive mainframes. My mentor used to say, “Raytracing is embarrassingly parallel.”

What was meant by that is that every ray fired is completely independent of every other ray fired. His adjunct program rrt was able to distribute work across 1000s of different compute nodes.

We were constantly attempting to improve our ability to throw more compute power at any problem we were encountering. It was always about combining more and more nodes to create more and more powerful compute centers.

Which moved the bottleneck. We went from being CPU starved to being memory starved to being network starved. So we added more network bandwidth until it all balanced out again. Until we bottlenecked on networks again.

After his passing, I did work with a company that supported multiple large corporations.

I was introduced to VMware. A virtualization framework.

Instead of taking “small” computers and joining them together to create larger computers, we were taking “medium” computers and breaking them into small virtual devices.

What is a virtual device

A virtual device is nominally a network interface, a virtual disk drive, or a compute instance.

To create a virtual computer (instance), you tell your vm manager to create a virtual drive, attach it to a virtual computer, attach a virtual DVD drive, allocate a virtual network interface, and boot.

The virtual drive can be a physical drive on the host computer. It can be a partition on a physical drive, it can be a file on the host computer, or it can be a network-attached drive.

If you attach from the host computer, you can only move the drive to other instances on the same computer.

If you attach a network-attached drive, you can only move the drive to other instances with access to the network-attached drive.

I use libvirt for my virtual manager. If I expect the instance to stay on the same host, I use a file on the host computer. That is easy.

If I need to be able to migrate the virtual computer to different machines, I’ll use a Ceph Raw Block Device or a file on a shared filesystem.

What are the cons of using a virtual machine

It can be slower than a physical device. It doesn’t have to be, but sometimes it is.

While you can oversubscribe CPUs, you can’t oversubscribe memory. Memory is always an issue with virtual machines.

When the network isn’t fast enough, network-attached drives will feel slower.

And the big one: if the Network Attached Storage (NAS) fails, all instances depending on the NAS will also fail. Which is why I use Ceph. Ceph can survive multiple drive or node failures.

Another big con: if a host computer fails, it will cause all virtual computers running on that host to also fail.

What are the pros of using a virtual machine

It is trivial to provision virtual machines. There is an entire framework OpenStack that does exactly this. Using OpenStack you can provision an instance with just a few simple commands.

You can migrate an instance from one host computer to another. Even if the disk drive is located on the host computer, it is possible to move the contents of that drive to another host computer.

If you are using a NAS, you can attach a virtual drive to an instance, work on it with that instance, then detach that virtual drive and attach it to a different instance. This means you don’t have to use over the wire data moves.

You can also increase the size of a virtual drive, and the instance can take advantage of more disk space without having to be rebooted or any downtime.

Besides increasing the size, we can attach new drives.

This means that storage management is much easier.

Virtual Networks

The host computer lives on one or more physical networks. The instances can be bridged onto that physical network.

The instance can also be protected behind a Network Address Translation (NAT) service. This gives complete outbound connectivity but requires extra configuration for inbound.

But an instance can be placed within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). A VPC provides the complete internet IP space to the instance (or instances).

This means that user A can have their instances on 192.168.100.x and user B can have their instances on 192.168.100.x with out collisions.

None of user A’s traffic appears in user B’s VPC.

VPCs can be connected to share with gateways. When this is done, all the VPCs must use non-overlapping subnets.

In other words, 192.168.100.1 on user A’s VPC cannot communicate with an instance on user B’s VPC at address 192.168.100.55.

But if user A agrees to use 192.169.100.x and user B agrees to use 192.168.99.x then the VPCs can be connected with a (virtual) router.

Using a VPC means that the user must use a gateway to talk to any other VPC or physical network. This places a NAT service in the gateway.

A physical address is assigned to the gateway, which forwards all traffic to one or more VPC IPs.

Conclusion

While every infrastructure manager (network manager) needs to know their VM Manager. They all work in similar ways. If you know the basics, the rest is just a matter of finding the correct button or command.

This stuff is easy once the infrastructure is set up.

In a post from Sunday, I’m Very Disappointed in You abc123 used a term I’ve not heard or maybe not noticed before, “Honest History.”

It is a term that I am going to add to my standard vocabulary. Phrases such as “inferior courts,” “Second Amendment protected,” and “criminal illegal alien.” All of these terms, in my opinion, create a truer representation of the situation than some word games being played by the media.

What is “honest history?” It is a statement of what happened to the best of our knowledge. There is nothing left out, nothing hidden, and no lies.

Was there slavery in the United States? Honest history requires us to say “yes.” We need to go on to report that it was horrific, immoral, and evil.

