There’s a mindset, these days, that everything is disposable. If something breaks, just get another one. Toss the old one in land fill and ignore it. This is not a sustainable practice.

Why did we become the strongest country in the world? We made do. We took everyone else’s outcasts, people who wanted to work and were motivated to become citizens, and we said “let’s do this.” Those people, coming into America, were coming here to become AMERICANS. They didn’t come to be African Americans or Cuban Americans or Chinese Americans or Polish Americans. They came here to be Americans, plain and simple. They came here because America provided (and still provides) a place for hard work and sacrifice to pay off in the creation of strong family and safe home.

Use It Up

If you buy something, use it up. It seems simple when you say it that way, but I have to ask you, how many times have you allowed that cabbage or bit of leftover stew in the back of the fridge until it turned into something approaching sentience? Too often, I’d wager. I’m bad at it myself, frankly. This is a basic thing that Grandma would have wanted you to know, though. If you’re in doubt, ask yourself: would Grandma be disappointed in me for doing this (or not doing it, as the case may be)?

Learn to turn little bits of leftover vegetables into something new. Learn how to make stews and soups. Learn how to dehydrate and can. Learn how to compost, too. If you have animals like chickens or goats or pigs, feed things to them rather than putting them in the trash. Make certain that every bit of food you purchase is actually eaten or preserved in some way.

This is how we end up with scrap quilts, by the way. When you buy (or thrift) fabric for clothing (or sheets or towels, or whatever), you will almost always be left with a handful of scraps. Sometimes they may be tiny, because you’ve patterned extremely well, and you can congratulate yourself. Still, stash away those scraps. They can be used to patch up clothing or sheets, or to fill holes in jeans. When you have enough scraps of whatever size, you cut them into a lovely pattern of squares or hexes or triangles, and now you have a quilt. Our grandmothers turned their leftover bits and pieces into huge sheets of stitched love that are now passed down from generation to generation. You, too, can do that.

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Once You See It …

Why Is It Slow?

We use multiple different server infrastructures. The paying clients run on cloud infrastructure, development and my pet projects run on internal infrastructure.

The internal infrastructure consists of a 2GB link to the outside. This connects to a dedicated PfSense box.

PfSense provides firewall, VPN, and load balancing. The box itself might need a bit more memory, but nothing horrible is happening with it.

PfSense uses HAProxy for load balancing. It does SSL offload to allow easy certificate maintenance as seen from the outside.

For web connections, it looks for one of two nginx process running on one of the servers.

Those nginx services run inside a container and connect to a dedicated shared network. They forward traffic to the correct container.

That container is running WordPress. It is configured on the correct network and connects to a MariaDB server on the external network.

That database is running on NVMe and has zero performance issues when tested.

The base code is stored in the docker container, the plugins, and media are stored in a mounted volume.

So, you request a page from The Vine of Liberty. That hits the firewall, which forwards it to a web server (nginx). The web server forwards the request to an Apache web server running in a container with WordPress installed. PHP within WordPress is configured to connect to the database for long term storage.

Media that is needed is loaded by Apache from the mounted volume of a Ceph distributed file system.

PHP that is on the mounted volume is loaded and cached.

This is running much too slow. I’ve tested so many parts of this, and I can not discover what the bottleneck is.

JavaScript Sucks

Over the years, I’ve gotten better and better at JavaScript. This week and last, I transitioned to TypeScript.

This is driving me bonkers. I know how to write a module. I know how to load a module and have it do something. I can see how other packages have exposed global items. What the heck do I need to do to make this work!!!!

Just another learning curve. Sometimes I get tired.

jQuery is so yesterday

For the new site I’m working on, I’ve decided that I will only support modern browsers on the internal side. This means I’m writing everything in pure JavaScript/TypeScript. It is working, but I still use jQuery syntax when I should be using JavaScript syntax.

And I miss my Makefiles.

Snope and Ocean State Tactical

Were both relisted yesterday. This makes 13 times they have been distributed for conference.

Mark Smith says this is good. Points out that the Dobbs case was relisted 12 times before cert was granted. This lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

I’m tired of waiting for the Court to do the right thing.

They’re Suing John Roberts!

Yeah, the same way we sued Bruen, and they are suing Donald J. Trump.

They are suing these people in their official capacity.

In other words, they are suing the head of an entity. Roberts is being sued for some entity he heads, other than SCOTUS.

What can you do with a .357 magnum?

Turns out that with that old lever gun, I can vaporize a skull. My bone person is upset with me. I’ve learned to take headshots at most smaller animals to protect the pelt and meat. It was a short range shot, less than 30 yards.

