•         

  • One of the great things about following people on X is that you get news faster and from different points of view.

    One of the worst things about X is that you get idiot NPC talking points dumped into your feed constantly.

    For the last three weeks, every weekend, there is a spat of NPCs telling me that Trump has gone golfing. That he has gone golfing every weekend since he took office. That his golfing has cost some number of millions of dollars. The number is the same across every post.

    This week, the talking points included that Trump was golfing while there were fires on Long Island. How can he be so cruel. And he went golfing last weekend during the fires in North and South Carolina.

    Last weekend it was about how the fires in the Carolina’s were happening despite the claims of good forest management. Claims that there wasn’t water to fight the fires. While showing the same video of firefighters using water to fight the fires.

    The biggest NPC talking point has been on “Tax cuts for Billionaires.” The claim is that Trump is taking money away from veterans, the sick, and the elderly to give to his “billionaire friends”.

    If you open the curtain and peek behind it, you find that they are lying.

    So let’s do a little numbering.

    We are going to look at somebody making $12000/year, $50,000/year, $100,000/year, $500,000/year, and a million dollars per year.

    We use a progressive tax rate, so as your income goes up, so does your tax rate.

    Income Tax Rate Amount
    Paid
    $0 10% $0
    $11,601 12% $1,160.12
    $12,000 12% $1,208.00
    $47,151 22% $5,426.22
    $50,000 22% $6,053.00
    $100,000 22% $17,053.00
    $100,526 24% $17,168.74
    $191,951 32% $39,110.98
    $243,726 35% $55,679.06
    $500,000 35% $145,374.64
    $609,351 37% $183,647.49
    $1,000,000 37% $328,197.62

    Somebody with an income of $1,000,000 pays 328 thousand dollars in taxes. If everybody got a 1% tax cut, he would get to keep $3,281 of his money. The person making $50k per year would get to keep $500 of his money. Oh my goodness.

    So what are these huge tax cuts that “Trump gave his billionaire friends?” The Trump tax cuts apply to everybody. The NPCs claim that everybody getting tax cuts is not fair because a millionaire gets $3k back, but regular folk only get $500 back. This is so horrible, that they proposed an amendment that would have increased the tax rate of people making more than $999,999.

    This would have added another tax bracket. They are literally saying that if we don’t raise the taxes on those making more than $999,999 we are giving a tax cut.

    It doesn’t make sense to anybody except NPCs.

    This entire talking point also avoids the question of how billionaires make their money.

    If I was working a full-time job and pulling in a billion dollars per year, I would be charging $480,769.23/hour.

    It isn’t happening. A million dollars per year income is only $480/hour.

    Yes, there are some professions that charge at the $500 to $1000 per hour rate, but they are generally not taking it all home. Instead, that hourly rate goes into paying for many people.

    What a millionaire does is they make money by investing. Pretend you made $174,000 in 2024. After paying all your bills, you might take home $50 to $75 thousand for fun stuff.

    Now, supposed you took that $50k and invested it in a stock, like $TEM in January 2025 at $32/share. If you sold it at the end of February 2025 at $89.44 you would have made a profit of $89k. Not a bad return over the course of a month.

    This is a short-term capital gain which gets taxed at your as above, according to your tax bracket. On the other hand, if you hold that stock for a full 12 months and then sell it, you would only get taxed at 15%, not 24%. That is a 9% savings in taxes.

    If you were to have a taxable income of over $533k/year, then your rate would be 20% on that $89k, not 37%. That translates to savings of $15,140.

    Trump is not talking about cutting the capital gains taxes. He is talking about income tax changes.

    Representatives make $174k/year. $TEM was one of the purchases a representative made in February.

    This is the same language game that congress critters make every year. “We made cuts to the budget!” translation, “We aren’t going to spend as much as we wanted to. We are only spending $500,000 more, not the $3.3 million more we wanted”

    A cut is when the amount spent this year is less than the amount spent last year.

    I believe that I managed to lose some of my article. Still, it is just a rant.

            

  • Or “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

    The short of this is that I’ve been building PCs for years. They are LEGO blocks. You make sure the parts will fit together, and it all just works.

    As an example, I “knew” that LGA sockets were for Intel CPUs. Last night I learned that LGA just means the motherboard socket has the pins. PGA means the CPU holds the pins.

