Chris Johnson

My brother-in-law is an addict. Drugs and alcohol. There is nothing he wouldn’t sell to get booze or drugs. For a while his scam was to con his sister into believing he was starving; she would order him a pizza. He would then sell slices at $2 a slice.

She bought the pizza for $25 delivered. He ate one of the pieces, sold the other 7 and got something from it.

He sold canned goods. He sold his mattress. He sold everything he was given, then begged for more. Always preying on his mother’s and sister’s sympathy. For his mom, it was cleanliness. He would con her into paying for laundry and clothes. For his sister, it was food. With his daughters, it was something else.

Of course you can sell your EBT card. My BIL sold his, many times.

Range Day

Last week I made it to the range in time for the orientation class. The “Range” is large enough to take about 45 minutes to get the orientation tour. It was about 20 minutes of filling out forms. It was another 2.5 hours waiting for people to take the range safety and operating procedure test.

You need to score 90% on the SOP test to get your membership. I was unhappy because I got 2 wrong and scored a 95%. I passed on the first attempt. Nobody else passed on the first attempt. There was a membership person overseeing the test taking and answering questions.

The two questions I got wrong were about the 50/100/200 yard rifle range. The range is split between the 200 and the 50/100 targets. I consider them to be two separate ranges. But, there is only a single firing line. I messed it up because I was thinking of them as separate. 2.5% off.

The other was just as stupid.

I almost walked out. The gentleman taking the SOP when I first got there was not doing well. He was failed and was denied membership.

As I told the orientation officer, if they had passed him, I would have taken my money and walked back out.

How nice is this range? Let’s start with “The Range is closed, but here’s a bay for you to shoot in”. The 600 yard rifle range extends over most of the full range. When the 600 yard range is in use, all the other ranges are closed. But they open up the bay just outside the gate for people to use while waiting for the rest of the range to open.

The 600 yard range is scheduled for Thursdays, 0800-1200.

Next come the two trap ranges. The lower one has all the stuff for shotgun people. The upper range has a pavilion. The clay launcher is fully automated. You yell “pull” and the machine does it. No humans except for loading more clays. $5 for 25 clays.

Next is the 50/100 and 200 yard ranges. Then the rimfire bay, both rifle and pistol, .22 and .17 rimfire.

Next are the pistol bays; the first is for paper targets. Don’t draw from behind the bench; use the open slot or off to the side. Place your targets where you want. Then there is the steel bay. Pistol calibers only, no magnums. So I can’t shoot my .357 Mag rifle or pistol in that bay. .45ACP and 9mm all day long. Finally, is the “carbine bay”. Carbine is defined as “yes”. This is for people that want to do two gun practice.

There are more bays that are only open during competitions.

Finally, there is a 25 yard indoor range. As a member, I can use the indoor range 24 hours a day except when it is reserved for a group.

If things don’t break, I’ll be there today.

Food Budget

We eat well. We eat darn well. With the children gone off to university, we eat even better.

My wife grew up with “Love is food, food is love.” While the children were living at home, she constantly purchased crap food for them. I’d guess that 25 to 35 percent of our food budget went to crap food. Today, we buy almost no crap food. Our budget has gone down slightly.

At the high end, we spend about $8.30 per person per day. When we are running short on cash, I reduce that to $5 per person per day.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been using that $5 per person per day for the last 40 years. It has always included nice food.

There are people who have never used a budget. Much less used a budget for food. My wife was like that. For years every meal required a trip to the grocery store. And every week we tossed the dead food, because she doesn’t like leftovers. I eat them for lunch.

We now use a budgeting grocery shopping list. Everything we want for the week goes on the list. We have a chat channel just for groceries. If you think you are going to need it next week, you say it and it gets added to the list.

We don’t buy it if it isn’t on the list.

If you need help budgeting for food, please reach out to us if you want help. If you are hungry, please reach out to us if you want help.

I have sent care packages to people around the world.

Surprised Shooting

Firearm skills are a perishable skill. I finally had a chance to put rounds on paper out of my .357 wheel gun. It actually shot much better than I thought it would. Well, it always shoots well. I, on the other hand, can easily fail.

I’m looking forward to finding out what some of these WWII rifles I’ve collected can really do at range.

Head, Swivel, Keep

Stay strapped. Stay out of stupid places. Stay away from stupid people. Nothing good happens after midnight; don’t be out and about at stupid times.

The next couple of weeks will be touchy. Be careful.

IPKVM

I’ve used Keyboard, Video, and Mouse devices in data centers in the past. They are great when you have many servers that you need to work with but don’t want to have multiple monitors and I/O devices for.

