Supreme Court Lessons

There are people who spend a lifetime learning how to predict what the Supreme Court is going to do. The short answer?

They get it wrong almost as often as us amateurs.

There are many moving parts involved with court cases. What is allowed and what is not allowed.

In general, the Court prefers to take cases that are important to the country or which the federal government wants them to take.

There are things that reduce the chances of a case being granted certiorari, the biggest being a case that is still in an interlocutory state. Interlocutory means that the fact finding part of the case has not completed. A final judgment has not been reached and all other means of redress have not been exhausted.

Four justices must vote to grant certiorari. Just because one side or the other has a majority, that might not be enough to get a case seen by the Court.

The question then becomes, what makes a case important to the country, in the eyes of the Court?

One of the big ones is a circuit split. The country is broken into circuits. Each court of appeals handles one circuit.

The famous circuit courts are the Ninth, Seventh, Fifth, and Second. If you want a good court for business law, the Second Circuit is the place to go. They deal with it constantly, being based out of New York City.

The Fifth circuit covers Texas and can be trusted to do the right thing most of the time. The Seventh Circuit is out of Chicago, and there isn’t an infringement they haven’t found constitutional. The Ninth en banc is currently around 250 to 0 for the state and against The People in Second Amendment cases.

To have a circuit split, different circuits must come to different conclusions given the same fact pattern. In this, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 9th Circuits have all been presented the same fact pattern regarding magazine bans and assault weapon bans. They have all agreed that such laws are constitutional.

The Fifth has not issued an opinion on that fact pattern because they don’t have any magazine ban or assault weapon ban challenges.

This means no circuit split.

The next thing the Court seems to be looking at is correcting past errors. We can look at the history of Roe v. Wade and Chevron and a host of other cases where the Supreme Court started walking back their original opinion shortly after it came out.

This happens when the inferior courts decide to apply the new case law in ways the Court did not intend. The Court will then take cases that touch on the original issue to “refine” their opinion. In general, the inferior courts seem to ignore this.

In the end, the Court will issue a new opinion declaring their old opinion revoked, and they will explain why. The Dobbs opinion, overturning Roe v. Way is an example of this. The Court had been limiting the extent of Roe v. Wade for a few decades before Dobbs.

Chief Justice Roberts prefers this incremental approach over more substantive changes.

This takes us to the “important for the country” cases.

Heller was a good example of this. After 8 decades, the Court heard a Second Amendment case. The purpose of the case was to reset the inferior courts.

The holding in Heller was that the Second Amendment was an individual right. In the process, the Court set up the rules on how Second Amendment cases should be adjudicated in the future. They defined almost every word of the Second Amendment, established the “plain text and historical tradition of firearm regulations”, and established the dangerous and unusual test for banning arms.

This last is sometimes stated as “in common use.”

If an arm is in common use for lawful purposes, then it is not unusual. Since an arm can only be banned if it is both “extra” dangerous AND and unusual, this means that an arm in common use cannot be banned.

When we look at Snope it was a slam dunk. Why? Because it was a repeat of Heller. There is nothing new in it.

The Supreme Court knows that repeating a past opinion will not change the inferior courts in a positive way.

To put it differently, if a case is granted certiorari, and then the lower court’s opinion is vacated, and the cases is remanded back to the inferior court to redo in light of some other published opinion and the inferior court reaches the same opinion, doing a full opinion isn’t going to make a difference.

When we were breaking up with a partner family, the other family came to the negotiation table with an offer of $16,000. They explained how they got that number.

I used their numbers to show that $16k wasn’t the correct answer.

The next meeting, they again offered $16k. The justification reason and numbers were different, the result was the same.

Again, I used their numbers to show that $16k wasn’t the correct answer.

The next meeting the offered the same $16k with still another justification and set of numbers.

“Your sister only gave you $16k to buy us out, right?”

“Uhhhhh, yes”

The rogue inferior courts keep coming up with the same answer with the same fact pattern with different justifications, every time. See the Fourth Circuit court’s handling of Bianchi v Brown, now known as Snope.

There are several Second Amendment cases that are currently seeking cert or that will file a petition for a writ of certiorari soon. One of those is Duncan v. Bonta.

