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Site Display Issues

Somehow how, some way, my theme was lost. I’ve reset to a working theme.

It is loud, it is in your face, and it looks like 100 other sites. I do not have the time or energy to put it all back right now. I’ll be working it over in the coming weeks.

Woodworking

It is difficult to know or anticipate what you don’t know. I like to anticipate; I sometimes fail.

Right now my hands are scratched and bruised. My thumbnail is a beautiful shade of blue and black.

I’m currently working on flattening the benchtop. This consists of using the smoothing plane to take down local high spots. Then use a straight edge to make sure that you have a flat surface from side to side. Then you use winding sticks to make sure your top is not twisted.

My top is not yet smooth, much less flat, much less without twist.

On the other hand, there is no noticeable difference in moving from board to board.

Up coming woodworking projects

I intend to make a wood journeyman’s tool tote as my first action. I intend to pick up my wood at a local sawmill. 4/4 rough-cut pine.

If I can find some 6/4 or 8/4 cherry, I’ll pick up enough to make a rabbet plane and a router plane.

Vehicle Issues

I drove home from the autoshop today with a lighter wallet and a much cooler cabin. The bearings on the A/C condenser went out.

If I were the only person to drive my truck, I would have ignored it for a while. But I am not. So, I got it replaced. The issue is that it is too easy to turn the A/C on. All it takes is pushing the A/C button OR turning the knob counterclockwise.

We Must All Watch the Same Videos, Read the Same Articles

There are days when I finish writing an article and then watch a video that covers the same issue. Sometimes I learn more, and sometimes it feels like they are responding to the article I have not published yet.

In the Sotomayor situation, I was pleased to watch two videos where the presenters quoted nearly the same things I did. All of us pointing out that Sotomayor is an agenda-driven rogue justice.

Question of the Week

When I was a kid, people would buy a car for cash every couple of years. A car loan for 48 months was almost unheard of.

Today, I’m seeing people taking out 6- and 7-year loans on a vehicle.

How long do you expect your cars to last? My truck is 15 years old; it needs bits and pieces to be fixed or replaced. I expect to get another 5 years from it.

My first car, a 1967 VW Microbus, was traded in on a 1987 TransAm in 1987. I expect my cars to last 10 to 20 years.

SCOTUS

Trump keeps winning at the Supreme Court. There was an 8-1 opinion in his favor this week. With only the DEI Hire dissenting.

Violence In the Streets

There were two events where armed terrorists decided to shoot at federal agents.

Compared to the Dallas, TX, shooter a few years ago, this is barely making a ripple in the news.

Stay strapped. Keep your head on a swivel. Stay out of stupid places at stupid times with stupid people.

Evil

The flash floods in Texas and New Mexico have claimed multiple lives. Parents will never see their children alive again.

There are far too many people in the socials going, “Good, they deserved it.”

These people are evil. They sicken me.

TDS, Lies

People have been blaming Trump for the tragedy in Texas. I’ve heard that it was Trump’s fault because the fully manned weather service was not properly staffed. That he defunded the early warning system. That he hasn’t gone to Texas, like Biden went to NC.

Except that Trump was in NC before Biden. Trump has been in contact with the Texas state government. He has offered all help possible, and the federal government had responded, was rescuing people within hours of Trump learning of the tragedy.

These people are nearly evil. If they had the brains of an amoeba, they would be evil.

Safe Travels

My wife has returned from her vacation. Happy dances throughout the house.

Sharpen That Tool

Wednesday, I was cutting a mortise. Because of the style, I cut two partial cross cuts, then knocked out the waste. This created a mortise that was intentionally to small.

The mortise is then trimmed to size with a chisel. While this started fine, it really wasn’t working as I expected.

Thursday, I needed to finish trimming those mortises. Before I did that, I ran the same chisel through the sharpening pattern.

When I went to cut that end grain, the chisel shaved a piece so thin I could see through it.

I need to spend more time keeping my tools sharp.

Shortly, I will need to plane the top of the frame flat. This will require me to use the jack plane or joiner plane. Before I do so, I’m going to spend still more time making sure those plane irons are razor sharp.

Woodworking Tools

The tools you need to make tools. My workbench frame is nearly completed. I am currently adding bracing. But I can clamp boards to the top of this frame to do work.

Planing a short piece of lumber flat two days ago took about an hour and was a chore the entire tim.