    How did I learn this? I was researching AMD CPU sockets and learned that the AM4 socket was of the PGA style, while the AM5 socket is of the LGA type.

    I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

    We run a local data center. It is still a work in progress. We have enough disk space, but not enough redundancy. We have some compute servers, but not enough.

    We try to do some upgrade every month, trying to improve things. The last improvement was another node in the Ceph Cluster.

    After spending weeks researching, I found a 4 bay NAS enclosure that took Mini-ITX motherboards. This felt just about perfect.

    It uses a flex style power supply, which is balanced for the actual load of 4 HDD and a motherboard. 350 Watts is what I went with. Thus, it draws less power than older machines.

    Finding a Mini-ITX board was another research hell. What I wanted was MB with 4 SATA 3.0 ports, 1 or more SFP+ ports, one gigabit Ethernet port, at least 16 GB of memory and NVMe support for 512 GB of storage.

    I couldn’t find one. I haven’t given up, but I haven’t found one yet.

    After searching, I found a Mini-ITX MB with an LGA 1155 socket, 4 SATA2.0 ports, a 10/100 Ethernet Port, 2 DDR3 slots (16 GB), and a PCIe slot.

    This might seem low end, but it meets our needs. HDDs only require 3 GB/s to keep up. We would need 3.0 if we were using SSDs.

    The 10/100 is useless for moving data, but meets our needs for a management port. All in all, a good choice.

    When all the parts arrived, I couldn’t get the MB installed. The fan was too tall. I got a better cooler that was a low profile style. When that came in, I installed the board. It was painfully tight getting everything in. Took me over an hour to get all the cables hooked up just right.

    Everything went well until I went to put the cover back on. At that point, I found the cover didn’t fit “because the case had the motherboard too close to the edge.”

    I fixed that in the machine shop. Grinders and cut off wheels to the rescue.

    Everything goes together.

    After everything is configured and running, I slap a drive into the case and it works. Wonderful. Final step? Install the SFP+ network card.

    It doesn’t line up. The damn thing doesn’t line up with the slot in the back.

    After mulling it over for way to long, I made the cut-out in the back wider and moved the standoffs. Machine shop to the rescue.

    Except I had a bad network card. Easily fixed via a replacement. No big deal.

    After over a month of fighting this thing, making massive changes to the case. Taking it entirely apart to get the motherboard in, the machine is now in production.

    Yesterday the motherboard for an upgrade arrived. The case I bought to hold it had the PCI slot moved over. This looks like it will all just work.

    Except that when I go to install the MB, I can’t get it to fit into the case. No big deal, I’ll take this case apart too.

    But the board doesn’t line up. It doesn’t line up with the standoffs. It doesn’t line up with the back slot. It doesn’t even line up with the onboard I/O baffle.

    At that point, I measured my Mini-ITX board. It should be 170mmx170mm. This board is not. It is 0.8 inches to wide. It isn’t a Micro-ITX nor is it a Mini-ITX. It is some none standard PoS.

    I’m spitting mad at this point. I’ll put everything back in boxes until the new MB arrives. When it does arrive, I’ll be able to retire an older box that has been holding this data center back.

    Everything now fits.

    It wasn’t the case that was the issue with the last build. It was the motherboard. Time to update the reviews I wrote.

            

  • Years ago, I was in conversations with a lady, we agreed to meet for coffee and then a movie. When I arrived, she was busy with other people. I waited. When she was finally done with the others, I asked her which movie she was interested in seeing.

    “I’ve decided I don’t want to go to a movie with you.”

    My reply was, “I’m disappointed with you.”

    I walked away. Later, I heard through the grapevine that my sentence had nearly broken her. “I’m disappointed” carries great weight, emotionally.

    For years, I’ve felt like I’m in a political battle where the other side gets to decide what rules I fight by and what rules they fight by, but their rules are not the same as mine.

    I remember every time somebody called me a murder for wanting to keep my guns. Every time I was blamed because some asshole killed children. I was to blame for the blood spilled in the cities.

    If only I would consent to common-sense, reasonable gun laws. It is all about safety.

    After Sandhook, I was hearing the same things again. One of the people doing it showed up on my Facebook page.