It was a Hornady bullet with the plastic tip. I’m too lazy to go dig up my reloading log.

Question of the Week

When did you first suspect that the News might be lying to you?

When did you first find proof that the News was lying to you, in mass?

Ally and I have had some long conversations about winning the hearts and minds of the middle.

The common saying is, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

This is normally true. Sometimes it is not.

In 2016, my parents expressed their disgust for Trump. They were convinced that he was doing horrible things.

Today, there are people that scream and call him a felon. The “fine people” hoax still lives on.

If you are a normal person, you can’t help but be inundated with negative coverage of Trump.

His tariffs will destroy the economy! There is a recession coming! All those empty ships sitting in China means that the US economy is failing and prices are going to go through the roof.

What I see when I see all of those empty container ships is tariffs working. Those are sales China is not making. That is their economy burning to the ground.

But I can’t talk to those in the middle about it. Yes, it is my opinion. My friends that are thinking and on the left, can’t get past the constant barrage of “Evil Trump”!

They just tune out or they get TDS. My ex-friend went that way. It was Trump’s fault that Roe v. Wade was reversed, and that meant there would be no “reproductive care” for women.

It is years since that decision, there are still abortions happening in this country. In some places, more than before the Dobbs decision.

Most of all, I’m reminded of the people telling me that because there are so many accusations of Trump, there is so much smoke coming from the Trump Administration, there must be fire there.

What I saw were arsonists and smoke bombs.

Right now, as we all know, the media is in a tizzy. At one time, they owned the airwaves, and everyone had to report whatever it was that the letter agencies (ABC, NBC, AP, etc) found out at the White House press room. All the “little people” were forced to get their news from the NEWS agencies. That’s not the case, these days. Leavitt has opened the press room to other media platforms, and routinely makes certain that people other than the letter agencies get to ask their questions. This makes Big Media very angry.

We can speculate about who owns Big Media, but it seems fairly obvious to most of us, I believe. In the end, it doesn’t really matter who owns them; what matters is that the “standard” news is being used to wage war. For those who’ve known this for a long time, you  may not realize just how difficult that is to swallow, especially if you’re generally a thinking person.

I grew up with news being the place to turn to for up to date, factual information. I could look at news on the television at 6pm, or I could look in one of the newspapers local to me. Sure, there were some less than savory newspapers, but we all knew they were only good for their page two girlie of the week. It was easy to know what was good news and what wasn’t. It was obvious for a number of reasons, and there wasn’t any confusion over it.

I consider myself a thinking person. I am not traditionally educated, but I have put a lot of effort into keeping myself educated. I’ve attended classes, both formal and informal, I’ve gotten certificates, I’ve always achieved good grades. I can think my way through most problems, even if I do still struggle with the math**. When Chris started telling me that the media was lying to me, I was disbelieving. Sure, Weekly World News was all made up, but ABC nightly news? That was just the facts. How did I know this? Because all of the news agencies reported the same thing. Statistically speaking, it is quite silly to think that the entirety of every news agency out there would be lying, and lying in much the same (or sometimes exactly the same) way. That would be a statistical anomaly the size of New Jersey.

It’s a hard mouthful to chew, the idea that ALL of the news agencies are telling whoppers every day. The problem, of course, is that anything they say could be true, or might not be. There must be a balance of actual facts thrown in there. It allows newscasters and stations to say, “Hey, look, we covered that thing at the library, all that was factual. What makes you think the rest of it isn’t?” Plausible deniability, I think it’s called. Regardless, it’s been quite the eye opener realizing that basically none of the news stations I’d counted on (even ones like AP) were accurate or to be trusted.

This brings me to the concept of capturing minds.

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There is a battle of procedure that takes place in our courts. That is getting to a final result.

If the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of Trump in December 2028, it would not matter that he won. We would have lost.

That would be four years of waiting for a final result.

We watched and are watching this play out in the Second Amendment community. Duncan v. Bonta has been around for almost a decade at this point. It has been through the district court twice, the Ninth Circuit court multiple times, and the Supreme Court at least once.

The case has won at the District and Supreme Court, yet the relief sought by the plaintiff is still out of reach. In March 2025, the Ninth Circuit decided to twist the words of the Supreme Court to find that magazines are not arms and are not protected by the Second Amendment.

The State of California doesn’t care how long this case takes or how much money it costs to litigate. The district court enjoined the law back in 2017-2018. The Ninth stayed the injunction. That stay has remained in effect even now as the case has been remanded to the district court, ordering the district court to rule for the state.

