Chris Johnson

Networking used to be simple. It is unclear to me why I think that. Maybe because when I started all of this, it was simple.

Networks are broken down into two major classes, Point-to-Point (P2P) or broadcast. When you transmit on a P2P port, the data goes to a dedicated port on the other side of a physical link. There it comes out.

Each port is provided an IP address. A routing table tells the router which port to transmit on to reach a particular network. A router works in a store and forward procedure. It reads the entire packet from a port, then retransmits that packet, modified as needed, on a different port.

A broadcast network is one where multiple devices are connected to a single physical network. What is transmitted on the link is heard by all the other nodes on the same physical network.

Originally, that physical network was a switch. Your network card would connect to a switch, the switch then transmits everything it receives on one port to all other ports.

Switches could be connected to each other. The only requirement was that of time. The amount of time it takes for a packet to travel from one end of the physical network to the other was limited. If it took more time than that limit, the network became unstable.

This concept of everything going back to a single switch was expensive. The cabling was expensive, the switch was expensive, the network card was expensive. A working network started at around $50,000. $30K for the switch, $10K for each network card. Hundreds of dollars for cabling.

The original Internet protocol was only going to have addressing for 65,000 machines. How many machines would be network attached if each site required $50k just to get one or two machines hooked up. We compromised at 4 billion.

We are working on getting everything on IP version 6 with 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses. I think somebody told me that that is enough addresses for every atom in the known universe to have an IPv6 address.

From those expensive switches, we moved to 2-base-10 and “thick” Ethernet. These had the same limitations, but the costs were starting to come down. Something around $1000 to get into thick net and a few hundred to get into thin net.

Routers were still expensive. With the advent of 10baseT, we saw costs drop again. You could get an Ethernet hub for under a hundred dollars. Routers were only a few thousand. The world was good.

The other day I purchased an 8 port 10 Gigabit router for under a hundred dollars. It has 160 Gigabit internal switching. This means it can move 10 Gigabit per second from and to every port.

It cost less than $35 for two fiber transceivers. It cost around $33 for an Intel-based NIC capable of 10 Gigabits.

This means that I can upgrade a server to 10 Gibibit capability for around $60. Not bad.

A Step Forward

My data center was rather small. It was set up as a single /23 (512 addresses) connected via L2 switches. The switches were all one Gigabit copper.

You can buy 10 Gigabit L2 switches, but they are either copper, with limited distances and a need for high-quality cabling, or they are expensive.

Moving to an L3 device got me a better price and more features.

Moving to an L3 router gave me some more options. One of the big ones is the ability to have multiple paths to each device to provide high availability.

This requires that each node have multiple network interfaces and multiple routers and switchers. With the routers being cross connected, with each node being able to handle multi-path communications.

This is the step forward.

A step backwards

This High Availability (HA) solution requires multi-path capabilities. This is not always available for every piece of software. I want to keep things simple.

A Solution

A solution is to move from a physical network with multiple paths and redundant capabilities to virtual networking.

Each node will have two physical network interfaces. The interfaces will route using OSPF. This is a quick response system that will find other paths if one link or router fails. This provides the HA I want for the network.

Each node will have two VPCs for the ceph cluster, one or more VPC for each container system, and one or more VPC for each VM cluster. A VPC is a “virtual private cloud” It is a virtual network with only allowed traffic.

You can have multiple networks on a single physical network. For example, you can have 192.168.0.0/24 be your “regular” subnet and 172.16.5.0/24 be your data plane subnet. A network interface configured as 192.168.0.7 will only “hear” traffic on subnet 192.168.0.0/24.

But you can configure a network interface to hear every packet. Allowing a node to “spy” on all traffic.

With a VPC, there is only subnet 192.168.0.0/24 on the one VPC and only 172.16.5.0/24 on the other. Packets are not switched from one VPC to the other. You need a router to move data from one VPC to another. And the two VPCs must have different subnets; otherwise the router doesn’t know what to do.

OVN Logical Switch

It turns out that a VPC is the same as an OVN logical switch. Any traffic on one logical switch is restricted to that switch. You need to send traffic to a logical router to get the traffic in or out of the VPC.

Since the traffic is going through a router, that router can apply many filters and rules to protect the VPC from leaking data or accepting unwanted data.

I configured 4 VPCs for testing. DMZ is part of the physical network. Any virtual port on the DMZ VPC is exposed to traffic on the physical network. This is how traffic can enter or exit the virtual clouds.

