• Continuing Resolution

    DOGE has its first confirmed kill!

    The continuing resolution is the legal device that the government has been using to avoid passing a budget. It has been nearly 30 years since Congress completed all its appropriation bills before the start of the new fiscal year.

    The last time a budget was passed was in December 2020.

    A continuing resolution is supposed to say, “We are going to keep going at the current rate.”

    This was not a continuing resolution. This was a barge of pork barrels. Maybe three or four barges.

    The last CR to be passed was around 29 pages. This thing was over 1500.

    Elon posted a one sentence message to X with a picture of the printed CR. Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?

    People decided to read the bill. And what they found was infuriating. In addition, people took to using Grok, X’s AI to look for pork in the bill.

    This caused The People to light up the switchboard in Congress demanding that this monstrosity not be passed.

    Not Budget Related

    It appears there were items in the CR to limit the ability to investigate the J6 commission. To give Congress critters a $100,000/year raise.

    It wasn’t just money pork, it was congress critters trying to save their asses.

    Too Many Nerd Postings

    I have an issue where I need to get packets from here to there securely. Not only must it be secure, it must be fast. Add to this that there is a network routing issue that needs to be solved for multiple systems, the obvious choice is to move to an overlay network.

    The overlay network methodology I picked was OVN.

    OVN is well documented, if you want to use a OpenStack or Kubernetes. If you don’t need or want the overhead of OpenStack, then things are more complex.

    Why am I avoiding K8S? It is too expensive in the cloud. Using a container-based system just makes more sense, for me.

    After spending 10 to 12 hours researching and testing, it is difficult to be interested in the stuff going down in politics or the courts.

    I wrote my first article on OVN yesterday. It is published but not yet linked. There will be more.

    Court Cases

    In 2022, we were anticipating the Supreme Court taking the first Second Amendment challenge since the 2010 McDonald case. The first case we were hoping for was New York Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. New York City.

    The city and state of New York worked overtime to moot the case, and succeeded.

    The Supreme Court instead took the Bruen case, which resulted in a new landscape of Second Amendment litigation.

    It felt much like the giddy times after Heller. You might recall that there was a time, shortly after the Heller decision, when Washington, D.C. was a constitutional carry city. They changed that in a hurry.

    The same thing happened after Bruen. A boat load of new cases were opened. We waited to see what would happen when the rogue, inferior, courts got involved.

    We found that it was the same shit in a different color. The Seventh Circuit court still thinks they are better than the Supreme Court. The First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Ninth circuit are still playing games to keep unconstitutional laws on the books.

    We were hoping that the Supreme Court was going to stomp on those nasty, evil, duplicitous, lying inferior courts. Instead, the Supreme Court kept sending cases back down because they weren’t ripe yet.

    Today we are at the same point as we were in 2022. Waiting to see which cases the Supreme Court decides to hear. There are three big ones lined up. My expectation is that they will take all three and consolidate them.

    The consolidation will allow them to create a single opinion. This will keep the rogue inferior courts and the state from picking and choosing language from the three different opinions to create confusion.

    Question of the Week

    When did you hear about the CR? When did you find out it was a pork barrel of non-essential and frankly terrible bills stuffed into a must pass bill?

    What is your opinion of Elon’s method of addressing the CR?

            

  • The Internet is a fantastic creature. I’m not speaking of the information you can find on the internet. Nor am I speaking of the entertainment that is available on the Internet.

    The mere fact that you can ask for information at your desk or on your phone and somehow that request gets there, and the response gets back, is mind bogglingly complex.

    Here is the dirty little secret about computers. It is all zeros and ones. There are no pictures, there are no videos, there are no songs nor even text, it is all zeros and ones.

    We group these zeros and ones into units of different sizes. The three primary sizes are 8, 32, and 64, with a spattering of 16. At the lowest level, we think about these in groups of 8, called octets.

    You might know them as “Bytes”.

