B.L.U.F.
The babblings of a not lawyer about just how good a weekend order from the Ninth Circuit was for The People.
(1500 words)

There is a name that should be familiar to us, but which is not, Federal Judge Jack Weinstein. He sat on the Eastern District of New York district court from 1967 until 2020.

Why is he important? He was the federal judge that oversaw a number of mass tort cases. The one of interest to us, in the Second Amendment community, is the cases involving Diethylstilbestrol, or DES.

DES was prescribed to pregnant woman to reduce the risk of complications from 1940 through the early 1970s.

It turned out that it caused significant medical complications.

Of course, being America, once it was determined that there was an injury and that somebody might be at fault, lawsuits were filed.

But here is the thing, every pharmaceutical company made DES. Each of the pills was the same. It was almost impossible to tell the manufacture of a DES pill.

More than that, most people just don’t know. When I look at my medication bottles, there is no indication of who manufactured that particular lot of pills. I can go to my pharmacist and find out. On the other hand, I would have a difficult time finding out who manufactured the pills I took when I lived in Maryland. I’m not even sure what pharmacy I used, at that time.

This is where Judge Weinstein comes in. His name was pulled as the judge to hear the first suit filed in the eastern district of New York. From the start, it looked like he was sympathetic to the plaintiffs, the people suing. More suits were opened in the Eastern District.

Instead of a judge being drawn at random, the plaintiffs would request that their case be handled by Judge Weinstein. For judicial expectancy, these requests were granted. This is normally a good thing. This is what happened in California when Judge Benitez was the judge to hear so many Second Amendment challenges.

The defendants stood up in court and said, “Hey, it wasn’t me, and they can’t prove it was me. Dismiss me from the suit.”.

This is because no plaintiff could point to any particular defendant and prove that the defendant in question was the company that manufactured the pills that the defendant took. Since there was no way of figuring out which defendant was responsible for which plaintiff, it looked like the cases would be dismissed.

Judge Weinstein reviewed this and came up with a plan. His plan was a type of joint responsibility. He reasoned that for any particular year, each defendant held a particular market share. Company A held 50%, company B held 25%, company C held 15%, and D, E, and F held the remaining 10%. His ruling was that each company was responsible for a portion of the fine based on their market share.

Thus, for every $100 award, company A paid $50, company B paid $25 and so on.

But how did this intersect with the Second Amendment?

It turns out that Judge Weinstein was a rabid anti-gun person. There wasn’t a thing about guns he approved of, unless it was protecting his sorry arse.

The anti-gunners were not winning in the courts in ways to completely ban guns, but they reasoned that they could “get rid of guns” if there were no more sellers or manufacturers of guns. To this end, they started suing gun manufacturers and sellers.

And they filed in the Eastern District of New York. And they requested that the cases be assigned to Judge Weinstein because these gun suits were just like the lawsuits filed in the DES cases. Judge Weinstein gleefully accepted these cases.

Even if the defendants (good guys), won the suits, the costs of litigation were so high it drove smaller companies out of business.

This ended with Congress passing several bills to stop it, the current version is the PLCAA.

Lawfare

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On December 20, 2023, District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney of the Southern District of California granted the plaintiffs (good guys) motion for a preliminary injunction.

This enjoined (stopped) the state of California from enforcing California Senate Bill 2. This was the “every place is sensitive, no guns allowed” bill.

Quoting Judge Carney, . SB2’s coverage is sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court. Reno May v. Robert Bonta, 8:23-cv-01696, (C.D. Cal. Dec 20, 2023) ECF No. 45.

Of course, the state started whining like a little baby when their infringement was slapped down. They went running to the Ninth Circuit to get an emergency stay.

The only surprise in this was that it took the state two whole days to file for the emergency stay.

While waiting for the emergency administrative panel to give their order, The People of California, lucky enough to have a CCW, could carry in all the places they use to be able to carry.

On December 30, 2023, Judges Johnnie B. RAWLINSON, Jay S. BYBEE, and Andrew D. HURWITZ granted the stay. This meant that on January 1st, 2024, The People of California could no longer carry. It was impossible, or nearly so, to carry with a CCW without violating a sensitive place restriction.

We do not know whether this was a three to zero ruling or a two to one ruling.

