Chris Johnson

Dellinger was fired. He went to the District Court the same day and demanded that he be reinstated, claiming the President didn’t have the authority to fire him. He did this at the end of the day on Friday. The judge in the case issued the TRO the same day.

The government appealed to the Circuit court, which kicked it back down because the case was in an interlocutory state. I.e., there wasn’t a final judgment in the case. If this status were to continue, this district court would have the ability to block the president’s authority to fire for the course of the case.

For rogue inferior courts and people like Dellinger, this is a win. All they need to do is drag out the case for as long as they can. Stopping The People’s agenda.

The TRO will expire on the 26th. The District Court will be hearing arguments for a Preliminary Injunction on the 26th. We can expect the District Court to issue their order on the 26th.

Given the activist tendencies of this judge, he is likely to grant the Preliminary Injunction.

If the Preliminary Injunction is issued, the President’s ability to fire anybody will be on hold until this case is fully resolved.

Any other challenges to being fired will be filed in DC District Court. They will all be assigned to this judge. This judge will then put them under the same PI until final judgment.

The Court has said that they will not issue an opinion until there is a Preliminary Injunction. This is still a live issue before the Supreme Court.

The two most liberal justices, Sotomayor and Jackson, would just have denied the vacatur.

Justice and Gorsuch would have issued an opinion, rather than waiting for the PI.

I won’t quote Gorsuch, but I love how his dissent is “When the plain text of the Constitution is implicated, it is the plaintiff’s burden to prove a tradition firmly based on this Nation’s historical regulations”. Gorsuch then cites numerous cases from the founding through until now which show a tradition of the courts not having the authority to reinstate fired federal employees.

When fired federal employees have sued for relief, they have been granted back pay, but never have they been reinstated.

I will quote the slap down of the rogue inferior district court:

For somebody who makes many grammar errors, who can’t speel worth a damn, and in general suffers dyslexia-driven writing issues, I am obsessed with communication.

My mentor taught me the “four parts of communication”.

1. What I say
2. What you hear
3. What you say
4. What I hear

If there is a mismatch between any of the two steps, then communication has failed. Only I know what I intend to communicate. Only I can do the work to verify, through what you say, and I hear, that I was able to communicate my concept correctly.

Part of the task of communication is agreeing on the meaning of words and of being able to identify what you are addressing.

If I use a word with one meaning, and you use the same word with a different meaning, it is unlikely that we are communicating when either of us use that word.

In the late 70s and early 80s, the feminists were becoming very vocal. They were making claims as to how good they were and how little they needed men for.

To put some perspective on this, in 1973, Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in a tennis match to prove women were as good as men or better. She was 29, at the top of her game. Bobby Riggs was 55 and most definitely not at the top of his game.

But, at the time, we couldn’t actually talk about how men were different from women and how some jobs were better suited to men. We couldn’t because to try to discuss the issue would get you slammed as a male chauvinist pig.

By controlling the language, the progressives were able to stop any dissent or even discussion about the issues from a male perspective.

It took a new term to come into existence before that discussion could take place. “Politically Correct”.

Once the term was available to us, we could actually begin the discussions that were needed, on equal footing.

Affirmative Action is another one of those topics. The phrasing is wonderful. Everybody wants to be affirmative.

How dare you want to discriminate against blacks by taking away affirmative action.

We can’t, or couldn’t discuss the harm that was coming from affirmative action because doing so would get you labeled “racist” or worse. The topic was forbidden. Not because it shouldn’t have been discussed, but because it lived in a protected state.

The new language is “DEI”. We are trying to discuss it. But we are being shouted down as bigots, racists and misogynists.

Now consider a current topic, plane crashes.

First, if you look up the NTSB numbers for plane crashes, you will find that more planes crashed in January 2024 than in January 2025. Not what we are talking about.

One of the questions that came out of the crash in DC was the sex of the pilots.

Why?

It was because there are people, myself included, that believe that the pilots of the helicopter were not qualified to be flying that Blackhawk in that airspace at that time.

Why? Because they caused a fucking midair collision!

