Chris Johnson

Elon Musk is making plans to send men to Mars. They will be going on a one-way journey. It will take them months to get there. Once they arrive, there is no short-term way to return. They are risking it all.

In 1620, 132 people boarded a small ship and sailed west. They were at sea for 10 weeks, nearly three months. The trip to Mars will take 115 days, or so, 16.4 weeks. Not all that much longer than the trip on the Mayflower.

The colonization of America, by Europe, was a daunting task. Most people who made the journey had no expectation of every being able to return to the land of their birth. When they arrived, they might be with earlier colonists, or they might be in a new location.

When they landed, they had to survive. They had limited resources to forge a new life in a new land. Some died, others thrived.

That sense of “we can do” is part of our heritage. It is part of my heritage. I hope it is part of your heritage.

Over the last half century, it feels like we have lost that mindset.

My Ex. used to tell me what her mother taught her, “Why try? You know you are going to fail.” There were so many things that she never tried because she “knew” she would fail.

My parents instilled in me a sense of ability. Do you want to go fishing? Go fishing. Do you want to go hunting? Go hunting. Do you want to disassemble your motorcycle to attempt to repair it? Do it.

Everything I attempted my parents were there giving me support to succeed. I hope I have given that same level of support to my children.

I came out of that childhood knowing that I can do better, do well, succeed. Failure is a possibility, but a failure is just a data point, telling me how not to do that thing. Now go try again.

We lost that.

We wait for the government to show up and help. “What are the ten scariest words in the English language? We’re from the government, we’re here to help.” — Ronald Reagan.

Katrina showed that. Sandy showed that. Those cities could not deal, they demanded help from the country. The government responded. And the people were not satisfied.

This weekend, hurricane Helene made landfall. Florida was hit, but the storm moved north and dumped water on the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. People describe it as a once in a 1000-year storm.

Entire mountains washed away. Homes, businesses, roads, bridges are all washed away in the mud slides and water.

I had family that used to live in that area. I’ve been there. It is gorgeous. Living on the side of a mountain, where your driveway leads to a family road, and it is 1000 feet in elevation to reach a county road.

I can close my eyes and see it, and it is beautiful.

Our government cannot help us. When we talk about FEMA coming to help, what they actually bring is a checkbook. They are money people. They are management people. FEMA has no construction equipment, rescue gear, supplies on hand to help in an Emergency.

They are there to pay bills.

So instead, the American Spirit came out in force.

Because our Government has been failing us, we, The People, have been learning that we have the power. We can do. We do have a voice.

And that spirit is there in the South East. It is people dragging their Bass Boats up from the Gulf coast to do rescue missions. It is private pilots, flying their personal copters into to the area with supplies and to rescue people.

It is a company that trains pack mules showing up with mule trains to haul supplies.

It is people sending targeted donations. It is people handing some of their food and supplies for the mobile to move forward.

It is people, who, like myself, own construction equipment (John Deere 210C), showing up and putting their equipment to use.

It is we, The People, acting like a community, standing shoulder to shoulder doing the right thing.

I don’t have places for you to donate. I don’t have a list of things that are needed.

Find those for yourself. If you do locate a source that you trust, please tell us and include your source or reason for trusting.

God bless and watch over those at risk.

This is from a screenshot from Facebook or X. I have not verified the source, but it sounds like her.

The Second Amendment should be a viable defense for anybody charged with a “gun crime”. Found carrying with an expired CCW? Second Amendment defense. Cross an imaginary line and your right to carry disappeared? Second Amendment defense.

We should have seen 100s if not 1000s of cases over the years where the defendants argued that their actions were protected by the Second Amendment.

The reason was actually pretty simple, the courts refused to give those defenses any weight. No defense lawyer was going to bring up a 2A defense when they knew it would just upset the court.

Add to that the many circuit courts that had determined that The People had no right to keep and bear arms. The right to keep and bear arms was reserved for the militia.

As it stood in 2007, private militias were illegal in most states, the National Guard was either formally or informally declared “the [state] militia”, the state AG was charged with bringing any state level constitutional challenges, AND the state AG was charged with defending state laws against constitutional challenges.

In the Ninth Circus court of appeals, the only group that could challenge California’s gun laws was California.

In 2008, the Supreme Court issued their opinion in Heller.

This cut through the crap, said clearly that the Second Amendment was protecting an individual right. It went further, defining almost every word and phrase in the Second Amendment to absolutely define what the protected right was.

Rogue courts immediately pivoted to a new reason to stomp on the rights of The People, the Second Amendment protected rights of The People were not as important as the important things the state wanted to do.

