BLOG

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?

Tariffs

I work with people that are dealing with tariffs. I needed to update a custom web application which handles purchase orders, inventory control, warehousing, sales orders and a bunch of other things.

The owner explained to me how tariffs were going to affect them. I gave some of that in the Thursday’s post.

What does it come down to?

American goods are becoming competitive in other countries. As more than one person has pointed out, there are no American-made cars on the road in Japan. The cost of the tariffs into Japan are high enough to alter consumer choices.

As other countries lower their tariffs, they are lowering the prices of American-made goods, this in turn increases demand for American-made goods.

The price you pay for goods is based on what the market will bear, not on the cost of production. Every leftist will tell you that when they talk about pharmaceuticals. “It only cost them $15 to make this, and they are charging over $1000!!!!”

When they are talking about tariffs, they are talking about tariffs on the $15, not on the $1000.

Pricing Goods and Services

The boss calls in his best salesman and yells at him costing the company money. He is selling widgets for less than it costs to make them. How the heck does he expect the company to make any money!

The salesman beams, leans in and says softly, “I’ll make it up in volume.”

In a different situation, I once listened to the CEO of Cray Research give a speech. He was telling a humorous story about how he was out selling a super computer to Apple that was designed on Apple computers.

He and Cook got a chuckle out of it. They were then discussing their income streams. Cook mentioned a number and our CEO was happy to respond with “That’s just about what we made last year.”

Cook looks him in the eye, “I’m talking about per quarter.”

Cray sold million dollar computers, Apple sold thousand dollar computers. They sold so many more that they were making more than Cray.

Every businessman attempts to set their prices to get as much as the market and their conscience can bear.

That elementary equation is Price*volume. My profit on a sale is price-cost. If my profit is $1000 per unit and I sell 10 units, I make $10,000. If my profit per unit is $100 per unit and I sell 1000, I make $100,000.

The price you see is always profit + cost. In most resale stops, the profit is multiples of cost.

It costs $0.50 to make a glass of lemonade. You don’t sell it for $0.75, you sell it for $5.00. If your costs double, to $1.00 per glass, you can still keep your price at $5.00 and advertise your sacrifice selling more.

So here is the dirty secret, spelled out, again. If I am assembling a computer with parts bought in China, my price will be multiples of what I paid for those parts, and the tariffs only apply to my cost of getting the parts.

Typescript vs. JavaScript

The power of a scripted language is that you can see the results of your changes instantly. In 1976, I was writing code on an PolySci 8080 computer. I think I got that name right.

The language was BASIC. As I typed each line, the computer told me if the syntax was correct. Instant feedback.

I moved to assembly language. That was done in an instant assembler on the Apple II. Again, instant feedback on syntax errors.

As I moved forward, I learned different languages, PASCAL, FORTRAN IV, FORTRAN V, COBOL, Compass, C and some other assembly languages.

These separated the process of creating a working executable into: Edit, Compile, and Link. You could then execute (run) the resulting “binary”.

Compile times for even small programs took a noticeable time. I wasn’t aware of how long it took until I wrote my first test program on the Cray X/MP.

Same edit process. Then I ran the compile and link process.

The time it took was so short that I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

The power of most of the languages above, outside the Assembly languages, was strong typing and good structures.

It was worth it to have slower test cycle times to have those features.

Then came some more modern languages, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, and others. These do not have strict typing. JavaScript being one of the worst.

Consider the following, what is 10 + 100? The answer is logically 110. What is 10 + “100”? Logical, 110 is the answer. Except that in JavaScript the answer is “10100”.

What we want or expect is for the language to convert the string “100” to the value integer value 100. Then we are adding the integer 10 to the integer 100, resulting in 110. But JavaScript says that adding the integer 10 to the string 100 requires converting integer 10 to the string “10” then concatenating “10” with “100” resulting in “10100”.

TypeScript is simply adding strong typing to JavaScript. Then a TypeScript transpiler/compiler writes the code out as pure JavaScript. The original C++ did a similar thing. The C++ “compiler” translated C++ to pure C. Then it used the C compiler to create assembly code which was linked to create an executable.

The process is going relatively smoothly. Unfortunately, JavaScript is not my favorite language, see “no typing and weird implicit type conversions” above.

This means that I’m having to learn a new workflow. I’m getting there.

Question of The Week

What is the most outrageous lie you’ve heard from a leftist political leader, this week?

A.A.R.P. with SCOTUS

This is just sitting there, waiting for the Justices to give an opinion. This is a motion for terrorists being removed under the Alien Enemies Act to be paused.

The legal argument is that the terrorists haven’t been given enough warning to petition for a hearing. The argument also includes statements that the warnings are only printed in English, so the terrorists don’t know what is being put in front of them.

This is mostly a nothingburger. I suspect the Supreme Court will let the Fifth Circuit do something then will say, yes, what they said.

