Anonymous Web Angel(GFZ)

That’s what I felt like, working issues yesterday. There was always another problem to fix.

It is 2100 and after 6 hours of working with our cloud provider, everything is back.

There was a hardware glitch that caused a node to fail. The website automatically moved to a new node and attempted to restart. Unfortunately, that hardware glitch caused the cluster to believe that the node was still there and still working. Since it was there and working, none of the resources (disk space) used by GFZ was released.

Because the resource did not release, the website on the new node would not start.

Linode took 8 calls from me, 22 ticket updates and worked the entire 6 hours to get things working again.

I’m sorry the site was down for so long. I’m working with Linode management to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Furthermore, I’m also looking at options for shared file systems so that a pod can move from node to node seamlessly.

AWA

B.L.U.F. An analysis of the horrible opinion out of Oregon where the district Judge decided that arms aren’t covered under the Second Amendment and that there is a history and tradition of requiring government approval before you can exercise your Second Amendment protected rights.

This opinion is 122 pages long. This is not a complete analysis. I don’t think I can stomach that much muck.

Inserted a title and added a “more” block to take the text-wall off the front page

When I originally looked at Judge Karin Immergut, I was hoping for better from her. She was appointed by President Trump. Unfortunately, it appears that her time in liberal cesspools has corrupted her judgement. She has degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, Amherst College, and UC Berkeley School of Law. To say that she was educated in leftest incubator schools is a fair statement.

The Question

This is a horrible statement of the actual questions in the case. 1) Is banning ammunition feeding devices based on characteristics in violation of the Second Amendment protected rights? 2) Is requiring a member of The People to get state approval before they are allowed to purchase constitutional?

Even with her horrid wording, she should not have been able to find that BM114 is constitutional.

Holding

I’ll use the words of Paul Clement et al.:

She even messes up Supreme Court dicta This Court also finds that the text of Oregon’s permit-to-purchase framework is consistent with the type of regulation that the United States Supreme Court has deemed constitutional under the Second Amendment[xCite item=”FHMK3ZW8″ p=6 pos=3]. The Supreme Court never said that any permitting scheme is constitutional, only that shall issue states are assumed to be constitutional.

The court then went forth and said, “If you get a 2A case, look to the plain text, history and tradition to make your ruling. That means …”

We should not have been surprised because she granted Oregon Alliance for Gun Safety’s motion to intervene based on Federal Rule 24 of Civil Procedures, 24(b).

I believe that she is referring to 24(b)1(B) has a claim or defense that shares with the main action a common question of law or fact the Oregon Alliance for Gun Safety is an anti-gun group that uses emotional blackmail constantly.
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First, thank you to Miguel for creating this fantastic place. Thank you to J.Kb. for contributing. Thank you to both of you for allowing me to be an author here.

Just over a year ago, Miguel announced his retirement to J.Kb. and myself in a private email. We considered a couple of different options, one of which was to just move it to Substack with a Patreon style of support system. We all wanted to have some small amount of monetization from the blog.

I suggested a pay to comment with some content being restricted. Miguel and J.Kb. allowed me to try that.

It didn’t really work.

We pay for a number of things directly for the blog. The total for all of those services is around $1000/year. Those include the different yearly subscriptions for certain plugins and other direct paid support.

In addition to that, there is another $600/year for the servers that host the blog.

In prior years, there was an additional $600/year to me. The minimum cost for the blog per year was $2200. Miguel paid all of that out of pocket. He asked for money once a year to pay me and the hosting costs.

In other words, this blog cost him money.

I can no longer charge for my work on the blog. That’s good because I have spent countless hours, easily well over 200 hours. I work dirt cheap at $50/hour, that’s $10,000 of billable time. That does NOT include any of the time I spend writing.

We are seeing the renewals happening now. I did not break even last year. I won’t break even this year.

I do care. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been in love with this blog for many years. I lost it for a couple of years. Realized I was missing it, went and found it. I’ve never left.

The comments you leave help so much. It tells me when I get things right. I stumbled onto a new gun blog yesterday, went looking through their postings, and there was reference to one of my case analysis. That single back link made me smile through a rather shitty day.

So, I thank all of you.

If you want to help the blog out financially, please sign up for one of the membership levels. The lowest level is $1/month. The highest is $5/month. You do have to pay for a year at a time.

