Politics

I was in 2nd grade when I decided I was going to make a table and chairs. I had watched my grandfather make things. It couldn’t be that hard. With my mother and grandparents providing the material, I made a table and chair.

It was a success. Was it sturdy enough for an adult to stand on? No. Regardless, for a 2nd grader, it was very much a success.

As a 4th grader, I watched my father rebuild the engine of our VW Microbus. He used the original “idiot” book to do it.

From my father, I learned how to break concrete, how foundation forms were put in place, how concrete was poured and how to frame in a room. When I say, “I learned”, it means that I had my hands on the tools doing. I had the blisters to show for it.

A few years later, 6th grade or so, I purchased my first motorcycle. When it needed work, I am the one who tore it down and rebuilt it. And then got it back together and running.

That was my success. My father didn’t lay hands on that motor or motorcycle. It was mine, and I was going to do.

Did I mess up? You bet I did. I don’t remember the failures because they were mine. I learned from them. Then I went and tried again. Today, 50 years later, I can still hear the sound of that MX-80 screaming back to life.

My parents let me own my failures, they let me own my successes. They never stole my success nor my failures from me.

Years passed. It didn’t matter what it was, I was willing to try. I was willing to fail. I tried learning how to draw. I spent four months drawing hands. In the end, I decided that I preferred photography.

When my brother and I needed to work on the VWs, we pulled the engines ourselves. We could tear down and rebuild an engine on the side of the road. How do I know we can? Because we did. It was in a gas station parking lot. Bro and I pulled the engine from the VW, tore it down enough to get to the broken, removed and replaced the broken part. Put the whole thing back together and put it back into the bus.

We did it between 1700 and 0200, then we drove another 400 miles the next day to get to my grandparents.

“Can do” isn’t the correct version of our attitude, it was more like, “We’ll make it work.”

Today, children aren’t allowed to fail. Even in simple things. My son made a wonderful meal the other weekend. I was asking him what went into it. We are about done, but still discussing things, when my wife pipes up to tell me a spice that was in the meal.

I knew it was there. I wanted my son to tell me. She stole his success.

I’m lucky, my kids do know how to succeed because they also know about failure.

My second wife refused to try new things. She explained the reason thus:

As a child, her mother would look at what she was going to attempt to do, then her mother would tell her, don’t bother to try, you can’t do that.

How can you succeed if you don’t try? How can you fail if you don’t try?

It is said that Edison said, “We didn’t fail, we just learned another material that doesn’t work as a filament.”

We learn so much more from failure than we do from success.

Consider a class of 20 students. We can fit a bell curve to those students. There will be a mean and standard deviation for those students. From that, we can determine which will get As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs. It is standard statistics.

We do this by using an instrument to measure something about those students. If we have an instrument that gives every student a 100%, we know nothing. That instrument is useless.

We want an instrument in which nobody gets 100%. At the same time, we need to be careful of the outliers on the high end. If you have somebody who gets 100% on a test where everybody else is getting 50% or lower, you can’t design your test/instrument to have the outlier get a 95%

One of the interesting things my mentor taught me about digital cell phone communications is that the protocols strive to match a 90% raw error rate. If the error rate is higher than that, the phone uses more power to get a cleaner signal. If it is better than that, the phone reduces power until it is running at that 90% error rate.

At 90% error rate, the algorithms can repair the damage and give a perfect digital signal.

If we were running at 100%, we would never know when we were using too much power.

We live in a society where the ego of a student is much more important than long-term success. We give out participation awards. We have games where we ‘don’t keep score.’

There is an old joke: A man walks up to a baseball diamond where some kids in a youth league are playing. He asks one of the fathers/couches, “What’s the score?” “We don’t keep score. We play for the joy of the game.” One of the kids yells over from the dugout, “We’re ahead 5 to 3.”

My children know that if they ask for feedback, they will get honest feedback. If they don’t ask, they will get a proud parents’ response. My kid’s friends know the same.

It also means that when I give out a “well done”, it means something. My kids know that their mother will always praise whatever they do, no matter how bad it is.

“Everybody makes mistakes!” is something I’ve had shouted at me.

Yep, that’s true. But not everybody learns from their mistakes. You cannot learn from your mistake if you don’t know you made a mistake. You can learn from your mistakes if you’re not allowed to make mistakes.

I’m learning how to turn wood. I’ve learned not to stand in front of the work when I first apply the cutting tool. Why? Because that damn bowl coming off the spindle at 1300 RPM HURT. I’ve learned a little.

