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The DNC held their convention this week. The level of hypocrisy exceeds even my expectation.

The left attacked Trump’s kids, Bush’s kids, Palin’s kids. It was always “OK”. Some idiots on the right pointed at Walz’s kid, and the left is having a meltdown over how evil Republicans are.

I don’t remember walls around the RNC. They have walls around the DNC and hotels where attendees are staying. Besides the business owners that boarded up their stores for the week because of “mostly peaceful riots”, there are businesses that are inside the DMZ where people can’t go without IDs. They are losing money.

The lies are never ending. Policies are still unstated. And Kamala promises to fix all the issues on day 1. Issues that she and the Muppet that is residing in the White House haven’t fixed in the last 3.5 years.

I’ve started to dig through some of the cases that have been going on. It has been hard as I’ve been in “learning mode” for the last two months, interrupted by trips home to see my father.

Dad is back in intensive care. My brother doesn’t think he will make it to Christmas. That will be hard.

Thank you to everybody who is still here. It is a bit disheartening to see how many people no longer visit regularly.

So again, thank you.

We are currently looking for somebody to social engagement on X. The auto post doesn’t work, and the share doesn’t seem to put the image or anything else interesting.

I think there are maybe 4 followers of @vineofliberty on X at this point.

If you are interested, please reach out to us at AWA@vineofliberty.com

If you were one of the regulars and are just stopping by, please leave a comment as to what caused you to leave. I know we aren’t Miguel nor J.Kb.

Have a great weekend!

Welcome to the weekend!

We’ve made it through another week.

I think the biggest thing I’ve heard to-date is simply this: We need to focus on the candidates for president, not their VPs.

JD Vance is a better candidate than Walz, by far. No matter how much of a scumbag Walz might be, we need to focus on policy.

Kamala has not given an interview in 27 days? She has failed as VP, we need the people to know that she will fail as president.

There have been a couple of wins for the 2nd over the last week. Things are starting to break free. I think that one of the most significant changes in the circuit courts has been the dissenting judges being willing to stand up and call out the rogue judges for stomping on The People.

I’m working on decommissioning my Kubernetes cluster. I’ve already torn down the local “test” version. The cost is too high for the benefits.

The number of “supporting” containers is ridiculous. Each container takes a bit of memory. These containers suck the memory from the host nodes, causing instability.

As an example, there are three containers that run constantly to handle SSL certificates. They are needed once every 90 days per certificate and once when a new certificate is needed. That’s a bit of resources for something that isn’t really needed constantly. There are 23 running as k8s command and control.

I’m moving back to old school stuff.

The comments are open, let us know your thoughts.

Olympic “trans” controversy where we lost. The boxer in question isn’t trans. She might be cheating. But we lost because the facts are not in our favor.

We had a great opinion from an east coast federal judge. The gist? “I hate Bruen, I’ve worked hard to find something that would allow me to find for the state. I couldn’t. AR-15s in particular can’t be banned. This doesn’t apply to other ‘assault weapons’ nor does it apply to magazine bans.”

Rahimi is being used by the state as an “everything goes” but the courts aren’t really buying it unless they were already in the anti-gun camp.

Thanks again for my grammar checkers. I don’t take offense and I will continue to attempt to do better.

This has been a week of Rants.

There are things happening on the legal front. I need to go read those cases and digest them.

Ally has been doing a fantastic job getting good articles out, with good engagement. Thank you, all.

For those giving me feedback on grammar, thank you. It is very helpful. I do have some tools that help, but they are not perfect.

I hope you all have a great weekend.

Another week has gone by. The world is still here.

In an astonishing turn of events, the attempted assassination of Trump is no longer in the news. Instead, all the talk is about the Democrat’s selected, presidential nominee. Amazing.

X is all a tweet over how Joe’s appearance keeps changing. The one that made me go, “Hmmmm” was the one where the camera angles appear to show that Joe grew 3 to 5 inches while recovering from Covid.

I’ve been busy with a few different tasks, limiting the amount of time I have for research. I do have a couple of “personal” articles in progress, as well as two case articles.

Ally has stepped up to the plate and is putting out articles on the regular.

The store is coming, not this month, but soon enough.

It will offer items I manufacture or make, virtual products (to support the site), and Ally’s signed books.

We will be providing links to the unsigned books on Amazon, there are some contractual things in play.

For me, the biggest question of this week was, “Is Joe still alive?”

