• A.A.R.P. with SCOTUS

    This is just sitting there, waiting for the Justices to give an opinion. This is a motion for terrorists being removed under the Alien Enemies Act to be paused.

    The legal argument is that the terrorists haven’t been given enough warning to petition for a hearing. The argument also includes statements that the warnings are only printed in English, so the terrorists don’t know what is being put in front of them.

    This is mostly a nothingburger. I suspect the Supreme Court will let the Fifth Circuit do something then will say, yes, what they said.

    Trolling Garcia

    The amount of world-class trolling going on makes my heart sing. The RNC is offering to pay Democrats to fly down to El Salvador to attempt to see Garcia.

    There is a question of the Login Act, but all in all, this seems to be a gift that just keeps on giving.

    His wife has taken to posting all images of herself with her wife-beating husband, with cute hearts over his tattoos. It doesn’t matter, the images are already out there.

    Ally is reporting that even some of her leftist friends are starting to get a clue about this.

    It Is Always A Surprise

    I ordered a small fiber switch (L2) from somebody in China. It arrived. What I was expecting was a box around 1U high, 6 inches wide, and 4 inches deep along with a 12v wall wart.

    What I got is 1U high, 9 inches wide (have rack), and 4 inches deep. It has an internal power supply and uses a standard three prong power cord for 110v AC feed.

    I’ve not tested it yet. If it handles jumbo packets, this is a going to be a winner for me.

    Oh, it showed up with this cute power cord. Standard female at one end, to plug into the box, and the other end had two round prongs with the third prong removed/missing. I think that what I am seeing is a British style power cord.

    Fun with CSS

    Every time I start working with CSS, I end up frustrated. Why? Because I’m generally starting with somebody else’s base and I need to modify things.

    In this case, I needed to make the logo a little larger. Look it up in the debugger. Add a new class, modify the height, no change. Turns out that somebody was taking advantage of SCCS and so had created a more specific selector of .header .logo img which was firing instead of my .trog-logo

    Used the correct selector, things got much better.

    Also JavaScript

    JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, jQuery-ui, custom.css, main.css, bootstrap.css, oh my.

    Everything is magic when significantly complex. Don’t breathe hard, it will break.

    Question of the Week

    What is the most ludicrous thing you’ve heard somebody on the left say this week?

    And on the right?

            

  • These things round between $40 and $90. They weigh about a pound. This is in Rock Maple. I have one in some exotic wood I purchased years ago.

    Yesterday I started my third. Why three?

    Well, it is much more likely that I will have more than three.

    This simple wood turning is a great way to turn small logs into wood chips. In doing so, I’m learning how to do wood turning.

    I’ve watched a half dozen videos on how to use a skew to rapidly turn a rough piece round. Most of what I’ve accomplished is catches and ouches.

    A catch is when the chisel catches in the wood and the chisel has a great deal of force applied, rapidly. If you are holding the chisel correctly, with a light controlling grip, nothing bad happens. It is scary, loud, and your chisel will move.

    If you have a death grip on the chisel, it is much worse. In that case, you can throw the wood out of the lathe, you can have a piece of wood ripped out of the work, and you can feel the jolt to the bottom of your soul.

    The tool I would like to learn is the skew chisel. This is a straight chisel, no curve, 1/2″ to 1.5″ wide and about 1/4″ thick. It is sharpened on both sides to an edge.

    I’ve watched a few videos on how to do this right. And I’ve been failing.

    Yesterday I made some real progress. The first thing I learned is that the speed at which you advance the chisel is dependent on the surface speed of the work.

    My lathe is a light weight, only a hundred or hundred fifty pounds. If the work is out of balance, it will vibrate the entire lathe. You fix this by slowing the lathe down.

    The slower it turns, the lower the surface speed. This means that when doing a pealing cut, you have to slowly work inward because you have an interrupted cut. If you advance too quickly, when the high spot comes around at speed, you will be cutting too deeply, which is a type of catch.

    It just takes time to get most of the high spots worked down enough that you can turn up the speed. I’m still running it to slowly.

    So I’m slowly turning this rough-cut log into something of value to me, and learning skills as well. I’m doing ok with the peeling cut — now. I’m also doing better on the shearing cut.