I have seen some people decock the hammer of a firearm with their thumb between the firing pin and the hammer. I thought it was stupid. It is how I do it now. I had the hammer slip one time with a loud bang when the hammer stopped moving. It will not hurt all that much to have the hammer fall on my thumb if it stops a round from going “that-a-way”.

It is easy to see how stealing their successes can be bad. Stealing their failures is worse.

This Representative is talking out of both sides of her mouth.

According to her, “they” went into the Delaney Hall premises, guided by the guards.

She claims that she has oversight authority to be there.

Let me see, what happens when you enter a federal property, look around, take pictures and selfies, then walk back out, thanking the cops on duty?

If I remember correctly, you get tossed in jail without bail to wait till a judge decides to hear your case. You are given an option to confess or to be returned to your cell.

The rest of the story is that the Mayor of Newark was arrested. He does not have any “oversight” authority.

The democrat representatives were there for a camera opportunity. Not oversight. I do not know if they even sit on a committee that oversees this facility.

So the good news, is these stunts are getting these showboating politicians arrested.

There is a battle of procedure that takes place in our courts. That is getting to a final result.

If the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of Trump in December 2028, it would not matter that he won. We would have lost.

That would be four years of waiting for a final result.

We watched and are watching this play out in the Second Amendment community. Duncan v. Bonta has been around for almost a decade at this point. It has been through the district court twice, the Ninth Circuit court multiple times, and the Supreme Court at least once.

The case has won at the District and Supreme Court, yet the relief sought by the plaintiff is still out of reach. In March 2025, the Ninth Circuit decided to twist the words of the Supreme Court to find that magazines are not arms and are not protected by the Second Amendment.

The State of California doesn’t care how long this case takes or how much money it costs to litigate. The district court enjoined the law back in 2017-2018. The Ninth stayed the injunction. That stay has remained in effect even now as the case has been remanded to the district court, ordering the district court to rule for the state.

As long as the status of the case leans towards the infringers, they are happy to delay.

To show how real this is, a district judge in New York issued a TRO enjoining the SAFE act (Bruen tantrum law). The state had that appealed within hours, even though a TRO is not appealable. The Second Circuit Stayed the injunction.

It took over a year before the Second Circuit finally ruled against The People and The Constitution, sending it back to the District Court for more litigation before the case can start up the chain to the Supreme Court, again.

Because that stay is in place, most of New York state is a gun free zone.

The left is using the same methods to stop the Trump administration. They do not care if they win or if they lose, as long as it doesn’t happen now.

They go court shopping until they find a court willing to issue a universal injunction, stopping the Article II executive branch.

Once the injunction is in place, they start slow walking things.

The Circuit courts are just as rogue in these locations as the District Courts. They are using the interlocutory state to excuse not staying the injunctions. “Just let it play out in court.”

The leftest Justices on the Supreme Court echo those words, “just let it work its way here through the normal process. There is no reason to rush this.”

This go around, the Trump administration has been ready and has been moving hard and fast. Multiple cases have made it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court has issued opinions favorable to the Trump administration each time.

How are they favorable? In most of the cases, the Justices have ruled to allow the Trump administration to continue as they had intended, while the case works its way through the courts.

This means that the left is on the wrong side of that snail. They are the ones attempting to get the cases through as fast as they can. And it isn’t working for them.

In the few cases where the Justices have not issued a stay, they have chastised the lower courts or scheduled oral hearings quickly.

The case at hand.

A group of people suffering from gender dysphoria have been given medical release from the military. They sued in federal district court, asking for an injunction, which was granted.

This means that the military does not have the power to determine which service members are medical disqualified from serving.

The Supreme Court issued a stay against that injunction for the duration. The stay will remain in effect until the Supreme Court denies cert OR issues a final opinion.

We are winning, the courts are moving at breakneck speed, and it keeps looking good.

The other thing which is happening, is that the lanuguage of the Court is changing, they are getting less and less polite and more and more pointed in their correcting of the inferior courts.

Situational morals at work again.

It is being reported, and I haven’t heard anybody deny it, that two or more U.S. Citizens under 10 were “deported”.

Well, they weren’t actually deported, their mother(s) were deported. Their father may or may not have been deported as well.

This is what happens when an illegal alien is detained, they are given due process to challenge the removal before an immigration judge. If that judge finds that you are in the country illegally, they will sign a removal order.

The illegal alien can appeal that to a higher immigration judge. If they agree, the removal order remains. They can then appeal outside the immigration court system, I don’t know how that works.

These mothers had that due process, there were removal orders issued against them.

Those mothers then had to make a very difficult decision, leave the children who were born in the US here in the US or take them with them.