    I proceeded to call her a heartless subhuman for wanting children to die. Why wouldn’t she agree that it was just common sense to have teachers armed to kill assholes that would harm our children? How could she be so selfish?

    Every attack that had ever been leveled at me, I threw back at this lady.

    Turns out that his lady was a friend’s aunt. They came to me and asked me to tone it down. To back off because I was being hurtful. She was a teacher and had spent her entire career helping children.

    I did. I took the highroad, again.

    This is where we always went.

    When Trump v0.1 came on the scene, the Democrats loved him. They loved him because they knew he was a Democrat at heart. They wanted him to win the primary because he would be easier to beat than Hillary.

    Trump v0.9 showed up when he became the Republican candidate for President. The Democrats turned on him like a pack of hyenas.

    Trump v1.0 started when he took office the first time.

    One of the reasons he won that time was because he was fighting back. He was calling the left out for their lies. But he used belittling terms for them. He fought from the gutter where the left lives.

    Ally was so upset about his words that she couldn’t accept his deeds. Almost every interaction regarding Trump was her telling me about something he said that was mean.

    She was still part of that leftist mindset. That mindset that looks for a reason to throw a person out of the tent. If a person is in perfect lockstep with the sheep of the left, then they are kicked out.

    Every conservative was unacceptable to her because they had done something that disqualified them.

    She has come around. But some of those old habits die hard.

    We got into a big argument after a Republican representative introduced the mentally ill representative as “The representative of ??? Mr. ???” sorry, I don’t recall the names.

    When I was talking at dinner, I mentioned this and mentioned that I got a chuckle over this.

    She was very upset with me. “I expect better of you.”

    From her perspective, I was being mean to that ill person. It would have been easy for the Republican to introduce the other member as “Representative X”. No Mr. No Mrs. No Miss. Just “Representative”.

    Yeah, she could have. But I was pleased to have her punch back.

    But everything she observes from her new group gets that same, “I expect better of my team” treatment.

    I read Alito’s dissent. It didn’t pull any punches. Thomas joined him in his dissent. When those two are in agreement, then the right thing to do is what they are saying.

    Barrette didn’t agree with them. She voted with the majority to deny a stay pending appeal.

    Having mulled over it for a few days, I have to agree with Amy. And it is one of the reasons why she is a good choice for the Court.

    I do not want somebody who votes the “right” way on my issues. I want somebody who respects the law and follows the constitution, regardless of where it leads.

    I am sure that it was hard for her to withstand the powerhouse that is the Thomas-Alito team.

    The short of it was that Roberts made the issue moot. This saved everybody time. It kept the status quo for a bit longer. And it put the case on the correct footing for an appeal of the preliminary injunction. In addition, even the denial was a win because it slapped the inferior courts square in the face with their rogue behavior.

    I expect more of my justices. Amy gave me more. It hurt, to be sure, but she did the right thing.

    When I see Trump 2028 I know it is not going to happen. The push for allowing a president to have three terms happened near the end of the Obama presidency. The left wanted their chosen one to have another term.

    I didn’t like the idea then, I don’t like the idea now.

    Because I don’t see any real push to get Trump a third term, I know that Trump 2028 is a troll. It is a good troll because the left can’t treat it as a joke. They can’t because they were serious when they were trying to get Obama a third term.

    When I see “Trump 2028” posted on the idiot signs held by Democrats during the address to the joint session of Congress, it makes me smile even more.

    It trolls on so many levels, and it makes me chuckle. It isn’t being pushed by anybody seriously. J.D. 2028 is what I’m actually hearing. The serious faces of the people holding idiot signs makes it work more. The fact that if it happened, the Democrats would have an even bigger meltdown. There would be accusations all over the place.

    And not a single Democrat would admit that they had seriously looked into it for their guy, for Obama.

    As a practical matter, getting a third term for a president requires a Constitutional amendment. If somebody were to propose one, I would be on the phone to my Senators and Representative to tell them to vote against the amendment.

    Until that happens, this is a great troll. I’m not going to let realities get in the way of good humor.

    As many have said, the left can’t meme.

