Skills

There are all sorts of old timey skills that are useful in a SHTF scenario, but knowing how to bake bread will be high on the list. At one time in history (ie anytime prior to 1930), pretty much everyone had at least a vague idea of how to bake bread. If they hadn’t done it themselves, they at least had witnessed it being made. The modern grocery store killed the last of the bakers, though. Baking, even the “bougie” artisan stuff, is done largely by machine these days. Why bake when you can just pick up a couple of loaves at the store? And store loaves last for weeks and weeks, while fresh bread goes moldy after only a few days.

When you have access to store bought bread, that’s fine. But what if you don’t? What if … oh, say a pandemic happens, and all the grocery stores are out of EVERYTHING, and you can’t find store bread? The bottom line is you need to know how to make your own.

There are simple loaves, no knead recipes that come together quickly with a minimum of mess. There are complex loaves that require multiple rises and tons of work. I tend to go for bread somewhere in the middle. Two rises to develop the gluten and make for a lovely, crusty bread that will hold together as sandwich exterior. A nice mix of flours. Standard yeast. It’s not a difficult loaf, if you know how to bake.

On Sunday, I held a class for six people at the Fort at No. 4, where I taught them how to make bread. From scratch. In a wood fired bake oven. We had a real range of students. One was a reenactor from the current iteration of Roger’s Rangers, who simply hadn’t learned to bake in the beehive and really wanted some help. One was a complete bread virgin but the price was right and how exciting to get to hang out in a fort and cook bread? The two couples were doing the lessons as a sort of “date day” thing, and were at varying levels of having attempted bread. One of the guys was a baker at a big company, but had never made bread with nothing more than a wooden spoon and a bowl.

We started out the day by adding yeast to warm water, and feeding it a bit of sugar. I explained that we were fermenting the yeast, letting it become active. While it isn’t necessary with dry active yeast (which is what we were using), it’s a good habit to get into. While our yeast was waking up, we went out to start the fire in the beehive oven. Everyone brought some wood, and I had already split kindling and had scraps from Chris’s day in the workshop on Saturday, so the fire started up quickly. Once it was loaded up and roaring, we were off to the kitchen again.

We slowly added our flour into the water and yeast mixture, then stirred with a wooden spoon. Once we had most of the flour in and the dough was forming, it got turned out onto the table, and we started the kneading process. Everyone has sore shoulders this morning (except me), because when kneading entirely by hand, it takes about 20 minutes. They all had various problems with their dough as we kneaded, and I was able to explain a variety of possible failure points. Everyone ended up with a decent “silky smooth” ball of dough, and we set that to rest.

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We’re leaving the 15th century behind, at this point, and moving boldly into the 18th! This recipe comes from The Compleat Housewife, written by Eliza Smith in England in 1773. Today’s recipe is entitled, “To boil Fowls and Cabbage” and is another forced meat yumminess!

Ingredients:

• a well shaped cabbage
• savory forced meat
• 2 eggs
• 2 whole chickens, cooked
• “some” melted butter
• slices of bacon

Pick yourself a nice, sizable cabbage, peel off a few of the outer leaves until it looks clean and good, and then use a sharp knife to cut off the top (like a lid), then cut out the inside of it. You want to form a cavity, in which you can put your meat, but it doesn’t have to be anything special. Set aside the removed bits of cabbage to stew up as a side dish.

Mix together “savory forced meat” (generally this means any ground meat mixed well with spices that you like, and I use a nice chub of country ground sausage meat) with two whisked eggs, so that it’s well distributed. Put the meat and egg mix into the hole in the cabbage, then put the “lid” back on. Wrap the stuffed cabbage with a cloth (cheesecloth or even a tea towel tied in place with kitchen string works well), and lower it into a large pot of lightly salted boiling water. Boil until the exterior of the cabbage is tender, and the meat inside is fully cooked (anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours, depending on the size of your cabbage and the rate of your boil – you want the meat inside to register AT LEAST 160°F to be food safe).

While your cabbage is cooking, roast up a couple of chickens or warm up some rotisserie chicken. Place these on a large platter, and then put the stuffed cabbage (removed from its cloth prison) in between them. Over everything, place several slices of cooked bacon, and then drizzle it with some melted butter.

This makes a lovely presentation, and is quite historically accurate to the 1750s!

When I started to babysit Cray Supercomputers it was just another step. Massive mainframe handling many users, doing many things.