The second VPC is “internal”. This is a network for every physical node to exist. By using the internal VPC, each node can communicate with each other, regardless of the physical topology.

That was working.

There was a data plane VPC and a management VPC. Those VPCs were connected to the DMZ through a router. The router is distributed across multiple nodes. If one node goes down, the other node is ready to take up the traffic.

Falling way back

I now have a VPC for testing. The idea is to test everything extensively before moving any nodes to the virtual network. I need to be able to reboot any node and have everything still function.

The VPC came up perfectly. My notes made it easy to create the VPC and configure it.

The problem began when I added a router to the VPC.

Now I can’t get traffic to flow to the VPC.

WTF?

I have a friend who voted for Kamala. He is an intelligent person. Reasonably educated, firearms guy. I like talking to him and hanging with him.

We don’t talk politics because politics stresses him. I didn’t know he was voting for until recently.

I got about ten minutes of his time and asked him if he could tell me why.

There were multiple reasons, the one that stuck in my mind was, “How could you vote for a convicted felon? He should be in prison.”

I’ve heard this many times, I just tune it out because it is a true statement without context.

He had other reasons having to do with his perception of Trumps morals and how he believes Trump treats people. Not relevant to this discussion.

I asked him if he knew what Trump had been convicted of. His answer was “fraud”.

This set me back a little bit. I know what the case was about. The big “37 counts” was the same charge repeated in different ways.

If I recall correctly, for each check that Trump signed a check to his lawyers, it was notated as “legal expenses.” The state claims there are three separate counts for each one.

Regardless, I asked my friend if he was aware that these felonies were misdemeanors until they changed the law and that the statute of limitations had expired.

“No, I wasn’t aware.”

“Were you aware that this is the first and only time this crime has been prosecuted?”

“No, I wasn’t aware.”

“Were you aware that the crime charge was that he had attempted to cover up a crime by filing false statements, but that they never proved the precursor crime?”

“No, I wasn’t aware.”

This is propaganda at play. He would rather not be involved in politics, but he can’t escape it. Listening to someone like me just stresses him out. He would rather not have that conversation, and I do not blame him.

The overwhelming political noise that he is exposed to is always, “Trump is bad, Trump is Evil, Trump is a rapist, White Supremacists, and he is a convicted felon!”

He can’t escape that noise. It is everywhere.

One of the things that Allyson exposed me to is the left’s filter method.

You can’t vote for him because

I like to believe that we have a big tent. If you are a conservative, you are welcome under the tent.

This is surprising to most leftists. They believe that if you are gay, trans, black, brown, immigrant, poor or whatever other label they have, that you will be not only kicked out of the Conservative tent, but you will be attacked and hurt.

Some of that “attacked and hurt” comes from their claim that speech is violence.

What do I mean by “the left’s filter method”?

It is the process of finding a fault or flaw or “unacceptable” position to rule a candidate out.

Consider Ronald Reagan. He was a great president. He also made mistakes as the Governor of California. He signed gun-control bills into law as Governor.

I have heard people say that because I find Reagan to be a great president, I should agree that gun-control is good, since my hero signed gun-control bills.

That is not how it works.

From the left’s standpoint, that single error on Reagan’s part is enough to disqualify him. If it doesn’t, then I’m stupid.

Every time I would talk to the leftist Ally about a conservative candidate, she would tell me how she could never vote for them because… She would then present a single point to prove that they were unqualified for her approval.

It wasn’t about the whole of the person, it was about filtering them out for any reason possible.

This is why the left runs campaigns of emotion. Kamala never said anything that would cause the filter to kick in. And those filters are always judged against the enemy.

“He endorsed a person who said that Puerto Ricans were garbage.” And that would filter him out of the acceptable list.

All the hoaxes we saw are based on this. They are quick sound bites that are designed to trigger that filter. “He called White Supremacists ‘fine people'”. It doesn’t matter how often this is debunked, it still works.

It works because there will be people that hear just the sound bite and it will be enough to support their desire to not vote for orange man bad.

Blackmail is a nasty thing. It is about exposing secrets. If you don’t give me what I want, I will expose your dirty little secret.

When you look at American traitors, spying for our advisories, you find that most, if not all of them, were bought off for dirt cheap.

What would happen is that the traitor would decide they needed something, generally money. They then tried to sell the information they had. They were offered very little for the information. Then they were blackmailed for having sold the information.

