Chris Johnson

This is filler as I’ve not looked at the news nor anything else on Friday.

As I’m writing this at 1830 on Friday, my hands are almost as grease covered as the worker’s hands in the image. I’ve been up since 0700 and have been at work on the Truck since 0930.

First stop, the auto supply store for cotter pins, brake cleaner, and brake fluid.

The first wheel comes off just fine.

Then it was time to take of the calibers. That is where I got my first surprise, these are big, and they do not float.

I’m used to calibers that are attached to the knuckle with two 14 mm headed screws. Torque specs are “yep, click”.

These bolts are normally greased and the calibers just float on the pin portion.

Not mine. They are attached with bolts torqued to 91 ft/lbs, and they are stuck. It took nearly 45 minutes to break them free using a 1″ black iron pipe as a cheater. The big issue was that there was not enough room to work the breaker bar with cheater. I got it done.

Once the caliber was off the truck, it was time to attack the rotor.

The rotor refuses to leave the truck. I whaled on it with a 5 pound hand sledge, it did not budge.

Second trip out, I sent my son to get some 6mx1.0 jack bolts. He returns with exactly what I needed. It only took three text messages. “What is grade 8?”, “do you want the type with the hex top?”, and “How long do they need to be.

Guess what? They don’t fit.

It is only then that I remembered that I have a nice thread gage checker. This is a steel cable with most thread sizes you would find in normal stuff. Each “key” (my son’s term for them), has an external threaded section on one side and an internal threaded section on the other.

In other words, you can screw one side into a hole, and you can screw bolts and screws into the other side.

Testing the jack boltholes I find they are 8m1.25 Off my son goes to get them.

With those in hand, the rotor comes off,

It is now time to attack the axle dust cap. This doesn’t want to come off, but a gentle (not really) attack with a cold chisel, and it gives me a gap for a pry bar to pry it off.

This revels the first clean metal I’ve seen, the axel, axel nut, and the lock for the axel nut.

With a bit of help from my son to keep the hub from rotating, I apply 300+ foot pounds with my foot. There is a load SNAP and all the tools let go. The bar being used to stop the hub from turning, the breaker bar, the 36 mm socket all went their directions.

We recovered all the pieces. I inspected the axel for damage, trying to figure out what snapped. The axle nut now spins off with just light finger pressure. Good news.

I then get the first “win” of the day. Driving the axel out of the sandpaper, err, bearing, was easy and just worked the way it was supposed to.

Driving the other side off? Not so much. After way too much effort, some stupids along the way, my son and I were able to drive the bearings off the knuckle.

The day is good!

After all that work, it is time to start reassembling the front right side. I picked up the “hub with pressed bearings” and compared it to the old part.

Not only does it not match the old part, I can’t make it work without someway to cut a spline in the damn thing.

I messed up. I wasn’t paying enough attention when I ordered front-wheel bearing assemblies. Yes, it had the 6 lugs, but it turns out that there was another version of the Tacoma which uses the heavy-duty brakes, calibers and all the rest, but it is RWD only.

I’m almost in tears. My son takes me to the parts store. They have it in stock. $195. Rockauto.com sells a better version for $106. OUCH! This is precisely what I was hoping to avoid.

It is too late to got back, I buy the parts and we go back.

With the correct part in hand, we can install the bearing assembly. I was just a question of tightening each bolt in sequence, the same amount.

I even have the right tools to torque the bolts. I’m a happy creature.

Time to install the new rotor.

This is where I started cussing to myself.

As I was checking out, I had the rotors, pads in the cart. The website suggested that I use a kit because it came with more hardware, and it was cheaper.

I went for it.

And missed that I had returned the 6 lug version and replaced it with a 5 lug version.

After a short crying jag, my son takes me back to the parts store. Yes, they have the parts in stock. 2 rotors and a set of pads. But because they only have premium in stock, $214.

The passenger side is completed. The bearing has been replaced, the rotor has been replaced, pads have been replaced, brake caliber has been replaced.

The only thing remaining is bleeding the brakes.

Starting work on the driver’s side. The damn wheel won’t come off the rotor! This required energetic use of that five pound sledge with a long punch to knock it off the rotor.

Jack bolts and a bit of hammering and the rotor came off. The brake caliber is stuck on and the head of the bolt holding the hard line on the hub side and the flex line on the frame side rounds over. I can’t get it off.

My son bounces on the breaker bar a few times before the bolts finally come loose. We managed to get the correct two bolts out, pay no attention to the extra bolt we took out.

