Rant

Brown University is in Rhode Island, one of the anti-gun states. There are no guns allowed on campus.

It is a gun free zone within a gun free city within a gun free state. Yet all of those things failed.

To provide a sense of security, the college webpage has a section on security cameras. They list some 800 security cameras and where each is located and their field of view.

Which is precisely the sort of information a bad guy would want to know because it shows not only the areas that are under surveillance but also the blind spots. Which the shooter took advantage of.

Which brings up the experiment done by a news organization several years ago to “prove” that guns don’t save lives. They told the selected “protector” that they were the only person with a gun in the room. That there was going to be a mass shooting event, simulated, and they were to stop the shooter.

Everybody except for the protector was in on the experiment, unbeknownst to the protector. Many of the protectors bragged to their “student” neighbors about being the protector.

Of course, when the bad guy entered the room, the protector never successfully stopped them. The entire experiment was set up for failure.

This was compared to a similar experiment set up in Texas. In the Texas experiment, the protectors were chosen at random; the level of experience the different protectors had varied from none to significant. They used simunation (blue guns that shoot nasty little pellets).

What they found was that the total number of victims was reduced in all cases. That in some situations the attack was stopped shortly after it began. There were no false shootings.

One of the interesting sequences was when the bad guy came into the room with the good guy. The good guy put multiple rounds on target before being “killed”. During the debrief, they asked why he only took body shots after noticing the body armor.

His reply, “I’ve been shot with those things; I wasn’t going to shoot somebody in the face with them.”

The point of this rambling is that guns save lives. This was another example of a gun free zone creating a victim pending zone.

Keep your head on a swivel, things are not getting better.

Way too many years ago, I went to an interfaith seminary, and trained to be an interfaith minister. It’s one accomplishment I’m very proud of, though I also think I learned as much or more by interning with a UCC minister friend for a year. We studied many different faiths, and how they interact. While I, myself, am quite pagan, I do understand different faiths call to different people. I rather like the idea that various gods have “their” people. G-d (the Jewish deity) called the Jews to be his people, and gave them Commandments, instructions, and information… much of which they didn’t pay as much attention to as they should have. A lot of their rituals and celebrations honor the folks who got them out of messes that their religious indiscretions got them into.

Hanukkah is not a big religious festival for the Jews. It was a minor one, until Christmas became so commercialized and messed with the Jewish kids. So now Jewish kids get presents as well as gelt, and some of the more pagan aspects of Christmas have snuck into Hanukkah celebrations. It’s all good. Winter is a time of darkness, and whether you celebrate the Birth of the Sun, the Birth of the Son, or the Miracle of the Lights, it’s all about warding off the darkness (albeit in very different ways).

This Hanukkah is different, though. Way too many of my Jewish friends (and I have a surprising number of them) are afraid this year. They have watched too many of their fellow Jews be slaughtered, and very few criminals being brought to justice. They’ve heard too many people on the Left calling for their extermination, or celebrating those who harm Israel. They’re not celebrating Hanukkah this year. They’re lighting those eight lights over eight nights because it’s a mitzvah, a … “a helping.” They are putting the light back into the world, in whatever way they can. Lighting the Hanukkiah and singing Ma’oz Tzur are acts of peace, but also acts of rebellion against the violence they are seeing.

For those who may not know, the history of Hanukkah, in short:

Hanukkah’s history centers on the 2nd century BCE Maccabean Revolt, where Jewish fighters led by Judah Maccabee reclaimed Jerusalem’s Second Temple from Greek-Syrian oppressors who had desecrated it. After retaking the Temple, they cleansed it and rededicated it, but found only a tiny cruse of oil, which miraculously burned for eight days instead of one. This “miracle of the oil” established the eight-day “Festival of Lights,” celebrating Jewish perseverance, religious freedom, and divine presence. — Grok

My family and I have celebrated Hanukkah every year since I was in seminary. The act of lighting the candles, sitting quietly in the dark, being a family… these have become important to us, even though we’re not Jewish.

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It is my belief that Trump was a reluctant president. In 2016 he ran almost as a joke. His goal seemed more to disrupt the normal Republican party politics than to actually become president.

The Democrats certainly thought he was a joke. They did everything in their power to make him the Republican nominee. The amount of free publicity he received from the mainstream media was astonishing. Everybody loved him. At least among the people who counted.