            

  • If you live in any of the Plant Hardiness Zones that are 1a through 6b, then you need to know how to start your seedlings indoors. This is something that can be a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of work as well. Doing it right takes effort and time. The end results are worth it, though! Of course, you could simply buy “starts” (ie seedlings) at your local farm store, but what if TEOTWAWKI has happened, and there are no more farm stores? That’s right, you need to know how to do this.

    There are various methods for starting seeds, but the one I’m going to talk about today is indoor sowing. The basics of it are fairly simple: fill containers with soil, add seeds, care for them, and voila, you’re ready to plant as soon as the ground is warm enough. This can give you as much as 45 days of extra growing time for vegetables, and that gets important when you’re in New England or any of the northern states.

    Common plants to start indoors include tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, eggplant, kale (and other large, leafy greens), sweet and hot peppers, cabbage, most flowers, and most herbs. This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but I picked the most common ones to start indoors. Tomatoes are definitely the most popular, with peppers coming in a close second. All of these plants will transplant well from indoors to your outdoor garden later in the spring and early summer.

    On the other hand, there are a variety of plants that should NOT be started indoors. The reasons vary, but generally speaking it’s because they either grow quickly, have incredibly sensitive roots and will die if transplanted, or they like the cold. Common plants that go direct to the garden include beans, beets, carrots, radishes, some lettuces, peas, squash, corn, spinach, and root crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes.

    The first thing you’re going to need is a list of what you want to grow. For a typical first garden, I suggest the following: bush beans, peas (either snap peas or shelling, your choice), tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini (if your family likes them), broccoli, kale and/or cabbage, spinach, and one or more of beets, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash. It seems like a small list to me, and it may seem huge to you, but this is a very small but decent kitchen garden for a first year. Add to that your herbs, and you have the beginning of a new hobby that will engulf your life.

    (more…)

            

  • What’s a few electrons between friends?

    We had a power hit Thursday morning. Almost everything recovered fine. Two machines needed to be kicked in the pants and one needed a BIOS configuration change.

    All in all, a good test of stability and reliability.

    Just how slow is that box?

    I’m embarrassed to say.

    I’ve been using AMD chipsets since the days of the Pentium. When they found the divide error and Intel refused to acknowledge the bug, requiring OS modifications to resolve, I switched to AMD.

    I do not regret it.

    I recently moved into the Intel chipsets and bluntly, I didn’t get it.

    What is Core-i3? How is that different from Core-i5 and Core-i7? Which of the Core families is older?

    Well, it turns out that i3 means “small”, i5 is “medium” and i7 is “large.” They just took a lesson from Starbucks, just how big is a vente?

    Instead, they have “generations. The higher the generation, the higher the speed. A 4th gen i7 will be slower than a 12th gen i3. Nice to know.

    They also have CPU sockets that have different names, but I’m not sure if they are compatible. An LGA1150, LGA1151, and an LGA1155 all seem to be compatible. So far, I’ve been lucky.

    There is one server that is older than the rest. I benchmarked it. There is a 25x difference between it and my workhorses. It was already slated to be retired. It is just happening sooner.

    I actually have 2 machines that must be retired and one machine that should be retired. 2 more machines that can be upgraded.

    The world moves forward.

    Networks

    Well, I finally found the small switch I was looking for. 4 10Gbit SFP+ ports and less than $60. I’m waiting for it to arrive from China.

    Constitutional Crisis!

    I’ve looked at a number of the cases filed to stop Trump’s policies. So far, Trump is winning.

    In the case of “You can’t fire me!” the circuit court said, “Well, for the moment you are fired.” and the plaintiff folded. Win for The People.

    In the case of the inferior district court ordering the government to payout nearly $2billion, The People won again.

    The Supreme Court stayed the TRO. The TRO expired. The Supreme Court said, “Well, it is moot now. Inferior court, don’t do dumb things.”

    The DoJ is suing New York. Nothing is going to happen there because they are slow walking it.

    The State of New York is suing President Trump.

    The big takeaway from these cases is that this is not going well for the enemy. These are not cases that are being tied up in court for months and months. These things are moving rapidly.

    In the normal course of a court case, I can check on the case once or twice a week and see nothing happening. In these cases, once or twice an hour might not be often enough.