Blackmail is normally about hiding dirty little secrets.

Back when I had a security clearance, they were concerned about several things. Can you keep your mouth shut? Can you be blackmailed? Can you be bought?

When I was in debt, I explained that I was in debt and that my country was worth more to me than money ever could be. I showed that I had been paying my debt down and that I was not hurting financially. For that level of clearance, that was enough.

At another time, there was a personal issue. I went to my boss and told him the personal issue. I told my parents. When security asked about the personal issue, I could easily show that I couldn’t be blackmailed by it because I had told my boss, my parents, and them.

The gist of this is that if you can’t be embarrassed by your actions, you can’t be blackmailed by a dirty little secret.

History

My first wife was an expert in emotional blackmail. When we got married, I was informed that she had had her cat for longer than she had known me and that I would go before she would let go of the cat.

In other words, a cat was more important to her than the person she had just sworn to love.

I am allergic to most fur bearing critters. Cats in particular. My allergies started off bad, they are impossible now. Because we lived with a cat.

The most common refrain that still echos through my head was, “If you don’t do X, I’m going to leave.”

It was used over and over, again.

One night, I spent a long time talking to my father at a bar. This was unusual because mom was the emotional rock, not dad. Plus, we had never done it before, we didn’t do it again after.

I left that conversation and returned to the hotel room where my wife and kids were. I was more relaxed than I had been in years. I had come to the decision that I wasn’t going to be emotionally blackmailed anymore.

When we returned home, it was just about like normal. Until the day she said, “If you don’t do X, I’m going to leave.”

My reply rocked her to her soul and a bit further, “Ok, there’s the door.”

Our life became more of a partnership until her abuse became too much and I left.

Just what is “emotional blackmail”

It is anytime you attempt to control somebody with threats that engender strong emotional responses.

The person who is threatening to commit suicide is using emotional suicide. The person who withholds love unless you do your chores. The person who threatens to leave you if you don’t give them money.

All of these are emotional blackmail.

Peer pressure is a type of emotional blackmail. When you feel like you will be ostracized if you don’t go along with your peers.

Having that feeling of belonging is incredibly powerful. Loosing it is even more powerful.

This is how you get teenagers to submit to being “jumped in”. Being jumped in for males is generally allowing other peer members beat the shit out of you. For women, it is often submitting to being gang raped.

That desire for membership in a peer group, or gang, can be that strong.

The Left and Emotional Blackmail

We are seeing large numbers of leftists resorting to emotional blackmail.

• You are dead to me if you voted for Trump.
• The 4Bs. No sex with men, no children, no dating men, no marriage with men
• Withholding sex until Trump is out of office
• Divorce or threats of divorce
• Excommunicating people from the peer group.
• Dissolving friendships
• Blue “friendship” bracelet. If you don’t have it, you aren’t a friend.

Conclusion

The only way to deal with emotional blackmail is a strong “fuck off, I don’t care.” Yes, that might cost some friends. They might come to their sense later. For now, don’t let them blackmail you.

Willful incel stupid

You would have voted for Kamala. But you are a stupid incel, so Trump is president-elect.

racist

It isn’t Democrat messaging that caused people to turn away from Kamala in droves, no, it was you were racist. Against the woman who can’t figure out if she black, brown, Indian, or something else.

uneducated

The uneducated population of America is holding the rest of the country hostage.

You uneducated want to weaken education, ban books and outlaw teaching BLACK history.

entrenched in tribal superstition, irrespective of all facts

You wouldn’t have voted for Trump. Because your mortgage, grocery, fuel prices will go up under Trump.

You need to understand just how wonderful the economy is right now.

didn’t vote for a convicted felon

Those 34 felony counts are real. For you to vote for a convicted felon is horrible.

knew that Trump is coming for your Social Security and Medicare

You wouldn’t have voted for him.

white supremacist and full of toxic masculinity

You would know that Kamala is right for America.

able to recognize bullshit coming from Democrats

The meltdown is incredible. My favorites have been the leftists claiming there was something fishy about this election because 15million votes have “disappeared”. There is no ability on the left to look at the numbers and think that 2020 was the outlier.

Why did they lose? Not their fault. It is your fault they lost. If only YOU had.

There is no introspection going on, only blame.

Sound up 😩 pic.twitter.com/HeVE74uvGh

— Sara Rose 🇺🇸🌹 (@saras76) November 6, 2024

The last four years have been a shitshow. On the first day of Harris’s term as VP, Joe started signing executive orders to undo what Trump had accomplished.