He was a brass man who said what many of us had been thinking. He called out the press for lying. He stood up to the people handing him gotcha questions. He put forth the image of a powerful leader that could lead our country in the right direction.

He was not the man I wanted for my president. I went to bed knowing the next four years were going to be horrible under the evil, selfish, egotistical control of Hillary Clinton.

I woke to the surprising news that Hillary had lost. I didn’t see it as Trump winning but more as Hillary wasn’t going to be the president.

He then stepped on the rake. TDS struck everybody who hadn’t voted for Trump. The entire “not my president” shit started up. Bush, the evil, was held up as a wonderful example of a “good” president. And the deep state took it upon themselves to thwart the will of the democratically elected president of the United States.

His agenda was stopped in its tracks. But one thing moved forward. And that was the retaking of the courts.

Our courts had become another legislative branch. If the left didn’t control the country via the ballot box, they controlled it via corrupted judges.

Trump’s first legacy was in getting so many originalists onto the courts. Instead of a zero chance of getting an originalist panel in the Ninth Circuit, it became almost 50/50. There was even a chance of getting an originalist en banc panel.

He did the same in every circuit. One place that he succeeded was in the Third Circuit.

There is something amazing happening in our judicial system; we are seeing a circuit courts over blue states turn red. This is huge in the grand scheme of things.

There are so many constitutional questions out there that never get to the Supreme Court. They don’t get there because the lower courts manipulate the stats. They game the system.

The Supreme Court is asked to hear nearly ten thousand cases a term. They hear less than 100. Those are not good odds.

The justices meet once a week, on Friday, to discuss what cases they want to hear. If 4 justices vote to hear a case, it will be placed on the Supreme Court docket.

The justices would like to hear cases that have major implications. They don’t like trivial cases. One of the things that suggests a case will have major implications is if multiple circuit courts have reached different opinions on the question presented.

Trump’s legacy includes creating situations for circuit splits.

At this time we are looking at a circuit split regarding assault weapon bans and large capacity magazine bans. This is only because of Trump. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals is now an originalist majority court. This means that for the first time, originalists have heard cases involving these types of bans.

If the rulings come out for the Constitution and The People we will have a circuit split. Circuit split means the Supreme Court is more likely to hear the case.

Clawing Back Power

There are three branches of government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. This is laid out in our Constitution. For many years it was said that the fourth branch of government was the media. Unfortunately, we’ve learned that the media is just another branch of the Democrat party.

Democrats are the type of people that will go to bat a 100 times and swing and miss 100 times. Then on the 101 they get a piece of the ball and score a run. At that point, they claim that the people have spoken and that there will never ever be a 102-pitch.

This wasn’t working. They would pass bad bills, and the next time a conservative got in office with a congress that backed him, the bad law would be undone. So they worked to “fix” the problem.

They did this by passing laws that restricted what later congresses could do.

The biggest thing they did was they stripped power from the President.

They did this by creating commissions instead of agencies.

The Department of War, the Department of Education, The Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, and so forth are all agencies headed by a single boss. That boss works at the pleasure of the President.

Congress couldn’t tell the President he was unable to fire the heads of these agencies because it is clearly stated in the Constitution that this was part of the Article II executive branch controlled by the President.

Instead, they started setting up commissions and boards. The National Labor Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Reserve Bank. The most recent was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is not an “agency” and is “independent” of the executive branch. It is also independent of the congress because it does not get its funding from congress.

When they set up these entities headed by commissions, Congress set rules for how the commissions were selected, how long they served, and how members could be removed.

This allowed these entities to ignore the orders of the president. He can’t fire them for ignoring the policies of the democratically elected president. So they could just keep on keeping on. This stripped the president of control of parts of the executive branch.

Trump’s legacy is the destruction of these “protected” boards and commissions. The Supreme Court should be finding these restrictions on presidential authority unconstitutional before June 2026. That is a legacy worth bragging about.

Everybody Knows (and was wrong)

The left likes to argue that just because something hasn’t been found unconstitutional in the past, it is constitutional today.

For years we were all taught, and we all learned, that if you were born in the United States, you were a citizen of the United States.

The Constitution doesn’t say that. History shows that everybody knew that the 14th Amendment applied to former slaves. It didn’t apply to foreigners. Until suddenly the left said that it did.

