• That nip in the evening air, the scent of rain in the distance, and the sound of falling leaves in the forest behind the house all call to me that it’s soup weather! My favorite part about soup is that you can make pretty much anything into soup if you really want to. My turkey noodle soup is a great example. On Sunday evening, we treated ourselves to a lovely turkey breast for our supper. It was much too large for us to finish, even though it wasn’t a whole turkey, and so I diligently denuded the carcass of meat and put it into the fridge for use later in the week. Then it occurred to me that I ought to make broth!

    This is a great recipe to use if you’ve got leftover carcass of any kind. If you like to pick up rotisserie chicken, it’s perfect for making this kind of soup.

    Ingredients for the stock/broth:

    • 1 stripped carcass (turkey or chicken), with whatever skin and gristle there is
    • any drippings from the cooking process
    • the skin of 1 or more onion
    • several crushed garlic cloves, skin on
    • the peelings of 1 or more carrots
    • the leafy tops of 1 or more stalks of celery
    • salt and pepper to taste
    • fresh herbs to taste (optional)

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  • “Management Agency” is the key here.

    In leadership courses we hear the phrase “Either lead, follow or get the fuck out of the way.” There is a strong reason for this, projects fail when leadership is weak.

    “A bad decision now is better than a good decision too late,” is another.

    What this means is that in a situation where leadership is needed, we need a good leader, and then we need to follow them. If we are not following, then we might be the de facto leader. If we are not following, and we are not leading, we are the problem.

    If you want to see a prime example of failed leadership, consider your local PTA. There are reputations at stake, there is money on the table. And there are a dozen voices, all attempting to get their way.

    A natural leader has an ability to lead that comes from their nature, and their upbringing. They might have augmented that natural ability with training. They are still few and far between.

    Trained leaders are those that have been through training on how to lead. They might be able to lead, but they are likely to be uncomfortable leading. This causes failure in trust and mistakes.

    In a disaster, leaders will step up at the time of the event. These will be those that who are natural leaders. The “trained” leaders are likely to be slow to step up, hoping that someone else will take on the mantel of leadership.

    This is precisely what we saw in the current disaster. The natural leaders got up and did.

    These people heard the call of duty, put their lives on hold, grabbed what they could and went into action. When they arrived at the scene, they self organized. That is to say, leaders stepped forward and did what was needed.

    Because they are doers, things got done. The right people were in the right place doing the right thing.

    When FEMA arrives, they bring two things with them, a checkbook and “management”.

    If the management is good, then they will slide into the existing system, their natural or trained leadership skills will shine through, and they will make it easier for the doers to get things done.

    The horrible truth is that the people that FEMA brings to the party are unlikely to be natural leaders. Natural leaders do not find themselves as low-level government employees.

    These examples of petty bureaucrats arrive on scene and start following their scripts. Just like they were taught in class.

    They start by making an inventory of the goods and capabilities they have on hand. According to the book, this is more important than actually seeing those goods and services being delivered to those in need.

    A primary goal is to make sure that those most in need get the help they need. This means holding back on the supplies at hand, to have a reserve for when they find those in desperate need.

    Because they are a management team, when they step in, they take over all the prepositioned goods and services.

    Being management, they need to make sure that they are rested and prepared for the next day’s work.

    As you might guess, this is written from the perspective of the petty bureaucrat. They believe they are doing good. They believe they know better. They believe they are the saviors.

    The correct answer is that they should arrive with hat in hand and ask, “how can I help?”. Instead, they know they are supposed to lead, and leaders take control and bark orders.

    FEMA is a failure at this point.

    That, and they have been used to funnel money to illegal immigrants, makes it all the worse.

    “We are from the government, we are here to help.” is a strong indication that it is time for SSS.

            

  • There are two cases that have been granted certiorari so far. I expect there to be three or four this term.

    The most important, in the long term, is Smith & Wesson Brands Inc. et al. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

    This is a lawfare case initiated by Mexico against a number of firearm related companies. Wholesalers, manufacturers, and retailers. It was brought in Massachusetts. The reasoning is obvious, Massachusetts hates guns. The First Circuit hates guns. The First Circuit is a known rogue inferior court.

    The gist of the case is that people who make and sell guns know that some of their guns will be used illegally. They also know that they will be used illegally in Mexico. The companies did not do enough to keep guns out of Mexico. Therefore, they are responsible for the violence using guns in Mexico.

    This is another attack on the PLCAA, Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The PLCAA was passed to stop frivolous lawsuits against firearms dealers. It affords those that make and sell guns protected from responsibility for the miss use of their products. Just like every other industry in the country.

    Ford Motor Company is not responsible when a drunk driver kills somebody while driving a Ford F150. Chicago Cutlery is not responsible when somebody uses a cheap kitchen knife to kill somebody. Stanley is not responsible when somebody uses one of their hammers to bludgeon somebody to death.

