General

Immigration law in the United States is garbage. For many years, we did accept immigrants. Americans to be.

We were the melting pot. You came to the United States, proud of your original country, or hating it, then you work to become an American.

The stories of parents demanding that their children only speak English, to become even more American.

If you want to see a group of very proud people, just watch a group of immigrants become citizens. They work hard for that privilege.

But the Democrats had to ruin it. First, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. This is the act that closed mental institutions.

Yes, there were things wrong with mental health institutions. On the other hand, there are so many mentally ill people living on the streets.

But Teddy did worse. He pushed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law abolished the discriminatory national origins quotas that favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.

In other words, he made a person from a third world shithole in Africa just as eligible as an Engineer from Germany. In addition, it pushed family-based immigrant visas.

The fallout from this could be anticipated, and was. Since immigration law favors family connections over what is best for the United States, family connections became much more valuable.

Before the Immigration and Nationality Act, if a couple wanted to come to the United States, both applied for visas and both worked towards becoming Citizens. Both were vetted and the needs of the United States were taken into account.

Afterward, we saw the concept of anchor immigrants. These were people who were admitted to the United States. Once established, they then sponsored other members of their family for visas.

Having a single immigrant become a citizen often leads to their spouse, their children, their parents all being granted visas. If any of those became citizens, they could sponsor even more relatives.

As more and more people applied to become citizens, the wait times started to go up. But there was a shortcut.

There are two methods of creating a family-connection. By birth, or by marriage.

Under current law, marrying a US Citizen will get you a visa, a green card, and a good start towards citizenship.

It became so common that laws were put in place to stop “sham-marriages”.

A sham-marriage is a marriage that exists only for the purpose of becoming a citizen.

How common are these sham-marriage? Common enough, that I knew of a woman who was taken advantage of by a middle eastern man.

But what are the odds of knowing two such women?

Yeah, it turns out that I know another woman that was taken in by a Muslim, once he had his citizenship, he divorced her, tried to take her kid, failed at taking the kids but was now an American Citizen.

Please leave a comment if you know anybody who was taken advantage of or who participated in a sham-marriage. I’m curious.

What does this have to do with the Second Amendment?

It appears that Mel Gibson is a prohibited person.

If you read §922(g) closely, you will find that prohibited person includes people who have not been convicted of a felony nor any of the things we might consider reason to prohibit.

It gets better, under Rahimi, a person can only be prohibited temporarily and when found to be violent.

This means that many of the cases challenging the §922(g) sections are likely to win on the merits. The Range case for example. A non-violent felon. He pleaded guilty to fraud. He did not claim income from his lawn care side hustle when he was asking for financial help.

He served no time. It has been many years since Range pleaded guilty to this crime.

Oh, it wasn’t a felony when he pleaded guilty.

Over time, crimes that were not “felonies” under §922 have become felonies. I.e., if you can be jailed for the crime for more than a year, then it is a felony under §922, even if you serve no time.

Mel Gibson pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault on his ex-girlfriend. He paid a $500 fine and put it behind him.

Turns out that this misdemeanor assault actually triggers §922(g) and he is now a prohibited person.

He has been attempting to get his Second Amendment protected rights back.

Pam Bondi?

A lawyer at the DoJ was fired. She ran to the New York Times to whimper about how unfair it was. About how she was the victim of the Evil Trump administration. She was doing the right thing.

What was she claiming to be the “right thing”? She claimed that disobeying her superiors was the right thing. In particular, she “couldn’t sign off” on a DoJ’s working group working to get gun rights restored to The People.

Yep. She mentioned that she was told to work to restore Mel Gibson’s rights and refused. She seems to feel that nobody should have gun rights, and that keeping as many people from having the right to keep and bear arms is the “right thing” to do.

Years ago, I was in conversations with a lady, we agreed to meet for coffee and then a movie. When I arrived, she was busy with other people. I waited. When she was finally done with the others, I asked her which movie she was interested in seeing.

“I’ve decided I don’t want to go to a movie with you.”

My reply was, “I’m disappointed with you.”

I walked away. Later, I heard through the grapevine that my sentence had nearly broken her. “I’m disappointed” carries great weight, emotionally.