They messed up and killed people. We KNOW that the helicopter was above its max authorized height and had no pilot input to avoid the jet. We KNOW that the jet had nearly full elevators and a 9-degree roll to the left to avoid the helicopter.

So we ask, why were they allowed on that flight?

One of the first things that came out was that the pilot was female.

Was the collision because she was female?

There is nothing in the record, the facts, that indicate that her sexual organs had anything to do with the crash.

But that is only half of the question. The rest of the question is, “Was she qualified?”

This raises further questions, “Were the standards lowered to allow more women to ‘qualify’?” and “Were better qualified males passed over to have more female pilots?”

These are all questions that should be asked.

We are having trouble asking them because to ask them is to be yelled at for something that was not said.

What are we being accused of? We are being accused of saying that the crash(es) occurred because they were women.

The media talking heads make the claim that they have the secret decoder ring that allows them to translate our questions into what we “really” mean. And what we “really” mean is that women are not qualified to be pilots. We DIDN’t say that.

But it gets worse. That message gets out there. And some on the right are not careful with their words. They might be attempting to ask the same thing we are. But it comes out as “because they were women”.

As soon as that happens, there are a hundred NPCs to claim that that dogcatcher speaks for every conservative, for every Trump supporter.

And those on the left believe them. As Ally has pointed out, one of the difficult things for her to accept as being right of center, is that we aren’t in lock step. That we don’t support everybody with an R behind their name or a MAGA hat on their head.

That duffus over there can have his crazy ideas. I don’t agree with him.

It is difficult for me to make friends. In general, my friends have come from my place of work or from my lady introducing me to people.

I make the effort when I’m out. I just don’t like people enough to be out and about.

I’ve been watching the pain that Ally has been going through as she has realized that she is now right of center.

It hurts her.

People on the left lives in such a self – created bubble that anything that threatens that bubble is unacceptable.

One of our acquaintances is full on TDS. At a recent event, they were going on and on about how horrible Trump is. But, they stepped way over the line when they attacked anybody who voted for him or supports him. They announced, proudly, that people who voted for, or support Trump will not be accepted around her.

The fear that exists and the need to not offend means that nobody who disagreed with her spoke up. This was a friendly gathering. To take up arms (or words) against her would have been unacceptable. Those that don’t have TDS just grit their teeth and stay silent.

The other day I was talking about an event in congress where a representative intentionally “misgendered” a trans person.

For me, it was a big middle finger to the “Trans Agenda”.

I took joy in that gesture. For Ally, my glee was hurtful to her. She still runs on emotion with a strong backdrop of facts and reasoning.

She was also hurting because this representative had an R after her name. She would rather not support somebody who she thought was being hurtful to somebody. She felt she was being forced to support this representative because she now was a conservative.

No, she didn’t have to support that person. This isn’t the left.

The jackals out there are eating their own. Everyone who doesn’t agree with them is evil. Everyone who isn’t in lockstep with them is a fascist. Everyone who isn’t attacking Elon and Trump must be a NAZI.

In a short skit I watched the other day, the person says they are leaving the Democrat party. They say how they are still the same person, but that the Democrat party no longer represents them. That they will still be friends with their former friends. That this doesn’t change anything between them, that they had been friends since kindergarten, they will be friends long into the future.

The “democrat” responds with, “The last time I looked, I’m not friends with Nazi’s”.

We’ve talked about the process of litigation in a civil suit.

A complaint is filed. In the complaint, the plaintiffs state what they are challenging, why they believe the law supports them, what harm they are suffering, and what relief they seek.

The facts in this case are that on Friday, February 7, 2025, Trump “fired” Dellinger. Dellinger was “Special Counsel”. Being a legal eagle, Dellinger filed suit in federal district court to stop Trump from firing him. Before the government could even respond to the filing, the court held a hearing.

The court issued an “administrative stay” on Trump’s action. This is a made up term. A Court can issue injunctions, a TRO is a type of injunction, and they can issue judgments. They can also stay injunctions and judgments. They can’t “stay” things outside the court system.

So “administrative stay” is actually a TRO but using language to hide the fact.

The court’s order required the government to “recognize Dellinger as Special Counsel” and to let him back into the office. It also required the acting Special Counsel to be removed from the position.

