Third Circut Court Win
Judge Jennifer Mascott now sits on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. This means that the Third is no longer an agenda-driven leftist playground.
She was confirmed last Week, Trump signed her appointment early this week, and she was sworn in on the evening of the 14th or the morning of the 15th.
And the first case she heard was as a member of the en banc panel, Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs I v. Attorney General New Jersey, 24-2415 (3rd Cir.) This is an Assault Weapons Ban and a Large Capacity Magazine Ban (propaganda terms).
The court was 9-7 last week and is 10-7 this week. This means that it takes to Republican appointed judges to slide over to the dark side to lose this case en banc.
This is a case that is fully briefed; it has been decided at the trial (district) court level the 3-judge merits panel and has now been heard en banc by the Third Circuit.
My guess is that The People will win. The state will decline to appeal. If they were to appeal, it has all the right characteristics to be granted cert. It is fully developed; it will be the cause of a circuit split; it is a ban case that the Justices have said they want to hear.
Rogue Inferior Court Judges
In another set of rulings from rogue judges, a judge in California has decided that Trump can’t fire federal employees until she approves.
The magic is that Trump couldn’t fire people who had been funded by Congress. When the funding ran out, he can fire them. So he did.
Another rogue judge has decided that he gets to decide if Trump can deploy the National Guard. He thinks the opinion of a local police chief holds more weight than the Article II executive, which was granted that power by the Constitution.
Still another Judge ordered the fence protecting the ICE facility in Chicago removed. It was blocking the road, according to the court. ICE declared one side of the building a “no protest zone” so of course that is where they are protesting, screaming about the 1st Amendment (that screaming statement is my guess, not verified).
Home Owner Tribulations
Very little demo involved. If you want demolition pictures, go read Miggy’s Substack.
Our plumbing is the result of additions being added and then new pipes being put in place. At one time the owners of our house ran a daycare facility. One of the reasons our doors open out and not in.
Part of the requirement was to add another bathroom. The floor of that part of the house is nearly two feet lower than the rest of the house.
As they say in the plumbing business, shit flows downhill. Except that the output of the toilet was only 6 inches above the outlet to the sewer system on the other side of the basement. This did not allow for enough slope to carry that shit downhill.
The answer is simple: a pooper shooter. This is a sump with a garbage/ejector pump. The output of that bathroom flows downhill into the sealed sump. When the solid/fluid level gets high enough, the pump fires up. This ejects the contents, violently, up a 2 in PVC pipe into the joists and across the basement to flow down into the sewer system.
Great system, works great. Until the pump fails. That was a $2.5k replacement. The entire system had to be cut out and a new one put in place.
That was 4 or 5 years ago. The next problem we were having is that the output from the kitchen sink was going through copper pipes across the basement one way and then the other to get out to the sewer. Food particles and grease were building up in those pipes and making me flush those pipes every four or five months.
The fix? We had the plumber reroute the sink to the pooper shooter. No problem. Until…
Somebody was pouring grease down the sink. This would flow into the pooper shooter, and it slowly built up a dam around the pump. Then it sealed off the pump inlet.
This allowed the sump to overflow. Yes, it was a gross as you think it was, and it smelled worse than you think.
My son and I spent a less than pleasant day opening each cleanout and making sure there were no blockages. In the end we got a plumber in who emptied the sump, cleaned it out, and made it all good. We called the plumber because the installers had not put the proper joints to allow us to remove the lid of the sump to do the cleanout ourselves.
See above about total replacement.
Which leads us to today’s unpleasantness.
If you remember, my son and I removed every cleanout to do what we could. We put them back. We got them on tight. We thought.
For the last two years we’ve been chasing a “bad smell” It wasn’t all the time. It was only part of the time. We checked for dead animals in the crawl spaces. We checked to make sure the pooper shooter was still shooting. We couldn’t find where the smell was coming from.
I had isolated it to wet weather. I was thinking the vent pipe might be to low. But before I invested in that. I did another check in the basement.
There was a mound of dirt below the last cleanout before the sewer. It was a little damp.
As I was looking at it, a drop of water fell from the cleanout onto the pile.
Our basement gets wet when it rains hard.
During the dry seasons, that drop is slow enough that it dries before the next drop lands. In the wet seasons, it doesn’t.
We had a shit pile in the basement, built from a single drop of water carrying small amounts of solid waste.
And I can’t get the damn cleanout open to clean the threads and reseal it correctly. That’s today’s fun project.
Oh, I love being a home owner.
Holsters
My new holster system from “We The People Holsters” arrived this week. I’ll be at the range testing it out tomorrow. It feels good. It looks good. My only issue is that it doesn’t come standard with the pad to protect my delicate skin.
If you are looking for holsters, they might be worth looking at.
(Of course you are looking for a better holster)
Mantis Laser Academy
This Mantis system uses the laser insert to spot where your shot goes. The the targets are self identifying. There are multiple games that can be done with the different targets.
Push stick, app, laser, and targets all get a giant thumbs up.
The phone holding tripod and phone holder, not so much. My phone in its OtterBox case didn’t fit. Luckily, I have real camera tripods and real phone holders.
The little I did was helpful. I’ll do more when I have a bit of time and now that I have a holster.
Hello, My name is Chris, and I’m a (sugar) addict
My wife’s birthday was recently. She ended up with many pies, which was an acceptable day off the diet. We like our food way too much, and I eat too much if given the chance.
I’ve lost nearly 20 pounds since I went on this diet. Not enough, but a start.
What I can’t do is walk by those sugar things without taking a piece. A cookie, a slice of pie, a slice of cake. I don’t even like the flavor. It leaves my mouth tasting bad. And I feel, mentally, horrible after I do.
Yet I still do it. I can walk past a sugar thing 10, 20 times and leave it. But at some point I give in and eat that sugar thing.
The only thing I don’t do is buy those sugar things and stash them. It isn’t that I crave them so badly that it overcomes my innate laziness; it is that I have difficulty not eating those sugar things when they are available.
Question Of The Week
If you have been listening to regular news reporting, what are some of the subtle ways they twist the narrative?
I’m not talking about the outright lies they tell about Trump, or quoting out of context. There is nothing subtle about that.
It things like the straight reporting that Trump had authorized the CIA to operate in Venezuela because they had emptied their prisons and sent the prisoners into the US.
The statement, as presented here was neutral. The reporter then followed it with, “President Trump has offered no evidence that Venezuela emptied their prisons into the US.”