For years, I’ve felt like I’m in a political battle where the other side gets to decide what rules I fight by and what rules they fight by, but their rules are not the same as mine.

I remember every time somebody called me a murder for wanting to keep my guns. Every time I was blamed because some asshole killed children. I was to blame for the blood spilled in the cities.

If only I would consent to common-sense, reasonable gun laws. It is all about safety.

After Sandhook, I was hearing the same things again. One of the people doing it showed up on my Facebook page.

I proceeded to call her a heartless subhuman for wanting children to die. Why wouldn’t she agree that it was just common sense to have teachers armed to kill assholes that would harm our children? How could she be so selfish?

Every attack that had ever been leveled at me, I threw back at this lady.

Turns out that his lady was a friend’s aunt. They came to me and asked me to tone it down. To back off because I was being hurtful. She was a teacher and had spent her entire career helping children.

I did. I took the highroad, again.

This is where we always went.

When Trump v0.1 came on the scene, the Democrats loved him. They loved him because they knew he was a Democrat at heart. They wanted him to win the primary because he would be easier to beat than Hillary.

Trump v0.9 showed up when he became the Republican candidate for President. The Democrats turned on him like a pack of hyenas.

Trump v1.0 started when he took office the first time.

One of the reasons he won that time was because he was fighting back. He was calling the left out for their lies. But he used belittling terms for them. He fought from the gutter where the left lives.

Ally was so upset about his words that she couldn’t accept his deeds. Almost every interaction regarding Trump was her telling me about something he said that was mean.

She was still part of that leftist mindset. That mindset that looks for a reason to throw a person out of the tent. If a person is in perfect lockstep with the sheep of the left, then they are kicked out.

Every conservative was unacceptable to her because they had done something that disqualified them.

She has come around. But some of those old habits die hard.

We got into a big argument after a Republican representative introduced the mentally ill representative as “The representative of ??? Mr. ???” sorry, I don’t recall the names.

When I was talking at dinner, I mentioned this and mentioned that I got a chuckle over this.

She was very upset with me. “I expect better of you.”

From her perspective, I was being mean to that ill person. It would have been easy for the Republican to introduce the other member as “Representative X”. No Mr. No Mrs. No Miss. Just “Representative”.

Yeah, she could have. But I was pleased to have her punch back.

But everything she observes from her new group gets that same, “I expect better of my team” treatment.

I read Alito’s dissent. It didn’t pull any punches. Thomas joined him in his dissent. When those two are in agreement, then the right thing to do is what they are saying.

Barrette didn’t agree with them. She voted with the majority to deny a stay pending appeal.

Having mulled over it for a few days, I have to agree with Amy. And it is one of the reasons why she is a good choice for the Court.

I do not want somebody who votes the “right” way on my issues. I want somebody who respects the law and follows the constitution, regardless of where it leads.

I am sure that it was hard for her to withstand the powerhouse that is the Thomas-Alito team.

The short of it was that Roberts made the issue moot. This saved everybody time. It kept the status quo for a bit longer. And it put the case on the correct footing for an appeal of the preliminary injunction. In addition, even the denial was a win because it slapped the inferior courts square in the face with their rogue behavior.

I expect more of my justices. Amy gave me more. It hurt, to be sure, but she did the right thing.

When I see Trump 2028 I know it is not going to happen. The push for allowing a president to have three terms happened near the end of the Obama presidency. The left wanted their chosen one to have another term.

I didn’t like the idea then, I don’t like the idea now.

Because I don’t see any real push to get Trump a third term, I know that Trump 2028 is a troll. It is a good troll because the left can’t treat it as a joke. They can’t because they were serious when they were trying to get Obama a third term.

When I see “Trump 2028” posted on the idiot signs held by Democrats during the address to the joint session of Congress, it makes me smile even more.

It trolls on so many levels, and it makes me chuckle. It isn’t being pushed by anybody seriously. J.D. 2028 is what I’m actually hearing. The serious faces of the people holding idiot signs makes it work more. The fact that if it happened, the Democrats would have an even bigger meltdown. There would be accusations all over the place.

And not a single Democrat would admit that they had seriously looked into it for their guy, for Obama.

As a practical matter, getting a third term for a president requires a Constitutional amendment. If somebody were to propose one, I would be on the phone to my Senators and Representative to tell them to vote against the amendment.