I clamped a board to the top of the frame with a plane stop in it. With this in place, it took just a few minutes to smooth and flatten a brace. This workbench is a good height for me, and it is a joy to work on.

Question of the Week

When you look in your holster drawer, what brand of holster do you see that you should not have purchased?

What holster brand have you found to be good for you, and why?

We have decided to give away some cards!

The first 20 people who send a mailing address to us at info@troglodite.com will receive 15 cards via USPS first class mail.

Depending on demand, we might ask for a donation to cover the costs.

Thank you!
Chris, Ally, and the rest of the team

Trump Wins, Again

My hope is that in 10 years, my grandchildren can read about the 12-day war. Read how the man who did not want to be president became president and brought peace to the middle-east.

President Trump played better than anyone could have expected. And it started on the 20th of January.

When Trump took office in 2016, he was a businessman. He knew that even if it was a hostile takeover, you kept the top people. Everybody wanted things to work. They might hate your guts, but they wanted things to work so they could continue to take home a paycheck.

The government is not like that. Trump was sabotaged before he even took office. People he trusted shouldn’t have been trusted. People he wanted in his team were forced out. The swamp creatures latched on, the media tried to destroy him.

In some ways, losing to Biden is one of the best things that has ever happened to this country. Trump 2.0 is so much better.

Trump started this term as if he were a Democrat. He fired everybody who wasn’t on his team. He is still working on that. And it worked.

He got people in as directors and at cabinet level that believe in him and believe in his vision.

There were no leaks about the bombing attack. None.

D.C. has been a cauldron of leaked secrets since I was a child. Most of those leaks served Democrat interest.

After the attack, there was a leak. A highly placed source, or a person with access to high-level intel, leaked part of a BDA. They seemed to have omitted the part where it was a preliminary BDA with low confidence.

A day later, Trump declared a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. When both parties tried to “empty their tubes” he slapped them both down.

As I write this, there does not seem to be any more exchanges between the two major parties.

In The Supreme Court

Trump keeps winning cases that get to the Court. Sotomayor, Brown, and Kegan keep writing dissents.

It is important to note that the agenda-driven justices have not yet written a single thing about the merits of the cases that are being brought to The Court. It is all about waiting.

As far as I can tell, everyone who is not a sheeple knows that the Trump Administration is going to win these cases.

The leftists don’t care. For them, it is the cost to the Trump Administration and delay, delay, delay.

If these cases were to proceed through the courts as the leftist want, Trump will be out of office before they are resolved.

Consider Duncan, which was filed in 2016. The case went through the District Court, through the merits panel of the Ninth Circuit, through the en banc Ninth Circuit, through a motion for writ of certiorari, was granted certiorari, the Ninth Circuit’s opinion was vacated, the case was remanded to the Ninth, which remanded it to the district court, where another full finding of facts, post-Bruen, won, was appealed to the Ninth, was taken by the original en banc panel, against Ninth Circuit policies, the district opinion was vacated and remanded for final disposition, and is now seeking certiorari for the second time before the Supreme Court.

Nine years! I could easily see rogue inferior courts dragging out cases for years and years.

Regardless of the agenda-driven justices, the Supreme Court has handed out win after win to the Trump Administration.

Truck Sounds

Wednesday, I drove the truck 50 miles or so. It had this really weird sound.

That sound was silence.

It turns out that there really was a second bearing going bad, or which had gone bad.

Because my dude is cool, I was able to observe the work done on my truck. Watching the mechanic use the same methods that I was questioning was nice. On the other hand, watching him do some things just blew my mind.

Even when the metal does not rust, two metal parts in close contact will stick. The axle on the passenger side of the truck was seriously stuck to the hub. It took some heavy work with a 5 lb sledge and a punch to break the axle free.

Jess picked up the air chisel, put a punch in it, walked over to the axle and triggered the air chisel. That axel backed out almost instantly.

Doh, I have that tool. Never even occurred to me to use it.

The cost of the hub for the driver’s side was $10 more than I would have paid at the local shop. With his profit built in, having him (shop owner) source the hub didn’t really cost extra.

It turns out that the job I wasn’t willing to do, replacing the bad flex brake line in the left rear, was a simple job of unscrewing the hose from the two hard lines and replacing it.

I saw that and was irritated that I didn’t do that work myself. Easy, right?