There were no more filings after the December 30th order. But the plaintiffs must have been working hard, behind the scenes. How do we know that? Because yesterday afternoon, the 6th of January, the stay was dissolved. At least one judge on the Ninth Circuit had the gonads to stand up for The People.

All the filings have been forwarded to the merits panel.

The case is going to be heard on the merits? Wow?

What is even more amazing is that it will be heard in April. To put this in perspective:

Punch it Chewy!

At one time, I was a member of the NRA. My mentor gave me that membership. The legislative announcements we received were useful.

We submitted testimony three times, I spoke before the Maryland Senate committee that was looking at infringement bills. Every time, it was the NRA that gave us the heads-up. It was the NRA there, fighting for our rights.

In those committee hearings, there were always a dozen or more anti-gun groups and exactly one pro-Second Amendment group.

We look and see the NRA is missing in the current court battles. They were there. They still are.

Consider the name of this group, “The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association”. You might remember them from such hits as “New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York” and “New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, Superintendent of New York State Police, Et Al.”.

Let me quote you a little something from their web page: We are a not-for-profit 501(c)4 organization and the official NRA-affiliated State Association in New York..

That’s correct, that was the NRA working for many years to help get our win in Bruen

Today, the NRA is a shell of its former self. I know people who maintain their memberships because they just do. I send my money to other groups, groups who I see in court battles time and time again.

Please pray that the NRA can recover from its nose dive to become a powerhouse in the support of the Second Amendment again.

I am a “hobby” machinist. I’ve read some books, I’ve watched 1000s of YouTube videos. I’ve even been in the shop and made things. But I’m still a hobby grade machinist.

Occasionally, there are things that you just don’t know you don’t know.

The bible for machinists is the Machinery’s Handbook. It contains maths, it contains formulas, it contains specifications, it contains just about any knowledge you might need to machine something.

I’ve looked at the section on bearings, and it didn’t click.

Then one of you sent me some feedback on the Casinator. It was obvious from the outset that they knew what they were talking about. They rattled off specifications and bearing identifiers without issue. I had to spend some time looking things up.

One of the things that we deal with is attaching things to one another. You can glue things together with molten metal, but that has its issues. You can attach things with bolts and other fasteners. You can also shove something into a hole that is too small for it with enough force that it goes in and stays in place.

That last thing is called a “press fit”. Assume you have a 1/4in hole, and you want to press a 1/4in shaft into that hole and have it stick. If the hole is 0.2500 and the shaft is 0.2490, the shaft clears the hole. As long as the shaft doesn’t expand or the hole shrinks from heat, everything is fine.

But we want it to stick. We can either make the hole smaller or the shaft bigger. The Machinery’s Handbook will guide you to the correct values.

Bearings are designed to be held in place. One of the most common methods is a press fit. For the types of bearings I’m using, this means that when the bearing is pressed onto the shaft, it stays. When the bearing is pressed into the faceplate, it stays.

The amount of interference is based on many factors, some of those factors are known only to the manufacturer of the bearings.

Thus, “nominal”. With the R4ZZ bearings I am using, they are nominally 5/8 OD and 1/4 ID.

They are not 0.6250 and 0.2500. The OD is large, and the ID is smaller. The interference fit is built into the bearing design.

My job is to hit the proper sizes when I machine the pockets and shafts. That is to say, my pockets must be 0.6250 within the given tolerances, and the shaft must be 0.250 within the given tolerances.

No maths for me! Just hit my numbers.

Thank you!

Thank you, everybody who has given me feed back on the reloading series and on my dreams of building the Casinater.

The court cases are starting to ramp up, I’ll be digging into those a bit more as progress happens.

My wife told me that when she sees an article with countless words and numerous quotes, she has to put extra time aside to read them. That reading the quotes is particularly difficult.

I’ve added some new formatting capabilities. I’m going to start highlighting important parts of quotes. I need those quotes because I want context to be available to you. I want the highlighting so that it is easier for you to follow what I consider to be significant.

The comments are open, please let us know what we are doing right and what we need to improve.

Thanks again.

I have all the raw materials in hand, as well as the motor and power supply. The 5 mm drive belt material is somewhere in the reloading supplies. It is the material I used to make a replacement belt for the wet tumbler when the original, 20-year-old belt broke.

Is this a commercial design? No. The front drive belt is there to provide a built-in safety. It will slip if there is too much drag on the system. In a finished product, I would be mounting the motor differently, behind the front plate.

