Chris Johnson

Released in 1986. What’s new is old.

Out with the old!  In with the MUCH bettere.

Is it Moral?

We all have a moral code. Some people have a moral code that is more restrictive than yours. Some people have a moral code less restrictive than yours.

Occasionally, a moral code is imposed by outside authorities. Such a moral code is unlikely to be “your” moral code. You might agree with all or some of that enforced moral code.

An example of an outside moral code is “Thou shalt not kill.” The original Hebrew was “Thou shalt not murder.”

If you are reading this, it is highly likely that your moral code allows you to violate the first rule, “Thou shalt not kill.” If you carry, if you are willing to use lethal force, you have already decided to violate that rule.

At the same time, you should still be within the rule of “Thou shalt not murder.”

Humans are not born with a moral code. We are taught a moral code by our parents and our community.

A big problem for many Muslims is that their moral code is incompatible with our moral code. We can look at the rape gangs in the UK and question, “Why would they rape children?”. It is because, to their moral code, they have done no wrong.

There are those among us whose moral code would revolt you. Their moral code isn’t thou shalt not commit murder. It isn’t thou shall not kill. Instead, it is closer to “are you willing to do the time? Is it worth it to you to kill this person?”

We joke about feeding pedo’s into the wood chipper, feet first, with tourniquets in place. The reason we make that joke is because there are many among us that have evaluated the cost and are willing to do the time.

To quote Chicago, “It was murder, but it wasn’t a crime.”

In a series I was watching, the cops show up at a dirt poor family’s home. It is obvious that they have been eating meat from animals harvested from the forest. The cops know, they cops aren’t going to do anything about it. Who’s moral code is correct?

Is it legal?

Harvey Silverglate wrote Three Felonies A Day, How the Feds Target the Innocent. The book boils down to the fact that in the course of going about your day, most people will commit 3 or more felonies.

There is an imaginary line a few miles south of me. If I am standing, with my normal gear, on the north side of that imaginary line, no issues. If I step across that line, I’m committing felonies.

One of the things that is often said, which I have not verified, is that everything Hitler did to the Jews was legal, under German law, at the time.

In some cultures, it is legal to beat your wife. It is legal to beat your children. It is legal to do many things that are illegal here.

In the UK, it is illegal to say bad things about protected classes of people. In the US, there are people who want it to be illegal to say things that hurt their feelings.

What is legal and what is not legal is determined by the rules written in “The Book.” In the US, at the federal level, we need to have both houses agree to a bill and then have the president sign the bill into law.

In addition, the congress can pass a bill and have it signed into law telling some agency to create “regulations” with the force of law.

Is it Constitutional

To understand if something is Constitutional, we have to look at the regulation and determine if the regulation implicates the plain text of the Constitution. If it does, then we have to look to this Nation’s history of regulations on this type of regulation.

For most of the Constitution, we have historical jurisprudence telling us what each word and phrase means. This is so the inferior courts and the legislator can “get it right”. They don’t, but the Supreme Court does try.

The meaning of the words of the Constitution are locked in time. They mean today what they meant when the language was added to the Constitution.

For instance, the term “well regulated”, from the Second Amendment, does NOT mean “many regulations” or even “with regulations setting forth the boundaries of the right”. In 1791, “well regulated” means functioning well.

The phrase we are interested in, today, is Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech The full quote is above, I’ve expanded the clause to focus on the concept of “Free Speech”.

From the plain text, it is obvious that it is a limit on Congress’s authority to create regulations abridging speech. Any law that Congress passes that restricts speech implicates the plain text of the First Amendment.

Once we have determined that there is a Constitutional issue, we need to look at this Nation’s history of abridging free speech, at the time of the founding! 1791!

If you have a “hate speech” law that came into existence in 1950, that is not part of this Nation’s history of abridging free speech. The latest the law can exist and still be part of the original understanding of the law is around 1820.

Because this issue has been asked and answered by the Supreme Court, we don’t need to look for those laws. What the Supreme Court found was that there is a history in this Nation of abridging free speech.

What are those abridgments?

They fall into categories based on how much abridgment there is into the “core” right.

As an example, there are regulations limiting the use of the US Postal Service to distribute pornographic materials.

Does this intrude into “freedom of speech?” YES! It does.

How close to the core right does it cut? It is not political speech, for the most part, nor is it “educational” speech on the other. It does not seem to intrude into the core right.

