Chris Johnson

Communism, an idea so good it has to use force to keep its citizens in.

The fact is that Communism requires that all dissenting voices be silenced. They are silenced with violence. People are sent to re-education camps, they are disappeared in the dead of the night, and they are grabbed off the streets, never to be seen again. All with the authority and violence of the government.

The image of people being disappeared is what the anti-American agitators are using when they say that “masked men are kidnapping people off of the street.” It invokes images of communist countries doing just that.

The difference is that these people are not being disappeared. They are being arrested. They get lawyers, or they had lawyers.

When ICE agents detain a criminal illegal alien outside a courtroom, that criminal has had due process.

Are these arrests violent? Only if the person being arrested makes them that way.

Soft Violence

When the Tea Party came into existence, I wanted to fly the Gadsden flag. I did not for fear of how it might affect my wife and children. I flew an American Flag instead and still worried.

People were silenced by fear of reprisals. This was the time of cancel culture from the left.

Voice a double-bad-think opinion, and you were canceled. Voice a bad-think opinion, and you might only be warned.

You were made to feel alone, but for a few lonely voices in the dark. You were told by every talking head that you were guilty of bad-think and would be punished if found out.

This is also the screaming and in your face, just shy of physical assault.

Physical Violence

This is where you start to see the laying on of hands. Physical beatings, shoving, and punching. Actual battery.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous book The Gulag Archipelago, he talks about being stuffed into a cattle car. The violence was being dealt out not only by the guards but also by fellow prisoners.

But they weren’t “fellows” in the classic sense. Most of the prisoners were regular people stuffed in the pipeline leading to the Gulag. These were criminals, and they colluded with the guards for privileges and in exchange kept the rest of the prisoners cowed.

We see that in the criminal attacks in Seattle. Roaming gangs of violent thugs impose their beliefs with truncheons and bats. And if those don’t work, even more.

In Cabaret, the maître d` of the Kit Kat Klub kicked some Brownshirts out of the club. The cowards were not willing to do anything about it at the time. Instead, they waited until the maître d` had left the club, then beat the shit out of him.

They sent the message, “Oppose us, and bad things will happen to you.”

We see this type of thuggish behavior in the cities. We see it when conservatives set up tables to have a conversation and are driven off campus by gangs of feral louts.

And the state defends these thugs. Regular folk who stand up for themselves and others are punished by the state. Look at how the authorities treated prayer groups defending themselves vs. the antifa lice that attacked them. Look at the violence against federal buildings by antifa and then what happened when grandma walked through the Capitol.

This violence is vastly asymmetric, and it is intended to be. At every step of the process, you are told to back down. You are told that you have to restrain yourself. And if you don’t? Ask Kyle what happens.

Murder

Ask Lincoln how Democrats behave when they lose. Ask JFK, killed by a communist. Ask almost any victim of political violence in the last century how Democrats behave.

Unfortunately, you can’t. Most of those people were murdered.

The goal of the left is to create an event to prove the right is the more violent.

The problem is, we are. When we react, we do it with force and with a will to get things done.

Again, ask Kyle. When it was time, he pulled the trigger, and cos-playing degenerates died. That boy showed remarkable trigger discipline.

And this is not new.

In 1977, JoAnne Deborah Byron, AKA Assata Olugbala Shakur, was convicted of murdering a police officer.

This happy little communist worm was a member of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army and other groups. She was a murderer, a terrorist, and a bank robber. After she was convicted, she was sentenced to life + 26-33 years.

Of course the standard whining leftists blamed it all on racism.

She escaped, stayed on the lam for a while before moving to Cuba to live the life of a privileged Communist.

On September 26th, 2025, she became a good communist. Cuba has reported she died of health complications.

Pistol Optics

I have red dots on some of my AR-15s. For my wife, this is great. Put the dot where she wants the hole to be, and press the trigger. A hole appears near where the little red dot was.