This is a magazine ban case. Unlike Ocean State Tactical, this case is not in an interlocutory state. It should be ripe for taking.

I do not believe the Supreme Court will take it. It is not the slam dunk of an arms ban. It has too much extra baggage with it, regarding “is it an arm or is it an accessory.” The Court is more likely to take an arms ban because that is a slam dunk, and they can explain that accessories, such as magazines, are arms under the Second Amendment.

This leaves us some cases regarding the NFA, sensitive places, licensing requirements, and Second Amendment rights following you across state lines.

All of these cases will advance Second Amendment jurisprudence.

It Will Cost

My truck is 15 years old. It has a new frame and the motor appears to be strong.

Unfortunately, after 15 years, it is showing some of its age.

Yesterday I got the bad news: New pads and rotors in the front. New calibers on both sides for the front, new wheel bearings for both sides of the front. Replace brake hose crimp in rear right. Two broken brackets that need to be replaced, and a half dozen other things.

R and R for the wheel bearings is over $700 each.

The local parts store has everything in stock for me to do the break and bearing work. At over $1000 in parts.

Rockauto had all the parts available for $450 with $69 in shipping.

On the 21st I’ll be working on the truck to do all the work I can in the front. The only issue I really see is I might have to replace a short section of hard line.

Who wants to bet it will be raining that day?

Website Design and Coding

Tuesday I arrived at the next step in my museum website project. After three days of frustration, attempting to decide what I wanted to do, I took a step back, went and implemented the shopping cart.

Things just got simple in the backend. Simple in the front end. Just a small bit of coding before I find my next roadblock.

Question of the Week

What preparations are you taking for the “No Kings”, nationwide, mostly peaceful protests? It is taking place tomorrow, June 14th.

The court has issued 40 opinions as of June 7th. We are expecting more before the end of the term later this month.

Two of those cases were Second Amendment cases, around 5%. We had 2 major opinions, for The People, in the 2023 term.

The first major win for The People came in Loper Bright. This started life as a case regarding offshore fishing regulations and inspections. The Commerce Department issued new rules regarding inspections of offshore fishing. The rules required the fishing vessel to provide food and bunk space, as well as to pay the cost of the inspector onboard the vessel.

In short, the boat had to pay to have an inspector living onboard looking over their shoulders, even if they weren’t catching any fish that required the inspector.

They sued for relief.

The lower courts applied the Chevron doctrine, which had been interpreted to mean, “What the Federal Agency says is what we have to agree with.” Chevron has stopped many civil suits through the decades. Loper Bright puts an end to that.

Takeaway ONE

The court’s job is to decide what the law is, not some regulatory agency. Courts must do their job and not just accept what the government says.

This takeaway is used in later opinions of the Court.

NRA v Vullo is our second interesting case, this is one of the lawfare, red tape war waged against gun owners’ rights. The short of it was that the state of NY was pressuring regulated business to stop doing business with the NRA.

Takeaway TWO

The government cannot compel a third party to do what the government is forbidden to do.

Garland v. Cargill was one of the cases that led to the striking of Chevron. In Cargill, the Court found that the ATF exceeded their statutory authorizations.

Takeaway THREE

The executive branch does not get to create legislation, even when Congress appears to have granted that transfer of power.

United States v. Rahimi was a case with bad facts which did get us a reasonable result.

Rahimi had a TRO against him. He was aware of the TRO. He was in the courtroom when the judge issued the TRO and he had agreed to the conditions of the TRO. Those included “no firearms”.

Rahimi was and is a violent person. He was charged with multiple crimes and was captured with TRO paperwork and a firearm.

Takeaway FOUR

There is no regulation in this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation that permanently removed the right to keep and bear arms.

Takeaway FIVE

A violent person can be temporarily denied his Second Amendment protected right.

Bondi v. VanDerStok

HELD: The ATF’s rule is not facially inconsistent with the GCA.

This case is a legal match to Rahimi The question we wanted to be answered in Rahimi, and which was answered, is 18 U.S.C. §921(g)(8) facially unconstitutional.

To be facially unconstitutional, there can be no situation where the law is constitutional. This means that the law is unconstitutional when applied to 1 million people, but because it is constitutional when applied to the 1,000,001st person, then it survives the challenge.

