One of the hard things to accept is that so many inferior courts think that when a case is vacated and remanded, it isn’t for good reason.
The courts speak in polite ways. You don’t call out a judge for being an idiot. No matter how often they open their mouth to remove all doubt.
In Bianchi, the Supreme Court granted cert, vacated the Fourth Circuit’s judgement, and remanded it back to the Fourth Circuit for a do-over.
If my boss comes to me and tells me that I got it wrong, here is the documentation, read the documentation and do it over, right. I’m going to read that documentation.
If that documentation suggests that I’m right, I know that is the zebra in the herd of horses. Why? Because my boss told me to do it over.
If I read his documentation, use it to reason to the same method/result, I’m making a mistake.
Unfortunately, our court system doesn’t allow an easy method for an inferior court to say, “I’m too stupid to understand what you said, what does this line mean?”
One of the cases that was before the Supreme Court before Rahimi was U.S.A. v Jackson. It was not granted cert until after Rahimi was decided. At that point, the case was granted cert, the Eighth Circuit’s opinion was vacated, and the case was remanded back to the inferior court with instructions to “do it over, follow the documentation in Rahimi”
This case involves California’s one gun per month infringement.
On Dec 18, 2020, nearly 4 years ago, Michelle Nguyen and others filed a complaint against Xavier Becerra, the Attorney General of California asking for injunctive and declaratory relief.
Because this happened before the Bruen opinion issued, it is couched in terms of Heller and levels of scrutiny. Remember, arguing that interest-balancing was wrong was a losing argument at that time.
They claimed that their rights were being infringed because “arms” is plural and limiting the purchase of guns to just one per month is singular. Thus making the law unconstitutional, on its face.
This case was a series of motions and counter motions. Both parties trying to limit what the other party could present as “evidence”. On Dec 6, 2023, three years after the case was filed, a motion hearing was held. This is the place where the parties argue why their motions are better before the judge.
On March 28, 2024, the court issued its judgement. This brings this case to completion at the district level.
The court found for the plaintiffs. The good guys. The court issued an injunction against California Penal Code §§ 27535 and 27540(f) as violating the Second Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Knowing the state would appeal, Judge Hayes put a 30-day administrative stay on his ruling. This is perfectly normal.
The state filed their appeal the next day.
The Ninth Circuit administrative panel, continued its unbroken record in Second Amendment cases, issued a stay pending appeal.
Appellants have established a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits of this appeal and made a sufficient showing on the relative equities to justify a stay pending appeal.
This is pure spite. The Supreme Court has said, on multiple occasions, how the Winter’s factors are to be addressed. First, the merits of the case, second that irreparable harm, third the balance of equities, and finally that the injunction is in the public interest.
The order by the administrate panel did not address the merits of the case. This is an instant showing of a rogue court.
If the case is a civil rights case, and the party seeking the injunction is likely to win on the merits, the analysis is over. The denial of a civil right is “irreparable harm”. The balance of equities always tips to the party being irreparably harmed, the public has no interest in enforcing an unconstitutional law.
Thus, this admin panel did a crackerjack job of ignoring the law.
The administrative panel issued their stay on April 24, before the administrative stay expired.
The case is then calendared to be heard by a merits panel.
That took place on August 14th, 2024. It was a complete disaster for the state.
There are more than a few channels that have done reviews of the oral arguments.
So how bad were the arguments by the state? Their stay pending appeal was reversed.
The order (Dkt. 9) granting Defendants’ motion for a stay pending appeal (Dkt. 3) is REVERSED. Before: Owens, Bade, and Forrest, Circuit Judges.
It took the merits panel less than a day to issue the order reversing the stay pending appeal, in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
This is a good time to buy stock in heater vendors in hell, it has done froze over.
Americans know pasta. We eat tons of it every day. Of course, most of that is pretty boring or down right nasty stuff that comes from a box.
I know that my childhood was replete with box after box of Kraft’s Mac and Cheese. Bring your water to a boil, dump in the box of elbows. Cook until “right”. Drain the water, add butter and milk. Then add the powdered cheese.