In the same way, the idler shoulder bolt would be a blind hole instead of a through hole.

Finally, it is likely that a better design would use belts for driving everything instead of gears and belts.

Here’s a peek at the rear.

As soon as I get working drawings out of FreeCAD, I’ll go into the shop and make the faceplate and mount up the motor.

The next step will be to press the bearings into the faceplate. Then I’ll make the drive pulley, the cutter/driven pulley, and the three toolholders.

The last step is making the gears. I’ll be cutting a longish piece of Delrin with 22 tooth gears. That long gear will then be cut into 4 actual gears to use. The final task will be the 14 tooth idler gear and the shoulder bolt.

Exciting times.

The Seventh Circuit court ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen and decided that Illinois did nothing wrong when they held their Bruen tantrum to bass PICA.

The case got dumped back in Judge McGlynn’s lap. The plaintiffs filed motions for things to help The People.

Judge McGlynn denied them, but in writing that denial he took issue with the Seventh Circuit court. This is the same as publicly stating, “The boss told me to fill your home with concrete. I have to do it. They are wrong for all these reasons …”.

But in the meantime, the state has continued their quest to deny Second Amendment protected rights to The People of Illinois.

On December 22, 2023, the state told the court: Our attorney is super-duper busy. She’s scheduled herself out of the office from December 26 through January 9. And she’s so busy, she has other cases with deadlines, there are three holidays, she just can’t do it.

Yesterday, Judge McGlynn said, “NO. You WILL have the scheduled reply by the 19th of January.”

From following these cases, I believe that the normal scheduling is about a month, with replies due 3 weeks after and responses do a week after the reply. It feels like Judge McGlynn is going to keep the state on a short leash.

There was a time when I had the luxury of going shopping for movies and music every Friday. The family would get in the car, and we would drive over to Circuit City and look through the new movie releases.

As we were looking through the movies, I heard a nice five string quartet on the store speakers. I asked what the group was, found the disk and went to purchase it.

My eldest daughter, a freshman in high school, took one look at the cover and accused me of buying the album because the cover art showed some fine ladies.

If this is a repeat, sorry.

Welcome to the beginning of another year of crisis.

One and a half years after the Supreme Court issued their opinion in the Bruen case, not a single Second Amendment challenge has been resolved. Every state that had Draconian infringements now has worse infringements.

After Bruen I was hoping to get a permit to carry in MA. That is not happening anytime soon.

The economy is the worse I’ve ever seen it. For the first time in my life, I’m stressing about bringing in enough money for the family.

We are already into the campaign process. I’m watching Biden hide in the basement, not bothering to campaign at all. Meanwhile, the media is attacking each of the Republican candidates in turn. It will only get worse.

I’ve decided on my next project, I just do a reasonable job of it.

It turns out that there are multiple different companies that sell trimmers for cutting cases to length. The issue is setting the distance to trim. Both Lee and Lyman have a system where a probe goes through the flash hole to bottom out on the case holder.

Those probes fit all the standard cutters.

The cutters have standard threads.

My project is a geared motor driving the trimmer. The connection will be via rubber pulley. The shaft will feed through the face and where a gear will be mounted. That will drive a distribution gear to drive three other shafts. Feeding back to the front where they will be drilled and tapped to take the standard case prep tools.

So, when setup and running, you will be able to trim a case to length, chamfer the outside, chamfer the inside and then mount the next case for processing. When doing the pockets, you can have up to four tools spinning. I figure a reamer, a normalizer, and a pocket hole cleaner.

It is all fun, I’ve got some Delrin rods to make gears from, looking forward to making this monster.

Happy New Years to you all.

Stay ready, stay prepared, have fun.

My original router was Vyatta running on a virtual machine on at PC. 100baseT connections
I upgraded that to an EdgeRouter X by Ubiquiti. The base software was built on Vyatta.
The EdgeRouter X is dual core 800Mhz MIPS cpu with 4 (or 5?) Gig-E ports.
The EdgeRouter X was unable to keep up with 1GBit/s traffic between two ports with NAT running.
The EdgeRouter X was just replaced with an EdgeRouter 4.
The EdgeRouter 4 is a four core 1Gz MIPS cpu with 3 Gig-E ports and one 1Gbit SFP port.
The Edgerouter 4 is keeping up with the current traffic load.
Things will likely break when I upgrade to the Fidium 2Gbit/s services.
END-UPDATE
(950 words)
One of the things I enjoy doing is teaching English as a Second Language to some of my client’s employees. (You in the back, stop sniggering, yes, I can actually teach dis stuf.)