In Rahimi, was there any time a person could have their Second Amendment protected rights removed? The answer turns out to be “Yes.” They can be taken away temporarily if the person has been adjudicated violent.

In VanDerStok it was again a facial challenge. The Court found that there was at least one kit being sold which met the definition of a firearm.

Takeaway SIX

There are infringements which will survive judicial review in light of Bruen and Heller

Takeaway SEVEN

The Court attempts to be consistent with their previous opinions. This leads to outcomes we dislike.

Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc., et al. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos

Takeaway EIGHT

The Remington settlement caused negative ripples. It emboldened the infringers to ramp up their lawfare actions.

Takeaway NINE

The agenda-driven Justices agreed that Mexico did not meet the requirements to pierce the PLCAA protections.

Takeaway TEN

AR-15s are in common use for lawful purposes.

Takeaway ELEVEN

While it does not require a probable event to pierce PLCAA protections, it does require a true allegation of a crime and plausible connection of the defendant to that probable event.

Takeaway TWELVE

PLCAA is a powerful protection against frivolous lawsuits.

Takeaway Thirteen

This was a major course correction after the failures in the Remington case.

SCOTUS Watch: Trump v. CASA, Inc, 24A886

This is a case regarding birthright citizenship. That is not the important part before the Court. What is significant is rogue inferior courts issuing nationwide, or universal injunctions.

The numbers of universal injunctions is difficult to know, at this instant because there could have been another yesterday, or today.

Bush had 6 universal injunctions issued against him, 3 by judges appointed by democrats.

Obama had 12 injunctions issued against him, 7 by judges appointed by republicans.

Trump 1.0 had 64 injunctions issued against him, 59 by judges appointed by democrats.

Biden had 14 injunctions issued against him, all 14 by judges appointed by republicans.

As of May 15, there have been 40 nationwide injunctions issued against Trump. 35 come from the same 5 districts.

This case is about those nationwide injunctions. I’ll need to spend some time reading the transcript, but my takeaway from the first few pages is that Justice Sotomayor is firmly for universal injunctions.

My guess, is that she knows that rogue inferior judges live primarily on the left. She doesn’t need to worry about rulings that go against her agenda in the lower court getting nationwide injunctions. Those come mostly from leftist rogue judges.

Thomas asked the first question. Sotomayor talked over the answer and monopolized the mic to the point that Roberts asked “May I hear the rest of his answer?”

Hard reading.

Airplanes are Bribes?

Something that I have not confirmed, it seems as if the Biden puppet masters were talking to Qatar about getting this plane in 2022.

The amount of noise in the signal is pretty bad on this one. My best filters suggest that the plane is being given to the US military. Both narratives seem to agree on this.

One side says that the plane will be taken down to its bones and rebuilt to spec. The other side says we can’t trust Qatar and that they are giving a bribe to Trump in the form of this plane, which they will then blow up while Trump is aboard. The same group says that it is too expensive to accept because it will be stripped to the bones and rebuilt, so we should pay more, wait for the delivery from Boeing.

At which point the military will strip it down to the bones and …

One side says that the plane will stay in service. When Trump steps down, the plane will stay as part of the fleet transporting our next president. The other side says that the plane will go to the Trump library, making this a bribe to Trump.

You can guess which side I’m leaning towards.

Maryland Man Upgraded to Salvadorian Man

This case is over in the court of public opinion. We’ve got the left claiming Trump is so dumb that he thought the characters M, S,1, and 3 were tattooed on his hand.

This has led our smartest, elitist, left representatives to claim “The image was doctored! It doesn’t say MS-13”

Then argue that the actual tattoos don’t indicate MS-13 because they found an expert who says it doesn’t.

TdA is About to Go Flying

It looks like the case of J.G.G. is about done with. The left is still trying to bury Trump with “contempt of court.” The plaintiffs (bad guys) wanted the terrorists to get 30 days to seek representation and to have a chance in court. The case has been enjoined for that period of time. This means the case is moot and the government should be able to ship them out.

I have read part of a court finding that says that Trump is allowed to continue deporting terrorists.

Typescript is Winning

As I learn more of the syntax and tricks, this is getting easier and easier. I finished most of the text editing module yesterday. This makes it possible to edit live blocks on the page.

