Chris Johnson

The Fort is getting ready for the 2025 season. Allyson is up there for the woman’s weekend. She is incredibly excited.

Why?

Because this will be the first event she has gone to in years when she isn’t presenting/teaching. Her goal? To learn how to make a pie crust.

Like many events, there is an unload time. You are allowed to drive on site to unload your gear, and then you are to get your vehicle off site as soon as you can.

It felt like coming home. We stopped to talk to boss lady, then drove around to the Fort to unload. Bill saw us drive up and waved us inside.

It felt good to be recognized, to be welcomed.

There was “man bonding”, Bill was on his way to fix something, he had a crowbar in hand and made a pretend swing at the windshield. It felt welcoming. As I said, a coming home.

Allyson and I got out of the truck. She started unloading for her stay, I went to help Bill.

We worked as a team. I got to drive the idiot stick for a bit. We were able to move a large, heavy, ramp out of the way, clear up the damage a woodchuck had done, and get an aluminum ramp in place for the weekend.

It was good. It made me happy. The Fort is a home away from home.

The one thing that struck me as humorous was that we were going to use some 2x4s. They needed to be cut to size. Bill was in the jointery first. When I got there, I was expecting him to be using one of the handsaws.

Nope, he had a circular saw, making quick work of the task.

NPCs get new talking points

In the past 20 years of watching congress critters make huge amounts of money with some of the luckiest stock moves, it is refreshing to have some of them talking about limiting insider trading.

And all the normal NPCs are all yapping about wanting to pass a bill to stop themselves from trading individual stocks.

The bill, as pitched by the NPCs, is unlikely to actually accomplish anything, still it makes me smile to see them doing this because they are virtue signaling.

We won, again.

These inferior rogue courts lose and the media plays it up as a win.

The short of it, the state (not bad guys) transferred Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the El Salvador “super max”. Garcia was under a court order to be kept in the United States.

Garcia is a bad person. The state says he is a member of MS-18, he claims he is not. He does not appear to have a criminal record outside of being here illegally. He was detained under the Biden Puppet administration.

His transfer was a mistake. The state acknowledges this.

The District Judge issued another of those magic TROs. He overstepped his Article III power when he ordered the Government to facilitate and effectuate the return of [Garcia] to the United States by no later than 11:59PM on Monday, April 7.

To understand this win, it is necessary to understand the power of a court. When a court gives an order, it must be followed or the court can find you in contempt. Being in contempt can cause people to be arrested.

In this particular case, I believe it is Kristi Noem who would have been held in contempt.

The TRO uses two different terms with different legal meanings. The first is to “facilitate”. This is telling the Government to work with El Salvador to get Garcia back. It could be the Government paying money, it could be other diplomatic pressure, or it could be a simple “please give him back.”

The difficulty the Government has is that Garcia is a member of MS-13. Under El Salvador law, this means he is a terrorist. As a terrorist in El Salvador, he will be detained in their super max under their laws.

Under the facilitate requirement, as long as the Government was working to get Garcia returned to the United States, they were within the boundaries of the TRO.

The second term, “effectuate” is different. This is a get-it-done requirement. This requires that Garcia be back in the United States before midnight on the 7th. If the Government does not have Garcia back in the United States by that deadline, they will be in contempt.

Whatever the full reasons might be for the state not wanting Garcia back, it is unreasonable to expect the state to negotiate the return of Garcia and to have him back in the states within the deadline given by the court.

Chief Justice Roberts quashed this TRO without committing the Court. He issued an administrative stay. Because that stay took the case past the midnight deadline, there was no more threat of contempt.

Having made it past the deadline, the Court then issued an order today.

Yep, the district court was just slapped down for overreaching its power.

The government is no longer required to return Garcia, they are required to work towards getting him back. Meanwhile, they can continue the court case at the district level, which might end with Garcia staying in El Salvador.

The government is only required to share, what it can, about the steps they are taking to facilitate the return of Garcia.