All of my AR-15 red dots are co-witnessed. The little red dot shows up at the same place where my iron sight points. If the optic is off, I can see my iron sights through the glass. This means that if I have issues with the red dot being “dead,” I still have functional sights.

With the peep sight of the AR-15 platform, I have a rear sight that flips down. Some of my ARs have fixed front sights, and some have flip-up front sights. Even if they are flip-up, I leave them up.

Some pistol optics are set up so that when the optics are mounted, the rear sight is removed. This means that if your optic fails, you have no sights.

I looked into a P365-RS; this is a Sig P365 with a Romeo Sierra already mounted. The sights are co-witnessed. And the sights are the standard great Sig sights.

Holsters

I have been a fan of Alien Gear holsters for several years. I like how they fit and the positive retention they provide for my firearms.

I particularly like their Shape Shift system. This system consists of different shells, which are specific to a firearm; parts to mount to the shell for different types of retention; and a backer.

For example, you can use a positive retention where you have to use your thumb to release the firearm, or it can be retained by a spring loaded catch. Pull, and the firearm comes out of the holster. The tension on that catch can be set as you want.

The tool needed to adjust the different tensions and positions is the retaining nut, which retains the mounting system.

The shell can be used as a half shell with some backers or as a full shell with others.

For me, I like being able to move the holster to different backers: an IWB, an OWB, an appendix backer (which I haven’t used), and a shoulder rig. They have drop rigs and MOLLE rigs as well. There are many options. Those backers that attach to a belt can adjust cant easily. The belt clips are solid loops, J-Hooks or C-hooks. You choose which you want.

The C-hooks fit between your belt and your pants, so the only thing that is visible are two small black lines at the top and bottom of your belt. With the solid loop and J-hooks, you can see the “strap” of black plastic, which is the clip.

I’m looking for another holster for a P365X-Macro. They aren’t selling a shell for the Shape Shift system.

Yesterday I spoke to a rep and found out why. They are phasing the Shape Shift system out. Because the shells mount to the backers at the top of the slide, there isn’t enough room for many of the pistol mounted optics. In addition, pistols with weapon lights don’t fit well either.

According to this rep, they are working on a new system.

Is It Lawfare?

The big news yesterday was that the DoJ is attacking Trump’s political enemies, attempting to jail them.

It appears that the DoJ has found that James Comey is likely guilty of multiple crimes, so he has been indicted. We can tell this is lawfare because they are using laws that have existed for many years; they presented evidence to a grand jury, and the grand jury returned the indictment.

This is totally different from charging a political enemy with fraud for putting up collateral for a loan and then paying back the loan with interest but having a difference in opinion on the value of the collateral. It is also totally different from calling the secretary of state for a state and telling him that you need 200K votes to win the state. AND it is totally different from entering into an NDA agreement with a bimbo who is attempting to blackmail you, and then paying that bill through your lawyer.

You see, this crime is real, 18 U.S.C. § 1001 making false statements to Congress. James messed up and answered directly when asked if he authorized a leak. He should have gone with that old favorite, “I don’t recall.”

While not all the grand jury agreed that he violated 18 U.S.C. § 1001, a majority did.

All the members of the grand jury did agree that he violated 18 U.S.C. 1505, obstruction. Corruptly endeavored to influence, obstruct, and impede the Senate Judiciary Committee’s inquiry by making false and misleading statements.

The case was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, 25-cr-00272

Networking Almost Working

The wonderful thing about Unix configuration is that you can do anything you want to a configuration file. With a GUI, you can only do what the GUI allows you to do.

My internal network uses OSPF for internal networking with a bit of BGP magic for the OVN networks. Whenever a router is presented with two choices for a route, it chooses the one with the lowest cost.

It is a little more complicated than that because a router can also adjust its priority. Priority adjustments might be used when you have links that have different dollar costs but the same bandwidth.