I still miss Makefiles.

Snope

Has been listed again. It is in conference today. I do not expect to hear anything about it.

Ocean State Tactical

It seems I was mistaken, this case is still in an interlocutory state. The fact that it hasn’t been denied cert is very surprising to me.

Question of the week

What current behavior was not tolerated in your youth?

Has your tolerance of that behavior grown stronger or less over the last few years?

Are you suffering from behavior fatigue?

Once You See It …

Why Is It Slow?

We use multiple different server infrastructures. The paying clients run on cloud infrastructure, development and my pet projects run on internal infrastructure.

The internal infrastructure consists of a 2GB link to the outside. This connects to a dedicated PfSense box.

PfSense provides firewall, VPN, and load balancing. The box itself might need a bit more memory, but nothing horrible is happening with it.

PfSense uses HAProxy for load balancing. It does SSL offload to allow easy certificate maintenance as seen from the outside.

For web connections, it looks for one of two nginx process running on one of the servers.

Those nginx services run inside a container and connect to a dedicated shared network. They forward traffic to the correct container.

That container is running WordPress. It is configured on the correct network and connects to a MariaDB server on the external network.

That database is running on NVMe and has zero performance issues when tested.

The base code is stored in the docker container, the plugins, and media are stored in a mounted volume.

So, you request a page from The Vine of Liberty. That hits the firewall, which forwards it to a web server (nginx). The web server forwards the request to an Apache web server running in a container with WordPress installed. PHP within WordPress is configured to connect to the database for long term storage.

Media that is needed is loaded by Apache from the mounted volume of a Ceph distributed file system.

PHP that is on the mounted volume is loaded and cached.

This is running much too slow. I’ve tested so many parts of this, and I can not discover what the bottleneck is.

JavaScript Sucks

Over the years, I’ve gotten better and better at JavaScript. This week and last, I transitioned to TypeScript.

This is driving me bonkers. I know how to write a module. I know how to load a module and have it do something. I can see how other packages have exposed global items. What the heck do I need to do to make this work!!!!

Just another learning curve. Sometimes I get tired.

jQuery is so yesterday

For the new site I’m working on, I’ve decided that I will only support modern browsers on the internal side. This means I’m writing everything in pure JavaScript/TypeScript. It is working, but I still use jQuery syntax when I should be using JavaScript syntax.

And I miss my Makefiles.

Snope and Ocean State Tactical

Were both relisted yesterday. This makes 13 times they have been distributed for conference.

Mark Smith says this is good. Points out that the Dobbs case was relisted 12 times before cert was granted. This lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

I’m tired of waiting for the Court to do the right thing.

They’re Suing John Roberts!

Yeah, the same way we sued Bruen, and they are suing Donald J. Trump.

They are suing these people in their official capacity.

In other words, they are suing the head of an entity. Roberts is being sued for some entity he heads, other than SCOTUS.

What can you do with a .357 magnum?

Turns out that with that old lever gun, I can vaporize a skull. My bone person is upset with me. I’ve learned to take headshots at most smaller animals to protect the pelt and meat. It was a short range shot, less than 30 yards.

It was a Hornady bullet with the plastic tip. I’m too lazy to go dig up my reloading log.

Question of the Week

When did you first suspect that the News might be lying to you?

When did you first find proof that the News was lying to you, in mass?

Tariffs

I work with people that are dealing with tariffs. I needed to update a custom web application which handles purchase orders, inventory control, warehousing, sales orders and a bunch of other things.

The owner explained to me how tariffs were going to affect them. I gave some of that in the Thursday’s post.

What does it come down to?

American goods are becoming competitive in other countries. As more than one person has pointed out, there are no American-made cars on the road in Japan. The cost of the tariffs into Japan are high enough to alter consumer choices.

As other countries lower their tariffs, they are lowering the prices of American-made goods, this in turn increases demand for American-made goods.

The price you pay for goods is based on what the market will bear, not on the cost of production. Every leftist will tell you that when they talk about pharmaceuticals. “It only cost them $15 to make this, and they are charging over $1000!!!!”

When they are talking about tariffs, they are talking about tariffs on the $15, not on the $1000.