Honest history then requires us to fill out that picture. That not all white men were slave owners. That some slave owners were black. That the primarily white northerners spilled wealth and blood to free the slaves.

There were northern states that did not repeal their slavery laws until after the 13th Amendment was ratified.

Or how about the honest history of the trade triangle? Yankee ships left Boston with holds full of rum. They sailed to Africa, where the rum was traded for slaves. Slaves captured by blacks. The slaves were then transported to Caribbean islands, where they were traded for molasses. That molasses was transported to Boston to be turned into rum.

At every stop, the traders made a profit. Triangle trade routes are more profitable than bidirectional trade routes.

Honest history includes telling the history of women and underlings that contributed to great inventions. There is evidence, I don’t know how strong, that the cotton gin was created by Eli Whitney’s wife.

Today, there are too many people who can’t give us honest history. Compare the pure drivel of Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States. His telling of history is dishonest. It is told to hide the truth. There are more books debunking his drivel than Zinn wrote.

The 1619 Project is another example of dishonest history. Are parts of those histories true and correct? Likely. Do people come away from reading those books with an honest understanding and view of history? Unlikely.

I enjoy studying history. There is something I learned over time: different viewpoints make for different stories.

When I read stories about Vietnam, the story was often told from the viewpoint of a single soldier. I remember one book where a recon team was marching through the jungle. One of the soldiers had to switch to his glasses because his contacts were bothering him too much. Another had a bad case of diarrhea. This caused him to cut the bottom out of his pants so he could just squat over the side of the trail and let it all come out.

These were personal stories. They may or may not have been entirely fictional, but they allowed me to hike through jungles in my mind’s eye. They felt honest.

But there are other books that big picture. Oh my goodness, Winston Churchill’s The Second World War is a godawful read. Not because he was a poor author, but because his story is at such a high level you need notes and maps to follow along.

It is full of dates, names, and places. The names are generals and political leaders. The places could be as big as a country or as small as a town. Troop movements were often expressed in terms of corps being moved. I think the smallest unit I remember was a division.

Unless you know the geography much better than I do, it requires a map to follow.

Churchill’s histories are honest with an honest statement of his point of view.

Today, we are much more likely to be told what to feel and think rather than an honest history.

Who? What? Where? When? Why? are the questions that should be asked and answered.

These questions might never be answered in a “news” story. But you will walk away knowing who you should hate. Who is the villain. Who is the victim.

Take the time to read any headline, and you can spot the biases and likely lies without even reading the rest of the story.

I’ve been a teacher for 38 years. I still remember when I was taking my education classes early in my career, and my conservative uncle, who was a school superintendent in the Chicago suburbs, gave me a bit of advice that stuck with me. He said, “Do not join a teacher’s union.” At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. I guess I was too young and idealistic. But now, decades later, I understand exactly what he was trying to warn me about.

Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth on union membership. Sometimes I joined the NEA (National Education Association), sometimes I didn’t. If there was no pressure, I stayed out. If everyone else around me was joining, I’d go along with it. For the past 15 years or so, I’ve been a member off and on. But this year, as I prepare to move to a new school in a larger city where nobody knows me, I’ve made a clear decision: I will not be joining the teachers’ union again—especially after what I’ve seen recently.

In the past few weeks, I’ve read several articles that left me stunned. One headline from the Washington Free Beacon hit me like a ton of bricks: “Largest Teachers’ Union in the United States Erases Jews From the Holocaust.” According to the article, the NEA described Holocaust victims as “12 million people from various faiths”—never once mentioning the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. That omission is not just disappointing—it’s disgraceful.

It’s become increasingly clear to me that the NEA is no longer focused on students, academics, or educational excellence. Their priority now seems to be pushing political and ideological narratives. I’ve read how they’ve voiced support for groups aligned with Hamas and use language that downplays the suffering of Jewish people while glorifying the Palestinian “Nakba” and vilifying the state of Israel. According to their 2025 handbook, they want to “educate” the public about the Nakba, which literally means “catastrophe,” framing the founding of Israel in 1948 as a disaster rather than a historic triumph for the Jewish people and a vital democratic ally of the United States.

This is not why I became a teacher.

I’ve also seen videos from PragerU, like the story of a gym teacher who was fired because she wouldn’t allow a biological male to enter the girls’ locker room. She was then investigated simply for expressing Christian beliefs in her personal life. They actually questioned whether her faith could be “accommodated.” This isn’t just anti-education. It’s anti-freedom.

I am deeply disappointed, not just in the NEA, but in how so many educators have fallen in line with an agenda that is increasingly radical, anti-patriotic, and anti-Israel. The NEA has strayed far from its mission. It is now a political machine, not a professional organization serving teachers and students.

