Uncategorized

I recently posted that parents whose kids miss too much school should be fined. There were those who were incensed- why should THEY be fined because their little angels had an unavoidable series of absences?

A week ago, I posted that EBT is a travesty because it isn’t my responsibility to pay for someone else’s bad decisions. Nearly everyone who commented was in complete agreement.

Both topics are the same problem, couched in two different ways. The average cost for public school in the US is about $16,000 per year, per child. Since school is 180 days, it costs about $90 per day to send your kids to school. For a child to attend school from K through 12th grade costs about $200,000 in today’s money. Fining a parent $1,000 because their kid missed ten days of school is merely a refund of the money that was wasted on schooling a child whose parents couldn’t be bothered to make them attend.

That’s free money to those who have kids- free money that is taken from people who either don’t have children, or whose children have long since grown up. I pay over $3,000 per year in local school district taxes. So every day that a kid isn’t in school is my money that has been wasted, yet the parents of that child have no more skin in the game than I, a complete stranger.

The point that I was making with those two posts is this- if it is a waste to give parents free money to purchase junk food, why is it not a waste to pay money for children to attend school, only to watch the educational dollars be wasted when the child doesn’t show up?

I have to pay taxes to feed and educate the children of some fat, lazy bitch who has never had a job, only to see that money squandered and used to produce more fat, lazy criminals who will also need my tax dollars to survive.

---

Sixty percent of all jobs don’t require more than an 8th grade level of education. That is, they don’t require the worker to perform algebra, know world history, or be able to quote Shakespeare. The high school years are spent preparing the students to attend college, yet only about 61% of high school graduates go on to college, and the graduation rates for them are low.

• 52% of students seeking a Bachelor’s degree will graduate
• A quarter of them take longer than 4 years to do so
• 30% of those seeking Associate’s Degrees will graduate
• 87% of those who begin high school actually graduate

Overall, 32% of those who begin high school will graduate from college with ANY degree (two or four year). It’s a pure waste of money to use high school as a college prep system when they clearly aren’t benefiting.

Here is my proposal:

At the end of the 8th grade, there will be an entrance exam for high school. Those who are in the top half of the scores will be permitted to move on to “college prep” high school at public expense. If you become a discipline, attendance, or academic problem, then you get sent down to be with the lower half.

The bottom half will attend a 2 year vocational school. They can pick between various tracks: auto mechanics, carpentry, welding, or other useful jobs. Included in the common, general curriculum will be classes in personal finance, budgeting, cooking, cleaning, and general skills needed to be a functional adult. Again, at public expense. Once they are done with that, they can enter the workforce at 16.

Kids who don’t make the cut for “college prep” can still attend, but at their own expense. You think your kid can handle it even though he failed the exam? OK, he or she can attend, but we aren’t paying for it. It will cost you $10,000 per year in tuition. If your kid becomes disruptive of the learning of other students, they can be removed and sent over to the two year vo-tech track. Any student who drops out of either program (college track or votech) will be ineligible for any public assistance of any kind until they complete a GED style votech program at their own expense.

A study performed by the RAND corporation has been picked up by leftists on social media. The claim is for the number of households who have a firearm in the house. Read:

Household gun ownership across the U.S.

🇺🇸 Montana — 66.3%
🇺🇸 Wyoming — 66.2%
🇺🇸 Alaska — 64.5%
🇺🇸 Idaho — 60.1%
🇺🇸 West Virginia — 58.5%
🇺🇸 Arkansas — 57.2%
🇺🇸 Mississippi — 55.8%
🇺🇸 Alabama — 55.5%
🇺🇸 South Dakota — 55.3%
🇺🇸 North Dakota — 55.1%
🇺🇸 Oklahoma — 54.7%
🇺🇸 Kentucky…

— Infodex (@infodexx) September 1, 2026

I replied that I think these numbers are wildly inaccurate. For example, Florida has a claimed household firearms ownership rate of 35.3%. Florida has approximately 8,752,810 households, so the claim is just over 3 million households have a firearm in it. Here is why that number is demonstrably inaccurate:

• Florida does not require concealed weapons permits, yet 2.5 million people in the state have a CCW.
• Since the Brady Act begin requiring NICS checks in 1998, Florida has seen more than 30 million of them performed.

Those two data points alone point to more than 3 million households with a firearm. Still, I pointed out there is no way to be sure, because no one keeps a registry of firearms and their owners. The leftists made the the claim that the numbers were close to accurate because:

• It’s likely from firearms purchased through an FFL where data is collected through the 4473.
• The FBI does the background check. A transfer to you is in their database.
• It could be a household of five all with five firearms but it is still just one household with a firearm.