There are three parameters that are used to calculate the cost of a link. The algorithm calculates the sum of the costs of all the links between two nodes and takes the lowest cost.

The first method and parameter is to set the cost of the link. This is a value that ranges from 1 to 65535. No calculations are done; this is the cost of using this link.

This means that you could assign different values to different link speeds: 1 for 100G, 2 for 40G, 3 for 20G, 4 for 10G, 5 for 5G, 6 for 2.5G, 7 for 1G, and so forth. This works, but it is painful.

A faster method is to assign a reference bandwidth to use within the router. For me, I set the reference bandwidth to 10G. Since the router knows the bandwidth of each interface, it takes that reference bandwidth and divides it by the interface bandwidth.

If my interface is a 10G fiber link, that is 10G/10G, or 1. But if that particular interface is a 1G Ethernet port, then we have 10G/1G equals 10.

This is a quick way to get the correct costs assigned to every interface. I only have to specify a bandwidth for an interface if that interface is a bridge.

Nice stuff.

Because I have a link that is acting up, I was able to describe that link to the protocol. That link is 10G down and 1G up. So it gets direct traffic down, but when it is sending upstream, that takes two hops.

The only issue I still need to solve is that I have an L3 Switch that is not passing OSPF multicast packets.

Question of The Week

Who else do you want to see indicted, and Why?

One of the best tools I’ve discovered in my many years of computer work is AMANDA.

AMANDA is free software for doing backups. The gist is that you have an Amanda server. On schedule, the server contacts Amanda clients to perform disk backups, sending the data back to the server. The server then sends the data to “tapes”.

What makes the backup so nice is that it is configured for how long you want to keep live backups and then attempts to do it efficiently. My backups are generally for two years.

On the front side, you define DLEs. A DLE is a host and disk or filesystem to dump. There are other parameters, but that is the smallest DLE configuration.

Before the dump starts, the server gets an estimate for each DLE based on using no other backups, a full dump, or a partial dump or multiple partial dumps. Once it obtains this information, it creates a schedule to dump all the DLEs.

The data can be encrypted on the client or the server, is transferred to the server, sometimes to a holding disk, sometimes directly to tape. I can be compressed on the server or the client.

In the end, the data is written to disk.

Every client that I have is backed up using Amanda. It just works.

In the olden days, I configured it to dump to physical tapes. If everything fits on one tape, great. If it didn’t, I could use multi tape systems or even tape libraries. The tape size limitations were removed along the way so that DLEs can be dumped across multiple tapes.

The backups are indexed, making it easy to recover particular files from any particular date.

More importantly, the instructions for recovering bare metal from backup are written to the tape.

Today, tapes are an expensive method of doing backups. It is cheaper to backup to disk, if your disks are capable of surviving multiple failures.

Old-Time Disks

You bought a disk drive; that disk drive was allocated as a file system at a particular mount point, ignoring MS DOS stuff.

Drives got bigger; we didn’t need multiple drives for our file systems. We “partitioned” our drives and treated each partition as an individual disk drive.

The problem becomes that a disk failure is catastrophic. We have data loss.

The fix is to dump each drive/partition to tape. Then if we need to replace a drive, we reload from tape.

Somebody decided it was a good idea to have digitized images. We require bigger drives. Even the biggest drives aren’t big enough.

Solution: instead of breaking one drive into partitions, we will combine multiple physical drives to create a logical drive.

In the alternative, if we have enough space on a single drive, we can use two drives to mirror each other. Then when one fails, the other can handle the entire load until a replacement can be installed.

Still need more space. We decide that a good idea is to use a Hamming code. By grouping 3 or more drives as a single logical drive, we can use one drive as a parity drive. If any drive fails, that parity drive can be used to reconstruct the contents of the missing drive. Things slow down, but it works, until you lose a second drive.

Solution: combine RAID-5 drives with mirroring. Never mind, we are now at the point where for every gigabyte of data you need 2 or more gigabytes of storage.

