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Friday Feedback

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Continuing Resolution

DOGE has its first confirmed kill!

The continuing resolution is the legal device that the government has been using to avoid passing a budget. It has been nearly 30 years since Congress completed all its appropriation bills before the start of the new fiscal year.

The last time a budget was passed was in December 2020.

A continuing resolution is supposed to say, “We are going to keep going at the current rate.”

This was not a continuing resolution. This was a barge of pork barrels. Maybe three or four barges.

The last CR to be passed was around 29 pages. This thing was over 1500.

Elon posted a one sentence message to X with a picture of the printed CR. Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?

People decided to read the bill. And what they found was infuriating. In addition, people took to using Grok, X’s AI to look for pork in the bill.

This caused The People to light up the switchboard in Congress demanding that this monstrosity not be passed.

Not Budget Related

It appears there were items in the CR to limit the ability to investigate the J6 commission. To give Congress critters a $100,000/year raise.

It wasn’t just money pork, it was congress critters trying to save their asses.

Too Many Nerd Postings

I have an issue where I need to get packets from here to there securely. Not only must it be secure, it must be fast. Add to this that there is a network routing issue that needs to be solved for multiple systems, the obvious choice is to move to an overlay network.

The overlay network methodology I picked was OVN.

OVN is well documented, if you want to use a OpenStack or Kubernetes. If you don’t need or want the overhead of OpenStack, then things are more complex.

Why am I avoiding K8S? It is too expensive in the cloud. Using a container-based system just makes more sense, for me.

After spending 10 to 12 hours researching and testing, it is difficult to be interested in the stuff going down in politics or the courts.

I wrote my first article on OVN yesterday. It is published but not yet linked. There will be more.

Court Cases

In 2022, we were anticipating the Supreme Court taking the first Second Amendment challenge since the 2010 McDonald case. The first case we were hoping for was New York Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. New York City.

The city and state of New York worked overtime to moot the case, and succeeded.

The Supreme Court instead took the Bruen case, which resulted in a new landscape of Second Amendment litigation.

It felt much like the giddy times after Heller. You might recall that there was a time, shortly after the Heller decision, when Washington, D.C. was a constitutional carry city. They changed that in a hurry.

The same thing happened after Bruen. A boat load of new cases were opened. We waited to see what would happen when the rogue, inferior, courts got involved.

We found that it was the same shit in a different color. The Seventh Circuit court still thinks they are better than the Supreme Court. The First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Ninth circuit are still playing games to keep unconstitutional laws on the books.

We were hoping that the Supreme Court was going to stomp on those nasty, evil, duplicitous, lying inferior courts. Instead, the Supreme Court kept sending cases back down because they weren’t ripe yet.

Today we are at the same point as we were in 2022. Waiting to see which cases the Supreme Court decides to hear. There are three big ones lined up. My expectation is that they will take all three and consolidate them.

The consolidation will allow them to create a single opinion. This will keep the rogue inferior courts and the state from picking and choosing language from the three different opinions to create confusion.

Question of the Week

When did you hear about the CR? When did you find out it was a pork barrel of non-essential and frankly terrible bills stuffed into a must pass bill?

What is your opinion of Elon’s method of addressing the CR?


Comments

4 responses to “Friday Feedback”

  1. curby Avatar

    congress has had too much freedom for too many years- back room “committee” deals late at night, late at night voting, rct… Elon is a frikjen genius for doing this. We the People are fukkin tired of so called “leaders” doing politics for themselves. this is going to be a fun four years.

  2. Tom from WNY Avatar
    Tom from WNY

    Saw an article on Substack. Please strip out the pork or vote on it line by line!

  3. What is your opinion of Elon’s method of addressing the CR?

    I think there’s a LOT of genius here, on multiple levels.

    Having someone with Elon’s media reach directly involved with the review and audit process; nobody else would have posted a photo of the 1500 page bill on social media. Even if someone in Congress had, they’d reach, what, 10,000 people? Elon has 200 MILLION followers. The outrage this generated among the People that they lit up the Congressional phone lines … that never would have happened without Elon shining the light on the process.

    Congressional happenings used to happen behind closed doors, and for the most part nobody noticed because very few were interested in digging into it … and you HAD to dig into it to learn anything. Elon is increasing awareness of governmental goings-on and bringing that information out from behind the closed doors.

    I truly believe that this level of public exposure to the “pork barrel” process is going to do more for government efficiency than anything else ever could. Congress-critters no longer have the privilege of working in the shadows.

    And all Elon has to do is make a few X posts, which he would have done anyway.

  4. BraulerBob Avatar
    BraulerBob

    I knew this CR was coming since before the election. I always assume any CR laid out shortly before the end of the term or just before a threatened “Government Shutdown” will be a multi thousand page pile of steaming pork barrel BS.
    Lobbyists write these bills. They will use every trick to try to sneak in additional funding for their pet projects and special interests. That’s what they get paid for. The fact that we now have an effective tools for communicating what is contained in these bills (X and Grok) is the key to getting the swamp drained or at least contained. You can pick the bills apart and shine a light on the specific portions that need to be removed.
    The CR went from over 1500 pages to just 120.
    Are there things in there that shouldn’t be? Probably. But its a step in the right direction if a squeaky clean CR is not possible.

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