We then got the hub ready for the new rotor. It took 30 minutes to get the rotor and caliber installed. It was then that I noticed that the hard line doesn’t line up. I take the top bolt out of the caliber and attempt to get the hard-line to attach.

That is when I called it. I was afraid I was cross threading the hard line to the caliber.

I’m tired, I’m grumpy, I don’t want to see the crap and noise that the leftist put out today.

I hope you are having a great weekend. I’m out there working on the truck. Only about 4 hours more of work.

Netting

2.5 nets completed. The first net will be used to practice repairs because I made a few mistakes. The fix? Cut the bad part out and tie in a new section. Easy.

The second net had no glaring errors. Mostly knots that did not get set perfectly and using a sheet-bend to tie on more line. The correct knot to use is a water knot. It has one section of whipped cord at the top for a handle. Future round nets will have a wooden handle, which I will turn.

The third net is a rectangular net. It is around 4 ft deep and is currently around 3 ft wide. The target size is 4 ft by 8 ft. I’ll turn it into a gill net by adding weights and floats. Then pictures and it will never be used in NH. Gill nets are not allowed in my area.

Django and Bootstrap

Refactoring is fun. Learning new stuff all the time. I am so glad I have an expert to help me with the bootstrap stuff.

Iran

Initially, I was concerned about getting sucked into a war with Iran. I no longer believe that will happen.

There is no need for boots on the ground. We can accomplish all that is needed by putting warheads on foreheads.

And, it looks like Israel will continue to be the point of the spear. Dropping those warheads.

If we do need to send the Boners in to deploy a few GPU-57s, that is still not boots on the ground.

The Market

We received the first part of our inheritance earlier this year. Some money went to fun stuff. Most of it went into the market. All of my kids’ money went into the market.

It turned out that the ‘savings’ account at my local bank was paying 0.01% APR. Not a way to make money.

I’m using one of the automated investment accounts. You tell it what your goals are. It buys the right things. If it decides it is time to get out of that security, it will sell. It will buy when it thinks it needs to.

Since I invested our money, we’ve had a 3.6% return on investment.

Last Thursday, Israel dropped warheads on foreheads. On Friday, the market responded. In the course of a day of trading, we lost about 40% of what we had made.

On Monday, there was a slight recovery.

Tuesday, saw another dip.

Wednesday saw more recovery.

I expect there to be more instability in the market over the coming weeks. War makes investors nervous.

Here’s the thing, I still have the same amount of cash available to me to use instantly.

I can convert the securities into cash and withdraw the money at any time.

Or I can just leave it the F. alone. Which is what I will continue to do.

When the market goes down, that’s when you should buy.

Car Parts are Here!

That cursing you hear is me working on the truck. All the parts arrived safely, yesterday. I have all the tools I need to do the installation.

My only concern will be knocking the wheel bearings off. Hopefully, that will not be too difficult.

I have decided to leave replacing the brake calipers to the shop. It isn’t that I can’t do it, it is that I hate bleeding brakes. This way, I end up with the best of all worlds.

The shop will have to pull the wheel and calipers. Disconnect the calipers and put in the new ones. They then get to bleed the brakes, but they have the brake fluid, they have the vacuum bleeding system. They have the multiple people ready to do the right thing.

This is low cost and sounds like the right path to me.

Question of the week

Which caliber have you taken up, bought gun and ammo and maybe reloading dies, which you later decided was a bad choice, and why?

Which caliber do you want to explore?

For me, the caliber that I have had second thoughts on is 7.62×39. I have one rifle in that caliber. I have limited ammunition in that caliber. And the gun would likely pass for “new” if I tried to sell it.

I’ve been thinking of something like .17HMR or one of the long-range calibers in the 30-06 class.

Ok, maybe something like the Savage Arms Revel Classic in .17HMR

Lumber has become expensive. A couple of 4x4s, some 2x4s and a 2×10, and I’m looking at painful amounts of money. Ouch.

Which brings us to working to a goal:

This cabinet will be knocked down and flat packed. We want this for events. All in all, it looks nice and will perform the functions we need.

I started looking at the materials required to make this. The costs for the lumber starts to get a little excessive. Mostly because of some wide boards that are required. In addition, we will be making more than one and some other pieces as well.

Which takes me to wood. Wood is what you find in trees and burn in your wood stove. Lumber is what you build from.

I have a lot of wood outback. I don’t even bother with all the pine that has fallen over the years because it is horrible for heating. And splitting it is painful.

In the best of all worlds, I would have some way to drag the wood out of the lot, load it into a wood mill, and then mill it to size. Base cost, about $3000. And I’m not sure if I can get the wood out. So add another $2k for the ability to move logs.

