Chris Johnson

The world is changing. When Judge Bork was being attacked by Joe Biden and the Democrats on the Senate confirmation committee, it was something new.

We had never seen a Supreme Court nominee being so maligned. It was the dirty tricks writ large and in color.

Justice Thomas had another slanderous hearing. He was strong enough to withstand the verbal attack, thank goodness.

It has become the expected action of the Democrats.

At the end of Obama’s presidency, he was attempting to push forth a “moderate” for the Supreme Court. An asshole named “Garland”. Ally was unhappy that Garland wasn’t given a full hearing before the Senate, much less a hearing before the committee. It didn’t feel “fair” to her.

I tried to explain that no matter how good Garland might be, he isn’t as good as anybody a Republican might nominate.

Today, Pet Hegseth was in the sights of the Democrats.

Senator after Senator went low. The difference is that Pete was expecting it. He took their slings and arrows without ranker and fired back winning salvos.

And he sits there with a smirk because little Lizzy has no idea what she is walking into.

The times they are a changing.

Next Monday we will see Snope and Ocean State Tactical granted cert or relisted.

Right now, there are 100s of lawyers writing briefs for these cases. I expect to see over a thousand pages submitted to the Supreme Court.

Bruen was distributed for Conference on 4/1/2021, 4/16/2021, and 4/23/2021. Cert was granted 4/26/2021.

The parties requested, and were granted, two extensions to file briefs on the merits.

From the time of being granted certiorari, the petitioner has 45 days to file their initial brief. The opposing party has 30 days from then to respond. Extensions may be granted at the discretion of the Court.

From there, the petitioner can file a reply brief. The opposing party can file a reply brief.

About 100 days total, if everybody stays on schedule.

The case was scheduled for oral arguments on 8/15/2021. The date for arguments was set for November 3rd, 2021.

The case was argued on 11/3/2021.

The court published their opinion on 6/23/2022 with the judgement being issued on 7/25/2022.

Because the case was conferenced in April, the case wasn’t heard in the 2021 term. We are teed up to have the opinion issue for these cases in June 2025.

In the order list for 2025-01-13 we have information on our three Second Amendment Cases.

Gray v. Jennings on how preliminary injunctions should be handled, DENIED.

Given that they were denied, I expect that we will see the case GVR once our Second Amendment case is heard.

Correction: They were denied Cert. It cannot then be GVR. This case will go back to the district court to move past the preliminary injunction stage.

Snope Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban. Nothing in the orders. I wasn’t expecting this. I don’t know what it means.

Ocean State Tactical Rhode Island’s “large capacity” magazine ban. Nothing in the orders.

More: There is another reason that SCOTUS doesn’t put cases in the orders after conference. That is, if they have decided to deny cert, but there are one or more justices that want to write a statement regarding the denial.

If this is the case, this is bad news for us.

I hope that they will release more on the cases, in a favorable light to us, in the next day or so.

YES!

Both Snope and Ocean State Tactical are relisted for conference this Friday!

This is it. We are off to the races!

We are in the process of moving from the image above to the image below.

At least in terms of what the infrastructure looks like.

Today I decommissioned an EdgeRouter 4 which features a “fanless router with a four-core, 1 GHz MIPS64 processor, 3 1Gbit RJ45 ports, and 1G SFP port.”

When they say “MIPS64” you can think of it as being in the same class as an ARM processor. Not a problem for what it is.

The issue was that there are only 1Gb interfaces. That and I’ve come to hate the configuration language.

This has been replaced with a pfSense router running on a TopTon “thing.” I call it a thing because it is from China and intended to be rebranded. It doesn’t have a real SKU.

It is based on an N100 with 4 cores and 8 threads. 2 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, 2 10Gb SFP+ ports. It can be upgraded and has multiple extras.

Besides the hardware, this is an entirely different animal in terms of what it can do. It is first, and foremost, a firewall. Everything else it does is above and beyond.

It is running NTP with a USB GPS unit attached. It runs DHCP, DNS, HAProxy, OSPF and a few other packages. The IDS/IPS system is running in notify mode at this time. That will be changed to full functionality very shortly.

So what’s the issue? The issue is that everything changed.

On the side, as I was replacing the router, I jiggled one of the Ceph servers. Jiggling it caused it to use just a few watts more, and the power supply gave out. It is a non-standard power supply, so it will be a day or two before the replacement arrives.

When I went to plug the fiber in, the fiber was too short. This required moving slack from the other end of the fiber back towards the router to have enough length where it was needed.

Having done this, plugging in the fiber gave me a dark result. I did a bit of diagnostic testing, isolated the issue to that one piece of fiber. I ran spare fiber to a different switch that was on the correct subnet, flashy lights.

Turns out that I had to degrade the fiber from the other router to work with the EdgeRouter 4. Once I took that off, the port did light off. But that was a few steps down the road.