Until that happens, this is a great troll. I’m not going to let realities get in the way of good humor.

As many have said, the left can’t meme.

I wrote this morning’s post last night, before Mark Smith had posted.

I felt I got it right.

It feels wonderful to hear him saying the same things I was trying to write about.

I’m tired, I’m stealing this from Miguel.

Sorry Miggy.

My mentor was a federal employee. He, and his team, worked odd hours. I would put in my 8 hours as a contractor and then go to his lab and work with him and his team until midnight or later.

Somewhere along the way, people noticed that his team didn’t have set hours and raised a fuss. They complained to the IG that he and his team were mis-reporting their hours.

This led to the IG sending people to investigate.

Now, this was in a secured area. During normal hours, you could just walk in after you should your badge. After hours, you had to sign in and out.

What this meant was that his team had security logs showing when they left for the night. And with a bit of work, they also had the time when people got to work.

After a thorough investigation, they found that yes, the team was misreporting their hours.

They were underreporting by 10 to 15 hours per week.

For me, it didn’t make any difference. I was on salary to the contractor. The time I spent with my mentor, working on projects for the government, were not billable hours. I didn’t care. I learned astonishing things.

Our system administrators were a pair of very sharp ladies. They arrived on time and they left on time. During their 8 hours, they worked constantly. I never felt like they gave less than 100%. When they needed to work late, they did.

Others I worked with were the same way. They gave their 8 hours and left. We got what we were paying for.

Some scientists over worked too.

Then there were the “slackers”. They arrived at work exactly on time. They went to their desks, were seen, then went to the restroom for their morning dump. This lasted anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes.

Subsequently, they went and did a bit of work before it was time for morning break. After the morning break, they had a pee smoke break. Then lunch, then a bit of work, then home, exactly on time.

Total time working, maybe an hour and a half.

A former friend worked for the state government. He was proud of the fact that he got paid for 8 hours of work per day, but on a normal day, he only spent about 2 hours working. The rest of the time he was doing own time projects/stuff.

Now, sometimes people look like they are cheating, but they aren’t really.

We had a group of scientists that looked lazy. They would get to work and sit around talking, reading the paper, for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or two. Then they would get busy pouring over results for a couple of hours. Then they would have another long gab session.

After that, they would spend a bit of time putzing with their program before telling the program to “run”.

They would twiddle their thumbs doing nothing until quitting time.

They were incredibly productive. They submitted a run before they left for the day. That would run overnight. If they had the parameters right, the run would complete shortly after they got to work. They would then analyze the results and submit the next run.

On Fridays, they would submit jobs that would run all weekend long. That made Mondays look like they were goofing off for an extended time as they waited for the runs to complete.

Their work was so important that it justified a major computer upgrade. The new computer was 4 times as fast. What used to take them 16 hours of run time now only took 4 hours. They should now be able to get two or three runs per day done.

Nope. With the faster computer, they were able to get more detailed results in the same 16-hour run time. They adjusted to the increased speed by answering more of the question more accurately.

All of this is to say, when I see former federal employees screaming about being fired, my heart gives a little thump of happiness. If they are good or needed, they will be rehired. In the meantime, learn to code. I hear COBOL is a good choice.

Never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake., Your enemy is not stupid.

In 2016, I was listening to Ben Shapiro, he had a hate on for Trump. He would often say something to the effect, “The people who think Trump is playing 4D chess are wrong.”

I think I liked his analysis better when he was anti-Trump. He is all in this time around.

I do think that Trump was attempting to play chess during his first term. Unfortunately, people kept taking his pieces and knocking over the board. He lost.

Trump 2.0 is moving fast. He is moving so fast that the left can’t keep up. We can’t keep up. I wake up, go on X and look for what happened in the last 8 hours. And I’m often surprised.

As Second Amendment activists, we know exactly how the game will be played. We know that states that are anti-gun are going to pass regulations to infringe on The People. We know that the rogue lower courts will rule in favor of the state. We know that any relief will be blocked. We know that it will take years to get even one case decided.

Since June 2022, we have not seen a single 2A win. Every win in the lower courts has been halted at the circuit level. Every “temporary restraining order” has been upheld against us. Every preliminary injunction has been stayed, against us.