Since that day, I’ve heard nothing but hate from the left with lies, more lies, and still more lies.

This article will be updated after we know the results.

Trump Wins

Keep your head on a swivel. Stay out of the cities, if you can. Stay away from stupid people doing stupid things at stupid times of the day. Hell, stay away from stupid people doing stupid things.

I expect the cities to start burning at any moment. The left is known to be very joyful as they burn down our cities and tear apart our country.

Please keep your Democrat neighbors in your prayers. They are hurting right now. Only laugh and dance in private. They need time to grieve.

Harris Wins (God, I hope this isn’t true)

Kamala has told us that she would not have done a single thing differently. It is going to hurt. Pray for the justices of the Supreme Court that hold our Constitution dear and treat it with respect.

Keep your eyes on a swivel. The left is known for being joyful in their destruction. They might decide to joyfully stomp those who disagree with them.

Remember, we will survive this.

Conclusion

This was writing at 2100 East Coast time. The first returns are coming in, and it looks good for Trump so far. The problem is that we haven’t heard from any of the battleground states.

I remember when Florida was in play as a battleground state, after they cleaned up their voting methods to reduce the chances of fraud, it seems to have gone strong Red. Correlation is not causation.

From the north to the south, from the east to the west, we all need to vote.

North

South

East

West

I have had good luck with picking up discarded computers, upgrading them, and making them functional members of the computer or services farm.

A computer consists of persistent storage (disk drives and SSD), dynamic storage (memory), a processor (CPU), and I/O devices.

Data is read from disk into memory, the processor then either executes it or processes it, the results are sent to an output devices. I/O devices allow the input from disks, keyboards, persistent storage devices, networks or other devices. They also send output to video devices, networks, printers, and storage devices.

The thing that defines how a computer can be configured is the motherboard. The motherboard accepts one or more processors, one or more memory devices, one or more I/O devices.

Some motherboards come with built-in I/O devices. For example, A motherboard will come with built-in disk controllers, sound cards, video drivers, USB controllers, P/S-2 keyboard and mouse, serial drivers and many more. These are the connectors that you see on the back of your computer or elsewhere on the case.

Many of these drivers lead to a connector or a socket. If your motherboard has SATA disk controllers, there will be SATA connectors on the motherboard. If your motherboard has built-in video, the back will have an ISA video connector and/or an HDMI connector. It might have a DVI connector as well.

The covers most of what you find on the motherboard. The rest are the important sockets.

There will normally be extension slots. These are where you would plug in extra I/O devices, such as network cards, disk controllers, or video cards. There will normally be memory slots. Depending on the amount of memory supported by the CPU and motherboard, this could be two, four, eight, or even more. Finally, there is normally a socket for the CPU.

For me, I have found that the cheapest way to upgrade a computer is to give it more memory. Most software is memory intensive. If you exceed the amount of memory in your machine, your machine has to make space for the program you want to run. Then it has to read into memory, from disk, the program or its data before it can continue.

The more memory, the less “paging” needs to happen.

Upgrading the CPU is another possibility. This is normally a fairly reasonable thing to do. Consider an AMD Ryzen 7 3700, which is the CPU in one of my machines. It runs $150 on Amazon, today. I purchased it for $310 a few years ago.

Today, I can upgrade to a Ryzen 9 5950x from a Ryzen 7 3700x for $350.

Buying the latest and greatest CPU is expensive. Buying second tier, older CPUs is much more price effective.

The motherboard in this particular server is nearing its end of life. It has an AM4 socket, which has been replaced with the AM5 socket. This means it is unlike that any “new” CPUs will be released for the AM4.

Bad Design

The first place I see bad computer designs is in the actual case. This is not as bad as it used to be. It used to be that opening an HP case was sure to get you sliced up. Every edge was razor sharp.

The next major “bad design” is a case and motherboard combination which is non-standard. The only motherboard that will ever fit in that case is a motherboard from that company. Likely the only place to get such a motherboard is from E-Bay.

The next issue is when there are not enough memory slots, or worse, not enough memory addressing lines. Apple was actually famous for this.

In the old days, Apple used a 68020 class CPU. The CPU that they were using had a 32-bit address register. This is 4 Gigabytes of addressing. More than enough for the time period. Except…

Apple didn’t use all 32 bits, they only used 24 bits, leaving 8 bits unused. This gives 16 Megabytes of addressable memory. More than enough in a time period where people still remembered Billy saying “Nobody will ever need more than 640 Kilobytes of memory”.