In one data center, we had a KVM with ports on the front for video out and keyboard connection. The monitor, a big-ass CRT, was on a cart. You rolled the cart to the rack with your server, plugged the CRT into power, and connected things up. You then had console access to 8 or more servers.

The price of a four-port KVM is down around $35. I have them in all the data closets. This made life much easier.

What I really wanted, though, was a KVM over IP. With this type of gizmo, you can access the console of a remote server over the network.

The cost of a four-port KVM starts at around $400. An 8-port runs around $650. For that, I’d build out another server.

Enter the iGL.net Comet and, shortly, their upgraded version. Plug a USB C into the side for power. Connect HDMI and USB to the computer. Plug in the Ethernet.

A few minutes later you have web access to the console of that computer. $89 for the gizmo. I have them plugged into the regular KVM.

Now I can select the computer I want on the KVM, go back to my desk, and do all the console work I need to do remotely.

The only issue I have is that if I have it in full screen mode and do any editing, the first time I press ESC, it reduces the size of the window.

vim uses the ESC key to leave insert mode. emacs uses the ESC key as a lead character for META control sequences.

If you have a need for remote access to a console, give it a try.

Oh, I had a friend who required support. I had him pick up one of these IPKVMs. I was able to reboot his computer remotely, configure BIOS, and bring his Linux back to life from 1500 miles away.

The hardest part was getting him to use the correct USB cables. I was attempting to use the power only cable(s) instead of power + data cables.

Question of the Week

What was your favorite range and why?

The Democrats have decided to shut down the government. Federal payrolls are only partially funded during the shutdown.

Amazingly enough, our Constitution says the federal government will maintain a standing army. Yet the shutdown affects their pay.

Senators that are bouncing around telling us how horrible the Republicans are are still taking a paycheck.

I’m unsure of how federal law enforcement is funded, but I keep reading about good enforcement actions.

SNAP, and it was gone

What isn’t funded is SNAP. All SNAP payments stop at the end of this month.

You are going to have many people who are suddenly unable to just buy food. Many of them haven’t prepared for this. Many of them have children.

Worse, many of these people feel entitled to take what is not theirs.

Over the next few weeks, I expect to see a massive increase in crime around the country as these people decide it is easier to steal what they want than to get a job and pay for what they need.

We pay taxes to our government to get services from that government.

We are forced to transfer our wealth to others via wealth transfer programs, e.g., welfare and the like. These are not services.

I want a strong military; I am willing to pay taxes for that. I want the law to be enforced; I’m willing to pay taxes for that. I want public schools, libraries, and other services of that sort; I am willing to pay taxes for that.

Regardless of what services or wealth transfers you like or dislike, taxes are how we pay for them.

Our history is filled with stories of the state collecting taxes. Why did Joseph and Mary travel to Bethlehem? Why was Robin Hood stealing? Why is there a battle over moonshine? The answer is taxes.

In Europe they have an insidious tax called a Value Added Tax (VAT). This imposes a tax every time the value of an item is increased. If you buy a piece of leather for a pound, add some leather dye, cut some holes in it, and put some pretty stampings on it, it is still a piece of leather, but as a belt it has a higher value. When you sell your belt to a distributor or retailer, you pay for the increase in value as a tax.

Tariffs are in the news. These are taxes that importers pay on goods imported into the country. One of the big things in the founding was the idea that the states could not put tariffs on interstate commerce. Part of the commerce clause of the Constitution.

Those taxes go to funding services and wealth transfers.

There can be existence taxes. If you are alive, you have to pay some amount in taxes. Or you have to pay a tax for owning your car or boat. Sometimes those taxes are hidden as “registration fees”.

There are transfer taxes. When you transfer ownership of an item to an end user, that will often have a sales tax or transfer tax.

Homeowners are well aware of the evil that is property taxes. We pay almost twice as much in property taxes as we do on our actual mortgage. People that rent are also paying property taxes; they just don’t know it. In other words, if the cost to the landlord was less, the landlord could charge less and not lose money.

There are capital gains taxes. When you sell something and make a profit on the sale, you get taxed on the profits. There are limits to the things you can sell this way. I learned the beauty of this when I wrote a check for $75K to the IRS for selling my domain name.

Income tax is the one that most people know about. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand how taxes work. Just ask the average American about filing taxes. They are thrilled when the government gives them money. They fail to realize that this is money that they loaned to the government, interest-free.

It is their money they are getting, not the government’s. The incentive structures are so perverse that there are people that are getting more money from the government in tax “refunds” than they paid to the government. This is an example of wealth transfer.