Now the issue is that all the Wi-Fi access points have gone dark. Seems that they are not happy. This required reinstalling the control software and moving them from the old control software instance to the new one. Once that was done, I could see the error message from the access point complaining about a bad DHCP server.

After fighting this for far too long, I finally figured out that the pseudo Cisco like router was not forwarding DHCP packets within the same VLAN. I could not make it work. So I disabled the DHCP server on the new router/firewall and moved it back to the Cisco like router. Finally, Wi-Fi for the phones and everything seems to be working.

At which point I can’t log into the Vine of Liberty.

I can see the pages, I can’t log into the admin side. It is timing out.

3 hours later, I figured out that there was a bad DNS setting on the servers. The software reaches out to an external site for multiple reasons. The DNS lookup was taking so long that the connection was dropping.

I think this is an issue that I have just resolved.

But there’s more.

Even after I got the DNS cleaned up, many servers couldn’t touch base with the external monitoring servers. Why?

Routing all looked good, until things hit the firewall. Then it stopped.

Checking the rules, everything looks good. Checking from my box, everything works. It is only these servers.

Was it routing? Nope, that was working fine.

That was one thing that just worked. When I turned down the old router, the new router distributed routing information correctly and took over instantly.

So the issue is that pfSense “just works.” That is, there are default configurations that do the right thing out of the box.

One of those things is outbound firewall rules.

Anything on the LAN network is properly filtered and works.

But what is the definition of the LAN network? It is the subnet directly connected to the LAN interface(s).

Because I knew that I would need to be able to access the routers if routing goes wrong, my computer has a direct connection to the LAN Network attached to the routers. The Wi-Fi access points live in on the same subnet. So everything for my machine and the wireless devices “just worked”

The rest of the servers are on isolating subnets. That are part of the building LAN but they are not part of the “LAN Network”.

I know this, I defined an alias that contains all the building networks.

Once I added that to the firewall rules, it just worked.

Tomorrow’s tasks include more DHCP fights and moving away from Traefik. Which means making better use of the Ingress network.

Allyson is a published author. I am a published author. She works at writing. I was told to write, I did, they published it.

When I decided to keep GunFreeZone.net alive, I tried to post multiple times per day. I quickly burned out. Today I have a schedule of once per day, with extras when it is important and not an echo.

In the course of a normal day, I will read around 400 pages of text. Some of it I skim, some of it I have to read carefully, and some of it is for fun. I will also write 3000 to 5000 words, some of that is code, most of it is in English.

To be blunt, I spend more time reading and writing than just about anything else in my life.

Writer’s block is an excuse for an amateur. If you are expected to write, you write, you don’t get to say, “I don’t feel it today.”

If you are getting “writer’s block”, you are writing as a hobby. Allyson talks about this in her writing blogs and groups.

The next part of writing is making sure you are writing for more than yourself. If you are writing for yourself, you should be writing for yourself six months from now.

Every evening, I sit down, and I write for the blog. Occasionally, it is easy. Usually, it is work. Then there are days when it is just plain difficult.

I want to babble about the cheap soldering station I just picked up. Claims to be good. Has a 4.5-star rating. I had to crank it to 800F before it would melt solder, and I’m not sure if I got good connections.

Boring.

I’m in the process of getting rid of Traefik, a “load balancer”. I would rather not have left Apache, I did. I went to nginx, I still don’t understand it as well as I do Apache, but it is my preferred web server. Nginx can work as a load balancer, but it isn’t really.

So I have: Traefik, Nginx, Apache, HaProxy, and whatever it is that pfSense used for “load balancing”.

It isn’t uncommon to have a path that hits firewall, HaProxy, Traefik, nginx or Apache. Boring.

There are dozens of court cases that are interesting to me.

If they are heard in a district court where they obey the rule of law and follow the instructions set for them, they will get yanked into the Circuit Court so fast your head won’t stop spinning. If the case is in the circuit court, then the argument will be a repeat of what has already been said.

Boring.

At this point, the only interesting cases are those that will be heard by the Supreme Court this year.

Current events? By the time my article is published I’m already 12 hours behind of the news cycle.

Still, I write about things. There is more than a little filler these days. There are articles where I go far too deep in technical babble.

So to all of you that read our blog, thank you for hanging with us.

If you have something you want to say, PLEASE submit it. It would give me a day off.

Senator Warren is using misleading language to make her base angry at the rich. Never mind that she has become wealth from being a Senator.

Social Security is supposed to be “forced” savings. The government decided that we could not be trusted with our own retirement funds.

Instead, they took money from us, during our earning years, put it in a big pot, where it would “earn” money over our lifetime of labor.

Of course, that turned out to be a lie. The investment the social security fund made was in US Government Bonds. That is, the government “borrowed” the money, promising to pay it back with interest.

To pay it back, they need to tax The People more. So the piggy bank is empty, but we pretend it holds massive assets.