Apple made use of the extra 8 bits in the address register for “Handles”. Not important.

Most CPUs today use a 64-bit address registers. I don’t know of a CPU that uses all 64 bits for addressing.

Which takes us to bad designs, again. Some motherboards only bring enough address lines to the memory slots to handle what is the “largest” memory card currently available. This means that you can have slots that support 16 Gigabyte DIMMs, but the motherboard only supports 4 Gigabyte DIMMs.

Often, it is worse. Cheaper motherboards will only have 2 DIMM slots. There is nothing more frustrating than having a machine with 8 GB of memory and finding out that it isn’t one 8 GB DIMM leaving room for another 8 GB, but instead two 4 GB DIMMs. Which means that when you receive that 8 GB DIMM you have 12 GB total instead of the goal of 16 GB, and you have a 4 GB DIMM that isn’t good for anything.

Sub Conclusion

If you want to be able to upgrade your computer, buy a motherboard with the latest socket design. AMD or Intel. Buy one that has enough DIMM slots to handle 4 times the amount of memory you think you are going to need. Buy a CPU that is at 1/4 to 1/3 the price of the top-tier CPU. Depending on the release date, maybe even less than that.

Make sure it has a slot for your video card AND having one PCIe-16 slot still open. You might never use it, but if you need it, you will be very frustrated at saving yourself $10.

Source of the rant

My wife is using an employer supplied laptop for her work. All of her personal work has to be done on her phone. With the kids off to university, their old HP AIO computer is available.

The only problem is that word “OLD”. A quick online search shows that I should be able to upgrade the memory from 4 GB to 16 GB and the CPU from an old Intel to an i7 CPU. This means that I can bring this shell back to life for my wife to use.

At the same time, I intend to replace a noisy fan.

Looking online, the cost of a replacement CPU will be $25. The cost of the memory, another $25. Plus $25 for a new keyboard and mouse combination. $75 for a renewed computer. Happiness exists.

Before I order anything, I boot into my Linux “rescue/install” USB thumb drive. I run lscpu and it spits out the CPU type. Which is AMD. AMD sockets do NOT support i7 CPUs. This means that my online research does not match what my software is saying. I trust the software more than the research.

Turns out that there are two versions of this particular All In One model. One is AMD-based, the other is Intel-based. The Intel-based version has a socketed CPU. The AMD version has the CPU soldered into place. It cannot be upgraded.

These maroons have rendered this machine locked in the past. With no way to upgrade the CPU, it is too slow for today’s needs. Even with maximum memory.

Conclusion

An old computer is sometimes garbage. Put it out of your misery. Use it for target practice or take it to the dump.

A few weeks ago, I went up to the Fort at #4 to use their warping board. I have a warping board, I just do not know where it is. I could make a warping board, I didn’t want to spend the time to do so.

On the way up, I stopped to pick up some more yarn for the warp. I have some yarn for the weft and I intend to spin more and have my wife dye it.

They didn’t have what I needed in stock. While the clerk went down to the warehouse to get more, I was introduced to the fiber club. This was three or four older women who had been working in fiber arts for some period of time.

“YES!” I thought, I was going to have a chance to learn something about spinning or weaving, or fiber prep. There must be a wealth of knowledge there.

But first I had to teach them how I clean my fleeces before combing or carding.

Then they wanted to know why I combed my fleeces, they had tried, but it didn’t work for them.

So then I ended up teaching them how to comb the fibers.

And I taught them how to put the flocks properly on the comb so that they aligned correctly.

When the clerk finally arrived with the rest of my yarn, I had spent the entire time in teaching mode. I had learned more about teaching. I hadn’t learned anything new about fiber prep, spinning, knitting or weaving.

At The Fort

As we drove into the fort to offload, the blacksmith waved at us. I figured this was meant that I would get a chance to play at the forge. It has been years since I was in a position to do any blacksmithing.

As I drove out, there was nobody at the smithy. Darn.

Back to Ally, in the house. I start combing some wool, just to keep my hands doing something. Shortly, our blacksmith comes in.

It is a younger man. We get to talking, and it is cool to hear about his skills.

We started talking about types of steel. The neat thing is that I know which steels I want and what their characteristics are. He was telling me the composition of the different steels. Amazing. I gave him some references to metal sources that he might be able to use.