    Is that a Mermaid you have?

    xychart-beta
    title "Sales Revenue"
    x-axis [jan, feb, mar, apr, may, jun, jul, aug, sep, oct, nov, dec]
    y-axis "Revenue (in $)" 4000 --> 11000
    bar [5000, 6000, 7500, 8200, 9500, 10500, 11000, 10200, 9200, 8500, 7000, 6000]
    line [5000, 6000, 7500, 8200, 9500, 10500, 11000, 10200, 9200, 8500, 7000, 6000]

    This is a five line Mermaid diagram. For me, it is more useful for things like state diagrams and other computer stuff. But it is neat to have graph capabilities here and in my git documentation.

    Why is it so big? It doesn’t fit!

    Most people use GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab for hosting their projects. These are nice, but some features require monthly payments. GitLab has a community version that can be self-hosted. It is a monster. It is a massive resource hog. I hated using it, but it gave me what I needed. With all of its features, it felt bloated. On the new infrastructure, it just would not run. This was causing significant stress. I tried using Emacs org-mode for tracking bugs, but that wasn’t working. So I installed Bugzilla. Nice, free, Perl. And it was too big for what I required, and I still required my “GitHub” like tool. Enter Gitea, “Git with a cup of tea.” It is lightweight, comes with issue tracking. Simplified port access. All in all, a good replacement.

    Teaching Classes

    I have been having fun teaching English as a second language. I wrote a program that integrates a text reader with a dictionary and the ability to play pronunciations. It has been fun. What has been more fun is teaching Use Cases. With some of my students we’ve moved from reading books to having developer conversations or having them do presentations. With one of them, we’ve been discussing Use Cases. I’ve never forgotten how useful they are. They are so useful I’ve started using them for own projects.

    Question of the Week

    For you, what was the best part of Trump’s address to congress?

            

  • I wrote this morning’s post last night, before Mark Smith had posted.

    I felt I got it right.

    It feels wonderful to hear him saying the same things I was trying to write about.

            

  • I am NOT a Lawyer. That being said, I do analyze large systems all the time. And as my mentor used to say, “The justice system is just a system.”

    History of the case:

    January 20, 2025: EO 14,169 was signed by President Trump. “It is the policy of the United States that no further United States foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President”

    This is the long-term goal. No more foreign aid that is at odds with the President’s foreign policy.

    for programmatic efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy…immediately pause new obligations and disbursements of development assistance funds to foreign countries

    Stop all foreign aid payments until we have reviewed it for alignment with current foreign policy. Don’t enter into any new contracts while paused.

    To you and I, this seems like a logical and reasonable situation. There was a short fuse put on the order of 90 days. Each agency had only 90 days to evaluate the situation and report.

    Within the EO, there is an allowance for the Secretary of State to issue waivers. If some entity had a need, and it aligned with our foreign policy, they could get a waiver now to receive funds.

    February 10, 2025: Plaintiffs/Respondents (Bad guys) challenged the pause. The alleged violations of the APA and the Constitution.

    February 13, 2025: The District court (inferior to the circuit courts which are inferior to the Supreme Court) granted relief. The court did not give the government (good guys) an opportunity to file an opposition brief.

    The court said that a pause wasn’t arbitrary or capricious, the government had not considered that aid recipients might be butt hurt.

    Having issued the TRO, the State Department started issuing payments again. The difference was that before issuing a payment, they were evaluating how that “aid” aligned with our foreign policy.

    The order, however, allowed the agency defendants to “take action to enforce the terms of particular contracts, including with respect to expirations, modifications, or terminations pursuant to contractual provisions.”

    The government obeyed the rules as set out by the court. The plaintiffs (still the bad guys) did not see the faucet of cash open, so went whining back to the court claiming that the government was violating the court’s order.

    February 24, 2025: One of the plaintiffs filed an emergency motion to enforce the court’s order.

    February 25, 2025: The court held another hearing. The court did not give the state time to file a written response to the emergency motion. The court then granted the motion from the bench. (Not a written order, yet)

    The court did not address multiple issues the state brought up.

    Instead, the court ordered the state to pay all invoices and letters of credit drawdown by 2359 on the 26th.

    This amounted to around $2billion. The order ignored due dates, standard accounting practices of verification, and other aspects of the contract.