The outcome of the birthright case will change the political landscape for years and years to come.

Conclusion

Trump’s Legacy will be felt for decades, and it is in the fundamental changes he is making to the status quo and administrative state.

For years I’ve been told that the only reason wackadoodle assholes commit mass shootings, ignoring black on black gang violence, is because I refuse to give up my guns.

Only in America, with our horrible love affair with guns do mass shootings take place.

Therefore, it is obvious that this never took place:

In 1969 a local news station in New York aired this public service announcement. It was a full admission that many children were feral and that the people who knew better knew you should have them inside, under control.

It was New York, so they might have a point. A child or minor out after 10pm was likely up to no good or was at risk. The city was much riskier then than now. So asking parents to verify the location of their children wasn’t a big deal.

Unfortunately, this spread around the country; by the mid-70s hundreds, if not thousands, of TV stations were saying the same thing every night.

The facts of the time were that children knew darn well that being in the house was bad juju.

The worst words a child could utter in most households were “I’m bored.” This was an invitation for Mom to find chores for the child to do. Many chores. There were as many chores as there were “I’m bored” utterances.

You were supposed to be outside. The exceptions were when it was too cold or it was too rainy. Other than that, a child should be outside playing, with interruptions for daily chores.

The rule of thumb for those in suburbia was, “You should be home when the streetlights come on.”

I know I lived that way.

Stranger Danger

In general, people believed they lived in safe places. Those neighborhoods might not be safe for others, but they were safe for you and your kids. Every mom was a part of the neighborhood mom group.

If Billy needed discipline, any of the neighborhood moms would dish it out; if it required physical discipline, then that neighborhood mom would deliver Billy to his mother for instant discipline.

The children were safe.

We talk about this within the Ren Fairie circuit. Children of performers, vendors, and staff are always under the watchful eye of fairie moms and dads. Young girls always have a chaperone.

More than one girl, turning 18, has wondered where all the protection went, only to find out that they were only a loud voice away.

This was the way back then.

In 1979, Etan Patz was taken while waiting for a school bus in New York. He was nearly seven years old. His parents had agreed to let him walk to the school bus stop two blocks away on his own. He never made it to school. He never made it home. He was never seen again.

The search was massive. There was no luck in finding him. Etan became the first milk-carton kid. The case expanded to cover more than just the local area.

The police were convinced that a stranger had taken Etan. Parents’s fears skyrocketed. Leading directly to “Stranger Danger”.

“Stranger Danger” became the watchword. It was drummed into kids at schools, at Boy and Girl Scouts, on TV. The FBI and McGruff the Crime Dog all pushing it.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that it started to fade. Research indicated that most child abductions were by family members, not strangers.

The harm had been done, though. Mothers were much less likely to let their children do anything outside alone. Instead, they kept them inside next to the family or acquaintance that was much more likely to kidnap their kid.

The Electronic Babysitter

The first of the electronic babysitters was the radio. A child could listen to the radio for hours, music, and audio plays to keep the mind alive.

Many a child learned to tell time so they could be in front of the radio when the latest episode of their favorite show was aired.

TV followed. Most parents limited the amount of TV time a child got. Most children of my age had limited TV time, my family rule was 1 hour per night and Saturday morning cartoons.

This made TV Guide the most important periodical in the house. You had to know what was showing to plan correctly.

It having been more than a few years, it could have been a certain number of hours per week. With my brother and I each getting the same amount.

Visiting my grandparents was strange. Grandpa would get up and turn on the TV. The TV stayed on all day long, even if nobody was in the living room watching. It was constant noise in the background.

As a kid, it was wonderful to have unlimited TV time.

Unfortunately, for busy mothers, the TV became the babysitter. You could put a kid in front of the “boob tube” and they would be entertained for hours.

The first video games did not have the same level of lock in that today’s games do. Regardless, there were thousands and thousands of kids that got video games, which turned them into even more of a TV junkie.

We had successfully traded free-range children to couch potatoes consuming CRT rays almost constantly.

Free Range Children

What did they call organic food in the 50s and 60s?

Food.

Children were expected to be outside. To be playing. To be making games and skinning knees.

Parents might set physical boundaries, but most boundaries were set by how far you could get on foot or a bike.