Trolling Garcia

The amount of world-class trolling going on makes my heart sing. The RNC is offering to pay Democrats to fly down to El Salvador to attempt to see Garcia.

There is a question of the Login Act, but all in all, this seems to be a gift that just keeps on giving.

His wife has taken to posting all images of herself with her wife-beating husband, with cute hearts over his tattoos. It doesn’t matter, the images are already out there.

Ally is reporting that even some of her leftist friends are starting to get a clue about this.

It Is Always A Surprise

I ordered a small fiber switch (L2) from somebody in China. It arrived. What I was expecting was a box around 1U high, 6 inches wide, and 4 inches deep along with a 12v wall wart.

What I got is 1U high, 9 inches wide (have rack), and 4 inches deep. It has an internal power supply and uses a standard three prong power cord for 110v AC feed.

I’ve not tested it yet. If it handles jumbo packets, this is a going to be a winner for me.

Oh, it showed up with this cute power cord. Standard female at one end, to plug into the box, and the other end had two round prongs with the third prong removed/missing. I think that what I am seeing is a British style power cord.

Fun with CSS

Every time I start working with CSS, I end up frustrated. Why? Because I’m generally starting with somebody else’s base and I need to modify things.

In this case, I needed to make the logo a little larger. Look it up in the debugger. Add a new class, modify the height, no change. Turns out that somebody was taking advantage of SCCS and so had created a more specific selector of .header .logo img which was firing instead of my .trog-logo

Used the correct selector, things got much better.

Also JavaScript

JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, jQuery-ui, custom.css, main.css, bootstrap.css, oh my.

Everything is magic when significantly complex. Don’t breathe hard, it will break.

Question of the Week

What is the most ludicrous thing you’ve heard somebody on the left say this week?

And on the right?

Trump Before The Supreme Court

Thursday afternoon, the Supreme Court consolidated three cases on appeal from by the administration and scheduled oral arguments for May 15, 2025, at 10 a.m.

24A884, 24A885, and 24A886 are consolidations of 10 different cases, though some of those are duplicates as they came through the circuit courts.

In short, this is the vehicle for the Supreme Court to knock down the raft of inferior courts granting nationwide TROs and preliminary injunctions.

I don’t know if this will extend to final judgment, regardless, this is the case to watch.

Fort at #4 — Projects

I will be up at The Fort tomorrow to take some pictures. I just finished two woodworking mallets. Boy, I’m a poor wood turner. They look ok. I’ve polished one of them and put a sealing coat on it. On the other hand, I can see ever mis-cut and catch as I learn how to do this.

I’m hoping to get at least one of the spinning wheels down and into the cabins. This will give me something to do when I don’t want to be in the wood working shop.

Which means I need to finish the clamps for the clamp to hold my wool combs. I like the way wool spins once it has been combed.

I might even try spinning some carded wool. I’ve not tried that yet.

I have a reed in our big floor loom. We got the loom for cheap, but the reeds were rusted nasty things. I’ve not recovered them yet. I need to make a raddle to allow me to warp the loom. And I have to spin some yarn for the weft.

Computer Frustrations

There are two standard ways that power is supplied to computer type devices. One, they take a 110v AC into a power supply, which then generates 12V and 5V from that for the system. Two, they have a “wall wort” which generates 12V DC, which is then converted as required internally.

More and more of the small devices I’m picking up use the 12V wall wort. The issue? Space for the wall worts.

Wed, I went to plug in a new device. Accidentally unplugged the wrong wall wort, dropped my room switch until I got it plugged back in.

Once I had the correct wall wort removed, I found that I had 2 open outlets but the orientation of the outlets and the orientation of the wall wart don’t fit.

Now I’m dealing with another issue, A new switch that won’t come online.

Snope

The SCOTUS Friday Conference was moved to Thursday. Snope was conferenced again.

I really, really, want to see some forward motion on these Second Amendment Cases.

The reason I don’t update you on Ocean State Tactical is that it has been following Snope and I’m too lazy to have another tab open on https://www.supremecourt.gov

Tea!

I used to drink Coke-a-Cola. I stopped years ago, mostly because of the sugar content. I was converted to coffee.

I do drink tea occasionally. It is not my go-to drink.

In 1773, a bunch of rebels dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Approximately 92,000 pounds.

For much of my younger years, I thought they were talking about Lipton tea bags. I.e., loose tea in individual small filter bags. There was no way that you could get that much tea into just 342 chests. Then I found out about real loose tea. This was better.

Then I found that what was actually transported were bricks of black tea from the orient. These bricks were solid.

For use at The Fort, we ordered a brick of black tea. It is formed the same way it would have been formed in 1773. Our brick is 2.5 pounds.

The cool thing? It has a shelf life of 50 years. This is prepper paradise!

