Rant

So this gets complicated.

Article I establishes the legislative branch, Congress. Congress controls the purse. They decide how money is to be spent and what tax rates should be.

Once Congress allocates money, it is the responsibility of the Article II executive to spend the money.

The Article III judiciary is there to make sure that what Article I and Article II branches are within the boundaries of the Constitution.

Congress decided that they were not allocating money for non-essential work for the 2025-2026 budget year, which started October 1st.

This means that only essential money can be spent.

SNAP is not considered an essential expenditure. And before you get upset about this, the military is something in the Constitution, and they are not considered essential.

This means that The Executive, The President, ordered the United States Department of Agriculture to stop SNAP payments.

SNAP benefits are administered at the state level. The state gets money from the federal government, skims a bit off the top, and then sends the money to those with EBT cards. Note, having an EBT card doesn’t mean you are on SNAP. EBT cards are bought and sold all the time. Yes, that’s illegal.

A group went to a district court in Massachusetts. Why? Because it is a progressive hell hole.

They claimed that it was illegal for the president to turn off the SNAP spigot. The judge agreed and issued a temporary order requiring the Article II Executive to take money from a pot of money that Congress had allocated for something else and send it to the SNAP program.

The Article II Executive appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, claiming that the Article III district court did not have the power or authority to order the Article II Executive to break the law and send money that Congress did not allocate to the SNAP program.

The First Circuit looked at the facts; the petitioner is the Trump administration, and they lose.

This ran out the clock. Even if a judicial order is illegal, you must follow it or face contempt charges.

The money was stolen from one program, sent to the USDA, which then sent it to the states. The states then sent it to the EBT cards.

The Article II Executive appealed the case to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket. KJB then issued an administrative stay. Yeah, even a broken clock is right once or twice a day.

The USDA then started the clawback process, demanding the money back.

The states said, “We don’t have it, we sent it out.”

The states should have clawed back all the unspent money on EBT cards.

Regardless, those states now owe the federal government all the money they spent.

The good news is that 8 Democrat Senators have voted for a CR through January.

“Democrats care more about illegal aliens than Americans!” is a proven fact!

Is it?

This is part of having an open mind. And Lord, is it difficult.

I believe this to be true. The left has demonstrated this over and over again.

Unfortunately, it is not as simple to prove to them.

Let’s look at an example: A soldier is in combat; he has a choice. He can kill 9 enemy combatants, and in the process he will also kill a civilian noncombatant. If he does nothing, he will be killed.

For me, the answer is simple: the life of one American is worth more than all enemy combatants, and collateral damage happens. I want the soldier to pull the trigger. It is the right thing to do.

For many, this is not a simple answer. They value the lives of those enemy combatants as humans first and enemies second. To kill even one person that is not a confirmed enemy is abhorrent. It is better that 100 enemy combatants roam freely than one innocent be killed.

We can see this with the noise being made regarding the targeting and elimination of drug trafficking vessels. I don’t need to know who is on the boat when it is destroyed. It doesn’t matter to me if they were forced to be there, if they are getting paid to be there, or if they just wanted to do it. They are moving poison into my country, which will destroy or kill my countrymen.

Stop them.

The left looks at those boats and makes a true statement: “Those boats might be doing something innocent.”

I believe that Harry describes it thusly:

Does this mean that they care more about the scum running drugs into our country? No, it means they are terrified of making a mistake and will bend over backwards to make sure that those people have every opportunity to suggest they are innocent.

A discussion I had a few years ago with leftist Ally was about immigrants. I bluntly said I didn’t want immigrants from third-world shitholes. I prefer educated people from first-world countries, or maybe some from second-world countries. She argued that those ignorant farmers from third-world countries would be bringing needed skills to this country.

I’m sorry, there are only so many farmers that cannot maintain their infrastructure that my country can absorb. And we’ve taken as many as we should.

But the leftist was looking for good in the policy. I was looking at a hundred head of horses. She was telling me there might be a zebra in that herd that we should save.

When you see a hoofprint of a horse, don’t go looking for zebras. It is much more likely to be a horse.