In one case, the child had a serious medical condition.

In these cases, the mothers opted to take their children with them. Those children remain U.S. Citizens, they can return to the United States at any time. Hopefully, they haven’t become MS13 or TDA members before they do return.

This is what Trump wanted, according to the dog whistle people. He wants to deport people he doesn’t like. He wants to deport U.S. Citizens who he declares are enemies of the state. This is proof.

In other news, an illegal alien mother was deported, choosing to leave her US Citizen children behind. Isn’t it horrible how Trump is choosing to seperate families?

The Fort is getting ready for the 2025 season. Allyson is up there for the woman’s weekend. She is incredibly excited.

Why?

Because this will be the first event she has gone to in years when she isn’t presenting/teaching. Her goal? To learn how to make a pie crust.

Like many events, there is an unload time. You are allowed to drive on site to unload your gear, and then you are to get your vehicle off site as soon as you can.

It felt like coming home. We stopped to talk to boss lady, then drove around to the Fort to unload. Bill saw us drive up and waved us inside.

It felt good to be recognized, to be welcomed.

There was “man bonding”, Bill was on his way to fix something, he had a crowbar in hand and made a pretend swing at the windshield. It felt welcoming. As I said, a coming home.

Allyson and I got out of the truck. She started unloading for her stay, I went to help Bill.

We worked as a team. I got to drive the idiot stick for a bit. We were able to move a large, heavy, ramp out of the way, clear up the damage a woodchuck had done, and get an aluminum ramp in place for the weekend.

It was good. It made me happy. The Fort is a home away from home.

The one thing that struck me as humorous was that we were going to use some 2x4s. They needed to be cut to size. Bill was in the jointery first. When I got there, I was expecting him to be using one of the handsaws.

Nope, he had a circular saw, making quick work of the task.

NPCs get new talking points

In the past 20 years of watching congress critters make huge amounts of money with some of the luckiest stock moves, it is refreshing to have some of them talking about limiting insider trading.

And all the normal NPCs are all yapping about wanting to pass a bill to stop themselves from trading individual stocks.

The bill, as pitched by the NPCs, is unlikely to actually accomplish anything, still it makes me smile to see them doing this because they are virtue signaling.

Just a short follow up. In one day the portfolio I am following recovered about 530%.

That is to say, the reported loss over the last 6 days has gone from 3.58% yesterday to 0.19% today.

Just stay the course and things will get better.

If you are invested in the market, don’t panic. As CBMTTek pointed out, February 2024 the S&P 500 was doing just fine, at the same level. The media wasn’t screaming about the economy tanking.

He’s correct. The amount of panic the media projects is tempered by which party is in control.

A 0.001% drop in the market when Trump does something is cause to panic, which causes the sheep to sell, causing the market to drop. A 1.000% drop in the market when a Dem is in office creates a cricket like ambiance. And saying anything makes you a conspiracy theorist.

Trump has put multiple tariffs into place. These tariffs cause changes in supply chains and in the costs to produce certain goods.

Every product produced requires raw goods, tooling, work space, and skills to create.

Consider a simple BLT. The raw goods are bacon, bacon, bacon, lettuce, tomato, bread, mayo. Having all of those raw goods does not a BLT make.

You have to have the correct tooling. The tooling here is a way of cooking the bacon, such as a grill top, cutting tomatoes, cutting bread, spreading the mayo.

Once the sandwich is produced, it has to be packaged for delivery. That requires still more raw goods.

When you sell that sandwich, you include the cost of the raw materials that go into it, you include the cost of the packaging, you include the cost of the tools, the building you used, and you include the cost of labor. You then need to include the cost the government imposes on you.

The cost of your raw goods includes the price you pay for the goods, the cost the government imposes on those goods, such as tariffs and VAT, and the cost of transporting the raw goods to your location.

Once you have all those costs, you add profit to come up with the price you will charge your customers.

Now, let’s change the product, instead of creating a sandwich, you are creating a gear. Your raw goods are iron and pattern making materials. You will use your tools to convert pattern making materials into patterns. You will then use those patterns to cast gear blanks. You will then turn those gear blanks into finished gears by applying different tools.

You have converted raw materials, with knowledge, skill and labor, into a finished product, a gear.

That gear is sold at a price which is profitable to you. That gear is likely a raw material for some other business.

Tariffs add to the cost of anything imported into a country that imposes imports. Imports are decided on the origin country or the country of manufacture.

Consider a car that is manufactured in Detroit. If that car includes raw materials that are imported from other countries, those materials that have tariffs applied will cost more.