So to boil it down: The ATF has your data because they somehow have a record of your gun purchases because 4473. Even though that is illegal, and once a firearm is sold by a dealer, no one knows for sure who it was sold to, unless it somehow winds up being resold to a dealer. That’s why the left pushes so hard for universal background checks.

I pointed out the law in the second- the FBI doesn’t do NICS checks, the state police do. He replied how the FBI is better and more trustworthy with your data than the FDLE. Whatever, that still doesn’t validate the above state level data, which actually came from a RAND report created from summing up telephone surveys.

Then there is the antigun trope of claiming just a small minority of people owning a large number of firearms creating an illusion of widespread firearm ownership. That’s simply not true. I have already blogged about that ridiculous claim:

the top twenty percent of all gun owners actually owned 55% of the guns. In terms of absolute figures, ten million people owned 105 million guns – for an average of ten guns per person, and the remaining 87 million guns were owned by 34 million people – for an average of 2.6 guns per person. The population of the U.S. was 263 million in 1994 – indicating that only 16.7% of Americans had actually owned a weapon.

I wrote about this in June of 2016, and I guessed at the time that there were somewhere between 400 and 500 million firearms in the US. Since that time, there have been another 310 million NICS checks.

Again, let’s look at Florida’s demographics- there are just over 8.7 million households in Florida, and those households contain 19 million adults. With over 2.5 million CCW permits, 200,000 known NFA items, and approximately 100,000 active law enforcement officers, there are just about 3 million people right there. That doesn’t account for people with granddad’s hunting rifle, criminals who have a firearm but aren’t going to tell some random survey caller, and others. On the other hand, there are households like my sister and her crotch fruit who don’t own any guns at all. Of course, none of them have a CCW, either.

Looking at the numbers, they seem to support a household ownership rate closer to 60% than to 35%. However, I also admit that my estimate is just as much guesswork as the RAND corporation’s report, because no one can know for sure.

Borepatch announced today his diagnosis of prostate cancer. I was going to comment over there, but my comment became lengthy, and I know he reads my blog, so here are my thoughts on this:

1 You will be inundated with people telling you to try this or try that. Don’t listen to Internet randos who claim to be cancer experts this week, but were experts on police procedures last week, Constitutional law the week before, experts in building construction last year, etc. Everyone has an opinion, and most of them are wrong, and in the case of cancer, fatally wrong for you. When my mother in law was diagnosed with breast cancer a decade ago, her sister sent her a book written by Suzanne Somers of all people. She advocated fighting off cancer with diet changes. I posed about it here, and retards came on here bleating “But COVID.” My MIL was going to take the advice and refuse treatment in favor of diet changes. I talked her out of that plan, and she is still alive and as cheap as ever. Oh, and cancer free for about 8 years now.

1a Look guys, Ivermectin isn’t the cure for everything. Jesus, I see people advocating for Ivermectin as a cure for everything from heart disease to cancer. Just stop it with the snake oil. This is a real issue with real consequences for the person with the disease. Not everything is a conspiracy, and not every disease is treated by Ivermectin or special fad diets.

2 Cancer is a complex disease. It involves problems with a cell’s dna, and with the immune system that is supposed to catch cells that have “gone rogue” and destroy them. There are many different types of cancer with many different causes and treatments. My advice to you is this: do some research and find the facility that is the best at whatever cancer you have. Then seek them out. My brother was diagnosed with B cell lymphoma, and the form of cancer he had is fatal within 5 years in 85% of cases. His doctor (also neighbor and good friend for decades) told him that he could get chemo for it in the office, or could see a specialist. My brother called me for advice, and I told him there was a top 10 cancer facility right here in Orlando. I advised him to go there.

My brother didn’t take my advice. Instead, he told me top 10 wasn’t good enough, he wanted the best. That’s what he did- he found a cancer center 1000 miles away that specialized in his cancer. They put him in a study group, and he traveled to that center every 6 weeks for chemo for a year and a half, followed by follow-up visits every 3 months for another year. He also went to support groups to help him deal with it, and got more and more depressed as members of his support group died off. We went together to my father’s grave outside of New Orleans, and we stood over my father’s grave as he cried on my shoulder in fear of what was coming. It was as psychologically hard on him as it was medically, but we got through it.

He goes in every year to be tested for a return of the cancer. Yet here he is, 9 years later, still cancer free.