We have not won a single battle yet.

That doesn’t mean we aren’t winning. It means that this is a war, not a battle. We have to fight. We shall go to the end. We shall fight in the Ninth, we shall fight in the Seventh and Second, we shall fight in the Forth, we shall fight to the Supreme Court. We shall never surrender. With apologies to Winston Churchill.

Trump 2.0 came into office with a bang. The left was working hard to show a “peaceful transfer of power”, so they could club the right with the events of J6th.

But Donald hit the ground running. I believe he signed over 200 Executive Orders on his first day. Held multiple press conferences and attended a ball. I’m tired just thinking about his day.

There were surprises in those Executive Orders. The biggest for me was that everything was done right. When he announced the formation of DOGE, I was skeptical.

I “knew” that it would be challenged and DOGE would be devolved because it didn’t come through Congress.

I was wrong. He out played me as I looked over his shoulder. He didn’t create DOGE out of thin air. He renamed an existing agency. He then told the new agency to go do their job, with Elon leading it.

The promises he made, I expected to take months to accomplish. He was keeping promises within minutes of taking office. And not in ceremonial ways.

He issued an Executive Order giving the US AG 30 days to report what to do about the anti-2A situation within the Federal government. Last month, I would have considered this to be a shot fired over the bow of the enemy. I would have expected results sometime in late 2026.

Today, I expect the report to hit his desk in 20 some days. I expect actions to happen the same day. This is the speed that Trump is moving at.

As I said, in the Second Amendment advocacy space, we know what is going to happen. How do we know? We’ve seen it too many times in the past.

Trump 2.0 is out playing the left in so many areas. Why should I assume he messed up with these court cases?

When the state is fighting The People, they want things to move as slowly as possible.

The case in New York was filed at 9pm on Friday. The TRO was in place by 1AM Saturday morning. The TRO was modified by 5PM Monday.

Having set out the limits, the Trump administration has provided documentation to the court by 4PM on Tuesday to make sure that DOGE people will still have access. They have taken the “loophole” opening and driven a train through it.

They are obeying the letter of the TRO while doing what needs to be done. They are preparing to take this to the next level.

I believe they will attempt to combine multiple cases from rogue courts, headed by political provocateurs. These combined cases will be taken straight to the Supreme Court.

To put a since of speed on this, the case I’m following is averaging 10 new docket entries per day. At this pace, I should be tired of this case in the next 2 days.

The amount of grief I’ve put up with to get this working buggers imagination.

To have a NTP stratum 1 server, you need to have a certain set of capabilities.

First, you need a stratum 0 device. This is an atomic clock or a GPS receiver.

You need a method to communicate with the GPS receiver.

Your clock needs to be network connected.

Each of these pieces must be done correctly with the least amount of jitter possible.

Jitter is how much a signal deviates from its target. If the jitter is zero, then we have a level of accuracy that depends solely on our reference clock.

The little GPS unit is self-contained. If it is supplied 3.3V of power, it will search for satellites and do the calculations to know what time it is and where it is.

The calculations turn out to be for someplace along the cable from the antenna to the GPS unit. Some highly accurate versions of the GPS SoC measure the length of the antenna feed and account for that in the calculations. Regardless, it is the time for a place a little offset from the actual GPS chip.

For me, that is a delay of around 10ns.

The GPS will communicate via a serial protocol. This means that we have a delay from when the message is received and when we can put our timestamp on the message. For me, that is around 140ms.

This can be discovered by tracking the time indicated by the serial GPS and the system/local clock. The local clock is synced to multiple remote NTP servers to get this number.

Unfortunately, there is about a 1ms jitter in this signal.

If I were to use a USB converter. I.e., serial to USB, that jitter goes up. I am seeing a jitter of 4 to 9 ms.

Using the serial directly is a good start.

But there is another signal that can help. That is the Pulse Per Second (PPS). We are using a 1second pulse.

IFF we can capture the time at which the pulse arrives, we can get a very accurate start of the second marker.

This requires that the hardware have a general purpose input/output(GPIO) pin available.

Most motherboards do not have exposed GPIO pins. Worse, some boards have GPIO pins, but there is no documentation on how to access them.