The American “Alfredo”. Yes, it is as cheap and nasty as it sounds. And American’s seem to love it.
As a cheese wanna-be snob, I order Parmigiano Reggiano DOP every few months. Much better than the powdered stuff in a can.
So why and article on Pasta? Because I like to make my pasta by hand. Well, I call it that, but it wasn’t really “by hand” per the definitions that the real snobs use.
There is this trope in story telling of the vagrant, hobo, bum, or cartoon character steeling a pie from a windowsill.
It is good story telling. But, in my opinion, we forget what is actually happening.
We can go to the supermarket and buy a decent, almost edible, pie for 5 dollars or so. We are going to put that price at 15 umms.
Let’s take a step back in time. It is the late 1800s in the rural outback. It is a 20-mile trek to town to get supplies. But you have your homestead, there is food in the larder, there is food in the pantry, and there is food in the root cellar.
While you are out working the fields, your wife is baking an apple pie for the family.
The basics going into that pie are flour, lard, water, apples, sugar, some cider, butter, salt, and spices.
She starts with pairing the apples. The apples are from last fall when she and the children spent a couple of days picking apples in the orchard, all three apple trees. Those apples were preserved and stored, they look ugly, but they will taste wonderful.
The cost of those apples is the cost of picking, cleaning, storing, and preparing them. Call it 45 umms.
The lard came from the pig they harvested last fall. There were many hours of tending the pig, feeding it, caring for it, then the slaughter, processing the pig, and rendering the lard. She’s only using a palm full of lard, so about 30 umms.
The flour came from the store. They grew their wheat. While the total labor that went into growing that wheat was in the 1000s of umms, again, she is only using a couple of cups worth of flour. 30 umms.
Sugar was purchased, the cost was 5 umms.
The spices were expensive, but because she is only using a small amount, 5 umms.
The pie is going to bake in the oven. That oven is heated with wood that was chopped from a tree they harvested. Total of 15 umms for the wood to heat the oven.
In total, excluding the preparing of the apples, she has 30 umms invested in this pie.
The total cost of that pie? 45 + 30 + 5 + 5 + 30 = 115 umms.
An umm is a Unit of Man Minutes. So that 115 is 2 hours of labor. At $20/hour, that is a $40 pie. When that vagrant steals a pie, they are stealing at least 2 hours of labor from that family.
This doesn’t even touch the cost of not having the pie for themselves. That might have been the last of their apples.
It could have been a meat pie instead of an apple pie. If it was a meat pie, it would represent meals for the family for a couple of days, at least.
As an aside, why did they put pies on the windowsills to cool?
Because it was hot in the kitchen!
You want the pie to cool, it isn’t going to do that as fast in the kitchen, plus, all that heat from the pie goes into making the kitchen that much hotter.
My wife is a teacher. She is a darn good teacher. She has a couple of masters, is working on another, besides having a bachelors. She is constantly doing continuing education classes.
For years, I would talk about The Teachers Union in a negative light. She took that as a personal attack because she is a teacher.
When I was just entering 1st grade, they had just started a new language curriculum. It was a five-year plan. The gist was to move students through the k-12 process cleanly and with a good foundation.
At the end of first grade, we moved to Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, most kindergarteners arrive knowing how to read. I didn’t know how to read as a 2nd grader.
Later we went through “new math”. It did not bring much to the table. It did make it extremely difficult for parents to assist their children.
The Education Industry had managed to drive a wedge between children and their parents. Parents were made to look stupid because they didn’t know the new math methods. Read More
We live in a strange world. There is so much information at our fingertips that it is almost impossible to comprehend just how much of an information age we live in.
I’ve talked about this in the past, my mother was a telephone operator, as was her sister. They worked in a large town in Wisconsin.
There were two T1 trunks heading towards Chicago and two T1 trunks headed west towards Minneapolis. This means they could have a grand total of 96 long-distance calls going at any one time.