That was, until I saw, as part of the miscellaneous shop items, two new lengths of hard line. Jess had to replace the hard line after they failed while replacing the flex line.

The truck is good for a few thousand more miles.

Stock Market

On the first two days the stock market was open after the start of the 12-day war, my accounts dipped, hard. It was extremely scary.

So I dropped another chunk of money into the market to make some purchases.

As of last night, the market has recovered everything from that dip and a bit more. I expect to see it go up again today.

Woodworking

I’ve started making my workbench. Instead of pulling out the chop saw, I set up a pair of saw horses and used hand tools. I don’t think I’ve ever made cleaner cuts by hand. After 58 years of using handsaws, I might actually have learned how to do it.

One end of the bench has been glued and screwed, and I’m working on the half lap braces. This is my first half lap.

It is finished, the fit is good, as long as I don’t want the other end to touch the opposite leg. I’ll have to refine the joint tomorrow.

Tools

I haven’t been able to find one of my marking gauges. The one I did find didn’t work for me.

The nice option was the 3/4 wide chisel I pulled off the wall. It was properly protected by a cap. It was properly sharpened and worked perfectly.

The other side of this was finding out that I seem to have let somebody borrow the 1″ chisel. How do I know? Because there are chips in the cutting edge. It looks more like a saw blade than a chisel.

It is going to take a bit of work on the grinder to get that edge back. Thank goodness for slow speed 320 grit diamond wheels. Without a grinder, it would take hours to recover that edge.

Oh, those bench chisels are the cheap box store chisels, they are Marple’s.

I now have a “working” No.4 Stanley. I have one of unknown condition of the same general size, and one that seems to be junk. It is nice to have the tools I need.

Question of The Week

How concerned were you that we were about to get stuck in another war?

Netting

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

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

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

Django and Bootstrap

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

Iran

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

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

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

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

The Market

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

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

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

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

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

On Monday, there was a slight recovery.

Tuesday, saw another dip.

Wednesday saw more recovery.

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

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

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

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

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

Car Parts are Here!

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

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

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

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

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

Question of the week

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

Which caliber do you want to explore?

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

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

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

Snope and Ocean State Tactical

This was a real bummer. We couldn’t get four justices to vote to grant cert. Thomas wrote a powerful dissent.

Unfortunately, if the Supreme Court is only taking two or three Second Amendment cases per term, they will be picky about which cases they take.

I believe that Thomas and Alito want to take every Second Amendment case which allows them to correct the inferior courts or to advance Second Amendment jurisprudence. If I were on the court, I would be the same way.

I believe that if they are being told, “You only get three Second Amendment cases in the 2025 term.”, then it is better to pick cases that advance Second Amendment jurisprudence over just slapping down the inferior courts.

Let’s face it, the Fourth Circuit was told they got it wrong in Bianchi, they then heard oral arguments in front of a three judge merits panel, then took the case en banc before the merits panel released their opinion, then decided they got it right the first time.

For different reasons, mind you, but they always get the same result.

S&W v Mexico

And just in time, a 9-0 opinion from the Supreme Court which advances Second Amendment jurisprudence. Congress passed the PLCAA to protect the firearm industry. PLCAA is designed to stop frivolous lawsuits against those involved with firearm sales, distribution, and manufacture.

There is a very tight exception, which is if the sued party aided, abetted, or committed an actual crime.

Kegan said that this case should have been dismissed at the outset via PLCAA. That third-party actions which are illegal is not the responsibility of the defendants. She went on to say that sales and advertising does not confer responsibility. And that making items that are attractive to third-party evildoers does not confer responsibility.

This is a case that will be used to stop lawfare suits before they begin.

Remington

An asshole killed his mother, stole her Bushmaster AR15, went to a school where he was known, entered the building and killed children, teachers, and staff(?).

Because Connecticut doesn’t allow for armed teachers in the classroom, they had no way of stopping this monster.

The usual suspects then got the parents of some victims to file a lawsuit against Remington. They filed against Remington because Remington had purchased Bushmaster. This lawsuit falls square in the PLCAA protections.

The plaintiffs (bad guys) alleged that Bushmaster had violated CT law by creating advertisements that appealed to bad actors. This violation of the CT law would pierce the PLCAA protections.

The CT supreme court ruled that there was not enough evidence to decide, and allowed the case to go forward.