That TRO ran through February 13th.

This is exactly right. The Winter factors order the courts to first look at the likelihood of success on the merits. The inferior courts are required to do so. If the district court judge and called this a “TRO” he would have had to use the Winter factors.

By using a made up term for TRO, the judge attempted to avoid the clear instructions of the Supreme Court on how to decide if an injunction should be issued.

To put this in perspective, Winter factors are to court cases what the four rules of gun safety are to gun culture. If somebody doesn’t fallow the four rules, they are at best ignorant, at worse willfully dangerous to themselves and others.

For the court to ignore Winter factors falls into the same category as pointing a loaded pistol at your junk and seeing how fast you can take up the slack in your trigger.

Katsas, the Circuit Judge writing above, says that the Winter factors were not used. The District judge did a shit job. Then went on to say that this case was not ripe to be heard. That Trump needed to wait until a TRO or a preliminary injunction was issued.

This is bogus.

Any time a Constitutional protected right or authority is delayed, irreparable harm has been done. A right delayed is a right denied.

The district judge has gone rogue.

The Trump administration was having none of this. They reached out to the Supreme Court, via their emergency docket, 24A790 to vacate the district court’s order.

So what authority did The People grant the President?

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. Article II, § 1, U.S. Constitution.

He is the boss of the executive branch. There doesn’t seem to be much limiting him. The limits are for Treaties, appointments of Ambassadors, public Ministers and Consuls, Supreme Court justices, and all other Officers of the United States.

Dellinger is an officer of the United States.

The Constitution does not explicitly lay out that the President can fire anybody. On the other hand, it has long been recognized that the authority to hire comes with the authority to fire.

What is the argument of Dellinger as to why SCOTUS should not vacate the order? That it would be granting an exception to the general rule that TRO’s can’t be appealed.

Amazing, the state seems to appeal any TRO that goes against them. But now TRO’s can’t be appealed?

Dellinger has not shown he has been harmed, much less irreparably harmed. It is unlikely that he will succeed on the merits of his case. Yet, he wants to let an inferior court stop the President while the case winds its way through the halls of (in)justice.

I purchased my first motorcycle when I was in the 7th grade. It was a dirt bike, a Yamaha MX80.

I feel in love with riding. The only issue I had was that there was no gas station on base. To get gas for my bike I would have had to walk a mile and a half from the gate to the gas station and then walk that same mile and a half back to the gate to get back on my bike.

Or I could have ridden my bicycle to the station and back.

The other option was that I could ride to the closest point to the gas station. There was a hole in the fence.

So I would do that. I would take the gas tank off the bike, carry it through the hole, across the road and fill it.

It cost $0.25 to put a gallon of gas in the tank.

When we moved, it was a little easier to get gas. I could ride the bike across one road to get gas.

I sold that bike when gas went over a dollar per gallon. I couldn’t afford it.

About this time, Jimmy Carter managed to fuck over the economy to the point where there was a perceived shortage of gas.

This caused the price of gas to go up. It leads to gas shortages and other things.

The congress responded with exactly the wrong answer. The put a nationwide speed limit in place.

They decided that the maximum legal speed should be 55MPH.

Now, if you have ever lived on the East Coast, you know that the difference between 55MPH and 65MPH really doesn’t mean much. Traffic is bad. If you are lucky, you might shave 5 minutes off a two-hour trip.

On the other hand, in the Midwest and west, the difference between 55MPH and 65 or 70 MPH can make a huge difference. The distances being traveled and the ability to maintain those speeds make it a significant difference.

This song and the movie based on it are part of the culture of rebellion that was happening as The People pushed back against the 55MPH mandate.

In this video, you can see that the gigantic crime The Rubber Duck committed was driving 63MPH in a 55MPH zone.

We, The People, are pushing back. Thank goodness.

There are a few servers that are too old. There is a need for a few more servers to get a room level redundancy. These things can be expensive.

As I’m cheap, I’ve been using older servers that accept 3.5″ disk drives. Some except 2 drives, some 6, some could accept more, but the case doesn’t.

The fix I chose was to move to some four bay NAS enclosures. This is a reasonable size that balances with the network I/O capability.