There are no “complexities” to this. The “PANIC!” people want you to think there are, that’s not true. Every business keeps track of the cost of raw materials. If they don’t know the costs, they can’t set prices. It doesn’t matter if Ford, Canada produces the part or Ford, Flynt creates the part. There is a cost that is paid to have that part in the Ford, Detroit plant to put into a new car.

In a well-functioning business, they are always looking at the cost of raw materials. The cost of raw materials includes the cost of taxes (tariffs) and transportation.

It also includes the cost of bad materials. If you are paying a $1.00 for a widget and there is a 10% failure rate, that means you are paying $1.10 for each working part. If somebody else has the same widget with a cost (price + extra costs) of $1.05 and a failure rate of 0.1% that means they are only scrapping 1 in 1000 widgets.

In this case, it is actually cheaper to buy the “more expensive” widget.

Included in the cost calculations are longer-term issues. If the ball bearings you purchase are not properly heat treated, and you assemble them into a high-precision roller bearing which then fails in a million dollar engine, there is a heck of a lot more costs involved.

We know that people will change their purchasing habits when the cost of needed goods goes up. We saw this when Americans switched from steak to ground beef as their primary meat. Look at the CPI for food, you’ll see that in the past it had steak on it, today it has ground beef.

Because the cost of goods goes up, people will look for better prices. If that search leads to a local business, so much the better.

Unfortunately, local business might not be set up to cope with a large influx of new business. This leads to shortages.

In a market-driven economy, this leads to people consumers offering more or producers charging more. This is called a “signal”.

Because this signal exists, asking for more of that product, producers will attempt to create more product. This could be as simple as turning on an extra machine or as complex as standing up an entirely new production plant.

When this is going on, “the market” will respond. The market responds by buying or selling ownership in different companies. If a company that used to clear $2,000,000 per year is now projected to clear $4,000,000 per year is likely to attract buyers. A company that is seeing their income drop is likely to attract sellers.

This causes market fluctuations.

Over the course of yesterday, the portfolio that I follow was up as much as 1% yet closed down 0.82% Since Trump announced the tariffs, the portfolio has lost 3.53%

On $100,000 that’s a $3,530 loss.

And it is meaningless. That portfolio will go up again.

The people who are screaming the loudest are the people with millions in the stock market. If that are looking at a $10,000,000 portfolio, a 3.53% drop is $353,000 “loss”. That is more than a 1/4 million dollars in just a few days.

But it only becomes a loss if they sell now. If they hold on to those securities and the price recovers or goes up, then they will “make money”. But again, that is only true if they actually sell the security to realize the profits they made.

There is no reason to panic. The sky is not falling. If anything, this might be a good time to look at putting money into the market. The trick is to buy when near the bottom of the sell-off.

The only reason I know this, is I did some research this last week. I am NOT the person you want to take financial advise from.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what are the odds of knowing two such women?

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

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

This is an interesting and challenging case, for me.

This is a Constitutional challenge to Mahmoud being detained and then deported. His claim is that this is a violation of his First and Fifth Amendment protected rights. Because it is a violation of his rights, the court should grant him relief.

Mahmoud is an Arab that claims to be a Palestinian. He entered the United States in December 2022 on a student visa to study for a Master’s degree at Columbia University in New York. He completed that degree in December 2024 and is going to graduate in May 2025. He married in November 2024 and got a green card.

He was granted a green card because he was married to a US citizen. He is still an alien, just not illegal. He has not overstayed his visa, nor is he required to leave when his visa expires.

His lawyer describes his actions in this way:

This describes his actions as speech. Regardless of how reprehensible that speech might be, it is still protected. The First Amendment protects reprehensible speech, not just the words we want to hear. It is easy to believe in “free speech” if the only allowed speech is that which we agree with.

This case is seeking the following relief:

1. Assume jurisdiction over this matter
2. Declare that the state violated Mahmoud’s First amendment and Fifth Amendment protected rights
3. To keep Mahmoud in New York
4. Release Mahmoud
5. Pay Mahmoud’s legal fees

Item 3 is mooted because Mahmoud was out of New York before the case was filed. In a later filing they requested that he be returned to New York.

So we look at the Constitutional challenge. One of the things to note is that not all the Constitution applies to everyone. Some apply to Citizens and some apply to “the people”. The rights limited to citizens are called out by the term “citizen”. The rest of the time the founders use the terms “the people”, “person”, and “the accused.”

The Supreme Court has issued many opinions that restrict “The People” to those with a strong connection to the community politic.

With these in mind, it seems clear that Mahmoud is a member of the people. His rights are protected by most of the Constitution.

