• 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

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  • 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.

            

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  • 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.

            

  • Blackmail is a nasty thing. It is about exposing secrets. If you don’t give me what I want, I will expose your dirty little secret.

    When you look at American traitors, spying for our advisories, you find that most, if not all of them, were bought off for dirt cheap.

    What would happen is that the traitor would decide they needed something, generally money. They then tried to sell the information they had. They were offered very little for the information. Then they were blackmailed for having sold the information.

    Blackmail is normally about hiding dirty little secrets.

    Back when I had a security clearance, they were concerned about several things. Can you keep your mouth shut? Can you be blackmailed? Can you be bought?

    When I was in debt, I explained that I was in debt and that my country was worth more to me than money ever could be. I showed that I had been paying my debt down and that I was not hurting financially. For that level of clearance, that was enough.

    At another time, there was a personal issue. I went to my boss and told him the personal issue. I told my parents. When security asked about the personal issue, I could easily show that I couldn’t be blackmailed by it because I had told my boss, my parents, and them.

    The gist of this is that if you can’t be embarrassed by your actions, you can’t be blackmailed by a dirty little secret.

    History

    My first wife was an expert in emotional blackmail. When we got married, I was informed that she had had her cat for longer than she had known me and that I would go before she would let go of the cat.

    In other words, a cat was more important to her than the person she had just sworn to love.

    I am allergic to most fur bearing critters. Cats in particular. My allergies started off bad, they are impossible now. Because we lived with a cat.

    The most common refrain that still echos through my head was, “If you don’t do X, I’m going to leave.”

    It was used over and over, again.

    One night, I spent a long time talking to my father at a bar. This was unusual because mom was the emotional rock, not dad. Plus, we had never done it before, we didn’t do it again after.

    I left that conversation and returned to the hotel room where my wife and kids were. I was more relaxed than I had been in years. I had come to the decision that I wasn’t going to be emotionally blackmailed anymore.

    When we returned home, it was just about like normal. Until the day she said, “If you don’t do X, I’m going to leave.”

    My reply rocked her to her soul and a bit further, “Ok, there’s the door.”

    Our life became more of a partnership until her abuse became too much and I left.

    Just what is “emotional blackmail”

    It is anytime you attempt to control somebody with threats that engender strong emotional responses.

    The person who is threatening to commit suicide is using emotional suicide. The person who withholds love unless you do your chores. The person who threatens to leave you if you don’t give them money.

    All of these are emotional blackmail.

    Peer pressure is a type of emotional blackmail. When you feel like you will be ostracized if you don’t go along with your peers.

    Having that feeling of belonging is incredibly powerful. Loosing it is even more powerful.

    This is how you get teenagers to submit to being “jumped in”. Being jumped in for males is generally allowing other peer members beat the shit out of you. For women, it is often submitting to being gang raped.

    That desire for membership in a peer group, or gang, can be that strong.

    The Left and Emotional Blackmail

    We are seeing large numbers of leftists resorting to emotional blackmail.

    • You are dead to me if you voted for Trump.
    • The 4Bs. No sex with men, no children, no dating men, no marriage with men
    • Withholding sex until Trump is out of office
    • Divorce or threats of divorce
    • Excommunicating people from the peer group.
    • Dissolving friendships
    • Blue “friendship” bracelet. If you don’t have it, you aren’t a friend.

    Conclusion

    The only way to deal with emotional blackmail is a strong “fuck off, I don’t care.” Yes, that might cost some friends. They might come to their sense later. For now, don’t let them blackmail you.

            

  • Light is a topic that’s come up a few times in my prepper discussions, and so I thought it deserved its own article. Light is defined as “…something that makes vision possible.” (Merriam Webster) We call the light part of our day, aptly enough, daytime. We can see to study, to teach, to learn, and to do. For hundreds and thousands of years, light has been of immense importance to human beings.

    The first light was, of course, the sun. Light happened during the day, and night was when you huddled together and tried not to get eaten. The purposeful use of fire is the second light. Fire allowed us to do things in the dark. It kept predators at bay. It warmed our bodies, our food, and even our souls. Once fire was harnessed, it was more a matter of what method to invent to keep the light on at night, safely and effectively.

    Some of the earliest lanterns were Canaanite oil lamps. These were basically pinch pots, or rather, a shallow bowl with a pinched spout at one end for holding a wick. These open candles go back farther than our written history. I can say with authority that they do work, too, having both made and used some myself. From a prepping standpoint, open candles can be made out of just about anything. A wick in a bowl works, especially if you can float the wick somehow. Consider an old cork with a hole in it to hold a wick, floating on an oil source.