On the other hand, if the State had anything to do with censoring conservative speech on Twitter, Facebook or any social network, that does cut directly into the core rights protected by the First Amendment.

Once the category is determined, the next step is to decide the “level of scrutiny” to apply.

If the abridgment cuts to the core protected right, then strict scrutiny is applied. Less than but still significant, then intermediate scrutiny applies.

There is another below that which I do not remember.

Using levels of scrutiny is giving our rights away. We should never agree to “levels of scrutiny” as it allows the State and rogue inferior courts to decide on the outcome by choosing levels.

In Bruen, the Supreme Court found that the inferior courts were intentionally misusing levels of scrutiny. As such, they said that levels of scrutiny were no longer allowed for Second Amendment challenges.

I highlight the phrase “shifting the burden” because that is an exact match to what was said in Bruen.

In Constitutional Challenges, once the plain text is implicated and strict scrutiny is invoked, the government must prove three distinctly different things:

1. That there is a compelling government interest in passing the regulation
2. That the solution proposed was the least restrictive possible
3. That the restriction was narrowly tailored to meet the compelling interest.

The government is not supposed to be able to just say they have a compelling reason, they need to prove it. Stopping murder? That is compelling. Stopping espionage is compelling. Stopping people from voicing their opinion is not compelling.

Having identified the compelling interest, the government must then show that they are using the least restrictive method to achieve the goal.

Increasing the penalty for murder? That is not restrictive. Banning all cell/mobile phones in businesses? That is not least restrictive. Banning people that might say something offensive is not least restrictive. Forcing a company to divest itself of foreign advisory control? That sounds like it might not be very restrictive.

Finally, was the law narrowly tailored to accomplish the goals?

Conclusion

Something can be moral and illegal. Something can be legal and immoral. Being Constitutional makes it “legal” but does not make it moral.

Remember that it was once legal and Constitutional to own slaves in this country. It was never moral.

We fought a war and amended our Constitution to make slavery Unconstitutional and illegal. It stayed immoral.

There are two network time protocols in use today. One is the NTP protocol, the other is PTP. I have no idea what the PTP looks like, I know that it requires hardware support.

The goal of NTP is to create a local clock that is accurate to less than 1ms from sources that have up to a hundred times that in latency.

The fact that this works at all simply amazes me.

I have 7 servers acting as an NTP cluster. That is to say, they all work to come to a consensus as to what time it is, and then each syncs to that time point.

They do this via actively querying each other every 64 seconds. The protocol knows that the referenced clock time is somewhere within the total time from query to response. Using complex statistics, it can get it much closer than just “somewhere” or “middle”.

As I am writing this, one server believes it knows the time to the network with a standard deviation of less than 500us. It has one nailed down to less than 83us.

Within the local cluster, it believes it knows the time within 50us for all the cluster members. For a few of the cluster members, they agree on the time within 3000ns (3us). That’s not bad.

So what are the problems.

The first problem is that I have a clock that claims to be very accurate, but which I know is slightly wrong.

The clock is fast by 957us with an SD of 57us. I believe it to be worse than that. The issue being that the clock is influencing the rest of the time cluster.

I did that because I had a usable fudge factor for the clock. Now I need to bring it much closer to “real time”.

To that end, I’ve reconfigured the server with the GPS clock to never use the GPS time. Instead, it will use the network servers to converge on “the time”. Once I know “the time” I will be able to adjust the GPS offset better.

The second issue is that USB injects jitter into the signal. We don’t know when the USB port received the time message from the GPS unit. Hopefully, we have a good estimate, but it is still very jittery.

It is nearly impossible to get down to 1ns or less with a clock that has a 500us jitter.

What does this mean? I need to stabilize the time signal. We do that with a PPS. This pulse tells us that the second happened on the rise or fall of the pulse. This is configurable. The second starts on the rising edge of the pulse. With a PPS input, we can reduce jitter to a few nanoseconds.

The issue still is, “What is the offset detecting the leading edge from the “real” start of the second?”

This value comes from the delay along the antenna cable and other such speed of light delays.

Which takes us to the conclusion of this article.

The GPS units I purchased came with a small ceramic antenna. The antenna is about 10 mm on a side. It has a 10 cm connector. This means the unit and the antenna are very close to each other. The antenna isn’t a great antenna.

With this taped to the inside of the window, I was picking up 3 satellites. I replaced it with a cheap, yet “real” antenna. I’m not locking on to 10 or more satellites. More locks mean better time keeping.