“We’ve scheduled a meeting with the representative of El Salvador.” Which is 4 weeks from now. They can slow walk this thing.

Just a short follow up. In one day the portfolio I am following recovered about 530%.

That is to say, the reported loss over the last 6 days has gone from 3.58% yesterday to 0.19% today.

Just stay the course and things will get better.

If you are invested in the market, don’t panic. As CBMTTek pointed out, February 2024 the S&P 500 was doing just fine, at the same level. The media wasn’t screaming about the economy tanking.

He’s correct. The amount of panic the media projects is tempered by which party is in control.

A 0.001% drop in the market when Trump does something is cause to panic, which causes the sheep to sell, causing the market to drop. A 1.000% drop in the market when a Dem is in office creates a cricket like ambiance. And saying anything makes you a conspiracy theorist.

Trump has put multiple tariffs into place. These tariffs cause changes in supply chains and in the costs to produce certain goods.

Every product produced requires raw goods, tooling, work space, and skills to create.

Consider a simple BLT. The raw goods are bacon, bacon, bacon, lettuce, tomato, bread, mayo. Having all of those raw goods does not a BLT make.

You have to have the correct tooling. The tooling here is a way of cooking the bacon, such as a grill top, cutting tomatoes, cutting bread, spreading the mayo.

Once the sandwich is produced, it has to be packaged for delivery. That requires still more raw goods.

When you sell that sandwich, you include the cost of the raw materials that go into it, you include the cost of the packaging, you include the cost of the tools, the building you used, and you include the cost of labor. You then need to include the cost the government imposes on you.

The cost of your raw goods includes the price you pay for the goods, the cost the government imposes on those goods, such as tariffs and VAT, and the cost of transporting the raw goods to your location.

Once you have all those costs, you add profit to come up with the price you will charge your customers.

Now, let’s change the product, instead of creating a sandwich, you are creating a gear. Your raw goods are iron and pattern making materials. You will use your tools to convert pattern making materials into patterns. You will then use those patterns to cast gear blanks. You will then turn those gear blanks into finished gears by applying different tools.

You have converted raw materials, with knowledge, skill and labor, into a finished product, a gear.

That gear is sold at a price which is profitable to you. That gear is likely a raw material for some other business.

Tariffs add to the cost of anything imported into a country that imposes imports. Imports are decided on the origin country or the country of manufacture.

Consider a car that is manufactured in Detroit. If that car includes raw materials that are imported from other countries, those materials that have tariffs applied will cost more.

There are no “complexities” to this. The “PANIC!” people want you to think there are, that’s not true. Every business keeps track of the cost of raw materials. If they don’t know the costs, they can’t set prices. It doesn’t matter if Ford, Canada produces the part or Ford, Flynt creates the part. There is a cost that is paid to have that part in the Ford, Detroit plant to put into a new car.

In a well-functioning business, they are always looking at the cost of raw materials. The cost of raw materials includes the cost of taxes (tariffs) and transportation.

It also includes the cost of bad materials. If you are paying a $1.00 for a widget and there is a 10% failure rate, that means you are paying $1.10 for each working part. If somebody else has the same widget with a cost (price + extra costs) of $1.05 and a failure rate of 0.1% that means they are only scrapping 1 in 1000 widgets.

In this case, it is actually cheaper to buy the “more expensive” widget.

Included in the cost calculations are longer-term issues. If the ball bearings you purchase are not properly heat treated, and you assemble them into a high-precision roller bearing which then fails in a million dollar engine, there is a heck of a lot more costs involved.

We know that people will change their purchasing habits when the cost of needed goods goes up. We saw this when Americans switched from steak to ground beef as their primary meat. Look at the CPI for food, you’ll see that in the past it had steak on it, today it has ground beef.

Because the cost of goods goes up, people will look for better prices. If that search leads to a local business, so much the better.

Unfortunately, local business might not be set up to cope with a large influx of new business. This leads to shortages.