Down in Florida, the Governor is working on getting rid of property taxes.

This is a great thing for homeowners and, indirectly, renters. I would love to see my monthly payments drop by two-thirds.

The problem is that the cost of running my local schools and my town services isn’t going to drop by two-thirds. The cost of the school system will continue to go up.

What will change is my power over the local budget. My town has voted down budget increases for the schools two or three times since I moved here. We can speak out and be heard.

If property taxes were to be eliminated, other taxes would increase to match the loss in revenue. We would just be paying a different tax.

Worse, that tax money would flow, not to the local government, but to the state government. The state government would decide where the money is best spent.

Do you truly believe the state is going to prioritize the school system of Athol, MA, or do you think Boston will get the priority.

All I need to do is look at how highway funds are spent. MA 32 coming north out of MA used to be a horrible mess. If you could go 25 MPH on the road, you were pushing it. When you reached the NH line, it became a beautiful road again.

At a time when locals were beating their cars to death on the MA32, the roads of Boston were getting repaved for the third or fourth time. I, personally, observed parts of I-95 and MA-2 near Boston get repaved twice while no work was performed on MA-32.

The NH people used their local budget, financed by property taxes, to pay for road maintenance. They got some funds from the state because it was a state road. The locals of NH had much more control than the locals of MA.

This was explained to me by my town office years ago, after I purchased my home. Our assessed value was about 2.5 times what we paid for the house. I wanted them to change our assessment.

The town clerk explained that assessments were done every year for a part of the town. If our home were to be assessed at the selling price and the value of our neighbors homes was also increased, the total assessed value of all the taxable property would drop.

If that happened, they would need to raise the rates. They wouldn’t be cutting town costs, they would be changing the dial they twisted to get the money they felt they needed.

My mentor was one of the fathers of the Internet. He was responsible for one of the most commonly used network test tools ever ping.

He was a subject matter expert in dozens of different areas; networking was just one of them.

After he died in a car accident, I moved into other areas, programming and learning new things. I quickly learned to ask people what terms and acronyms actually meant. The reason? Often I would know the thing they were referring to, but not that particular term.

This made me look like an ass. They would be talking about “jargon,” and I would be lost. They would explain what the jargon term meant, and I would suddenly be an expert. It wasn’t sudden; I just didn’t know what they were referring to to begin with.

The education industry is the worst for this. They change their terminology almost every year. This is very frustrating.

There is an entire set of students that cannot function in English. They don’t speak it, they can’t read or write it, and they don’t understand spoken English.

In other words, they are children of immigrants, both legal and illegal, with no English skills. This requires entire cadres of teachers to deal wtih.

The term I first heard for these students was “They had English deficiencies.” Of course they were functionally illiterate in English.

Then the term changed; they were children with “English as a Second Language”. This rapidly morphed into “ESL” students.

I teach ESL to friends in Brazil via Google Hangouts. There is no shame in not being literate in English if you live in a country where English isn’t the primary langauge.

I recently heard a teacher describe his school as being 1/3rd ESS. Huh?

Translation: ESS is the replacement for ESL. This is the education industry’s politically correct way to say “students who are functionally illiterate in English”. A third of the student population. Ouch.

Over time I’ve watched the term “pupil” morph to “student.” It still felt the same to me. The concept is one of a person learning from a teacher. A teacher is responsible for teaching pupils and students.

They changed the term again. The new term is “learners”.

This is a horrible term. Not all children are learners. Not all children are self motivated to learn. Learning is a skill we teach and we hope our children learn.

If a learner fails, the teacher is no longer the obvious responsible person.

I am so tired of trying to figure out what the term de jure is.

Words and phrases have particular meanings. These meanings are steeped in history and tradition. Over time, those definitions might change, but words have meaning.

The meaning of words morphs either naturally or intentionally. They also mean different things based on different cultures.

In England, a “fag” is a cigarette. In the United States, it is a male homosexual.

When I was a kid, we used a phrase, “I’m so angry I could jump down your throat!” Or, quoting from the Cambridge Dictionary, “I made the mildest of criticisms and he jumped down my throat.”

I was having a very frustrating conversation with my son’s principal. I some point I said, “I’m so frustrated I’m having a hard time not jumping down your throat.” At the end of the conversation, as I was leaving, she asked why I didn’t become a teacher and invited me to become one.

I left feeling good.

The next day I was told I was not allowed on school property because I had threatened to physically harm her.

She didn’t want to hear what the phrase meant. She didn’t care that she had not felt threatened at the time. Instead, after the fact she decided it was a threat.