He is primarily a blade smith. I’ve seen too many so-called “knife makers” to think it has any real meaning. Hell, even my brother makes knives. So I took the “trust, but verify” path.

Later, I went over to the smithy with him to sharpen a froe and to get him started on making a reproduction to use in the jointing shop.

It was interesting because this froe blade had seen some “repairs”. By repairs, I mean that somebody had wielded strange metal to the tip and maybe along the entire cutting edge.

Sam was using a file to sharpen and kept asking me if I thought the metal was hardened. It is a sort of test. People who work with metal can feel how hard a metal is based on how it files. He was doing a very polite test.

Then I was invited to actually do something at the forge.

Before I began, he taught me how to create a good, hot, fire. This is something I’ve done. But a method he used, of reaching under the fire to lift it, causing the crust to crack, is something I didn’t know how to do. I’ve always cracked the crust with my poker.

He wasn’t teaching, he was just doing.

Next he put a piece of iron rod in there to let me work it. On my first heat he couldn’t handle my lack of skill. I thought I knew what I was doing, I did not.

In 30 seconds, he demonstrated four or five things I was doing wrong. I learned.

I was intending to make a J-hook. There was a call for lunch, so he finished it up quickly, with me watching and taking mental notes. It was a wonderful learning experience.

History

After lunch, I was peopled out, I had worked with some visitors, now it was time to escape the people. I headed to the truck. Except, my keys are back in my jacket. Not with me in my 1700s garb. I go to see Sam at the shop.

After a bit, some visitors came to see what he was working on. The then proceeds to give a 30-minute lecture on trade knives of the 1750s. How they were made, what the differences are, why they were made the way they were, and who would be using them, and why.

He had manipulatives (knifes without handles) to show the visitors. He explained each type clearly.

I’ve been collecting knives since the 1980s. I learned more about knives in general, in that 30 minutes, than I have in the past 40 years.

It is wonderful to have somebody to learn from.

There are many left-leaning people out there. Many are broken. They cannot see what is in front of their faces and refuse to accept any fact that is counter to their current world view.

These are the people that can look you dead in the eye and tell you that calling you a racist piece of shit is just fine, but it is unacceptable for you to call them ignorant. This is why their riots were “mostly peaceful” while the January 6th protests and walk through was an “insurrection”.

There is another class of left — leaning people who aren’t really into calling you names. They are just so deep in the left bubble that they cannot believe that what you say could possibly be the truth. These are the people that watch nothing but CNN and will report what CNN says as being unbiased and fully truthful.

It is these people who still believe the “fine people on both sides” hoax. They have never seen anything to indicate that it could be anything but the truth.

There are the evil ones, who know exactly what they are doing. They are willing to lie to accomplish their goals. And are greatly offended when they are called on it.

The remaining are what I like to call “thinking leftist”.

These are not as uncommon as you might believe. They are often silent, they seldom get in your face. If you challenge them to check a primary source, they will. If you give them sources, they are willing to view them.

The Bubble of the Left

There is an information bubble that exists for everybody. This is the set of sources for news that we are presented with. It is how we get our information. It is from this body of information and opinion from which we build our world view.

Back in the olden days, there was a TV show called Murphy Brown. It was a show about a hard charging investigative journalist and news anchor.

She also happened to be female.

A strong female lead that was “believable”.

This isn’t a joke, “women are just as good as men in every field,” it was a profession where sex did not matter.

Single Mothers

What the character did was to have sex, get pregnant and decide to keep the child. Becoming a single mother.

This was a huge political message, though most didn’t understand it. Even today, most people consider it to be a major milestone in taking the stigma away from being an unmarried mother.

The biggest predictor of being successful in life is having a two parent family unit. There are so many things where two parents can accomplish something, while it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do it as a single parent.

Back in my single days, divorced from my first wife, she would sometimes decide I could have my kids for the week. This was always highly disruptive. I had to find temporary childcare, or I had to take the week off.

I always made it work because my children have always been that important to me.

Being a single parent is hard, difficult, all consuming, and will cost you more than you expect. If you are male, it might even be worse, it is harder to get help as a single father.

So what Murphy did, was she made it “ok” to be a single mother. Dooming hundreds of thousands of children to lives of hardship and lowering their chances of success.

This is part of that bubble. “Think of the single mothers.”, “Single mothers are so amazing.”

No, they are losing. Not always their fault. But those are the facts.

