• There are places where I feel sorry for The People. People in California seem to have gotten what they wanted. The people of Illinois, not so much.

    The lower court of the State recently issued an order in favor of The People, but not of the Second Amendment.

    This was a win. The people of Cook County no longer have to pay a tax on guns and ammo. Well, that is what the state supreme court said, and the lower court, but not Cook County. They are continuing to collect taxes.

    So how is this a win?

    It is a win because the plaintiffs, the good guys from Guns Save Life, got what they wanted. The courts have ruled that the county may not legally collect the tax. For perspective, they filed their lawsuit in 2015, the case was closed on January 10th, 2025.

    The state was actually arguing that the supreme court of Illinois had ordered the case dismissed because it was “moot”, while the county is still collecting taxes.

    Why is that?

    Because the case was filed as both an unfair tax and a Second Amendment challenge. The “unfair” was a challenge under the Illinois “uniformity act”.

    Well, the lower court decided that it was absolutely ok to tax guns and ammo. I don’t think the judge ever read —Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. V. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue, 75 L. Ed. 2d 295 (1983) where the Supreme Court found that taxing ink used by a newspaper was a violation of the First Amendment.

    The lower court also found that the taxes were uniform enough.

    This was appealed. On appeals, the intermediate court agreed with the lower court. This was appealed to the Illinois supreme court.

    There, the tables turned in favor of the good guys.

    But not in the way you might think.

    The court waved their hand at the Second Amendment challenge, likely because they had read the above cited case. They said, “We don’t need to consider the Second Amendment issue because this tax doesn’t withstand the uniformity challenge.”

    The supreme court then continued with instructions on how the state (Cook County) could change their low to make it safe under the uniformity clause.

    The court issued an order to the lower court “for entry of summary judgement in favor of the plaintiffs.”

    This should have been a done deal, in thirty minutes. Instead, the lower court sat on the damn case for four more years. This gave the state time to modify the tax law and to claim the issue was moot.

    Finally, the lower court did as instructed and entered summary judgement in favor of the plaintiffs, the good guys.

    The court addressed the Second Amendment challenge as such: the supreme court didn’t bother to hear anything about the Second Amendment, it is moot in this situation.

    Thus, The People won, but in winning did not get a Second Amendment win.

    Oh, Cook County is refusing to stop collecting the tax.
    LAWLESS: Despite court rulings striking down their Gun & Ammo Tax, Cook County says they’ll continue collections

            

  • This came up on my Facebook feed this morning. I had to read it four or five times to “get it.” The person who posted this believes (or so I understand) that because unfair-to-Right practices (and frankly, unfair-to-American practices) are being rolled back and gotten rid of, that “they” (presumably the Right and/or Trump and/or Musk) are attempting to destroy “our” (aka the Left’s) communities.

    What?

    Sweetheart, no one is trying to destroy your communities. You’re welcome to continue using your communities. No one has told you that you can’t. In fact, Facebook allows you to curate a group where you can literally control all the speech therein, so that your Leftist ears need not be sullied by the foul words of the Right.

    The only community that’s currently being destroyed, that I can tell, is TikTok. I’m bitter about it, because it’s a place that I really enjoy visiting and I like the platform. And the government is taking it down “to protect us” from something. Apparently we’re to be protected from free speech, but whatever.

    I can’t say that these “changes” are things that are just to Left leaning places, either. I decided to log into Truth Social to go see what it was about, maybe make some friends over there. I was on less than ten minutes, did nothing more than say hello in a handful of writing groups and history groups, and then got a ban notice. I have no idea what I did, because it doesn’t tell you. It says “go look at the guidelines” as if I’m a four year old. “You know what you did!” No, Truth, I don’t. I have no fucking idea. Ugh.

    Back to the message above. I love the presumption: “WE need these spaces to stay connected.” No, you don’t. Go to a coffee shop. Visit a bar. Read in the park. Enjoy rollerskating or ice skating. What about the library?