The leftist always seems to be looking for the zebra. They always seem to be looking to give bad ideas one more chance, because this time they will do it right.

There are very few people that are actually evil. Fewer still who believe themselves to be evil.

How do we know that they care more for illegal aliens than Americans? Well, they choose them over us every time.

This is only partially true.

For many on the left, there are no illegal aliens. They are just people. They are just migrants. They are just workers.

This is why we hear about “Masked men kidnapped a local worker.” They are just a worker. Those were just masked men. They could have been evildoers. We don’t know that they are federal agents.

And if they say they are, they could be lying. We need badge numbers, faces, names, and home addresses to vet them.

Those on the left don’t see these people as any different from you and me. In many cases, they see the people they know as being better than you and me. Since these people are no different from them, then anything that happens to those “workers” could happen to them.

This is not to say there aren’t leaders manipulating the sheep. They are out there. They communicate, and they plan. The message goes out via all the different signals and the NPCs all turn as one, newly programmed with the newest phrase.

Bibliography

• Elizabeth Elkind, Democrats Prioritizing Illegal Immigrants Over Citizens ‘Mind-Boggling,’ White House Says, Fox News (Apr. 15, 2025), https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-prioritizing-illegal-immigrants-over-citizens-mind-boggling-white-house-says.
• David Leonhardt, Where Democrats and Voters Differ on Immigration, N.Y. Times (Jan. 17, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/briefing/immigration-policy-democrats.html.
• Priscilla Alvarez, Top Democrat Expresses Confidence in US Intel on Boat Strikes, but Says Briefings Need Improvement, CNN (Nov. 5, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/05/politics/boat-strikes-democrats-briefing-trump-admin.
• Dareh Gregorian, Senators Criticize Trump Administration After Democrats Were Left Out of Drug Boat Strike Briefing, NBC News (Oct. 30, 2025), https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senators-criticize-trump-administration-democrats-left-drug-boat-strik-rcna240943.
• Brad Lander, The Nightmare I Saw at Manhattan’s ICE Detention Facility, MSNBC (Nov. 3, 2025), https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-ice-manhattan-26-federal-plaza-brad-lander-rcna241144.

We talk about “them” living in a bubble. And I do mean “us” and I do mean “them”. Both teams make the accusation.

The question then becomes, how much do other viewpoints leak into your bubble?

From where I sit, I am constantly exposed to what the other side seems to be saying. It is on every mainstream media. Often times in lockstep. I do mean lockstep. There are more than a few examples of talking heads saying the same words.

I don’t know how much of the conservative viewpoint actually reaches into the left’s bubble. I assume there is some, but I do not believe it is very much.

As an example, consider this piece of dialog from Last Man Standing

This was done as comedy. It was funny because it reflected a reality. That the left has a view of the right that is a caricature of reality.

When we deal with the caricature of a person, we are not interacting with a person; we are interacting with a clown like version of that person. It is insulting to the person in question, and it leaves you looking foolish.

EBT and SNAP

This is a good example of the strawmen being built.

“The left cares more for illegal aliens than they do about Americans!”

vs.

“The right doesn’t care that people are going to starve without EBT and SNAP!”

These are strawman arguments. Or maybe better, they are such misrepresentations that it is impossible to have an honest discussion.

If you look at me and tell me that I, personally, don’t care that people will starve, I will point you to the donations our family has made. Anticipating SNAP and EBT being cut off, we reached out to people and communities that we know, offering help.

So why would you say I don’t care? Why would you say that my family doesn’t care?

“Well, that’s different.” isn’t really an answer. The left has used a very broad brush to paint people standing over here as evil, uncaring subhumans.

We arn’t.

I believe, no, I know, that the left doesn’t care more for illegal aliens than Americans. What I believe is that they want to help everybody, regardless of the cost. Because they wish to help everybody, they are willing to do things to accomplish those ends.

How do we get here? We get here because it is easier to fight the bogeyman than to fight real evil. It is easier to fight the uncaring conservative that just wants people to starve than it is to talk to them and find out the reasons.

It is easier to write off a progressive as caring more for non-Americans.

Hand up or Hand out?

Much of this revolves around a perception of how help should be handled and what the costs are.