If you are doing this yourself, do yourself a favor and order a real antenna to go with your project.

In addition to being “real”, the cable is 3m long, giving me options on where to place it. And it is a water proof unit.

First, Mark Smith is a lawyer. I am not. Much of the “inside baseball” I’ve learned from listening to Mark and others like him on YouTube.

His analysis of many cases is spot on. Many times his analysis guides mine. I enjoy listening to him. To put it differently, I enjoy him attempting to “make [me] the smartest person in the room.”

One of his early videos was describing how the Roberts court handles grants of cert.

As he explains it, once a case gets to the point where it will be considered for cert, it will be distributed for conference. This means that it will be discussed by the Justices at a particular conference. Those conferences normally happen on Friday.

The court will then issue their “Orders” on the following Monday. Well, that is the day it is normally published.

The orders list consists of mostly of one or two lines, case such and such petition for something is denied. There are long lists of denied, a shorter list of granted.

In addition to the short statements from the Court as a whole, there will sometimes be statements by the Justices regarding denial of cert in a case. These can be considered dissenting opinions.

If a case has been conferenced, there are three options for the case going forward. The case can be denied cert. The case can be granted cert. The case can be relisted.

If a case is relisted. Which means to be distributed for conference the next week. That will not be in the orders. It will show up in the case docket later in the day.

If a case is not listed in the orders, after it has been conferenced, it can mean one of two things (IANAL), it can mean that the case is relisted, and we’ll read it in the docket later in the day, OR it means that cert was granted but one or more Justices needs time to write a statement.

As I said, the orders are normally given on the Monday following the conference.

Occasionally, there will be a misc. orders issued on the Friday of the conference. These are grants of cert.

Why is this important in tea-leaf reading?

The Supreme Court has a term that runs from the first of October to the end of June the next year.

In general, the Court will issue opinions in the same term as they hear oral arguments on the case.

Oral arguments must take place before the close of the term, while leaving the Justices enough time to write their opinion. Consider that the Heller opinion was nearly 157 pages in length, 60 lines per page, 10 words per line.

That makes the Heller opinion around 90,000 words in length. It was written by multiple justices, but still, that is two Novels.

It is 90 long Chris articles. Ally, our writer, will write 3700 words a day when creating the first draft. She will spend a month writing a 50,000 plus word book. Then she starts editing.

This means that if they expect it to be a long opinion, they need to have 45 or more days to write it. That 45 is an S.W.A.G by me.

This puts a fairly hard deadline for oral arguments.

From the time a case is granted certiorari, the clock is running. The petitioners have 45 days to file their brief. The respondents have 30 days to file their brief. The Petitioners have 15 days to file their reply. A total of 90 days.

To give the justices 45 days to ponder and write, oral arguments must happen on or before May 16, 2025.

Putting a more concrete number on this, it took 118 days from oral arguments in McDonald to the date the Court issued their opinion.

This implies my guess of 45 days might be a bit short. Bruen was heard in November and the opinion was issued on June 23rd.

Regardless, if we are going to have an opinion this term, we are running out of time. To hit the May 16th deadline, the Court must grant cert before February 15th.

120 days was this last Thursday, January 16th.

Wolf?

Mark explained to us that we wanted three cases conferenced on the 10th of January. This happened. Good for Mark.

He explained that we would like to see cert granted January 13th, but we should expect the cases to be relisted.

He posted a video on the 10th or 11th telling us that a miscellaneous order had granted cert in three cases on the 10th. This was bad news for the Second Amendment. These cases were being given a jump start on getting things done before it was too late for this term.

On Monday afternoon, two cases were relisted. The case that was in an interlocutory state was denied cert. There was another Second Amendment case that dealing with taxes on firearms that was also denied cert.

This was precisely what Mark had predicted.

On the 17th, our two Second Amendment cases were conferenced for the second time. In the evening, a miscellaneous order granting cert in four cases was issued.

Mark posted another video telling us this was bad news for our Second Amendment cases.

I’m sticking with Mark V1. So far, the situation is progressing as he predicted. This matches my predictions (IANAL).

I refuse to panic or even worry over the weekend. Monday morning, I will read the orders. I expect to see nothing regarding Snope and Ocean State Tactical. Later in the evening, I will check the docket for those two cases, and I expect to find them relisted.