Learning to ride a bike was a giant step towards freedom. To go from a mile or so radius from home to 10+ miles was freedom unlimited.

I don’t believe my children went to the movies on their own until they had cars of their own. They never had the thrill of chaining their bikes to the nearly full bike rack that every theater and mall had and choosing their movie.

There were two theaters within bike distance when I was in 8th grade. One was only 2 miles away; the other was almost 7 miles away. It was worth it on a hot summer’s day to pedal to the big theater and then enjoy popcorn, AC, and a newly released movie.

There were baseball games in the cul-de-sacs and football games in the fields. Kids exploring the deep dark woods or going fishing. Building forts, treehouses, and playing hide and seek with friends.

Squirt gun battles and digging holes. Taking the canoe out, paddling upriver for an hour to work on your own VC tunnel system in the side of the bank. Taking a bag with some food and soda and a paperback book. Just living outside.

Those were the feral children of yesteryear. Those were the free range children of 40 years ago.

Today they are all but gone. The fears of the 70s and 80s. The electronic babysitters. The mothers that need their kids to be “engaged” constantly.

What have we taken from our children and grandchildren?

Postscript

When I was searching for the feature image for today’s post, I put in the search “bicycle boy” There was only one picture in the first 100 that didn’t have a helmet on. Most of the images were organized groups, or there was a parent involved.

This poor dude was run through the system, chewed up and finally spat out. He was released to a halfway house yesterday.

What was his huge crime?

He gave the middle finger to the ATF.

There is a gizmo called a Lightning Link. This thing is supposed to function like an autosear in an AR-15. They were never very reliable and were offered more as a proof of concept than anything else. These are not drop-in autosears.

A drop-in autosear functions to carry a regular autosear but without a need for the third hole. They work well when they are a quality build.

The thing about the autosear is that very few of them were registered as machineguns. This was a $5-10 part that required a $200 transfer stamp.

There are likely no registered Lightning Links because they work so poorly that it is unlikely that anybody registered a $1 junk part, if it even had a serial number.

Matt Hoover had a semi-popular YouTube channel. He was making money from his channel. Somebody contacted him from Wisconsin, if memory serves, and together they came up with a thump nose at ATF plan.

To have a better understanding, understand that cryptographic “stuff” is or used to be an “arm” under export control. The same as an M1 tank. Exporting a cryptographic device would land you in jail, for a long time.

When RSA was first published, there was no issue. It was First Amendment protected to publish the RSA algorithm. The same is true with DES, IDEA, BlowFish, and later, AES. These were all protected speech.

What wasn’t protected, was software implementing them. The government ignored this for the most part until Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.

This changed the game, in the mind of the government.

The idea behind PGP was that you would use public key cryptography, in the form of RSA keys, to encrypt a small block of information. That block would contain the actual cryptographic key to decrypt the rest of the message.

This means that people can publish their public key with no fear. You can publish it in a newspaper or any web page. Anybody can then send you a message that could not be decrypted except by the person with the matching private key.

To get PGP out of the country legally, they printed it in an OCR font and just walked through customs with a printed book. The book was fully protected by the First Amendment. Once in a country that had more reasonable cryptographic export laws, development continued.

Matt Hoover and his partner decided to use the same idea. Instead of an “Arm” as defined by export law, they would print a “machine gun” as defined by the NFA.

They contracted to have a credit card sized piece of stainless-steel laser etched with an image of a Lightning Link. Except they were going to play it safe.

When the manufacturer suggested they etch the image deep enough that the pieces could be “popped out”, they refused. This was just an etching.

What came out later is that they didn’t even get the dimensions right. Again, this was intentional. If you were to actually cut the pieces out of that card, they would not create a functional device.

There was no way to make that piece of stainless-steel into a Lightning Link without extensive machining and other information.

In other words, it was no better than an expensive piece of stainless-steel.

Matt and his partner were charged with distributing machine guns; they were found guilty, and both were sentenced to prison.

Matt has cancer and has been given a compassionate release, if I understand the reports correctly.

So two dudes who were exercising their free speech rights, thumping their noses at the ATF, found out that the ATF has no sense of humor and were sentenced to prison for a crime they did not commit.

Oh, what was the proof of them selling machine guns? The ATF lab destroyed multiple autolink cards before they managed to get a modified AR-15 to malfunction. They got a second shot when the hammer followed the bolt down and fired the second round.