Enter Ceph and other things like it. Instead of building one large disk farm, we create many smaller disk farms and join them in interesting ways.

Now data is stored across multiple drives, across multiple hosts, across multiple racks, across multiple rooms, across multiple data centers.

With Ceph and enough nodes and locations, you can have complete data centers go offline and not lose a single byte of storage.

Amazon S3

This is some of the cheapest storage going. Pennies on the gigabyte. The costs come when you are making to many access requests. But for a virtual tape drive where you are only writing (free), it is a wonderful option.

You create a bucket and put objects into your bucket. Objects can be treated as (very) large tape blocks. This just works.

At one point I had over a terabyte of backups on my Amazon S3. Which was fine until I started to get real bills for that storage.

Regardless, I had switched myself and my clients to using Amazon S3 for backups.

Everything was going well until the fall of 2018. At that time I migrated a client from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 and the backups stopped working.

It was still working for me, but not for them. We went back to 16.04 and continued.

20.04 gave the same results during testing; I left the backup server at 16.04.

We were slated to try 26.04 in 8 or so months.

Ceph RGW

The Ceph RGW feature set is similar to Amazon S3. It is so similar that you need to change only a few configuration parameters to switch from Amazon S3 to Ceph RGW.

With the help of Grok, I got Ceph RGW working, and the Amazon s3cmd worked perfectly.

Then I configured Amanda to use S3 style virtual tapes to my Ceph RGW storage.

It failed.

For two days I fought this thing, then with Grok’s help I got the configuration parameters working, but things still failed.

HTTP GETs were working, but PUTs were failing. Tcpdump and a bit of debugging, and I discovered that the client, Amanda, was preparing to send a PUT command but was instead sending a GET command, which failed signature tests.

Another two days before I found the problem. libcurl was upgraded going from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04. The new libcurl treated setting the method options differently.

Under old curl, you set the method you wanted to use to “1,” and you got a GET, PUT, POST, or HEAD. If you set GET to 0, PUT to 1, and POST/HEAD to 0, you get a PUT.

The new libcurl seems to override these settings. This means that you can have it do GET or HEAD but no other. GET is the default if everything is zero. Because of the ordering, you might get the HEAD method to work.

This issue has existed since around 2018. It is now 2025, and the fix has been presented to Amanda at least twice; I was the latest to do so. The previous was in 2024. And it still hasn’t been fixed.

I’m running my patched version, at least that seems to be working.

I’m still working on how to write a persuasive essay to open minds that would otherwise be closed.

So you get a Charlie clip.

I sometimes think that high school students are not mature enough to understand literature. I know I was not.

The books that were assigned were mostly boring. They were almost impossible to read. I slogged through but never “enjoyed” reading them.

The closest I got was when we were reading Romeo and Juliet. The play was in our textbooks. Which made it easy, but I was and am lazy. Lugging a massive textbook to class when I could carry a thin, light book seemed stupid.

So that’s what I did; I purchased a copy from the local bookstore and used that instead.

This was not an issue until I was asked to read a part in class. Which I did. When I got to the end of my passage, nobody spoke the next lines. They were all thumbing through their textbooks trying to figure out where the F that language and those visuals came from.

My teacher, Mrs. Trout(?) was just nodding along. She knew the real words of Bill. The teacher from next door came and closed our classroom door because her class was listening to us instead of her.

What had happened was that I was reading the unabridged version. The textbook had stripped out all the “juicy” parts.

By the end of the next week, everybody in class had the pocket version and was much more invested in the writings of Bill. Our teacher was thrilled.

The Scarlet Letter, Oh my goodness, I still despise that thing. The Fountainhead, I’m glad I wasn’t forced to read that. And one of my most hated assignments? The Red Badge of Courage.

One of my ESL students picked The Red Badge of Courage. I walked into it knowing I would have to slog through.

Then it turned into something wonderful. The language is visceral. The author’s use of anthropomorphic language brings emotion to the story.