This is on track. We are doing well.

January 27th is the day we need to be paying attention to. That will be the day orders are issued for the conference held on the 24th. If the cases are relisted for a fourth time, I’ll be nervous.

Just remember, it isn’t over until the fat lady sings.

Ally came to me the other day upset about the TikTok case. One of her issues was that the AP was reporting that they couldn’t report more because it was “sealed”.

I found this to be unusual and went to the source to find out what is going on. What I found was somewhat different.

Ally pointed out that what I sent her, the docket, wasn’t something she understood.

This is a non lawyer’s take on reading dockets.

What is “The Docket”?

The docket is a record of a case. It contains the identifying information about the case as well as providing information on what court, panel, or judges will be hearing the case. It is relatively brief.

The biggest part is the “Proceedings and Orders”.

The Header

The header identifies the case.  In addition, it helps track the case back in history as it moved through different courts.

The title is the parties to the suit. The short title would be TikTok v. Garland. The date the case was docketed with the Supreme Court was December 18, 2024. The case comes from the D.C. Circuit Court. In the circuit court it had a case number of 24-1113.

The first entry tells an interesting story. The first is that this case was submitted to the emergency docket, sometimes called the shadow docket.

When a case is placed on the emergency docket, it is assigned to one justice. Each justice is assigned a set of lower courts that they “supervise.” In this case, the D.C. Circuit Court is supervised by Chief Justice John Roberts.

The party petitioners are TikTok and ByteDance. They have “filed a motion” which is legal speak for “asked for something.” What they have asked for is an injunction against the enforcement of <q>Pub. L. No. 118-50, div. H (2024)</q>. This is the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications.”

In other words, they want the courts to stop the banning of TikTok.

To pull the information about motion, I read the “Main Document”. On the website, this is a link to the PDF of the document.

Because this case was put on the Emergency Docket, they are not asking the court to decide on the merits of the case, instead they are asking for an injunction until the Supreme Court has made their final decision regarding the ban.

Entry two says that they have also requested that the court hear the case, on its merits.

The next three entries are briefs by different groups of people called “Friends of the Court”, or “amicus curiae”. These are not parties of the case but instead are people who want to stick their two-cents in.

These briefs must be filed by a lawyer who is a member of the Supreme Court bar. In some situations, the people filing amicus briefs must get permission first.

What is a brief?

Simply put, it is a written argument. The person or group that files the brief feels that they have something important to say that might change the Court’s mind.

These briefs are all going to be arguing that the Supreme Court do something.

The respondents will often not argue at this point. To argue that the Court not hear the case is to make the case more important. Since the Court prefers to take cases that are important in the broad scheme of things, arguing that the Court not hear a case is arguing for the case to be heard.

On December 18th, the application, as 24A587 on the emergency docket, was referred to the Court.

This is the Court’s normal Wednesday conference.

The Justice discuss the cases which have been referred to them and decide as a group what they are going to do.

There is a deadline of January 19th for them to issue an order or opinion.

Things Happen

The petition is granted on the 18th. This means that the case went from not existing within the Supreme Court’s system to being granted cert in 2 days.

This is what “Emergency Docket” means. It has to happen now.

Now this particular case is on an expedited track. The Justices have given a word limit on the briefs. We will see later that there are “Certificate of Word Count” attached to many filings, stating they are within the limits set by the Court.

The time is also shortened. All the primary briefs are to be filed by December 27th. This is only 9 days after the granting of cert.

The court also says when oral arguments are happening.

The court also consolidated two cases. This is why we went from 24A587 to 24-656. The two original dockets were 24A587 and 24A656.

While the court said that oral arguments were on the 10th of January in their order. The official order is “SET FOR ARGUMENT at 10 a.m., Friday, January 10, 2025.”

Things Start Moving

We start to see the Amicus briefs start to arrive. They have until 1700 the 27th to get their briefs in.

We can tell that the people interested in this case have already prepared their briefs and are submitting them within a few days.

Our first entry is an order from the clerk of the court. They are telling the filer that they didn’t do it right. The submitted their brief with a word count, but the proof of service was incomplete.

The clerk will not accept the brief until the deficiencies are resolved.

Many Briefings and Orders

Outside the amici briefs, we have a “request”, which is Supreme Court speak for “order”, to the circuit court for a complete record. There is an “appendix” which is the compendium of all the briefs filed in the lower court(s?).