    I run a writing group on Facebook. I’ve had it up for a few years now, but never paid much attention to it. Recently, I’ve been trying to get it more active. I discovered it was chock full of scammers and spammers. So for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly tossing people out. It’s frustrating. Facebook can ban people for saying positive things about Trump, but can’t take care of the marketing spammer who’s sneaking into people’s DM’s? Bah.

    I haven’t seen the above attitude amongst friends, for which I’m grateful. That sense of entitlement doesn’t seem to be infiltrating my own communities. It was definitely a real post, however, and so it certainly represents some people’s beliefs.

    Also, what the heck is with the language (or lack thereof) in the post? Ugh.

            

  • The world is changing. When Judge Bork was being attacked by Joe Biden and the Democrats on the Senate confirmation committee, it was something new.

    We had never seen a Supreme Court nominee being so maligned. It was the dirty tricks writ large and in color.

    Justice Thomas had another slanderous hearing. He was strong enough to withstand the verbal attack, thank goodness.

    It has become the expected action of the Democrats.

    At the end of Obama’s presidency, he was attempting to push forth a “moderate” for the Supreme Court. An asshole named “Garland”. Ally was unhappy that Garland wasn’t given a full hearing before the Senate, much less a hearing before the committee. It didn’t feel “fair” to her.

    I tried to explain that no matter how good Garland might be, he isn’t as good as anybody a Republican might nominate.

    Today, Pet Hegseth was in the sights of the Democrats.

    Senator after Senator went low. The difference is that Pete was expecting it. He took their slings and arrows without ranker and fired back winning salvos.

    WARREN: “You’re quite sure every General who serves should not go directly into the defense industry for 10 years, but you’re not willing to make that same pledge?”

    HEGSETH: “I’m not a General, Senator.”

    *Audience laughs*

    And he sits there with a smirk because little Lizzy has no idea what she is walking into.

    The times they are a changing.

            

  • Next Monday we will see Snope and Ocean State Tactical granted cert or relisted.

    Right now, there are 100s of lawyers writing briefs for these cases. I expect to see over a thousand pages submitted to the Supreme Court.

    Bruen was distributed for Conference on 4/1/2021, 4/16/2021, and 4/23/2021. Cert was granted 4/26/2021.

    The parties requested, and were granted, two extensions to file briefs on the merits.

    From the time of being granted certiorari, the petitioner has 45 days to file their initial brief. The opposing party has 30 days from then to respond. Extensions may be granted at the discretion of the Court.

    From there, the petitioner can file a reply brief. The opposing party can file a reply brief.

    About 100 days total, if everybody stays on schedule.

    The case was scheduled for oral arguments on 8/15/2021. The date for arguments was set for November 3rd, 2021.

    The case was argued on 11/3/2021.

    The court published their opinion on 6/23/2022 with the judgement being issued on 7/25/2022.

    Because the case was conferenced in April, the case wasn’t heard in the 2021 term. We are teed up to have the opinion issue for these cases in June 2025.

            

  • In the order list for 2025-01-13 we have information on our three Second Amendment Cases.

    Gray v. Jennings on how preliminary injunctions should be handled, DENIED.

    Given that they were denied, I expect that we will see the case GVR once our Second Amendment case is heard.

    Correction: They were denied Cert. It cannot then be GVR. This case will go back to the district court to move past the preliminary injunction stage.

    Snope Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban. Nothing in the orders. I wasn’t expecting this. I don’t know what it means.

    Ocean State Tactical Rhode Island’s “large capacity” magazine ban. Nothing in the orders.

    More: There is another reason that SCOTUS doesn’t put cases in the orders after conference. That is, if they have decided to deny cert, but there are one or more justices that want to write a statement regarding the denial.

    If this is the case, this is bad news for us.

    I hope that they will release more on the cases, in a favorable light to us, in the next day or so.

    YES!

    Both Snope and Ocean State Tactical are relisted for conference this Friday!

    This is it. We are off to the races!