Not everyone beats cancer, but medicine is getting better and better at it every single year. Among males, age-adjusted cancer deaths per 100,000 population decreased from 210.9 in 2009 to 172.9 in 2019. It’s not the automatic death sentence people fear, but it does need to be respected. Contact the best cancer specialist you can, discuss your case with them, and make a joint decision between you, your family, and that specialist.

Good luck, my friend. Dealing with cancer is difficult, but it is a battle that can be won.

If you have spent any time on the Internet, you’ve heard about the E4 mafia. Let me explain to you how that works. I already explained how laundry on a ship works. It was laundry day, and as the assistant workcenter supervisor, EM3 Divemedic was in charge of the night shift of the Flight Deck Power shop. He was sleeping during the day, and when he went to get up to get the evening meal to start his shift, laundry had not returned.

The reason, according to the coop cleaners, was the laundry had lost the electrical division’s laundry. All 300 pounds of it. There were now over 100 electricians whose uniforms were missing. Not wanting to put a dirty uniform back on, our hero called the ship’s laundry to ask where the clothes were. Some smartass junior enlisted said there was nothing he could do, the laundry was just missing.

So in his skivvies, this hero of the E division walked forward three spaces and pushed “off” on every ventilation fan that served the ship’s laundry space, then called the Chief Electric Watch (the CEW is the electrician on watch that controlled all electrical power on the ship that was not located inside of the nuclear power plant. The CEW is an E4-E6, but in this case was another E4 whose laundry was also missing.) and told him he would personally handle any trouble calls from the laundry for the next hour. Then he waits.

It took about 5 minutes for the laundry to call the CEW to complain. The CEW forwarded the call to the E division berthing, where EM3 Divemedic was waiting. The conversation was something like:

Laundry: “Our ventilation is broken, and it’s over 110 degrees in here. The laundry equipment is served by steam, and it’s pretty hot.”

EM3: “Man that sure does suck. As soon as I can get dressed, I will be there to fix it. I just don’t have a clean uniform, so it might take awhile.”

Laundry: “Turn those fans back on, or I am calling our Chief Petty Officer”

EM3: “Sorry. Wish I could help. Nothing I can do.”

The next ring of the phone was the E division CPO wanting to know why I was fucking with laundry’s ventilation. I explained to him that I wasn’t doing anything. I would troubleshoot the issue as soon as I got dressed. Maybe there was a ground or the controller was faulty. The chief replied: “Why are you working on this? This isn’t the flight deck and ventilation isn’t your shop’s job.” I replied something about the health and care for our shipmates was all of our concern.

While this conversation was going on, out laundry mysteriously appeared. All 300 pounds of it. I got dressed and turned the fans back on. Our laundry never got lost again, and everyone lived happily (or not) ever after.

Thanks to the E4 mafia. This story isn’t even the worst example of the Engineering department going to war with another department that I have.

SayUncle actually posted today, but it was only to tell us how long his blog has been there. Sadly, that is all he has time for where blogging is concerned. I still miss his blog. I hope he is doing well.

In March of 2020, his wife of 18 years went into cardiac arrest and he ordered her life support disconnected after her doctor informed him that her brain was no longer functioning and there was no chance of recovery. I understand his pain, we had to do the same for my father.

The following March, his house burned to the ground.

A tough year, for sure. I hope nothing but the best for him.

As a reminder for people who haven’t been here for long. When you comment, the comment goes into the moderation queue and waits for me to approve it. If I am busy, sleeping, or at work, it may be a little while before I get a chance to approve it. You don’t need to post it more than once if you don’t see it right away.

That’s been done here for two reasons:

• Prevention of SPAM. Between 50 and 200 spam comments a day are attempted on this site. The SPAM filters get most of them, but 20-30 of them a day wind up in the queue and have to be deleted.
• Enforcing the rules of the site. There were people who came here with no other intention but causing hate and discontent. Those people were banned, but they simply changed names and used a VPN. My choices were either require registering an account with an email, or go to moderation and approval of all comments. I chose the latter. There were benefits and drawbacks to either method, and I decided moderation was the best one for this site.

So wait, if your comment hasn’t been approved within 24 hours, then it was either sucked into the SPAM filter, or it ran afoul of the site rules for comments. You can always ask me.

A I write this, I’m sitting here listening to a radio channel on iHeart radio called iHeart 70s and it’s taking me back to my childhood. In 1976, fifty years ago, the number one television show in the US was a show called Happy Days. It was a wholesome show about a teenager growing up in in the 1950s. In 1976, the show was in its fifth season and the height of its popularity, set in the year 1957. My parents loved it because it was a story about their teenage years.