    The firearms’ industry is the only tool that is blamed for the misuse of their products.

    2022, murder by handguns: 7936. Murder by firearm, type unstated: 5704. Murder by knife: 1630. Murder by rifle: 541. Murder by hammer: 367.

    The district court dismissed the case as a PLCAA protected case. The bad guys appealed to the First Circuit where, of course, they decided the suit was novel and somehow outside the PLCAA. The good guys requested cert. back in April.

    Cert was granted October 4th.

    Why is this case so important? Because this is the second large case that has directly attacked the ability of firearm manufacturers for damages. The Sandy Hook case was part of the reason that Remington went bankrupt.

    The idea is not to win these cases, the idea is to drain these companies of money. If they win, so much the better, if they lose, they still win.

    It is a backdoor path to gun control.

    If these large cases succeed, we will see this lawfare extend down to the smallest of entities. Every FFL will be scared of somebody suing them because a firearm they sold was misused.

    The Supreme Court is highly likely to rule in favor of the PLCAA. The arguments given by the bad guys are feeble. The case is interlocutory (not completed at the district and circuit levels.) That there isn’t a circuit split. That the district court dismissed the counts against some of the good guys.

    All the reasons given by the bad guys did not stop the Supreme Court from granting cert. Now we will see what the merit fillings will be.

    The second case that was granted Cert. is Garland v. VanDerStok. This is the case where the ATF decided that a hunk of aluminum is a firearm because it might someday become a firearm.

    The GCA of 1968 defines a “firearm” and “frames and receivers”. A frame or receiver is a thing that can be readily converted into a firearm.

    An AR-15 lower receiver, with attached stock and grip, along with an FCG is not a functional gun. You have to pair it with an upper receiver to create a functional firearm.

    Since this is so easy, the lower receiver is considered a firearm because it can be readily converted to one.

    An AR15 lower receiver starts as either a piece of aluminum bar stock or as a forging.

    It is not a “firearm” under the 1968 GCA until it reaches that stage where it can be readily converted into a functional firearm.

    The ATF has long held that you can completely mill/form the outside of the receiver. That includes decking the top, establishing and threading the buffer tube connection. Forming the grip area.

    You can also drill and ream the holes for the pivot pins, the trigger guard, the magazine latch, the bolt hold open, and all detent pin holes. The magazine catch slot and the bolt hold open slot can also be completely milled.

    If you mark the location of the selector switch, trigger, hammer, or auto-sear pin holes, then it is enough to be a receiver, as defined by the 1968 GCA. Marking any part of the fire control pocket is also a no no.

    The ATF decided that they wanted people purchasing hunks of aluminum that they intended to turn into receivers to fill out 4473s and to have background checks done. So they changed the law.

    A frame or receiver is something that can be readily converted into a firearm.

    The ATF no claims that something that can be converted into a frame or receiver is also a firearm.

    There is no stopping this camel, once it gets its nose in the tent. The ATF could define a hunk of aluminum bar stock as a firearm. They’ve stated that hunks of plastic and aluminum with instructions are firearms. Without those instructions, they are not firearms.

    An 80% frame or receiver is not a firearm, but an 80% frame or receiver with a jig is a firearm.

    This is likely to be decided on process and not the Second Amendment protected rights.

    There are a few other cases teed up. These include the Maryland Assault Weapon/Large Capacity Magazine ban. The California’s LCM ban, if the Ninth actually issues an opinion this decade. In addition, there are a couple of cases coming out of Illinois that would look very nice on the Supreme Court docket.

    Our first case, VanDerStock will be heard on October 8th, 2024. This coming Tuesday.

            

  • I’m exhausted. I’ve been pulling fiber for the last two days. All part of an infrastructure upgrade.

    Normally, pulling cable in a modern datacenter is pretty easy. This is not a modern datacenter.

    The original cable runs were CAT6 with RJ45 connectors. When the cables were installed, the installation had to be nondestructive. No holes in walls, no holes in floors. Hide the cables as best you can.

    One of the cables we removed was to a defunct workstation. It had been run across the floor and then covered with a protective layer to keep it from getting cut or snagged. The outer insulation had been ripped away. There was bare copper showing. Fortunately, that particular workstation hasn’t been in place for a few years.

    The backbone switch was mounted in the basement. Not a real issue. The people who pulled some of the last cable didn’t bother to put in any cable hangers. So it had loops just dangling.

    There were drops that could not be identified. Those are now disconnected, but nobody complained, so nothing was taken offline.

    I’ve found a new favorite cable organizer.

    Cable Management Wire Organizer

    These are reusable. They open fully and will hold many cat6 and even more fiber. They have the 3M foam double-sided tape on them. This works great against smooth, clean surfaces.