Here’s wishing all of you a great year. Remember that we do want guest postings, and I mean real guest posts, not the “If you say yes, we’ll spend 30 seconds and send you an article with the word “gun” in it and 1000 words talking about us.” Yeah, we get about 1 a week of those.

My standard reply to them is something similar to, “That sounds great, what is your favorite 45-70 load?” I’ve never gotten a reply to that question.

This is a feedback article. Comments are open to all.
P.S. OldNFO and dana950, please reach out to me at awa (at) troglodite . com

It is a 122-page opinion written by somebody who was looking for a way of finding the plain text of the Second Amendment too hard to read. It is going to take time to wade through it.

B.L.U.F.We took a look at the bad guy’s arguments via Everytown earlier this week. Today we look at the reply brief submitted by the appellants/plaintiffs (good guys).

There is a huge issue that the good guys have to overcome in these cases, getting the Court to do their job. If you look at the plain text of the Second Amendment, is the proposed conduct implicated? If so, the conduct is presumptively protected under the Second Amendment.

The state is doing all in their power to make this first step as difficult as possible. As we observed in the Everytown brief, they don’t have any historical regulations to support their infringements. Because they don’t have the history nor the tradition, they desperately want to stop cases from getting to that point.

There is an old legal aphorism, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”

When I write about “emotional blackmail”, I’m discussing how the state is pounding the table. They don’t have facts on their side, they don’t have the law on their side. They pound the table in frustration, begging the court to give them just a little inch.

What this means, at a tactical level, is that the lawsuit almost all say “It is a regulation of conduct that is protected under the Second Amendment. Grant us an injunction stopping it.” The state then gets to do the song and dance “welllllll, it isn’t actually an arm. It doesn’t go boom boom.”. Or they try and say that as long as they allow you this arm, they don’t have to allow you that arm. All of this is just bonkers when the plain text is used.

Introduction

The plaintiffs start their response:

My lady has a difficult time answering simple questions. “Are you done with your homework?”. Reply: “Sort of, I’ve been working on it for hours. The …(172 words later) so I’m still working on it.” “Thank you, are you done with your homework?” “I just told you.” “No, you didn’t. You said many things in response to a yes, no answer without ever actually answering the question.”

The state is much like that. They don’t actually answer the question presented and instead talk about this or that. The plaintiffs (good guys) can’t force the state to answer. Only the Court can do that. If the state doesn’t answer the court, then the court can treat that none-response as meaningful.

Exactly what we have been saying. I’m pleased that this reply has stated it so clearly. I expect to use this in the future.

These guys really hammer the state: “Pretend”, “fiction”, “deny Bruen“, “ignore what the Supreme Court”. This is polite lawyer talk for “the state is a lying sack of flaming dog poo”.

HB6614 Violates The Second Amendment

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Welcome to Friday! It’s almost the weekend.

I really wish that the climate change gods would decide which way it should be. The last couple of nights I’ve gone to bed, it has been so hot and mucky that I didn’t want to be near my lady. Halfway through the night, I woke up shivering and had to pull up the blankets.

On the good news side, we had about two days of sun. It stopped raining just long enough to get the lawn mowed. Of course, the rain has started back up again before I got the weed wacker out

I’m hoping to do some reloading this weekend. I just have to clear a path to the reloading bench. After two years of not being able to find 30–30 bullets, suddenly everybody has them. I’m going to load a few hundred rounds and do the ballistics on it.

I’m halfway through a reference on ballistics. Not only that, but I actually remember some of my calculus from way back when. My first graphs came close to the correct answer, but not perfect. Likely because I wasn’t using the software correctly.

I picked up a laser range finder today. The range cards show up tomorrow. I intend to have range cards for each of the windows in the house, plus some known locations outside the house.

How many of you have ever used a range card? How many of you have actually used a ballistics chart or table to more accurately put rounds on target at distance?

The squirrel article is in the queue.

I expect to do a product review of the range finder after I’ve had a chance to use it for a bit.

Are you interested in articles about range cards and how to use them? I’ve read a bit and I’m going to put it to use, I am NOT an expert.

B.L.U.F.Looking at another amicus brief by Everytown. Since they are consistently filing briefs in all these Second Amendment cases, it behooves us to see what they are saying.