Pricing Goods and Services

The boss calls in his best salesman and yells at him costing the company money. He is selling widgets for less than it costs to make them. How the heck does he expect the company to make any money!

The salesman beams, leans in and says softly, “I’ll make it up in volume.”

In a different situation, I once listened to the CEO of Cray Research give a speech. He was telling a humorous story about how he was out selling a super computer to Apple that was designed on Apple computers.

He and Cook got a chuckle out of it. They were then discussing their income streams. Cook mentioned a number and our CEO was happy to respond with “That’s just about what we made last year.”

Cook looks him in the eye, “I’m talking about per quarter.”

Cray sold million dollar computers, Apple sold thousand dollar computers. They sold so many more that they were making more than Cray.

Every businessman attempts to set their prices to get as much as the market and their conscience can bear.

That elementary equation is Price*volume. My profit on a sale is price-cost. If my profit is $1000 per unit and I sell 10 units, I make $10,000. If my profit per unit is $100 per unit and I sell 1000, I make $100,000.

The price you see is always profit + cost. In most resale stops, the profit is multiples of cost.

It costs $0.50 to make a glass of lemonade. You don’t sell it for $0.75, you sell it for $5.00. If your costs double, to $1.00 per glass, you can still keep your price at $5.00 and advertise your sacrifice selling more.

So here is the dirty secret, spelled out, again. If I am assembling a computer with parts bought in China, my price will be multiples of what I paid for those parts, and the tariffs only apply to my cost of getting the parts.

Typescript vs. JavaScript

The power of a scripted language is that you can see the results of your changes instantly. In 1976, I was writing code on an PolySci 8080 computer. I think I got that name right.

The language was BASIC. As I typed each line, the computer told me if the syntax was correct. Instant feedback.

I moved to assembly language. That was done in an instant assembler on the Apple II. Again, instant feedback on syntax errors.

As I moved forward, I learned different languages, PASCAL, FORTRAN IV, FORTRAN V, COBOL, Compass, C and some other assembly languages.

These separated the process of creating a working executable into: Edit, Compile, and Link. You could then execute (run) the resulting “binary”.

Compile times for even small programs took a noticeable time. I wasn’t aware of how long it took until I wrote my first test program on the Cray X/MP.

Same edit process. Then I ran the compile and link process.

The time it took was so short that I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

The power of most of the languages above, outside the Assembly languages, was strong typing and good structures.

It was worth it to have slower test cycle times to have those features.

Then came some more modern languages, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, and others. These do not have strict typing. JavaScript being one of the worst.

Consider the following, what is 10 + 100? The answer is logically 110. What is 10 + “100”? Logical, 110 is the answer. Except that in JavaScript the answer is “10100”.

What we want or expect is for the language to convert the string “100” to the value integer value 100. Then we are adding the integer 10 to the integer 100, resulting in 110. But JavaScript says that adding the integer 10 to the string 100 requires converting integer 10 to the string “10” then concatenating “10” with “100” resulting in “10100”.

TypeScript is simply adding strong typing to JavaScript. Then a TypeScript transpiler/compiler writes the code out as pure JavaScript. The original C++ did a similar thing. The C++ “compiler” translated C++ to pure C. Then it used the C compiler to create assembly code which was linked to create an executable.

The process is going relatively smoothly. Unfortunately, JavaScript is not my favorite language, see “no typing and weird implicit type conversions” above.

This means that I’m having to learn a new workflow. I’m getting there.

Question of The Week

What is the most outrageous lie you’ve heard from a leftist political leader, this week?

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?

Trump Before The Supreme Court

Thursday afternoon, the Supreme Court consolidated three cases on appeal from by the administration and scheduled oral arguments for May 15, 2025, at 10 a.m.

24A884, 24A885, and 24A886 are consolidations of 10 different cases, though some of those are duplicates as they came through the circuit courts.

In short, this is the vehicle for the Supreme Court to knock down the raft of inferior courts granting nationwide TROs and preliminary injunctions.

I don’t know if this will extend to final judgment, regardless, this is the case to watch.

Fort at #4 — Projects

I will be up at The Fort tomorrow to take some pictures. I just finished two woodworking mallets. Boy, I’m a poor wood turner. They look ok. I’ve polished one of them and put a sealing coat on it. On the other hand, I can see ever mis-cut and catch as I learn how to do this.