And listening to Henry talk about the glory of war. The battles he would fight. The honors he would reap. His friend and he, looking at the officers with disdain while grasping at every rumor of battle.

But Henry did not earn honors in his first battle. He exposed himself. He stripped the glory from his uniform and dashed it in the mud.

He had to live with his actions.

The next time the bugles sounded, he stood and fought. He fought not as a man or a hero. He fought as a machine. Standing because he could not stomach another failure of his soul and honor.

He earned his honor. And he learned of the horrors of battle.

I’ve been working with Grok from xAI. It seems to be better than most of the others I’ve tried. It has done a good job of helping me debug complex systems.

I wouldn’t trust it to provide instructions to pour piss out of a boot.

I was working with it for the configuration of the Amanda backup system. I’m integrating it with my Ceph cluster. While it did an “ok” job of configuring Ceph, for Amanda it was entirely wrong.

Even though it asked, and I provided version numbers, it gave instructions for a configuration method that hasn’t been used in years.

I still don’t have a working Amanda configuration, but I have ideas on how to get there.

Because I’m not a great writer, I use every tool at my disposal to write better. I asked Grok to analyze my article about Charlie.

It insisted that Charlie was still alive and that I was writing some “wish-fulfillment” fictional scenario. I told it to prove that Charlie had been murdered. It did its thing and told me that Charlie had indeed been killed on the 10th.

In the very next prompt, it again insisted that it was a “fictional fact” and that it was merely “alleged” that Charlie had been killed.

One of the things to know about AIs is that the more they need to analyze, the longer it takes and the more “expensive” it becomes. This means that they have a memory or token limit.

This leads to article truncation when it is asked to retrieve web pages.

It told me my article ended abruptly and that it was willing to help write the ending. When it was instructed to print my original article, it showed me the truncated version. When I told it to fetch the complete article, that it had to be a complete <div>, it said it had fetched the article, then proceeded to write its version of the end of the article.

When asked to provide Obama’s statement on the death of Charlie, it showed me three or for articles that only short quoted Obama, leaving out all the context.

AI is an amazing tool. It is still at the verify then verify again stage.

Story Time

I was working with a client on a Magento site. This client was a “digital agency.” They specialized in throwing up WordPress sites for $1500 or so.

They could do this by outsourcing most of the work to an Indian firm.

The CEO was up to give us a talk on using Indian outsourcing. He was very proud of himself for figuring out that these Indian tech firms will claim they can do any technical thing, even if they have no idea what they are doing. You only know if they are any good at the task after you’ve invested in the firm.

He had solved this by going to India and personally investigating a dozen different Indian tech firms before deciding on the one that actually knew how to do WordPress sites.

He had great success using them.

He had asked this same firm, “Do you do Magento?” They had answered in the affirmative. I was the unhappy recipient of their “product”.

My question to that CEO: “Did you ask them if they can do a tech thing? “Yes.” “Do Indian tech firms always say ‘yes’ to that question?” “Yes.” “Did you violate your own rule about trusting Indian tech firms?” “Yes.”

My point is that you can find an AI that does a fantastic job on a task. They might produce great results every day for a month. That doesn’t mean you can trust the next answer it gives. It is just as likely to make it up or lie to you as give you a good, correct answer.

On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk was murdered. He was assassinated for his speech. He was a moderate that was willing to listen to anybody and engaged in honest dialog.

As Jesus did, he got angry from time to time, and his emotion came out, explaining in clear, short, easy-to-understand words what his point was.

He was a threat to the Left because he was bringing the youth out of the leftist bubble of never-ending lies.

He was winning hearts and minds.

Because he was winning, he had to be silenced. Intimidation did not work. Low-level violence did not work. So they killed him.

How did “they” kill him? They created a permission structure where it was acceptable to kill those you disagreed with. Words are violence, and violence begets violence. “It was Charlie’s fault” that he was killed. If only he had not been so violent.