Until 2022, this was the state of the right to keep and bear arms. For states that were not infringing, nothing changed. For states that were infringing, the rogue courts balanced our rights away.

In 2022, Bruen was decided. Bruen reaffirmed Heller. It laid out, in kindergarten language that even a rogue court could not misunderstand, exactly how to apply the law in Second Amendment challenges.

The two cases of interest that were not decided, but instead were Granted certiorari, the lower court’s opinion was Vacated, and the cases were Remanded back to the circuit courts to do over in light of Bruen were Duncan and Bianchi.

It was my opinion, at the time, that we would have a decision from the Fourth Circuit court on Bianchi within 6 months.
We got that opinion August 6th, 2024, two years after the case was GVRed.

It took the Fourth Circuit court two years to get around to issuing their opinion after they were told to do it over again, correctly. Since they were outcome-driven, the results were, predictably, the same.

AR-15s and their ilk are not “arms” as defined in the Second Amendment. At least that’s what the Fourth says. Mind you, the option is around 59 pages long. The dissent is 120 pages long.

The opinion is full of references to news reports, articles from all over the place. What it is lacking is references to this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. In addition, they misrepresented the Supreme Court’s holding in Bruen.

The Supreme Court said that when the inferior courts were using the two stage means-end balancing method to find every state infringement “Constitutional”, they got the first part right, where they said “This is covered by the Second Amendment”, and the rogue inferior courts were getting it wrong when they balanced our rights away.

The Fourth says that since the circuit courts were getting it right on the first part, and their first step was to find that assault weapons were not covered by the Second Amendment, even though they did means-ends, they still were right to declare assault weapon bans constitutional.

Bianchi v Frosh has been going on so long that they had a change in AGs, the case became Bianchi v. Brown. The case is now seeking cert from the Supreme Court as Snope v. Brown. Dominic Bianchi moved out of Maryland and lost standing.

Duncan is still stuck in the Ninth Circuit court, back in California. We are unlikely to hear anything from them in the next 6 months or more.

But, we might see Snope make it back before the Supreme Court in the next session. Which means that it will be argued in the 2025 term, which starts in October 2025.

It is my opinion that the Fourth Circuit delayed issuing their opinion until it was too late for Snope to request cert for the 2024 term.

The history of the race to the moon is amazing. There is so much that happened behind the scenes, out of sight of the public because it was that dangerous.

My parents kept me awake for the moon landing. I remember watching Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.

I am currently following Elon Musk’s personal goal of putting men on Mars. In 5 or so years, I hope to be watching man set food on Mars, to stay.

The short of it, watch the movie. It does a good job of telling the story of Neil Armstrong.

Then visit https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/apollo-11-what-we-saw to listen to the story of Apollo 11 or watch it:

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/WGmyPedxhacbTcmu

Well worth the time to watch all four parts and the movie.

Enjoy!

Part of the task of making a High Availability system is to make sure there is no single point of failure.

To this end, everything is supposed to be redundant.

So let’s take the office infrastructure as a starting point. We need to have multiple compute nodes and multiple data storage systems.

Every compute node needs access to the same data storage as all the other compute nodes.

We start with a small Ceph storage cluster. There are currently a total of 5 nodes in three different rooms on three different switches. Unfortunately, they are not split out evenly. We should have 9 nodes, 3 in each room.

Each of the nodes currently breaks out as 15 TB, 8 TB, 24 TB, 11 TB, and 11 TB. There are two more nodes ready to go into production, each with 11 TB of storage.

It is currently possible to power off any of the storage nodes without effecting the storage cluster. Having more nodes would make the system more redundant.

Unfortunately, today, an entire room went down. What was the failure mode?

DHCP didn’t work. All the nodes in room-3 were moved to a new 10Gbit switch. Actual 4×2.5 2×10. The four 2.5Gbit were used to connect three nodes and one access point. One of the 10Gbit SFP+ ports was used as an uplink to the main switch.

When the DHCP leases expired, all four machines lost their IP addresses. This did not cause me to loss a network connection to them because they had static addresses on a VLAN.

What did happen is they lost the ability to talk to the LDAP server on the primary network. Because they had lost that primary network connection, no LDAP, no ability to log in.

The first order of repair was to reboot the primary router. This router serves as our DHCP server. This did not fix the issue.

Next I power cycled the three nodes. This did not fix the issue.

Next I replaced the switch with the old 1Gbit switch (4x1Gbit, 4x1Gbit with PoE). This brought everything back to life.

My current best guess is that the cat6 cable from room 3 to the main switch is questionable. The strain relief is absent and it feels floppy.

More equipment shows up soon. I’ll be pulling my first fiber in 25 years. The new switch will replace the current main switch. This is temporary.