I’m hoping to get at least one of the spinning wheels down and into the cabins. This will give me something to do when I don’t want to be in the wood working shop.

Which means I need to finish the clamps for the clamp to hold my wool combs. I like the way wool spins once it has been combed.

I might even try spinning some carded wool. I’ve not tried that yet.

I have a reed in our big floor loom. We got the loom for cheap, but the reeds were rusted nasty things. I’ve not recovered them yet. I need to make a raddle to allow me to warp the loom. And I have to spin some yarn for the weft.

Computer Frustrations

There are two standard ways that power is supplied to computer type devices. One, they take a 110v AC into a power supply, which then generates 12V and 5V from that for the system. Two, they have a “wall wort” which generates 12V DC, which is then converted as required internally.

More and more of the small devices I’m picking up use the 12V wall wort. The issue? Space for the wall worts.

Wed, I went to plug in a new device. Accidentally unplugged the wrong wall wort, dropped my room switch until I got it plugged back in.

Once I had the correct wall wort removed, I found that I had 2 open outlets but the orientation of the outlets and the orientation of the wall wart don’t fit.

Now I’m dealing with another issue, A new switch that won’t come online.

Snope

The SCOTUS Friday Conference was moved to Thursday. Snope was conferenced again.

I really, really, want to see some forward motion on these Second Amendment Cases.

The reason I don’t update you on Ocean State Tactical is that it has been following Snope and I’m too lazy to have another tab open on https://www.supremecourt.gov

Tea!

I used to drink Coke-a-Cola. I stopped years ago, mostly because of the sugar content. I was converted to coffee.

I do drink tea occasionally. It is not my go-to drink.

In 1773, a bunch of rebels dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Approximately 92,000 pounds.

For much of my younger years, I thought they were talking about Lipton tea bags. I.e., loose tea in individual small filter bags. There was no way that you could get that much tea into just 342 chests. Then I found out about real loose tea. This was better.

Then I found that what was actually transported were bricks of black tea from the orient. These bricks were solid.

For use at The Fort, we ordered a brick of black tea. It is formed the same way it would have been formed in 1773. Our brick is 2.5 pounds.

The cool thing? It has a shelf life of 50 years. This is prepper paradise!

Question of the Week

What do you think will happen when Karmelo Anthony is convicted for murder?

SCOTUS is Busy

Yost v. Brown et al. was just granted a stay.

The plaintiffs (not bad guys) are attempting to get an initiative on the ballet. Before this happens, the AG of Ohio reviews the summaries of the initiative to verify that it is an accurate summation. The AG’s opinion differed from the plaintiffs so they took it to court.

The district court (bad guys) issued a preliminary injunction to force the AG (not bad guy) to “immediately certify” the plaintiffs’ desired summary language.

This is another case of the courts overstepping their Article III limits.

They have been clearing out 100s of cases requesting cert in the 2024-2025 term.

The slapped down the DC District Court for calling preliminary injunctions a TRO to avoid review. And they also slapped down the DC Circuit Court for allowing the District Court to do so.

The did the same for the Massachusetts District Court, which “issued what it styled as a temporary restraining order (TRO)”. This included a Gibb’s slap to the First Circuit court.

They have not granted Cert for Snope or Ocean State Tactical, nor have they denied it. They keep conferencing the cases. I’m not sure what they are waiting for.

They sent Antonyuk back to the District Court to finish their work.

I think everybody has learned that fighting for a win on an interlocutory state just isn’t worth it. The Circuit Courts over these rogue District Courts are just a rogue and just as bent. The Supreme Court isn’t going to deal with an interlocutory Second Amendment case until they have a new Second Amendment opinion out.

Simply put, the rogue inferior courts will just twist the Court’s words to get the outcome they want.

Market Fluctuation

What goes up must come down? Or maybe it is the other way around, what goes down must go up. I absolutely understand the panic day traders and market players must be having. People panic, people sell, the price of shares goes down.

If you are worried about your unrealized gains or losses, you aren’t in the markets for the long run. There are very few investment securities that will lose money in the long run.

You might not make as much, but it is unlikely that you will lose money. Just ride the trough out. Many people did just that for the four years of Biden, riding out a couple of months under Trump should be a no-brainer.

