• Ally has an event at the Fort this weekend. I drove her up Friday to stay the next two nights.

    We arrived after dark. The moon was bright, the skies clear.

    Ordinarily, visiting the fort is stepping back into a bustling place where I have so much to do.

    Tonight it was silence. There was nobody but Ally and I.

    We got to listen to silence. It was wonderful.

    It was dark. Walking through the entrance in the dark is different. The shadows are longer. The palisade, taller, more imposing.

    I stood there for a while, thinking of what it would have been like to stand sentry in the dark. My eyes adjusting to the moonlight, watching for the waving of the grass. Listening for anything disturbing the sleep of the fauna.

    It is a beautiful memory.

            

  • So there’s an emergency. The power is out, and your neighbor comes by to borrow a candle. It’s no big deal, you lend them one of your hurricane lanterns, so they can have light and be safe. You don’t even think twice about it. When it’s a short-term emergency, this is a standard response, and it’s very reasonable. When there is a better-than-coin-toss likelihood of replenishing your stash of any given item in the near future (“near” being defined however you like), lending or gifting is not a big deal.

    If we’re dealing with a big emergency, though, this may not be the case. Suddenly, giving something to your friend or neighbor seems a lot less reasonable. You have to weigh the possibility that you may not be able to get more of whatever it is you’re lending, before you run out yourself.

    It’s not easy to say no. It’s a skill, and it’s one you have to practice, as with all other skills. Unlike most of the other prepping skills, it comes with an emotional cost that far surpasses its use.

    Consider this scenario: It’s the apocalypse, however you see that. You’re fairly well situated, and have “enough” of stuff that you’re not hurting. But you’re budgeting every calorie, and watching the weather to know what to do next. Your neighbor comes by and asks to “borrow” a candle. They have kids, and those kids are afraid of the dark, and she knows you have extras… Suddenly, it’s not so easy to say no. Note the kids, because that’s the gotcha that many people will inveigle into the conversation if they think it’ll get you to part with your goods.

    It’s easy to say that they ought to have prepared in advance, like you did. And it’s true, the parents should have prepared. The kids, though, are not responsible for their parents’ stupidity or lack of forethought. So what do you do? You still say no.

    (more…)

            

  • Introspection

    This has been a long week of the left showing an enormous amount of introspection, looking at themselves to see why they lost the election…

    Who am I kidding, the number who are actually looking at themselves appears to be so small compared to the complete melt down of why you are bad for voting for Trump.

    Nerd Network Stuff

    There are times when I feel so slow. I’ve been learning about OpenvSwitch and OVN. There are some great advantages to using it.

    Unfortunately, nothing is ever easy.

    I know how networks work. I’ve been in the trenches, bit fiddling on the wire, since the late 80s. This means I understand all these logical switches and logical routers that OVN uses.

    Nope. I don’t.

    The euphony that hit today? Open Virtual Networks use tables to describe logical devices. It translates those to code. That code is then “compiled” and handed to OpenvSwitch.

    This is not “networking” this is “programming”. There are many things that “just work” in the networking world, which doesn’t translate to this programming perspective.

    I’ve started reading the code, it is now starting to make more sense.

    Fetterman

    Or as he is better known, Lurch, has lurched to the right.

    His race was seemingly pretty corrupt, and I knew he was going to be another Democrat rubber stamp.

    He has turned out to be a bit better than expected:

    I mean, I would describe it as god-tier level trolling, that has triggered a full-on China Syndrome to own the libs in perpetuity.”
    — Sen. John Fetterman

    Not a bad description of Matt Gaetz’s nomination for AG.

    The left can’t keep up

    I figure that by January, the left is going to have lost half of its people to heart attacks and strokes. Trump is announcing nomination after nomination.

    He is announcing them so rapidly that the MSM can’t keep up and Trump is blowing the news cycle right out of the water.

    I like winning

    Conclusion

    What has been your favorite nomination, so fart, and why?

            

  • Hopefully, a short one.

    I’ve been accused of reacting quickly to situations. Mostly, this is a result of anticipating different situations and making a plan, long before anything happens.