There will be three small switches for each room. Then there will be a larger switch to replace the current main switch. The main switch will be linked with 10Gbit fiber to the 3 rooms in server rooms. The other long cables will continue to use copper.

Still, a lesson in testing.

The final configuration will be a 10Gbit backbone with OM4 fiber, the nodes will be upgraded to have 10Gbit NICs which will attach to the room switches via DAC cables. There will then be a 2.5Gbit copper network. The copper network will the default network used by devices.

The 10Gbit network will be for Ceph and Swarm traffic.

I’m looking foward to having this all done.

This story showed up in my feeds. I took note of it because, of course, they blamed the death of this poor black man on the conservative Supreme Court justices.

The three liberals, would have granted the stay, but the six justices that insist on following the law did not.

So what is the actual case?

On August 11, 1998, F.G. was murdered in her home. A jury convicted Marcellus Williams of first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, and first-degree robbery, and two counts of armed criminal action.

The court then sentenced Williams to death for the first-degree murder.

The case was State v. Williams, 97 S.W.3d 462, 466 (Mo. 2003) (Williams I).

Williams then appealed to the supreme court of Missouri. After briefings were received, they issued a unanimous option denying Williams’s appeal and affirming the lower court’s judgement of convection and sentence.

In 2013, Williams filed a writ for certiorari with the Supreme Court, which was denied.

Williams asserted that DNA evidence would show that he was innocent.

The case went up and down multiple times before that issue was put to rest. Remember, the lack of DNA does not mean that a person did not commit the crime.

One of the most famous cases of this was the Central Park five. A young woman was stopped in Central Park by a pack of animals. They beat and raped her, leaving her severely injured. I do not remember when/if she died.

Of that large pack of animals, 5 were brought to trial and found guilty. The evidence that convicted them was their confessions. These confessions were given with their mothers present.

As an example, one of them stated, “I didn’t rape that woman, I just held her down while ??? raped her.”

This is an admission of guilt of the crime of rape.

Was his DNA found in or on the victim? No. It doesn’t matter. He admitted to doing the crime. He was found guilty by a jury of his peers.

Later, a jailhouse confession by a man serving life sentence(s), with no option to ever leave prison, confirmed that the convict did rape the victim.

This does not change the guilt of the original animals. The juries knew that there were unindicted individuals who took place in the gang rape. The juries knew that the animals on trial did not physically penetrate the victim. It does not matter.

20+ years after the crime, they were set free. They were “innocent”. No, they were not.

Back to Mr. Williams, his conviction was by jury. Multiple attempts to overturn that conviction happened. His case was before the Supreme Court, asking for a writ of certiorari 3 or 4 times. It was denied every time.

In the latest trip to the Supreme Court, there were 6 conservative justices. There was a majority of liberal, results-based justices on the court when the case was appealed originally. Those majorities did not grant cert. either.

The new appeal claims, not that Mr. Williams is innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted, no. It is a claim that he was only convicted because the prosecutor was racist.

When a case is going before a jury, the parties get to evaluate the potential members of the jury. These people are formerly known as “venirepersons”.

Each party has several peremptory strikes. These can be used to exclude any venireperson. No reason needs to be given. They can be excluded because the party thought they read too much, or too little. They are allowed.

In addition to the peremptory strikes, the parties can challenge a venireperson for cause. “Do you know any of the people involved with this case?” “Yes, you prosecuted my little brother last year.”

There were 131 venirepersons in total. Only 7 were black. The prosecutor struck six of them peremptorily.

What was the racist thing that the prosecutor did? He dismissed one of those six men because he thought the two men looked similar.

So, the left is very upset. They are very upset that a murder was executed for murdering a woman over 25 years ago.

They have not proven that he was innocent. He had the presumption of innocents when on trial before a jury of his peers. In his appeals he has to prove that he is innocent or that new evidence, if the jury had known about it, would have caused them to reach a different verdict.

This murder was long overdue, his chance to present his case to Saint Peter.

Creating rules for anything, a game, a business, the interaction between parties, there can be negative rules, or there can be positive rules.

You can have a set of negative rules. You cannot touch the ball with your hands. This is a rule in soccer.

What was the original intention? We don’t know. What we do know is that it is legal to hit the ball with your head, knees and body, as long as you don’t touch the ball with your hands.

This means that what is not forbidden is allowed.

If on the other hand, the rules are written in a positive mode. You can only touch the ball with your legs from the thigh down. You have inverted the restrictions. What is not permitted is not allowed.

You don’t have to state “you cannot touch the ball with your hands”. This is subsumed from the default negative. If it is not permitted, you cannot do it.