As someone who has dedicated nearly four decades to education, I feel disillusioned. I love my country. I support Israel. I believe in the importance of free speech, faith, and honest history. But I can no longer support an organization that undermines these values.

So goodbye, NEA. I’m walking away—with a clear conscience and my eyes wide open.

The Trump Administration has announced numbers for tariffs collected. The number is huge, something like $77 billion. Of course the panic vendors are now screaming that this means that Americans paid $77 billion in taxes. They also claim that the tariffs are causing the price of everything to skyrocket.

Let’s take the case of a lowly woodworker making a stool. The stool is made from two pieces of 2×4 by 8 ft.

Because the woodworker wants to up his game, he decides to use a different wood; he chooses Canadian maple.

A quick check on wood prices shows that hard maple is running $6 per board foot. The amount of lumber needed is 2*4*8/12 = 5.33 bf.

Or, 2*4*96 / 144 = 5.33 bf

At a cost of $6 per board foot, this means the cost of the lumber will be $32.

The woodworker uses a $25/hour labor rate. It will take him 3 hours to build the stool using hand tools and rough-cut lumber. That is $75 in labor.

There is another cost for the finish and time for finishing. We are ignoring that part of the equation. He also adds a 20% profit for the business.

Putting it all together, we get $32 for the wood, $75 for the labor, and $21.40 for profit, for a total sale price of $128.40.

Now say that there is a 25% tariff put on importing that wood from Canada. This would be $8 that needs to be paid to the US government.

From a bit of insider knowledge, I know that the $8 can be paid by the company shipping the wood, making the 25% come out of their profit. They might split the cost 50/50, or they can pass the entire cost on to the buyer, our woodworker.

Assuming our woodworker gets the entire $8 passed on to them, let’s see what that does to the cost of our stool.

$40 for the wood, $75 for labor, and $23 for profit, giving a total price for the stool of $138. With a 25% tariff on the cost of the materials, we see a $9.60 increase in the price. That is a 7.5% increase in the price of the stool.

The truth of the matter is that many products only use pennies of tariffed materials in their goods. Hershey increased the price of their chocolate recently. While the left is screaming “Tariffs!” the fact is that cocoa costs went up. The tariffs are a small part of the increase in costs.

The more value added in the US, the more the profit margin is the less impact tariffs have on your costs.

I do know people who are having a difficult time because of the tariffs. Their product uses a gizmo they import from China. That gizmo is not made in the US because there was no profit in making that gizmo here.

Until there is a US competitor for those gizmos, she is going to have to pay the tariffs on those gizmos. She has announced a very modest increase in the price of her goods to cover her increased costs. She feels miserable for doing so.

Regardless, our economy seems to be doing much better in 2025 than it was in 2024.

A friend I know has no health insurance. They have great medical care. They just pay for it out of pocket.

There are three different medical care facilities that they use. Their primary care provider, urgent care, and the emergency room. They have used the emergency room for broken bones and a burst appendix. Those bills have been paid in full.

The urgent care people collect in full before you leave the building. Those bills have been paid in full.

The lowest cost is using their primary care provider.

Recently they needed to get their medications out of hock. To get their prescriptions renewed, they have to visit the doctor once a year for an evaluation. No big deal.

The appointment was made; they went. The office visit was a longer one. Time to leave.

Stopping at the front desk, they asked how much. This required a wait while the desk called back to get the billing code from the doctor. Office visit, level 4 was the code.

This took an expected visit price of around $85 and bumped it to $110. They figured out why and paid in full. The desk refuses to mark bills “paid in full” or even “paid”.

Nearly a month goes by when a medical bill shows up. It is a bill for the visit.

The bill has a new line item, “complexity,” for $50. It has another line item for “medical,” and the price of the office visit has gone from $110 to over $200. In total, the bill has gone up by around $170. This is more than the original charge.

What happened?

Well, the first thing is that the medical group refuses to tell you what you will be billed for at the point of service. They know what was done, but they don’t “know” if there is anything else.

This means that the office manager, not the doctor, can change the code if they feel that the doctor spent more time than they coded. Some one in the backroom added a complexity charge because they saw their primary care provider, who considers the entire history. (Which I thought was a good thing, not something to be punished for with a surcharge).

The “medical” was tacked on because they took a medical survey which the doctor read before entering the treatment room.

The billing office claims that the change in price of the visit was because of an honest mistake.

In short, the bill turns out to be an extra $36.70 over what was paid at the point of service.

No wonder nobody knows how expensive medical care is. The doctors office makes it impossible to know.