Rant

People have a difficult time making hard choices.

The Trolley Problem brings is one of the ways that we explore ethical choices. The general premises are that there are five people that will die if you do nothing. There is one person, who is currently safe, who can be sacrificed to save the five.

Do you do nothing and let five people die, or do you throw the switch and kill the one?

What if we change the problem statement a little, what if the one was a child? What if the one was a woman? What if the one was a “person of color”? What if it was your wife?

Now take that same list of changes and insert it into the five. What if one of the five was a child, a woman, a person of color, your wife?

Ok. How about if your daughter was the one and your son was one of the five?

The problem hasn’t changed, but the emotional stress is greatly increased.

Politicians know this. They use it to their advantage.

The term is “Emotional Blackmail.”

Consider the following dilemma, you can choose to pay more in taxes or the school system’s proposed budget is capped at a half million increase rather than the 3.5 million increase they were asking for.

For me, that’s an easy choice. Cap at a 0.5 million increase. At which point the emotional blackmail begins.

“If you don’t give use the extra three million dollars, we will have to fire teachers.”

Is that really the only choice?

That is the question I posed a teacher. What other things in the budget can be cut, before we have to fire teachers.

Now, I’ve been told that I’m against teachers. That I oppose her. Why? Because I don’t want to cut teachers?

For her, there are only two choices, pay or cut teachers. If I don’t want to pay more in taxes, I must hate teachers and want them fired.

So I asked her about programs in the budget that could be cut instead. In our first iteration, there were no programs she was willing to cut.

The problem she has is that every cut is equally bad. Every choice is equally bad. Since all the choices are bad, the only option is to get the 3 million dollars out of the stone of taxpayers.

We had a similar issue at a family level years ago. We had a 16k windfall. We all agreed we would put that money into the homestead. The problem was that nobody could agree on what we should do.

Should we get new siding for the house? Should we replace one of the vehicles? Should we pay off a loan?

It wasn’t even that simple, there were about a dozen different projects or expenses we were considering.

By default, humans will spiral rather than make a hard decision.

I had to listen to people tell me that project A was more important than project B, but B was more important than C. And C was more important than A.

It was a circle. Everything was more important than everything else.

The first process was having everybody create an ordered list of by importance.

They couldn’t do it. They all had situations where they had multiple things with equal importance. Or worse still, some couldn’t do it because they couldn’t choose.

The method that did work was creating binary choices.

We lay out a grid, in that grid we compare every item to every other item, asking if item row was more important than the item in the column.

Once that grid is filled out, we can create an ordered list. Once we had ordered lists, we could present and come to an agreement as to what our priorities were.

From this table, we can create an ordered list

1. Roof
2. Foundation
3. Gutters
4. Siding
5. Paint
6. Truck
7. Car
8. Computer

The problem we have with our school budget is that every program is equally important. In the end, they will likely fire teachers and programs.

Whenever I see a motion for a TRO, Preliminary Injunction or a Stay, the opinion of the court always includes a reference to —Winter V. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 172 L. Ed. 2d 249 (2008).

These are known as the “Winter Factors”. They must be addressed in order by the court before granting any of the above.

The first factor is the likelihood of success on the merits. Is the person requesting the TRO, PI or Stay going to win the case in the end? If it is more likely than not, then the first factor has been met.

The second factor is the question of the amount and type of harm being done. The key phrase is irreparable harm. In short, this means that the harm cannot be redressed by throwing money at it. All violations of Constitutionally protected rights are considered irreparable harm. You will never again have that opportunity at that moment of time with those people listening back again.

The third factor is the balance of equities. Who will be most harmed whether the motion is granted or not granted. If the motion being granted will force a business to close, while not granting it will impose an eyesore, the balance of equities’ favorers not granting the motion.

The final factor is what is in the best interest of the public. The public has no interest in enforcing unconstitutional laws. This always favors The People. The state will often argue that “keeping the public safe” is the correct scale to use for determining what is in the publics best interests.

The court did not use the Winter Factors.

