Mrs. Murdersmith

♀️ Housewife with kids. Not around so much these days. In dire need of a better filter.

[Mrs. Murdersmith @Murdersmith]

The most important lesson I learned as a teenager:

Life doesn't stop. It doesn't care how you feel about it. It doesn't care if you "can't handle it". It just keeps marching on.

By all means, complain about it....but don't expect it to care.

[Lo-Ping @GamingAndPandas]

Hot take, but the primary function of prisons isn't rehabilitation but rather to separate convicted criminals from the rest of society.

[Pro America Politics @proamericapol]

In 1998, Serena and Venus Williams said they could beat any man ranked outside the top 200 in the men's division.

So, little known and 203rd ranked men's player Karsten Braasch took them up on the challenge.

Braasch after a night of drinking and smoking with zero practice, destroyed Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2 in straight sets.

The Williams sisters are the greatest female athletes of all time. And they barely made Braasch break a sweat.

It wasn't because Braasch was very good. He wasn't.

But, as a male, he possesses biological advantages even the best female athletes can't compete against.

That's the very reason we established women's sports to begin with.

To even the playing field.

That shouldn't be controversial. And you shouldn't need a biology degree to understand it.

[Michelle Barrett @muchtoocommon]

I don't think we should imprison them either.

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

I calculated what it would cost to replace everything my wife does as a stay-at-home mom.

The answer: $131,130 a year.

Here's how I calculated that amount.

My wife genuinely loves being home with our four children. She homeschools them, manages our home, cooks for our family, gardens, and invests her life in raising our kids.

But every so often, she asks whether she should get a job to help financially.

Not because she wants a career outside the home, but because our culture can make stay-at-home mothers feel like they are not contributing unless they bring home a paycheck.

I always remind her:

“You already have a career. You work for our family.”

She may not receive a paycheck, but much of what she does saves us money we would otherwise have to earn, pay taxes on, and then spend hiring other people.

So I ran the numbers using typical rates in the Des Moines, Iowa area:

HOUSEKEEPER
12 hours/week × $20.74/hour
$12,942 per year

NANNY FOR FOUR CHILDREN
50 hours/week × $23/hour
$59,800 per year

HOMESCHOOL EDUCATOR
5 hours/day × 180 school days × $25.03/hour
$22,527 per year

PERSONAL SHOPPER
4 hours/week × $20.58/hour
$4,281 per year

PERSONAL CHEF
2 hours/day × $38.33/hour
$27,981 per year

PERSONAL GARDENER
3 hours/week × 30 weeks × $40/hour
$3,600 per year

TOTAL ESTIMATED ANNUAL REPLACEMENT VALUE:
$131,130

This is not meant to be a literal salary calculation. Some responsibilities overlap, but that is part of the point: replacing what one stay-at-home mother does would require hiring several different people.

And this still does not account for sick children, overnight care, appointments, curriculum planning, discipline, emotional support, family scheduling, or the constant mental load of knowing what everyone needs.

My wife may not receive a paycheck, but she creates enormous value for our family every day.

A paycheck is not the only proof that someone is contributing.

Thank a stay-at-home mom today.

[QUANTUM GUARD ™️ @QuantumGuard17]

🚨 JUST IN: ICE has ARRESTED an illegal alien semitruck driver from India in Oklahoma, his ID said "no name given" - and ICE Director Todd Lyons is FURIOUS

"It's REALLY scary. To see that on a license? 'No name given?!' And there's a 'REAL ID' in the star in the corner!"

"I can't believe we're giving illegal aliens these driver's licenses, these sanctuary states, trying to make it 'welcome' for these people. And this is a CDL LICENSE, transporting hazardous goods, materials at times."

They are endangering the lives of Americans. Pull all funding.

[Handre @Handre]

The Cash for Clunkers program, which Congress passed in June 2009 and burned through its $3 billion budget in under two months, destroyed functional wealth on a national scale, and somehow they called it "stimulus."

The mechanics were simple: trade in a working car, receive up to $4,500 toward a new one, and watch government employees pour sodium silicate into the old engine to make it seize permanently. Around 700,000 vehicles got crushed. These were not rusted-out death traps. The eligibility rules required the trade-in to be drivable and insured. You were watching the state systematically annihilate usable capital because Keynesian demand theory told it that destruction generates recovery. Frederic Bastiat explained why this is wrong in 1850, in an essay short enough to read on your lunch break. Congress ignored it.

The ripple effect hit people the government never mentioned in its press releases. Mechanics lost repair work. Used-car dealers watched their inventory evaporate. Low-income buyers who depend on the sub-$5,000 market faced prices that jumped roughly 10% in the years after the program. Free market economists call this "seen versus unseen." Politicians only showed you the gleaming new Chevy Malibu driving off the lot. They never showed you the single mother in Akron who needed a $3,000 Corolla and found nothing affordable left on the lot.