The next best thing would be to mill in place. This I’m willing to try. It requires a jib for my chainsaw and a willingness to mill. I expect to be able to pull some reasonable 4/4 lumber out this way. Beach, red oak, pine, elm and some other wood.

Ok, that tool comes first. Add a learning curve.

Now that I have that, I need to turn that 4/4 into useful lumber for building. There is nothing in that shelf unit that is beyond my skills. I’ve built furniture in the past. I expect to be able to build this.

Except I don’t have a place to build it. Which leads me to: I need a workbench:

This is an English Joiners workbench. It has a torsion box interior to stabilize the top, The apron is 2×10 to add stability. There is diagonal bracing which is firmly attached to the rear apron and rear legs to stop racking side to side. And cross bracing for the trestles to stop forward and back motion.

It is held together with screws and construction adhesive. This is where I want to end.

For work holding, a wooden leg vise will be available as well as planing stops, hold down holes, Batten stop and a crochet.

All of this will make it easy for me to work on the cabinets that I intend to make.

Except… The front apron needs to be flat and parallel on both major sides. This is no problem. I have the planes to do this. I have the knowledge of how to do it and some of the skills required.

All I need is a workbench with a planing stop.

What I require is a flat surface to use as a pseudo surface plate for woodworking. The only thing that might come close is the floor of my shop. Which is full and where it is not full, it is oily.

The answer is to build a workbench.

The workbench that I would make is a “low Roman workbench”. It would have a laminated top of 2x4s on edge. I don’t need to make the faces of the 2x4s “flat” I just need to make them flat enough for glue up. I can do this without a reference surface.

To make the surface of the low Roman workbench flat, I can just plain it flat. This can be done with the good plains I already have and some winding sticks.

In addition, the low Roman workbench is better suited for sawing.

For now, I’m stuck between making both workbenches or using my plainer to plain the front apron. If I use the plainer, I get to a workbench faster.

Well, my rubber ducks, thank you for that option.

I’ll use machine tools to get my joiners workbench up and running soonest. I might build the low Roman a bit later.

Now to have time and good weather to build this thing. It looks to be a three day build.

This bit of text is quoted in almost every case where the state is defending their blatant infringements.

They still use this citation, even post Bruen. After Bruen, they added a ⁣more nuanced approach.

What these two quotes have in common is that they are “dicta”.

Dicta is short for obiter dictum. It refers to statements made by a judge in a legal opinion which are not essential to the decision of the case.

What is essential is the holding.

Part of the problem is that the superior courts would rather not resolve the same issues over and over again. They want a one and done case.

The core holding in Heller was that the Second Amendment was an individual right. As such, any ban of a class of firearm, defacto or not, was unconstitutional.

That’s it. The entire discussion on dangerous and unusual, in common use for lawful purposes, and “this is how you perform Second Amendment jurisprudence” is dicta.

Because it is “just” dicta, the inferior courts can choose to ignore it. Or pick and choose which parts of dicta they wish to use.

The rogue inferior courts will use the “not unlimited” to search for the boundaries. Then they will find that the particular law is outside the boundaries of the Second Amendment.

The Bruen opinion introduced more dicta. These dicta were directed orders to the inferior courts. No more two-step shuffle. No more means balancing.

The inferior courts were told, clearly, that the process of picking a level of scrutiny, and then applying a balancing procedure was unacceptable.

They were told to first look at the plain text of the Constitution. The very same language the Court has been using for decades, if not centuries. These inferior courts have shown that they are perfectly capable of reading the plain text of every part of the Constitution, except the Second Amendment.

Once the conduct “touches fingers” with the Second Amendment, the burden shifts to the state to show that their regulation is a match for this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

In Rahimi, they said that a person can only be temporarily denied their Second Amendment protected rights. The inferior courts then proceeded to decide that a permanent loss of Second Amendment protected rights was Constitutional, when applied to anybody who could have been sentenced to more than a year in jail/prison.

This is also dicta. This paragraph was written by Justice Kagan. Justice Sotomayor wrote something similar in Rahimi, I believe. Where she also admitted that the AR-15 was in common use for legal purposes.

After S&W v. Mexico was decided, many of the plaintiffs (good guys) filed notices with their respective courts, pointing them to the opinion. The gist of many of these notifications were, “The plain text is implicated. The burden shifts to the government to prove their ban is justified by this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The Supreme Court stated that a firearm or class of firearms can only be banned if it is both dangerous and unusual. If a firearm or class of firearm is in common use, it is not unusual and cannot be banned. Justice Kagan said AR-15s are in common use.”

