Month: January 2024

B.L.U.F.
A look at the research into the number of guns in America and who owns them. Why the state so desperately wants to shutdown real research into gun ownership and use.
(2800 words)

In 2008, the Supreme Court established the Heller methodology for handling Second Amendment challenges.

The methodology is: Does the proposed conduct implicate the Second Amendment? If so, the burden shifts to the government to establish a history and tradition of analogous arms regulations.

The rogue inferior courts immediately took this to heart. They found that almost all modern-day arms infringements were presumptively unconstitutional. They did this by assuming, without finding. That is to say, the did a “for the sake of argument, we will assume the infringement is unconstitutional”

Once they had made that decision, they then went to a second step, was the government need/want of more importance than the right of the individuals. In other words, was the rape hard enough to be important?

This called “means-end” balancing. The courts would first decide on the level of scrutiny, then they would determine if the state met the level of scrutiny they were using. This meant, that in the rogue courts, The People always lost.

The Heller Court also did a complete analysis of the history and tradition of gun bans in the founding era. They found that there were no analogous regulations. Since the Heller question was regarding a gun ban, that is what they looked at.

They found that there were NO analogous regulations from the founding era. Since there were no such regulations, the modern infringement was unconstitutional.

They expressed this by saying that an arm in common use for lawful purposes could not be banned.

The Supreme Court needed no outside experts, nor did they need briefings on “in common use for lawful purposes.” They used Judicial Notice.

Judicial Notice

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Do you remember the first album/CD you owned? I do.

My father was into woodworking. He made a beautiful stereo cabinet. He made his own speakers. He brought back two reel to reel tape decks from Japan. We had a good turntable and a good receiver.

I grew up listening to music. Listening to good music. I can still remember playing Peter from Peter and the Wolf as it played on the stereo. I remember listening to Peter Pan and other music/stories.

If I wanted to listen, I could put on the good headphones and lay on the living room floor and bliss out.

I never owned my own turntable. The portable versions didn’t sound good to me. If I wanted to listen to albums, I used The Stereo.

One Christmas, I received my own music. A portable cassette tape deck. Along with the tape deck, I was also given two tapes.

and

B.L.U.F.
hh465: I didn’t come to FreeCAD as a novice. I jumped in because I thought my experience in AutoDesk Inventor would just transfer over. It didn’t. On the other hand, I’m very, very pleased with the results. This article is from your prompt. Thank you.

Maybe the write-up below will help you get started, then start looking for YouTube videos about the thing you want to do.

Some of it is just wrapping your mind around different ways of accomplishing the same tasks.
(1400 words, lots of images, two videos)

I have been working in computer graphics since around 1976. My first introduction to “CGI” was in the show The Man From Atlantis. In the show, they had a fancy echo locator/sonar/radar system. You heard this wonderful sound, and then they showed you the visual results.

Those visual results were a standard demo for the Apple II. My parents were amazed by the technology of the TV show. Next time I had an Apple II home, I showed them the demo. It took a bit away.

While at University, I did a little more with computer graphics, but it was mostly just line drawing stuff. We had some Tektronix 4010s. The only reason these were of interest to me was that I recognized the graphics in Battlestar Galactica were generated using Tektronix displays.

After University, I did work at BRL. I was introduced to my Mentor and to CAD. My Mentor ruined CGI for me because suddenly, I could see all the artifacts of CGI in movies and TV shows.

What is CAD? CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. In its simplest form, it is a computer acting as a drafting table.

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Geek dump, run away, run away!

If I was a normal person, much of the software and hardware issues I run into would just go away.

Instead, I invite these disasters on myself.

In a normal business or home, you would have computers for each of your workers. You would have some virtual machines on the cloud.

The work computers would be reasonably fast, have reasonable graphics, reasonable memory, and reasonable amounts of disk space.

The idea is to give your workers the right equipment to get out of their way.

My life isn’t like that. I have multiple virtual servers in multiple states from different providers. All of which need to be monitored.

At the office, my computer has good graphics, unreasonable amounts of memory, very good CPUs, and unreasonable amounts of disk space.

There are two more machines that are powerful enough to be considered “servers”.

Nobody really needs servers in the office space. I do things that make it reasonable to have those servers.

I run multiple virtual machines for testing purposes. Occasionally, it is just easier to toss up a new virtual machine than to try to run it on my standalone servers. I have a cluster of virtual machines running as a K8S cluster. There is a ceph cluster running to provide a distributed multipoint mounting system for those virtual machines.

So I installed Zabbix on a virtual machine. That virtual machine uses a ceph file system. This means that I can migrate that machine to any of my servers that has access to that ceph cluster. Which is very neat.

I had to learn how to write Zabbix templates to add monitoring of Amanda backup sets. Just got that working a week or so ago. And it has already paid off.

As I figured some of this stuff out, I added more and more of my servers and client servers to the monitoring load.

One of the things I added was disk hardware monitoring via ‘SMART’.

S.M.A.R.T. then told me that I had a drive that was running hot. Then it gave me a warning that a drive was failing.