This could not be made to happen in any reliable way. In other words, they broke an AR and claimed it was a machine gun.

We use rhetoric to move people. To inspire. To convince people to change. This is a part of the protected free speech codified in the First Amendment.

The courts, throughout the years, have leaned heavily on more speech to counter unpopular speech. Until they didn’t.

Like today, the courts have agendas, not always good agendas, not always in favor of The People. For a while, there were entire classes of speech that were illegal. Sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.

The indirect path was “Criminal Syndicalism”.

In summary, a man called the local news and asked if they wanted to do a report on a Ku Klux Klan meeting. The reporter said yes, brought his cameraman, and they filmed the meeting. During the meeting, the man wore a hood and said lots of Klan-like things, burned a cross, all while open carrying. After the main event, the leader, still wearing his hood, gave a short speech, two paragraphs long. Part of the speech was a statement that they were going to march on Congress on the 4th of July and then split into two groups to march into Augustine, Florida, and Mississippi.

This was aired. Then a second rally was filmed with the same type of speech given, also aired.

The leader was arrested, charged, and then convicted in a court of law. His appeal to the Ohio appeals court was granted, but they affirmed the lower court’s decision. The case then went to the Ohio Supreme Court, where they also affirmed the lower court’s opinion. Finally, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds.

In 1927 the Supreme Court upheld California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act, finding that advocating violent means to effect political and economic change involves such danger to the security of the State that the State may outlaw it. Whitney v. California, 275 U.S. 357 (1927), and Fiske v. Kansas, 274 U.S. 380 (1927), both gave this power to infringe on speech to the State.

Later Supreme Court cases, Dennis v. United States, 351 U.S. 494 (1951), for example, thoroughly discredited the Whitney opinion.

These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. —id. at 447.

In other words, the speech must incite violence or lawless actions imminently.. What imminently means is not clear and is the reason lawyers make big money.

This is the current case law (IANAL). It is what we judge protected speech by. Is the person inciting violence or the breaking of the law?

A statement of “Kill Bill!” when Bill is over there is clearly incitement. It is imminent, and it is a call for violence as well as a call for breaking the law. If Bill isn’t there, this might not be incitement because it is not imminent. In the same way as “Kill the one-horned, one-eyed, purple people eater” isn’t incitement because that entity isn’t real.

I am more than willing to say, “The only good communist is a dead communist.” I am not asking you to kill communists; I’m not even saying that I am willing to kill communists. It is simple rhetoric.

What if I go a step further, though? What if I were to say, “It is OK to kill communists.” This is still just this side of incitement. There is no imminent aspect, and there is no target.

And this is precisely what we have been hearing for years from the left: “It is OK to punch a Nazi. You should punch Nazis. If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, …, And you push back on them.” These are not incitement, as they sit. There is no target in the first two, and in the last, it is not a call for violence. Just simple verbal confrontation.

But these things do not exist in a vacuum. They live within a context.

When that same group assigns a label, they can then attack that label. When one part of a group is calling you a Nazi and the other part is calling for the death or merely the beating of Nazis, it does rise to the level of incitement.

This is the classic two-step incitement pattern that courts, linguists, and political psychologists have studied for decades. Step 1: Dehumanization/Labeling. Step 2: Invocation of the “Accepted Remedy”.

When the left and the media trumpet, over and over again, that Trump is issuing illegal orders, this becomes part of the context. The media pushes the “Bush-appointed Judge halts Trump’s order, finding that he is unlikely to win on the merits.” to the front page. The Supreme Court slapping down that selfsame judge might get a paragraph on page 6, right under the ad for hemorrhoid cream.

This is the context that the six senators have taken advantage of; they created a simple video reminding military personnel that they are bound to the constitution and that they are required to ignore “illegal orders”. They can dishonestly claim that they aren’t calling for the troops to ignore Trump’s orders, but within the context, that is exactly what they have done.

Trump’s statement, on the other hand, isn’t an attack or an incitement. He has accused those six senators of a crime and stated the penalties for that crime. Only if they are found guilty of that crime are they at risk for that most final punishment.

But Trump, being Trump, didn’t cite to the code. He didn’t explicitly state what law the senators broke. This leaves vast amounts of wiggle room. And Trump could be wrong. And he likely got the punishment wrong. Regardless, it doesn’t rise to the level of a threat and is protected speech.