The comments are open, do you have a question for us? Do you have an idea for an article? Where do you stand on the “WTF is going on in the Dem party?”

Have a great weekend!

The big news of the week is, of course, that somebody got close enough to Trump to make a real attempt to kill him.

This has opened up a floodgate of horrible responses from people on the rightleft. Listening to Allyson drop people from her friends list on social media has been almost terrifying in its intensity.

Libs Of TikTok has made it a personal mission to expose many of the people who are calling for the assassination of Trump.

I think the most vile thing I’ve seen are “Hopes and Prayers for the shooter and his family.”

Allyson is dealing with a massive shift in politics. I’ve described it as she was standing in the ocean near the shore. Suddenly, the waters just swept out, leaving her standing on shore with all the rest of the right.

It is frightening to her. I’m not so sure of how much she has changed, though she has, but how much the left has just lost it.

I’m trying to figure out this X thing. I want to have each post automaticity go to X but the autopost isn’t working for scheduled posts and when it does post, it is a pretty sad-looking post.

Thank you to every one of you that is here reading our ramblings.

If you would like to contribute to the blog, please send your article to me, and I’ll see if it fits and can be published.

I’m attempting to tone back my case analysis postings to be more readable to humans. Please let me know if the tone is about right for you.

Finally, we will be opening a web store soon. We will be selling Allyson’s books, signed. If anybody is interested in the wooden bowls, I’ll put some of those up for sale as well.

Anybody who is in the NH, MA, VT area that wants to meet at the Fort at #4, reach out to me, and we’ll make it happen.

Have a wonderful weekend.

The weekend is upon us, just a few more hours.

Allyson is off at another event. This time as a vendor, selling her cookbooks, and having fun.

The blue-haired fairie is with her, they are going to have a grand time.

On the nerd side of things, I am in the processing of ditching AWS. Amazon Web Services is a gateway drug. You can get started for just a few cents per month, then you suddenly find yourself shelling out serious coin.

For me, the big cost was backups. When I was at University, I was introduced to “comprehensive backups”. The idea being that we should be able to recover a file for a very, very, very long time.

When most services describe backups, they talk about having “daily” backups. That means you have 24 hours to realize that something is wrong, and recover it.

My backups are different. If you have created a file, and it is on disk when backups run, it will be backed up.

Monday through Saturday go into the daily backups. These backups are preserved for 30+ days.

Sunday backups are different, on the first Sunday of the month, backups go to the monthly backups. These are kept for 2+ years.

Finally, all other Sunday backups go on to the weekly backups. These are kept for 6 months.

So, comprehensive.

All of that takes disk space. I was exceeding 10 terabytes of data on AWS. It was running me excess dollars.

No more. I now have a local ceph cluster with multiple nodes on multiple switches, in multiple power circuits. There are over 70 Terabytes in the cluster. Two hosts have room for another 12 TB each. Two hosts can be upgraded from 12 TB to 48 TB, each. There are spots for four more hosts, each of which can handle 48 TB each.

Backups are now going to my ceph cluster. This is very redundant. I can take an entire host out of the cluster and the cluster still functions. At some point, I will configure the cluster so that I can take out multiple hosts at one time and still be fully functional.

Sorry, this is about feedback, not nerd babble.

The site is still not stable enough. The work I’m doing with ceph locally, will transfer to ceph on remote systems. Tuning ceph on the remote systems and moving the ceph cluster, proper, out of K8S will improve things greatly.

What feedback do you have for us?

I am so pleased that Ally has stepped up her postings. It helps me keep going.

I’ve had way to many 503 errors recently. This is the service is temporarily unavailable error message.

At issue is a resource allocation problem. I’ve added a couple of new sites to the mix, added a mail service, and suddenly, there aren’t enough resources to go around.

There are two fixes, more hardware, or to reduce the load. I have reduced the load somewhat, I’ll be reducing it still more.

The issue isn’t even that the pods are dying. That I can work around with replicas. It is that an entire node is going down. When that happens, it is 5 minutes before the node is fully up and all the pods repopulate.

On the great news, Miguel has found a place to post his thoughts. It is good to see him posting again.

From a personal perspective, I know that it seems like it was just one tweet that killed GunFreeZone.net. It isn’t.

Miguel ran out of go juice for the blog over two years ago. He wanted to kill it then. J.Kb. and I asked if we could take over his baby and he agreed. Over time, the site morphed from Miguel’s baby to something else.