I would hope that both sides can agree that there are people who are cheating or gaming the system. I hope both sides can agree that there are people who need and deserve help. The question then becomes a balancing act. How much fraud are we willing to endure such that every person in need and who is deserving gets help? How many people will struggle to reduce fraud?

There are thousands of people who deserve and need supplemental food assistance. I want us to take care of those people.

What is the best way to do so? That is a discussion that we should have. My conservative beliefs suggest, strongly, that such help should come as close as possible to those in need. Their local community, be that a church or the community center, as local as possible. Then, maybe, we should be looking at town- or city-sized communities. Then state and rarely federal.

This begs the question, who decides?

Dick was my best friend. He is now in the special prison for kiddy diddlers. His wife worked hard; he didn’t work nearly as hard. There were always reasons he wasn’t getting a job. Because he was a thief and unwilling to work, his family lost their home.

We took them in. We found room in our home for them all. We were feeding them and housing them. His wife was buying food for all of us to contribute to the running of the house. He contributed nothing.

One day my wife had had enough and went off on him. Get his lazy ass off the couch and DO something. Get a job or make her life easier. He chose to leave to live with his mother.

His stepdaughters accused him shortly after, he was arrested, he was prosecuted, and he was found guilty.

We knew he wasn’t producing. He didn’t deserve our assistance. His wife was. His wife and stepdaughters lived with us for another year or more before they found their home.

We know our neighbors. Even those that don’t associate. We know them. I’m always unhappy that my grayman fails because people call me by name and greet me when I am out and about. I don’t think I have done anything to be recongized.

I’m sure if we needed help, we would get it from our local community.

Another example of local. A friend of ours lost their house to a house fire. People started showing up that evening to offer them help.

We handed them a chunk of cash with no expectations. Others in the community did the same. They had a place to stay that night. They had food and clothing the next day. Insurance kicked in a few days later. But the community were the first responders. They community took care of their own.

That expresses how I have observed conservatives respond to issues.

I know that progressives also responded to that fire and helped out.

The difference, which I have personally observed, is that progressives check to see if the person has the correct social score before they assist. Conservatives respond first and worry about politics and social scores later.

I know that the person that we helped out has full-on TDS, or did.

Conclusion

Stop looking at the labels. Stop looking at the strawmen. Instead, look at what people are actually doing.

Open your mind and listen; maybe there is a reason for their opinion. Don’t write off a differing opinion as evil, most people are not evil.

A Right leaning friend of mine posted the above, and it made me think. This was my reply to him:

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

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

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

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

SNAP, and it was gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those taxes go to funding services and wealth transfers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Maine Wire, Mon. October 20, 2025:

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Congratulations to the No Kings protesters! They did it! There are no kings in the US. Trump is still our president.

I had to go out yesterday to sign up at a new range. The new range is nice. But they are a membership club; pay in advance for a year, take an orientation class, provide proof you can pass a background check (a CCW or a recent firearm purchase qualifies), and proof of a safety class.

This was a worrisome trip because I would need to head out near the local college town; I knew the “No Kings” idiots would be out protesting the lack of freedom of speech. And they might have become violent. Best to avoid.

I was able to avoid because the range isn’t near the town. It was good to know that I didn’t have to deal with them.

On the way home, pulling into my local town square, who should be there? Those selfsame people I was trying to avoid.

There were some yelling across the street as there were counterprotesters. I couldn’t tell who were the protesters and who were the counterprotesters. Or maybe it was just poor English on the part of the protesters, making their signs impossible to understand.

The sad part is that this nonsense has made it to my little town. My alert posture just went up a few more notches.

Communism, an idea so good it has to use force to keep its citizens in.

The fact is that Communism requires that all dissenting voices be silenced. They are silenced with violence. People are sent to re-education camps, they are disappeared in the dead of the night, and they are grabbed off the streets, never to be seen again. All with the authority and violence of the government.

The image of people being disappeared is what the anti-American agitators are using when they say that “masked men are kidnapping people off of the street.” It invokes images of communist countries doing just that.

The difference is that these people are not being disappeared. They are being arrested. They get lawyers, or they had lawyers.