    I used to need to walk about a mile from where I parked to the office. This meant I had to carry my briefcase, with “extras”, my coffee travel cup, and my fat old self that distance. Sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sunshine, and often in the cold and snow.

    My briefcase was slung over my left shoulder, my left hand holding the strap. My right hand, held my coffee travel cup. Before I left the vehicle, I repeated, “if attacked, toss mug at attacker, draw.” and “Just drop the mug.”

    I never needed to do those actions, but it meant that I had already decided what to do if needed. Preplanning and positioning yourself to have the advantage.

    This required me to think about me, about how I respond, about what I would do. It is the easiest level of introspection.

    Introspection becomes more difficult when you have to look at yourself, warts included, to figure out if you have done wrong. If you need to change.

    If somebody says I did something wrong, I always treat it seriously. I always look to see what I did wrong and, if I was actually wrong, how to change myself to keep from making the same error.

    This is difficult to perform honestly. You need to be willing to admit errors, and accept responsibility for your mistakes.

    It Is His Fault

    If you are not being honest with yourself, it is easy to blame others. It is his fault, not your own.

    It isn’t that you didn’t study for the test, it is that he put things on the exam that he didn’t warn you about.

    It isn’t that you didn’t start your project until the day it was due, it was the size of the project.

    It isn’t that you said objectionable things, it was that he was mean. He wasn’t fair.

    If you look at a situation where you feel like you should have succeeded, but didn’t, and you are looking at outside reasons, stop.

    Look at yourself. What did you do wrong? What can you do differently.

    Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you

    If you look at yourself, and you believe that you didn’t make a mistake, then you can investigate outside causes.

    That means investigate.

    It does not mean leap to the conclusion. There are often other reasons. Look at yourself first.

    When you are looking at outside forces, don’t look at the motive. Look at the actions. Solve the actions before you assume motives.

    If you are told that you did something because you have impure motives, this isn’t going to accomplish anything.

    Did he perform better than you did. Did she put in a great effort than you did. Did they beat you because they were better than you.

    If so, be honest with yourself. Move forward, changing yourself, to do better next time.

            

  • It’s been a heck of a few weeks, but things seem to finally be slowing down slightly. I am behind in postings, and hella busy, so if I miss one or two, I apologize. It’s National Novel Writing Month, and I’m writing a new cookbook. I hope to have the first draft complete by Dec 1st. That eats a lot of time, because it requires me to do a LOT of writing each day, but it’s very productive.

    I got talking with friends about the differences between the Left and the Right. The biggest one that I see is the concept of morals. These are, of course, very sweeping generalities. Take what you will from them.

    The Right has a very strict sense of morality, and while there are people under the Big Tent with different beliefs, generally speaking the vast majority hold incredibly similar morals. You can be a straight laced, white Christian and be Republican. You can be as gay as they come, pagan, and be Republican. But if you think it’s okay to punch people because of their beliefs, you can’t really be Republican. The opposite is true of the Left. On the Left, if you aren’t clad in rainbows and supportive of whatever the victim-de-jour requires, you can’t be Democrat. On the other hand, you can have wildly different moral codes, and in fact have moral codes that change depending on the moment.

    The Right likes to talk about how intolerant the Left is, and the Left makes all sorts of claims about intolerance on the Right. Trump’s election win has the Left trotting out Karl Popper’s essay on intolerance, of course. Let me share:

    “Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.” — Karl Popper, The Open Societies and Its Enemies

    (more…)

            

  • During the dark days before Heller, the rogue inferior courts, like the Ninth Circuit, came to the consensus that the phrase “a well regulated militia” was more indicative of who had the right to keep and bear arms than “the right of the people”.

    The result of this piece of stupidity was that we, The People, could not challenge a law based on the Second Amendment. We had no standing.

    The federal courts can only address active controversy for the people affected for which they can grant relief. You cannot go to the court and have them decide on which color is best. Nor can you challenge many government regulations, even if they are known to be bad. You have no bone in the fight. No skin in the fight.

    The courts have long ruled that being a taxpayer does not grant you the right to challenge the government.

    Heller says that the Second Amendment applies to the people

    Yes, it does. The Court did a fantastic job of driving a spike through the heart of that bit of sophistry in Heller, ⁣ but that doesn’t mean that the inferior courts haven’t found other things they can twist.