But I quickly learned that there are ways of making “supercomputers” that don’t require massive mainframes. My mentor used to say, “Raytracing is embarrassingly parallel.”

What was meant by that is that every ray fired is completely independent of every other ray fired. His adjunct program rrt was able to distribute work across 1000s of different compute nodes.

We were constantly attempting to improve our ability to throw more compute power at any problem we were encountering. It was always about combining more and more nodes to create more and more powerful compute centers.

Which moved the bottleneck. We went from being CPU starved to being memory starved to being network starved. So we added more network bandwidth until it all balanced out again. Until we bottlenecked on networks again.

After his passing, I did work with a company that supported multiple large corporations.

I was introduced to VMware. A virtualization framework.

Instead of taking “small” computers and joining them together to create larger computers, we were taking “medium” computers and breaking them into small virtual devices.

What is a virtual device

A virtual device is nominally a network interface, a virtual disk drive, or a compute instance.

To create a virtual computer (instance), you tell your vm manager to create a virtual drive, attach it to a virtual computer, attach a virtual DVD drive, allocate a virtual network interface, and boot.

The virtual drive can be a physical drive on the host computer. It can be a partition on a physical drive, it can be a file on the host computer, or it can be a network-attached drive.

If you attach from the host computer, you can only move the drive to other instances on the same computer.

If you attach a network-attached drive, you can only move the drive to other instances with access to the network-attached drive.

I use libvirt for my virtual manager. If I expect the instance to stay on the same host, I use a file on the host computer. That is easy.

If I need to be able to migrate the virtual computer to different machines, I’ll use a Ceph Raw Block Device or a file on a shared filesystem.

What are the cons of using a virtual machine

It can be slower than a physical device. It doesn’t have to be, but sometimes it is.

While you can oversubscribe CPUs, you can’t oversubscribe memory. Memory is always an issue with virtual machines.

When the network isn’t fast enough, network-attached drives will feel slower.

And the big one: if the Network Attached Storage (NAS) fails, all instances depending on the NAS will also fail. Which is why I use Ceph. Ceph can survive multiple drive or node failures.

Another big con: if a host computer fails, it will cause all virtual computers running on that host to also fail.

What are the pros of using a virtual machine

It is trivial to provision virtual machines. There is an entire framework OpenStack that does exactly this. Using OpenStack you can provision an instance with just a few simple commands.

You can migrate an instance from one host computer to another. Even if the disk drive is located on the host computer, it is possible to move the contents of that drive to another host computer.

If you are using a NAS, you can attach a virtual drive to an instance, work on it with that instance, then detach that virtual drive and attach it to a different instance. This means you don’t have to use over the wire data moves.

You can also increase the size of a virtual drive, and the instance can take advantage of more disk space without having to be rebooted or any downtime.

Besides increasing the size, we can attach new drives.

This means that storage management is much easier.

Virtual Networks

The host computer lives on one or more physical networks. The instances can be bridged onto that physical network.

The instance can also be protected behind a Network Address Translation (NAT) service. This gives complete outbound connectivity but requires extra configuration for inbound.

But an instance can be placed within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). A VPC provides the complete internet IP space to the instance (or instances).

This means that user A can have their instances on 192.168.100.x and user B can have their instances on 192.168.100.x with out collisions.

None of user A’s traffic appears in user B’s VPC.

VPCs can be connected to share with gateways. When this is done, all the VPCs must use non-overlapping subnets.

In other words, 192.168.100.1 on user A’s VPC cannot communicate with an instance on user B’s VPC at address 192.168.100.55.

But if user A agrees to use 192.169.100.x and user B agrees to use 192.168.99.x then the VPCs can be connected with a (virtual) router.

Using a VPC means that the user must use a gateway to talk to any other VPC or physical network. This places a NAT service in the gateway.

A physical address is assigned to the gateway, which forwards all traffic to one or more VPC IPs.

Conclusion

While every infrastructure manager (network manager) needs to know their VM Manager. They all work in similar ways. If you know the basics, the rest is just a matter of finding the correct button or command.

This stuff is easy once the infrastructure is set up.