    Fuel oil in early times came from animal fat, or from nut oils. Tallow candles were used as early as 500 BCE, in Rome. They continued to be used until modern paraffin became easily available. Paraffin wax was quickly adopted, because it had almost no smell at all. Candles made from tallow or other animal fats were quite stinky.

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  • Nerd Stuff

    Had all the parts in hand. I opened up the case. Proceed to install the new NIC, another hard drive. Realize I need to go fetch a SATA cable. Go to plug in the power to the drive… Who the heck only puts one SATA power connector in a modern computer power supply!

    ARGH.

    The drive is still in the box, the correct adapters will be here shortly, and I will power up that drive and add it to the cluster.

    Bloggers stepping over the line

    Thursday, Allyson was shown a post by her BFF. The gist was, “if you voted for Trump, you are dead to me.” It wasn’t directed at Allyson, but Allyson was part of the target group.

    Emotions are running high. For me, it is a joy and lightness I have not felt in years. I have taken delight in poking the leftists that have been melting down.

    I have lived with the knowledge that the left will vandalize my property if I show support for the Republican Party. I’ve kept my mouth shut and just kept on keeping on.

    Allyson has been on the left for so long, she didn’t believe my fears of being attacked for not toeing the Democrat party line.

    Yesterday, she learned in a very personal way. And it hurt.

    She wants compassion from the left. She wants them to be the good people she knew them to be. To have people she loved, and respected become unhinged broke her.

    She will be posting. She has asked me to moderate her replies.

    She broke the rule. She was a dick. She made person, if veiled, attacks on individuals. This will not and is not tolerated.

    I’m sorry that it got to this point.

    The Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy Dance

    There are two Supreme Court Justices that have expressed an interest in leaving the court. Another is thinking about it. A fourth is in bad health.

    Our guys will not Ruth it up. They will retire after the Snope opinion issues. That is my opinion. I think we might see another of our people retire.

    It would be horrible if illness forced the last Justice to leave the court, but it would move another seat back to the constitution.

    If this happens, we will have a majority of originalists on the Supreme court for the next 30 years, or more.

    Trifecta

    Not yet. We have the Senate. This allows us to put more constitutional originalists in the inferior courts. This is great. It means we can confirm Supreme Court nominees over the objections of the Democrats.

    We have the Presidency. Even if they were to succeed in assassinating Trump, at this point, JD will become the president. He would become President four years earlier than I expect. Not particularly concerned — now. Monday, it was an issue.

    We do not, yet, control the house. As of 2000, Thursday, we had 210 seats in the House. There are 27 seats still to be called. Some races are very close. We need 218.

    Keep your fingers crossed.

    Friends and Family

    I lost my Mother and my Father this year. They passed. I lost my brother when he exposed his evil side. I hope I gained family in The Cousins.

    My parents were Republicans until they drifted in to the propaganda of CNN. I never felt that I would be disowned for still being conservative when they no longer were.

    Many of us have had to deal with friends and family that cannot tolerate those on the right. They have removed us from their lives.

    If you have had an experience where a friend or family member who has expressed that you are still loved or still a friend, regardless of your politics, please share those positive stories.

    I really need some positive stories about people on the left.

    Please have a great weekend

            

  • BLUF: Be compassionate. Yes, even if it hurts. Yes, even if they’re assholes and dickwads. I want to know that I picked the right side. I want to know that this is the side that isn’t lying to me.

    Right, we have a new President Elect. Trump defied the odds, and he took it all. He is the President Elect. He won us the Senate. And it looks like he won us the House. I’m sure most of us have been celebrating in some fashion or another for the past couple of days. And now it’s time to buckle down.

    The Right have decried the Left for having majorities and doing nothing with them. We have the majority across the board for the next while, and we NEED to be doing stuff with it. We need to enact those campaign promises. Better economy, getting dangerous criminal aliens out of the country, lower grocery costs, better housing market, and the list goes on. This isn’t going to happen overnight, but Trump must put himself to work immediately and start getting things done.

    The Left is so aflutter with terror right now that there might actually be a teaching moment, if the Right can keep things together. For the next few weeks, between election results and inauguration, the Left expects to be treated like dirt. We can’t. We must act with compassion.

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