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Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock lives in Portland, Oregon, but he’s not at all excited about it.

In an interview with Polish website Onet, Brock had some harsh things to say about the city, as Willamette Week points out.

He admits he kind of ended up in Portland out of circumstance, but it’s not really where he’d like to live. He continued: “Portland is weird, but it’s kind of a crappy weird. It is the most vagrant-ridden… it’s really fuckin’ up my liberal mind. I’m just like, what a collection of human turds. Within the one week before I came on this tour, I had to run people out of my house. Twice with axes. Two people died. This is within 300 feet of my house. It’s just a constant shitshow of fights.

“And that’s just Portland keeping itself weird. That’s the saying: Keep Portland weird… It’s a cool city. But a lot of the keeping itself weird is actually just allowing people to be complete pieces of shit. And that’s exhausting.”

You can watch the video and read more here.

Why is Mississippi doing so well?

In 2013, the state passed a reform to require teachers to understand the science of reading (basically, phonics), deploy literacy coaches to schools, identify students struggling to read early and hold back students in third grade who weren’t ready to advance.

Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana have now done much the same, and have also made gains.

The original source of all this was a 2002 reading law in Florida that boosted student achievement in the Sunshine State.

https://nypost.com/2025/09/30/opinion/mississippi-is-no-miracle-its-the-future-of-education/

Meanwhile, Oregon, with some of the highest per-student spending, run for over a decade by a one of the most progressive Democratically controlled state legislatures in both the house and senate, continues to double-down on proven failed teaching methods and suspended all education standards to graduate in order to promote racial equality.

While Oregon is passing increasing numbers of functionally illiterate children on to adulthood, kids in Mississippi can read, and other countries children are doing this:

Recalibrate Portland does a decent job being a voice that calls Portland, and Trump’s, BS what it is. In a radically polarized city that feels it must toe the party line blindly, it’s nice to see someone that apparently doesn’t mind calling out the idiots on any side when they start lying or distorting the truth. That’s something I can get behind.

Change in total nonfarm employment by state, over-the-month and over-the-year, seasonally adjusted.

Local user brrent reviews putting solar panels on his house and gets a good discussion going on the process, pros and cons.

Summary:

1. There are a lot of crummy installers out there with slimy salesman. Out of 6, only 2 even passed the sniff test
2. Total out of pocket cost was $30,925 – but about $20k after rebates.
3. Seriously consider doing this when you need to get a new roof. You don’t want to install and then find you need to rip it up to put down a new roof in 5 years. A roof lasts 30 years and panels last 30 years, so it’s good to have them in sync.
4. Don’t go with any installer that doesn’t use Enphase micro inverters. A micro inverter makes each panel operate independently from the array. Without them, if one panel is shaded, the whole array is impacted.
5. A lot of companies will assume crazy electricity price hikes, I’m assuming 4-5% annual increases, and the companies that felt the most honest also used those figures for their payback period. On that assumption, payback is ~10 years.

Oregon’s education system is now ranked as the 5th worst school system in the country. Continuing a long trend of continued declines and disastrous statistics for failing Oregon schools. This despite decades of complete Democratic party control of the state and school systems that have some of the highest funding per student in the country.

As it turns out, removing requirements to prove basic skills in reading and math hasn’t worked out so well. While Oregon leaders try to do a victory lap because the results are better than they were, the end result has been bad for all students. Ironically, it has been particularly bad for students of color, students that specifically targeted by activist educational policies:

Only 11% of Portland Public School’s Black students scored as proficient in math — akin to getting an A or B grade — the state tests indicated, and only 19% met that level in reading and writing.

And to show just how bad Portland itself is:

Proficiency levels for Black students were roughly twice as high in most of the four surrounding districts… In Beaverton, 35% of Black students hit proficiency goals in reading and writing and 23% in math, followed by Hillsboro at 34% and 25%, Tigard-Tualatin at 33% and 24% and North Clackamas at 29% and 22%.

Sadly, the one thing the teachers union has done is come under increasingly activist leadership. They held strikes that were proved to be without merit, union leadership encouraged pro-Palestinian messages and flags during strike marches, the union publish Pro-Palestinian teaching handbooks for classrooms that encourage students to pray to Allah. All of this has led to numerous lawsuits against the union and schools for being anti-semitic. Add to this fun Portland hosted the 2025 National Educational Conference in which Portland members openly harassed and threatened Jewish attendees from other parts of the country.

Meanwhile, Mississippi has gone from one of the worst schools, to one of the top performers by bringing back tried and true methods of education. They require 2 hours of daily reading from grades 1-4. They separate groups into skill level of reading and provide remedial reading assistance for those struggling. Those who fail – really do fail. It’s a system of accountability and phonics that is leading to dramatic improvements compared to what has been called the ‘soft racism’ of lowering or removing requirements to improve poor statistics.

It seems the Democratic governor has finally agreed and is now forcing science-backed phonics-based approaches instead of activist backed agendas.

Links:

• https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2025/10/portland-public-schools-celebrate-test-score-recovery-but-whos-left-behind.html?outputType=amp
• https://www.koin.com/news/portland/deeply-painful-experience-jewish-educators-allege-antisemitism-at-portland-nea-event/

The study ranks Oregonians, youth and adults, as having the highest prevalence of mental health challenges among residents of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Mental Health America’s newly released 2025 annual report.

Despite complete Democratic party control for over 30 years and spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year – the latest annual report on mental health shows Oregonians have the highest rates of mental health issues in the country. Rates have increased every year for the last 5 years and Oregon has been above national averages since 2015.

How many Oregonians suffer from mental illness? 30% of the adult population.

There’s lots of finger pointing. Many blame normalizing homelessness and living on the streets for people who often struggle with addictions and mental health issues. Others point at attempts to normalize mental health issues and neurodivergence as simply ‘lifestyle choices’.

No matter how you look at it, the decades of policies we have today are clearly failing – and failing worse than anywhere else in the country.