Question of the Week

What do you think will happen when Karmelo Anthony is convicted for murder?

SCOTUS is Busy

Yost v. Brown et al. was just granted a stay.

The plaintiffs (not bad guys) are attempting to get an initiative on the ballet. Before this happens, the AG of Ohio reviews the summaries of the initiative to verify that it is an accurate summation. The AG’s opinion differed from the plaintiffs so they took it to court.

The district court (bad guys) issued a preliminary injunction to force the AG (not bad guy) to “immediately certify” the plaintiffs’ desired summary language.

This is another case of the courts overstepping their Article III limits.

They have been clearing out 100s of cases requesting cert in the 2024-2025 term.

The slapped down the DC District Court for calling preliminary injunctions a TRO to avoid review. And they also slapped down the DC Circuit Court for allowing the District Court to do so.

The did the same for the Massachusetts District Court, which “issued what it styled as a temporary restraining order (TRO)”. This included a Gibb’s slap to the First Circuit court.

They have not granted Cert for Snope or Ocean State Tactical, nor have they denied it. They keep conferencing the cases. I’m not sure what they are waiting for.

They sent Antonyuk back to the District Court to finish their work.

I think everybody has learned that fighting for a win on an interlocutory state just isn’t worth it. The Circuit Courts over these rogue District Courts are just a rogue and just as bent. The Supreme Court isn’t going to deal with an interlocutory Second Amendment case until they have a new Second Amendment opinion out.

Simply put, the rogue inferior courts will just twist the Court’s words to get the outcome they want.

Market Fluctuation

What goes up must come down? Or maybe it is the other way around, what goes down must go up. I absolutely understand the panic day traders and market players must be having. People panic, people sell, the price of shares goes down.

If you are worried about your unrealized gains or losses, you aren’t in the markets for the long run. There are very few investment securities that will lose money in the long run.

You might not make as much, but it is unlikely that you will lose money. Just ride the trough out. Many people did just that for the four years of Biden, riding out a couple of months under Trump should be a no-brainer.

Hypocrisy lives

Elizabeth Warren is trying to get a bill passed to ban congress critters from investing in individual stocks. Of course, this doesn’t touch the astonishing wealth she’s accumulated since taking office.

As Allyson says, “Read the Bill.” I don’t believe anything a Democrat says about a bill. I need to read the darn thing myself.

It is straightforward to write a bill that sounds like it stops insider trading but leaves gaping holes for congress critters to make money from inside knowledge.

One of Chuck Schumer or Adam Schiff got out there and said that Trump was guilty of insider trading. His proof? Trump said that it was a good time to buy while the market is in this panic sell off.

Yet, Adam and Chuck seem to make way more money than a government employee should.

Trump and the Second Amendment

There are things that are happening in the administration that seem to be good. I’m concerned because nothing is set in stone. I’ll start cheering once I hear the Solicitor General get before the Circuit and Supreme Court and back The People.

Question of the Week

Do you think Trump is getting what is best for our country with his tariffs?

Vanderstock

I am unhappy with the decision because it feels like we got played. I’m with Alito on this one.

My issue with the decision is that outside things are considered when determining what a thing is.

I have a Bridgeport mill in my workshop. Does my having that tool mean that, for me, an 80% lower is actually a firearm?

If I have a CNC milling center with a program to turn a block of 6061 into a lower receiver, does that make a piece of 6061 a firearm?

This takes us back to the days when having one of the 6 forbidden M-16 parts while owning an AR-15 showed constructive intent, and that AR-15 was really an NFA controlled machine gun.

Signal

The oops of that chat session escaping into the wild has been shoved down my throat. I’m tired of hearing about it.

My opinion here, worth exactly what you paid for it, there is a security issue, and it wasn’t using Signal.

Every communications method used by the government has a classification placed on it. It could be only good for unclassified materials, or it could be good for TS and above. It doesn’t matter. It has a label and the people who are using it should know what the levels are.

Consider my situation, I’m just a computer geek. Any traffic that travels over one of the subnets is absolutely insecure. It is on a Wi-Fi. Any traffic that travels over the air waves can be intercepted.

This is why that subnet is labeled DMZ. to remind me that it is insecure.

There is another set of subnets that are fiber connected with no outside connections. That isn’t part of the DMZ, but it is still not secure.

I have another virtual network. This virtual network uses encrypted tunnels between the different nodes. Any traffic that enters the virtual network is securely encrypted until it exits the virtual network.

This is used for transfer of data blocks for the Ceph file system.

Any traffic that should be secured is secured on an end to end basis. I use SSH for node to node connections. I use SSL for other types of connects.

You can’t even connect to this website without using SSL.

In the case of the Signal chat, that application is labeled to handle a certain level of classification. From what I’ve seen, the traffic that was transmitted over the Signal chat did not exceed the levels authorized for that application.