When ICE agents detain a criminal illegal alien outside a courtroom, that criminal has had due process.

Are these arrests violent? Only if the person being arrested makes them that way.

Soft Violence

When the Tea Party came into existence, I wanted to fly the Gadsden flag. I did not for fear of how it might affect my wife and children. I flew an American Flag instead and still worried.

People were silenced by fear of reprisals. This was the time of cancel culture from the left.

Voice a double-bad-think opinion, and you were canceled. Voice a bad-think opinion, and you might only be warned.

You were made to feel alone, but for a few lonely voices in the dark. You were told by every talking head that you were guilty of bad-think and would be punished if found out.

This is also the screaming and in your face, just shy of physical assault.

Physical Violence

This is where you start to see the laying on of hands. Physical beatings, shoving, and punching. Actual battery.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous book The Gulag Archipelago, he talks about being stuffed into a cattle car. The violence was being dealt out not only by the guards but also by fellow prisoners.

But they weren’t “fellows” in the classic sense. Most of the prisoners were regular people stuffed in the pipeline leading to the Gulag. These were criminals, and they colluded with the guards for privileges and in exchange kept the rest of the prisoners cowed.

We see that in the criminal attacks in Seattle. Roaming gangs of violent thugs impose their beliefs with truncheons and bats. And if those don’t work, even more.

In Cabaret, the maître d` of the Kit Kat Klub kicked some Brownshirts out of the club. The cowards were not willing to do anything about it at the time. Instead, they waited until the maître d` had left the club, then beat the shit out of him.

They sent the message, “Oppose us, and bad things will happen to you.”

We see this type of thuggish behavior in the cities. We see it when conservatives set up tables to have a conversation and are driven off campus by gangs of feral louts.

And the state defends these thugs. Regular folk who stand up for themselves and others are punished by the state. Look at how the authorities treated prayer groups defending themselves vs. the antifa lice that attacked them. Look at the violence against federal buildings by antifa and then what happened when grandma walked through the Capitol.

This violence is vastly asymmetric, and it is intended to be. At every step of the process, you are told to back down. You are told that you have to restrain yourself. And if you don’t? Ask Kyle what happens.

Murder

Ask Lincoln how Democrats behave when they lose. Ask JFK, killed by a communist. Ask almost any victim of political violence in the last century how Democrats behave.

Unfortunately, you can’t. Most of those people were murdered.

The goal of the left is to create an event to prove the right is the more violent.

The problem is, we are. When we react, we do it with force and with a will to get things done.

Again, ask Kyle. When it was time, he pulled the trigger, and cos-playing degenerates died. That boy showed remarkable trigger discipline.

And this is not new.

In 1977, JoAnne Deborah Byron, AKA Assata Olugbala Shakur, was convicted of murdering a police officer.

This happy little communist worm was a member of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army and other groups. She was a murderer, a terrorist, and a bank robber. After she was convicted, she was sentenced to life + 26-33 years.

Of course the standard whining leftists blamed it all on racism.

She escaped, stayed on the lam for a while before moving to Cuba to live the life of a privileged Communist.

On September 26th, 2025, she became a good communist. Cuba has reported she died of health complications.

One of the best tools I’ve discovered in my many years of computer work is AMANDA.

AMANDA is free software for doing backups. The gist is that you have an Amanda server. On schedule, the server contacts Amanda clients to perform disk backups, sending the data back to the server. The server then sends the data to “tapes”.

What makes the backup so nice is that it is configured for how long you want to keep live backups and then attempts to do it efficiently. My backups are generally for two years.

On the front side, you define DLEs. A DLE is a host and disk or filesystem to dump. There are other parameters, but that is the smallest DLE configuration.

Before the dump starts, the server gets an estimate for each DLE based on using no other backups, a full dump, or a partial dump or multiple partial dumps. Once it obtains this information, it creates a schedule to dump all the DLEs.

The data can be encrypted on the client or the server, is transferred to the server, sometimes to a holding disk, sometimes directly to tape. I can be compressed on the server or the client.

In the end, the data is written to disk.