    The thing about the shearing cut is that it leaves a nearly finished surface. It only takes a very light touch up with the sand paper to take it to a finished product.

    Now to take this skill to the treadle lathe at The Fort.

            

  • Sorry for posting so late, lately. It’s almost fair season, and I’m having a minor procedure done on my foot tomorrow, so I’ve been going crazy getting things ready. With any luck at all, after tomorrow I might be able to heal up and start to wear shoes again. Oy.

    The Left is going nuts over the knuckle pic posted of Garcia by Trump. Because Trump had his people label the tats with “MS13” so people understood, the Left is now saying that the “MS13” is photo shopped. Um. Yeah. Like, Trump had the letters and numbers put there. The Left is NOT saying the tats are fake. Just the numbers. You can’t make this shit up.

    I’ve seen a number of articles and videos talking about how American citizens have been “wrongly detained” in the immigration crackdown. Of course, if you read through, you find out that they were pulled aside, had their documentation verified, and then released. Sometimes, if it was busy, it took a few hours. Yes, that sucks. No, I don’t like it. But yes, right now it’s going to happen to anyone who looks like they don’t belong in America. Please note, that doesn’t mean a different skin color. It means people who don’t speak English, people who seem to want to destroy American culture, etc.

    Still, I firmly believe in what Heinlein wrote:

    “When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.” — Robert A. Heinlein, from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

    It sounds like China is about to give in with regards to Trump’s tariffs. Some 50 other countries have already caved. The Left is still melting down over how horrible it is that we’re trying to force other countries to pay more to sell things here in America, and how Americans will suffer. I’ve become rather unpopular for presenting the (admittedly VERY Leftist, imo) view that if you Buy Local [tm], you avoid tariffs altogether. Aren’t we all supposed to be buying local? *I* buy local, don’t you? That usually leaves them confused and unable to respond.

    I admit to being concerned over Trump pushing AI into schools. I’d like to see LESS electronics in schools. Let’s face it, AI used incorrectly is basically just theft. It takes an inherently ethical person to use it without stealing from others surreptitiously. I really don’t think we can expect elementary or high school kids to have that kind of responsibility. At this point, teachers are having to work their asses off to find out which essays come from AI and which are actually written by the students. It was bad enough when the parents were doing the homework, but now it’s Siri and ChatGPT, and teachers can’t always tell because AI is better at it than the parents were. I’d like to know more about what kind of AI Trump wants in our schools, because based on what I’ve read in mainstream media, I’m concerned.

    And of course there’s still the overarching panic over making the government smaller. It’s amazing how many Dems seem to be down on trades people, negative about buying local, and pissed off to have more control at local levels. TDS is still in full bloom.

    On the other hand, I’ve seen more and more people on the Left questioning their own folks. Of course, they immediately get tossed out of the party, which leaves them floundering. I offer cookies and a place to catch their breath. I’m unhappy that the Left has no leadership and no direction right now. This country works best with a two party system, and while I’d support the idea of MORE parties, I definitely don’t want one party, and that seems like where we’re headed.

    Alright, time for bed. I’ll try and write something for Friday, but if I don’t, forgive me. 😉

            

  • I’m saddened when I read the blog of somebody I respect, I’m looking at you Divemedic, gets it wrong because it is everywhere.

    The inferior district court judge has claimed (lied) that the Supreme Court agreed with him and that the Government had to “Facilitate the return of Abrego-Garcia”. The Supreme Court did not say this.

    The Supreme Court used polite court speak to slap this inferior court judge around the block. The judge then decided to take a victory lap because he refused to read the Supreme Court’s ruling correctly.

    What does that “polite court speak” require? First, it requires that you respect all parties. Second, it requires you to treat all statements by the lawyers as being truthful. And it requires that you treat any willful error by the inferior courts as being honest mistakes.

    The District Court judge ordered the United States Executive Branch (Article II) to “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Abrego-Garcia. The judge was ordering the government to put Abrego-Garcia in his courtroom.

    Under the standard legal dictionary meaning, facilitate means “get out of the way, do what you can do to help get this done.” “Effectuate” means “get it fucking done.”

    The inferior court judge cannot order the Article II branch of the government to “effectuate” the return of Abrego-Garcia because the US Government does not have control of Abrego-Garcia.