Our Constitution was written as a set of positive rules for the government. The government is authorized to do X, Y and Z. They are, by design and default, not allowed to do A through W.

When the Bill of Rights was ratified, we added negative rules. “Congress shall make no law…”

There is no conflict between the amendments and the original Constitution. The Bill of Rights made explicit that which was implicit. The government shall not do C, G, and W!

Unfortunately, this left the door open for the government to do evil. “Since the Constitution doesn’t say anything about A, B, and D, we can intrude in that area!”

The explicit addition to our Constitution made this argument possible.

Since the state always seeks to increase their power over The People, this is a fight that has been going on for decades.

In Bruen, the Court made it clear that the state must …demonstrate that the regulation was consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. —No. 114 Dominic Bianchi v. Anthony Brown, No. 21-1255 (4th Cir.).

The state bears the burden of demonstrating to the court that the law is consistent.

Not the plaintiffs, (Good Guys), nor the court, but the state.

For the state, this is a losing position. “Shall not be infringed!” is powerful language. They want that history to be as open as possible and as wide-reaching as possible.

In the early post-Bruen cases, they through the legal dictionary at the wall to see what would stick. In Duncan, the first iteration of “historically reinvent” regulations ranged from the 1500s through the mid-1900s. They were forced to reduce that for their second iteration, I think it was limited to 50 or 100.

Today, they are attempting a different path. Using the Rahimi language, Bruen was “not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.Missing citations for GE7W7FBY as amplified by Justice Barrett:

Under Bruen, silence in the historical record indicates that the current has no support in this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. Now, the state claims that silence does not mean a loss. Instead, they claim that it just indicates that they didn’t wanna at the time. They could have, if they wanted to. Since they could have, the state is now authorized to do so today.

This shifts the burden to The People to show that the state in 1791 not only didn’t want to pass such regulations, but instead were prohibited by the Second Amendment.

Nasty stuff.

“We can’t afford… We can’t afford… four more years of this”

Every so often the masks slip and they tell the truth.

Note, the ellipsis in the quote are him pausing. Not anything being cut out.

Or Cultures of Honor.

Most people in western civilizations understand the concept of Honor. Or, at least, they think they do. Most understand, “do the honorable thing.”

It is a question of right and wrong. It is a moral decision.

The honorable thing to do is to return the wallet you find on the sidewalk. The honorable thing to do is to protect the lives of the innocent over your own. The honorable thing to do is to put yourself between the bad guys and the innocents.

This is honor in western culture and civilization.

An “Honor Culture” or a “Culture of Honor” is not about doing the honorable thing. It is about personal honor.

Scotland was an honor culture for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This is what led to clan wars. These people weren’t attacking other clans because they intended to take land or goods, so much as “honor demanded it”.

At some point in the past, the offending clan had done something to “dishonor” the clan. So the entire clan is at war with the offending clan.

There is new jargon, To “Dis'” somebody. This means to show them disrespect. To dishonor them.

Dissing somebody often escalates into verbal or physical violence.

You don’t disrespect somebody in an honor culture unless you are ready and willing to defend yourself. And to those members of an honor culture, you are the instigator.

Calling somebody the “N” word when not a member of that sub-culture is to dishonor them. It is to disrespect them. As such, you have invited violence upon yourself.

The Scots migrated from Scotland to the United States. Many of them came to live in the south. They brought their honor culture with them.

Thomas Sowell discusses this in —No. 114 Dominic Bianchi v. Anthony Brown, No. 21-1255 (4th Cir.).

One of the signs of an honor culture is a tendency to “defend my honor”. Dueling. When the south was fully invested in being an honor culture, duels were common.

Later, as the honor culture dissipated, the number of duels, both gun, knife and fist, decreased.

According to Sowell, that honor culture didn’t just disappear, though. It was adopted by the slaves. When the slaves became freedmen, they didn’t forgo that honor culture. Instead, they took it with them.

That honor culture survives today in “the hood”.

For the most part, honor societies in the west exist as a decoration we wear. It is blustering over a football game. It is taking a joking offense at some perceived slight.

In an honor society, you do not joke about some ones honor. “Them’s fighting words”

Other primitive cultures still exist as honor cultures.

It is dishonorable for a woman to have sex outside marriage. The woman’s owner is dishonored by this. Because his honor has been harmed, he is entitled to punish her. Like having her stoned to death.

He is dishonored if _____. Fill in the blank. A Jew defends himself and stops an attack. They have dishonored the attacker.

When I use the term “honor society” or “honor culture”, I am not talking about an “honorable society” or even a society that is governed by being honorable. I am talking of the horrific, barbarous, back world “honor culture” that hangs gays from construction cranes, and kills women who have been raped.