Well, the replies to those filings have started to come in. In a shocking turn of events, the infringers are now arguing that the Justice Kagan quote is “just dicta” and should be discarded. That it is just meaningless noise.

(But please remember that my dicta, “not unlimited”, cannot be discarded. It was put into a Supreme Court opinion.)

The title is from Miguel.

I’ve written about “Black Fatigue”, a physiological condition of being done with “that” shit. It is that entire situation where I have gone from a person who doesn’t see skin color to somebody that treats it as a threat indicator, every time.

I’m old, I’m tired of this game. I’m tired of fighting to be left alone. I don’t like having to tell my wife what path to take to work to avoid the potential riots downtown.

I want to be a quiet man, left alone.

It appears that every week there is another group of cosplayers claiming that it is my belief that they all be put in a subservient position, to fulfill my needs. What utter bullshit.

It is Freudian projection. I don’t know a single conservative woman that would put up with being placed in the position these deranged girls suggest.

They might meekly put on the costume, but if you tried to put any of my women into that costume, you better have a dipstick to check fluid levels because you will have a major leak. My daughters are not going to submit to that shit. My wife is not going to submit to that shit.

You will only find out just how “meek” conservative women are if I’m already dead. At which point I will have my honor guard.

These same girls, playing out their fantasies, will also scream to disarm themselves. Oh, and me as well. If they don’t want to be the sex toys of their fantasies, then they had damn well better be ready and willing to standup to anybody that would attempt to make their fantasies real.

But it isn’t just these girls cosplaying their sick fantasies. It is the entire left-wing of our body politics. The screaming about Trump doing this or that. It is the fantasies they have. Of what they would do.

I’m tired of these mentally ill children trying to use emotional blackmail on me and mine.

Be strapped, keep your head on a swivel, be where they are not.

Your repressed fantasy is showing its hem

The state has stepped up and opened their mouth in an Amicus brief in —District of Columbia v. Heller, 467 U.S. 837, 626 (2008) (not a good cite). The gist of the case is that the state of Illinois had a Bruen tantrum and created a new assault weapon and magazine ban.

Now the United States DoJ is sticking their oar in the water. Ugh.

Yeah, I’ll believe that when the cows come home.

The United States has strong interests in ensuring that these questions are correctly resolved; Now, isn’t that weasel words?

that the Second Amendment is not treated as a second-class right; and that law-abiding Americans in this Circuit are not deprived of the full opportunity to enjoy the exercise of their Second Amendment rights.

Wait, WHAT?

Yes, the Supreme Court did say, in Heller and Bruen that the Second Amendment isn’t a second class right.

Exactly, Illinois passed a “Bruen tantrum bill”. They did not get the message.

…the key question under the Second Amendment’s text is whether the banned semiautomatic firearms are “Arms”

Well, Doh, of course AR-15s are “Arms” under the plain text.

Please note that the quote comes from the S&W v. Mexico was written by Justice Kagan. In other words, we now have two lefty Justices writing things that are pro-Second Amendment.

Ok, what happened? The DoJ are the bad guys, aren’t they?

Exactly, if the plain text of the Second Amendment interacts with the conduct, bearing assault weapons in this case, then the Second Amendment’s protections presumptively apply to that conduct. The state bears the burden of proving a history of historical regulations that are a match.

Furthermore, while many said that Rahimi was bad for The People, it keeps showing up in positive ways in these court cases. Now if the rogue courts would just follow simple instructions.

The DoJ goes on to correctly apply the “in common use” process. The Supreme Court has already done the work of determining what this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulations are in reference to firearm bans. They determined that for an arm to be banned, it must be both dangerous and unusual.

If an arm is in common use among The People, it is not unusual and cannot be banned.

One of the things the DoJ points out, that I had not noticed, is that these rogue, inferior courts, have decided that Heller severed the Second Amendment’s prefactory clause from its operative clause. These rogue courts were then able to argue that if a weapon was militaristic, the operative clause did not protect it.

This is just BS. The Supreme Court actual recognized that the Second Amendment also protects the right to keep and bear arms for individual self-defense, but also collective self-defense.

My gosh, the DoJ just said that suppressors are “arms” under the Second Amendment and thus fall under the “in common use” shortcut.

Conclusion

The United States of America Department of Justice just filed one of the most powerful motion, supporting the Second Amendment, I’ve ever read. It calls out the rogue inferior courts. It says that rogue inferior courts are wrong in how they are interpreting the Second Amendment.

In general, parties to a case are careful in their wording to not offend the court. This is why you don’t normally read statements in a motion saying the court got it wrong.