            

  • “In all her life Laura had never tasted anything so good as that savory, fragrant, sea-tasting hot milk, with golden dots of melted cream and black specks of pepper on its top, and the little dark canned oysters at its bottom. She sipped slowly, slowly from her spoon, to keep that taste going over her tongue as long as she could.” — from By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder, pp 204

    Anyone who knows me, knows that I have an uncontrollable fascination with the Little House series. It was my introduction to Christianity, and the reason why I invited the minister to dinner when we moved to New England (Ma insisted it was right and proper, so therefore it was what I ought to do, yes?). I’ve been through the series so many times that I’ve had to buy new copies on several occasions, the older ones having worn out. I learned morals and ethics from them. For me, Laura and Ma and Pa and the other people there are just as real as you and me.

    Several years ago (several severals of years ago), I was living on the west coast and had managed to become unemployed and rather destitute. I was scraping by on unemployment insurance payments, but it was pretty dicey. My partner D and I were approaching the Christmas and Yule season with as much joy as we could muster. After all, we had a roof over our heads, heat, and each other. It was lean, but love fills a lot of gaps.

    Some kind soul had told the local fire department that we were living lean over the season, and a soft spoken gentleman brought us a hamper of food. I tried to protest, but he insisted that it was alright, we weren’t taking anything from someone else. I’ll admit, once he was gone, I tore into that box like … well, like it was Christmas morning. D and I went through the rice and pasta, a tiny canned ham, some fresh vegetables, and then at the very bottom we found the single precious can of smoked oysters.

    We could have eaten that can of oysters in two seconds. We’re both in love with them, their smoky flavor, savory and oily… But I looked at him and ran to the book shelf. I pulled out “By the Shores of Silver Lake” and went skimming through it to find the New Year’s Eve scene. There it was, Laura’s description of the oyster soup Ma had made for their guests. He and I started laughing, and we recreated that soup for Christmas Eve for ourselves. It was a wonderful meal.

    A while ago (before I couldn’t handle dairy anymore), I wanted to make the soup again. I remember how delicious it was way back when I was barely an adult. Tastes change, though, and I wondered if it would still be as magical. I picked up three cans of cheap smoked oysters and sacrificed some of my coffee half-and-half, and made the soup as a starter to our Yule meal last night.

    Everyone enjoyed it. I made enough that I assumed there would be much in the way of leftovers, but there wasn’t. Barely a drop was left in my soup tureen when we were done! It was just as Laura described it, with the oil and butter, the salty sea taste.
    (more…)

            

  • We are in the process of moving from the image above to the image below.
    Server room data center with rows of server racks. 3d illustration

    At least in terms of what the infrastructure looks like.

    Today I decommissioned an EdgeRouter 4 which features a “fanless router with a four-core, 1 GHz MIPS64 processor, 3 1Gbit RJ45 ports, and 1G SFP port.”

    When they say “MIPS64” you can think of it as being in the same class as an ARM processor. Not a problem for what it is.

    The issue was that there are only 1Gb interfaces. That and I’ve come to hate the configuration language.

    This has been replaced with a pfSense router running on a TopTon “thing.” I call it a thing because it is from China and intended to be rebranded. It doesn’t have a real SKU.

    It is based on an N100 with 4 cores and 8 threads. 2 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, 2 10Gb SFP+ ports. It can be upgraded and has multiple extras.

    Besides the hardware, this is an entirely different animal in terms of what it can do. It is first, and foremost, a firewall. Everything else it does is above and beyond.

    It is running NTP with a USB GPS unit attached. It runs DHCP, DNS, HAProxy, OSPF and a few other packages. The IDS/IPS system is running in notify mode at this time. That will be changed to full functionality very shortly.

    So what’s the issue? The issue is that everything changed.

    On the side, as I was replacing the router, I jiggled one of the Ceph servers. Jiggling it caused it to use just a few watts more, and the power supply gave out. It is a non-standard power supply, so it will be a day or two before the replacement arrives.

    When I went to plug the fiber in, the fiber was too short. This required moving slack from the other end of the fiber back towards the router to have enough length where it was needed.

    Having done this, plugging in the fiber gave me a dark result. I did a bit of diagnostic testing, isolated the issue to that one piece of fiber. I ran spare fiber to a different switch that was on the correct subnet, flashy lights.

    Turns out that I had to degrade the fiber from the other router to work with the EdgeRouter 4. Once I took that off, the port did light off. But that was a few steps down the road.