If a show were made today using the same timelines, that show would be set in the year 2007 and would depict the teenaged years of my children. If you want to know what was happening then, just go back to the early days of this blog, which started that same year. It makes me feel old to even think about it.

I never met my great grandparents. I never even met all of my grandparents.

On my father’s side, my grandfather died 20 years before I was born. I’m now older than he was when he died. My dad’s mother, my grandmother, died when I was 9 years old. In fact, none of the males in the three generations before me on my father’s side lived past the age of 63.

On my mother’s side, the men fared somewhat better. My grandfather on that side lived to be 66 years old, and my great-grandfathers died at the ages of 84 and 72. The women lasted a bit, with my mother dying at 73, and her mother also dying at the age of 73. My great-grandmothers died at the ages of 39 and 66.

In many cases, medicine has advanced over the past generations, and people are living longer. I can say that I am healthier than my dad was at this age. He had already had a heart attack and heart surgery at a couple of years younger than I am now. He was disabled and on Social Security disability just a year older than I am now. I’m still kicking. I just got done mowing the lawn, which my dad was unable to do at this point.

Still, as we get older, we can’t help but wonder how many years we have left. I know there are more years behind me than there are in front of me. I’ve done so much and so many things in my life, it seems incredible to me. I still have so many more things I want to do, see, and experience. I doubt I have enough time left to get through the entire list.

I’m sure many of you bought your first albums from Columbia House. I remember the deal- it was 12 albums for 1 penny, plus 3 or 4 bucks for shipping. Then they would send you a card to see if you wanted the album of the month. You were required to buy 3 of them in the next 2 years.

Columbia House is now out of business.

If you remember, I ordered a door from Lowe’s on June 14. I ordered a right handed door using the instructions on their own website. They delivered a left handed door. I was worried it was my fault, so I did some research, and yes, it’s a right handed door. My sources are this video, and I went and matched it to doors already in stock at Lowe’s.

To be even more clear, when you push the door, whichever way the door swings is the handedness of the door. To further explain things, I even sent Lowe’s vendor a picture of the door this one was replacing.

They assured me it would be correct the second time, so I ordered another door from their website on July 13. It wasn’t, and I again got the wrong door. So this time, I went down to my local store with pictures of everything and I talked to the millworks guy. He agreed with me that it was a right hand swing that I needed. So we ordered it again. While the millworks guy was putting in the order, I was in a texting conversation with the vendor. He apologized and assured me he would personally inspect the order before it left his warehouse.

You guessed it, I again got a left handed door. Look closely at the picture below.

So this time, I called the 800 number for Lowe’s. The one that’s on their website to call if a special order is incorrect. The drone on the call told me a few things:

• He said he was sorry this happened to me, but it isn’t their problem. If I have an issue, I can take it up with the store manager. Even though I pointed out it was ordered through their website the first two times and not the store, they pushed it off on my local store.
• Since it is a “special order” there will be no fixing this and no refunds. They are officially washing their hands of it, and I just have to eat the $400 for the door.
• He then gave me a case number, but refused to escalate it to management or his supervisor.

I know why they make you call. That smarmy little shit was being such a smartass that, had I been standing in front of him, it would have taken some real effort to not kick his ass.

I’m going down to the store and I will attempt to return the door.

I would point out that I bought this door on my Lowe’s card. Lowe’s can’t refuse to refund money that I haven’t paid them yet. The FTC specifically identifies receiving the wrong merchandise as a situation in which a credit-card charge can be disputed. The CFPB likewise says merchandise that wasn’t delivered as agreed can qualify for a billing dispute. The Lowe’s card is serviced through Synchrony bank. I am disputing the crap out of this. Additionally, if they want to stick to their guns here, I will not do one dime of business with Lowe’s ever again. Not for a door, a mower, construction materials, or even a stick of gum.

I am a Lowe’s gold key customer. I spend at least $5000 a year in their stores, and I have every year for years. That’s not contractor level spending, but it does make me a good and steady customer. I would be surprised if they want to screw me on this, because there are other stores out there, plus there are plenty of online merchants who would be happy to have my business.

At the end of the day, I don’t have a lot of faith in dispute processes, and I am not going to let them ruin my credit over $400 by refusing to pay and getting collections on my credit. If the dispute doesn’t fall in my favor, I will wind up paying it. However, I only work one day per week, and I might be bored enough to take them to small claims court for the $400. I wonder what a billboard costs…