Immediately after his murder, we started to see the blood vultures. This time they were not dancing in the blood of dead children; instead, they were dancing and painting themselves in Charlie’s blood. Dancing in joyful celebration of the death of a moderate conservative.

It was and is disgusting. They were in the FA stage, knowing there was no FO stage.

But Charlie’s death changed that. And the FO stage became very real. Hundreds of people have lost their jobs for being vile, disgusting subhumans.

That paint of blood they so proudly wore was used to fire them. And they whined.

They whined about “free speech”.

Here is the short, simple truth: they used their right to free speech to slander and attack Charlie and his family and us. They took joy in the death of a good man. They clearly expressed their hatred for over half of this great country.

Their employers used their freedom from association to get rid of their sorry asses. They weren’t fired to silence them. They were fired because their employers didn’t want them contaminating the workspace.

Health facilities had no choice. The legal liability of keeping a health care worker after they express an interest in harming people who are not part of the sheep herd is greater than they could risk. Other employers looked at losing 50% of their business and decided they were going to cut their loses.

Nobody in the government ordered this. Reasonable people in the government decried the vile, evil, disgusting statements of these subhumans. They did not step on the First Amendment.

We took the left’s tools and used them. And employers were able to get rid of the trash stinking up the workplace.

Of course some bigger names couldn’t help themselves. An author of horror novels lied about Charlie. The pushback was verbal, but he was smart enough to read the writing on the wall. But far too late, the damage was done.

A movie based on one of his pieces has just come out. People are choosing to avoid it. Nobody called for a boycott. His movie is still being screened.

It is being screened to nearly empty theaters. Theater owners understand that upsetting 50% of the country is going to reduce customers.

The momentum kept growing; more and more FAFO was happening.

A late-night political hack opened his failing show with his normal monologue. He lied about the murderer’s affiliation. He attacked 50+% of the country.

His show had been falling in popularity for years. He was avoiding his job of “comedian” to focus on being a political hack.

Broadcast TV still exists. There are very few independent TV stations. Most are owned by larger groups. These stations get their content from multiple sources, but the primary one is their national affiliate, such as ABC, CBS, or NBC.

Every TV station is entitled to preempt a broadcast with their choices. If they would rather not air “Why The Racist, Evil People Are Racist, Evil People,” they don’t have to.

That is their choice. When they go to their advertisers and their advertisers say, “We don’t want our advertisements aired on that show.” They might not have any choice. That is where the slot is.

At that point, the advertiser might choose to pull their ad. To spend their money elsewhere.

When the station starts to hemorrhage money over political content, they might decide to preempt.

If the station preempts a show, that means they don’t show the broadcaster’s advertisements. That means the broadcaster is losing money.

They don’t like losing money.

So they took this political hack off the air.

The government didn’t. Trump didn’t know about it until he was briefed on the hack’s firing. He didn’t request it.

While the FCC has been considering investigating the broadcaster’s lying about known facts, they hadn’t done anything. This was a stupid statement to make, but it happened.

So here is the situation: According to the left, this political hack being let go is the definition of destruction of free speech. Charlie being murdered was just the consequence of being a “Nazi.”

You see, they are the real victims of political violence, not Charlie, not you, not I.

I’m considering getting a dry-fire practice system.

If you follow the gun-tubers, you’ll have heard of Mantis. I tried to figure out what their system consists of. My concern was that I would have to attach something to the outside of my pistol, changing how it holsters and how I draw. I would rather not have a special holster for my dry fire system.

I read that they have a cartridge system, but what I read didn’t really help me understand how it fit into their system.

Strikeman is another system. It requires my phone to do the analysis, but that would be fine for indoor practice. Better than picking the safe corner for dry firing.

Google suggests Triumph Systems and CooFire Trainer.

Does anybody have any personal experiences with dry fire systems? If so, which system? What did you like about it? What did you dislike?