    Now the issue is that all the Wi-Fi access points have gone dark. Seems that they are not happy. This required reinstalling the control software and moving them from the old control software instance to the new one. Once that was done, I could see the error message from the access point complaining about a bad DHCP server.

    After fighting this for far too long, I finally figured out that the pseudo Cisco like router was not forwarding DHCP packets within the same VLAN. I could not make it work. So I disabled the DHCP server on the new router/firewall and moved it back to the Cisco like router. Finally, Wi-Fi for the phones and everything seems to be working.

    At which point I can’t log into the Vine of Liberty.

    I can see the pages, I can’t log into the admin side. It is timing out.

    3 hours later, I figured out that there was a bad DNS setting on the servers. The software reaches out to an external site for multiple reasons. The DNS lookup was taking so long that the connection was dropping.

    I think this is an issue that I have just resolved.

    But there’s more.

    Even after I got the DNS cleaned up, many servers couldn’t touch base with the external monitoring servers. Why?

    Routing all looked good, until things hit the firewall. Then it stopped.

    Checking the rules, everything looks good. Checking from my box, everything works. It is only these servers.

    Was it routing? Nope, that was working fine.

    That was one thing that just worked. When I turned down the old router, the new router distributed routing information correctly and took over instantly.

    So the issue is that pfSense “just works.” That is, there are default configurations that do the right thing out of the box.

    One of those things is outbound firewall rules.

    Anything on the LAN network is properly filtered and works.

    But what is the definition of the LAN network? It is the subnet directly connected to the LAN interface(s).

    Because I knew that I would need to be able to access the routers if routing goes wrong, my computer has a direct connection to the LAN Network attached to the routers. The Wi-Fi access points live in on the same subnet. So everything for my machine and the wireless devices “just worked”

    The rest of the servers are on isolating subnets. That are part of the building LAN but they are not part of the “LAN Network”.

    I know this, I defined an alias that contains all the building networks.

    Once I added that to the firewall rules, it just worked.

    Tomorrow’s tasks include more DHCP fights and moving away from Traefik. Which means making better use of the Ingress network.

            

  • Allyson is a published author. I am a published author. She works at writing. I was told to write, I did, they published it.

    When I decided to keep GunFreeZone.net alive, I tried to post multiple times per day. I quickly burned out. Today I have a schedule of once per day, with extras when it is important and not an echo.

    In the course of a normal day, I will read around 400 pages of text. Some of it I skim, some of it I have to read carefully, and some of it is for fun. I will also write 3000 to 5000 words, some of that is code, most of it is in English.

    To be blunt, I spend more time reading and writing than just about anything else in my life.

    Writer’s block is an excuse for an amateur. If you are expected to write, you write, you don’t get to say, “I don’t feel it today.”

    If you are getting “writer’s block”, you are writing as a hobby. Allyson talks about this in her writing blogs and groups.

    The next part of writing is making sure you are writing for more than yourself. If you are writing for yourself, you should be writing for yourself six months from now.

    Every evening, I sit down, and I write for the blog. Occasionally, it is easy. Usually, it is work. Then there are days when it is just plain difficult.

    I want to babble about the cheap soldering station I just picked up. Claims to be good. Has a 4.5-star rating. I had to crank it to 800F before it would melt solder, and I’m not sure if I got good connections.

    Boring.

    I’m in the process of getting rid of Traefik, a “load balancer”. I would rather not have left Apache, I did. I went to nginx, I still don’t understand it as well as I do Apache, but it is my preferred web server. Nginx can work as a load balancer, but it isn’t really.

    So I have: Traefik, Nginx, Apache, HaProxy, and whatever it is that pfSense used for “load balancing”.

    It isn’t uncommon to have a path that hits firewall, HaProxy, Traefik, nginx or Apache. Boring.

    There are dozens of court cases that are interesting to me.

    If they are heard in a district court where they obey the rule of law and follow the instructions set for them, they will get yanked into the Circuit Court so fast your head won’t stop spinning. If the case is in the circuit court, then the argument will be a repeat of what has already been said.