    When I send out an invoice, my clients have a certain amount of time to pay the invoice. Normally, 30 days.

    Government contracts often have longer delays built in. IIRC our contracts with the government had 90 day due dates.

    What the court ordered was that the government had to pay invoices received by January 24th even if the invoice wasn’t due for many days.

    After this hearing and new order, the government filed for an emergency stay pending appeal to the D.C. Circuit court.

    The motion asked for an administrative stay by 1300 on the 26th. If not an administrative stay, the government wanted a ruling by 1600. These time frames are very fast, but the government was given about 36 hours to issue 2 Billion Dollars.

    February 26, 2025: The Circuit court asked the plaintiffs (bad guys, still) to file a response by 1300. This is the deadline the state put forth for an administrative stay.

    The circuit court didn’t issue the stay, nor did they rule on the motions. Instead, they dragged their feet. With time running out, the government appealed to the Supreme Court.

    Just before the midnight deadline, Chief Justice Roberts issued an administrative stay. The Court then asked for a response by 1200 on February 28th.

    February 28, 2025: Everybody got their briefings in. The state by normal rules can reply to the response.

    March 3, 2025: The state filed their reply to the response to the motion.

    March 5, 2025: The application was referred to the Court. An opinion was later issued.

    Analysis

    There is so much going on and so many moving parts, it is easy to get lost without picking up the minutia.

    What we wanted was for the Supreme Court to roll up a newspaper and swat the inferior courts across the snoot a few dozen times. They didn’t.

    The district court’s order was labeled a TRO, it was acting as a Preliminary Injunction, and the modified order granted relief that before the adversarial part of the case took place.

    Said differently, the plaintiffs want the money to flow. The government says that they have paused spending. The plaintiffs seek the relief of having the money flow. The court’s original order said, “The money must flow.” The government started spending. The plaintiffs claimed that it wasn’t fast enough. The court “modified” their original order and said, “let the money flow”.

    Thus, the court actually granted the relief the plaintiffs wanted.

    What the Supreme Court’s opinion said was: The application is denied

    This is the takeaway. The government has to start the money flowing again.

    But here are the important parts that aren’t being noticed in some of the postings I’ve seen (all).

    … Given that the deadline in the challenged order has now passed, and in light of the ongoing preliminary injunction proceedings, the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines. …

    This is an order to the inferior court to change their order and correct deficiencies.

    What the government (good guys) were asking for was time to present their case. The inferior district court stripped them of that right. They were not allowed to respond in writing. They were not given time to make appeals safely. In addition, they were ordered to do things which they cannot recover from.

    If they pay some of these bills, there is no clawback available to the government. We know that the entities receiving that money will disperse it so fast heads will spin.

    I don’t know what Barrett was thinking, but she sided with the denial of the application. I don’t trust Chief Justice Roberts to take risks. He much prefers the safer path, the more limited opinions. It always surprises me when he does join with
    Thomas and the rest of that team.

    But, in my opinion, the big takeaway is that the inferior court has to consider feasibility. They have to make sure that their order is clear.

    The other part of this is that this should take the case out of the TRO state and into the Preliminary Injunction state. While a case is in the TRO state, there are limits in what can be appealed.

            

  • Larry Correia of Monster Hunter warned about the Dem’s white signs from Trump’s speech yesterday. He said they would live to regret using white signs, because they’re so easy to manipulate into memes. He was right. This picture says it all (and says the truth, where the originals probably didn’t). This is a good meme. First, it’s true. Anytime a meme can highlight truths (harsh or otherwise) it’s good. There’s nothing nasty about this, BECAUSE it speaks the truth.

    I will say, whether I agree with it or not doesn’t matter. In this case, I do, but I’ve seen a few lately that I didn’t agree with. But when the message that comes across is intelligent, funny to at least some, and not innately harmful/hateful to large portions of people, I think it does a necessary job. There’s a reason that America and some other countries have had political cartoons for a long time. We need to see satirized versions of ourselves to make sure we keep our egos in check.

    I have a strong opinion that if a meme like this causes you to get upset, a meme that doesn’t attack someone’s weight or call them names, then you ought to take a good look at yourself. Over the past few years, I’ve done just that. Getting butthurt happens to all of us, once in a while. If you find yourself feeling that way over the meme of the week, it’s time to look at the old brain and decide what’s going on up there. Dislike of a meme or political satire or commentary should mean you just scroll on. There shouldn’t be any big emotional bugaboo over it.