Even the environmental justification collapsed under basic scrutiny. A 2009 study by Resources for the Future calculated that the program cost between $237 and $365 per ton of carbon dioxide reduced. The voluntary carbon credit market at the time priced a ton around $10 to $20. The government spent up to thirty times the market rate to achieve an environmental outcome the market was already pricing far more efficiently.

This is what central planning always does. It takes your money, destroys real assets, and transfers wealth from the poor to auto manufacturers and their financiers. The program's designers received awards. The Akron mother paid higher prices. The engines sat crushed in junkyards. Nobody in Washington answered for any of it.

[Allie Beth Stuckey @conservmillen]

Inviting a bunch of strangers into your home to eat your kids’ food and sleep in their bed doesn’t make you a good neighbor, it makes you a bad parent.

The same is true for governments who allow unvetted migrants flood their borders.

It’s the toxic empathy that feels good for a short time from a distance but hurts in the long run and up close.

[Eve Keneinan 𝛗☦️ن @EveKeneinan]

"An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind."

No, it doesn't.

When tribe A starts gouging out the eyes of the men of tribe B, how do you think that ends?

It depends on what B does.

If B refuses to gouge out the eyes of tribe A in return, there's a good chance that all B will end up blind and enslaved by A.

If B does start gouging in return, them members of A might discover what B already know (thanks to A), that eye-gouging is bad, and it's a bad norm — and put a stop to it.

In other words, it seems that it is often the case that "an eye for an eye" is the best means to putting a stop to the eye-gouging cycle.

[Ụlọma @ulxma]

We spent years calling people misogynistic for saying “periods are disgusting” only to arrive at “pregnancy is gross.” Surely, this is what progress looks like.

[Fr. Cassidy Stinson @TheHappyPriest]

Look, I'm still not the kind of priest to say things like "they're putting demons in the robots," but the chainsaw-wielding black drones with eyeball horns are making it harder to argue my case

[Mrs. Murdersmith @Murdersmith]

@ZainabSana2622 And? That isn't done anymore & a lot of men weren't even alive at a time that it was being done.

[Mrs. Murdersmith @Murdersmith]

@filmsbylara Sometimes you should keep your thoughts & feelings to yourself for the sake of being polite. Many of my "natural responses" are rude too, but I'm an adult and have learned self control.

[bug girl @buggirl]

hating children and babies doesn’t make you edgy or cool it just kinda makes you a weird as fuck asshole. dehumanizing the most vulnerable population on earth and thinking they should be excluded from society is not the quirky take you think it is

[Mrs. Murdersmith @Murdersmith]

@h3reallnight My son is autistic. There 3 types of autism parents:

The parent that uses the diagnosis as an excuse for everything.

The parent who is in denial/is oblivious to their child being autistic.

And the parent who tries to help their child have as many skills/tools as possible.

[Mrs. Murdersmith @Murdersmith]

@moontruther34 All boys play a shit ton of video games. If their parents aren't setting limits, that's dumb of them.

My homeschooled son loves video games. He has a limited amount of game time per day though. Sometimes he'll do yard chores to earn extra time.

[Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ @InezFeltscher]

We’ve got so many people out there going through multiple functional divorces before 35 and say they “dodged a bullet” by not getting actually married. Ma’am, the bullets are lodged in your ribs.

[Mrs. Murdersmith @Murdersmith]

@anisenot People who have never experienced severe PPD have no clue what it is like.

I thought about drowning my daughter in the washing machine. It was horrifying! And my doctor just threw pills at me & said "see you in 6 months"....pills that can make you WORSE. 🤦‍♀️

[MaryCate Delvey @marycatedelvey]

I’m INSANELY pro-death-penalty. I think we need to expand the list of crimes that qualify for rope. I think we should go back to making them public events. I have a lot of thoughts.

[Hannah Frankman Hood @HannahFrankman]

I do not think all women are meant to have children, or should.

I do not think having children is the only way to have a meaningful life (it’s not).

I do not think people who cannot have children are condemned to a sadder or emptier life.

But the older I get, the more I wonder: what is a greater use of YOUR potential than nurturing another human?

What is the point of YOUR potential if you don’t pass it on?

Everything in our biology is wired towards survival and building the future. The deepest meaning in our lives comes from fulfilling those biological directives.

No one will remember your professional work in a hundred years. But if you have children, and they have children, whole unique individual humans will be experiencing existence in a hundred years because of your work.

To me that does not seem like wasting your youth. It seems like transmuting it. It’s performing alchemy to make precious humans.

And at 70, 80, 90, what is more meaningful, looking at a resume of accomplishments or the humans you have loved and raised and who love you back?

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

My story about pulling our son out of NC public schools to homeschool him reached far more people than I expected.

So I owe you the full explanation. Fair warning: it's worse than you think.

1) My son was in a class with many kids that could not speak the English language.

Zero English. None. Not a word.

