Chris Johnson

A few years ago, NASA crashed a Mars probe into the surface of the red planet when they got their units mixed up. One group was using metric, and the other was using Freedom Units.

I would have laughed if it hadn’t been such an expensive mistake, both in terms of money and lost opportunity.

I’m a firm believer in Freedom Units. It is what I use regularly. My last big learning curve was going from 1/2 inch, 1/4 inch, 1/8 inch to 0.500, 0.250, 0.125, and 0.062, as in thousandths of an inch.

This small-scale metric stuff is for the birds.

Whenever I start to get a bit confused, I go 25.4 mm == 1 in. That’s close enough to 1/32 of an inch that I can use it for a working number.

The other number I use is 6 mm, which is around 1/4 inch. These are just to get some sort of feel for the numbers.

I just printed my second book for crimpers and terminals. It is 5 x 3 units and 6U tall. I found a Gridfinity bin to hold the crimpers I purchased. All’s good.

Except the bin doesn’t fit the pair I purchased. Slightly different.

So I went back to learning how to do this.

To help with just this task, I purchased a cutting mat with grid lines and other fancies on it. Here is the first photo I took.

It is in its blow-molded holder. This should give me the ability to trace the factory’s cutout/shadow box.

Once this is imported into FreeCAD, you rotate it until the grid is aligned properly, then you “calibrate” the image.

Calibrating means drawing a line between two points with known distance. In this case I have a bunch of 1cm squares. To average out my error, I clicked on one intersection, then counted over 70 mm by 10 mm and clicked. The image scaled. It is now ready to be traced.

I used a B-spline curve, which worked well. I’m getting the hang of it again, it having been 20 years since I used b-splines of this style.

When done, I simply cut the curve from a rectangle, padded the result to 3 mm, and printed it. This allows me to test fit the tool to the shadow without wasting lots of plastic and time.

It didn’t fit. It was too small.

I need to do it over again. This time I’m omitting the blow mold and working directly from the tool. I’ll draw a close-fitting curve, then pad it in X and Y by a mm or so.

This will work better; can you see why?

Yep, one side of the cutting map is in Freedom Units and the other in metric. My first photo was on the Freedom Unit side because it is less crowded. When I was counting out 70 mm, I was really counting out 3.5 in. If I had input 3.5 in into the calibration, it would have been fine.

Leason learned.

We are having a snow event. So are the people of New York City.

The difference is that here nobody is concerned. We have dry wood inside waiting to go in the stove. We have the snowblower ready to run. We have gasoline to run the blower. We have propane and a gas stove.

Worse case, the internal computers are down and Internet service goes to shit.

NYC is not nearly as prepared.

The socialist in charge has run out of other people’s money but still needs the city cleared of snow.

His answer is to hire people to shovel snow for the city.

If you want to do this, all you need to do is apply bring two official photo IDs and your social security card.

Of course the fact that you need two forms of ID to shovel snow but NY state has no voter ID requirement and the Democrats continue to fight the SAVE act lead to this being a trending story.

And then the explainers came in. “He’s not demanding two IDs to shovel snow, that’s so you can get paid.”

They somehow think this is a big winning argument for them.

If you are getting paid, the I-9 requires two forms of ID and your social security card. But requiring ID to get paid is not the same as requiring ID to vote.

They’re not the same.

This is opinion is around 163 pages, excluding the syllabus. Which is a fair bit.

Each Supreme Court opinion has a primary author, or it is per curiam. Per Curiam means by the court and says that no one justice authored the opinion, but they all concur.

So what about this case? “C.J.” is Chief Justice Roberts. He is the primary author of this opinion. Six of the nine justices agreed with his opinion. Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Jackson explicitly agreed with Parts I, II-A-1, and II-B.

The “JJ” after lists of other justices means “junior justices,” while “J” is the singular of “junior justice.” What is a junior justice? Any justice that is not the chief justice.

Now Gorsuch and Barrett agreed with Roberts on Parts II-A-2 and III. The other three, Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson, didn’t agree entirely on these parts.

In addition to the majority opinion, authored by Roberts, six other justices wrote opinions.