This motion did precisely that. It called out the Seventh Circuit court for intentionally reinterpreting the Supreme Court to get their agenda-driven results.

Israel is in the process of turning Iran into an ashtray, like Jimmy Carter, may he burn forever in hell, should have in 1979.

Unfortunately for Israel, they have to do it with conventional weapons.

The normal blood vultures are out in force, screaming about Israel is killing babies.

Unfortunately for us, this raises the possibility that Iran will activate terrorist cells in the United States (and other countries) to attempt to harm us. Keep your head on a swivel.

Here, in my sleepy little rural town, the mostly peaceful protesters are planning to riotprotest this morning and afternoon. I’m hoping they stay on the peaceful side of things.

We are not in the town center, but we are on one of the main roads leaving downtown. Yes, we call the two traffic lights, “downtown”. The rifles will be loaded and ready. The LBV will be out and ready.

Just because you live in a small town that is patriotic doesn’t mean that you won’t see protests. At issue is the high probability of outside agitators being bussed in.

Keep your head on a swivel.

If your particular state requires a permission slip to exercise your rights, attempt to get one. And make a decision, which is worse, to be carried by six or judged by twelve.

Final note. Before you put that firearm on your hip, decide if you are willing to take a life. If you are willing, in what circumstances? I re-evaluated my principals after I watched the George Floyd video. My initial response, when watching the video, was “I’m glad I wasn’t there, I don’t know if I would have killed the cop or not.” Today I know that the cop was in the right.

My internal infrastructure is getting better and better. Unfortunately, it is still not stable enough.

The router is having issues with memory. I need to add more memory to fix the issues. The problem being that I need to take the router out of production to do so. I’ve not been willing to do that.

The symptom is that connections time out. The fix, restart HAProxy.

HAProxy forwards traffic to the ingress service. This should be running on multiple servers, but it currently is not. There is an issue which I have not resolved where communications from the second ingress service gets lost, leading to the gateway not responding.

This means that when the server that runs the ingress service has to reboot, all ingress stops.

The network is broken into segments, each segment is on a different subnet. Ceph prefers to be on a single subnet.

My solution was to use OpenVSwitch to create a virtual network for Ceph. This works great!

This adds a dependency on OpenVSwitch, which should not be an issue.

The underlaying physical network depends on good routing. The reason I don’t use static is that some nodes have multiple paths and I want there to be multiple paths for every node. This adds a dependency on the routing stack.

Free Range Routing, or FRR, is the solution. It supports OSPF, which is the correct routing protocol for internal routing. It just works.

Unfortunately, FRR and the Linux kernel will stop talking to each other. When this happens, we lose routing of the physical networks.

When we lose routing on the physical network, the OpenVSwitch network stops working.

If the OpenVSwitch network goes down, then the different Ceph nodes can’t talk to each other.

All of this is to say, I’m sorry for the issues you have been seeing with this site. Thank you for hanging in there.

I had to find the sick FRRs and restart them. Once that happened, everything came back to life.

Ms. Google will try to get me to read “news” from different sources. Yesterday, she showed me one of many articles claiming that the Trump administration is reacting differently to the riots in LA than they did to the “riot” on January 6th.

Paraphrasing Mr. Dunn, “Orange man bad. He pardoned those evil J6ers that admitted to …”

This is an absolutely true statement. Many of the people who were detained for their actions on January 6th did plead guilty to multiple crimes.

What was not said was that these were people who had been crushed by the juggernaut of the Department of inJustice. These people were often arrested in S.W.A.T. type raids, early morning dynamic entry. They were then held without bond awaiting trial.

There are multiple reports of these people being held in horrible conditions for many months. There were people who served multi-year sentences before their trial even began.

They were offered a chance to plead out and if they did not take the plea deal their court date was frequently pushed back.

It was never about justice, it was about punishment and sending a message.

So people did plead out. They took the plea so they could get out of the damn gulag. They wanted their lives back. They knew that they would continue to be punished for maintaining their innocences.

One of the hard things for anybody to understand is that these were people that had never expected to be locked up. They aren’t prepared for prison/jail.

These aren’t gangbangers that expect to do a few years behind bars to gain cred.

These were just regular people that were abused by the inJustice system to make a despicable point.

This is one of my favorite songs. This version is visually great.

Boring visual, but the music, oh my, that sound. Duke Ellington.

Or a good video with wonderful sound, 2017: Edmonds Woodway High School. (Darn, I wish my kid’s high school band sounded like this).

We have to close this out with the divine Ella, with the Duke on the piano.