You might be asking yourself... well, how did lessons occur in the classroom?

I'm glad you asked.

In fact, the way the teachers communicated with the Spanish-speaking only students was by using their personal iPhones as translators, speaking instructions into the iPhones, and the iPhones spitting out the Spanish instructions to the Spanish-speaking students, and then the Spanish-speaking students speaking Spanish into the iPhones, and the English questions/answers coming are read out for the teacher.

If you're exhausted just reading that...good. Now hold that feeling.

Imagine you’re an English-speaking student sitting in that same classroom, like my 5 year old son was.

Every lesson is interrupted while translations happen and naturally, the teacher’s attention is constantly divided.

The pace of learning slows DRAMATICALLY for everyone else.

The consequence is that the classroom stops being optimized for the students who can already understand the instruction and instead becomes an exercise in overcoming a language barrier that never should have existed inside an American, English-language classroom in the first place.

A place built to teach kids who are ready to learn quietly becomes a place mostly occupied with bridging a gap in language.

I don't think my five-year-old should spend one irretrievable year of his early schooling waiting at that bridge.

2) I saw the writing on the wall for the future of my county's school system and realized that not only was the future incredibly bleak, but downright aggressively woke in a way words fail to describe.

For multiple months, our school system allowed kids to:

a) Create Anti-ICE protest signs inside of the schools
b) Exit the school grounds, often WITHOUT SUPERVISION by ANYONE
c) Stand along busy highways and scream "FUCK ICE" for a few hours

Most shockingly, it was clearly encouraged by the schools, by leadership, and by many of the teachers.

That was political activism.

It gets worse... for years Buncombe County has forced biological girls to deal with biological males (who call themselves trans) to enter into girls locker rooms and bathrooms.

This has been happening for years and no one dared to try to change or speak up until very very recently... that should tell you a lot about what the school leadership believes and their political bent.

There is an evil lie that I see being spread by many that have condemned our decision to homeschool.

That lie is this:

“Public schools are neutral. By homeschooling, you’re only exposing your child to one side.”

This is a grossly evil lie.

In fact, the opposite is happening.

Schools are not neutral institutions simply because they are publicly funded; every school day has a limited number of hours, and every lesson taught means another lesson isn’t.

There is a finite amount of time in school, everyone understands this, which means priorities matter.

Every hour spent discussing political activism is an hour that isn’t spent on reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, or civics.

So when schools increasingly prioritize activism, identity politics, or current political causes... something else inevitably gets pushed aside.

Guess what? That’s not neutrality, that’s a choice.

What so many parents continue to discover is that their child comes home with a head full of ideas about the world that are purely one-sided because that's all there was time for.

Nuance is lost because nuance is time-consuming.

Is there TIME for nuance when half the class cannot speak English and you're speaking into a translator?

Of course not.

A child who can chant but cannot argue the other side hasn't been educated, they've been conditioned and the conditioners always, ALWAYS believe they're doing the child a kindness.

3) I'm fairly confident that today's school system is not designed for boys at all, it's purely designed for girls.

I'll give an example.

One of the schools in my area noticed that boys were throwing pine-cones (calling them grenades) and playing with sticks (calling them guns and swords).

This made the girls in the class uncomfortable.

So the school banned the boys from playing with sticks or pinecones outside, saying that the boys were playing "violent games" and should stop.

One group's nature (the girls) became the rule.

The other group's nature (the boys) became an problem... and once you see it, you see it everywhere.

Classrooms rewards staying still, staying quiet, non-aggression, obedience.

So ask yourself honestly... if you designed an institution that graded children partly on their ability to sit motionless for six hours, who would you expect to win?

Girls, of course.

Boys "get into trouble" FAR more often than girls, and the "offenses" are things like being too aggressive, not staying in line, fidgeting, or being "defiant" for staying buried in a book instead of the worksheet.

The punishment schools reach for first is often to take AWAY recess, which is literally the physical release every study says he needs, as the penalty for needing it!

At my table, he can stand up when he needs to move. He can go deep on the thing that lights him up instead of being dragged off it. He can build his imaginary armies.

He can be exactly the boy he is and have that be an ASSET instead of someone saying that's a problem.

4) No teacher, no matter how gifted, no matter how well-meaning, walks into that classroom knowing my son the way we know him, and no one ever will.

The single most important qualification for teaching a child isn't a degree or a curriculum or a district budget..

...it's just how much do you actually care whether this SPECIFIC kid makes it?

How far would you go for him?
How late would you stay for him?
How many times would you explain it again and again?
How completely would you refuse to give up on him?

And on that measure, the whole world loses to his mother (who will be homeschooling him), it's not even close.

Nobody on earth will ever love him more than she does.

Nobody will study him, root for him, ache for him, and delight in him the way she does every ordinary day.

There has never been anyone on this earth more qualified to raise my son than the woman whose love for him knows no depths and has no end.

Hope that helps clarify a few things.