Yesterday that drive failed. That drive failure affected my ceph cluster. Now, I found this out when I got alarms from Zabbix.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to fix my technical drawings. I was using the latest, greatest, version of FreeCAD. I was running it from a “snap”. Turns out that snaps run in a confinement. This means that I couldn’t get it to run any outside programs that were not approved. That was two+ days chasing my tail.

This caused me to revert to the stable release of FreeCAD. Which reset all of my settings. Which added hours to redoing parts of my blueprint.

FreeCAD can record a frame for each step change in a variable. That’s cool. I’ve made a couple of short animations using it. But what I really want to do is to have it send each step to a ray tracer. Which I’ve not figured out how to do yet.

So it is now 0115, I have almost recovered from the bad drive issue. I’m just waiting a bit longer to be able to reboot that server and take the drive out. I can’t do that yet because ceph wants that server to be up for a bit longer.

If I get very very lucky, I’ll be done with this shortly.

(750 words)
The state of Texas, as well as many other states, are tired of being over run by illegal aliens. Having begged the federal government to do their job, Texas and Arizona have had enough and have stepped up to do the job of Customs and Border Patrol.

Texas initiated Operation Lone Star after the Governor declared a border security disaster, in 2021.

One of the initiatives was buying and placing concertina wire fencing on the US side of the border on private (and state?) lands. Not federal land. Texas received the permission of the landowners before placing the fencing.

This created conflict between the Customs and Border Patrol and the State of Texas.

8 U.S.C. §1357(a)(3) gives access to private land within 25 miles of the border, without warrant, to the feds. 8 U.S.C. §1357(a)(1)-(2) allows for the interrogation and arrest of anybody attempting to enter in violation of law. 8 U.S.C. §1226(a) allows them to arrest and detain noncitizens pending a removal decision.

NOTE: The previous paragraph is paraphrased from DHS filings and should not be trusted as a true representation of those sections of 8 U.S.C.

Now we get to the legal fictions and the realities of the world.

Legally, Border Patrol agents have the legal right to arrest illegal aliens as they cross the border illegally. The state of Texas and its people cannot stop the Border Patrol from doing this.

The legal fiction is that Texas was stopping the Border Patrol from doing its job by putting up these barriers, keeping the Border Patrol away from the illegal aliens.

Nobody would have an issue if that was the case, the Border Patrol could arrest and detain those illegal aliens until they are kicked out of the country.

The reality on the ground was different from the legal fiction. On the ground, C&BP were cutting the wire and allowing illegal aliens to enter and NOT arresting or detaining those that they let through.

As part of the legal fiction, they might load those illegal aliens into transport, take them to the bus terminal and release them. They were “detained” for the duration of the bus trip.

We saw videos of C&BP using a fork lift to lift the wire so that illegal aliens could walk through the wire.

Texas filed suit in federal court, STATE OF TEXAS v. US Department of Homeland Security, 2:23-cv-00055, (W.D. Tex.). The suit asks the courts to enjoin the federal government from cutting, destroying or removing the border fence/wire that Texas had installed.

Texas lost. There are 34 pages of excellent analysis and history by the judge who says “The feds are full of it. What they claim and what they are doing are not the same. Texas has good reason for what they are doing.”

The judge then respected the law. I don’t like the decision, but reading his reasons, it is clear why he did. The Judge applied the Winter factors and found that the plaintiffs (Texas) did not reach the bar in “likelihood of success”.

That is to say, the state of Texas was unable to show, at the preliminary stage, that they were likely to succeed on the merits.

This did not mean that Texas had lost, just that the court wasn’t going to issue that preliminary injunction. Given that they had issued a TRO, this indicates that the Judge is doing it correctly.

Texas then appealed to the Fifth Circuit court. There, the Fifth circuit did issue the preliminary injunction pending final judgement. This means that enough of the panel believed that the State was going to succeed on the merits.

DHS then appealed to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket, requesting that the injunction be vacated. The Supreme Court vacated the injunction.

So what does this mean?

It means that the feds can go back to cutting fences.

That’s it.

Nobody is violating the Supreme Court’s ruling.

There is no constitutional crisis.

Texas can put up more barriers. They can lock gates, they can keep the BP away from their fence.

This case is in an interlocutory state. That means it isn’t finished yet. It will now proceed to a final judgement, on the merits.

We already know that whatever happens, it will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit. We already know that it will be appealed from the Fifth Circuit to the Supreme Court.

That is the decision we need to wait for.

If you look, there are several YouTube channels that are discussing Thursday’s oral arguments in front of the Ninth Circuit. The tea leaves suggest that the three judge panel will not issue their opinion until after the en banc issues their opinion on Duncan v. Bonta. The panel did not ask questions that make you feel like The People will win this case.

I am continuing to work on the Casinator

Mostly my issue has been in learning something about drafting. Stupid things like how to layout dimension lines. What the correct size is. How to do hole callouts.

Many things. And don’t get started on GT&D. That is a nightmare but useful.

I recently started using a “highlighter” on quotes. Is that helpful to you?

Here’s hoping you all have a great weekend.

B.L.U.F.
Another explainer about the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. More references, more better. Mexico and the blood vultures are so eager to find their way around the PLCAA.
(2000 words)

No, they got away with it because the Connecticut Supreme Court didn’t want to follow the constitution nor congress.