As long as the status of the case leans towards the infringers, they are happy to delay.

To show how real this is, a district judge in New York issued a TRO enjoining the SAFE act (Bruen tantrum law). The state had that appealed within hours, even though a TRO is not appealable. The Second Circuit Stayed the injunction.

It took over a year before the Second Circuit finally ruled against The People and The Constitution, sending it back to the District Court for more litigation before the case can start up the chain to the Supreme Court, again.

Because that stay is in place, most of New York state is a gun free zone.

The left is using the same methods to stop the Trump administration. They do not care if they win or if they lose, as long as it doesn’t happen now.

They go court shopping until they find a court willing to issue a universal injunction, stopping the Article II executive branch.

Once the injunction is in place, they start slow walking things.

The Circuit courts are just as rogue in these locations as the District Courts. They are using the interlocutory state to excuse not staying the injunctions. “Just let it play out in court.”

The leftest Justices on the Supreme Court echo those words, “just let it work its way here through the normal process. There is no reason to rush this.”

This go around, the Trump administration has been ready and has been moving hard and fast. Multiple cases have made it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court has issued opinions favorable to the Trump administration each time.

How are they favorable? In most of the cases, the Justices have ruled to allow the Trump administration to continue as they had intended, while the case works its way through the courts.

This means that the left is on the wrong side of that snail. They are the ones attempting to get the cases through as fast as they can. And it isn’t working for them.

In the few cases where the Justices have not issued a stay, they have chastised the lower courts or scheduled oral hearings quickly.

The case at hand.

A group of people suffering from gender dysphoria have been given medical release from the military. They sued in federal district court, asking for an injunction, which was granted.

This means that the military does not have the power to determine which service members are medical disqualified from serving.

The Supreme Court issued a stay against that injunction for the duration. The stay will remain in effect until the Supreme Court denies cert OR issues a final opinion.

We are winning, the courts are moving at breakneck speed, and it keeps looking good.

The other thing which is happening, is that the lanuguage of the Court is changing, they are getting less and less polite and more and more pointed in their correcting of the inferior courts.

There are so many versions of this song. The ending changes sometimes.

Each summer, I spend an inordinate amount of time dressed up as a medieval kitchen drudge, cooking feast foods over an open fire in a cow field. Beside me, knights and dames fight with sword, pole arm, axe, and shield to display their prowess to huge crowds. I’m not much noticed during the fights, but before and after I always have a bevy of fair patrons coming by to ask questions and see what I’m up to. They’re always amazed to see the foods I produce, from pies to salads to stews and soups.

Last summer, it was beastly hot, and I didn’t want to do much cooking at one particular event. The heat was too oppressive to think of spending hours kneeling by the flames, tending to whatever morsel I felt like making. Instead, I retreated to the shade of the kitchen tent, and put together a cold meal for our fair knights and gentle ladies. This dish is deceptively simple, but incredibly tasty and pretty to boot.

Based on A Sallet for Fish Daies, aka a cold shrimp salad:

Ingredients:

• 1 lb carrots, minced or shredded
• 2 cups small shrimp, cleaned, cooked, & cooled
• 1/2 cup finely minced red onion or green onion
• 1 cup white wine vinegar
• 1 cup olive oil
• salt to taste

Mince your carrots with a knife or food processor, or do what I did and cheat: purchase the finely shredded carrots in a bag. In a bowl, combine the oil, vinegar, and salt, and whisk until thoroughly mixed. Drizzle the carrots with just enough of the dressing to lightly coat them, and then use a mold to shape the carrots. This could be a circle biscuit cutter, a fancy and large cookie cutter, or whatever you have on hand.

If you want a heavier onion flavor, use the red onion. Otherwise, use the green onion (whites and greens together). Mix together the onion and shrimp, then toss with just enough of the dressing to lightly coat them, and arrange them gently on top of the carrots. Serve chilled.

Notes:

Traditionally, this was made in the shape of a fleur de lys using a gelatin or pudding mold, but I skipped that entirely and just tossed everything together. The first time I made it, I used red onion, and the second time I used green onion. I liked both, but my taste testers (the various knights and dames) preferred the green onion one. I found it definitely looked more “fancy”, for what it’s worth. I also sprinkled some minced parsley over the top of the sallet, and garnished it with a carrot coin carved to look like a Tudor rose and a few sprigs of parsley. It was well received, and I could have made a lot more of it and it would have disappeared.