These other opinions are not the official opinion of the court. They are often cited, and if concurring, can hold some weight. Dissenting opinions don’t carry any weight, though unscrupulous judges and lawyers sometimes cite to dissents as if they were The Court’s opinion.

Gorsuch wrote such a concurring opinion. In it he expresses why he came to the decision he did. No other justice agreed with his opinion enough to “sign” it. The term used is “joined”.

Barrett also wrote a concurring opinion, which nobody joined .

Kagan, the sharpest of the three shrews of The Court wrote a concurring opinion with her fellow agenda driven crones joining. This is to be expected. If Kagan writes an opinion, the other two will join.

Jackson loves to hear herself talk. She just loves to see her words in print. So she wrote a concurring opinion, but only agreeing with part of The Court’s opinion. She was satisfied with the judgment because it met her agenda driven goals. I’ve not read her opinion because I’m having a good weekend and want to keep the blood pressure under control.

Finally, we have the dissents. Thomas wrote a dissent. I need to read his dissent because he will explain why the president has the power to tariff at will.

Kavanaugh also wrote a dissent. Thomas didn’t join, which indicates that it wasn’t as pure as Thomas likes. Again, I’ll need to read it.

Alito joined with Kavanaugh, so we don’t have his words to evaluate.

The big takeaway from this case is not that Trump can’t impose tariffs at will; it is that he can’t do it under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This is no more of a loss for the President than The Court saying he couldn’t deploy the National Guard to Chicago using the law he cited.

The Court went so far as to say that Trump might even be legally allowed to deploy the Marines to Chicago, if he can’t enforce the law with the law enforcement officers.

The Supreme Court issued their opinion on Trump’s use of tariffs. In a 6-3 decision, The Court ruled against Trump’s use of the IEEPA as unconstitutional.

Thomas and Kavanaugh filed dissenting opinions. Alito and Thomas joined with Kavanaugh.

Jackson was off the rails, again, in her concurrence.

We interpret the constitution’s plain text and this nation’s tradition of regulations. The meaning of the constitution is as it was understood when it was adopted. The meaning of amendments is as it was understood when the amendment was ratified. The meaning of the 14th Amendment is as it was understood when it was ratified. Its meaning when it was ratified was that the constitution, as amended, applies to the states, meaning what it was understood to mean when adopted and ratified.

In other words, the 14th Amendment is understood to be incorporating the federal constitution, not as redefining the understanding of the constitution or previous amendments.

Jackson feels that it is important to look at and evaluate the legislative history of a regulation, rather than the plain text and how that text was understood.

The Question

Given all of that, how do you feel about this decision?
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Rob Bonta has been screwing over The People of California since the day he took office. He took over exactly where his predecessor left off, working hard to deny The People of California the ability to acquire, carry, and use guns.

Around nine years ago, Virginia Duncan wanted to purchase a standard magazine. California refused to sell her a standard magazine because the state had decided that standard magazines are too dangerous.

Virginia, having a better than 3rd grade reading comprehension level, understood that “shall not be infringed” meant that the state has no say in what arms she possesses or wishes to acquire. Thus showing that even a 3rd grader has a better comprehension of our rights than the state of California and Rob Bonta.

Virginia filed a civil rights case against California. The case was assigned to Judge (Saint) Benitez. He found the magazine ban was unconstitutional.

He used a text, followed by history and tradition, as Heller directed to reach his ruling. Because he was under the Ninth Circuit, he layered it in a scrutiny decision, where he used strict scrutiny.

His ruling placed an injunction on the state, and The People of California celebrated freedom week by buying as many magazines as were available to be had. Online vendors flatly told customers that magazines being shipped to California had priority and that others would just have to wait.

The state came back and asked for an administrative stay.

Benitez granted the stay with the explicit ruling that magazines that had already been purchased but not yet received or that had been received were exempt from California’s infringement.

A 3-judge merits panel affirmed (agreed with Benitez) that the magazine ban was unconstitutional. They left the administrative stay in place because everyone knows that the state was going to petition for an en banc panel and it would be granted.

No en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit has ever found a Second Amendment infringement. Every case they have heard on gun control, they have ruled in favor of the state.