And this is why she is using the Nken instead of Winter To be able to discount the likelihood of success because of the amount of harm. In other words, instead of having to prove they are likely to win on the merits, the plaintiffs have chosen to prove that they might be horribly harmed if some hypothetical comes true.

Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

IANAL. My opinion is that the first question to be resolved is if the APA law(s) passed by congress limiting the power of the President are constitutional. If they are not constitutional, then they must be vacated and there is no cause for the case.

Instead, the court assumes the APA overrides the authority granted to the President under the Constitution. She then turns the Winter standard on its head.

Even though the text reads To establish a likelihood of success on the merits, a plaintiff need not show that success is an absolute certainty. It need only make a showing that the probability of … prevailing is better than fifty percent.

The plaintiff bears the burden. Not the defendant. This judge says it is the States that bear the burden.

The gist of this is that the courts are planning to ignore the Constitutional issues as much as possible and instead base their opinions on laws that are unconstitutional.

For somebody who makes many grammar errors, who can’t speel worth a damn, and in general suffers dyslexia-driven writing issues, I am obsessed with communication.

My mentor taught me the “four parts of communication”.

1. What I say
2. What you hear
3. What you say
4. What I hear

If there is a mismatch between any of the two steps, then communication has failed. Only I know what I intend to communicate. Only I can do the work to verify, through what you say, and I hear, that I was able to communicate my concept correctly.

Part of the task of communication is agreeing on the meaning of words and of being able to identify what you are addressing.

If I use a word with one meaning, and you use the same word with a different meaning, it is unlikely that we are communicating when either of us use that word.

In the late 70s and early 80s, the feminists were becoming very vocal. They were making claims as to how good they were and how little they needed men for.

To put some perspective on this, in 1973, Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in a tennis match to prove women were as good as men or better. She was 29, at the top of her game. Bobby Riggs was 55 and most definitely not at the top of his game.

But, at the time, we couldn’t actually talk about how men were different from women and how some jobs were better suited to men. We couldn’t because to try to discuss the issue would get you slammed as a male chauvinist pig.

By controlling the language, the progressives were able to stop any dissent or even discussion about the issues from a male perspective.

It took a new term to come into existence before that discussion could take place. “Politically Correct”.

Once the term was available to us, we could actually begin the discussions that were needed, on equal footing.

Affirmative Action is another one of those topics. The phrasing is wonderful. Everybody wants to be affirmative.

How dare you want to discriminate against blacks by taking away affirmative action.

We can’t, or couldn’t discuss the harm that was coming from affirmative action because doing so would get you labeled “racist” or worse. The topic was forbidden. Not because it shouldn’t have been discussed, but because it lived in a protected state.

The new language is “DEI”. We are trying to discuss it. But we are being shouted down as bigots, racists and misogynists.

Now consider a current topic, plane crashes.

First, if you look up the NTSB numbers for plane crashes, you will find that more planes crashed in January 2024 than in January 2025. Not what we are talking about.

One of the questions that came out of the crash in DC was the sex of the pilots.

Why?

It was because there are people, myself included, that believe that the pilots of the helicopter were not qualified to be flying that Blackhawk in that airspace at that time.

Why? Because they caused a fucking midair collision!

They messed up and killed people. We KNOW that the helicopter was above its max authorized height and had no pilot input to avoid the jet. We KNOW that the jet had nearly full elevators and a 9-degree roll to the left to avoid the helicopter.

So we ask, why were they allowed on that flight?

One of the first things that came out was that the pilot was female.

Was the collision because she was female?

There is nothing in the record, the facts, that indicate that her sexual organs had anything to do with the crash.

But that is only half of the question. The rest of the question is, “Was she qualified?”

This raises further questions, “Were the standards lowered to allow more women to ‘qualify’?” and “Were better qualified males passed over to have more female pilots?”

These are all questions that should be asked.

We are having trouble asking them because to ask them is to be yelled at for something that was not said.

What are we being accused of? We are being accused of saying that the crash(es) occurred because they were women.