    The place where they shine is that they also have a hole designed for a #6 screw. In places where there were no smooth surfaces, much less clean surfaces. The sticky held them in place long enough to drive a screw.

    There are no more dangling cables.

    My only hope is that there are no more configuration issues with the new switch. *caugh*DHCP*caugh*

            

  • This is a person I have been following for years. She has shown herself to be honest. When she makes mistakes, she comes back, acknowledges the error, corrects the error and moves on.

    She was in MA, she is currently in TN(?)

            

  • It seems appropriate to talk about what to do after a flood, right now. With all the devastation down in the southern states, it’s on all our minds.

    First and foremost, if you’re in the path of something and you know about it, listen to locals. If you’re asked to evacuate, DO SO. The people in the Carolinas and Tennessee didn’t receive evacuation orders until after it was too late, but people in Florida knew what was coming. Those who chose to stay behind did so at their own peril. When you ignore an evacuation order, you are telling the authorities that you are entirely on your own, and do not expect any aid from them. You do so knowing that 911 won’t work, that health and medical emergencies will need to be dealt with in house, and that you’ve decided you know better than the weatherman.

    I realize it can be hard to leave everything behind. I’ve done it twice in my life, and it wasn’t any easier the second time than it was the first. What you’re leaving behind is Stuff and Things, and I guarantee you, Stuff and Things are not nearly important as Friends and Family. I speak with experience and authority here. Leaving ahead of an emergency allows you to leave on your own terms.  You can take the time to pack bags, to grab family photographs and important documentation. You can bring along family pets, and favorite children’s toys. Leaving (or attempting to leave) once the emergency is upon you means you’re leaving on the emergency’s terms, rather than your own. You may not have time to find the cat cowering in the basement, or find the woobie your kid can’t sleep without.

    If you can’t leave, for whatever reason, then you need to make reasonable plans for what is likely to happen, what could happen, and what is unlikely to happen. There will always be things that can’t be planned for (like the current destruction of Asheville, for example), but you have to do your best.

    In my area, we deal with freezing rain often enough that we know the power will go out at least once, and likely twice over the winter. In the spring, it’s wet weather and high winds knocking down trees and taking out power lines. The most likely occurrence is that we’ll be without power for a day or less. What might happen is that we’re out of power for a couple of days, and our water might be affected. It’s unlikely that we’ll be out for more than a few days, but we have things on hand to make that less troublesome if it does happen. We’ll be very busy canning all the stuff in our freezer, honestly.

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  • Nerd Babble

    “Switch in the wrong direction…” oh my, that does sound bad.

    We use VLANs for isolating network traffic. Our switches will happily forward all VLANs as on all ports. So a tagged VLAN on port 1 will be transmitted to port 2, if port two responds with an answer on the VLAN. It all just works.

    The new switches are configured so that all the ports are in “access” mode. Access mode means that VLAN traffic does not move across the switch. All of our testing showed that the new switches would just work.

    They did, for the primary, untagged network. Unfortunately, the new switch is “smarter” and refused to forward VLAN traffic.

    The idea of a port in “access” mode is that you can plug an IoT item, think security camera, into a port. All traffic from that port is then forwarded as VLAN traffic, by configuration. This means that the IoT item doesn’t need to support VLANs nor do you have to configure it.

    By changing the ports to the correct setting, things just started to work.

    FEMA

    “We are the government, and we are here to fuck things up.”

    I’m getting some back channel reports that things have gone kinetic down in the disaster area. These are good ol’ boys and they understand the three S’s. Shoot, Shovel, Shut up.

    My reports say that looters were hitting some communities. The looters have gone missing. SSS.

    It is unclear if the looters in question had government ID.

    The number of reports of the government messing things up down there is growing daily.

    The latest story was of one of the helicopter teams having rescued an elderly couple attempted to get them checked into a local hotel, outside the disaster area. They were turned away because there were no vacancies.

    The hotel was filled with government employees.

    The pilot was talking about how they had been living out of their trucks so that there was room for those that needed it in the hotels.

    Seems the government is not as thoughtful.

    Pay careful attention to the words coming out of the puppet and his handlers.

    They appear to have deployed 1000 men to the disaster area. They are claiming that these 1000 men are joining 6000 men already on the ground at work.

    Yes, there are 6000 military men on the ground, getting the job done. They are volunteers there as citizens, not as government employees. They are not under the command of anybody in the government.

    Don’t trust what the MSM says, don’t trust what the government says. Verify everything. Don’t trust my words, check for yourself.

    Ally suggests TikTok. I’m using X.

    Iran, the Target

    Watching my feed blowup over the last 48 hours regarding Iran’s open attack on Israel has been mind-blowing. Hundreds of accounts showing the same footage of explosions in the distance while claiming huge victories for Iran.

    Israel’s ability to wage war was not affected. We know because of the targeted strikes carried out Thursday night.

