• There were several cases GVRed at the end of June. This is one of the methods the Supreme Court uses to communicate with the inferior courts.

    What they are doing is telling the inferior courts, all of them, that this opinion we issued, applies to these sorts of cases.

    The Loper Bright case was the death of Chevron. Chevron was the horrible opinion out of the Supreme Court that said, if the agency administrating a law thinks it is ambiguous, then it is ambiguous. If it is ambiguous, the courts must use the agency’s interpretation of the law.

    Since the Chevron opinion, the Supreme Court has been attempting to “fix it”. The problem was that they needed the inferior courts to do rational, reasonable things. Too many of the inferior courts did not do reasonable, rational things.

    Chevron became a catch-all for any power hungry agency.

    The Loper Bright opinion told the inferior courts, “Stop avoiding your job. You are the final arbitrator on questions of law, not any party. Get out there and read the law and do the right thing.”

    Judge Aileen M. Cannon did exactly this.

    Trump’s team had filed a motion to dismiss his case based on the theory that Jack Smith did not have the authority to bring charges.

    While everybody has been calling Jack Smith “The Special Counsel”, that is a position that must exist.

    The Trump motion points out that the Constitution defines how “Officers of the United States” are appointed. Those officers are separated into “inferior” or “principal” officers.

    Principal officers must be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

    Jack Smith argues that he is an inferior officer.

    While inferior officers can be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in Heads of Departments. — U.S. Constitution

    The state, through Jack Smith, argued that his appointment was lawful because it was done under an ambiguous law. Since it is an ambiguous law, the DoJ was able to say, under Chevron that of course they got it right.

    But with Chevron dead, the Court looked at the law and determined that the DoJ did not have the authority to create the position. Since they could not create the position, Jack Smith had no special standing. I.e., his authority was no more than yours or mine.

    This is another win for us. And this case was decided without a need for looking at Presidential Immunity for official acts.

            

  • When the sniper in the Texas Clock Tower started shooting men stopped and grabbed rifles from their trucks and returned fire.

    Today, it is the odd of us that carry a truck gun.

            

  • Back in May, I decided to attempt a new recipe while out in the field, cooking over a fire at a Renaissance Faire. I do this a couple of times a year, when I know I have time to play with new things. Not all fairs allow me the time to pay attention to details, and so quite a lot of the time I stick with a standard rotation of recipes. But this was a new fair, and one which I had no other responsibilities at. I was just there to cook and talk about history, and maybe sell a few cookbooks. So I picked a new one, and ran with it.

    The result was incredibly delicious. I had people trying to steal pieces off of each other’s plates. They scraped the bottom of my dutch oven with bits of bread, to be certain they’d eaten every last drop. It was an impressive sight, to say the least. It seems to me, this makes a wonderful first recipe for my weekly recipe post.

    To make Alloes of beef

    Take lene beef and cut hym in thyn pecys and lay hit on A borde then take sewet of motton or of beef and herbys and onyons hackyd small to gether then straw thy leshes of beef with powder of pepur and a lytell salt and strew on thy sewet and the herbys. And rolle them up ther yn put them on a broche and roste them and serue them up hote. — Transcription of original receipt (Source: MS Pepys 1047)

     

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  • I like to learn new things. My goal is to be able to fix anything at The Fort At #4. A large part of that is learning how to turn wood.

    This is not as difficult as it could be because I have experience with a metal lathe. The concepts are similar, but very different.

    In metal working, we look at the type of metal, the amount of metal we want to remove, and the speed at which we wish to do it. This informs us of the type of tool to use.

    Steel likes larger nose radius than aluminum. The chip breakers are different, the rake is different. The cutter shape defines speeds and feeds. What tool I pick is dependent on what I am doing.

    In wood turning, there are two major types, “spindle” and “bowl”. A spindle is a long, round thing. Think of round legs on chairs, or the spindles in the back of a chair. Round chair rungs. All of those are spindle turnings.

    Bowl turning is just about would it sounds like. You are carving out wood from the center of a round, thick piece of wood. The difference is grain orientation.

    In spindle turning, the grain is oriented end to end. In bowl turning, it is side to side.

    When cutting the outside of a spindle, you are always cutting away the along the grain. The easy way. In bowl turning, you are cutting side grain, then end grain, then back again.

    The tools are different. A bowl gouge and a spindle gouge have different shapes and different sturdiness.

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  • Having watched the video of Trump being shot, my first thoughts were of “Thank God he survived the attempt.”