In a market-driven economy, this leads to people consumers offering more or producers charging more. This is called a “signal”.

Because this signal exists, asking for more of that product, producers will attempt to create more product. This could be as simple as turning on an extra machine or as complex as standing up an entirely new production plant.

When this is going on, “the market” will respond. The market responds by buying or selling ownership in different companies. If a company that used to clear $2,000,000 per year is now projected to clear $4,000,000 per year is likely to attract buyers. A company that is seeing their income drop is likely to attract sellers.

This causes market fluctuations.

Over the course of yesterday, the portfolio that I follow was up as much as 1% yet closed down 0.82% Since Trump announced the tariffs, the portfolio has lost 3.53%

On $100,000 that’s a $3,530 loss.

And it is meaningless. That portfolio will go up again.

The people who are screaming the loudest are the people with millions in the stock market. If that are looking at a $10,000,000 portfolio, a 3.53% drop is $353,000 “loss”. That is more than a 1/4 million dollars in just a few days.

But it only becomes a loss if they sell now. If they hold on to those securities and the price recovers or goes up, then they will “make money”. But again, that is only true if they actually sell the security to realize the profits they made.

There is no reason to panic. The sky is not falling. If anything, this might be a good time to look at putting money into the market. The trick is to buy when near the bottom of the sell-off.

The only reason I know this, is I did some research this last week. I am NOT the person you want to take financial advise from.

This case has had a long and torturous journey. We are not at the end of its travels.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court denied cert in this case. There was no statement issued in relation to this case.

Just “cert is denied”

That might sound like a horrible loss, it is not.

This case has not reached a final judgment at the district court yet.

On December 13, 2022, Judge Glenn Suddaby issued his decision and order. The state (bad guys) had filed a motion to reconsider the court’s preliminary injunction granted November 17, 2022.

The state then appealed to the Second Circuit court. The Second Circuit court stayed the injunction pending the outcome of the appeal. They issued their opinion against The People, finding that it was ok for the state of New York to ban the carrying of firearms almost everywhere.

The plaintiffs (good guys) appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court granted certiorari, vacated the Second Circuit Court’s ruling in light of Rahimi.

The Second Circuit heard oral arguments again. After a suitable delay, they said that they got it right the first time, even when considering Rahimi. The plaintiffs (still the good guys), filed a petition for writ of certiorari.

Friday, the Supreme Court justices held their Friday conference. Yesterday, they issued their order and simply denied cert.

This means that the Second Circuits stay of the case stays in place. The case is remanded back to the district court to finish the “fact finding” and then to await final judgment.

In other words, this case is still in an interlocutory state.

In my humble opinion, the Supreme Court declined to hear this case because it was in an interlocutory state and if they were to GVR the case, they knew the Second Circuit will get it wrong again. The Second Circuit is a rogue inferior court.

We still have Snope and Ocean State Tactical seeking cert.

I don’t see either conferenced yet, but that should be forthcoming soon.

A modern website is a complex system of inter related pieces. Each of which must work correctly and communicate correctly with the other parts of the system.

As website creators, we break the design into the Frontend and the Backend. The front end is anything the end user sees, while the back end is responsible for generating content to be displayed.

The backend is further subdivided into the Model, Controller, and View. The model is our term for the database and database access. The controller is the rules for the website. The view is the creation of content to be displayed.

Consider a website that allows you to purchase an item. The “model” would describe that item. SKU, size, weight, cost, price, images, description, name, and much more. The “controller” encodes the business rules. We can only ship to people that have paid us. And the view turns all the information into content for a browser to display.

The content is delivered as HTML. We can also supply JavaScript code and Cascading Style Sheets. The HTML can have the JavaScript and CSS embedded in the HTML or the HTML can link to other resources to be included with this page.

HyperText Markup Language

The US government wanted a standardized way of creating electronic documents for printing. This was the Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO8879.

SGML has the advantage of being very application-specific. If you are writing a book, you use one set of tags, if you are creating the Message Of The Day, you use a different set of tags.