    Query

    Does anybody have firsthand knowledge of what’s going on down in the disaster area?

            

  • Three steps forward, 2 steps back, we should be stable.

    Nerd stuff: We upgraded our infrastructure, again. We moved from a copper to a fiber backbone. Server links are now up to 25Gbit/second. Everything went smoothly until we started our final tests. It appears that the new switch defaulted ports in the wrong direction.

    This default blocked traffic from our distributed network file system. The switch has been beaten into submission, and is now performing its duties correctly.

            

  • @hunnybeenatural All the info I have is: He’s on IG. Thicc30abroker. Jonathan Howard. Facebook profile Jonathan Howard He has this in his bio on IG Work with me: linktr.ee/jonathan.howard Charlie Keebaugh http://aerialrecovery.org Zeb @National Coatings tinyurl.com/NCIFundraiser They also need Starlink communication. Most areas don’t have a way of communicating. Ppl asking for staging location? Rutherford airport is a great drop off location Please story for other ways to help Hurricane Helene Relief 🙏🏼❤️ #HurricaneHeleneRelief #HurricaneHelene #JonathanHoward #Thicc30abroker #NationalCoatings #aerialrecovery ♬ original sound – Hunny Bee Natural !

    @theappalachianson

    Special thanks to everyone who has supported us and our mountain communities. I see other content creators and myself connecting people with funds and supplies and seeing the power we have to do so is spectacular, but it's still not enough. We scroll through our phones all the time and see tragedies all over the world never thinking it'll be in our own back yard. Donate to: BeLoved Asheville Equal Plates Poder Emma

    ♬ original sound – The Appalachian Son

    Just a sample of the videos that are getting out.

    The primary method of communications, at this point, seems to be StarLink. StarLink has proven itself to be a viable solution to disaster communications. Enough so, that I will be getting StarLink for us, to use as a backup.

    I’ve heard almost nothing good from the federal government. The last I heard was that Kamala is promising those people who lost everything $750.

    I’m sure they will have to pay taxes on that.

    Multiple sources have reported that FEMA has arrived and is confiscating goods and money meant for disaster relief sent by people. One posting claimed that if FEMA decides to, they can choose not to disperse that money, keeping it for the next minor disaster in a blue city.

    If you are donating, make sure your goods and money are going to the people, not the government. Do your research.

            

  • BLUF: Are you in the area that’s been affected by Helene? Talk to us. We want to hear what’s going on from those who are there. If you need help, let us know what we can do. We might not be able to do everything, but we’ll do *something*!

    As I watch what’s unfolding in the Carolinas and Tennessee, I am just heartbroken for the people who’ve lost family members, homes, everything. I’m happy to see so many people, “average people,” standing up and doing what needs doing. I know a lot of people are turning to X for their information from boots on the ground, and I watch TikTok for the same reason.

    I want to scream at the people who are whining about their holidays being cancelled, due to the hurricane’s devastation of the area. Yes, there are people on TikTok who are actually complaining that they can’t go visit scenic Appalachia and such. I suppose they don’t realize that the hotels and AirBnBs they had booked are simply no longer there. It’s not that trips are cancelled to do a bit of clean-up… it’s that entire communities are under water, or have been destroyed. On the other side of that spectrum, there are so many people who are cancelling their bookings but not their fees, meaning they let the owners know they aren’t even attempting to come, but to keep the money because they know it’s needed.

    Yesterday, I watched Trump talking in Georgia (I think? I can’t remember, but one of the places hit hard), and he commented that the state governor couldn’t get ahold of Biden or Harris. I also watched a reporter ask Biden if there was more aid going to the southern states to help dig out the towns devastated by the hurricane, and Biden’s very clear answer was no. Now, Trump’s campaign tends to cut it off right after the “no” but Biden do go on to say more (here’s the clip). I don’t know that Biden’s staff is ignoring the issue, and certainly he managed to get on tv later in the day to tell everyone that there was more aid going to the south. I think the problem is that *Biden* isn’t doing anything. I didn’t really expect him to. He can’t handle simple stairs; I don’t know that we want him somewhere that the ground is uneven and it’s moderately dangerous. Regardless, the mainstream media seems to think that the clip I reference above simply doesn’t exist. They say that Trump is lying about it. But it’s RIGHT THERE.

    I really don’t know what to make of all this. I understand not wanting the President or the VP on the site right now. When Katrina hit New Orleans, Bush delayed going so that he and his entourage of Secret Service didn’t interfere with search and rescue. I didn’t expect anyone from the White House to arrive on scene for a few days, and that’s just fine. But I did expect to see Harris, at least, on television saying words of hope and concern. Isn’t that what she’s all about? The fact that she seems to have completely ignored the red states makes my skin crawl. I mean, let’s face it, there are Blue folks down in the rubble there. Surely she cares about them?

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