There are a zillion books out there on various aspects of prepping, and I can’t recommend them ALL. But these are some I consider to be truly important, or they’re ones that have been recommended highly by others. I’m going to stick stuff in categories to help make it easier to look through.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY

• The Perfect Bug Out Bag
• Emergency Food Storage and Survival Guide
• Best Guide to Disaster Readiness
• SAS Survival Handbook
• The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It

MED/FIRST AID

• SpecOps Forces Medical Handbook
• Where There is no Doctor
• PDR for Herbal Medicine
• Medicinal Plants of North America
• A Book for Midwives
• The Survival Medicine Handbook (TY Tom!)

SECURITY/SELF-DEFENSE

• 100 Deadly Skills
• Prepper’s Home Defense
• Holding Your Ground
• Navy Seal’s Bug In Guide

GENERAL SKILLS

• Encyclopedia of Country Living
• Basic Butchering of Livestock
• Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties
• Wildwood Wisdom
• No-Grid Survival Projects
• The Way Things Work (TY CBMTTek!)
• 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive (TY Tom!)

CRAFTING/DIY

• The Barefoot Architect
• The Off-Grid Living Bible
• Make, Sew, and Mend
• How to Build a Moonshine Still
• Footwear Pattern Making
• How to Build Wind Turbine (etc)
• Wind Mills and Wind Motors
• Homemade Contrivances

FICTION

• Homestead Bound
• The Collapse
• One Second After
• Going Home
• Getting Out

People do a poor job of creating, managing, and remembering passwords. We are horrible at making random numbers and worse at creating things that are random-like but we can remember.

Part of this is because of the rules put in place by NIST and ISO. ISO 27001 has this to say about passwords:

As computers have become faster, the need for better passwords has also increased. Brute forcing a password has a simple cost formula:
$$\frac{{\mathrm{complexity}}^{\mathrm{length}}}{2}$$
For example, if the complexity is all uppercase letters and the length of the password is 8 characters then we have:
$$\frac{{26}^8}{2}=\mathrm{104,413,532,288}$$

Which might look like a large number, but in computer terms isn’t really. As the complexity goes up, the final number goes up. Adding length causes the number to go up even faster. Consider adding the set of numbers, 0-9 to our complexity verse adding one more character to the length of our password.
$$\frac{{36}^8}{2}=\mathrm{1,410,554,953,728}$$
And adding one more character to the length:
$$\frac{{26}^9}{2}=\mathrm{2,714,751,839,488}$$

Adding just one extra character gives us nearly twice as many values to test.

Oh, the divide by 2 is the average number of tests before we guess right.

If the characters are not truly random, the number of guesses decreases substantially. Using names or words, even with character exchanges, produces a much smaller search space. Regardless, the formula stays the same, even if the vocabulary changes.

Consider just using a 3-word passphrase:

$$\frac{{\mathrm{104,334}}^3}{2}=\mathrm{567,868,237,365,852}$$

As you can see, using a passphrase increases the search space incredibly. The only requirement is that the search space of the letter search meet or exceed the search space of the word search.

Unfortunately, many password methods do not handle long passwords well. In early Unix times, no matter how long of a password you entered, only the first 8 characters were used.

Which brings us to

Password Managers

A password manager stores passwords in an encrypted form and retrieves them for you on demand.

For a password manager (PM) to be acceptable to the users, it must interface with the users browsers and other tools that need passwords. This means it must have a mobile app. If it does not, it will not be used.

The PM should monitor applications for password requests and autofill those requests.

The PM must lock itself after a certain amount of idle time or browser/device restart.

Finally, and in some senses, most important, the PM must be secure from data breaches.

To be secure from data breaches, the PM should never store credentials in clear text.

LastPass

This is one of the better-known PMs. While it had a good track record, there was a data breach and credentials were exposed.

One of my clients used LastPass, so I used it. I never particularly liked it. When I could, I moved away from it.

One of the big downsides is that it requires a live, active internet connection to function. No network, no access.

Keeper

I have used Keeper. It is a well-rounded PM with all the expected features. It stores all credentials encrypted by your password. They can’t access your credentials even if they wanted to. Since they can, your passwords cannot be exposed in a data breach.

One of the strong points of Keeper is the ability to share “folders.” You can have a folder for passwords related to a single project or client and share that folder with other users, inside or outside the organization.

The ability to share passwords means that the administrator can update a shared password, and every member with access to that password gets the change immediately.

Shared folders requires a paid tier.

There is also the ability to store small files securely.

The one downside I discovered with Keeper is that it too requires an active internet connection to function.