As we were outdoors (in the aforementioned cow field) with no modern cooling equipment, I made the salad in a metal bowl, and set that into a wooden bowl filled with ice. This kept it lovely and chill for most of the day. It was cool, refreshing, tasty, and the perfect foil for the sliced sausage, cheese, and bread that I served it with.

When dealing with people of the left, a failed program with horrible outcomes is almost always excused with, “it was done with good intentions.”

Obamacare was intended to give health care to every one. Instead, it cost people their insurance, their doctors, and made everything more expensive. But the intentions were good, so just forgive and forget the bad outcomes.

“Do I believe that this language is meant to harm or confuse students?” is not relevant. “Never attribute to malice, that which can adequately be explained by stupidity”. That is where I lived for many, many, many years. Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three time is enemy fire.

“More inclusive?” No, it is designed to allow people, teachers, administrators, parents, and students to get participation awards for failing.

I took my oldest daughter to the range, back when I didn’t know enough, and tried to teach her how to shoot. She did a miserable job. In the end, she managed to get all 8 rounds from the 1911 on paper. Not even in the target, just on paper.

I was so proud of her improvement, I praised her, “That’s perfect, brat!”.

She came home, excited about range day. She showed her final target to the rest of the family, telling everybody she had done perfectly.

Today, If there is more than a MOA in my pattern, I have to do better. No, I don’t get MOA most of the time. There is lots of room for improvement.

Telling somebody they are a “learner”, when they are not, is malicious. It might not be meant in a malicious way, that doesn’t mean it isn’t.

A learner is somebody with a learning mind set. Someone who is open to learning something new, or improving on something they already know. I’ve known many learners over the years.

Some people are not natural learners. They will “turn off their brains” after a hard day at the office. They do mindless things. They only have enough energy to learn when it is required.

I know people who have 4.0 grade point averages that were not learners. They were great students, they learned while in class, but they might not ever apply that to anything in the future.

I want to highlight the entire quote, but there are three sections.

“Done with positive intentions.” I do not know that it was done with positive intentions. Nobody has presented any evidence to me that it was done with positive intentions. The intentions are not relevant.

I believe the most of the people who are currently using the term haven’t really thought about it. Instead, they fall into the patterns of their bosses. They are slowly herded into standard group think.

Most of these people never thought about the misuse of the word “learner”, they didn’t think at all. They were sheep.

The second part is the definition. Yes, that is a reasonable definition of a learner.

“It reflects a belief…” is not part of the definition. It is wishful thinking. Not every person can grow, discover and take ownership of their learning.

This type of thinking is certainly reflective of left think. If we label something, then that something will become the label.

This is a pile of dung. Calling it pizza will not make it pizza. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” — Act II, Scene II, Romeo and Juliet

We don’t call somebody a “winner” because of their potential to win. We call them a winner when they do win.

We don’t give out Medal of Honor to soldiers because of their potential to earn the medial, but because they did earn it.

… I still believe all students can become learners… Exactly! A student can become a learner. And when they do, they are learners. Until that, they can still be students.

I am a computer scientist by education. I’m good at it. I was hanging with my friends, all of them scientists as well. We were working on a difficult problem, making slow headway on it. One of them spoke up, “Come on, it’s not that hard. It isn’t rocket science.”

Everybody got very silent and stared at her. She worked for NASA. The problem we were working was rocket science.

We all laughed, and I remember it to this day.

When I have to deal with somebody with an associates degree in information technology claiming the mantel of “Scientist”, I become irritated.

The sales jerk that expressed his opinion, incorrectly quoting MSM telling me I couldn’t have an opinion because I wasn’t a “Scientist”, made me walk to the other end of the building to confront him in person. The words I had to say weren’t for the rest of the team to hear.

We need to stop giving out participation awards

I remember coming up on a tee-ball game.

“What’s the score?”

Player’s dad: “We don’t keep score, everyone is a winner.”

Player: 4 to 1, they won’t use the scoreboard, so we have to keep track ourselves.

…or to become curious, independent learners?

Personally, I want them to become curious, independent learners, with a lifelong learning mindset. To that end I will reward them with the well-earned title of “learner” when it happens. Until then, they are, at best, students.

After reading Chris’s article on the so-called “abuse” of language in the education industry, I felt he may have taken the argument a bit too far. I do agree that education is full of jargon and constantly shifting acronyms. But do I believe this language is meant to harm or confuse students? No. In most cases, these changes seem intended to be more inclusive or politically correct, not malicious.