The grand total of the bandwidth for the town was 6.176 Mbit/second. That was it.
In the early 90s, we were mostly using 10base2 and 10baseT connections. That is, 10 Mb/s. The actual throughput was closer to 5 Mbps. So, about the same bandwidth as the entire town.
We were pleased when we upgraded to 100baseT. We were also using 125Mbps fiber connections. We actually had more network bandwidth than disk bandwidth.
Today, most of my boxes, at the office/house, are 1000baseT. I’m in the process of upgrading the infrastructure to 10Gbit/second. This isn’t for the servers, most of them will continue to be 1Gbps connections, but the inter-switch connections will upgrade to 10Gbps.
Why is this of any interest? Why am I doing this? Simple, I currently have 70 TB of storage at the home. This is about to get to nearly 100 TB. There will be 5 servers with 24 TB of disk each, 2 servers with 12 TB of disk. Those servers need to be able to move data very rapidly. The bottleneck has become the network, again.
This storage is for every movie I ever purchased plus daily backups, plus more software than I can shake a stick at.
Each of the primary servers cost $300 to stand up. $100 for the computer, $200 for disk drives. The other servers are multipurpose, so they have more CPU and more memory.
For you, old folks, you might remember the encyclopedias of your youth. This was the single largest collection of knowledge we knew. The Encyclopedia Britannica was 32 volumes in size. It was released on a two CD version. Each CD held 750 Mbytes of data.
1.5 GB total.
That encyclopedia would consume 0.00101725% of my storage. And I’m small compared to the bigger boys out there.
All of this is to say, there is nothing that has ever been digitized that doesn’t now exist somewhere on the Internet. Storage is cheap.
If you have ever sent a “dick pic”, it is on the Internet, somewhere. If you have ever sent a “bra pic”, it exists. It doesn’t go away.
If you have ever written a comment or posted an article, it exists, somewhere.
There are entities whose entire business model is to scarf every last byte from the internet.
To quote a great philosopher, quoting some stranger:
Dance like nobody is watching, Post like one day your tweets will be read in court.
A First Principle is that two things can be true at the same time.
I can be fat and I can be old. Both are true, at the same time.
Next, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
50 years ago, a picture was worth a thousand words, and it could communicate truth where words could lie.
This was never “true”, it was just believed. Photographers have been doing “touch up” of photos since the earliest days. Some of that involved painting directly on the plates, other times it was more extensive.
It got to the point where people were building composite photographs, showing things that did not exist. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
This painting caught my eye when I saw it in the National Gallery. I took a picture of it, then had a correspondence with the Gallery because I could not find it in their gallery.
The reason is that the painting doesn’t belong to the Gallery, so it is not in their gallery. This was explained to me, and then the very nice lady explained that this painting was a “fake”.
It was fake in that this particular scene never took place. This is not the artist adjusting the setting or anything like that. The artist was known to make quick sketches of interesting people doing interesting things. Or just interesting things. He would then create a composite image from those sketches and, from that image, paint something that wasn’t “real” but it wasn’t truly fake, either.
I expressed it as “The Photoshop of 1846”, to which she agreed.
We have become much more sophisticated. We even have a word for those manipulated and faked images, they are “Photoshopped”.
We see, and most of us recognize, the manipulations that are used on the cover of magazines. We notice it when things “just don’t look right”.
One famous example was the Vogue cover featuring Cindy Crawford. The magazine had “erased” her mole. She got upset and said that her mole was part of who she was.
I spent years working on Computer Graphics, making very high-quality renderings with no real images involved. At one point, one of my teammates was giving a presentation to some brass. He was talking about how we had managed to make our trees look more realistic.
As he was speaking, he was clicking through different images of a real place. Well, the digital elevation map, as we rendered it, with our fake trees planted where the trees were in the real location.
Not a single pixel of the images shown was real. It was all computer-generated images.
After about 15 minutes of the talk, somebody with brass on his shoulders stood up and said something like: Enough, I’ve been to there, I know what it looks like, I want to see your images.