We were on a long road trip when my kid ran us out of data on my mobile plan. They consumed nearly 10GB of data in a little over 6 hours.

This left me in the position of attempting to log into my provider’s website using credentials stored in Keeper. Except that the amount of bandwidth available to me was so low that it took 30 minutes to get that password and login.

BitWarden

This is my current PM of choice. It provides all the features of Keeper with a few that appeal to me.

First, it is can be self-hosted. This means that all the data security is provided by me. With the self-hosted version, I can offer PM services to anybody at cost to me.

When you move up to any of the paid tiers, the lowest being $4/user per month, you get the ability to create organizations and then share a collection (folder) with that organization.

The mobile application does not need to have Internet access to function, though you might need to request a sync if there are recent changes to your vault.

All data is stored encrypted. The key to decrypt your vault is your master password. Even if there were to be a data breach, your password would still be secure because decrypting your passwords requires your master password.

The BitWarden allows for the use of a Personal Identification Number, or PIN. Unlike most PINs, the BitWarden PIN can be any number of digits. I find that it is easier to remember a number sequence than to remember random character strings.

You can set when the master password is needed to unlock the vault.

If you happen to forget your PIN, you can still unlock your vault with the master password.

Like all good PMs, BitWarden offers two factor authentication (2FA). It supports YubiKeys and TOTP options. TOTP is commonly referred to as an authenticator.

You can use a secondary authenticator for your 2FA to access BitWarden. But you can also use BitWarden’s integrated TOTP generator.

The pricing appears to be reasonable: $4/user per month for “small teams” and $6/user per month for enterprise-level features.

Psono

This is another self-hosted option. It does not seem to have the same polish as BitWarden. It would be my choice if I were just playing.

Conclusion

If you are not using a Password Manager, now is the time to start. For my readers, I’m willing to give you a free account on our BitWarden server, though you are likely better off using BitWarden’s free offering.

If you live in or near New England, you may know of the very Northern experience of canned brown bread. Cylindrical and sweeter than regular bread, more dense, and yet so delicious when camping! Canned bread has a long history in New England, and is deeply entrenched in our culture (The Takeout). The reality is that canning only made this steamed version of bread more easy to disseminate to the public. It had long been part of the New England colonists’ food culture. So here is a recipe based firmly on the 1908 version of The Rumford Complete Cook Book.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups whole wheat or Golden Wheat flour
• 1 cup yellow cornmeal
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1 egg
• 2 cups whole milk

Sift together the flour, cornmeal, salt, and baking powder. Add in the raisins and molasses. Whisk together the egg and milk, then add that to the flour mixture.

Have ready several well greased tins with oven-safe lids, and fill these 2/3 full of the batter. Grease the lids and fit them onto the tins. If you don’t have appropriate tins, you can use #3 (large bean) cans or even coffee cans (which are generally #10). For can sizing, you can check out this site.

There are two methods you can use for steaming your bread: stovetop or oven.

To steam your bread on the stovetop, you need a pot that is sufficiently larger than your can that you can put a lid on the pot. Put a steamer rack (a metal trivet, even balled up aluminum foil will work) in the bottom of the pot, and put your can on top of your rack. Add enough boiling water (yes, boil it before you put it in the pot with your bread) to come about a third of the way up the side of your can. Cover the pot and turn the heat to its lowest setting that will still maintain a simmer to generate steam. Steam the bread for three hours.

To steam your bread in the oven, pre-heat your oven to 325°F. Find a high sided roasting or other pan that will hold your can of bread and still allow you to pour in enough boiling water to reach a third of the way up the side of the can. Again, steam the bread for three hours.

You can check your bread for doneness by inserting a toothpick. If it comes out clean, it’s ready. I would suggest you start checking your bread at the 2 hour mark, especially if you’re using smaller cans. Continue to steam until the bread is baked through. Let your steamed bread cool on a cookie rack on the counter for at least one hour before removing it from the can. It should slide out fairly easily after it has cooled.

Serve this up as is, or “toast” it in a frying pan with a little bit of butter or margarine. This is very dense, very filling bread, and is in NO WAY a reduced calorie item.

Last week’s project was to make a shooting board.

I had all the stock prepared and had started assembling it when I realized that the screws were too long. They poked out into the part my plane slides down.

This is not good. The project is on hold until I receive more screws.