The media talking heads make the claim that they have the secret decoder ring that allows them to translate our questions into what we “really” mean. And what we “really” mean is that women are not qualified to be pilots. We DIDN’t say that.

But it gets worse. That message gets out there. And some on the right are not careful with their words. They might be attempting to ask the same thing we are. But it comes out as “because they were women”.

As soon as that happens, there are a hundred NPCs to claim that that dogcatcher speaks for every conservative, for every Trump supporter.

And those on the left believe them. As Ally has pointed out, one of the difficult things for her to accept as being right of center, is that we aren’t in lock step. That we don’t support everybody with an R behind their name or a MAGA hat on their head.

That duffus over there can have his crazy ideas. I don’t agree with him.

A hearing was held on Friday. I expect the judge to issue an order regarding the Preliminary Injunction on Monday.

The TRO expired on Friday, so the judge will either issue an order regarding the case. If she is going to go rogue, she will want to have that done on Monday to stop the President from doing his duty. If she wants to respect the constitution, she will issue an order denying the preliminary injunction.

In my businesses, I sometimes had a bookkeeper. She would receive the bills, make entries in the books, then bring me checks to sign to pay those bills.

I could also tell her to issue a check to somebody or some business. It was never her job to tell me not to pay that person, nor to verify if that entity was supposed to get the money. It was my job to make sure that when I told her to pay an entity, that entity should be paid, and how much.

She was supposed to tell me “no”, only if it would run afoul of the law or if we didn’t have the cash for it. If it meant we would be short later, she still did it.

The Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS) is that bookkeeper for the Federal Government. They are tasked with making payments. They are not tasked with verifying that the payment should be made.

The decision to make a payment comes from other entities within the bureaucracy.

These payment files are checked against a list of “don’t pay”. If the recipient of the payment is on any of those lists, the payment is held. The agency that sent the payment file is responsible for determining if the payment is proper.

In the best of worlds, this would mean that no payments went to bad actors.

Now consider the case of the President issuing an Executive Order stopping payments to purple people eaters. There are dozens of agencies that send money to purple people eaters. All of those agencies are responsible for stopping payment files from going through to pay purple people eaters.

The BFS receives a payment file to send a payment to a PPE. If that PPE is not on the do not pay list, they will send the payment to that PPE. If the PPE is on a no pay list, the payment is held and the agency is informed.

If that agency sends back “pay it”, the BFS pays it. And the PPE gets money, regardless of what the President ordered.

When the bureaucracy is working with the President, every agency would have heard the “stop payments to PPEs” and would have done so. Any payment files that were already sent might be called back or stopped. If the BFS flags a payment as going to a PPE, everybody says “good job”.

If the bureaucracy is at odds with the President, they ignore the EO and do whatever the hell they want. If BFS flags any payments, they just order them paid.

If some agencies are attempting to obey the President, there can still be others that are not.

Worse, in many cases, contracts are let and budgeted. Some low level GS-2 with TDS can order a payment on a contract they control, and it just gets paid. Even if all of his bosses have told him “no”.

The President has ordered that no more payments to PPEs be made. To make this happen, he can either send people who are willing to obey him to every agency and every desk where somebody can send a payment to a PPE.

Or, he can send a few people to the BFS, and they can analyze each payment file as it comes in, check to see if it is a PPE payment.

Watching the bookkeepers doesn’t mean that the bookkeepers are doing something “wrong”, it is just the proper chock point in the flow of money.

The argument being made by these former treasury officials is that “career officials” are non-partisan and can be trusted to do the right thing.

For decades, BFS has been staffed by nonpartisan career employees led by nonpartisan career official…

There appears to be a claim without evidence that these workers are nonpartisan. At least they left off the “nonpartisan” when describing the fiscal assistant secretary, their boss.

They claim that all these nonpartisan career employees have undergone a security screening. Screening is one of those weasel words we see people use when they want the reader to think one thing when it isn’t true.