These enclosures all take the Mini-ITX motherboard.

These motherboards are nothing short of amazing. In the middle tier, they have all the things a full-size motherboard has. Some have 4 memory slots, some only 2. They come with 1, 2, 4 Ethernet ports. Some have SFP ports. Some have SATA ports. The number of SATA ports ranges from 1 to 6. Some come with PCIe slots.

Depending on what your needs are, there is a motherboard for you.

Since this was going to be a NAS, the motherboard I selected had to have 4 SATA ports, an NVMe slot, and SFP+.

Yep, this exists. They don’t exist at the price point I wanted to pay. It finally clicked with me. I can just put an SFP+ PCIe card into the machine.

Thus, I picked a motherboard with 4 SATA, 1 Ethernet, 1 USB3, 1 PCIe slot, enough memory and 2 M.2 slots.

Some NAS enclosures do not have the opening for a PCI slot, so it was important to pick a case that had the card opening.

When I got the enclosure I was impressed.

It is a sturdy, thick steel case. There is no plastic on the entire thing. There are for hot swap disk bays plus mounting space for 2 2.5″ drives. Exactly what I was looking for.

When I went to install the motherboard, I was shocked to find that the CPU cooler didn’t fit. I ordered a low profile. I’m impressed with that as well.

I get the board mounted. It looks nice. I go to close the case and the cover won’t fit on. The cover has a folded U channel that goes over the bottom rail of the case to lock the case closed.

The problem is that there isn’t enough space between the edge of the motherboard and the bottom rail for the U channel to fit.

My first real use of the right-angle die grinder. I don’t have a cut-off wheel for it, so I just ground the edge away and it worked.

Of course, I gave myself a frost burn because I was too busy to put gloves on to handle the die grinder.

Back to the worktable, the cover now goes on. I plug a wireless USB dongle into the USB 3.0 and boot. Nothing.

It took me a couple of days before I figured it out. The case came with no documentation. The front panel connector has both a USB 3 plug and a USB 3 plug. I plugged both in. You are only supposed to plug in one. Fixed.

The installation happens, I’m happy. It is fast enough, it is responsive enough. I just need to get it put in place with the fiber configured.

I take the cover off the back slot. Go to put the PCI card in.

The (many bad words) slot does not line up with the opening in the back of the case.

The open in the back is off by 0.8 inches.

I consider cutting another card opening in the back. That won’t work. The card would be half out of the side of the case.

I ordered the cutoff wheels for the die grinder, I know I’m going to need them.

I decided to cut the back opening wider. This will leave an opening that can be taped closed on the PCI side. It allows me to use the existing slot with retaining hardware. I good idea.

All I need to do is unscrew the standoffs, drill and tap four holes in the right place, and I’m done.

Except… Those standoffs are pressed into place. They don’t unscrew.

No problem. I have a set of standoffs. I’ll just cut the existing standoffs off. Drill and tap holes in the right place and use my standoffs.

Except… My standoffs are the normal length. These standoffs are a custom length. I can’t do that.

Tools to the rescue

First stop, the arbor press. It is a small 2 ton press. I have no problems pushing out the standoffs. The press also removes the bulge from removing the standoffs.

Next step, the milling machine. Using the gage pins, I found the size of the holes is 0.197-0.198. Measuring the standoffs, I get 0.208. I settled on 0.201 for the hole size. I should have gone a 64th smaller.

There is no way to clamp this thing in the vise. I do have strap clamps. The case is quickly put into position.

The first hold is located, then drilled. No issues.

Except I don’t have enough travel to reach the other three holes. I reposition the case on the table and go for it.

I go back to the arbor press to put the standoffs back in. I don’t have enough height to support the case while installing the standoffs.

Back to the mill. Square to ends of a hunk of aluminum. Punch a 3/8in hole in it. Work on the mill vise and get the standoffs put back in place.

In the middle of this, I have an alarm, fearing that I put the standoffs in the wrong place. I do a quick test fit and everything is perfect.

It takes me a good hour to put the case back together with all the case mods done. It looks good. I’m happy with how it came out.