Remington appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court denied their petition.

This is not unusual, the case was still in an interlocutory state.

The battle went on and on. Remington went out of business. The name was left with ???, the insurance companies cut a deal with the parents to make the suit go away.

This has emboldened the blood vultures to continue to file lawfare suits whenever there is a mass shooting.

Uvalde

An asshole entered a school in Uvalde, TX. He shot multiple children and adults.

The cops stood around with their thumbs up their collective asses in a circle jerk for over 40 minutes.

A group of border agents rolled up, stacked up, and ended the standoff with a good school shooter. I.e., the shooter is dead.

The usual blood vultures lined up to get parents to front another lawfare attack.

I do not know where that case currently is.

If it is still active, I expect the defendants (good guys) to file notices on the docket pointing to S&W v. Mexico, and that should bring that suit to an end.

Good Teachers Have Skills…

I was at The Fort at No 4 on Wednesday. It was a good group of homeschooled children.

There was one student that was a little mouthy and it changed how I dealt with him.

I have to do better. Even if he and I were cool, it wasn’t cool. As the adult, representing the Fort, I must do better.

It sometimes sucks learning new people skills. No, it always sucks learning new people skills.

Hard Things Made Simple

My entire computing career has been at the bleeding edge of technology. Even when it wasn’t, it was doing things that nobody else had done. Of figuring out how to do something with little guidance.

Back when I was babysitting Cray super computers, there was another site that wanted to upgrade from the Cray specific operating system to Unix (SYSV/UNICOS).

These people were performing cutting-edge research in the medical field.

This type of upgrade is normally a two-week project if pushed but normally three weeks.

I did three one-day prep visits to the site, then did the complete upgrade over a three-day weekend, finishing 20 hours earlier than we expected.

Was this cutting edge? Not really, I just knew it had to be done and did it. My boss’s boss’s boss was there, he kept pizza and coke-a-cola in the ready room and took notes.

One of the difficult things I’m learning is that if it is a hard problem, it is likely somebody else has already published a solution. Go find it.

This just happened to me with Django content Types and generic foreign keys. Sigh, I wish I had known about them 7 years ago.

New Skills

I’ve taken up net making. I’m likely to finish my first round net today. Too many people are telling me that learning a new skill in a couple of days is not reasonable.

Question of the week

What is one skill you would like to learn in the next year?

What is one skill you would like to master in the next year?

Second Amendment Cases Seeking Cert

Yes, there are cases seeking cert.

No, there has been no real movement.

Yes, they are still there.

What does it mean? I don’t know. Mark Smith suggests that Snope being conferenced 16 times is a good thing. Certain controversial cases have been conferenced this many times, or more.

If they grant cert, oral arguments will not be heard until October. We would expect to see an opinion issue 3 months later. If cert is granted, the court must publish their opinion by the end of June 2026.

Why is there now movement on 2A cases?

Bluntly, everything is in a holding pattern. It doesn’t matter what happens in the different circuit courts, the rogue inferior courts have made their play. Bruen stopped the two-step shuffle and replaced it with a new two-step shuffle.

The old two-step was to first assume without granting that the plain text of the Second Amendment was implicated. Then deciding on what level of scrutiny was required. In rogue courts, the balance was always in favor of gun control. The Ninth Circuit is over 120 opinions in favor of gun control and zero in favor of The People.

Snope is the best vehicle forward we have. The Supreme Court can address the issue of what is an arm, slap down the gun bans and magazine bans, all at once. This leaves the sensitive places issue still to be heard.

Long Days

Wrapping my head around different concepts is not difficult. My problem comes in seeing how complex issues are tied together. Sometimes it is documented, sometimes it isn’t.

There are three templating languages that I know and use. Twig, Jinja2, and Django Templating Language. They all have similar syntax, and they all have the same basic concepts.

The gist is that you have a template which has “tags” and “variables”. When you insert a tag, it can render something, it can modify variables, or it can add programming structure. Variables just render the content of the variables as a string.

When we address forms, Django has a sophisticated system. You define a form by asking for a form to be built from a model (a record in a database) or by hand. Each field is identified. Each field is assigned a rendering widget.

In the simplest form, you can render a complete form with: <form method="POST" action="">{{ form }}<button type="submit">Submit</button></form> Which is wonderfully powerful.

