• Cassoulet Vert is one of those fancy French dishes that has the look and feel of a delicacy. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to make, and it’s incredibly tasty as well. If you make this one, cook it in a big pot but serve it in individual bowls. The presentation makes it look like you’ve worked for hours in a kitchen, and you’ll impress your friends and family. This recipe doesn’t just look good, by the way. It is both tasty and rather filling!

    Ingredients (soup):

    • 1 can (29 oz) little white beans
    • 2 tablespoons olive oil
    • 1 medium onion diced
    • 4 garlic cloves, rough chopped
    • 4 cups vegetable broth
    • 1 cup water
    • 2 teaspoons salt
    • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
    • 2 bay leaves
    • 2 teaspoon herbs de Provence

    Ingredients (pesto):

    • 2 cups fresh kale, packed
    • 1 cup cilantro, packed
    • 3 cloves garlic
    • zest and juice from one small lemon
    • ¼ cup pine nuts
    • ¼ cup olive oil
    • ¼ cup water
    • 1 teaspoon salt

    In a soup pot, add olive oil and onions, and saute for four to five minutes, stirring. When the onions are soft, add garlic, and saute another 2 minutes.

    Rinse the canned beans well. Add beans, stock, salt, pepper, bay leaves, and other herbs, and stir gently. The broth should just barely cover the beans. Simmer for 30 minutes to an hour.

    While the cassoulet is cooking, make the pesto.

    Put the kale, cilantro, and garlic into a food processor. Pulse until it is chopped but not soupy. Add the rest of the ingredients: lemon zest, lemon juice, oil, water, salt, and the pine nuts. Pulse until it’s well combined but not too smooth. You want pesto, not soup. Use a spatula to scrape off the sides, and pulse briefly one more time. Set aside.

    When the cassoulet is ready, you should remove some of the broth if there’s too much. The soup part should be mostly beans, with only a bit of broth. Stir in the pesto, gently turning it until it’s well mixed. The cassoulet should have the consistency of stew, rather than soup. Continue to simmer on your lowest heat setting for another 10 minutes to let the flavors blend together.

    Add salt and pepper as needed for flavor. This dish should be quite lemony, and salty as well. Top with croutons, sprouts, sliced avocado, a poached egg, or some cheese, depending on your tastes. It pairs well with a white wine, and a hearty, crusty bread.

    Notes:

    You can use traditional basil pesto in this recipe, but you may want to use a bit less. The jolt of flavor from the basil will overpower the mild taste of the beans if you use too much. Add other types of pesto slowly, until the flavor seems right to you. That said, I recommend making the kale pesto above. It’s so delicious!

            

  • Today is different. It is challenging to put into words what is different. I know what has changed, but finding the words is difficult.

    More than 36 years ago, I was sitting in an operating room as a doctor was cutting my wife’s belly open. I was in scrubs, looking and feeling out of place.

    I had informed the doctor ahead of time that if there was a choice to be made between saving my wife or my child that my wife would take priority.

    My child was six months early. She is now a successful mid to upper manager in a large corporation.

    My second set of children came before my oldest graduated from middle school.

    Today, my youngest children, twins, start classes at University.

    The house seems quiet. Their spoor is being quietly removed from the public areas, reviling my mess/spoor.

    I have been informed that there will be cleaning done. That I will be moving my “stuff” out of common areas and into my areas.

    I’m both sad for the silence in the house. I’m also at a loss. This is the first day in over 36 years when my children were not a major part of any decision I made.

            

  • People get very upset when they go to visit Amazon, Netflix, or just their favorite gun blog and the site is down.

    This happens when a site is not configured with high availability in mind.

    The gist is that we do not want to have a single point of failure, anywhere in the system.

    To take a simple example, you have purchased a full network connection to your local office. This means that there is no shared IP address. You have a full /24 (255) IP addresses to work with.

    This means that there is a wire that comes into your office from your provider. This attaches to a router. The router attaches to a switch. Servers connect to the server room switch which connects to the office switch.