Every client that I have is backed up using Amanda. It just works.

In the olden days, I configured it to dump to physical tapes. If everything fits on one tape, great. If it didn’t, I could use multi tape systems or even tape libraries. The tape size limitations were removed along the way so that DLEs can be dumped across multiple tapes.

The backups are indexed, making it easy to recover particular files from any particular date.

More importantly, the instructions for recovering bare metal from backup are written to the tape.

Today, tapes are an expensive method of doing backups. It is cheaper to backup to disk, if your disks are capable of surviving multiple failures.

Old-Time Disks

You bought a disk drive; that disk drive was allocated as a file system at a particular mount point, ignoring MS DOS stuff.

Drives got bigger; we didn’t need multiple drives for our file systems. We “partitioned” our drives and treated each partition as an individual disk drive.

The problem becomes that a disk failure is catastrophic. We have data loss.

The fix is to dump each drive/partition to tape. Then if we need to replace a drive, we reload from tape.

Somebody decided it was a good idea to have digitized images. We require bigger drives. Even the biggest drives aren’t big enough.

Solution: instead of breaking one drive into partitions, we will combine multiple physical drives to create a logical drive.

In the alternative, if we have enough space on a single drive, we can use two drives to mirror each other. Then when one fails, the other can handle the entire load until a replacement can be installed.

Still need more space. We decide that a good idea is to use a Hamming code. By grouping 3 or more drives as a single logical drive, we can use one drive as a parity drive. If any drive fails, that parity drive can be used to reconstruct the contents of the missing drive. Things slow down, but it works, until you lose a second drive.

Solution: combine RAID-5 drives with mirroring. Never mind, we are now at the point where for every gigabyte of data you need 2 or more gigabytes of storage.

Enter Ceph and other things like it. Instead of building one large disk farm, we create many smaller disk farms and join them in interesting ways.

Now data is stored across multiple drives, across multiple hosts, across multiple racks, across multiple rooms, across multiple data centers.

With Ceph and enough nodes and locations, you can have complete data centers go offline and not lose a single byte of storage.

Amazon S3

This is some of the cheapest storage going. Pennies on the gigabyte. The costs come when you are making to many access requests. But for a virtual tape drive where you are only writing (free), it is a wonderful option.

You create a bucket and put objects into your bucket. Objects can be treated as (very) large tape blocks. This just works.

At one point I had over a terabyte of backups on my Amazon S3. Which was fine until I started to get real bills for that storage.

Regardless, I had switched myself and my clients to using Amazon S3 for backups.

Everything was going well until the fall of 2018. At that time I migrated a client from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 and the backups stopped working.

It was still working for me, but not for them. We went back to 16.04 and continued.

20.04 gave the same results during testing; I left the backup server at 16.04.

We were slated to try 26.04 in 8 or so months.

Ceph RGW

The Ceph RGW feature set is similar to Amazon S3. It is so similar that you need to change only a few configuration parameters to switch from Amazon S3 to Ceph RGW.

With the help of Grok, I got Ceph RGW working, and the Amazon s3cmd worked perfectly.

Then I configured Amanda to use S3 style virtual tapes to my Ceph RGW storage.

It failed.

For two days I fought this thing, then with Grok’s help I got the configuration parameters working, but things still failed.

HTTP GETs were working, but PUTs were failing. Tcpdump and a bit of debugging, and I discovered that the client, Amanda, was preparing to send a PUT command but was instead sending a GET command, which failed signature tests.

Another two days before I found the problem. libcurl was upgraded going from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04. The new libcurl treated setting the method options differently.

Under old curl, you set the method you wanted to use to “1,” and you got a GET, PUT, POST, or HEAD. If you set GET to 0, PUT to 1, and POST/HEAD to 0, you get a PUT.

The new libcurl seems to override these settings. This means that you can have it do GET or HEAD but no other. GET is the default if everything is zero. Because of the ordering, you might get the HEAD method to work.

This issue has existed since around 2018. It is now 2025, and the fix has been presented to Amanda at least twice; I was the latest to do so. The previous was in 2024. And it still hasn’t been fixed.

I’m running my patched version, at least that seems to be working.