The issue comes when you need something extra special. In my case, I needed to set a CSS class on a subwidget. I could not make it work. I read the code, I knew what it was doing, but I just could not access the context I required.

The issue? When a field from a form is rendered, a new context is created which is passed to the widget templates. My templates came before the field was rendered, making it impossible to access context which had not yet been created.

The Fort at No 4

I’m heading up to the Fort at No 4 today. We’ll be there most of the day, interacting with school kids there as classes. This will be my first time doing this. I have no idea how well I will do, or what I will be doing. I might just sit and comb wool.

Rogue Judges

We have now reached the point where administrative judges are issuing injunctions against the Trump administration.

We have a district court in Maryland issuing a standing order that any Habeus filing involving a criminal alien will automaticity find against the state.

Rogue inferior judges now believe that they have the power to supervise the Article II executive branch in all things.

Just tired of this…

More and more people are grumbling about being tired of this shit. People are no longer allowing themselves to be pushed around.

In my opinion, this is because they believe that the state will have their back. It is no longer Daniel Parry doing the right thing and then being forced to go through lawfare. There is a growing feeling that if you stand up for what is right, things will go OK for you.

Question of the Week

There were disturbing noises out back last night. When I went out to investigate, I took the R95 in .357 Magnum. This is more than enough for the small game I normally deal with back there.

As I followed the sounds, it sounded like small game. Then I heard what, I thought, was a wild pig. And I remembered that there had been bear sightings around here.

My question, if you were to see a boar or bear over the sights of a lever action .357 magnum, coming towards you. Do you fire? Do you try to retreat? Do you head back to get something bigger? Is 30-30 big enough? Or would you move up to 45-70?

NPC Talking Points

I am old. I remember how the world came together to punish South Africa for its extreme racist behavior. After years, South Africa turned the page and recognized that blacks were people to be valued.

I watched as South Africa seemed to be a success story. An African country that was pulled from hand to mouth substance living to a thriving country via white colonists. Those colonists built something wonderful.

When they stepped away, the people who came after seemed to value that culture, that level of civilization. When those leaders faded away, the barbaric culture of Africa came roaring back.

South Africa is one of the most racist countries in the world. Their racism is thinly veiled, when it is veiled at all.

“Kill the Boar. Kill the Whites!” is a rallying call.

Imagine what an outcry there would be if the white leaders were to yell, “Kill the N*! Kill the blacks!” ? The media would go ape shit.

The NPCs got their marching orders rapidly this week. Trump invited the president of South Africa to attend a meeting in the White House. He sent a low level white female to meet the South African delegation at the airport. When the cameras were rolling, Trump presented the proof.

Video of crosses representing murdered farmers. Stories and articles of white farmers being murdered. Of husbands forced to watch wives and children being raped.

And the NPCs in unison echoed “Fake”, “False”, “Unfounded”. “Well, actually, those crosses represent blacks and whites.”

“There is no evidence of white genocide in South Africa.”

“Kill the Boar, Kill the Whites!” from South African leaders dancing in joy at the thought of murder.

Murder in The Streets

We now have one attempted murder and one successful murder by the pro-hamas terrorists.

Two members of the Israeli embassy were murdered in Washington, DC this week.

The NPCs are talking about how this wasn’t anti-Semitism because they weren’t actually Jews.

One of the pro-hamas assholes went so far as to return the “rape rag” to the murder after he lost it when arrested.

Nerd Babble, JavaScript

One of the most difficult things for me to do is to ask for help. I will get it done, by myself. In programming, this is especially true.

40 years ago, when I started down this path, everything you needed to know to program an Apple II was in a red 8.5×11 book, about a half-inch thick. I was able to read the complete operating system manual for the ODU mainframe over the course of a week. The slow part being the fact that the manual set was about 10 inches thick.

When I got to University, I read the manuals for the mainframe. All of them. About 12 inches of 8.5×11.

I read the Unix manuals, all of them, online over the course of a month. The X manuals. The MacBooks. It was just what I did.

Today, every tool or framework I want to use has page after page of documentation, or none at all. I read code when the manuals don’t exist or are lacking.

JavaScript has advanced to the point where it is useful in its pure form. This means that THE library, jQuery is no longer needed. Yes, it has a more concise syntax, but it really isn’t needed.

For the website I’m building in Django, I chose to stick to pure JavaScript for the management side. This gives me the longest runway until things are no longer supported.