    All good.

    You are running a Windows Server on bare metal with a 3 TB drive.

    Now we start to analyze failure points. What if that cable is cut?

    This happened to a military installation in the 90s. They had two cables coming to the site. There was one from the south gate and another from the north gate. If one cable was cut, all the traffic could be carried by the other cable.

    This was great, except that somebody wasn’t thinking when they ran the last 50 feet into the building. They ran both cables through the same conduit. And when there was some street work a year or so later, the conduit was cut, severing both cables.

    The site went down.

    (more…)

            
  • Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceivebe a system admin

    I’ve been deep into a learning curve for the last couple of months, broken by required trips to see dad before he passes.

    The issue at hand is that I need to reduce our infrastructure costs. They are out of hand.

    My original thought, a couple of years ago, was to move to K8S. With K8S, I would be able to deploy sites and supporting architecture with ease. One control file to rule them all.

    This mostly works. I have a Helm deployment for each of the standard types of sites I deploy. Which works well for me.

    The problem is how people build containers.

    My old method of building out a system was to create a configuration file for an HTTP/HTTPS server that then served individual websites. I would put this on a stable OS. We would then do a major OS upgrade every four years on an OS that had a 6-year support tail for LTS releases. (Long-Term Support)

    This doesn’t work for the new class of developers and software deployments.

    Containers are the current answer to all our infrastructure ills.

    (more…)

            

  • Picture this:

    The worst case happens. Trump wins, the Dems create complete havoc, and the country loses large portions of its infrastructure. Unknown agents provocateurs have managed to take down the cell system and the power grid. The grocery stores are empty, and what’s left of the government is having issues getting FEMA where it needs to be. Basically, the world is shit, and once that big ball gets rolling, it takes a long time to stop. You can tell your area isn’t getting any better, anytime soon.

    What do you do?

    All too often, I hear weekend warriors talk about how they’re going to play soldier in the woods with their friends. I was once scoffed at because I said in a dire emergency, I would be home in my comfortable bed and not traipsing around the forest living off worms and beetles. Apparently I’m not a Real Rebel [tm]. *shrug* That’s fine. I let them know it was perfectly acceptable for them to sleep in the dirt and be uncomfortable, but my family wasn’t going to do that.

    (more…)

            

  • The DNC held their convention this week. The level of hypocrisy exceeds even my expectation.

    The left attacked Trump’s kids, Bush’s kids, Palin’s kids. It was always “OK”. Some idiots on the right pointed at Walz’s kid, and the left is having a meltdown over how evil Republicans are.

    I don’t remember walls around the RNC. They have walls around the DNC and hotels where attendees are staying. Besides the business owners that boarded up their stores for the week because of “mostly peaceful riots”, there are businesses that are inside the DMZ where people can’t go without IDs. They are losing money.

    The lies are never ending. Policies are still unstated. And Kamala promises to fix all the issues on day 1. Issues that she and the Muppet that is residing in the White House haven’t fixed in the last 3.5 years.

    I’ve started to dig through some of the cases that have been going on. It has been hard as I’ve been in “learning mode” for the last two months, interrupted by trips home to see my father.

    Dad is back in intensive care. My brother doesn’t think he will make it to Christmas. That will be hard.

    Thank you to everybody who is still here. It is a bit disheartening to see how many people no longer visit regularly.

    So again, thank you.

    We are currently looking for somebody to social engagement on X. The auto post doesn’t work, and the share doesn’t seem to put the image or anything else interesting.

    I think there are maybe 4 followers of @vineofliberty on X at this point.

    If you are interested, please reach out to us at AWA@vineofliberty.com

    If you were one of the regulars and are just stopping by, please leave a comment as to what caused you to leave. I know we aren’t Miguel nor J.Kb.

    Have a great weekend!

            
  • “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” In the Ninth Circuit, if a panel upholds a party’s Second Amendment rights, it follows automatically that the case will be taken en banc. This case bends to that law. I continue to dissent from this court’s Groundhog Day approach to the Second Amendment.