She then picked a DDS. Why? Because a DDS makes more than $176,000/year. Better stated, he has more than $176k taxable income.

Why is that number important? That is the social security tax cap.

Social Security was set up to take care of the “little” people. The wealthy were left to find for themselves.

We all “know” that the amount we get back from Social Security is based on the amount we paid in. The more we paid, the more we get back.

That means that the person who made $40k per year over the course of their labor should get back something “near” $40k per year. A person who earned an average of $100k? They should get back around $100k per year.

The reality is that you get back less and the money you get back is worth less than when you put it in, and several other things. But that is the general idea.

But, if you are making over $176k/year, the government doesn’t think you should be getting back that amount. Instead, it is up to you to plan your retirement.

What she is saying is that she wants him to pay in much more than he will get out.

One other thing to remember, US taxes are on income. If you have money sitting in the bank, you don’t pay taxes on it. Instead, you pay taxes on the money you take out.

Elon paid over $11 Billion dollars in taxes for 2023. He’ll pay more this year. He has paid more in taxes than any other single human in the history of the world.

And this fork – tongued devil wants him to pay more, so she can spend it.

This is the type of case we want the Supreme Court to slap down.

The district judge’s analysis is based on a twisted view of Heller as affirmed by Bruen.

In Heller, the Court said that weapons that are most useful in military service, or at least that’s how the district court quoted it.

Ok, a bit more context, but how did the district court interpret this?

Heller specifically contemplated that weapons most useful in military service fall outside of Second Amendment protection.

This is good wordsmithing. That word “contemplated” doesn’t say that weapons most useful to military services are outside or inside the protections of the Second Amendment. It just means they discussed it. Factually, this is the only place they mention “useful” to the military or in military service.

In other words, the court gave far too much weight to what was not said.

But why is this even a question?

It is because the inferior courts can’t stop messing things up. Of going rogue.

The question is if the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated. The district court even agrees that it is.

The district court slaps down the state for claiming that magazines are not arms as defined for purposes of the Second Amendment.

Having equivalently answered the question “Is the plain text of the Second Amendment implicated?”, the district court then goes on to claim that is not the first part of Heller.

Instead, the district court argues that the plaintiffs (good guys) have to prove that they are in common use for lawful purposes of self-defense AND that they are not most useful for military service.

If the Supreme Court issues an opinion in Ocean State Tactical, then this is a done deal. Magazine bans are gone. This case will evaporate.

If the Supreme Court doesn’t issue an opinion in Ocean State Tactical, then we can hope they strike down Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban in Snope.

Regardless, I still get upset when I read the twisted arguments of these rogue inferior courts.

John of www.GunsSaveLife.com was kind enough to post a link back to us and to quote The Game is On! SCOTUS update

He expressed a bit of skepticism.

John is skeptical because nobody knows what is going to happen in Supreme Court conferences.
It is all “reading the tea leaves”.

The black box which is Supreme Court conferences has visible inputs. Status of the case, briefings on the case, circuit split, time after the last Supreme Court opinion on the subject and a few others.

For output, we have “Denied”, “Denied with statement”, “Granted”, “relisted” and “rescheduled”.

Why the justices decide on which output is a guess. Some people are good at those guesses. Mark Smith has a good record. I don’t have a record to stand on. We know historically that “rescheduling” happens when the justices want to see multiple cases at the same time. We know that under Roberts, cases that are relisted are almost always granted cert. and those that are not have some procedural issue with them, not merits issues.

Cases that are denied Cert generally have nothing said about them. Think of it as spending 30 minutes trying to convince your parents to do something, and at the end of that they say “no”. That’s how most denial of cert goes. Nobody cares when cert is granted. It is going to happen.

When one or more justices feels strongly that cert should have been granted, they will write a statement to go along with the order list. Occasionally, a justice will write a statement explaining to the petitioner why cert was denied so that they can address the issue.

We saw several statements from Justice Thomas on why they were not granting cert on Second Amendment challenges that were in an interlocutory state.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel. I think that I might have the new router up and running tomorrow. I’ll be turning down two servers. Many good things happening.

As of January 6th, we are on deck for THREE Second Amendment cases to be evaluated by the Supreme Court.

On January 10th, the justices will discuss all three cases, Ocean State Tactical, Snope, and Gray.

On the following Monday, or Tuesday, they will issue their orders.

The Court can:

• Grant Cert.
• Deny Cert.
• Relist the case

.

While it would be wonderful to have them just grant cert in all three cases, the more likely event will be that the cases will be relisted.

In the Roberts’ court, this is the standard for cases where the justices have agreed to hear the case, but Roberts wants to make sure there are no issues hiding in the case history.

We can expect two to four relisting before they finally decide yes or no.

At that time, we will know what the schedule will be. If the cases will be combined, or if they will all be heard on the same day.

We are on track to have a major Second Amendment opinion issued by the Supreme Court around the end of June.