Which leads me to cropperjs. The manual says this will be easy. Yeah, not so much.

One of the most important things this tool must do is give use the results of cropping an image. That means there should be a way of getting the current cropping rectangle simply.

Nope, it doesn’t exist. Get the canvas where it is painting. Get the working image that we are working with. Find the bounding rectangles of the two elements. The image rectangle (x, y) – the canvas rectangle (x, y) is the offset. The first and third entries in the transformation array are the x and y scaling factors.

If you reuse the cropper, it may or may not properly position the image within the canvas.

There isn’t an event telling you that the cropping system is stable, to allow you to make changes.

In short, I’ve spent 20+ hours getting this to a workable point. And it is not up to my standards — yet.

Asking for Help

One of the frameworks I use is “Bootstrap 5.2” If I recall correctly, it was originally developed by Twitter, and then released to the world. It is a powerful formatting framework that helps you position and color your website.

I wanted an elementary thing, two text input boxes, side by side, and small. I fought that battle for 4 hours before asking one of my students for help. He works with Bootstrap every day and is a front end programmer.

I typed my request into our chat on Saturday. He gets the message on Sunday, down in Brazil. He tells me it was simple and took him less than 5 minutes to figure out what I was doing wrong, correct it, and give me more options.

NFA Is Under Attack

I’m not happy with the weak spined representatives in Congress. As far as I can tell, almost none of the savings that D.O.G.E. identified are being terminated by law.

But something good might come out of this.

The NFA is a tax. All the regulations regarding NFA items are justified as taxes. This makes the NFA difficult to attack via the courts.

The $200 tax stamp was designed to remove guns from the hands of regular people. It never affected the rich. They could pay if they wanted to buy.

But as a tax, that means that Congress can change tax law like any other tax. Change the tax rate on those making more than $1000/year? Yeah, that’s a normal part of congressional duties.

Yet so is deciding not to tax suppressors, short barreled rifles and short barreled shotguns.

As of Thursday night, there was an amendment in the budget to remove suppressors from the NFA. There might be an amendment to remove SBR and SBS.

If this happens, I know that I will be purchasing a can or three and some new uppers.

Question of the Week

What is the most egregious example you’ve seen this week, of the media hiding realities from the sheeple?

SCOTUS Watch: Trump v. CASA, Inc, 24A886

This is a case regarding birthright citizenship. That is not the important part before the Court. What is significant is rogue inferior courts issuing nationwide, or universal injunctions.

The numbers of universal injunctions is difficult to know, at this instant because there could have been another yesterday, or today.

Bush had 6 universal injunctions issued against him, 3 by judges appointed by democrats.

Obama had 12 injunctions issued against him, 7 by judges appointed by republicans.

Trump 1.0 had 64 injunctions issued against him, 59 by judges appointed by democrats.

Biden had 14 injunctions issued against him, all 14 by judges appointed by republicans.

As of May 15, there have been 40 nationwide injunctions issued against Trump. 35 come from the same 5 districts.

This case is about those nationwide injunctions. I’ll need to spend some time reading the transcript, but my takeaway from the first few pages is that Justice Sotomayor is firmly for universal injunctions.

My guess, is that she knows that rogue inferior judges live primarily on the left. She doesn’t need to worry about rulings that go against her agenda in the lower court getting nationwide injunctions. Those come mostly from leftist rogue judges.

Thomas asked the first question. Sotomayor talked over the answer and monopolized the mic to the point that Roberts asked “May I hear the rest of his answer?”

Hard reading.

Airplanes are Bribes?

Something that I have not confirmed, it seems as if the Biden puppet masters were talking to Qatar about getting this plane in 2022.

The amount of noise in the signal is pretty bad on this one. My best filters suggest that the plane is being given to the US military. Both narratives seem to agree on this.

One side says that the plane will be taken down to its bones and rebuilt to spec. The other side says we can’t trust Qatar and that they are giving a bribe to Trump in the form of this plane, which they will then blow up while Trump is aboard. The same group says that it is too expensive to accept because it will be stripped to the bones and rebuilt, so we should pay more, wait for the delivery from Boeing.

At which point the military will strip it down to the bones and …

One side says that the plane will stay in service. When Trump steps down, the plane will stay as part of the fleet transporting our next president. The other side says that the plane will go to the Trump library, making this a bribe to Trump.