I came back to add this text. You might get angry with Everytown over this brief. Regardless, they did a good job. Their arguments are self-consistent. They take a stand, then hammer the point home. Their goal isn’t to necessarily win these cases, but to give the court something to hang a bad decision upon.

Everytown is now the overarching group for “Moms Demand”, “Mayors Against Illegal Guns”, It looks like they are claiming “March for our lives” but they don’t do so by name. They claim to have nearly ten million “supporters” with nearly 10,000 of those “supporters” in Rhode Island. Make not that “supporters” are not “members”

For the tax year 2020 they had total revenue of $20,492,640. $20,288,442 of that was from contributions. They reported expenses of $52,280,883 for a net lose of $31,788,243. The largest listed expense is $11,390,489 for other salaries and wages and around $500,000 for the Executives and fundraising. I could not find a “members” number. They only speak in nebulous terms, which could mean anything from a person going around knocking on doors, to the mom that dropped a five dollar bill in their begging hat.

Using the standard modification of language, they claim [Everytown] is the nation’s largest gun-violence-prevention organization, with nearly ten million supporters across the country, including nearly 40,000 in Rhode Island.[xCite item=”RIK53V58″ pos=0]

Argument Summary

This is pretty clear. The first thing they do is argue that magazines are not arms. More, they place that burden on the plaintiffs (good guys). In many of the infringing cases, we see the state argue this. “AR-15s aren’t arms”, “Big magazines aren’t arms”, “Sawed off shotguns aren’t arms”, but a hunk-o-alumninum is an arm, a plastic stock is a machine gun as is a shoelace.

The second thing is, they argue that the court should look at 1868 as the date to understand what the Second Amendment means. We have discussed this in previous posts. The date of the 14th amendment’s ratification is the date at which 3/4s of the states agreed to accept the Bill of Rights as it was understood in 1791.

They did not redefine the meaning of the Second Amendment in 1868. They affirmed that they accepted it as it was understood in 1791.

Their final argument is that there has been “unprecedented societal concerns or dramatic technological changes” which means that they don’t have to match historical regulations as closely.

The last two arguments are very telling. It means that the state and state operators, such as Everytown, understand that there are no good matches to laws in the founding era. Since there are no good matches, they need to either change the time period or they need to open up what “a good match” means.

They also make the claim that a small number of laws will provide a “tradition and history” of analogous regulations. They are begging for the court to give them as much leeway as possible.

Plaintiffs Have Not Met Their Burden To Establish that the Second Amendment’s Plain Text Covers Their Conduct

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I admit the reason I bothered to do the transcription for this case is because I was playing with my tools. I’m to the point where I am either going to have to learn more, write my own, and learn enough about deep learning and AI training to be able to get the results I want.

Just to give you an idea of where all of these sit, three separate “AI”s worked to produce the video and transcript.

The first one is used to convert speech to sound. It is trained on around 680,000 hours of audio data. On my system, it runs at either 1:10 if I use the large data set and at about 8:1 if I use the small data set. The small data set runs on my GPU. The large does not.

The second AI is tasked with segmenting the audio. That is, it listens to the audio and finds where there is speech and where there is not speech. It can go further and detect that the speech is different. This has nothing to do with turning sounds into words nor in identifying the speakers, just labeling the audio for the next “AI”.

The third AI further segments the audio by speaker. It then clusters the different segments and assigns them a label. These labels correspond to individual speakers.

Finally, the NI (natural intelligence) uses inferences to determine the name of the person who is associated with each speaker.

The audio recording has some of the audio missing from the front.
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My wife had her first true vacation in years last month. Her mother invited her to go to Greece with her and her husband. She had a wonderful time, but we were both ready for her to get home.

Preparing for her return, I told Miss Google, “Play love songs from the 50s and 60s.” This worked well on the drive to the airport. And I heard a song I had heard many times before and thought, “That’s the right one for Tuesday Tunes. She’ll readyreally like this and know I was thinking of her and telling her with all my heart how much I love her and missed here while she was gone.”

And of course, in the excitement of seeing her again, I lost the song. I can’t freaking remember the title. Just that it had something nice about saving kisses for her.

Instead, here’s Frank with a love song.