While the cases are combined, both petitioners request to argue separately. It will happen on the same day, one after another.

When reading these entries, the notation “(Distributed)” means that the filing has been given to the justices.

Many briefs are filed. The justices met and on the 31st granted the petitioners motion to argue separately.

All the replies were submitted on time.

One of the amici managed to mess things up so badly that they didn’t get their homework in on time. They asked the Court for an exception, the Court said, “no”.

Interesting Entry

This is the record of the cases before the D.C. Circuit Court. The records came in to parts. One part is open to the public, they other is sealed.

Sealed information can include things like financial details, personal identifying information (think SSN), or the identity of undercover or human sources. It can also include methods that the state doesn’t want public.

The Supreme Court can decide to unseal those records, but it isn’t going to happen. There is no need.

The Oral Arguments

The quick way to find out what happened on the 10th is to read the transcript.

If you want to spend 2 hours listening, you can listen to the oral arguments

What’s going to happen?

On the 17th, the Court has its next conference. They will discuss the cases referred to them, the cases distributed to them seeking cert, and cases where oral arguments have been heard.

They will come to a conclusion.

Once they decide, they need to write the opinion. If any justices are dissenting, they have to write their dissent.

Justices can write concurrences as well. This is when the justice agree with the opinion, but not the reasoning of the majority opinion.

Once all the opinions are finished, the opinion of the court will be released.

If the justices know that it will take longer to write the opinions than they have, they can issue an injunction. The injunction will put everything on pause until the Court can issue their opinion.

Where to From Here?

The path from here is working backwards. Given the circuit court and the docket number for that court, you can look up the docket on the Circuit Court’s website.

Of course, this doesn’t always work. To answer this, we use Court Listener to look up the case at the circuit court. The link I’ve given takes you to this case.

Within the circuit court docket, we find the same type of docket. Part of what we will find is a reference to the district court case.

All the oral arguments at the circuit level are available on the web. It can be difficult to find. Court Listener is your friend there as well.

Go have some fun reading documents.

David Snope, et al., Petitioners

There are places where I feel sorry for The People. People in California seem to have gotten what they wanted. The people of Illinois, not so much.

The lower court of the State recently issued an order in favor of The People, but not of the Second Amendment.

This was a win. The people of Cook County no longer have to pay a tax on guns and ammo. Well, that is what the state supreme court said, and the lower court, but not Cook County. They are continuing to collect taxes.

So how is this a win?

It is a win because the plaintiffs, the good guys from Guns Save Life, got what they wanted. The courts have ruled that the county may not legally collect the tax. For perspective, they filed their lawsuit in 2015, the case was closed on January 10th, 2025.

The state was actually arguing that the supreme court of Illinois had ordered the case dismissed because it was “moot”, while the county is still collecting taxes.

Why is that?

Because the case was filed as both an unfair tax and a Second Amendment challenge. The “unfair” was a challenge under the Illinois “uniformity act”.

Well, the lower court decided that it was absolutely ok to tax guns and ammo. I don’t think the judge ever read —Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. V. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue, 75 L. Ed. 2d 295 (1983) where the Supreme Court found that taxing ink used by a newspaper was a violation of the First Amendment.

The lower court also found that the taxes were uniform enough.

This was appealed. On appeals, the intermediate court agreed with the lower court. This was appealed to the Illinois supreme court.

There, the tables turned in favor of the good guys.

But not in the way you might think.

The court waved their hand at the Second Amendment challenge, likely because they had read the above cited case. They said, “We don’t need to consider the Second Amendment issue because this tax doesn’t withstand the uniformity challenge.”

The supreme court then continued with instructions on how the state (Cook County) could change their low to make it safe under the uniformity clause.

The court issued an order to the lower court “for entry of summary judgement in favor of the plaintiffs.”

This should have been a done deal, in thirty minutes. Instead, the lower court sat on the damn case for four more years. This gave the state time to modify the tax law and to claim the issue was moot.

Finally, the lower court did as instructed and entered summary judgement in favor of the plaintiffs, the good guys.

The court addressed the Second Amendment challenge as such: the supreme court didn’t bother to hear anything about the Second Amendment, it is moot in this situation.

Thus, The People won, but in winning did not get a Second Amendment win.

Oh, Cook County is refusing to stop collecting the tax.
LAWLESS: Despite court rulings striking down their Gun & Ammo Tax, Cook County says they’ll continue collections

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!