Which was precisely what happened. The Ninth Circuit heard the case en banc and ruled for the state. This was appealed to the Supreme Court.

The case became one of the dozen or so Second Amendment challenges at the Supreme Court, waiting for cert or denial of cert. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. New York City was granted cert. New York State then mooted the case.

In the end, the Supreme Court took up New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. In June of 2022, they issued their opinion in Bruen

Once Bruen issued, The Court then granted cert to a number of other Second Amendment cases, vacated the lower (circuit) court’s rulings, and remanded the cases back for review in light of Bruen.

A GVR, like this, is explicit instructions to the inferior court to rethink their original opinion, considering the instructions provided in the latest case.

A GVR is clear. If the inferior court had gotten it right, the Supreme Court would have denied cert, and the case would be over. The remand when the inferior court got it wrong.

The rogue inferior courts refuse to see it this way and continue to support infringements.

It reminds me of when I was going to arbitration over some property. I was offered $16k as a buyout. The offer came with the calculations showing how the co-owner reached that number. I pointed out that his calculations were in error.

The next week, at arbitration, he offers me $16K as a buyout. This time with a different set of (bogus) calculations. I showed how his numbers were still bogus.

The next week, $16K again. Different set of calculations. I again called him on his bogus calculations. I then stated, “$16k is all you have to offer, isn’t it? It isn’t justified by anything. It is all you have to offer.”

It turned out that his wife’s sister had given them $16K to buy me out.

These rogue inferior courts act the same way he did. They know the result they want, they get that result using some justification. When they are called on the inherent error in their justification, they don’t do it right. They get the same result using a different set of justifications.

It doesn’t matter what the rules say; they will always get the result they want.

Because the case was coming back to the Ninth Circuit, the same en banc panel took the case, again.

It is important to understand that the Ninth Circuit is so large that it is impossible to get all the judges to sit to hear a case. Instead, they draw judges at random to create an “en banc” panel of 11 judges. Smaller circuits have all active judges sit for an en banc case. This means the results of an en banc panel in the Ninth Circuit are random, leaning heavily towards the state.

The en banc panel decided that they needed more fact finding. They sent the case back down to the district court.

The district court did the right thing and once again found that magazine bans are unconstitutional.

The Ninth decided the district court was wrong.

Today, Duncan goes back into conference at the Supreme Court. It is in the same place it was in 2022 before Bruen.

It is nice to go to the bookshelf and find what you need.

All about M3 size nuts and bolts.

And look at that, we’ve got examples!

Which can be removed from the book!

Seriously, this is a BookFinity print. These come in different sizes. This one is 3x4u for a total of 12 singleton bins. The book is 4U high.

You can put anything in these books that don’t become disorganized if tipped on their side. They won’t come out of their bin; they will move around.

These are Socket Head Cap Screws, I’m going to do another M3 book for Button Headed Cap Screws.

There are dozens of these books already designed, ready for the printing.

How I was feeling over this last week.

My wife took me to an incredible Valentine’s dinner. I wanted to have dinner in my state, not in Mordor.

I got what I needed. A lovely dinner with my lovely wife.

I love her so much, it sometimes hurts.

I finished the first set of base plates for putting Gridfinity into the top desk drawer of the printer support platform.

It looks nice. It is a 15 inch by 14 7/8 inch drawer. The base plate printed in four sections. It could have been just put in the drawer and worked, but I put snaps on the edges.

Since then, I’ve been watching as things move from the desk next to the printer and into its own bin, often custom, in one of three Gridfinity drawers. The two custom printed drawers in the riser and the one desk drawer.

It is slower than I would like, but it keeps getting better. I think this is going to work.

The next base plate will be for the “Shelf of No Return”. This is the shelf where things from the dining table get cleared, never to be seen again.

The hope is that when we turn that into an organized space, there will be less inclination to just pile stuff there.

Just a short post. I’ve spent the last two days “fixing things.”

Our dishwasher decided to stop emptying the dirty water. I knew exactly what the problem was: the sump/discharge pump had died, again.

Quick order of a $25 part from Amazon, get a hand under the dishwasher, press the release catch, rotate the pump and it comes off in your hand.