Our fake images looked enough like the real thing that an intelligent guy, with stars on his shoulders, that he was looking at real images.
Those images took days to model, weeks of programming, hours per image to render.
Today, you can ask an “AI” to create an image for you, refine it, then push it out as real. The image will often be a composite of many real images or sub-images.
Photoshop actually has “smart fill” and “smart erase” that are designed to use AI to “seamlessly” fill areas of an image or erase areas of an image.
What 20 years ago took a team months to accomplish, a troll on a media team can accomplish in minutes.
It has gotten to the point where people can create an AI movie by creating the proper prompts.
Some AI-generated images are easy to detect. A Tuesday Tune I posted had visuals created by AI. Not my doing. Some guns were absolutely mind-blowing. The cylinders with 8 chambers, each chamber looking like a keyhole. It was fun, in its obvious errors.
We had the period of time when people were getting multiple rows of teeth, or hands with six fingers, or a dozen other “standard” errors. It was fun to pick out, or down right terrifying, depending on your view point.
Can we trust our eyes when we watch a video? We know some ways that things are faked. But this new technology is going to get better, harder to detect. We are already long past, “Pictures, or it didn’t happen”. We are rapidly moving past, “Video, or it didn’t happen.”
Dad is in long-term care. He will never return to the home he shared with his wife, my mother, for the last 20+ years.
Last week was a hard trip to say goodbye. He was in good spirits and doing “ok”. He is not nearly as sharp as he was a couple of years ago. He has had one major cardio event, and they think he is having mini-strokes.
He remembers that his wife is dead, then 5 minutes later starts asking if we have talked to her recently and know how she is doing.
He remembers her going into the basement at our family goodbye to mom. That was about 6 months ago. He does not remember her ever coming back upstairs.
He has conflated an event with my eldest daughter and his wife to think mom borrowed some money from him to buy a car and left him.
It is easier for him to believe that she left him, than that she is dead. I wish I could believe she was still alive.
But that is boring stuff.
The more interesting part was that we were tasked with helping to clear the house. My youngest coordinated with “The Cousins” to make sure all the grandchildren got a fair share and what they wanted. When we arrived on Wed., they were there.
They went into a search and divide mission, which was cool to see. What was even better was the lack of anxiety or conflict between any of them.
After the work was done, I had the pleasure of working with one of my nephews. He is interested in picking up his first EDC pistol. He is very down on “small” pistols. That was until I showed him the P398 to show him that it works very well as a pocket pistol.
That started to change his mind, but then he got to try the 1911 for size. That he liked, even though he felt it was a bit heavier.
He got to look over and handle the AR15 platform.
The conversation then turned to Mom and Dad’s views on guns.
Dad was never “anti-gun”. After he was exposed to CNN and the constant Republican’s are bad rhetoric, he changed his opinion from “2A” to “you don’t need a …”. At the end, he was no longer pro-2A and felt that universal background checks, LCM, and “assault weapon” bans were ok.
He never pushed back on me about my very PRO 2A opinions. It was something we didn’t discuss when he was able to discuss.
One of my tasks is to evaluate and rescue every piece of data he has on his computer. This meant collecting all the external drives, the main desktop computer, the two husks, the external drives, the USB cards. I think I have all of that.
In the process, I was down under his desk taking things apart, and I turned and looked at the mid-shelf of his desk.
I’m looking at the back strap of a Glock like pistol.
To say I was a bit surprised would be a serious understatement.
I take the pistol and bring it out to inspect, automaticity going through the clearing operation.
The slide doesn’t run. There is no safety keeping the slide from moving. The weight is wrong.
I drop the mag and only then realize it is a BB gun.
0.177 steel balls.
Mom hated the squirrels in the bird feeders. She must have gotten tired of the lack of results from airsoft and upgraded to this thing.
The next time somebody says, “It was only a BB gun.”, I will remember this instant. There is no way in hell I would have let a bad guy point that thing at me. There was no way to know it was “just a BB gun” from the muzzle end at 5 feet.