    Following the Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Rahimi, the federal government acquiesced in certiorari in a handful of cases pending before the Court and presenting the same question addressed in this case. The Supreme Court should have granted one or more of those cases, and this case illustrates why. After New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, perhaps no single Second Amendment issue has divided the lower courts more than the constitutionality of the 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(1) felon-disarmament rule’s application to certain nonviolent felons. The Third Circuit—and for a time, this circuit—concluded that there was no analogous tradition of disarmament for at least some defendants. Range v. Att’y Gen.; United States v. Duarte. The Eighth Circuit concluded otherwise, United States v. Jackson, while the Tenth and Eleventh Circuits upheld the continued constitutionality of Section 922(g)(1) under pre-Bruen precedent without reaching the historical question, Vincent v. Garland; United States v. Dubois

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  • I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks thinking a lot about voting, and who I’m supporting, and what I’m learning about politics along the way. I’ve never been a fan of Biden, and Harris wasn’t even a speed bump on my highway to hell until Biden fell down the plane stairs that time. I wasn’t a fan of Trump, either, and found him abrasive and rude. Now, Trump continues to be a bit abrasive, and occasionally rude, but I think he’s learned a bit about what it means both to run for the position of President, and to BE President. I can find him annoying to listen to, and still think he’s the better of the two current choices offered.

    But Harris? She scares me. She doesn’t scare me the way Hillary did. Hillary was actually a wee bit competent (that’s why no one’s been after her about all the people who “accidentally” died when they crossed her or Bill’s path), and that’s terrifying. Harris seems to be a sock puppet. I could actually be happy with a sock puppet, depending on who’s hand was up inside it. In this case, though, I think Harris doesn’t even realize she’s a sock puppet. She doesn’t have a clue what she’s saying. She regurgitates stuff, sometimes out of order. It’s not that she’s senile like Biden or anything. She just doesn’t have enough brain cells to run at full capacity. I suspect that’s why they aren’t having her answer questions.

    Despite all that, I could probably manage to live through a Harris presidency. The economy would tank, and a lot of socialist programs would eat up what little money we have left, and the country would be in shambles… but we’d live through it. The Right would buckle down, make do, and solidify itself over a four year Left presidency. I would probably be unhappy. I know most of my family would be devastated. But none of our lives would be directly threatened.

    If Trump comes into the presidency, we have a whole different story. I genuinely believe he’ll fix a lot of the problems we’re currently having. He’s smart enough to listen to advisors, and smart enough to pick decent advisors. He’s not afraid to fire people who do stupid stuff. The economy will likely get better, slowly.

    And then the Left will burn the country to the ground, in the name of love, tolerance, and peace.

    (more…)

            

  • One of the hard things to accept is that so many inferior courts think that when a case is vacated and remanded, it isn’t for good reason.

    The courts speak in polite ways. You don’t call out a judge for being an idiot. No matter how often they open their mouth to remove all doubt.

    In Bianchi, the Supreme Court granted cert, vacated the Fourth Circuit’s judgement, and remanded it back to the Fourth Circuit for a do-over.

    If my boss comes to me and tells me that I got it wrong, here is the documentation, read the documentation and do it over, right. I’m going to read that documentation.

    If that documentation suggests that I’m right, I know that is the zebra in the herd of horses. Why? Because my boss told me to do it over.

    If I read his documentation, use it to reason to the same method/result, I’m making a mistake.

    Unfortunately, our court system doesn’t allow an easy method for an inferior court to say, “I’m too stupid to understand what you said, what does this line mean?”

    One of the cases that was before the Supreme Court before Rahimi was U.S.A. v Jackson. It was not granted cert until after Rahimi was decided. At that point, the case was granted cert, the Eighth Circuit’s opinion was vacated, and the case was remanded back to the inferior court with instructions to “do it over, follow the documentation in Rahimi”

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  • We are watching The Inside Man. They have a version of this which I wish I could find.

    Regardless, a powerful message.