So the server board requires GPIO plus a method of accessing those pins.

There are two ways to discover a change of value, we can pole for it, or we can get an interrupt.

Consider you have your phone alerts silenced so you don’t get a noise every time you receive an email or message.

You have to check your phone for new messages. This is “poling”.

If somebody calls, your phone still rings. You then immediately check to see who it is and perhaps answer the phone.

This is an interrupt.

The default operation of a GPIO pin is poling driven. Even if it is generating an interrupt, that interrupt is only used to record the change of value.

What is needed is a high-performance interrupt handler. When an interrupt happens, the handler records the system clock. A user land process watches, either poling or interrupt, it doesn’t matter, for that value to change.

When it changes, the software knows that the GPS “knew” it was the start of the second when it created the pulse.

The amount of jitter is only as much time as it takes for the system to allocate a CPU and for that CPU to process the interrupt. In other words, really, really fast.

Currently, the jitter on my PPS reference clock is 300ns. Because of the many samples that have been taken, the PPS reference clock is currently running 17ns from the real time. That has been going down over the last few hours. By the time you read this, it is likely to be even less.

The PPS clock is so tight that the other clock sources hide the values, even in logarithmic form

This is an interesting graph, to me, as it indicates how the system clock is slowly being conditioned to keep more accurate time. It software currently says that the drift is -17.796271 ppm off which I think translates to 3.324ms

So how bad was this task?  More painful than I wanted it to be.

I’m fine with “dumb” computers.  I started programming on 6502s.  I’ve been bit slinging for 50 years.  Programming Arduino’s?  No problem.

Building a PC from components, installing any compatible operating system?  I do it a dozen times a week when developing.

The Raspberry Pi is a different animal.  It isn’t sold as a low-level system.  You can use it that way, but that is not how it is intended to be used. It is sold as a System On a Board (SOB) that runs a modern (Linux, Android) operating system.

This is where things get strange. When we are working with modern PCs, they have known hardware.  We boot the computer, run the OS, the OS has drivers to talk to the hardware.  Everything just works.

This is possible because PC’s have a Basic Input Output System (BIOS).  This is a low-level set of routines that are there to allow accessing certain parts of the hardware with a standard Application Protocol Interface (API).

Since every BIOS has the same API, OS vendors can use the BIOS to load enough of their software to continue booting.  The hardware is attached in known ways.  The hardware vendor supplies the drivers for their hardware.  Linux people write their drivers if needed.

So consider that SOB. It has a serial port.  The serial port is controlled by a standard UART.  That UART is programmed in a standard way.  They are all the same.

In order for that UART to work, the software needs to know where the UART is located in memory (or on the I/O bus). In addition, the pins that the UART uses have to be configured for the UART.  Most UART’s use standard pins on the GPIO header. The pins that the UART uses can be used in different modes for different things.

The problem comes from that address being different in every SOB or SOC.  A board could have one, two, or more GPIO driver chips.  It all depends on the designer.

The developers overcome this issue with what is called a “Device Tree”.

The device tree is a parsable description of devices and their locations in memory or on the I/O bus.

The board I purchased doesn’t have a supported modern OS.  The only OS that I could get to boot was released in 2016.  The OS is not really supported anymore.  The board itself was flaky. It would randomly reboot, or just power off.

The “modern” OS that should have worked didn’t even complete the boot.

In discussions with a community support person, we decided that there was hardware that was not being properly initialized in the kernel.  I.e., we had a bad Device Tree.

The replacement Banana Pi doesn’t have a supported modern OS.  It is fully supported by Arabian, which is a supported, modern OS.

When I first booted the system, it just worked.  I was thrilled.  It has continued to work properly.

Then I plugged the GPS in.  I could see it blinking.  This indicates that it has a lock and the PPS signal is being sent.

But I can’t get any input on the serial ports.

It turns out that the default device tree doesn’t activate that UART.  Once I figured that out, I had to find an overlay to the device tree to turn on the UART.

That was a pain, but it happened.

Working serial, no PPS.

With the tools on hand, I could monitor the GPIO pin and see the PPS.  But it wasn’t doing anything.

I loaded the correct kernel modules, still no PPS.

My Google Foo suggested that the device tree entry for PPS was missing.