The power of markup is that you describe what you are marking up, rather than formatting whatever it might be.

Consider and address. Bilbo Baggins, 999 Bagshot Row, Hobbiton, The Shire. As written in this sentence, it is just a row of text. You could write it that way on a letter and it would be delivered, but the postman would be unhappy at the formatting

<b>Bilbo Baggins</b><br/>
999 Bagshot row<br/>
Hobbiton, The Shire<br/>

Is the address formatted, which looks like

Bilbo Baggins
999 Bagshot row
Hobbiton, The Shire

Using DocBook, a particular version of SGML, we would write that same address something like:

<address><surname>Baggins</surname><givenname>Bilbo</givenname>
<street>99 Bagshot row</street>
<city>Hobbiton</city><state>The Shire</state>
</address>

We do not know how to display the address, but we know that it is an address. If we are provided rules on how to display addresses, we can display this address per the rules.

Structure

HTML was designed to be simpler than SGML. There are fewer tags, and the fixed meaning of the tags made it easy to write HTML by hand.

Almost every post I create is written in raw HTML. That HTML is then styled and displayed in nearly pretty ways.

HTML defined the structure of the document. The structure was of a header section, describing the page, and a body section with the actual content.

Within the content section were the different displayable content. You had headers, levels 1 through 5, you had numbered lists, unnumbed lists, and definition lists (a word with an attached definition). There were paragraphs, links, tables, and finally, there were images.

This content was rendered however the browser wanted to.

There were formatting tags for bold, italics, blinking, and not much more.

If you wanted to “layout” your webpage, you used tables and fought to get things right.

Cascading Style Sheets

CSS allowed us to provide styling to an element. The paragraph above has margins, padding, and boarders applied to it. It has colors applied for the background and for the font. All are set via a style sheet. Your browser has a default style for each element.

The problem that arises is how to attach that styling to particular elements. The answer starts with the structure of the document.

p {
  color: red;
  background-color: green;
  margin-left: 50px;
  border: 2px;
}

This uses a CSS selector, ‘p’ to locate all paragraph elements. It then sets the background to green, the font to red, moves it to the right 50px, then draws a 2px solid border around the paragraph.

This is a basic selector. Selectors get very complex.

DOM

Every element in an HTML document is loaded into the DOM. From there, we can select elements and modify the style of the element with CSS and CSS Selectors.

The simplest method is to give important elements an ID. IDs are unique for a DOM. If there is more than one element with the same ID, this will generate an error, which most people will never see. The rules tell us which element will own that identifier.

To find a particular element with a particular ID you use the ‘#’ symbol. Thus, to find the header just above, we would write “#DOM”. While the header would look like <h3 id=”DOM”>DOM</h3>.

We can add a multiuse identifier, called a class, to multiple elements at the same time. <div class=”quote”> is the code I use to create a quote. The class “quote” has a CSS group attached. This causes all the divs of class quote to be rendered as a block quote.

We then have the tag selector. We used one above with the “p” element. This allows us to select all the elements of a particular type. The selector “li” would select all the list items in the DOM. We could use this to make every line italic.

We can combine selectors to limit which elements are selected. “ul>li” would select all line items of unordered(without numbers) list, while “ol>li” would select all line items which were part of an ordered (with numbers) list.

These selectors can even allow us to move through the DOM in a structured way. We can ask for the first paragraph after a header for special treatment.

DOM Manipulation

When we load JavaScript on a web page, that JavaScript can watch for events on elements. This is done by locating an element with a selector, then watching for a particular event to take place on that element.

The JavaScript can then modify the DOM. This can be by changing the structure of the DOM, or it can be modifying the style of elements in the DOM.

A recent example of this, I added a class to some table data items (td). I did it with a class. I then found all the elements with that class and watched for a mouse click on those elements.

When the click was detected, my JavaScript ran. The JavaScript grabbed the contents of the element, stripped out formatting, then put that content into a text input box, displayed the text input box for the user to edit.