Is he challenging a federal law prohibiting the free exercise of or abridgment of his speech? Not directly.

Instead, he challenges the law as applied to him, His claim is that he can’t speak while detained and that the threat of detention has a chilling effect on his ability to speak freely.

The state has not justified his detention in court documents — yet. Instead, they are fighting the most relevant parts first. Bluntly, I don’t care if this asshole is deported or rotting in a jail cell. He’s not out there intimidating the people of the United States.

What the state did was they revoked his visa and his green card.

When can a green card be revoked?

What this means is that the state need only prove that Mahmoud was part of or assisting a terrorist group. Hamas is a designated terrorist group.

Conclusion

The left loves to talk about hate speech. They love it because it allows them to justify their violence. Hate speech is always in the eye of the offended.

“Violent” speech is violence, according to the left.

Violence can be countered with violence.

Therefore, you saying something that they disagree with is hate speech, which in turn is violence, which means they can punch you.

In the other direction, any real, physical violence they engage in is “just protests” and is “speech” protected by the Constitution.

They are going to lose this one. I’ve seen to many good filings from this administration to believe they aren’t going to win. Maybe not at the district level with all the rogue inferior judges, but they will win higher up.

One of the great things about following people on X is that you get news faster and from different points of view.

One of the worst things about X is that you get idiot NPC talking points dumped into your feed constantly.

For the last three weeks, every weekend, there is a spat of NPCs telling me that Trump has gone golfing. That he has gone golfing every weekend since he took office. That his golfing has cost some number of millions of dollars. The number is the same across every post.

This week, the talking points included that Trump was golfing while there were fires on Long Island. How can he be so cruel. And he went golfing last weekend during the fires in North and South Carolina.

Last weekend it was about how the fires in the Carolina’s were happening despite the claims of good forest management. Claims that there wasn’t water to fight the fires. While showing the same video of firefighters using water to fight the fires.

The biggest NPC talking point has been on “Tax cuts for Billionaires.” The claim is that Trump is taking money away from veterans, the sick, and the elderly to give to his “billionaire friends”.

If you open the curtain and peek behind it, you find that they are lying.

So let’s do a little numbering.

We are going to look at somebody making $12000/year, $50,000/year, $100,000/year, $500,000/year, and a million dollars per year.

We use a progressive tax rate, so as your income goes up, so does your tax rate.

Somebody with an income of $1,000,000 pays 328 thousand dollars in taxes. If everybody got a 1% tax cut, he would get to keep $3,281 of his money. The person making $50k per year would get to keep $500 of his money. Oh my goodness.

So what are these huge tax cuts that “Trump gave his billionaire friends?” The Trump tax cuts apply to everybody. The NPCs claim that everybody getting tax cuts is not fair because a millionaire gets $3k back, but regular folk only get $500 back. This is so horrible, that they proposed an amendment that would have increased the tax rate of people making more than $999,999.

This would have added another tax bracket. They are literally saying that if we don’t raise the taxes on those making more than $999,999 we are giving a tax cut.

It doesn’t make sense to anybody except NPCs.

This entire talking point also avoids the question of how billionaires make their money.

If I was working a full-time job and pulling in a billion dollars per year, I would be charging $480,769.23/hour.

It isn’t happening. A million dollars per year income is only $480/hour.

Yes, there are some professions that charge at the $500 to $1000 per hour rate, but they are generally not taking it all home. Instead, that hourly rate goes into paying for many people.

What a millionaire does is they make money by investing. Pretend you made $174,000 in 2024. After paying all your bills, you might take home $50 to $75 thousand for fun stuff.

Now, supposed you took that $50k and invested it in a stock, like $TEM in January 2025 at $32/share. If you sold it at the end of February 2025 at $89.44 you would have made a profit of $89k. Not a bad return over the course of a month.

This is a short-term capital gain which gets taxed at your as above, according to your tax bracket. On the other hand, if you hold that stock for a full 12 months and then sell it, you would only get taxed at 15%, not 24%. That is a 9% savings in taxes.

If you were to have a taxable income of over $533k/year, then your rate would be 20% on that $89k, not 37%. That translates to savings of $15,140.

Trump is not talking about cutting the capital gains taxes. He is talking about income tax changes.

This is the same language game that congress critters make every year. “We made cuts to the budget!” translation, “We aren’t going to spend as much as we wanted to. We are only spending $500,000 more, not the $3.3 million more we wanted”

A cut is when the amount spent this year is less than the amount spent last year.

I believe that I managed to lose some of my article. Still, it is just a rant.