Chris Johnson

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

So you get a Charlie clip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had to live with his actions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Story Time

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

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

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

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

He had great success using them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was winning hearts and minds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They whined about “free speech”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They don’t like losing money.

So they took this political hack off the air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google suggests Triumph Systems and CooFire Trainer.

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

Is it Trolling?

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

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

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

Using the DSM-IV we see

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

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

What’s a good leftist to do?

Noem v. Vasquez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom From Association

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is the violence coming from?

It is all in the definitions.

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

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

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

Question Of The Week

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

The First Amendment declares:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your employer has the right to not associate with you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know what I want to do, I am just not able to do it justice currently.

What is Charlie’s Voice?

This is taking up Charlie’s bloody microphone, not in hate, but in love and compassion.

It is being willing to listen to people ask questions and addressing them honestly with the truth and compassion. It is being willing to stand up for what is right but without acting out.

As one person put it, WWCD, What Would Charlie Do?

Since I believe that Charlie lived by WWJD, this is not meant to be a slight to any Christian; it is expanding on those ideals.

His voice is strong and positive.

But how did he convince people?

From what I have seen and read, his strongest point was to give people a smaller concept to grasp and think on. To personalize it. Instead of talking about weaponized lawfare, he talks in terms of a single person. Do you purchase things with credit? How do you pay for those things? How do you record those payments?

It is about getting the person to have something personal to work with.

So many of the big lies are so big that people can’t wrap their heads around them.

One I’ve heard recently is “Trump is a pedophile.”  Now the logic is a bit twisted, but I think it goes something like this: Trump’s DOJ took Epstein to court and got him convicted.  But because the court didn’t release the names of the people involved with Epstein’s crimes, Trump must be one of those people. Now the Biden administration couldn’t release the Epstein files because Trump had the records sealed. Now that Trump is attempting to get the files released, but it hasn’t happened yet, he must be on the list as a pedophile. Q.E.D. Trump is a pedophile.

On the other hand, Biden isn’t a disgusting pedophile, even if his daughter Ashley wrote about her father taking showers with her at inappropriate ages, because Biden is a kind man, while we know that Trump is a criminal.

Trump having material protected and guarded by the Secret Service, which he had the legal right to have, is proof of criminality.  Biden having classified material stored in open boxes in his garage is not proof of criminality. Even though Biden never had the authority to remove those classified documents from their proper locations.

It is hard to follow the logic. But it is there, you just have to tease it out.

Lyrics

The Irish fought for independence for far too many years. There were multiple uprisings. It was very much an asymmetric war.

This song spoke to me earlier this week when thinking of how the left thinks and acts. I wish I had the skills to set new lyrics to this tune to describe how the murder of Charlie is the start of major change.