When the user completed their edit, the value they entered was formatted, the input was removed from the DOM. The formatted value was then placed back in the element.

All with a bit of good selection to make it work.

Finally, Selenium uses different types of selectors to find elements for manipulation or testing.

Very powerful stuff.

This is boring geek babble.

Quality Assurance is not something computer nerds are good at. It is boring, repetitive, and difficult.

That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Instead, it means that you need somebody to do QA for you. You cannot do QA on your own. You won’t see your own errors.

Consider a simple unit test. You have just created a new model (database table). You know you have created it correctly. Some of that is because you trust the infrastructure you are using, but mostly it is because it has worked in the past.

To do a proper unit test, you would need to verify that you can read and write an object of that model. That each functional manipulation does what is should, and that all possible options into the functional unit works.

In the past, I would test student programs that did simple math. For example, they would write a simple four function calculator. I’m the ass that would get their calculator to attempt to divide by zero. They had to handle that case.

The thing that happens, is that as we are developing new code, we test that code, extensively. We know what we are adding and what it should do. We don’t “retest” what we know is already tested and working.

Last Tuesday, that nearly broke me. I had tested my code, was getting ready to deploy the code. Before deploying, I was doing some testing. It wasn’t until I clicked on a link that went to a page I was not going to be testing that I discovered a major error.

I wasn’t even planning on looking at that page.

Here is another example, you have a standardized header for your website. If you check it on one page, why should you test the header on every page? It should work the same. So you don’t test it on every page. Except that there is one page that doesn’t set a context variable, so it causes errors on the page. Because you didn’t test that particular page, the error is missed.

This is where unit tests are a win. In theory, you write a test for every part.

Currently, I’m working with Selinium, This is an API that interfaces to an actual browser. This allows you to control the browser via code.

The basics are you write code to find a page element, you can then verify different aspects of the page.

I’m currently writing code to test the left column. The left-hand column is on almost every page of the website. In the past, I’ve verified the parts of that column I’ve been working on. I haven’t verified the entire column since I first created the site.

Using Selenium, I am able to run the same set of tests against the left column on every page. I can also verify that every menu item opens and closes. I can exercise the entire website.

Because it is so easy to do this, I can just run the tests every time, giving me better results.

Of course there is a learning curve. Of course it takes a different mindset to do these tests. Regardless, it is worth it.

The games people play…

Consider the following, a plaintiff comes to the district court with a challenge and a request for a summary judgment. The court looks at the filings by the plaintiff, agrees the plaintiff is in the right. The court grants the summary judgment.

At that instant, the defendants will appeal to the circuit court. They will request an administrative stay pending the court deciding if a stay pending appeal is warranted.

The administrative stay is supposed to be very short.

In one of the cases coming out of the D.C. District Court, the inferior court granted a temporary stay on a government action. The TRO then granted the plaintiff the relief they wanted as final judgment. The government appealed to the D.C. Circuit court, which said, “You can’t appeal a TRO, even if it is acting like a preliminary injunction or summary judgment.” The government then appealed to the Supreme Court.

The appeal was presented to Chief Justice Roberts, who granted an administrative stay. This required almost no argument, the papers filed by the petitioner were enough. When SCOTUS heard the petition for a stay of the TRO, the Court denied the stay because the TRO had already expired, and thus the petition was moot.

If the appeals court denies the stay, the defendant can then appeal to the Supreme Court for a stay pending the outcome of the case.

The point of all of this is that a summary judgment can be appealed up to the Supreme Court.

A Temporary Restraining Order is a temporary injunction. It is supposed to pause actions until a hearing for a preliminary injunction is heard.

Since it is such a short-term instrument, it is not (normally) appealable.

These inferior court judges are granting TRO’s against the government that act more like preliminary injunctions than TRO’s.

Winter Factors

The Supreme Court, in the Winter opinion, gave clear guidance on when an injunction or stay should/can be issued. These are known as the “Winter Factors”.