Hypocrisy lives

Elizabeth Warren is trying to get a bill passed to ban congress critters from investing in individual stocks. Of course, this doesn’t touch the astonishing wealth she’s accumulated since taking office.

As Allyson says, “Read the Bill.” I don’t believe anything a Democrat says about a bill. I need to read the darn thing myself.

It is straightforward to write a bill that sounds like it stops insider trading but leaves gaping holes for congress critters to make money from inside knowledge.

One of Chuck Schumer or Adam Schiff got out there and said that Trump was guilty of insider trading. His proof? Trump said that it was a good time to buy while the market is in this panic sell off.

Yet, Adam and Chuck seem to make way more money than a government employee should.

Trump and the Second Amendment

There are things that are happening in the administration that seem to be good. I’m concerned because nothing is set in stone. I’ll start cheering once I hear the Solicitor General get before the Circuit and Supreme Court and back The People.

Question of the Week

Do you think Trump is getting what is best for our country with his tariffs?

That New Car Feeling

Well, a portion of the inheritance from my parents arrived. I gave myself a small amount and the wife. Money that wasn’t spoken for in other ways.

The last few times I’ve needed a rental car, I’ve gotten a current version of my Toyota Tacoma. Every time I came away wishing I had a new truck.

Then a few days after getting back in my truck, I would realize that I didn’t want a new Truck. What I wanted was the new radio/head end.

So that’s what I got. A serious upgrade, It is an Alpine unit with Android Auto. I will be able to get in the truck and when I turn on the unit, it will hook up and give me navigation, calls, and music. Life is nice.

And for much less than a month’s payments on a new truck.

Boy they last a long time

In 1967, my parents bought a VW Microbus. It had hauling capacity that a standard station wagon did not. It was the equivalent of today’s mom van.

At the time, most cars were getting an astonishing 5 to 7 MPG. The VW got 20MPG. Given the amount of travel we did, this likely made a difference.

They gave me that car when I turned 16. I drove it until 1987 when I traded it in.

At the time I traded it in, it was on its third engine, its second gas tank, it didn’t have a working speedometer. The floor was nearly rusted through. Hell, it was rusted through. The aux. heater hadn’t worked in years. The main heater wouldn’t even defrost the windshields.

The bumper was a replacement that my brother wielded up out of diamond tread.

In short, it was at the end of its life. A year after I traded it in, I saw somebody driving it around town.

My truck is 15 years old. At 15 it is in better condition than that VW was at 10. It is still on its first engine. There is no rust on it. I expect it to keep going for at least another 5 years.

Lawfare

We keep moving closer and closer to the administration telling the courts to pound sand until the Supreme Court Rules.

It is sickening how inferior courts can find their way to always rule against trump.

A stat I heard was that between 1900 and 1999, there were 22 nationwide injunctions issued. There were 87 issued against Trump in his first term.

I believe I heard that there have been 30 so far in his second term.

People Fall For This?

I had numerous ads pop up because I purchased some computer stuff direct from China. Would you believe that you can buy a 2023 GMC Sierra for only $1,500? Sounds too good to be true.

Looking at the listing, they only accept payment via Western Union or wire transfers. Yeah, too good to be true.

And This

A friend ordered a DVD he had been searching for over the last 5 years. It arrived. New In Box.

Except it was just the box and book. No DVD. Amazon seller who was long gone by the time my friend received his package.

Amazon is covering the costs, but still…

Tariffs

I spent the last two weeks adding tariff processing to a B2B e-commerce website. The Canadian was just frustrated at the extra work for him and having to finally track tariffs. He had just been eating the cost of tariffs for years, a part of doing business.

In the meantime, I’ve been told that Trump’s tariffs are going to cost me thousands of dollars per year.

I’ve watched videos of leaders in other countries say, “We aren’t going to take this from the USA!”

One article pointed out that Vietnam has tariffs on the $10B they import from the US. Trump has put tariffs on the $150B we import from Vietnam. Isn’t it stupid that he did this to them?

Question of the Week

If the United States putting tariffs on imports is so bad, why is it good when other countries put tariffs on our goods.

What do you think of this entire tariff thing?