Yep, there was no PPS overlay.

The Linux kernel documentation describes the Device Tree.  But no real examples, and nothing fully commented.

By comparing multiple sources, I finally was able to create a device tree overlay for PPS. I need to figure out how to return that DTD to the community.  The problem is, I don’t know what the hell I did.  I made it work.  I think I know what was done.  Nonetheless, it was truly a case of looking at different device tree overlays and picking out the parts that seemed to match what I needed to do.

I don’t think I’ve had this much difficulty hooking up a piece of hardware since 1983, when I was attempting to attach a DEC 10 MB hard drive to a computer that wasn’t really a DEC.

The only tasks remaining is to put everything in a case and move it to its long-term home, off the top of my computer.

Consider for a moment that you are a company that contracts with the government. You have a 5-page contract about what you are supposed to deliver, how much you will charge, and when it will be delivered.

The other 200+ pages of the contract are where you promise to do all the “equality” stuff the government mandates.

You don’t even need to be a government contractor, there are many industries where there is a government agency watching over them to make sure they are “equitable” in their hiring.

So we have two positions open, one is for a Widget Designer, and one is for a Machine Operator.

The requirements for the Widget Designer are that they have a 4-year degree, 3 years in the Widget Industry, and have two successful widget designs.

The requirements for the Machine Operator are the ability to lift 50 pounds, to be able to stand for 8 hours, to be able to read English, and to be able to learn to operate the machine. Training will be provided by the company. The first 6 months are probationary.

20 people apply for the Machine Operator position. The top 5 are asked to return for a second interview. After the second interview, two are offered employment.

These 2 are the top 10% of the applicants. They both look good for the position, both have the potential to move up.

And they are both people of color and met the diversity requirements put in place by the government. Everybody is happy. These are both merit-based hires.

The Widget Designer position is a different animal. There are four applicants, not 20. Of the four, one does not meet the requirements and does not move forward.

The other three are interviewed and two are asked to return for a second interview with the lead Widget Designer.

After the second interview, there is a management meeting. The lead Widget Designer comes in to give his opinion.

Candidate A is outstanding! They know this stuff inside and out. It turns out that they were part of the design team for the XYZ Widget Company.

Candidate B is ok. They are competent, they will work out. We might have to do a bit of hand holding in the beginning, but not a horrible choice.

The lead leaves and management gets down to work.

Both candidates meet the requirements.

But, one of them is a black woman in a wheelchair that is non-binary. The other is a normal, every day, guy.

Who gets picked?

If there is any DEI involved, the woman gets picked. If not, then candidate A gets picked.

Did the company lower their standards if they picked the woman? No. They did not. Both candidates passed the requirements stage.

Did they pick the best candidate for the job, based on merits? Only if the woman is candidate A.

And this is how you end up with a lower quality of people without ever lowering your standards.

If candidate A is not picked, he will go find something else to do. He might even change careers. The world is his oyster because he is a capable person.

In a couple of years, when the company is looking for another Widget Designer because they hired based on “equity” standards and not merit standards, he, and many like him, aren’t available. They have moved on.

Because there is an education requirement as well as an experience requirement, there is a tail from the time the “equity” hires start until there are new, qualified people.

If a person in school learns that they will not be hired, because of the color of their skin, they will switch majors. That means from the time that they say “We want to hire” it is four plus years before we have new candidates, with no experence.

So the Mexican cartels have decided that they want to play games and win big prizes.

They might actually find out. They have already started taking pot shots at federal agents on the north side of the river.

I believe that we might just have that moment when Mexico remembers that they lost all the wars with the United States.

A bit further south, Rubio visited with the president of Panama. They contract with the Chinese company has been canceled, and it looks like the canal will go back to treating US ships with due respect.

The Governor of Canada is having a hissy fit. Seems that he doesn’t want to close the border to drug trafficking and unvetted terrorists crossing in to the rest of the US.

Instead, he has decided to call what he thinks is a bluff. A 25% tariff goes into effect this week.

Doubling down on stupid, Mexico and the great state of Canada have decided to impose tariffs on us.

As the Texas Governor put it, “Texas has a larger economy than Canada, and we are not afraid to use it.”

Have a fantastic week.