Today is search day. I have to find the 8 meter OM-4 fiber for this NAS, and I have to find the box of screws that came with the case for the hard drives. Once I have those, this can go into production.

I know what to look for on NAS cases. I’ll be building out a few more of these boxes over the coming months. First to replace two boxes which are too old. One for the redundancy.

The world will be good, or I’ll punch it again and again until it is good.

P.S. This is filler, the article about Trump’s win in the D.C. District court was taking to long.

A hearing was held on Friday. I expect the judge to issue an order regarding the Preliminary Injunction on Monday.

The TRO expired on Friday, so the judge will either issue an order regarding the case. If she is going to go rogue, she will want to have that done on Monday to stop the President from doing his duty. If she wants to respect the constitution, she will issue an order denying the preliminary injunction.

In my businesses, I sometimes had a bookkeeper. She would receive the bills, make entries in the books, then bring me checks to sign to pay those bills.

I could also tell her to issue a check to somebody or some business. It was never her job to tell me not to pay that person, nor to verify if that entity was supposed to get the money. It was my job to make sure that when I told her to pay an entity, that entity should be paid, and how much.

She was supposed to tell me “no”, only if it would run afoul of the law or if we didn’t have the cash for it. If it meant we would be short later, she still did it.

The Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS) is that bookkeeper for the Federal Government. They are tasked with making payments. They are not tasked with verifying that the payment should be made.

The decision to make a payment comes from other entities within the bureaucracy.

These payment files are checked against a list of “don’t pay”. If the recipient of the payment is on any of those lists, the payment is held. The agency that sent the payment file is responsible for determining if the payment is proper.

In the best of worlds, this would mean that no payments went to bad actors.

Now consider the case of the President issuing an Executive Order stopping payments to purple people eaters. There are dozens of agencies that send money to purple people eaters. All of those agencies are responsible for stopping payment files from going through to pay purple people eaters.

The BFS receives a payment file to send a payment to a PPE. If that PPE is not on the do not pay list, they will send the payment to that PPE. If the PPE is on a no pay list, the payment is held and the agency is informed.

If that agency sends back “pay it”, the BFS pays it. And the PPE gets money, regardless of what the President ordered.

When the bureaucracy is working with the President, every agency would have heard the “stop payments to PPEs” and would have done so. Any payment files that were already sent might be called back or stopped. If the BFS flags a payment as going to a PPE, everybody says “good job”.

If the bureaucracy is at odds with the President, they ignore the EO and do whatever the hell they want. If BFS flags any payments, they just order them paid.

If some agencies are attempting to obey the President, there can still be others that are not.

Worse, in many cases, contracts are let and budgeted. Some low level GS-2 with TDS can order a payment on a contract they control, and it just gets paid. Even if all of his bosses have told him “no”.

The President has ordered that no more payments to PPEs be made. To make this happen, he can either send people who are willing to obey him to every agency and every desk where somebody can send a payment to a PPE.

Or, he can send a few people to the BFS, and they can analyze each payment file as it comes in, check to see if it is a PPE payment.

Watching the bookkeepers doesn’t mean that the bookkeepers are doing something “wrong”, it is just the proper chock point in the flow of money.

The argument being made by these former treasury officials is that “career officials” are non-partisan and can be trusted to do the right thing.

For decades, BFS has been staffed by nonpartisan career employees led by nonpartisan career official…

There appears to be a claim without evidence that these workers are nonpartisan. At least they left off the “nonpartisan” when describing the fiscal assistant secretary, their boss.

They claim that all these nonpartisan career employees have undergone a security screening. Screening is one of those weasel words we see people use when they want the reader to think one thing when it isn’t true.

When I purchase a firearm, I fill out a 4473 and a “background check” is performed. This is a type of “security screening”. Having undergone a “thorough security screening” does not mean that this person has a clearance. If they had clearances, the brief would have said they have clearances.

This is intended to make it seem that the DOGE team’s actual clearances are not as thorough or complete as the BFS security screening. The reality is that any real clearance is likely better than the screenings these people got.

There is more, I’ll leave you with Grok’s explanation, it isn’t bad.

Not what I intended to write about. The Court has surprised me, again.

Snope and Ocean State Tactical are both distributed for the conference of 2/21/2025.