I’ve read remarks about how GFZ was so much worse, once I started posting regularly. That’s fine. It hurts at one level, but I realize that I am not Miguel.

One of the things that I have noticed, is that there isn’t a Vine of Liberty “voice” yet. I’m working towards it.

We are still looking for more guest posts. Poor Elrod was the first victim. His well-written comment was promoted to a front page post. I hope he takes it as the compliment I intended it to be.

Which leaves the two questions of for the day:

1) What one thing is missing from the site which you want back, right now? And no, you can’t just say “Miguel”, I’ve already told him that I want him here.
2) What topic do you think is in line with The Vine of Liberty, which isn’t being covered?

Thank you for being here, it means a lot.

There are days…

I accidentally deleted The Vine of Liberty k8s deployment. I’ll have to make some updates, but I’m working on it.

Sorry,
AWA

If you’re coming here from GFZ, you may already know me. Over there, I used the nickname Hagar, because I was very unsure about posting when AWA first asked me to do so. I’m certainly farther left than most people reading this blog, but I’m definitely not “Left.” I’m not “Right” either, though I do seem to be drifting that way on many issues. I spent a lot of time over on GFZ looking into how the Left perceived things, and tried to explain it to everyone here, to foster communication and learning. I will continue to do that here on Vine of Liberty.

But… I’m also many more things. I’m a re-enactor, specializing in the late 14th century England, and 18th century America. I’m an author, with several books and many articles under my belt. I’m a cook, which is reflected in both my re-enacting and my writing. I’m an interfaith minister. I suspect that, now I’m openly myself, I’ll write more about all of those things here on the blog. If there’s a topic you’d like to know about, let me know and I’ll see if I or someone I know has information. If you want information from the Left, I’m happy to provide, if I can.

I love to start conversations about tough topics, and so I tend to read and respond to replies relatively quickly. I have a long-standing personal rule that I don’t interact with certain types of replies, though. People who do name-calling, fat shaming, or are generally dicks, I simply don’t respond to. If something goes over the top, I might let AWA know about it, but most of the time I just don’t respond to it. You’re welcome to your thoughts, and I’m welcome to ignore them. 😉 As an example, I don’t respond to posts about “Obumma” or “tRump” or other bastardizations of presidents’ names. A long time ago, someone explained to me that people who use such rhetoric are generally doing so because they lack the intellectual oomph to go head to head, and so I don’t embarrass those who do it by engaging them. Just my little bit of community service.

On the other hand, politely challenging my viewpoints will almost always get a response out of me. I love to learn, and so if you’re giving me an honest challenge, I will do my best to rise to it and educate myself. I won’t always agree with others, and certainly don’t expect people to agree with me all the time. But I work very hard to present factual information, with opinions being clearly labeled as such.

I’m a staunch 2A gal. I’m a staunch “separation of religion and state” gal as well. Religious freedom is a big one for me. Because I spent my childhood in Canada, I know the woes of socialist healthcare, and so I definitely am not a fan of Obamacare. I am very much a sincere and devout convert to my new home country, and I love America very much. I’m part of this blog, and was part of GFZ, because I see the harm that the “great divide” between Left and Right has caused and is causing, and I want to do what I can to help heal it. I realize the writings of a random woman on a small blog in the middle of New England really isn’t going to do much for the country as a whole, but it’s what I can do, and so I do.

You will probably see a lot of posts about myself and the Fort at No. 4, because it is an important part of my life. I love teaching history to people, especially in a setting where those who come through can touch and taste and interact with that history like they do at the Fort. I believe making history come alive is the secret to making it interesting for kids, and so I patiently churn butter and make fried bread and teach the school groups about building fires in the beehive oven. I try to make it fun, which automatically makes it interesting.

Another thing you’ll probably see from me, if people are at all interested, is stuff about prepping. I tend to look at prepping as more “how to live comfortably without internet, electricity, running water, and central heating” than “bunkers and MREs.” That’s reflected in my hobbies and my interests. I have many subjects to touch on, from making lye from wood ash (which I’ll actually be doing at the fort, at some point this fall) to washing clothes by hand. Again, if there’s something in particular that interests you, let me know and I’ll either write about it, or find someone who does!

So there you have it. I’m me, Allyson, and I was Hagar. Nice to meet you all. I’m kind of happy to get out from under the shroud.

Allyson,
who is feeling at peace today.