What we have is an operational failure. Somebody without the proper clearances and with no need to know was added to the chat.

My opinion is that it was done maliciously by somebody.

This is functionally equivalent of using SSH to connect to a remote node but having the password to log into your computer, “password123”.

It doesn’t matter how good the communications channel is, if you are going to give away access to the channel through poor operational security.

Tariffs

I have a client that has to deal with the new tariffs being imposed by the United States. They aren’t unhappy, they just need to deal with in.

What I found was that they just built the cost of tariffs into their prices and never worried about it.

Now that I’ve written a new module for them, they will be using that module to handle tariffs to all the countries they ship to.

Prices will go up. I’m hoping that some of these foreign countries decide to do “the right thing” and the tariffs are removed.

Question of the Week

If somebody were to come to you looking to buy firearms for a SHTF situation, what would you recommend and why?

For me it would be:

1. 30-30 Lever Action with scope
2. Sig P365
3. AR-15 with red dot
4. Bolt action .22LR, with scope
5. 7.62×51 bolt action, with scope

The 30-30 lever action doesn’t scream tactical, can be used for taking game as well as self-defense. With the side gate, it can be reloaded on the move. Dual purpose and non-threatening.

You can substitute whatever pistol you like. Be it a Glock or a 1911. I like the compact nature of the P365.

For personal security, an AR-15 with red dot seems to be a suitable option. Light weight, easy to acquire your targets, reasonable stopping power. It can be used on some small game.

There will be times when you need to take small game, a .22LR will do a good job on squirrels, rabbits, and other small stuff.

Finally, a rifle to reach out and touch game and two-legged varmint at distance.

My Luck be with you

In an amazingly lucky series of events, having nothing to do with skill or will power, Kash Patel is reporting that the FBI has captured 3 of the FBI’s top ten since January 20th.

There is no way that this had anything to do with policy changes, it must have been luck that allowed the FBI to accomplish this.

Chinese Made, Doesn’t Matter If It Isn’t Crap

I’ve talked about my fight with hardware. Currently, I have the pieces of a NAS enclosure on the healing bench, ready for the motherboard to be returned to Amazon.

Why? Because it is the wrong motherboard!

As I’ve said, the standard for Mini-ITX boards is 17cmx17cm. There are many motherboards that are advertised a Mini-ITX which are 17×19. Not a big deal, unless it means that it doesn’t fit in the case.

After I figured this out last time, I made sure I ordered a motherboard that was 17×17, 4 SATA ports, PCIex16. That’s not what arrived today, after waiting for a week+.

What arrived today was another 17×19 board. It is also short by one SATA port. I’m unclear as to what motherboard it is, but it is going back.

Amazon will give me a refund, but I’m back to waiting for a motherboard, again. I’ll get there.

Microarchitecture

The first computer I worked on was an 8080. This was an 8bit CPU. The second was the 6502, another 8bit CPU.

Over time, the CPUs became more powerful. The computer I type this on is more powerful than the Cray X/MP I babysat. It has more memory, more cores, more threads. It has more network capacity. It is also a 64bit machine.

The problem that I’ve run into is that an X86-64 architecture CPU doesn’t fully describe what the CPU is capable of.

When I moved from the i386 to the X86-64, it was simple. Unfortunately, Intel and AMD have been adding instructions to their CPUs that extend them past the base X86-64 definition.

To work around this, operating systems and libraries have become more complex as they attempt to determine what features are available and how best to use them.

Coding for the base X86-64 works on all machines, but it is handicapping the newer CPUs.

Thus, several groups came together and created a new standard called Microarchitecture. In this system, the CPU is at the X86-64 X86-64-v1, …-v2, …-V3, or …-V4 level.

RedHat stopped support of X86-64-v1 several years ago. They are dropping support for X86-64-v2 with REL 10.

I’m replacing machines that don’t meet the minimums, and having to try three different motherboards is upsetting me.

SCOTUS Watch

Snope and Ocean State Tactical are back for conference today. The earliest we hear the Court’s decision on Writ of Certiorari will be Monday.

I do not expect to hear anything except, maybe, that they are re distributed for the conference on the 28th

If they are heard on the 28th, they will be heard in the same conference as Antonyuk. This could lead to all three cases being heard at the same time.

This would mean that the Supreme Court would be addressing magazine bans, semi-auto bans, and sensitive places bans in the same opinion.

Given how the Second Circuit snubbed their noses at the Supreme Court, it would not surprise me if the Court took it up again.

To refresh your memory, this case has been to the Supreme Court three times. Once, cert was denied. Once cert was granted, the Second Circuit court’s opinion was vacated, and the case was remanded to the Second Circuit to do it right, in light of Rahimi.

This Week’s Question

What is your current opinion of AG Pam Bondi? How is it different from when she was nominated for AG?