Remove the power connector, attach the power connector to new pump, put the pump into place, and rotate until you hear the click. Done.

Except it didn’t resolve the issue.

Call out the repair dude; I didn’t have time to deal with this.

Two weeks later, he’s there. As I suspected, he diagnosed the issue as a dead controller board. This is a $130 part. And it is known to be a quick failure part; if the first dies, the second will die shortly after. Of course, the extra brown on a couple of wires and the look of some ABS connectors made it appear that something had gone overcurrent.

We decided to replace the dishwasher. Communications issues put a delay on that. Then Facebook Marketplace to the rescue. A 300 series Bosch dishwasher for under $200, in good condition.

Which leads us to Saturday, when I’m looking at the new dishwasher and realizing that I don’t see some of the things I expect to see. Turns out that there are missing parts, the power cable for one. Back to Amazon.

That’s tomorrow’s issue: installing the dishwasher, part two.

Meanwhile, I managed to break the 3D printer.

I was changing from ABS to PLA on the external supply. I messed up. Usually the UI just tells you what to do. But I haven’t read the online manual, so there are things I don’t get, and I don’t know I don’t know.

The sequence I had been using, which always worked before, was to unload the old filament, load the new filament, tell the printer the type and color of the newly loaded filament.

This is the wrong sequence.

You first unload the old filament. You then tell the printer the new filament type and color. Then you load the new filament.

When you do it in this order, the printer helpfully tells you, “Don’t push that PLA into the chamber/hotend that is too hot! It will melt and jam things.”

I didn’t get that warning. I pushed the PLA into the extruder; I kept feeding during the “grab filament” stage. And I created a blob after the drive wheels and before the cold end of the nozzle. It couldn’t go forward. The printer then tried to retract the filament. This deformed the filament going the other direction. Locking the end of the filament in the extruder drive.

This was a 15 minute fix, if I had a clue. Instead it took 2 plus hours. But it is fixed and I know more now.

I just have to keep fixing.

Watching court cases can be interesting. Watching the legal system can be interesting. Watching the system is crucial.

Back in 2022 there was the case of New York Pistol and Rifle Association v. The City of New York. This question in this case involved the right of the people of NYC to take their permitted firearms out of the city.

As the laws were at the start of the court case, a person had to get a permit to possess a firearm. They were then given permission to have that firearm on their premises, to transport it in a disabled manner to one of seven gun ranges in NYC, where they could shoot.

They were not allowed to take the gun out of the city to other ranges nor to competitions.

The plaintiffs, the good guys, argued that they owned property outside of NYC where they wanted to possess their firearms. The city and state argued that if they wanted a gun in those places, they should buy a second gun and store it in that other place, leaving it unattended when they were in the city.

The city and state of New York argued this case vigorously through the district and Second Circuit Court of Appeals. All the inferior courts found that this infringement was consistent with the Second Amendment and Heller.

When the Supreme Court granted cert, the city and state backpedaled so fast that it made Road Runner cartoons look slow in comparison. The city changed the regulation. The state passed a law saying that the city law was illegal, and the lawyers argued that the case was moot.

The Supreme Court agreed that the case was mooted, and the case was closed.

We thought this would be the end of Second Amendment cases in the Supreme Court that year, but the court choose to hear Bruen and we got one of the best opinions on the Second Amendment in years.

Watching The Case

I was watching this case. When it was mooted, I was concerned. When Bruen was decided, I was through the roof with happiness, tempered by my knowledge that there were going to be Bruen tantrum response laws.

What I didn’t realize at first was that this was a stepping stone.

We don’t get back our rights instantly. It is a war. A series of battles where we win, over and over again, only to face another battle.

Bruen is just about the right to carry outside our homes without being subjected to subjective licensing regimes.

Until you realize that it is that stepping stone.

When the Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments on Bianchi shortly after Bruen issued, I was sure we were going to see a rapid advancement of good Second Amendment Case law.

That case was heard and disappeared. The next case was Antonyuk v. Hochul. We had wins at the district level, and it looked like we were going to get wins at the appeals level. But we didn’t.