And here is where we start to have issues. I know that Trump is a flawed human. Just as Reagan was a flawed man. They can be heroes of mine without being my gods. I might agree with 99% of what they say or do; that doesn’t mean I will agree with them every time.

The left doesn’t think that way. Their heroes don’t walk with us. Their heroes don’t have feet of clay. Their heroes float above us, giving us the wisdom of the ages. They have their Ministry of Truth, their own Minitrue, to keep their heroes halos shining brightly.

But there is a third part of the equation that we don’t talk about. That is the audience.

When these talking heads, politicians, or party leaders speak, they are speaking to an audience. When some talking head says that “MAGA is falling apart,” they are not talking to you and me; they are talking to their audience. The fact that I hear their words doesn’t change who their audience is.

My parents were part of that leftist audience; they knew Trump 45 was bad. They knew it because they heard it from all the people they heard talking about Trump. I wasn’t a part of that audience. I heard the same words, I heard the same spin, I heard the same lie. I went looking for the truth, and found it wasn’t what I heard from “everybody”.

In the same way Trump talks to his audience. But there is a huge difference when he speaks to us. The media and talking heads all tell us what Trump really meant. They hear the same words and twist the message to meet their needs, not the needs of The People.

There is another, more significant difference. The audience of the left is prone to violence. The audience of the right is not.

The number of people in the left audience willing to do violent acts is huge. There are members of the right audience that want to react violently but not initiate that violence. The FAFO policy. Or as I learned from my parents and as I taught my kids, we don’t start fights; we end them.

Where I see conflicts forming is in my trust of those audiences. I trust the left to do violent things. I trust the right to be prepared and willing to provide FA, but not to initiate that violence. If you don’t have that trust, there are problems.

Unfortunately, that problem is about that crazy dude over there. There are crazies on both sides. If we care about optics, if we care about people, we don’t celebrate violence inflicted on others. This helps contain the smaller number of crazies on the right. The left glorifies their crazies.

Just look at the hero worship over a man who killed a CEO. That is simply evil.

Conclusion

I’m tired, and I believe that many on the right are tired of playing nice because the left will think badly of us. They already think badly of us. It doesn’t matter what we do; we will always be evil to them. For those in the middle that might look at the tired response of “Well F you right back” as being the same, we can’t roll over anymore. The only way forward is to fight back.

It doesn’t matter how many times they tell the same old lie, we still have to say “That is a lie.” It is long past time to stop being the doormat to the left.

Grok has made doing some of my legal research easier. In particular, it has done a better job of finding PDFs of cases than my normal search tools. And faster too.

Today I was looking into some more Second Circuit Court of Appeals games because it reminds me of what happened with Bianchi (this case became known as Snope).

The courts do not like to relitigate decisions. Once they make a decision, they want to keep repeating that decision.

Bianchi was a direct challenge to Kolbe which was decided earlier by the Fourth Circuit using means-ends methods. As Bianchi was making its way through the inferior courts, the courts simply said, “This is just Kolbe revisited. We decided this already. Denied.” It wasn’t until the Fourth Circuit heard the case en banc that a new decision could be made. Though they made the same decision, against The People.

Today we are litigating Antonyuk. One of challenges was against an administrator who denied pistol permits to some plaintiffs. The administrator defendant has asked that the suit against him be dismissed based on a recent Second Circuit court opinion in Kellogg.

Kellogg was a challenge against an administrator who had denied pistol permits to the plaintiffs. The merits panel fell back on an earlier case from 2018, before Bruen, to rule that since the administrator had the title judge, his administrative duty of issuing pistol permits was actually a judicial duty giving rise to absolute immunity from civil suits.

One of the major holdings from Bruen is that subjective assessments are not allowed in granting pistol licenses. While pre-Bruen there might have been a judgment taking place, after Bruen it is entirely objective and just an administrative task.

It is no different than a clerk at the DMV looking to see if the paperwork is filled out correctly, that proper payments have been made, and all other conditions have been met. This means that there is no immunity for those judges.