Chris and I actually discussed this during a car ride to Fort at Number 4 yesterday. I’ve since had time to reflect more on what he said. One of our points of disagreement was the shift from the word “student” to “learner.” My own school district made this change just before COVID, and while it took a few years for me to adjust, I now use “learner” regularly.

I believe this change was made with positive intentions. To me, “learner” suggests someone who is actively engaged, not just passively sitting in a chair. It reflects a belief in the potential of every child to grow, discover, and take ownership of their learning. I don’t believe the shift was done with ill will.

Chris argued that not all students are learners—that some are disruptive and show no interest in learning. I understand his point. But I still believe all students can become learners, even if they don’t show it yet. Will every child become a lifelong learner like Chris or me? Maybe not, but we can still hope and work toward that goal.

The ever-evolving language of education doesn’t bother me much. After 38 years of teaching, I’ve learned to go with the flow. I’ve seen many changes in terminology. Chris is passionate about precision in language, and while I agree that language matters, I just don’t get as worked up about it.

When our children were in elementary school, they were in the Talented and Gifted program. Later, it was renamed the “Infinity” program. I questioned the change at first, but ultimately, nothing really changed—the same kids were in the program, and they all knew they were high achievers. It was just a new label.

Similarly, the language used around learning disabilities has changed many times. These shifts often aim to reduce stigma and promote first-person language that emphasizes the individual, not the disability. As our understanding grows, so does our vocabulary.

Chris also criticized the use of the word “friend” in classrooms, something many teachers began using in the early 2000s to refer to all students. He argued that calling every classmate a “friend” confuses children, especially when some of those classmates are bullies. I agree with him on this point. The term may have been used too broadly, but again, I don’t think it was intended to cause harm.

Ultimately, words like “student” and “learner” carry different connotations. A student is typically someone who studies within a formal structure, while a learner is more self-directed and intrinsically motivated.

So, what do we want for our children? To simply complete assigned tasks, or to become curious, independent learners? Will changing our language help us reach that goal? I’m not sure, but I don’t believe these language shifts are malicious. Most are simply well-intentioned efforts to reflect evolving values in education.

This weekend is opening weekend at the Fort at No 4. This is the first time The Fort has been open to the general public this year.

I believe this is the first opening weekend I’ve attended. It was fun, it was outstanding, it was hard work.

The first time I arrived, it felt like I was arriving at “House of Cash” from “Hurt”. “Closed to the Public”.

It felt like it was in disrepair, dying from neglect and lack of public love.

That’s not what it feels like today.

Ally had to stay home, she has been under the weather and is recovering. She has a hard deadline of two weeks to have her dress ready. Something special is happening for her.

My lady and I went up instead. When we pulled into the parking lot, the lot was more than half filled. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it that full before, outside major events.

We had two of our blacksmiths working the forge. Richard Write and Sam. Richard has forgotten more about smithing than I expect to ever know. Sam is an expert in blade smithing. We discussed how to make a reproduction tool that would be period.

It is a bit of work, but I can make it happen.

We had visitors arrive. I learned that 4th and 5th graders have a sorry grasp on the history of this countries founding.

Still, it was good.

From there I headed over to the workshop, I had given two of my mallets to the Fort for use in the workshop.

Having had the winter to do research, I got to work with wood planes. It was adjusted perfectly. Watching the rough-cut lumber turning into finished product was a type of zen. The sound of a well tuned plane is something I don’t get in my modern shop.

I didn’t need to plane this wood down. It would have been fine like it was, I wanted to learn.

The Fort likes to have programs. These are times when an interpreter does something that visitors can watch, or sometimes, participate in.

Normally, I do plaining at the back side of the big table, this time I moved to the front and setup there, so people could see what was happening. Sure enough, there were soon visitors there.

My favorite type of visitor is a family with 3rd to 8th graders. Children that are still interested in the world and what came before, but not grumping about being off their phones.

We had at least two families like that.

The twins came in and were interested in the augers. They got to touch and teach me how it worked, then we looked around the shop to locate examples of holes with pegs. Mostly we found holes for legs and several chairs that holes in them for runners and whatever the back spindles are called.

They picked a plain, they got to see how it would work, then the boy got to use the plain. In other words, he was working to smooth the piece of lumber I needed to be smoothed. If we trick them into doing the work, is it really child labor?

Molding plains, shave horses, draw knives, yarn counter and others. They were bouncing and happy when the left. I’m hoping they will remember this day long into the future.

That’s it. I’m tired and sore. But it is good.

For those of you that are within the distance, I am really looking forward to seeing you at The Fort.