When I purchase a firearm, I fill out a 4473 and a “background check” is performed. This is a type of “security screening”. Having undergone a “thorough security screening” does not mean that this person has a clearance. If they had clearances, the brief would have said they have clearances.

This is intended to make it seem that the DOGE team’s actual clearances are not as thorough or complete as the BFS security screening. The reality is that any real clearance is likely better than the screenings these people got.

There is more, I’ll leave you with Grok’s explanation, it isn’t bad.

You might have heard that the DoJ is suing Hochul and James. This is not quite true. They are being sued in their official capacity. So the Governor, Attorney General, and head of the DMV of New York state are being sued.

What is the suit about?

New York will give a license to illegal aliens. I am not sure how that works, but they do.

The license indicates that the person is an illegal alien. As an illegal alien, they have extra rights under New York law.

In particular, the “Green Light” law requires the DMV to inform the illegal alien anytime the feds request information about them from the DMV.

Things are happening.

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.

Every piece of information the government or military processes has a classification level assigned to it.

Currently, the federal government lists four levels of clearances that are associated with classification levels.

The other level is “No Clearance”.

Information that is classified as “Confidential” could cause damage to national security if disclosed. Note the weasel word “could”. The definition will often add “without authorization”.

This is the “lowest” classification. There are really two other levels below this.

There is For Official Use Only (FOUO) which is sometimes called Sensitive Unclassified.

This is information that anybody working at a government site might be exposed to. It may not carry any markings. So if you were to see a list of SSN, you don’t have to be told that those are Sensitive Unclassified or FOUO.

This is the same in the health care industry or data processing industry. By this, I mean that there are laws in place that protect people from sharing my personal information. My doctor can’t share my health information. I can’t share your name or email information, if I collect it via a credit card payment.

This doesn’t mean that people aren’t stupid. At one government installation I used to work at, they had a recycling program for paper. You could take used printer paper home to use for projects and stuff. Think of using it in the bottom of a bird cage.

The head of the installation put an end to it when he picked up something at a local shop, wrapped in used paper. The paper was from the installation and had SSN plus wages printed on it.

By the time I got to the installation, we had industrial shredders. Every piece of paper that would have gone in the garbage was fed through the shredders.

What does this mean in terms of the DOGE team? If they are properly employed and tasked to do the work they are doing, they have all the clearances they need to see FOUO and Sensitive, Unclassified material. They don’t need a clearance to see and work with that data.

As soon as we move to information that is classified, certain things become true. First, it is supposed to be marked.

This is one of the issues with the Hilary emails. She had information on her private server that had no markings, which came from classified sources. Those classified sources were marked.

In addition, she was informed that the source of that information was classified, and the information was classified, regardless of markings.

In other words, if I observe a weapons test and I see something that I know is or will be classified, I must treat it as classified. Even if it is not “marked”.

So information is classified. It is classified by level. Just because you have a clearance, it doesn’t mean that you have access to the information.

You must also have a need to know.

I, personally, got racked over the coals by one Army Officer and then got to watch our security officer rake him over the coals. The difference being that the Army Officer could have had lots worse happen to him.

He was in an area that implied he had a clearance. I knew he had a clearance. I even knew what level he had. It was higher than mine, at the time. He asked to see some classified information and I refused.

For this, I was raked over the coals by this officer. I told him that I had to have confirmation from my security officer that he had a need to know.

He stormed out, came back with my security officer. He explained. The security dude asked if the officer had it right. I said “yep.” The security dude then ripped the officer a new one.

The army officer had to have a need to know. He did. But I don’t get to make that determination. Only authorized people can do that. One such authorized person was my security officer.

Above Confidential is Secret, above that is Top Secret, and above that is Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information.

To be granted any clearance, you need to be vetted. That requires you to fill out several invasive forms. These are then used to start a background check. How through these background checks are depends on the level of clearance being requested.

Your clearance doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the entity that wants you to have a clearance. That entity must have a clearance. The entity requests that you be granted a clearance. Your entity then gets the paperwork from you which is then handed over to the investigators.