The first factor is the likelihood of success on the merits. That is to say, is the party requesting the stay or injunction likely to prevail on the merits of the case?

For example, if you are requesting an injunction on the IRS freezing your assets, you have to have a strong enough argument that you will win before the court will consider your request. Since it is unlikely you will win, no injunction will issue.

This is the place where most Second Amendment challenges loose. The courts will determine that the plaintiffs (good guys) are unlikely to succeed on the merits, and will thus not grant the injunction.

The second factor is irreparable harm.

In general, if the party were to prevail with no stay or injunction, could they be made whole with a payment of money?

Any suit involving money is very unlikely to create irreparable harm.

For example, if you are fired, and you sue for wrongful termination, your loses can be made whole with payment for your lost wages. The courts do not consider secondary problems, only the primary. So if you were to lose your house because you defaulted on your mortgage, you might not get enough money to recover from that lose.

The third winter factor is Balance of Equities. This is designed to balance harm. If the injunction is granted, one party will be harmed. If the injunction is denied, the other party will be harmed. If granting the injunction would delay some “good thing” to the harmed party, but denying the injunction would cause somebody to lose their home, the balance of equities swings to granting the injunction.

The fourth factor is Public Interest. Is granting the stay or injunction in the best interest of the public?

When any court disregards the winter factors, they are going rogue.

In Second Amendment cases, the courts would often say that the infringement was “in the best interest of the public” and deny relief to the Second Amendment plaintiffs. They would do this, even if the other factors would lead to granting the stay or injunction.

The Supreme Court has emphasized that a denial of a Constitutionally protected right is irreparable harm, that the balance of equities always tilts to those being denied their Constitutionally protected right, and that the public has no interest in enforcing unconstitutional regulations.

Winter v. public interest

The opinions issued by these rogue inferior judges often discard the winter factors. This is something that could and should be appealed. But a TRO cannot be appealed.

This means that these rogue judges are doing their best to make these TRO’s as broad as possible and to last as long as possible to stop the administration’s policies from being effected.

Judge Shopping

There are almost 100 federal district courts with 677 judgeships, with a few more senior judges thrown in.

A senior judge is a judge who is no longer in the lottery but still hears cases. I.e. A judge who is very near retirement.

If you want to file a suit against a gun company, you can do no better than filing your case in the District Court of Massachusetts. They haven’t found an infringement they didn’t approve of.

There is no combination of judges in the First Circuit court who would agree that any law was an infringement of the Second Amendment. They are so anti-gun that I don’t believe there is a single case where they found for The People in a Second Amendment Challenge.

The attitude of the Supreme Court has varied. Unfortunately, it takes a very long time for a case to make its way to the Supreme Court.

These bad actors are intentionally searching out judges that they expect will go rogue. There also appears to be a thumb on the lottery system used to pick judges for cases.

Oh, when a case is filed, the judge assigned is picked at random via a lottery. A plaintiff can request that a case be assigned to a particular judge, if the plaintiffs believe that their case is similar to other cases the judge is or has handled.

This is why one judge in the Southern District of New York got so many of the product liability cases against drug manufacturers. He’s the guy who decided that even if a person couldn’t prove which company manufactured the medication, he would portion out the penalty based on the market share of the different manufacturers.

Consider a judge who found that the distillery was liable for crashes where the driver was drunk. He has 1000s of plaintiffs demanding money from the distillery.

The problem is which distillery is at fault for a particular crash. The guys drinking rum and coke, which brand of rum did they drink? It is unlikely they know.

So instead of forcing the plaintiffs to point to a particular “guilty” distillery, the judge looks at the market share of each distillery. If the penalty is $1,000,000 then the distillery with 50% of the market share of that class of product is responsible for $500,000 of the penalty.

The little distillery, that is producing Don’t Drive Vodka, is so small they only account for 0.1% of the market share of vodka. They would be responsible for $1,000 of the $1,000,000 penalty.