A Joiner’s Box

This is a simple box to hold my tools. It is about 38″ wide, 15″ deep, and 13″ tall. I think. The design calls for a simple till, an internal box for small parts. I think I will do the more period-correct and have two sliding trays the length of the box.

I brought in my first glued-up panel for my wife to fuss over and tell me nice things. Ego stroking for sure.

She came clean and told me that it was just a board to her, not really worthy of praise.

This led me to think about that simple panel.

To get to the point where I could make that panel, I needed to build my workbench. This was a big build; it is done.

I needed work holding for the bench. I installed a leg vise and drilled holes for hold-downs. I made a batten to hold boards in place as they are planed. This was more than a bit of work.

The first step of making a panel is to be able to cut it to size. My skills at handsawing have gotten good enough that this is no longer an issue for right-angle cuts. It is fast enough that I’m not interested in using a power tool.

Next, the stock needs to be planed smooth and flat. My smoothing plane made short work of the smoothing, and my jack plane got the boards flat. I was able to quickly check for twist and flatness with my winding sticks and a straight edge.

The first board I attempted to smooth and flatten took me hours, and I did a poor job. Today it went quickly, with low effort.

That is because I’ve spent far too many hours sharpening plane irons and chisels. My slow-speed grinder now puts a 26-27° bevel on an iron or chisel; the three stones then bring that to 25°, and the strop polishes the bevel to a mirror-like finish. It is to the point where I only need to use the fine, extra-fine, and strop to bring an edge back to razor sharpness.

You can hear and feel when the blade is sharp. If I would only put the time into sharpening the irons of all the planes every day before starting, my life would actually be better and easier.

Even with a sharp iron, you need to know how to adjust the plane. Before I started this journey, I didn’t know how to do that. My planes fought me constantly. Now they are a pleasure to use.

Besides knowing how to tune, sharpen, and adjust your planes, you need to know how to use them. It is to the point where the process of smoothing and flattening a piece of stock is easy. I start with the #4, make it smooth, and move to the #5 Jack plane for the flat. Using the Jack plane at an angle to present a shearing action also makes the boards flat from side to side.

It only takes 5 to 10 minutes to make a board smooth and flat.

The next part of stock prep is to square an edge. Again I start with the #4, knock down the high spots until I have a smooth edge from end to end, and then I switch to the #5 again.

Checking for squareness is easy but humbling. Except that more and more often the edge is square after the Jack plane.

I’ve been playing with the Jointer plane. It is a huge, heavy, and long plane. The iron is wide enough to cover 2+ inches of wood in a single pass.

For my first panel, I clamped the finished faces together with the squared edges aligned with each other. Less than 4 minutes in the vise with the Jack and Jointer, and the edges are jointed.

The glue-up went very smoothly. There was a very thin bead of glue that came out of the glueline, as wanted. The final product is pretty darn good for my first glue-up in many years.

After the glue had dried for a few hours, I took the clamps off and gave it the once-over. It is not flat enough to plane the finished surface, so I worked on the back surface.

I think that this will be the last panel that I glue up that is full thickness. From now on, I’ll either rough plane the back surface or feed it through the (cheating) bandsaw to take 3/16 off the back face to reduce the amount of chips I make.

So that very unimpressive 12×13 panel represents an entire series of new skills. I’m looking forward to doing still more.

First, a huge shoutout to CourtListener.com. These guys are doing an impressive job of exposing the inner workings of the legal system.

They haven’t hit the state-level courts yet, but at the federal level, they really can’t be beat.

They are a part of the Free Law Project. FLP has managed to get contracts and access to many court filings. They have created software to scrub court filings and collect them in one place. They have created a good search engine that just works.

Recently they announced a new feature: voice-to-text transcription of circuit court oral arguments.

In general, it is much faster for me to read a transcript than to listen to it. Plus, knowing who is speaking makes a difference in understanding what is happening.

With this new feature, I expect to be paying more attention to oral arguments at the appellate level.

I am biased towards them; I contributed a small bit of coding a while ago. They have just gotten better since I found them.

Supreme Court Terms

The Supreme Court term runs from July 1st to July 1st. The old term ends on June 30th, and the new term starts on July 1st with the court starting business in October.

In practical terms, this means that the case numbers change on July 1st. We are now seeing cases with a “25-” prefix, indicating the case was filed in the 2025 term. We won’t see anything really happen until October.