    Thus, the “effectuate” becomes an order to the government to start a war or otherwise do diplomatic things at the whim of the court.

    Instead of saying, “You are a fucking arrogant worm. What the hell did you think you were doing when you ordered the Article II branch to do things? You are a co-equal branch, you don’t get to determine US policy, that is the job of the Article II branch.” Instead, the Supreme Court said, “We know you couldn’t have meant what you said, so you must clarify what you meant by ‘effectuate’.”

    Sort of like when a little guy is starting to square up against a bigger dude and says something nasty.

    Little dude, “Your mother wears army boots!”

    Big dude, “I think I misunderstood you, you didn’t say my mom wears army boots, did you?”

    This particular rogue judge decided to misunderstand. According to the documents that were available to me when I researched this article, the district court judge has not clarified what he meant by “effectuate”.

    Instead, he has lied and changed “facilitate” to “effectuate” by claiming the Supreme Court said that the Article II branch must “facilitate the return of Abrego-Garcia”. Nowhere did the Supreme Court say that.

    The Supreme Court told the government they had to talk to the judge and provide him with what information the government felt was acceptable to share.

            

  • I have always loved this song. I first heard it some 20 odd years ago, and it has stuck with me ever since. There’s a specific verse that comes to mind once in a while, when I’m feeling down or bad or wrong…

    Now, depression’s not a million laughs
    But suicide’s too dang’rous
    Don’t go leapin’ out of buildin’s
    In the middle of the night
    It’s not the fall but landin’
    That’ll alter social standin’
    So go first and ask your father
    And I’m sure he’ll set you right

    I miss my father. I was always a daddy’s girl when I was young, and even as an adult, it was dad that I wanted to spend time with. My mother was an abusive cunt, and I had little interest in anything to do with her, and we’ll leave it at that. Dad made a hard choice, some years ago, when he chose to stick by his wife and to let go of his daughter. I barely talked to him the past 20 years, and he died a couple of years ago. It hit me funny. Until that schism, I could have gone to him with anything, and he would have shared good advice. I miss that.

    Anyhow, this isn’t political, it was just… introspective. I hope you enjoyed.

            

  • I went to the Fort last weekend and I made an amazing pie. Cheshire Pie is one of the recipes shared by Hannah Glasse in her cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. The original recipe:

     

    As you can see, it’s fairly sparse with its directions, which is a common theme among recipes prior to the early 1900s. One of the things I do is “redact” or recreate recipes from earlier times. I do this using my own skills as a cook, and it pleases me to no end when I find a great combination. This is one of those times, though I  can’t take the credit. I went to the class to learn how to make a good pie crust (and succeeded: that’s my actual pie in the header image), and learned the recipe along the way.

    For the pastry, I don’t have an exact recipe. I was taught to measure by feel, because your crust turns out much nicer. As this was my first successful crust, I have to say I agree it works. 😉 Basically, you can either purchase a pie shell (you’ll need a top and bottom), or you can use your own recipe. Or you can try this one, which I’ll describe as best I can.

    First, take about 3 cups of good flour. We used a mix of all purpose, white, and bread flour (and no, I didn’t get ratios, so I’ll have to try it on my own), and put it into a large bowl. A pinch of baking powder was added in, and then we added “a bit” of Crisco vegetable shortening (you can also use butter or lard, but I’ve never had success with either and had GREAT success with Crisco, so I’m sticking to it), about a cup or so. Just plop it into the flour. Then, slowly use your fingers to rub the flour and fat together. You don’t want to handle the fat too much or it will melt, so you kind of scoop up a handful of shortening and flour and then rub gently but briskly between your thumb and across all your other fingers. It helps if you keep your elbows tight to your body while doing this. You continue doing this until all the fat is mixed in evenly to the flour. It will start to make little “peas” or look like coarse cornmeal. Add a bit more Crisco and keep doing it until the bits of dough are about pea sized. It took me about 20 minutes to do this by hand. At home, I think I’ll use my pastry cutter to do the early part, and just switch to hand mixing at the very end, which should cut the time down quite a bit. Two knives may also work, but I’d say that handling it at the end is important.

    (more…)

            
  • In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order. I refused to join the Court’s order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate.