    But then we have this. I have real problems with this one. First, it’s insulting on a whole other level. It implies several things to me. First, it says that American voters are so dumb that they’d attempt to have Trump in for a third term. Second, it says Dems are pushing hard for a Trump third term (and while I might agree many of them are stupid enough to do so accidentally, this one’s over the top). But most importantly, it gives the impression that the Republicans don’t care about the Constitution.

    As a note, this was being passed around happily by Conservative friends. I asked them why they would have such a poor understanding or respect for the Constitution, and was met with crickets. That upsets me almost as much as the meme itself. I ask myself… why does this meme burn my chaps so badly? Why am *I* butthurt over it? The answer is, I would not be if it were being passed around by Dems as a way of attempting to make the Right look stupid. I would laugh because it meant the Dems didn’t understand the Constitution and the reason for term limits. But when it comes from the Right? Yes, this one hurts.

    As someone dipping their toes into Constitutional waters, who is learning what it means to be a Constitutional Originalist, this makes me outraged. While I understand that Hamilton felt we ought to let Presidential candidates run as often as they wanted, that was a very different time, and a people who were (sadly) less divided than we currently are. Back then, the average length of time in office was two terms, similar to what we have today. I believe the 22nd Amendment was a good idea (and that it ought to be applied to all politicians, but that’s another political rant), and that if we want to be strong Conservatives, we must uphold that idea of two terms being the limit. Washington had the right idea; after two terms, it’s time for the President to retire back to his farm.

    Don’t put out shit like this, folks. It’s just wrong. And while I know most of you don’t care what the Left thinks, this is just the kind of crap that they love to pick up and parade around, and that they can easily prove was created by someone on the Right.

            

  • Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in this case.

    It is difficult to actually conceive of how long the battle for our Second Amendment rights has been going on. It started in 1792 and has continued through tomorrow.

    In the founding era, there were a number of racist and religious exceptions. These were designed to keep arms out of the hands of Negros, mixed race people, Indians, certain religions, and other deplorable. By the 1870s, all of these exceptions were found to be unconstitutional, leaving very few infringements that would survive constitutional muster.

    At this time, temporarily denying the right to people that have been adjudicated violent in a court of law is the only one I know of. See: —Opinion, United States v. Rahimi, 602 S.Ct. ____ (U.S. 2024)

    In the early 1900s, New York City decided to ignore the Constitution and passed the Sullivan Act. The Sullivan Act was designed to disarm those that would stand up to the corrupt bosses who controlled the city. They used a permitting system.

    They claimed that this was constitutional because some people did get permits and everybody could beg for permission from the government for that permission slip. This continued until 2022, with the Bruen decision, the corrupt NYC permitting scheme was shutdown. For all of 10 seconds.

    The Bruen response bill attempted to create a statewide “sensitive” places replacement.

    After the Sullivan Act, the infringers decided to ban handguns, machine guns, and short shotguns. They did this by placing a tax on these guns that was so outrageous that The People could no longer afford them.

    They did not accomplish this. What they got instead was a functional ban on Short Barreled Rifles, Short Barreled Shotguns, Machine guns, and Silencers. By 1936, this was the accepted law of the land.

    Using a saying that had not yet been published, in the late 1960s the infringers took advantage of a crisis to stop mail order gun sales. The GCA of 1968 created FFLs and required in person sales of firearms.

    The claim was that those FFLs wouldn’t sell to bad people.

    When bad things kept happening, they tried more gun control. Mostly permitting schemes that made it nearly impossible for The People to get permission.

    Using another crisis, they got the Brady Act passed. Thank goodness, the NRA was fighting for some level of a win. The original intention was to create a system where buyers would have to get permission from the government for any gun purchase.

    This was in the form of a “background check” with no limit on how long it took or how intrusive it might be. The NRA got the NICS system for us. Along with a “not denied is proceed”. It put the onus on the government to complete the check rapidly.

    In 1986, we got a win with a poison pill. This was the Firearms Owner Protection Act. This was designed to protect firearm owners from being persecuted by the ATF.