When you are granted your clearance, your entity will be informed. Your entity will have a security officer at the least and may have an entire office dedicated to handling clearances.

My entity was Cray Research. Once their security office was informed I had received my clearance, they informed the security office where I was employed. At that point, I had a clearance. And nobody would have given me a bit of classified information.

The people I worked directly with were told I had a clearance by their security office. The people I worked indirectly with I told. They then verified with their security office.

When I left that government installation, my clearance still existed. It was “owned” by Cray Research. My clearance didn’t mean anything because I wasn’t at a government installation.

When I went to different government locations, where I had a need to know, my security people sent the proper security magic to the locations where I was going. This allowed me to see what I had a need to see.

When I left Cray Research, my clearance still existed. Cray Research no longer owned it. Somebody in the government had control over it.

When I joined a different company, they put in a request for my clearance, and it was granted because it already existed.

Ok. Done with me.

What this means is that the people that DOGE is using could have had clearances because of other projects they had worked. When they started working for DOGE, their clearances were either transferred to DOGE or their entity informed DOGE of what clearances they had.

So this nice young man of 20 or so wants to inspect a computer system at CFPB. The administration says, “Hell no, you don’t have the clearances to see our systems because you might see our data.”

The young man calls his security office and has them transmit the clearances to CFPB security. “Call your security office, they will verify that I have the clearances to access the systems and the data.”

The administrator, having lost the first battle, says, “You don’t have a need to know.”

The young man presents the orders he has been given him by the boss of CFPB and that is satisfied, after verification.

That’s how clearances work.

Now, the current NPC talking point is that this young man is unelected, reports to Elon, and as such will access data he shouldn’t and then use it or leak it.

When you hear this, you should translate it to: “Are you saying the FBI and other agencies can’t do a background check? That this young man with clearances shouldn’t have them? What agency or person are you accusing of granting a clearance to somebody that can’t be trusted?”

Yeah, I’ve about had it with Democratic(NPC) talking points.

If you have had the misfortune of listening to the democrats rant about “constitutional crisis” or “illegal actions”, it is time to take a long hard look at what Donald Trump is actually doing.

I believe that one of the problems that Trump 1.0 had was that he came into office thinking it was another corporate takeover. Something he had done multiple times. He brought his lawyers with him.

Those lawyers were not prepared for the conflict, the war that was going to be waged against Trump.

Having spent the last few years reading court cases, listening to lawyers pontificate about cases, I have learned that there are different types of lawyers. Some are good at one thing and horrible at others.

Trump 1.0’s people were not ready to take on the swamp.

Trump 2.0 has hit the ground running. And he is trolling his opposition like the master he is.

So consider this, as a state lawyer, Trump has no power to fire Letitia James. She is not within the chain of command.

On the other hand, for her to do her job, she needs access to federal resources.

Trump revoked her security clearances. He has also banned her from all Federal buildings.

Her fangs have just been pulled.

He is yanking clearances left and right. This is a good thing. The less access these people have, the less damage they can do to our country.

Consider these two posts:

If you read the comments, you can see exactly how I feel. This is what we voted for.

Here is the same information, posted by a democrat.

Being a little short of ideas today, I went to the well again. X never fails to deliver.

I have seen so many lists of Republican wins that when this showed up in my feed, I just read it.

And what I read sounded like a win to me. I went to see which of the people I was following posted this wonderful list.

It was David Hogg. He posted this thinking it was a win. He is the gift that just keeps on giving.

Yes, the feature image is AI generated. Grok made it for me.

Somehow, they managed to talk for 30 hours straight in a 24-hour day.

It is unconstitutional to create a law targeting a person.

The acting secretary of Education will give the letter all the attention it is worth. About nothing.

They admit it is just a delay tactic.

Good, let’s find out if they should be receiving funds, if they are supposed to receive funds, let’s get the money flowing again. If they aren’t supposed to be receiving funds, great! We’re done.

We win.

Protecting Second Amendment Rights