    Now, zeros and ones are a bit difficult to read and write. So we use base 16 to read and write bytes.

    Base 16 has 16 digits, just like base 10 has 10 digits. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. are the digits of base 10.

    For base 16, we add A, B, C, D, E, and F as the six extra digits.

    So we have a 32-bit number that looks like this: 4C4F5645 in hex (base 16) and 1280267845 in base 10, and “LOVE” as ASCII.

    It is all zeros and ones. It takes meaning when we decide how those bits will be interpreted.

    When you ask Google to search for “The Vine of Liberty”, your browser starts with a name, which it needs to convert to an address. The name is “www.google.com”. Depending on where you are, one of the addresses will be 142.250.69.68.

    This is a different representation of a 32-bit word. In this “dotted quad”, each number represents the decimal value of an 8-bit byte.

    For you, the simple household, your device asks, “How can I get this message to 142.250.69.68?”

    Your device looks up the address in the “routing table”. Your device likely only has a single entry in the routing table. The route of last resort, or default route.

    When no other table entries match, then send the request to a default router

    A router has a single job, to move packets (requests and responses) from one network to another. When your default router receives your device’s request, it looks up the IP address (142.250.69.68) in its routing table. Again, it is likely that there is only a single entry in that table, the default route.

    This is the simple way that things work in simple networks. It continues to work until the moment when a router has to make a choice. Does it send the packet from network H (your home network) to network A or to network B.

    That router will have a routing table. It will find a match for 142.250.69.68 in that table, which will tell that router which network to forward your request to.

    If nothing about the Internet ever changed, that would be all that was needed. Every router would know how to get to every address and that would be it.

    But it isn’t that easy. The Internet changes, constantly. This means that we need to be able to change those routing tables quickly and easily.

    The answer to that issue is a routing protocol. The oldest was RIP. It doesn’t work well today as it sends too much data too often. Back in slower networking times, RIP was taking up nearly 70% of my bandwidth. We stopped that.

    There are two major types of routing protocols, external and internal. The primary external protocol, today, is the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. I don’t have to worry about that.

    What I do need to worry about is internal routing. For internal routing, I use a combination of static routes and OSPF.

    And this is where it gets complex. The data center has two physical networks. A management network and a production network.

    The management network runs on a single subnet, with each host having a unique address on that subnet.

    The production network runs on multiple subnets, each subnet serving to isolate problems. In addition, traffic on the production network needs to be able to reach the Internet.

    The management network requires zero routing. One network space. No connection to the outside world.

    On top of the physical network are layered multiple other networks. There is the OVN NAS network. This is how each of the hypervisors gets access to block storage (and shared file systems). There is the OVN NAS data network. There is the OVN VM network, the container network.

    In addition, there are other networks used inside the container environment.

    Some of these networks exist in isolation. Others are used as transport networks. No traffic originates nor terminates in these transport networks.

    But other networks need to be able to speak to each other.

    That means that every device needs to know how to reach every address. This means that OSPF is doing magic all the time to make things work.

    Why? Redundancy. Every device has at least two paths to the next hop. If the primary link fails, the secondary link takes over.

    This is done by rebuilding the routing table.

    OVN links don’t fail (unless the idiot driving the keyboard does something stupid). The physical network can fail. When this happens, OVN just routes the tunnels in different directions.

    So why this rant?

    Because I can’t get parts of this to work!

    My need is to move the containers into the OVN.

    And I can’t get routing to work consistently. ARGH!

    Oh well. Filler done.

            

  • ABC is being forced has agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s Presidential Library(1) after being found guilty of defamation of character. “ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll(2).”