Opening Our Minds

When we are listening, we need to understand and accept the meaning of the words as the person speaking intends them. To do otherwise is to act in poor faith.

When I am talking about criminal aliens, or illegal aliens, it means exactly what the law says it means. It means a person who is not a citizen of the country and who is here without permission of the government.

It does not mean all immigrants or migrants. It means exactly what the definition says it means.

If you hear somebody say, “We should deport illegal aliens,” it is highly unlikely they are talking about legal immigrants. Yes, there are some people who want legal immigrants gone. That is a different issue.

It is worse when we hear spokespeople conflating these terms intentionally. Normally they begin by claiming to know the motive of the speaker. Having decided on the motive of the speaker, they then tell you how to interpret the phrase, twisting the intended meaning of the word or phrase.

Again, I grew up in an age where proper English used male pronouns to indicate both male and female when speaking of a group. I’ve gotten used to the newfangled method of using “they” and “them” instead, but I slip from time to time.

When I slip, does this mean I’m excluding women? No. It just means I’m using proper English from my childhood.

This includes things like “postman”, “mailman”, “policeman”, “fireman”, and hundreds of other terms of the sort. It is not exclusionary, nor is it denying that there are female letter carriers. These are just the original terms.

Phopic

“Agoraphobic”, “arachnophobic”, “hydrophobic”, and “acrophobic” are all fears. Fear of open spaces, fear of spiders, fear of water, and fear of heights.

My daughter has said I’m “transphobic”. I asked her, “Have I ever exhibited fear of a trans person?”

“No.”

“Then why are you saying I’m afraid of trans people? That is what “phobic” means.”

“Yeah, that’s what ‘phobic’ means, but ‘transphobic’ doesn’t mean fear of trans people.”

The word was intentionally picked to suggest that anybody having a disagreement regarding anything trans related is actual acting out of fear of trans people.

It doesn’t matter what they say the term means; people know that “phobic” means “scared of.”

Unregistered Firearm

Uh, there is no such thing.

While TV shows talk about firearm registrations and people owning registered firearms, the reality is that there is no federal requirement to register your firearms.

An “unregistered firearm” just means a gun that nobody was forced to tell the government about. Some states require firearm registration. Some states require that the firearm that you carry on your person be registered with your permit.

These are the exceptions to the law.

A recent news story about a New Hampshire man sueing his former high school administration for breaking into his vehicle and searching it because he had told a friend he owned a firearm mentions that “He had a registered firearm”.

There is no such thing in New Hampshire. There is no way to register your firearm with the government in New Hampshire.

Mostly Peaceful Protest

Between 2003 and 2012, The March for Life in Washington, D.C. drew crowds exceeding 400,000 people. I’ve heard reports as high as 1.2 million for some of the 2020s.

Between 1987, the first march, and today, there have been zero or nearly zero violent actions by the protesters.

What reports of violence can be found seem to be from counterprotesters doing violent things to the people of the march.

Any protest that erupts into violence or mob-like actions is not peaceful. It isn’t even mostly peaceful.

I’ve strayed; some of these are more akin to lying than misusing words.

Look for the least offensive definition

When you open your mind, you should be able to read or hear the words and decide which definition to use. Don’t leap to the worst possible definition, or to an obscure definition; work to understand what is being said and communicate.

A little bit off the sides

Well, it turns out that Trump’s new ballroom is going forward. In the process he has removed the old east wing. A bit more than expected.

The rumor mill suggests that they located major security issues when they tore down the portico, leading to a larger project.

Regardless, this sounds much nicer than a private basketball court or an empty cutlery cabinet.

Supreme Court and DOJ

The DOJ has requested that the Supreme Court pause consideration of cert for an 18-20 year-old. This could be because they expect the two cases currently before the court to resolve the issues of 18-20 year-olds.

I am cautiously optimistic about our chances before the Supreme Court this term.

Ball Joints Eat Tires

The ball joints in my wife’s Jeep have been failing. They were on the work to be done list for the next oil change.

Yesterday they were changed.

It wasn’t that they had gotten that much worse; it was that my wife decided her car was unsafe to drive.

While the ball joints were still “OK” for small values of OK, both front tires were badly worn on the inside 1/3. Like showing steel worn.

We have the tires at the house, I’ll get the tires changed today.

Holsters

The We The People holster I’ve been wearing for a week now is nice. Nicer than I expected.

I’ve become used to the pad to protect my tender skin. This holster doesn’t have that pad.

And still it is more comfortable. The firearm seats with a better fit. The draw feels better.

Over all, I think I’ll be getting a few more from them.

Question of the week

How would you describe your local “No Kings” protest?