    Both the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law. The Executive must proceed under the terms of our order in Trump v. J. G. G., 604 U. S. ___ (2025) (per curiam), and this Court should follow established procedures.
    — 604 U.S. ____ (2025), Alito, J. dissenting. Thomas, J joining

    )

    A.A.R.P. are the initials of one of the plaintiffs. They are currently proceeding as John Does. This is the same with Trump vs. J.G.G., where J.G.G. are the initials of one of the plaintiffs in the inferior district court.

    When Alito and Thomas are on the same side of an issue, your best bet on what is correct is to be on their side. Yes, I know I’ve been on the opposite side from them a couple of times. I lost my bet.

    This case is moving rapidly, the Solicitor General had filed his response shortly after Alito published his dissent. This is “fast” in court terms.

    To start, this Court is “a court of review, not first view.” Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U. S. 709, 718, n. 7 (2005). Yet the application insists on judicial review in reverse. It calls for this Court to be the first to resolve due-process challenges to the adequacy of notice that designated enemy aliens receive, on behalf of a putative class that no court below has certified, on a nonexistent record. As the Fifth Circuit observed last night, appellate courts should not address those questions unless and until the district court is given a reasonable opportunity to rule. App., infra, 2a. Yet applicants gave the district court a mere 42 minutes’ notice before divesting it of jurisdiction by filing a notice of appeal claiming constructive denial of relief. Under these highly irregular circumstances, applicants can hardly establish a clear and indisputable entitlement to the extraordinary relief they seek. The application should be denied on that basis alone.

    — Respondents’ Opposition to Emergency Application. 24A1007

    Here we see the Solicitor General say much the same as Alito, with facts involved. Alito also stated in his dissent that the Supreme Court had spoken with the Fifth Circuit and knew that a decision was forthcoming from the Circuit shortly.

    Nothing will happen today. The plaintiffs, (illegal aliens), will file a reply to the response. We might see some amicus briefs, but nothing is going to happen. The Court will have time to reflect and read the briefs.

    We might hear something on Tuesday, but I don’t expect a response until laster in the week. The Supreme Court has given themselves time to move deliberately while instructing the parties to move rapidly.

            

  • This has been a tradition at our house for the last 12+ years. I was roped into doing the Easter Egg Hunt for my kids.

    Easter Sunday, my wife tells me she’s going to be gone with the kids to church for a period of time, I’m to make an Easter egg hunt for the kids before they get home.

    I did. Then played dumb when they came in asking about the eggs they could see. I think that was the year of the jelly bean rabbet poop.

    Things became more elaborate over time. Once I remember clearly was the Easter where there was still snow on the ground. I used a sliding pitch to place eggs in places with no footprints. That cemented the belief that it was the Easter Bunny and not dad hiding the eggs.

    By the time they were teens, the hunt had become something more. The first big hunt was about 100 eggs in the forest behind the house. This is not a “search to find eggs”, this is a challenge to find the next egg.

    Each egg is carefully placed to be visible from the last egg found. Lose the track, you’ve lost the remaining eggs. In general, the eggs were placed in easy to see locations, IFF you were standing where the last egg was found.

    Last year, there was a swarm of 9 teenagers on the hunt. My son bought a handful of cheap orange cones, to be able to mark found eggs so they could go back.

    This hunt was different, there were written clues with either compass direction, distance, or both. This meant that they might not be able to see the next egg from the current egg.

    Of course, they beat that. They used swarm tactics. The 9 of them just moved out in all directions, searching for the next egg.

    3 hours to plant the eggs, 1.5 hours for them to complete the search.

    Tonight I’m sore. I walked about 3 miles placing eggs. Then another mile or two while helping them get back on track. It took them over four hours to finish the hunt. And that was with a rescue from dad.

    It appears that they lost the track, they attempted a swarm, picked up a part of the tail of the track, cleared those eggs, recovered the forward track.

    What this meant was that when they got near the end, there were no eggs in sight to follow because they had already picked up those eggs.

    From the egg count, they missed around 8 of the 100+ that were placed. There were a total of 201 eggs in the hunt.

    10 went to a littles hunt for the 4yo across the street. The next 100 to 150 were hidden in the forest.

    To give some idea, we located three eggs from last year when placing eggs this year.

    The kids had another failure, I had placed 10 eggs on the ground, carefully laid out in an arrow pointing in the direction they needed to go. They got to the “cluster of eggs” and just picked them up.