    That idea, that the only “people” that had standing to make a Second Amendment challenge were the Militia. That private Militias are banned in many states. The only “legal” militia is the National Guard. The state controls the National Guard. The only people that can challenge state infringements on Second Amendment grounds was the state.

    What Part of the Constitution Authorizes the Department of Education?

    The civics and history lessons required to understand the federal government’s role in education are of course deeply intertwined and begin, as with so many things American, with the Constitution. That document makes no mention of education. It does state in the 10th Amendment that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution … are reserved to the States respectively.” This might seem to preclude any federal oversight of education, except that the 14th Amendment requires all states to provide “any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
    —When it Comes to Education, the Federal Government is in Charge of … Um, What? | Harvard Graduate School of Education, (last visited Nov. 13, 2024)

    When the Supreme Court issued their opinion in —Brown V. Board of Education, 98 L. Ed. 2d 873 (1954) the Federal Government has used the 14th Amendment to justify prosecuting legally sanctioned discrimination.

    The issue is that the Federal Government’s lust for power caused them to overstep “…to correct for persistently unequal access to resources…” —When it Comes to Education, the Federal Government is in Charge of … Um, What?, supra. This is all the justification they really needed to create the Department of Education.

    You and I can look at this and agree that the Department of Education is not authorized under our Constitution. What can you, or I, do about it.

    You would think we could run to the courts and file a lawsuit to stop the law. It doesn’t work that way.

    The “case or controversy” clause of Article III of the Constitution imposes a minimal constitutional standing requirement on all litigants attempting to bring suit in federal court. In order to invoke the court’s jurisdiction, the plaintiff must demonstrate, at an “irreducible minimum,” that: (1) he/she has suffered a distinct and palpable injury as a result of the putatively illegal conduct of the defendant; (2) the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct; and (3) it is likely to be redressed if the requested relief is granted.
    —Justice Manual | 35. Standing to Sue | United States Department of Justice, (last visited Nov. 13, 2024)

    You have not suffered a distinct and palpable injury. You would have paid taxes regardless of the law, and the only injury you, or I can point to is our tax dollars being miss-spent.

    Most of the requirements that the DoE places on the state are stated in terms of getting or not getting money.

    A few years ago, the school board was hearing a request to raise the price of school meals for students. There was no need to raise the price of the meals. The costs were still covered by what the students were paying.

    They were required to raise prices to maintain compliance with a DoE “free lunches” program. Under the program, the schools are allowed to purchase food from the government at a significant savings.

    If we had ditched the program, the cost of school meals would have gone up more than what the program required.

    The board was forced to raise prices so that they could continue to offer lower priced school meals. You can’t make this stuff up.

    Who has standing?

    Let’s say that on day one, Trump uses Obama’s pen and phone methodology and shuts down the Department of Education. The DoE answers to the executive. He decides how the laws are enforced and carried out.

    You are no longer having your money taken to give to failing schools, that will never succeed. You don’t get to keep any more of your money, that’s still going to be taken away.

    But somebody is now being injured. All the people who are no longer getting the beautiful DoE money have been injured by the executive order.

    This means that they have standing to file a lawsuit in federal court.

    Which means the government can now argue that the DoE violates the Constitution. The plaintiffs (people wanting money from the federal government), have to argue how the Constitution authorizes the transfer of wealth to them.

    Reading the plain text of the Constitution and the 14th Amendment, we can see that education is not mentioned in the Constitution, as amended.

    At the first step, the plaintiffs lose. If we presume, without finding, that it is constitutionally authorized, the plaintiffs need to show a match to this Nation’s historical tradition of education regulations.

    That fails as well.