Firearms

Ignoring the magic technology of most procedural cop shows, there is a political message in most of them: All Guns Are Registered.

The scene: the duty room of NCIS, Washington, D.C. Abby has come upstairs with the identification of the type of firearm used in the latest murder.

“He was killed with a 9 mm slug from a Glock 17 with a 6-inch barrel,” she dutifully reports.

“Ge me a list of all owners of Glock 17L’s,” Gibbs says.

Ten minutes later, he is presented with a list of names which are then reduced to just a few, depending on plot needs, to investigate.

I have a few firearms that are registered with the state police of Maryland. That’s because they do not have anything to stop them from creating such a registry. Every firearm sold by an FFL in Maryland requires you to fill out an ATF-4473 plus an MD-4473.

The state is not allowed to keep records of the ATF-4473 information. Indeed, they request for that background check only states who you are and what type of firearm you are purchasing, pistol, rifle, et so forth.

The MD-4473 is sent to the state police, and they do keep a record. There are also waiting periods involved.

I have personal knowledge that they have a registry. I had purchased a featureless AR-15 during the assault weapon ban. That required the MD-4473 and a waiting period.

No big deal, I didn’t understand. That information bubble at work.

When the D.C. Sniper was killing people, they were having a difficult time tracking the sniper down. They were able to determine that the bullets were coming from a .223/5.56 rifle. They even suspected that it was an AR-15 platform.

I, personally, received a call from the MD state police because I owned an SUV and I had purchased an AR-15 platform rifle.

Impossible without a firearm registry.

Abortion

I would have a hard time finding a single show or opinion piece in the media that was pro-life. Even in the cases where there are characters who are pro-life, they are almost always portrayed poorly.

Take a look at how the annual March for Life was covered. (is covered?) The organizers estimated attendance at 650,000 for 2013. The media reported it as “tens of thousands”. The pro-abortion groups protesting the march normally get more media attention than the march itself.

It isn’t uncommon for a small pro-abortion march to get significantly more media coverage than the largest pro-life march.

The amount of positive coverage of pro-abortion positions makes me cringe.

Women’s Reproductive Health Care/Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood is an abortion business. While they claim that only 3% of their services are “abortions”, you need to dive into what “services” are. Services include handing out literature or condoms, answering calls, and all the other myriad things that are just part of being a business.

In 2014-2015, the received over half of a Billion dollars from the government. Every cent of that is fungible. That means that they had millions of dollars from us that freed up money to fund abortions.

When the federal government looked into shutting down that flow of money, they went into overdrive. The selling point was, “If Planned Parenthood shuts down, there will be no women’s reproductive healthcare.”

There are more women’s reproductive healthcare clinics in my state than there are Planned Parenthood clinics. The difference, most of them offer real women’s healthcare. Teat squishing, pap smears, and all the rest of taking care of unique women’s health issues.

Misc

The list goes on and on and on. Everything from gun owners are fat, stupid, and ignorant to people who watch Fox News are not as smart as the rest of the smart, to their elite know better than you.

Laughter

Ally went on a rant last night. What was she ranting about? The stupid Kamala ad which says that the wives of conservatives can vote for Kamala without telling their husbands. That conservative/Republican wives are just robots of their husbands.

It wasn’t a great video because she was so upset she was fumbling her words. I think the strongest message in the rant was, “…give me a break.”

At morning conversation, she started ranting about it again.

And I broke out in a giant smile.

“Stop laughing at me!”

Ally was a thinking leftest. She took the blinders off a short time ago and is seeing everything with newly cleared eyes.

For years, I’ve been listening to her responding to my indignation over things the left has done. And for years the response was always the same, “What about this thing that the right is doing?”

No matter who the Republican candidate was, she found a reason to disapprove of them. Of course, she couldn’t go to the Democrat candidate because they were just horrible. So it was always a third-party candidate.

For years, I bit my tongue so that I wouldn’t go too far, “can’t you just accept that they did something evil, bad, or stupid?”

She couldn’t.

The reason seemed to be that she was fearful of what “The Right” was going to do. They were going to take her rights away, They were saying mean things about people. They stood on the wrong side of an issue that she was passionate about.

Watching her accept her own views without those blinders has been invigorating. It makes me smile, every day.

And yes, she would have ranted at herself of a year ago. And the person she was a year ago would have written this Ally off as evil, bad, stupid, and moronic.

So smile and laugh. It feels good.