15 U.S.C. §7903: The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act

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B.L.U.F.
Mexico sued S&W and other manufacturers. They claim that but for those evil gun makers, the cartels would not have guns.

The district court said, “PLCAA applies. Get the out of my courtroom”.

Mexico appealed, the First Circuit says the case can go on. The price of your firearms just went up, again.
(1400 words)

The first pages of the opinion issued by the First Circuit court tell us that The People have lost another round. It takes nearly 30 pages to find out why, though.

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) was put in place by a bipartisan congress to stop those anti-gunners that were filing nuisance suits against entities in the firearms’ industry. FFLs and manufacturers, primarily.

Since the PLCAA passed, those same anti-gunners have been trying to find a way around it. On the media front, they make the false claim that “only the gun industry can’t be sued”. This has never been true.

The arms industry is the only industry where people attempt to hold the manufacturer responsible for the acts of a third party. The standard example would be a wife suing Ford because her husband was killed by a drunk driver driving a Ford F-150.

Or worse, suing because her husband was that drunk driver and was killed in a traffic incident which he caused.

It doesn’t make sense. The argument is based on two shaky, and false, foundations: 1) There is no need for guns, 2) If they didn’t make guns, nobody would be killed.

I’m reminded of this quote:

Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.”

[Six Questions for Slavoj Žižek, Harper’s Magazine, November 11, 2011]

And I’m not sure those who wish to disarm us are “good people”. They do horrible things, though.
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On Saturday, I found I needed a couple of items. Both were produced in China. I placed my order on Saturday evening, and they showed up yesterday by noon.

In the ’70s, my mother would have all of our gifts for her parents wrapped and boxed and ready to ship by early November. We would go to the Greyhound bus depot to ship them to Wisconsin from wherever we were in the country. In general, we could get packages by the Post Office in a couple of weeks.

In the ’60s, you could send a letter to a mail order location and “allow four to six weeks for delivery”.

Earlier, it took longer. The time it took to transport goods was much longer than people think.

We had stage coaches and riders to carry packages and mail before then.

But if you needed to move goods, the way to do it was by sea.

As a sailor, you would sign aboard. The ship would load with goods. The ship would sail to its destination. There it would put in for repairs. You could sign aboard for the return trip or stay.

In the ’70s, I read Two Years Before the Mast. It tells one such story. From the time Richard Dana left Boston in 1934 to California, it was two years before he returned. He published his memoir in 1840, describing his voyages.

Whenever I hear this song, I am taken back to that voyage in my mind’s eye. Fighting to keep a ship afloat in foul weather.

Or the NSFW version:

B.L.U.F.
Filler. Yapping about medicine and my kids having a tough time after oral surgery.
(550 words)

It has been a long weekend for us, here at the house.

On Friday, the kids finally got in to see the oral surgeon. A few hours later, they no longer had wisdom teeth.

My youngest has been having a hard time of it. They gave them a total of 5 does of Oxy and 600 mg Ibuprofen.

They were able to eat some soup today. The broccoli in it was too hard, so we had to put it in the blender.

My youngest son only had 3 wisdom teeth to remove. He’s been doing much better than his sibling.

I am so proud of him. He got up this morning, decided he wanted scrambled eggs. He made them himself and made extra for his sibling and made sure they ate some protein.

He spent most of the day on his computer playing games with his friends, yelling and laughing. I think he over did it as he looked a bit sore today.

So what is it about modern medicine? Well, first and foremost, it is freaking amazing.

While both kids are sore, there was no pain while their teeth were extracted.

They have antibiotics and pain meds for recovery. The odds of something bad happening is nil.

We saved up the money to cover the parts of the surgery that insurance didn’t cover. It was still something that we could do.

My wife has had 4 knee replacements. We are not bankrupt from medical bills.

I know that there are people who are not as fortunate as us.

On the other hand, I have a hard time with the people who say that they cannot afford health care.

I have a friend who has not had insurance in years. When her appendix burst, it was handled on an emergency basis. They took care of her. They didn’t worry about money until afterward.

When they learned she had no insurance, they got her to the finance people, and they basically paid for that surgery from their uninsured patients fund.

While they were taking pictures of her appendix before starting the surgery, another organ photo bombed the x-rays. The radiologist, with an abundance of caution, said it could be cancer, and she had to have it inspected.

That was another expensive procedure, as they had to take x-rays from the inside. Again, it cost her very little.

Years ago, I watched a show where a couple was trying to live as “poor folk”. The man got a job and the woman stayed at home, I think. She was prone to UTIs. She got a UTI. She knew it was a UTI.

Instead of scheduling an appointment to see a doctor or going to an urgent care clinic, they decided to go to the Emergency room.

They reported that it cost hundreds of dollars just to get antibiotics.

I’ve been there too. A friend without insurance got an infection. $100 at the urgent care clinic and they walked out with a bottle of antibiotics after the doctor reviewed her symptoms.

There are options. Make plans if you need to.

(It was a babble or pictures of ice and snow while telling Miguel that he should be happy he lives in the warm country)