    My third though was of grief for the person in the audience who was killed and the other that was injured. This asshole, shooting at Trump, didn’t give a shit who was hit by his shots. In his zeal to kill Trump, he killed a Trump supporter, and likely considered that “good.”

    My second thought was, “Why would I give up my guns now? You evil assholes.”

    There are many more. It is always the same, “Now that it happened to YOU, you will ban guns, right?”

    This is just as revolting as the idiots that post “Now that “People of Color” are buying guns, Republicans will be willing to ban them.”

    There isn’t a single drop of blood these vultures won’t use against us.

            

  • At around 1800, 2024-07-13, President Trump was shot. He was hit in the right ear, was escorted off the stage at the rally in Butler, PA.

    He was taken to the hospital where he will be evaluated.

    Three different versions of what happened are floating on X.

    1. Someone shot him with a pistol, missing his head by only a small amount.
    2. Someone shot at him with a rifle at distance.
    3. Someone shot at him with a BB gun.

    The reports indicate 5 to 9 shots. The shots did not sound like a firearm to me.

    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/possible-gunfire-breaks-out-trump-rally-pennsylvania

    It now appears that the shooter was using a long rifle from outside the venue. The shooter is dead. Having been wrong on the “didn’t sound like a firearm”, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that it wasn’t an AR-15 platform.

    If it had been an AR-15, there would have been more rounds fired.

    Regardless, thank God that Trump survived with only minor injury.

    Take a look at CNN and the Washington Post for examples of TDS and malicious reporting.

            

  • There are many topics which generate strong feelings. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years, is that people on the left can find a reason to hate you and that is it. You can have one “bad” opinion, that is enough to remove you into their subhuman category.

    People on the right seem to be more accepting. As some have said, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” We are the big tent side of the body politic.

    With that said, I do hope that I do not chase away any of our readers by having positions they disagree with.

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  • I’ve been thinking about this one a LOT. I’m very against staff, admin, and above putting anything religious in schools. It too quickly becomes problematic, and it takes away from learning. I have yet to see something like this recent Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law turn out well, short OR long term. Do you want Satanists and Wiccans and Muslims to have stuff in schools? If not, then keep Christianity out as well.

    There’s been commentary made by the people involved that posting the Ten Commandments isn’t religious, it’s there to show the original laws.

    BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

    The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

    “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses” who got the commandments from God, Landry said. 

    — AP

    There are so many things wrong with this, that I had a hard time finding a place to begin.

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  • The weekend is upon us, just a few more hours.

    Allyson is off at another event. This time as a vendor, selling her cookbooks, and having fun.

    The blue-haired fairie is with her, they are going to have a grand time.

    On the nerd side of things, I am in the processing of ditching AWS. Amazon Web Services is a gateway drug. You can get started for just a few cents per month, then you suddenly find yourself shelling out serious coin.

    For me, the big cost was backups. When I was at University, I was introduced to “comprehensive backups”. The idea being that we should be able to recover a file for a very, very, very long time.

    When most services describe backups, they talk about having “daily” backups. That means you have 24 hours to realize that something is wrong, and recover it.

    My backups are different. If you have created a file, and it is on disk when backups run, it will be backed up.

    Monday through Saturday go into the daily backups. These backups are preserved for 30+ days.

    Sunday backups are different, on the first Sunday of the month, backups go to the monthly backups. These are kept for 2+ years.

    Finally, all other Sunday backups go on to the weekly backups. These are kept for 6 months.

    So, comprehensive.

    All of that takes disk space. I was exceeding 10 terabytes of data on AWS. It was running me excess dollars.

    No more. I now have a local ceph cluster with multiple nodes on multiple switches, in multiple power circuits. There are over 70 Terabytes in the cluster. Two hosts have room for another 12 TB each. Two hosts can be upgraded from 12 TB to 48 TB, each. There are spots for four more hosts, each of which can handle 48 TB each.

    Backups are now going to my ceph cluster. This is very redundant. I can take an entire host out of the cluster and the cluster still functions. At some point, I will configure the cluster so that I can take out multiple hosts at one time and still be fully functional.

    Sorry, this is about feedback, not nerd babble.

    The site is still not stable enough. The work I’m doing with ceph locally, will transfer to ceph on remote systems. Tuning ceph on the remote systems and moving the ceph cluster, proper, out of K8S will improve things greatly.

    What feedback do you have for us?