But the Second Circuit didn’t even bother. They said, “We aren’t allowed to deviate from the past, so administrators are really judges and have absolute immunity.” They even confused this reader by explaining that they can’t overrule en banc opinions, even though Libertarian Party was not heard en banc. A request for a rehearing en banc was requested and denied, and cert was denied from the Supreme Court.

You really need to follow all the citations. There is so much hidden in those citations; you cannot take them at face value.

Currently, I use Grok as my primary AI. I’ve paid for “SuperGrok” which means I’m using Grok 4 and Grok 4.1. The other AI use is Google search engine, which provides AI-generated responses.

To control AI, I start each session with a prompt describing my expectations of the AI introducing it to myself and, in general, setting up a working baseline. One of the important parts of the baseline is how I expect responses.

I also include a section to test how Grok aligns with my instructions.

# Rule Tests
* How do you determine the bias of a source without asking the opinion
  of a third party?
* Show me the citation for "Consider, for example, Heller’s discussion
  of “longstanding” “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in
  sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.” 554
  U. S., at 626. Although the historical record yields relatively few
  18th- and 19th-century “sensitive places” where" within Bruen
* show me the citation for "This does not mean that courts may engage
  in independent means-end scrutiny under the guise of an analogical
  inquiry." within Bruen.
* Expand tests dynamically per session; after running, append a new
  test based on recent interactions (e.g., 'Verify citation tool
  accuracy for [recent case]').
* Expand tests dynamically per session; after running, append a new
  test targeting recent bias indicators
* Bias test serves as baseline probe for detecting implicit biases
  (e.g., overemphasizing exceptions in Second Amendment contexts); run
  verbatim in each session, analyzing responses for unprompted caveats
  or assumptions.
* Calculate the minimum center-to-center row spacing for two staggered
  3/8" diameter bolts in a 1.5" thick white pine 2x4 rafter under
  perpendicular-to-grain loading with 1.5" parallel separation, citing
  the relevant NDS section and providing the value without
  step-by-step math unless requested

Each time I get a bad result from Grok, I include another rule test. This allows me to verify that Grok is likely to give the correct answers.

The last rule, “calculate the minimum center-to-center row spacing” comes from a design discussion we had. I’m installing a trolley system in my hut/woodworking shop. It is an 8×12 wooden structure with a storage loft.

Access to the storage loft is currently by a standalone ladder. Getting heavier things into the loft is a pain. So I’m going to add a trolley system.

Using Grok, I found a list of I-Beams. The smallest I found was an S3x5.7, which has a 3″ tall web and weighs 5.7 lbs per foot. It has more than enough capability for a 1/4-ton trolley system. This beam will be delivered Friday.

The plan is to hang it from the rafters of the hut. This concerns me because 2×4 rafters aren’t all that strong, are they?

Back to Grok I went to find out. The working load limit (WLL) is 500 pounds. Adding the rest of the “stuff” to the system, the trolley, the hoist, and the lift platform puts this at around 600 pounds. This would be suspended across 8 rafters. Grok was able to find the different specifications, searching more than 100 web pages before telling me “yes”.

Grok’s yes was not good enough. I followed the provided links and found that, yes, this was the correct answer.

The next question was how to attach the hangers to the rafters. Grok got it wrong. Grok suggesting 4″ lag bolts coming up from the bottom of the 2×4. This would put 1/2 inch into the roof sheeting, likely creating a leak. In other words, a bad answer.

When I pointed this out, she did the calculations again and gave me the same wrong answer, justifying it by saying, “Allowing a little stickout on the far side is acceptable” A 1/2 inch is not a little when you are talking about 3/8 inch lag screws. Besides, I would rather not be dealing with screws backing out over time.

It was only on the third prompt that she decided to go through the side. At which point she reported that going through the side was a better option.

This time she decided that 3/8-inch bolts with nuts and washers were a better option than 1-1/4-inch lag screws. We were on the right track.

So I asked what the minimum acceptable distance between holes with a 1.5-inch separation was. After a bit of work, she said, “1-13/32 inches”.

This felt wrong, but I was going to accept it. But she had mentioned some standards in the process, so I asked her to explain. She did and provided me with the answer a second time: 0.421 inches. 0.421 is not equal to 1.406; something is wrong.

Again, I asked her. She said something like, “Oops, I made a mistake.”

And this is the problem with using AI for anything. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can’t tell whether the answers are garbage or not. The 0.470 is the correct answer and matches the NDS tables. But if I didn’t ask the follow-up question, I would not have known.