You can guess which side I’m leaning towards.

Maryland Man Upgraded to Salvadorian Man

This case is over in the court of public opinion. We’ve got the left claiming Trump is so dumb that he thought the characters M, S,1, and 3 were tattooed on his hand.

This has led our smartest, elitist, left representatives to claim “The image was doctored! It doesn’t say MS-13”

Then argue that the actual tattoos don’t indicate MS-13 because they found an expert who says it doesn’t.

TdA is About to Go Flying

It looks like the case of J.G.G. is about done with. The left is still trying to bury Trump with “contempt of court.” The plaintiffs (bad guys) wanted the terrorists to get 30 days to seek representation and to have a chance in court. The case has been enjoined for that period of time. This means the case is moot and the government should be able to ship them out.

I have read part of a court finding that says that Trump is allowed to continue deporting terrorists.

Typescript is Winning

As I learn more of the syntax and tricks, this is getting easier and easier. I finished most of the text editing module yesterday. This makes it possible to edit live blocks on the page.

I still miss Makefiles.

Snope

Has been listed again. It is in conference today. I do not expect to hear anything about it.

Ocean State Tactical

It seems I was mistaken, this case is still in an interlocutory state. The fact that it hasn’t been denied cert is very surprising to me.

Question of the week

What current behavior was not tolerated in your youth?

Has your tolerance of that behavior grown stronger or less over the last few years?

Are you suffering from behavior fatigue?

Once You See It …

Why Is It Slow?

We use multiple different server infrastructures. The paying clients run on cloud infrastructure, development and my pet projects run on internal infrastructure.

The internal infrastructure consists of a 2GB link to the outside. This connects to a dedicated PfSense box.

PfSense provides firewall, VPN, and load balancing. The box itself might need a bit more memory, but nothing horrible is happening with it.

PfSense uses HAProxy for load balancing. It does SSL offload to allow easy certificate maintenance as seen from the outside.

For web connections, it looks for one of two nginx process running on one of the servers.

Those nginx services run inside a container and connect to a dedicated shared network. They forward traffic to the correct container.

That container is running WordPress. It is configured on the correct network and connects to a MariaDB server on the external network.

That database is running on NVMe and has zero performance issues when tested.

The base code is stored in the docker container, the plugins, and media are stored in a mounted volume.

So, you request a page from The Vine of Liberty. That hits the firewall, which forwards it to a web server (nginx). The web server forwards the request to an Apache web server running in a container with WordPress installed. PHP within WordPress is configured to connect to the database for long term storage.

Media that is needed is loaded by Apache from the mounted volume of a Ceph distributed file system.

PHP that is on the mounted volume is loaded and cached.

This is running much too slow. I’ve tested so many parts of this, and I can not discover what the bottleneck is.

JavaScript Sucks

Over the years, I’ve gotten better and better at JavaScript. This week and last, I transitioned to TypeScript.

This is driving me bonkers. I know how to write a module. I know how to load a module and have it do something. I can see how other packages have exposed global items. What the heck do I need to do to make this work!!!!

Just another learning curve. Sometimes I get tired.

jQuery is so yesterday

For the new site I’m working on, I’ve decided that I will only support modern browsers on the internal side. This means I’m writing everything in pure JavaScript/TypeScript. It is working, but I still use jQuery syntax when I should be using JavaScript syntax.

And I miss my Makefiles.

Snope and Ocean State Tactical

Were both relisted yesterday. This makes 13 times they have been distributed for conference.

Mark Smith says this is good. Points out that the Dobbs case was relisted 12 times before cert was granted. This lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

I’m tired of waiting for the Court to do the right thing.

They’re Suing John Roberts!

Yeah, the same way we sued Bruen, and they are suing Donald J. Trump.

They are suing these people in their official capacity.

In other words, they are suing the head of an entity. Roberts is being sued for some entity he heads, other than SCOTUS.

What can you do with a .357 magnum?

Turns out that with that old lever gun, I can vaporize a skull. My bone person is upset with me. I’ve learned to take headshots at most smaller animals to protect the pelt and meat. It was a short range shot, less than 30 yards.

It was a Hornady bullet with the plastic tip. I’m too lazy to go dig up my reloading log.

Question of the Week

When did you first suspect that the News might be lying to you?

When did you first find proof that the News was lying to you, in mass?