During a term, motions are filed on the docket and the emergency docket. These motions request certain actions of the court. The one we are most familiar with is a motion for a writ of certiorari.

Normally these are filed on the main docket. If a stay or injunction is requested, that will normally be done through the emergency docket.

Occasionally a motion for a stay or injunction will turn into a motion for a writ of certiorari.

Over the course of the term, the Court will hear oral arguments on 60 to 70 cases. These cases encompass all areas of law. Constitutional issues, business law, property law, criminal law, and all the other areas that I don’t know anything about.

The case that overturned Chevron was an administrative case. It just happened to be incredibly important to dismantling the administrative state.

Because of the breadth of types of cases, SCOTUS does not like to take on repetitive cases nor too many cases in the same area. They would rather pick one to three cases that address issues significant to the Nation.

We can expect two or three Second Amendment cases to be heard in a term. The cases chosen will address large issues that advance jurisprudence in Second Amendment law.

Will there be an assault weapons ban case? At this point, I believe the court has indicated that it will not. The refusal to grant cert to Snope (Bianchi) is a strong indicator.

Snope has been an ongoing case since 2017. It was one of the cases looking for cert before cert was granted in Bruen.

The case was brought in the Fourth Circuit to get a favorable ruling to reverse Kolbe v. Hogan.

Bianchi made it to the Supreme Court. Was granted cert after Bruen. The opinion of the Fourth Circuit Court was vacated. The case was remanded to the Fourth Circuit for a “do-over” in light of Bruen.

Two years later, the en banc Fourth Circuit decided they had gotten it right the first time around.

A motion for cert was made to the Supreme Court. That motion was denied.

Why Didn’t The Supreme Court Take These Second Amendment Cases?

Because they are a do-over.

Bruen was a licensing case. The question asked was does the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms extend outside the home? The resounding answer was “YES!” The right to keep and bear arms does exist outside the home. All states are now must-issue states.

The rest of the opinion is dicta. In that dicta, the Court explained how to evaluate Second Amendment challenges. They stated that when there is a constitutional challenge, the first step is to determine if the plain text is implicated. If the plain text is implicated, then it becomes the government’s burden to prove a history and tradition of that type of regulation.

Note, this is for all constitutional challenges. This is the basis of originalism in jurisprudence.

Because the question asked had to do with the right to keep and bear arms outside the home, it was not a repeat of Heller. The Heller methodology was and always has been: is the plain text of the Second Amendment implicated? If yes, then the burden shifts to the government to prove a historical tradition of matching firearms regulations.

Bruen did not change that in the least. It affirmed the Heller methodology.

Heller‘s dicta talks about how to find matching historical firearm regulations. It also discusses every word of the operative clause of the Second Amendment and why the operative clause is controlling and not “well regulated militia.”

In their research into the historical laws of this Nation, the Supreme Court could not find any regulations banning firearms that were in common use. Because there are no matching regulations, there is no history nor tradition of banning firearms in common use, such as the pistols at issue in Heller.

The opinion held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. The specific question allowed the gun-grabbers to limit that to “in the home”.

The gun haters then created a two-step shuffle where they would first decide on the level of scrutiny required to balance away any practical Second Amendment-protected rights in the anti-gun states.

Bruen extend those protections outside the home and explained that the two-step shuffle was not allowed.

So what is Snope? The question asked in Snope is can the state ban a firearm in common use?

This is the same as Heller. The observed fact that the lower courts are not applying Heller correctly does not make the case significant to The Court.

Misbehaving inferior courts can be slapped down via other means.

Types of Second Amendment Cases

I believe there are a few types of cases that are making their way up the court system that will interest The Court.

The first is “sensitive places.” While SCOTUS gave examples of “sensitive places” and examples of what were not “sensitive places”, the states have decided on their definition.

The state’s definition of sensitive place is any place they don’t want armed people.

The second type of case is a definition of “The People.” There have been several cases where 18-20 year-olds have challenged laws restricting their right to keep and bear arms. There is a clear circuit split.

This case would allow The Court to clarify that “The People” means all the people. They might choose to extend that definition to people under the age of 18 as well as legal residents of the United States.

The more important part of that decision will be the dicta. That is where The Court will, again, tell the inferior courts how to do it right.

Finally, I believe we are going to see a case on the NFA. It won’t address machine guns; it will address infringements when there is no justification.