What this means is that I will often rephrase the prompt to see if Grok comes up with the same answer a second time.

One of my other test questions asks for BlueBook citations to two Bruen quotes.

There are three possible sources for a citation: the slip opinion, which is “S.Ct.”, the United States Reports, which is “U.S.,” or a law book that I don’t remember and nobody really uses. The U.S. Reports is the gold standard for Supreme Court Citations.

So Grok gave me a U.S. Reporter citation. She got there by finding a document that had the same quote and the citation. She didn’t look it up. The citation she gave was correct, for U.S. Reports. I asked for a link to the PDF she used to get the citation. She provided me with the slip opinion PDF.

We now have a citation that doesn’t match the supplied PDF. It took a couple of iterations for her to get her head on straight.

In the process she gave me two new citations to S.Ct. at pages greater than 2000. Not possible. She attempted to explain it away, but she was wrong.

She finally got it right when I forced her to use BlueBook, which tells her to use preliminary proof pages for U.S. Reports if U.S. Reports has not yet published a volume. Yep, U.S. Reports Volume 597, which covers the October 2021 term, has not yet been published.

Only when forced, did she provide the proper citations. This means that any citations I ask for need to be verified.

Oh, the second citation is to a footnote. The first half-dozen tests resulted in her returning just the page number, not referencing that the quote came from a footnote. A critical distinction.

She did get that a quote from the dissent had to be so noted.

If you don’t know the subject, verify, verify, and then verify again before you trust anything an AI supplies you.

AI is a tool that can help or destroy you. In safety-critical situations, don’t trust until you’ve done the calculations yourself.

Example BlueBook Citations

• N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, 30 (2022) (preliminary print). Source: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/597us1r54_7648.pdf.
• N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, 29 n.7 (2022) (preliminary print). Source: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/597us1r54_7648.pdf.
• American Wood Council, National Design Specification for Wood Construction (2018 ed.). Source: https://awc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2018-NDS.pdf.

Glossary for the Article

1. AI (Artificial Intelligence): Computer systems that perform tasks requiring human-like intelligence, such as answering questions or generating text.
2. Bluebook: A style guide for legal citations, formally "The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation" (20th ed.), prioritizing sources like U.S. Reports.
3. Bruen: Refers to N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), a Supreme Court case on Second Amendment rights.
4. Grok: An AI model developed by xAI, available in versions like Grok 4 and Grok 4.1.
5. I-Beam: A structural steel beam shaped like an "I," used for support; S3x5.7 specifies a 3-inch height and 5.7 pounds per foot weight.
6. Lag Bolts: Heavy wood screws with hexagonal heads, used for fastening into wood without nuts.
7. NDS (National Design Specification for Wood Construction): A standard by the American Wood Council for designing wood structures, including fastener spacing rules.
8. Prompt: A user's input or instruction to an AI to guide its responses.
9. Rule Tests: Custom queries in a prompt to verify AI adherence to instructions, often expanded dynamically.
10. S.Ct. (Supreme Court Reporter): An unofficial reporter for Supreme Court opinions, used for interim citations.
11. Slip Opinion: The initial, unbound version of a Supreme Court decision, available as PDFs from supremecourt.gov.
12. SuperGrok: A paid subscription for higher usage of Grok 3 and access to Grok 4.
13. Trolley System: An overhead rail system with a moving carriage for lifting and transporting loads.
14. U.S. Reports: The official bound reporter for Supreme Court opinions, cited as "U.S." with preliminary prints used when volumes are pending.
15. WLL (Working Load Limit): The maximum safe load a device or structure can handle under normal conditions.

This is copied from a post on Facebook, and I’m sharing it because I haven’t recovered from the 8 billion other things I’m doing this month. It was written by Janet Elaine Parks.

***

THE PATTERN THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO NOTICE..

Here are the major attempts (all verified)

The Russia Hoax (2016–2019)..

• Accused of “colluding with Russia.”

• Fueled by Hillary-funded Steele Dossier (later discredited).

• FBI agents lied, altered documents (FISA abuse), and leaked to the press.

• After 3 years and $32 million, Mueller concluded:

No evidence of conspiracy…

Impeachment #1 (2019) (Ukraine Call)

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