    This is an interesting ending, one I sort of wish Trump had pushed to completion instead of settling. Carroll has never managed to get Trump convicted of rape. What she did was make complaints, and her lawyers set things up such that the jury decided the Bad Orange Man had to be guilty of something, so they went with the lesser charge of sexual assault and/or battery. Please know, that charge (which was not, to my knowledge, defined beyond that) can be handed off to someone who patted the ass of someone in public. It’s ridiculous. I have a real problem with it, because if someone has committed sexual assault, it needs to be dealt with in a court of law. If you can’t prove that it happened, then you need to walk away. Does it suck? Yeah, sometimes it does. But this is America. We don’t get to presume someone guilty until proven innocent, as they do in other countries.

    Regardless, he was never convicted of rape, and ABC has to pay for saying he was. It’s not enough, though. We need to get back to our roots, where someone is innocent until PROVEN guilty. Not guessed. Not raked over the media coals. PROVEN guilty, in a court of law, in front of a jury of peers or a judge. I’m tired of the media telling us what to believe.

    There have been a few wins for Trump, of late, beyond winning the Presidency. Near as I can tell, he’s basically stopped WWIII. Canada is so upset that they’ve got politicians standing up and vowing to tighten the border while simultaneously saying that Canadians must stand up for Canada and how dare the United States stand up for the United States! It’s rather funny, or it would be if it were a joke.

    In the media, we’re seeing interesting reports. Democracy Forward is saying that Trump loses 93% of his cases in court(3), but it isn’t quite that simple. If you go to Policy Integrity’s “round up,(4)” you can see a list of the things Trump won and lost in his first term. If you actually read them, some of the “losses” are wins for Trump. It’s hard to understand, because they (the media, and these sites that report about court cases) just seem to dump everything out in a way that’s difficult to follow. I can only assume that’s because it hides the fact that Trump is doing pretty well.

    (more…)

            

  • The trifecta of pro-Second Amendment cases

    In the 60s, I can remember wrapping Christmas presents and then going to the Greyhound bus terminal with my mother. There, she would pay to have a box shipped to the Midwest. This had to be done weeks in advance.

    My relatives would go down to the bus station when the packages arrived to pick them up. There were no tracking numbers, there were no promises to deliver on any particular date.

    As regular people, it was how you shipped large boxes safely and “rapidly.” The US Post Office would tell you that by the early part of November you should have mailed all your Christmas presents.

    When Federal-Express came into existence, the concept of getting something from here to there in less than 24 hours sprang into existence as well. For a few dollars, you could send your packages in early December and still get them there in time.

    On Friday night, near midnight, I ordered a gift. It arrived Sunday morning.

    Instant gratification.

    The courts still move like it was in the days before the Pony Express. Everything takes more time than you want it to. Everything is slower than it should be. Everything is designed to allow for extensions to file.

    Nothing is ever “fast”.

    For example, you file a petition for writ of certiorari, the respondent has 30 days to file a reply. If that reply is not “We aren’t going to reply”, the petitioner has 14 days(IANAL) to file their response.

    This back and forth always has a built-in delay. In addition, the parties can always ask for an extension. It is unusual for the extension to be denied.

    September 16th, Petition for writ of certiorari is filed. It is a month before the state says, “we are not going to respond”.

    October 28th, the court “requests” the respondent file a response. It is a month before the respondent asks for another 30 days to respond. They want 60 days to write a response.

    The Court says, “No, you can have 14 days.”

    The petitioner files their response on the day it is due. Do you think they wrote on the day it was due, or do you think they wrote it back when the request for a response was filed?

    By the rules of the Court, the petitioner has 14 days to respond. This would put their due date as the 26th of December, past the date to distribute for the January 10th conference.

    The Supreme Court conferences every(?) Friday to discuss which cases they will grant cert. These conferences are just the 9 justices. Nobody else attends them.

    If the normal schedule was kept, that would mean that the case would not be conferenced until late January. Which means we might miss the 2024 Supreme Court term.

    The lawyers for the petitioner (good guys) filed a short note requesting that the petition be distributed on the 24th of December for the January 10th conference. They promise to file their response on the 20th.

    This puts this case on schedule for the 2024 term.

    Conclusion

    We might not see a response from the Court regarding this letter. What we will see is the filing of the response on the 20th.