    In the question of Anchor Babies, the same is true. As soon as Trump says “no more anchor babies”, somebody will sue. Then it can go through the court system. During that process, they will find that the Supreme Court has already decided the question of Anchor Babies with —United States V. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898)

    That decision was placed upon the grounds, that the meaning of those words was, “not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance;” that by the Constitution, as originally established, “Indians not taxed” were excluded from the persons according to whose numbers representatives in Congress and direct taxes were apportioned among the several States, and Congress was empowered to regulate commerce, not only “with foreign nations,” and among the several States, but “with the Indian tribes;” that the Indian tribes, being within the territorial limits of the United States, were not, strictly speaking, foreign States, but were alien nations, distinct political communities, the members of which owed immediate allegiance to their several tribes, and were not part of the people of the United States; that the alien and dependent condition of the members of one of those tribes could not be put off at their own will, without the action or assent of the United States; and that they were never deemed citizens, except when naturalized, collectively or individually, under explicit provisions of a treaty, or of an act of Congress; and, therefore, that “Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States, members of, and owing immediate allegiance to, one of the Indian tribes (an alien, though dependent, power), although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more `born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ within the meaning of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children born within the United States of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign nations.” And it was observed that the language used, in defining citizenship, in the first section of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, by the very Congress which framed the Fourteenth Amendment, was “all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed.” 112 U.S. 99-103.
    —id. at 680–81

    In other words, if the child is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, it is not a citizen of the United States. Welping your child on American soil does not make your child a citizen of the United States.

    Life is going to get interesting, in a good way.

            

  •         

  • I’m not a huge creamed corn fan, but wow, this was delicious! It was a bright, sunny looking meal on a miserable, chill evening. The sweetness of the corn complimented the savory chicken, and the entire dish came together in under an hour. I hope you enjoy!

    Ingredients:

    • 2 lbs chicken breasts, cut into strips
    • 1 tsp onion powder
    • 1/2 tsp garlic powder
    • 2 cans of corn (15 oz each) strained
    • 1-1/2 cups milk
    • 3 tbsp olive oil
    • 1 large onion, diced
    • 4 cloves of garlic, minced
    • 1 tsp of dry oregano
    • 2 sprigs of fresh thyme
    • 1 pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)
    • 2 tbsp butter
    • 1/3 cup Parmesan cheese, freshly grated
    • salt and pepper to taste
    • fresh cilantro for garnish (optional)

    On a plate or platter, lay out the chicken strips. Drizzle them with a tablespoon of olive oil, and season with salt and pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder. Set the chicken to the side.

    Add the first can of drained corn into your blender or food processor and add in the milk. Blend until this is smooth, then set it aside.

    In a large sauce pan, heat the remaining olive oil over a medium high heat. Add in the chicken strips and sear until they are golden brown. Don’t rush this! You  may need to do it in stages, depending on the size and depth of your pan. Don’t crowd the pan; it’s better to do several batches than to try and shove them all in at the same time. When the strips are seared, remove them and rest them on a plate.

    In the pan you just removed the chicken from, add in the onion and saute until it’s soft and translucent. Add in the minced garlic, and saute until it is fragrant, about a minute. Add in the pinch of red pepper flakes (if desired), oregano, and thyme. Stir to combine.

    Pour the corn and the corn and milk mixture into the pan over the onions and herbs. Stir well, and then simmer until it begins to thicken. Season it with salt and pepper, to taste.

    Remove the sprigs of thyme, and add in the butter and cheese. Fold it in gently, and let it simmer for another few minutes until it’s all incorporated. Return the chicken and the juices to the pan, cover, and let it simmer for another few minutes until the chicken is cooked through and the sauce is thick and gravy-like.

    Notes:

    I didn’t use fresh thyme. Instead, I used a teaspoon of dried thyme. It worked fine! I used oat milk, because I can’t do dairy, but regular milk would be great. I used plant based “butter,” and I added the cheese at the very end, so I could have mine (with plant based “cheese”) separate from everyone else’s (with real cheese). That worked out relatively well, to be honest. I served it up with some pasta, but it would have gone equally well with rice or mashed potatoes.

    It does need a vegetable, as corn really doesn’t pause much on its way through you. I went with carrots, because it was such a bright yellow that I thought it needed some orange in there. I boiled them, then sauteed them in olive oil and garlic, and served them on the side.

            

  • Networking used to be simple. It is unclear to me why I think that. Maybe because when I started all of this, it was simple.

    Networks are broken down into two major classes, Point-to-Point (P2P) or broadcast. When you transmit on a P2P port, the data goes to a dedicated port on the other side of a physical link. There it comes out.