    The arrow was there because the next egg was not visible from the location of the arrow. Plus, that direction had a heavy thicket full of fallen trees. They should have had somebody maintain that point and sent others around the obstacle until they were in the right location.

    I had fun, I’m sore, my legs hurt. I’m already planning next year.

    Oh, I received permission to place booby-traps next year. This will be fun.

            

  • I am actually good at this computer stuff. It is what I do. So I get frustrated when I order hardware and it doesn’t work.

    A month ago, I ordered a Mini-ITX board. It was cheap, and it wasn’t 17×17 cm, it was 17x19cm. Which didn’t fit in the case. The low profile CPU cooler/fan I ordered was too tall, so I needed to get a shorter unit. It just wasn’t worth the fight.

    I ordered a new Mini-ITX board. This was supposed to be the right size. Not only was it the wrong size, it only had 3 SATA ports, not the 4 on the board I ordered.

    That was taken care of with still another motherboard purchase. This time all was good. And amazingly, I didn’t have to wait 2 weeks for the board to get here from China.

    Everything is installed, I install the PCI SFP+ NIC, it won’t power up. I don’t know if the card is bad but I replaced the card and that machine is now in production.

    Switches are the next big issue. I gave up trying to find a cheap switch, I ordered a new switch, the same as the last I purchased. It should just work.

    This switch is an 8 port SFP+ unit, similar to the one in the featured image. It is powered by a 12v DC wall wart.

    What arrived was a plastic box with 8 RJ45 connectors. Similar switches can be found on Amazon for under $8. To make it pass the Amazon inspectors, they threw in a free USB-A to USB-C connector. That was returned and a refund was issued.

    So I ordered another L3 switch. It arrived in short order. When I powered it up, the power light came on. Then the SYS light started blinking.

    Read the manual. Green blinken SYS light means the unit is starting up. Figure that it might be that the unit isn’t fully configured. No problem, I connected it to the network.

    Still the blinken light. I scan the network where the device is supposed to be. No response.

    Well, the instructions don’t mention the “console” port on the unit (missing from the image because they used the wrong image on the Amazon listing). I ordered a generic console cable to watch the boot sequence, maybe I can spot what went wrong.

    What went wrong? Nothing.

    The unit is working exactly as it should. I’ve configured it, ready to go into production. The documentation is wrong about what the green blinken light means.

    Frustration with hardware, yet this time it is working correctly.

    Once this device is in place, every machine, but one, will have at least on 10Gbit fiber link to the main back plain network. Every machine will have a connection to the management network.

    As a side effect, it means that each data closet will have at least two fibers into the closet for redundant backup links.

    Oh, this also means I can consider using bonded links to get 20G bit transfer rates. That will be cool.

            

  • Big news early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court “ordered Trump administration not to deport Venezuelans under Alien Enemies Act for now” — NPC News.

    Or did they?

    There is before the Court an application on behalf of a putative class of detainees seeking an injunction against their removal under the Alien Enemies Act. The matter is currently pending before the Fifth Circuit. Upon action by the Fifth Circuit, the Solicitor General is invited to file a response to the application before this Court as soon as possible. The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court. See 28 U. S. C. §1651(a).

    Justice Thomas and Justice Alito dissent from the Court’s order. Statement from Justice Alito to follow.
    — Order in Pending Case 24A1007

    Yep, they did. But there are interesting things happening in this short order.

    First, it was issued at in the early morning of Saturday. Second, the Solicitor General is invited to file a response ASAP. Not on a particular date and time, but now.

    In A.A.R.P. v. Donald J. Trump, in his official capacity 25-CV-00059 N.D.TX., the district court judge found for the administration and did not grant the TRO nor the Preliminary Injunction.

    They appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court, A.A.R.P. v. Trump, 25-10534, (5th Cir.). The Fifth Circuit denied the appeal because the case is at the TRO stage, and TROs cannot be appealed. Where have we heard this before?

    What we are likely to see is the statements by Alito and Thomas in the coming days. From there, they will wait for the Solicitor General of the United States to file a response, so they have both sides of the argument, briefed.

    At that point, they will likely say, “This is in an interlocutory state, we aren’t going to interfere.”