Watching cases was a disappointment. We were stuck in the same court of bad opinions as we were before Bruen. It didn’t seem like anything had really changed.

Watching the Legal System

From this I started to notice patterns. When Chicago’s infringements, oops, Illinois’s infringements were heard by the Seventh Circuit Court, a name popped up. Easterbrook. Why was his name familiar? Because he was the judge who authored the Seventh Circuit Court’s opinion in McDonald where he found that the Second Amendment didn’t apply to the people of Illinois, “Because the Supreme Court has never said that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment.”

This case also made it to the Supreme Court, where The Court proceeded to say, “The Second Amendment damn well does apply to the states, you moron.”

This is a web of legal decisions. Each layered on the last, making a stronger and stronger platform for The People to exercise their rights.

What I started to see is that there is a game being played by the infringing states. It wasn’t about winning; it was about not losing.

If a Second Amendment case makes it to this Supreme Court, The People will win. The three DEI hires on the Court are the wise Latino, Obama’s in-house lawyer, and “What’s a woman?” Jackson will not be able to convince any of the originalists to violate their morals or the law.

But what if we were to lose Thomas? If Hillary or Kamala were able to appoint another Jackson, the battle would be much more difficult.

The infringers aren’t interested in winning right now; they just don’t want to lose. They are waiting for the makeup of the Supreme Court to change to favor them instead of The People.

This is how come we saw Duncan GVRed to the Ninth Circuit Court, where they sent it back down to the District Court, where the District Court found that it was just as unconstitutional under Bruen as it was before Bruen.

Which means that Duncan still has not been decided. It is still up in the air with millions of dollars spent.

So, the infringers want to keep these cases out of the Supreme Court. One of the ways they do this is by arguing the ripeness of a case.

The gist of “ripeness” is that any controversy in law across this nation will have suits brought in different circuits. Until the circuit courts have had a chance to weigh in, the case is not ripe for the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court needs to know the opinions of the inferior courts to make good judgments.

The counter to this is when there is a circuit split.

A circuit split happens when two or more circuits come to different opinions on the same controversy. If circuit A says that assault weapon bans are constitutional and circuit B says that they aren’t, that’s a split.

In the First Circuit, they have found that MA’s infringements are consistent with the Second Amendment. So having a shell casing in MA without having the proper license/permit/permission is a felony, but cross over to NH and it isn’t an issue.

Two states with two different sets of laws, both “constitutional” according to the First Circuit, and no other circuit disagrees.

We are much more likely to see the Supreme Court take a case if there is a circuit split.

Watching the System

New Jersey had that tantrum after Bruen and decided to make as much of New Jersey a “sensitive” place, gun-free zones. It was very egregious.

The district court enjoined the laws. The administrative panel of the Third Circuit stayed most of the restraining order. When the case was heard by the merits panel, two of the three found that New Jersey’s laws were consistent with the Second Amendment and let the laws stand.

But the system worked. Trump managed to get Judge Mascott appointed to the Third Circuit. The day the case was to be heard by the en banc Third Circuit court, Mascott was sworn in at the Supreme Court, and then was in court to sit with the en banc panel.

We will win that case. And with that win, there will be a circuit split.

The system, appointing originalists to fill as many judicial positions as possible, is going to give us a win. And that win will mean that there will be bigger, nationwide wins.

But there’s more!

The Trump and Bondi DOJ seems to be for The People one day, and then argues for infringements the next day. It is enough to give a grown man whiplash.

For example, the DOJ is arguing that the registration requirements of the NFA should still apply, even if the tax is zero.

We all know this is BS. Trump ordered his DOJ to become defenders of the Second Amendment; why would they argue for the NFA? That’s just stupid.

Except it isn’t.

Trump ordered the DOJ to defend the Second Amendment. If Newsom were to become president, he is just as likely to order his DOJ to go back to infringing.

What the pen can do, the pen can undo.

On the other hand, if the Supreme Court were to rule that without the tax requirement, there is no hook for Congress to regulate suppressors and SBR, that is much more concrete.

It is a system. You need to look at all the moving parts to see just how complicated it actually is. You can’t just take a single snapshot and claim that is representative of the system. You have to look from many different angles.