    Each port is provided an IP address. A routing table tells the router which port to transmit on to reach a particular network. A router works in a store and forward procedure. It reads the entire packet from a port, then retransmits that packet, modified as needed, on a different port.

    A broadcast network is one where multiple devices are connected to a single physical network. What is transmitted on the link is heard by all the other nodes on the same physical network.

    Originally, that physical network was a switch. Your network card would connect to a switch, the switch then transmits everything it receives on one port to all other ports.

    Switches could be connected to each other. The only requirement was that of time. The amount of time it takes for a packet to travel from one end of the physical network to the other was limited. If it took more time than that limit, the network became unstable.

    This concept of everything going back to a single switch was expensive. The cabling was expensive, the switch was expensive, the network card was expensive. A working network started at around $50,000. $30K for the switch, $10K for each network card. Hundreds of dollars for cabling.

    The original Internet protocol was only going to have addressing for 65,000 machines. How many machines would be network attached if each site required $50k just to get one or two machines hooked up. We compromised at 4 billion.

    We are working on getting everything on IP version 6 with 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses. I think somebody told me that that is enough addresses for every atom in the known universe to have an IPv6 address.

    From those expensive switches, we moved to 2-base-10 and “thick” Ethernet. These had the same limitations, but the costs were starting to come down. Something around $1000 to get into thick net and a few hundred to get into thin net.

    Routers were still expensive. With the advent of 10baseT, we saw costs drop again. You could get an Ethernet hub for under a hundred dollars. Routers were only a few thousand. The world was good.

    The other day I purchased an 8 port 10 Gigabit router for under a hundred dollars. It has 160 Gigabit internal switching. This means it can move 10 Gigabit per second from and to every port.

    It cost less than $35 for two fiber transceivers. It cost around $33 for an Intel-based NIC capable of 10 Gigabits.

    This means that I can upgrade a server to 10 Gibibit capability for around $60. Not bad.

    A Step Forward

    My data center was rather small. It was set up as a single /23 (512 addresses) connected via L2 switches. The switches were all one Gigabit copper.

    You can buy 10 Gigabit L2 switches, but they are either copper, with limited distances and a need for high-quality cabling, or they are expensive.

    Moving to an L3 device got me a better price and more features.

    Moving to an L3 router gave me some more options. One of the big ones is the ability to have multiple paths to each device to provide high availability.

    This requires that each node have multiple network interfaces and multiple routers and switchers. With the routers being cross connected, with each node being able to handle multi-path communications.

    This is the step forward.

    A step backwards

    This High Availability (HA) solution requires multi-path capabilities. This is not always available for every piece of software. I want to keep things simple.

    A Solution

    A solution is to move from a physical network with multiple paths and redundant capabilities to virtual networking.

    Each node will have two physical network interfaces. The interfaces will route using OSPF. This is a quick response system that will find other paths if one link or router fails. This provides the HA I want for the network.

    Each node will have two VPCs for the ceph cluster, one or more VPC for each container system, and one or more VPC for each VM cluster. A VPC is a “virtual private cloud” It is a virtual network with only allowed traffic.

    You can have multiple networks on a single physical network. For example, you can have 192.168.0.0/24 be your “regular” subnet and 172.16.5.0/24 be your data plane subnet. A network interface configured as 192.168.0.7 will only “hear” traffic on subnet 192.168.0.0/24.

    But you can configure a network interface to hear every packet. Allowing a node to “spy” on all traffic.

    With a VPC, there is only subnet 192.168.0.0/24 on the one VPC and only 172.16.5.0/24 on the other. Packets are not switched from one VPC to the other. You need a router to move data from one VPC to another. And the two VPCs must have different subnets; otherwise the router doesn’t know what to do.

    OVN Logical Switch

    It turns out that a VPC is the same as an OVN logical switch. Any traffic on one logical switch is restricted to that switch. You need to send traffic to a logical router to get the traffic in or out of the VPC.

    Since the traffic is going through a router, that router can apply many filters and rules to protect the VPC from leaking data or accepting unwanted data.

    I configured 4 VPCs for testing. DMZ is part of the physical network. Any virtual port on the DMZ VPC is exposed to traffic on the physical network. This is how traffic can enter or exit the virtual clouds.