    What we want to see is the case distributed for the conference on the 24th. We are also hoping to see Snope and Ocean State Tactical distributed as well.

    If that happens, then the Justices will be discussing all three Second Amendment cases on the 10th of January.

    Out of that Conference, we can expect to see each case either relisted or denied. I do not expect to see any of them denied.

    If they are relisted, the most likely reason is that they are being granted cert, barring anything procedurally wrong with the cases. That week, the law clerks will be researching those cases to make sure there are no monkey wrenches to be thrown.

    The next week, we should expect another relisting. If we don’t see a relisting, we will see acceptance.

    What we do not want to see is more than two relistings. More than two is likely to indicate something is wrong with one or more of the cases, and one or more of the Justices is writing a statement regarding that denial of cert.

            

  • I’m hoping this is true…

            

  • I love making different feasts. It pleases me to no end to come up with some new recipe based on something I saw in passing online. This recipe is based on something I saw on TikTok, and another recipe that I skimmed through on Facebook.

    Ingredients:

    • pork ribs (2 per person, roughly)
    • barbecue sauce (your favorite)
    • orange juice
    • cranberries
    • salt, pepper, paprika, thyme, oregano, red pepper flakes

    Grease a large oven-safe pot or pan, deep enough to contain all the ribs plus the liquids. I use no-stick spray, but you could use any fat, really. Preheat your oven to 250F.

    Place your ribs into the pan in whatever manner you like, but in a single layer. Don’t stack them on top of each other, or some will be delicious and the rest will be hard and yucky. While the oven preheats, whisk together the barbecue sauce and juice, then add in the spices until it’s right for you. You want enough to cover the top of your ribs, but not to drown them. They’ll make their own liquid as they cook, so you just need to coat the top.

    Cover the top of the ribs with the sauce, using a brush to get all the nooks and crannies. Add in the whole, fresh cranberries or some dried ones (or dried cherries, or whatever floats your boat here). Cover the pan with a lid or tin foil, and place in the oven. Bake for 2 hours.

    After 2 hours, check on the ribs. They should be partially cooked (pork ribs are fully cooked when they reach an internal temperature of 210F, but they also tend to fall apart when you try to take their temperature, so you can just judge it by that if you like) at this point. Move the ribs around if some of them are sticking out or looking dry, but otherwise, just check on them. Raise the temperature of your oven to 350F, and continue to bake, covered, until the pork is falling apart and ready. You’ll know it’s ready when it basically falls apart when you poke it with a fork.

    Serve up hot, with delicata squash and fresh made spinach noodles.

    Notes:

    I spooned the liquid out of the pot over my noodles, and it was FANTASTIC. I made the noodles myself, although they were a bit soft. I didn’t add enough flour to the recipe. Still, they were tender and quite yummy. And green LOL!

            

  • It’s 0430 and I’ve finally regained access to my admin account. The good news is none of the other clients seem to have been affected.

    The short of it, three days ago I started draining one of my nodes. It completed Sunday.

    This allowed me time to move it to its new home IP and network. In the course of doing the move, I found that I didn’t understand OSPF well enough. But that’s working.

    What I did find is that my system is both complex and very resilient. The system was slowly losing contact with different nodes in the OVN cluster. But because I had configured it to be an HA system, it all just kept working.

    Even when it stopped, the rest of the cluster kept on trucking. No changes could be made, but it just ran.

    This gave me a few hours to make sure all the network configurations were “right”.

    Then I found more places where the HA was just working because I had not updated configuration files.

    It all seems good now. A little slow, but it’s working.

            

  • Defamation: A statement that injures a third party’s reputation. It is a type of tort.

    Slander: A false statement, usually made orally, which defames another person. The damages from slander must be proved by the party suing.

    Libel: A method of defamation expressed by print, writing, pictures, signs, effigies, or any communication embodied in physical form that is injurious to a person’s reputation.