Is it Trolling?

18 U.S.C. §922(g)4 says, who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution is a prohibited person.

Trump went there. He suggested that people suffering from gender dysphoria are mentally ill.

If they are mentally ill then does 18 U.S.C. §922(g)4 apply?

Using the DSM-IV we see

There were situations where people with Gender Identity Disorder were classified as “mentally defective” under §922(g), but with the release of DSM-5, that is no longer possible, and it still requires an adjudication.

The trolling is because we now have Trump taking guns away from somebody, good from the left’s point of view while at the same time doing something to a member of a victim class, which is bad.

What’s a good leftist to do?

Noem v. Vasquez

In another win for the Trump Administration, the Supreme Court decided that the Constitution really does say that the President oversees the executive branch, not judges.

In —Marbury V. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803) the Supreme Court defined who they were and what their job is. The gist of that decision is that the Supreme Court decides if a government action violates the Constitution. They gave themselves the power as the final arbitrator of what the law means.

Since that time there have been ongoing skirmishes between the branches as each branch attempts to wrest power from the other branches. In some cases it was one branch taking it from another branch to give to the third. Thus we have judges who think they can oversee immigration policy.

The left is playing one of their favorite games: redefining words. As I’ve said in the past, we can easily tell if the plain text of the Second Amendment covers the proposed conduct by looking to see if any of the usual suspects speaks up. If Giffords, Brady, or Everytown is involved, the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated.

When an unmarked vehicle pulls up and 3 or 4 men jump out in full police gear wearing vests that say “POLICE” or “I.C.E.”, they know who it is. They aren’t unknown people. They are law enforcement officials.

They know damn well that it isn’t a kidnapping; it is an arrest. They know damn well that the officers are wearing face coverings because the left are violent. The left is willing to kill people to get their way.

The Court found that briefly detaining a person with reasonable suspicion is good enough. An I.C.E. agent can briefly detain a person they suspect of being a criminal illegal alien for reasonable suspicion. They must then release that person if they are not a criminal.

A person is not arrested if they are detained. They are not kidnapped. And they are not at any particular risk, unless they do something stupid..

I’m tired of reading about a “pastor” or “father” or “youth coach” that has been “kidnapped” by “masked men.” Reading just a few paragraphs in, it becomes obvious that the person in question was a criminal alien being arrested for deportation.

Freedom From Association

It has been pointed out that medical professionals making any statement suggesting they will discriminate in how they care for a patient is cause for dismissal.

The legal ramifications are so high that a medical facility can’t risk it. If some nurse says they are intentionally causing pain to a patient, that nurse must be fired. If they are not fired, the medical facility is ripe for a lawsuit, which they are likely to lose.

At this point many people who thought they were talking to like-minded people or who thought they were in the majority have reached the FO stage of the equation.

Businesses are finding that they have no customers. Employees are being shown the door and then finding out that they do not qualify for unemployment. FA and FO is happening all over the world.

In addition, people are speaking up in opposition to the vile, evil devils and finding that they are suddenly “Right wing extremists.”

They are being welcomed with milk and cookies and don’t understand how they got here.

Where is the violence coming from?

It is all in the definitions.

While there are multiple outlets reporting that there is more right-wing violence than left-wing violence, the singleton source leads back to the ADL.

Just a few observations. If the violence is anti-government, that is labeled as right-wing. Countless antifa thugs throwing firebombs at government buildings is “right-wing violence.” If charges are dropped, it wasn’t violence. Walking through the capitol is violence; burning cars is not.

The data is so corrupted that you can’t take it at face value.

Question Of The Week

Have you decided to go to red dots on your EDC?

The First Amendment declares:

This is our protection from the state for religion, speech, distributing speech, gathering, and demanding changes from the state when the state harms us.

This is what the First Amendment to our Constitution says. We interpreted it first by looking at the plain text of the amendment, as it was understood in 1791. While the 14th Amendment incorporated the entire Constitution as amended for all states, the meaning of the First Amendment is fixed to 1791.