    The second VPC is “internal”. This is a network for every physical node to exist. By using the internal VPC, each node can communicate with each other, regardless of the physical topology.

    That was working.

    There was a data plane VPC and a management VPC. Those VPCs were connected to the DMZ through a router. The router is distributed across multiple nodes. If one node goes down, the other node is ready to take up the traffic.

    Falling way back

    I now have a VPC for testing. The idea is to test everything extensively before moving any nodes to the virtual network. I need to be able to reboot any node and have everything still function.

    The VPC came up perfectly. My notes made it easy to create the VPC and configure it.

    The problem began when I added a router to the VPC.

    Now I can’t get traffic to flow to the VPC.

    WTF?

            

  • I have a friend who voted for Kamala. He is an intelligent person. Reasonably educated, firearms guy. I like talking to him and hanging with him.

    We don’t talk politics because politics stresses him. I didn’t know he was voting for until recently.

    I got about ten minutes of his time and asked him if he could tell me why.

    There were multiple reasons, the one that stuck in my mind was, “How could you vote for a convicted felon? He should be in prison.”

    I’ve heard this many times, I just tune it out because it is a true statement without context.

    He had other reasons having to do with his perception of Trumps morals and how he believes Trump treats people. Not relevant to this discussion.

    I asked him if he knew what Trump had been convicted of. His answer was “fraud”.

    This set me back a little bit. I know what the case was about. The big “37 counts” was the same charge repeated in different ways.

    If I recall correctly, for each check that Trump signed a check to his lawyers, it was notated as “legal expenses.” The state claims there are three separate counts for each one.

    Regardless, I asked my friend if he was aware that these felonies were misdemeanors until they changed the law and that the statute of limitations had expired.

    “No, I wasn’t aware.”

    “Were you aware that this is the first and only time this crime has been prosecuted?”

    “No, I wasn’t aware.”

    “Were you aware that the crime charge was that he had attempted to cover up a crime by filing false statements, but that they never proved the precursor crime?”

    “No, I wasn’t aware.”

    This is propaganda at play. He would rather not be involved in politics, but he can’t escape it. Listening to someone like me just stresses him out. He would rather not have that conversation, and I do not blame him.

    The overwhelming political noise that he is exposed to is always, “Trump is bad, Trump is Evil, Trump is a rapist, White Supremacists, and he is a convicted felon!”

    He can’t escape that noise. It is everywhere.

    One of the things that Allyson exposed me to is the left’s filter method.

    You can’t vote for him because

    I like to believe that we have a big tent. If you are a conservative, you are welcome under the tent.

    This is surprising to most leftists. They believe that if you are gay, trans, black, brown, immigrant, poor or whatever other label they have, that you will be not only kicked out of the Conservative tent, but you will be attacked and hurt.

    Some of that “attacked and hurt” comes from their claim that speech is violence.

    What do I mean by “the left’s filter method”?

    It is the process of finding a fault or flaw or “unacceptable” position to rule a candidate out.

    Consider Ronald Reagan. He was a great president. He also made mistakes as the Governor of California. He signed gun-control bills into law as Governor.

    I have heard people say that because I find Reagan to be a great president, I should agree that gun-control is good, since my hero signed gun-control bills.

    That is not how it works.

    From the left’s standpoint, that single error on Reagan’s part is enough to disqualify him. If it doesn’t, then I’m stupid.

    Every time I would talk to the leftist Ally about a conservative candidate, she would tell me how she could never vote for them because… She would then present a single point to prove that they were unqualified for her approval.

    It wasn’t about the whole of the person, it was about filtering them out for any reason possible.

    This is why the left runs campaigns of emotion. Kamala never said anything that would cause the filter to kick in. And those filters are always judged against the enemy.

    “He endorsed a person who said that Puerto Ricans were garbage.” And that would filter him out of the acceptable list.

    All the hoaxes we saw are based on this. They are quick sound bites that are designed to trigger that filter. “He called White Supremacists ‘fine people’”. It doesn’t matter how often this is debunked, it still works.

    It works because there will be people that hear just the sound bite and it will be enough to support their desire to not vote for orange man bad.