    There was a time when describing the internal workings of a machine gun was being construed by the ATF as manufacturing a machine gun. Selling a gun or two could get you sent to prison for not having an FFL. It was bad. There are stories of ATF agents hanging around gun shows seeking people to arrest or FFLs to bust for trivial things.

    The bad part of the Firearms Owner’s Protection Act was the Hughes Amendment. The infringers had realized that the NFA had outlived its usefulness.

    In 1934, the $200 surcharge for transferring a machinegun was unreachable for most of The People. When a M3 machinegun was selling for under 30 dollars, $200 was nearly impossible. An ad for a Colt M16 shows a price of $236.00 plus $5.00 for shipping. By the mid-1980s, the price was around $1800.

    At $1800, a $200 surcharge wasn’t as bad.

    One of the problems that started happening after 1986, when the NFA was closed to new machineguns, was a price boost of $200 every time a NFA item changed hands.

    Consider buying a silencer today. The can costs $500 + $200. If you want to sell the can, you would like to get $700, to recover your costs. Now, this doesn’t work. Given the choice of a used can for $700 + $200 tax or a new can for $500 + $200 tax, you buy new. Thus keeping the costs of silencer’s down.

    After 1986, there were no new machineguns. This means that every transfer increases the cost of that gun by at least $200.

    At this point, the infringers moved to stop the sale of all firearms. The method they decided on was to sue firearm retailers and manufacturers out of business.

    What they did was they found a bloody victim and then sued the FFL that sold the gun. They knew they would not win the case, but the cost of litigation was punishment enough.

    In 2005, bipartisan legislation was passed to stop this lawfare. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) was designed to protect entities in the lawful commerce in arms from frivolous lawsuits.

    And it worked.

    Until Sandy Hook.

    They sued Remington Arms because they owned Bushmaster who manufactured the rifle that the asshole used to murder children and teachers.

    What they claimed was that Bushmaster produced ads that caused the asshole to decide to murder his mother. Steal her keys to the safe. Open the safe. Steal the AR-15 within. To drive the car he stole from his mother to the school. And there murder children and teachers.

    It was all the fault of the manly man ads that Bushmaster used to sell guns.

    The lower state court dismissed the case based on the PLCAA. It was appealed up to the Connecticut Supreme Court. They decided the case could move forward. That was appealed to the Supreme Court, who denied cert.

    Remington was bleeding money, and this case didn’t help. They went bankrupt. The hull of the company had no assets and no people. The insurance companies were on the hook for the money involved in the suit.

    They settled. No gun people were involved in that disaster. It was a purely money motivated decision.

    Which brings us to this case. Sorry for this long history.

    Mexico was approached by the usual suspects. They filed in Massachusetts claiming that all the gun manufacturers were causing horrible things in Mexico.

    The argument goes something like this:

    The Cartels get guns from an illegal gun dealer. That illegal gun dealer purchased that gun from an illegal gun smuggler. The illegal gun smuggler purchased the gun from a straw purchaser. The straw committed felonies when they filled out the 4473 and when they sold the gun. The FFL knows that some of the guns he sells are being sold to straw purchasers. The distributor knows that the retailer knows that he is selling some guns to straw purchasers. The manufacturer knows that they are selling to distributors that know that the FFL is selling some guns to straw purchasers.

    Therefore, the gun manufacture is guilty of adding and abetting murder in Mexico.

    Yeah, it is that bad.

    The lawyer for the petitioners (good guys) gave his opening statement explaining this. He then stated that the path between crime and manufacture had too many intermediate steps to make them responsible. This is known as “proximate cause analysis”.

    He didn’t say anything about PLCAA.

    Thomas started the questioning. The conservatives asked the right types of questions.

    Then Sotomayor stepped up to the plate. And asked good questions. Not great, but good.

    After Gorsuch and Barrette, Kagan asked questions. Again, not great, but good.

    Then the surprise of the day.

    Jackson started asking questions. And her leading question was, “Why wasn’t this stopped by PLCAA?”

    It was a Good question.

    I’m looking forward to reading the court’s opinion. At this point, I am finding myself thinking that this maybe a 9-0 opinion.

    Transcript of oral arguments in 23-1141