We will near nothing about these cases before then.

This puts these cases on track for arguments in the new term. Those oral arguments could be as early as October. If the cases are heard in October, we could have an opinion by December.

We didn’t lose this one, the Court took a time out.

You might have heard that the DoJ is suing Hochul and James. This is not quite true. They are being sued in their official capacity. So the Governor, Attorney General, and head of the DMV of New York state are being sued.

What is the suit about?

New York will give a license to illegal aliens. I am not sure how that works, but they do.

The license indicates that the person is an illegal alien. As an illegal alien, they have extra rights under New York law.

In particular, the “Green Light” law requires the DMV to inform the illegal alien anytime the feds request information about them from the DMV.

Things are happening.

Never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake., Your enemy is not stupid.

In 2016, I was listening to Ben Shapiro, he had a hate on for Trump. He would often say something to the effect, “The people who think Trump is playing 4D chess are wrong.”

I think I liked his analysis better when he was anti-Trump. He is all in this time around.

I do think that Trump was attempting to play chess during his first term. Unfortunately, people kept taking his pieces and knocking over the board. He lost.

Trump 2.0 is moving fast. He is moving so fast that the left can’t keep up. We can’t keep up. I wake up, go on X and look for what happened in the last 8 hours. And I’m often surprised.

As Second Amendment activists, we know exactly how the game will be played. We know that states that are anti-gun are going to pass regulations to infringe on The People. We know that the rogue lower courts will rule in favor of the state. We know that any relief will be blocked. We know that it will take years to get even one case decided.

Since June 2022, we have not seen a single 2A win. Every win in the lower courts has been halted at the circuit level. Every “temporary restraining order” has been upheld against us. Every preliminary injunction has been stayed, against us.

We have not won a single battle yet.

That doesn’t mean we aren’t winning. It means that this is a war, not a battle. We have to fight. We shall go to the end. We shall fight in the Ninth, we shall fight in the Seventh and Second, we shall fight in the Forth, we shall fight to the Supreme Court. We shall never surrender. With apologies to Winston Churchill.

Trump 2.0 came into office with a bang. The left was working hard to show a “peaceful transfer of power”, so they could club the right with the events of J6th.

But Donald hit the ground running. I believe he signed over 200 Executive Orders on his first day. Held multiple press conferences and attended a ball. I’m tired just thinking about his day.

There were surprises in those Executive Orders. The biggest for me was that everything was done right. When he announced the formation of DOGE, I was skeptical.

I “knew” that it would be challenged and DOGE would be devolved because it didn’t come through Congress.

I was wrong. He out played me as I looked over his shoulder. He didn’t create DOGE out of thin air. He renamed an existing agency. He then told the new agency to go do their job, with Elon leading it.

The promises he made, I expected to take months to accomplish. He was keeping promises within minutes of taking office. And not in ceremonial ways.

He issued an Executive Order giving the US AG 30 days to report what to do about the anti-2A situation within the Federal government. Last month, I would have considered this to be a shot fired over the bow of the enemy. I would have expected results sometime in late 2026.

Today, I expect the report to hit his desk in 20 some days. I expect actions to happen the same day. This is the speed that Trump is moving at.

As I said, in the Second Amendment advocacy space, we know what is going to happen. How do we know? We’ve seen it too many times in the past.

Trump 2.0 is out playing the left in so many areas. Why should I assume he messed up with these court cases?

When the state is fighting The People, they want things to move as slowly as possible.

The case in New York was filed at 9pm on Friday. The TRO was in place by 1AM Saturday morning. The TRO was modified by 5PM Monday.

Having set out the limits, the Trump administration has provided documentation to the court by 4PM on Tuesday to make sure that DOGE people will still have access. They have taken the “loophole” opening and driven a train through it.

They are obeying the letter of the TRO while doing what needs to be done. They are preparing to take this to the next level.

I believe they will attempt to combine multiple cases from rogue courts, headed by political provocateurs. These combined cases will be taken straight to the Supreme Court.

To put a since of speed on this, the case I’m following is averaging 10 new docket entries per day. At this pace, I should be tired of this case in the next 2 days.