    In other words, it is all linked together. In general, we speak of libel as written defamation and slander as spoken defamation.

    E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her. Trump denied the allegation he raped her. Carroll then sued Trump for defamation.

    Trump lost the defamation case. I believe that the case is on appeal.

    This is the case that leftists have been using to say “Trump was found guilty of rape.”

    No, he was not. Rape is a criminal offense, tried in a court of law, prosecuted by the state. E. Carroll was unable to find a single prosecutor willing to charge Trump with rape.

    She brought a civil case. In a criminal case, the accused must be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil case, it is a preponderance of the evidence. Very different.

    Nobody on the left is willing to say that a court that finds in the way they want might be biased, while at the same time screaming that any court that finds against their wishes must be right-wing extremists/right leaning bias. In terms of this case, the suit was brought in a notoriously anti-Trump court.

    The court allowed statements that did not directly relate to the charge.

    In the end, the jury found that no rape occurred but felt that there was a sexual assault. See past articles regarding multiple charges to allow a jury to do the right thing and then give a lesser charge to make the plaintiff (in a civil suit) or the prosecutor a “smaller” win.

    The jury awarded E. Carroll 5 million dollars.

    Trump makes it all back, and then some

    Yesterday, December 15th, Trump reached a settlement with ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle Trump’s defamation suit against ABC News for statements made by George Stephanopoulos.

    George claimed that Trump had been found guilt of Rape. This is a false statement that damages Trump’s reputation, i.e., defamation.

    Rather than a length and expensive civil trial, which they would have lost. ABC News agreed to pay $15 million for the building of the Trump presidential library. They will also pay $1 million dollars towards Trump’s legal fees.

    https://www.foxnews.com/media/george-stephanopoulos-abc-apologize-trump-forced-pay-15-million-settle-defamation-suit

            

  • Divination is the art of predicting the future or reading a person using some type of indicator.

    Most people can do a cold read of a person and get it mostly right. Others do a much better job.

    My personal example was being on a date with a young lady while at university. We had had a nice dinner and were sitting in the rose garden on campus, watching and listening to the water of the river.

    I wasn’t pushing, being mostly stupid about females at the time, I was just talking and listening.

    I stopped, and said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you had been raped here.” The “guess” was right. I was able to observe her discomfort, and divine what was causing it. Was it magic? No. It was simply a logical result of analyzing the situation and her no verbal cues.

    One of the methods that “readers” use to do divination is “reading the tea leaves.” Tea is poured into a teacup with loose tea. The person drinks the tea, leaving the leaves behind. The reader then looks into the cup and divines something about the person, often predicting what will happen to that person.

    They read the non-verbal cues to do this, frequently without even understanding the cues they are reading.

    The Supreme Court is mystical in how they decide what cases to hear. It is difficult to predict how they will decide given the questioning during oral arguments. Yet, we insist on trying to predict what they will do.

    The information we have to work with is typically very limited. In this case, we are attempting to predict if they will grant certiorari in a Second Amendment case.

    We have access to the case histories, we have access to the opinion pieces written by others, we have the briefs filed by the parties. We know what other cases are seeking certiorari. And we know cases that will be seeking certiorari.

    And we have the orders issued by the Court.

    The case which is furthest along appears to be Snope v Brown. It has been fully briefed, it was scheduled to be discussed yesterday.

    Snope is an “assault weapon” ban.

    Another Second Amendment case is Ocean State Tactical v. Rhode Island. It has been fully briefed, it was scheduled to be discussed yesterday.

    Ocean State Tactical is a “large capacity magazine” ban.

    Then there is the case of Gray v. Jennings. This is one of the interesting cases because it doesn’t ask the Court to decide a Second Amendment issue directly, instead, it asks how the inferior courts should address motions for a preliminary injunction.

    In September 2024, the petitioner (good guys) filed a petition for writ of certiorari. They are asking the Court to clarify a Winter factor.