The language of the 14th Amendment was fixed in the 1860s, when it was ratified.

Once we determine if the plain text of the Constitution is implicated, the state bears the burden of proving that the current regulation, law, or action is supported by this Nation’s historical traditions of regulations.

While an exact match is not required, the regulation must match the what, how, and why of our Nation’s traditional regulations.

The first thing we note is that it is a restriction on Congress, the government, not the people. The 14th Amendment means that it is also a restriction on all local and state governments. It does not apply to people or companies.

This means that your employer can create a rule that says you cannot post anything about the company. They might have a rule that says you are always a representative of the company and that you must show good moral character.

The First Amendment has nothing to do with any rules your employer makes. There might be other laws or regulations that apply, but not your First Amendment protected rights.

While the common vernacular is “Freedom of Speech”, this phrase does not appear in the Constitution. Instead, it commands the government to not create a state religion nor to stop people from practicing their religion.

One of the things that the left yells is, “No right is absolute!” This is true. We have other protected rights; we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. — U.S. Declaration of Independence

When there is a conflict between “life” and “religion,” the courts have found that the right to life supersedes the right to practice your religion as you wish. This is why we have freedom of religion, but human sacrifice is illegal. There are other crimes that are not protected by freedom of religion as well.

In general, the process is called “levels of scrutiny.” This is the process where the court first determines how much a regulation interferes with your protected right; based on that level, the court applies Strict, Intermediate, or Rational scrutiny.

Each level of scrutiny has a corresponding burden that the government must meet to justify that interference.

It is the same when we look at the freedom of speech, …abridging the freedom of speech…. We look at the meaning of “abridged” in 1791 to understand. We look to regulations on people’s speech in 1791 to find what are and are not allowed abridgements of speech.

While the left uses, “You can’t shout fire in a crowded theater.” This is not true. It is a lie.

It was stated as part of dicta by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in Schenck v. United States, 1919. He then spent much of his later career trying to reverse this horrible opinion.

We know it is a lie because you most certainly are allowed to shout “fire” if the theater is on fire. Or if there is a legal need to move people to an exit.

After Charlie was murdered, many people went on social media to express themselves. Some were grieving, and their pain came through. Others celebrated his death. Still others expressed their desire for others to be murdered, as Charlie was.

All of these statements are covered by the plain text of the First Amendment. As were the statements that a man cannot become a woman and that abortion is evil.

These are all examples of speech. They all fall within the plain text of the First Amendment.

We add one more example: people sharing these posts with others, including employers.

First, there are laws regulating speech. In particular, credible threats of violence are illegal. See 18 U.S.C. § 875 for example. §875 covers threats sent through interstate communications, such as X or Facebook.

But, people are being fired for what they said. Their speech is protected; that can’t be legal?

It is legal. You were allowed to speak freely when you said those vile, evil, disgusting things. You still have the freedom to speak as you whine about being fired. Your freedom of speech has not been abridged.

Here is the thing: we have the right to assemble peacefully. There is an ancillary right that has been put into case law, and that is the right to not assemble. In the same way that the state is forbidden from stopping you from associating with others, they can’t force you to associate with people.

Your employer has the right to not associate with you.

In addition, it is highly likely that your employment contract includes phrases that say you can’t harm the company’s reputation.

You might argue that this means that a company can fire somebody for being a “Nazi.”

You would be wrong. In general, you can’t be fired for your political beliefs. The left fought this battle and won.

While you can’t be fired for being a communist, you can be fired for disrupting the workplace. You can’t be fired for organizing; you can be fired for not showing up for work.

You can’t be fired for having conservative beliefs, and you can’t be fired because someone accuses you of being a Nazi or racist or a white supremacist.

So to all those whining leftists out there, upset that they were fired, you don’t have legal grounds to get your job back. Learn to code.