Remember, the reason that you can’t buy a short-barreled rifle with a 4473 is because the federal government has to collect a tax on the transfer of that firearm.

All the requirements, extra background checks, fingerprinting, and chief law enforcement officer approval exist to make sure that you pay your transfer fee and that you can prove that you have paid, on demand.

And nobody is stopping you from buying a machine gun if you are willing to meet the requirements and pay your $200 tax. The closing of the NFA to new machine guns isn’t stopping you from buying existing (pre-1986) machine guns.

In a few years, we might see something challenging the right to acquire machine guns. Acquiring would include making them.

If it ever becomes possible to add new machine guns to the NFA, I can see a booming business for drill guide jigs.

Conclusion

There are big things coming from the Supreme Court in the Second Amendment area. I’m sure it will be good.

I don’t have many pictures of last weekend, as I was busy as all get-out. I have a single shot of one of my pies, which I pre-made at home so I wouldn’t be so busy. The pies were great, but I was still too busy to do anything but be at the kitchen tent.

Saturday, we had a glorious day. Rumors are floating that we had over 6000 people in fair that day, which is pretty damn fine. I sold several books, which was nice. Tips were good, too. With a beautiful day, though, comes the heat. It’s vastly important to put on sunblock several times during the day, because it does wear off as you sweat and it’s vital. Even more important is drinking enough water and assorted other liquids to balance your electrolytes. Water alone won’t do it, because you’re working much harder than usual, sweating buckets (or worse, you stop sweating, which is downright dangerous), and not peeing nearly as often as you should. You can actually get water drunk (loopy from too much water) and still be dehydrated. As someone with VERY low sodium naturally, I always have Gatorade, sekanjabin (a Persian “gatorade” style drink from the middle ages), Liquid IV, and LMNT on hand. It’s necessary to stay on top of things, in order to continue to be functional.

Why is this in the “prepping” section this week? Partly because I didn’t have anywhere else to put it, but partly because there are actual survival skills that I’m talking about here. Being hydrated during heavy labor, especially a kind you’re unused to in daily life, is something  you won’t think of in an emergency situation unless you’re already in the know.

The first weekend of fair, I managed to get slightly dehydrated. I stopped sweating. I knew how hot it was, and that I should be sweating, and I dosed myself with LMNT to try and fix things. Almost immediately, I started sweating again. My body knew it was going to get what it needed, and voila. How is that done if you don’t have fancy, expensive packets of stuff to put into your water? Add vinegar, salt, ginger, and whatever flavoring makes it drinkable for you. This will quite literally save your life. Salt is necessary, and when you’re very hot and NOT sweating, it means your body can’t naturally regulate your body temperature. Salt makes the sweating happen. Vinegar helps balance your natural electrolytes. Ginger stops a cold drink from causing cramps in a very hot body. Sugar makes it palatable. Know how to make some version of it (sekanjabin, shrub, switchel, haymakers, posca, whatever).

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For me, anything cooked in coconut curry is going to be good. You could easily sub out the whitefish for tofu or chicken or anything else, and this would still taste wonderful. This diet friendly, delicious meal is a great way to use cheap whitefish protein in your meals.

Ingredients:

• 2 pollock fillets
• 1 small onion, diced
• 2 carrots, peeled and diced
• 3 red potatoes, diced
• 2 asparagus spears, cut into bite sized pieces
• 1 tbsp red curry powder (or to taste)
• 15 oz can coconut milk
• 15 oz water
• 1 tsp lime juice
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 tbsp avocado oil, divided (or other neutral oil)
• fresh dill (for topping)

Add 2 tbsp of the oil to the cooking pot and heat over medium heat. Stir in the onion, carrots, and asparagus and saute until softened and starting to become clear. Stir in the red curry powder and cook for about 1 minute. Add in the can of coconut milk and then fill the can with water and add that to the pot.

In a skillet, heat the remaining 2 tbsp of oil over medium-high heat. Cook the fish for about 1 minute per side to brown then remove from the heat and cube the fish. Try not to fully cook the fish or it will be too flaky to cube.

Bring the soup pot to a boil and add the diced potato. Reduce to a simmer, then cook for 5 minutes. Add the fish, salt and lime juice to the pot and simmer for 5 more minutes.

Salt to taste, then serve into bowls and top with fresh dill. Add a side of hot, crusty bread and some pickles to make the perfect meal!