    Winter factors are the four questions that must be answered before a preliminary injunction is granted, or a stay is granted.

    The first question is, “Is the party likelihood of success on the merits of the case?” In other words, is the party requesting the injunction or stay likely to have the winning argument.

    The second question is, “Is the party likely to suffer irreparable harm without the injunction/stay?” Losing money is not irreparable harm. Losing your life is. Losing your business? That might be something that can be fixed with lots of money.

    The third question is, “Does the balance of equities and hardships tip in favor of the party seeking the injunction/stay?” If the hardship is trivial, then it does not justify an injunction or stay.

    The fourth question is, “What is in the best interest of the public?”

    In the past, the state has often won injunction’s and stays by getting the courts to modify the order of the factors. They claim it is in the public’s best interest, the court agrees, so never looks at the likelihood of success. Or the court finds that the party is likely to win on the merits, but no harm and no hardship is happening.

    The Supreme Court not only set forth the “Winter Factors” but they later ordered that the factors be done in order. Success on the merits must always be done first.

    In most civil rights cases, if the party is likely to succeed on the merits of the case, they are granted the preliminary injunction or stay. Having your constitutionally protected rights infringed is always irreparable harm. You will never again be able to speak at that moment.

    The balance of equities always favors the protection of The People’s rights.

    The public has no interest in enforcing unconstitutional laws.

    The exception, of course, has always been Second Amendment cases. Many courts believe that there is no harm in denying The People their constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.

    Gray asks, “Is the infringement of Second Amendment [protected] rights per se irreparable injury?”

    The Reading

    Snope and Ocean State Tactical were both conferenced for December 13th. The state declined to respond to the petition in September/October by Gray. The case was scheduled for conference on November 8.

    Five days after it was scheduled, the Court issued a demand for the state to respond.

    This is tea leave one. If the Supreme Court is “requesting” a response, it means that they are looking at the case seriously. You get your response in.

    The state delayed in responding, then asked for an extension. The extension was granted. The date for the state to respond was fixed at December 12th.

    The response is the normal anti-gun garbage. They first claim that there is no circuit split. This is not a requirement, it is just an assumption. The Court will often let an issue simmer until there is a good case. The one place where they are more likely to step in, is if the interpretation of the law is different in different parts of the country.

    Their second argument is that the plaintiffs (good guys) should have presented evidence that being unable to purchase guns and magazines was actual irreparable harm.

    Finally, they argue that the Circuit court not only rejected their appeal regarding the denial of preliminary injunction on winter factor two, but on factors three and four.

    Because the petitioners (good guys) are only challenging the second Winter factor, if it is a Second Amendment challenge, then it is irreparable harm. The reason is that the other two factors also favor the plaintiff, per current case law.

    Conclusion

    The Supreme Court likely wants to discuss all three of these cases in the same conference. When we see these three cases distributed for conference on the same day, that will be a strong indication.

    The Supreme Court can decide to combine the three cases, combine two and leave the third separate, or hear all three.

    Of course, they could decide to hear none of them, this is highly unlikely.

            

  • Okay, today’s post is a bit of a cheat, but what can I say. I like to window shop, even when the window is Amazon. LOL!

    There are a ton of items out there that would make excellent gifts for the Prepper in your life. I hope you find some of these to be of use.

    It’s just a little list. It’s one I think is worthwhile looking into. Create your own. If you have young ‘uns or teens, give them a Get Home bag for part of their stocking. Plan out your garden for next year and get all the seeds as stocking stuffers. Heck, get seeds you can start indoors now, and plant outside when it gets warmer.

    There are some items that are “always buy” in my opinion, like the zip ties and thermal blankets. No matter how many you have, more is always a good thing. Also in that list would be paracord on the roll, small first aid kits, rain ponchos that fit in a purse… There are so many ideas.

    Happy holidays, folks. No matter what you celebrate, this is a month full of holy days, and may each of you find something soul comforting over this month.