But what if 90% of the drivers that are drunk were drinking “Don’t Drive Vodka”? Wouldn’t that mean they should pay more of the penalty? Yes, it does mean that, but it’s not what this judge did. It was all about market share.

California in Massachusetts?

Why would the lead plaintiff, California, be opening a case in Massachusetts?

Because they know that it is an almost certainty that they will get a judge with TDS.

The five Justices that wrote the unsigned opinion obviously thought the rogue, inferior judge, was playing games.

The Chief Justice couldn’t bother to write why he dissented, but he did.

Justice Kagan claims her dissent was because the government didn’t argue that what they did was legal. She entirely ignores the government’s merits argument, that the district court didn’t have jurisdiction, instead focusing on “irreparable harm” that involved money.

Justice Jackson spent 15 pages on her dissent, with Sotomayor joining. Jackson also ignores the majority’s view that the government was likely to prevail on the merits, no jurisdiction, instead focusing on the inferior court thinking that the government’s termination of grants was somehow illegal.

She argues that the TRO would be moot in a few days, so this wasn’t the right time to take up the issue.

And finally, she thinks the government has to provide “meaningful explanation” of the cancellation of these grants.

I still think she is a clown.

Conclusion

This is a win for the Trump administration. It is the Supreme Court taking a stand. They are calling this particular judge on these preliminary injunctions wrapped in the verbiage of a TRO.

More importantly, that part where they say, …the Government is likely to succeed in showing the District Court lacked jurisdiction to order the payment of money under the APA &mdash, Ibid, that is a warning to the inferior courts that they need to reconsider if they have jurisdiction in these cases.

The Supreme Court speaks in code. Lawyers understand the code. Courts understand the code. Those that follow the Supreme Court will often figure out the code. Leftist refuse to acknowledge the code.

Rogue courts insist that the code means something different. All that you need to do to understand this is to watch a court twist one footnote into the most important part of Bruen while ignoring the thousands of words that refute the footnote.

Watching The Supreme Court is always frustrating. There is a tendency for things to take a long time.

David Snope filed a petition for writ of certiorari on September 23, 2024. This will be the third or fourth time he has requested a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court.

It has been granted once, the ruling of the Fourth Circuit court was vacated, and the case was remanded back down to the Fourth for a do-over in light of Bruen.

In November 2024, we were hoping that this case and Ocean State Tactical would both be granted cert. It did not happen.

If cert had been granted by January 16th, the case would have had oral arguments in the fall, with the opinion issuing in August.

As things sit, we might not hear the outcome of this case, if granted cert, until the fall of 2026.

But there are things afoot here.

First, the court heard Bondi v. Vanderstok and published their opinion on March 26th. This was not a direct Second Amendment Challenge, it was more of an administrative challenge. We did not win. Both Alito and Thomas dissented.

Mexico’s lawfare case was heard. We will have an opinion on that before the end of the 2024-2025 term. This is a case where the Supreme Court can slap down the lower courts for abusing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

Snope is in regard to Maryland’s “assault weapons” ban. It is one of the many cases where the inferior courts have said things of the sort of “well, some arms aren’t arms under the protection of the Second Amendment.”

Another case, with a docket that looks almost the same, is Ocean State Tactical challenging Rhode Island’s magazine ban. Here, the inferior courts have declared that magazines aren’t really arms under the Second Amendment.

A third case has shown up on the radar.

Antonyuk II is a Second Amendment challenge to New York State’s Bruen tantrum response bill.

The heart of this is New York designating almost every part of the state a sensitive place. Even though Bruen explicitly said that the state couldn’t declare Manhattan a sensitive place, just because there were cops and people there.

All three of these cases are being discussed by the justices, again, this Friday. If we get lucky, we will hear some movement on Monday.

At this point, my tea leaves are missing, my crystal ball has clouded up, and the wife won’t let me sacrifice a chicken to read its entrails.

I haven’t a clue what the justices are going to do. I am holding out hope.