    Boring.

    At this point, the only interesting cases are those that will be heard by the Supreme Court this year.

    Current events? By the time my article is published I’m already 12 hours behind of the news cycle.

    Still, I write about things. There is more than a little filler these days. There are articles where I go far too deep in technical babble.

    So to all of you that read our blog, thank you for hanging with us.

    If you have something you want to say, PLEASE submit it. It would give me a day off.

            

  • Senator Warren is using misleading language to make her base angry at the rich. Never mind that she has become wealth from being a Senator.

    Social Security is supposed to be “forced” savings. The government decided that we could not be trusted with our own retirement funds.

    Instead, they took money from us, during our earning years, put it in a big pot, where it would “earn” money over our lifetime of labor.

    Of course, that turned out to be a lie. The investment the social security fund made was in US Government Bonds. That is, the government “borrowed” the money, promising to pay it back with interest.

    To pay it back, they need to tax The People more. So the piggy bank is empty, but we pretend it holds massive assets.

    She then picked a DDS. Why? Because a DDS makes more than $176,000/year. Better stated, he has more than $176k taxable income.

    Why is that number important? That is the social security tax cap.

    Social Security was set up to take care of the “little” people. The wealthy were left to find for themselves.

    We all “know” that the amount we get back from Social Security is based on the amount we paid in. The more we paid, the more we get back.

    That means that the person who made $40k per year over the course of their labor should get back something “near” $40k per year. A person who earned an average of $100k? They should get back around $100k per year.

    The reality is that you get back less and the money you get back is worth less than when you put it in, and several other things. But that is the general idea.

    But, if you are making over $176k/year, the government doesn’t think you should be getting back that amount. Instead, it is up to you to plan your retirement.

    What she is saying is that she wants him to pay in much more than he will get out.

    One other thing to remember, US taxes are on income. If you have money sitting in the bank, you don’t pay taxes on it. Instead, you pay taxes on the money you take out.

    Elon paid over $11 Billion dollars in taxes for 2023. He’ll pay more this year. He has paid more in taxes than any other single human in the history of the world.

    And this fork – tongued devil wants him to pay more, so she can spend it.

            

  • We’ve used the term “grey man” a few times over the last couple of years. There’s been a bit of debate over what it is, how useful it is, and when to use it. I wanted to address a bit of that.

    For me at least, the “grey man” is the person who just blends in.  You don’t notice him. It isn’t that he dresses in grey, it’s that he’s dressed just like everyone else. He walks like everyone else. He talks like everyone else.

    This means that sometimes, the grey man has a gun on his hip (when it’s common and everyone else does), and sometimes it’s concealed. It means sometimes the grey man wears a camo jacket (my neighborhood, for instance, is rife with people who do this), and sometimes a golf shirt and boat shoes. Sometimes he has a “two on the top and one on the sides” and other times he has hair to his waist. It depends entirely on where you are at any given moment.

    The best grey man is the one who can switch his look to match his surroundings. We see this in movies, as people like Tom Cruise drop wigs and fake mustaches into trash cans, and turn jackets inside out. In reality, it’s a lot less dramatic. It means taking off your patches when going into big cities, for instance. Wear a plain jacket instead of a camo one. Slip your side carry into your waistband carrier and out of site, rather than having it under am arm or in plain view on your hip.

    The big thing that I see right now is the desire to be grey man combating with the desire to just be ourselves and fuck the Left. I think there’s something in the middle, and that it’s important to find that central position. It allows you to swing both ways, to coin a phrase. I like the jacket that Chris has, which has velcro spots for patches. They come on and off easily, and you can simply add the correct camouflage to your outfit, be that a 2A patch, an American flag, or a rainbow.

    Only you know what your area is like. I can’t judge that. No one but you and your family can, honestly. I know that in my neighborhood, it’s perfectly okay to be a firearms owner, to enjoy shooting and hunting, and to engage in a variety of household preps like gardening and such. No one gives us a second glance. In Chicago, I would not do a quarter of what I do here in New Hampshire. You have to look around you, and judge how to blend in based on who you are and what you do, and where you live.