I have written a custom program that tracks the progress of each student in their book of choice. There is a screen for reading which displays a bit more than a paragraph. I have buttons to show definition or to play a pronunciation sound bite.

It tracks each session, recording which paragraphs are read, what words we look at. At the end of a session, I can click one button and email them the automatic notes along with any notes I might add.

To do the actual communication, we use Google Hangouts/Meetings. Unfortunately, switching between different displays is not easy.

Enter Open Broadcast Studio, or OBS for short. OBS allows me to set up scenes. Each scene has different sources. These are combined to create a single output.

The output is then streamed to a streaming service, or it is recorded. Or you can use the virtual camera to export the image.

This thing is so neat that I created a short animation of Sonic popping up over my shoulder as I sat at my desk. Then, in a video chat with my grandson, I clicked the button that made the animation run. My grandson was over the roof to see Sonic in the same room as me.

I set up OBS to follow the window that has focus, of an allowed subset, which makes it easy for me to run three windows and have my students see exactly what I want them to see.

The problem that started to crop up was the network was dropping out. Two or three times per session.

In addition to that, we’ve had significant issues with the upstairs getting good signal since the new roof went on the house.

When we upgraded from Comcast to Fidium, we got a 100x speed up in our uploads. This means that we can do regular backups of the machines at the house.

Except I can’t. I’m topping out at 20 Mbits/second on the backups. This is much too slow.

Tuesday, I had had enough. I had communicated with my cloud provider, verified bandwidth in and out of my instances. From there I followed up with Fidium. Fidium said, “that’s slow” and sent out a tech.

Wednesday the tech arrives. We do speed testing with all of my equipment out of the loop. 995Mbit/s. Close enough to 1Gbit/s to make no difference.

The problem is with my equipment.

My equipment is commercial grade stuff. It should not be failing. So I do testing. Sure enough, my router is the bottleneck.

My original router was a virtual machine running on a PC with Vyatta router software. It worked fine, but that PC needed to retire. It was replaced with an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X. That was a fanless box about 4x5x1 inches. 5 ports with PoE. Great little router. 800Mhz Dual core. It replaced my old PC box and just worked.

That is, until I tried to move 1Gb/s in and out of that poor little box.

It crapped its little pants. Up to and including locking up hard.

As I’m investigating, my wife screams from the kitchen. When I went to investigate, the door of the front-loading washing machine had broken off.

That’s ok, It is mostly plastic with some metal bushings for the hinge.

NOPE. It is mostly plastic. The outer frame runs $250, the inner door panel runs $250, the hinge is cheap at $55.

And I can’t get it apart because one of the screws has rusted and stripped while I was attempting to take it out.

Which leads to ordering new and better tools.

The next day we were in the garage, on a 20ft extension ladder leaning against the slope of the roof, drilling and cutting a hole in the roof.

When we had the roof replaced, I had the guys go into the garage and mark where it was safe to cut through into the space between the house and the garage. So I was able to drill it safely.

We then spent nearly 3 hours trying to pull cable from the house side to the hole we had cut. It didn’t help that my son got his left and right mixed up and was yelling at me to move my tape to the right when he really wanted it to go left.

In the end, we stuck a 6 ft length of aluminum rod through the hole at the house side. My son then fished a zip tie loop over that rod and then that was pushed back to the wall. Then we feed the other fishing tape out from the house and through the loop. Then my son pulled his tape back to the hole we had cut, finally pulling it back into the garage.

10 minutes later, I had cable upstairs and the PoE access point powered up. It all just worked.

Network win! We finally have good connectivity in the upstairs again.

This left the washing machine and router to deal with. After discussions with the family, I ordered a new router.

It arrived Saturday. I was able to transfer the configuration from the old router. Did some other magic configuration. Then simply unplugged the old router, plugged the cables into the new router.

The upgrade was so seamless that connections to my remote instances stayed up while I did the switch over.

So I now have 950Mbit/second in and out of the router. My backups might run faster. The world is getting network better.

Oh, no glitches in network traffic since I replaced the router.