Love it or hate it, project management is a thing. It has to be there. If you don’t think it is there, you are just doing it badly.

Project Managers are a different kettle of fish. Some need to be boiled alive. Others can just dance on hot rocks. And a very few can sit at the big boys’ table.

I’m coming off the end of a rush project that was big. I had to take a customized system and add tariffs to it with about 14 days from concept to deployed. More than a little to get done.

When I started programming, I had a choice of an 8080 with a 24×80 character display, or a 6502 with a 24×40 character display.

When I was introduced to JOVE, Jonathan’s Own Version of EMACS, I fell in love with it. Multiple views into the same file, the ability to copy and paste from different files or different places in the same file. And auto indentation.

Powerful stuff for the time.

My fingers worked will with vi and later vim because I played Nethack and before that, Hack. The programs had a particular key set for moving the cursor based on the key caps of a terminal type used at MIT.

The author had never seen a terminal without arrows over the J, K, H, and L keys. To give you an idea of how ingrained those are, I had to fire up vim and tell my fingers “down”, “up”, “right”, and “left” to record the keys for this sentence. My fingers know, I don’t.

Besides jove, I learned emacs. Emacs is my programming editor. It is what I use when I need to write a lot of code or text. With modern computers, it starts just as fast as jove ever did on a 68020 class CPU.

The problem we had was keeping track of what needed to be done or fixed. This might start off as a document, written with jove in troff. This could be fed to different processors to create PostScript files to be sent to our printers.

Later, some of us used LaTeX for the same thing. Your “design document” was a separate file that was “fixed” before you started coding. These documents never contained more than brief pseudocode and discussions of algorithms.

As you were coding, if you discovered something, you created a comment and marked it. The two most common marks were, XXX which meant that the code was broken in some way, but it didn’t need to be fixed now. All XXX marks had to be addressed before the code could be released.

The other mark was TODO. This was working code but needed some features or extensions added. These did not need to be fixed before release.

In general, we used grep to find all these markers in a list of files. It wasn’t difficult.

The small program I’m working with has some 250k lines of code. After 3 or 4 years of supporting this site, I would say I’ve looked at every line of code in the system.

Finding every marker in 4100 files across 1200 directories is a pain.

Enter Kanban

Kanban is a project management tool. The concept is easy enough to do with sticky notes and a white board or notes with push pins on a larger bulletin board.

Today, the normal Kanban has 4 columns to hold cards. The cards are labeled, “backlog”, “To Do”, “Doing” or “Working”, and “Done”.

When you create a card it goes into the “backlog” column. These are issues or tasks that have no resources assigned to them.

Once per week, there is a meeting of the workers and the project manager. In this meeting, the project manager evaluates the cards that are in the “Done” column. If they are truly done, then they are removed from the board and added to the QA project.

Cards that are in the working column stay in the working column. Cards that are in the working column can be moved into the backlog column if some other card blocks them.

For example, if you have a card that says, “Put new tire on left front wheel” it cannot be worked on until the card that says, “Purchase a new tire for the front left wheel.” Until the purchase card is completed, you can’t work on the installation card.

If there are any resources (workers/developers) that think they are going to need more tasks to work on, the project manager will take cards from the backlog column and move them to the To-Do column.

When a worker requires more work, they move the card from the To-Do column to the working column. When they complete the card, they move it to the Done column.

I’ve used Kanban in the past. It never really appealed to me as it didn’t feel any different from the old ways of doing things.

For this latest project, I used my Kanban board.

Instead of putting markers in the code, I opened a new issue. That issue just went into the “backlog” column. I could tag the issue as a bug or a feature. I could indicate that cards were blocked. It was faster to create the issues/cards than to make entries into the files and then try to locate them later.

Today, I’ll be looking through anything in the QA column and writing unit or web tests for them. I’ll also be doing a QA across the site, to add to the project board.

The biggest thing for me was the ability to visual see what still needed to be done.

Conclusion

Good tools make the work go faster.