I belong to several writer’s groups on Facebook, partly because I like to connect with other authors and partly to hear about new opportunities when they come by. One of the groups I belong to is run by a very successful cookbook author (who I’m not at liberty to talk about in public, as the group is private and very bougie). The owner posted this video, and then left us to comment on it before coming back. I’ll skip to the good part: if you watch about five minutes of it, you’ll get the whole gist.

Basically, what she says is cookbooks are training you to think you’re bad.

That’s right folks, the recipes you’ve been enjoying in your family for the last umpteen years, the ones you’ve snatched off the internet? They’re apparently actively attempting to strip you of your abilities. I can’t make this shit up. Here’s a quote:

“I want to show you that your cookbooks are more than just lists of instructions for how to cook your next meal. Your cookbooks are in fact deeply judgmental stories telling you that you are not already good enough at doing mundane household tasks.”

What I got from the half of this travesty that I managed to watch is that because a cookbook usually contains a story, it’s only a vehicle for the author to tell you that you’re a failure, because if you weren’t a failure, you wouldn’t need to read the cookbook. As a secondary message, apparently we’re also being told that if we cook like Rachel Ray, we’ll look like her and be rich like her. As near as I can tell, the only thing cookbooks aren’t communicating to you, is how to cook. She’s adamant that people cannot possibly learn to cook from a book, and that it must be transmitted from person to person.

I’m aghast that this woman, Dr. Rachel Rich. She’s a doctorate, so that means she has a PhD in this stuff. Per her own words, “…I’m a historian at Leed Becket University and co-editor of the journal Food And History. I’ve been researching and writing about cookbooks for over 20 years…”

So, is there enough information out there to keep a food historian busy for over 20 years? Absolutely. It’s a fascinating subject, and one which has important connections with today’s world. Not only are food historians bringing the past to life in a way that no other historian can, they’re also behind the revival of several old types of food, plants that were popular in the middle ages or earlier but that had faded into obscurity in modern times. That’s important because we can learn about plant genetics, and how to better feed our growing population by studying those plants and the recipes that they were used in. So yes, there’s a ton of information out there, and a solid researcher could spend a lifetime tapping it.

Instead, this Dr. Rich is handing out this pap.

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During the term, the Supreme Court has multiple conferences. The Friday conference is when they decide which cases will be granted cert, which will be denied, and other issues relating to cases, outside of opinions.

On the following Monday, they publish their order list. This is a list of all the cases they have an action on. Some of those a denial of cert, others are denials of moving forward as somebody that can’t pay filing costs, others are invitations to the federal government to speak up on the case.

The only people in the conferences are the 9 justices. There are no law clerks, no bus boys, no secretaries. It is just the nine of them.

When evaluating a motion for a writ of certiorari, it only takes 4 justices to grant the writ.

A case that is granted cert can be quickly handled by vacating the inferior court’s decision and remanding the case back to the inferior court. This is normally accompanied by instructions to “do it over, right, in light of a recent opinion”.

I would have loved to see the Court GVR Snope with “in light of Heller and Bruen“. Not that it would have done anything when dealing with the Fourth Circuit, but it still would have been an interesting method of dealing with these rogue inferior courts.

If they are not GVRing a case, but simply granting cert, they will schedule oral arguments and set deadlines for all briefs to be filed. They never state a dissent or make a statement when a case is granted cert.

If they deny cert, most times it is a simple list of cases with a short sentence at the end, “the motion for certiorari is denied.

The Snope case is ripe to be heard by the Court. It has been kicking around since 2013. It was one of the cases that was seeking cert while Bruen was seeking cert. It could have been the case to move Second Amendment jurisprudence forward.

The Court did the right thing in taking Bruen. Snope, known as Bianchi at the time, was a simple repeat of Heller. Bruen advanced our cause significantly.

The holding was that the Second Amendment extends outside the home. That is huge. It is much bigger than saying, “It is a gun ban case, we decided it in Heller, you can’t ban guns in common use for legal purposes.”

The Supreme Court only hears 70 or so cases a year. That is across all parts of the legal landscape. First Amendment, Fourth and Fifth amendments, environment and a host of other subjects.

The question becomes twofold, how many Second Amendment cases will the court hear in a term, and what are the best cases to take?

The Supreme Court heard Rahimi in the 2024 term (current term) as well as VanDerStok.

Was Snope the right vehicle for the next major Second Amendment opinion?

Maybe not. If the Court could hear every Second Amendment case presented to them, then yes. This was a slam dunk case for The People.

It would not have advanced Second Amendment jurisprudence in any significant way. It would be a redo of Heller.

Justice Thomas would have written, either as the author of the opinion or in a concurrence, that the plain text is plain, there is no evaluation to do. But it would still just be another Heller.

We have other cases coming forward. My feelings were that an opinion in Snope would have addressed these other cases, but maybe we need to have the court look at sensitive places?

When the Bruen opinion issued, I remember focusing in on “sensitive places”. It was obvious to me that many of the rogue states would laser focus on making as much of their state “sensitive places” as possible. The goal isn’t to make every place illegal for you to carry, it is to make it so legally dangerous that you don’t bother.

Every time something comes up on Craigslist that I want which is in MA, I evaluate it in terms of drive time and danger. Because I have to leave my firearm behind when I travel into Mass. It is painful.

There are two east-west roads near me. One is faster to certain towns in NH. But, it dips into Mass for part of that trip. I refuse to use that route, even if it adds 15 to 30 minutes to trip time.

Now imagine thousands of little “legal guns prohibited” areas in a state. What happens if you’re driving to pick up a rabbit hutch, and you drive past a school. With the way some states work, that could be a felony.

So the Court could be looking for a sensitive places case. Or, one that I would like to see, a reciprocity case? How cool would it be if the court found that whatever requirements my state requires is all it takes for me to be able to carry any state?

I’m disappointed. I never expect anything of Roberts. I was hoping for better from Amy.

This is a war. It is better to not lose this battle and continue to make headway in the Supreme Court.

Boy am I disappointed.

I’m feeling down from the SCOTUS lack of spine. I was looking for a song about good things to come. Instead, this came to mind.

Today, the Supreme Court denied cert in both Snope and Ocean State Tactical.

Thomas and Kavanaugh wrote dissents. Alito and Gorsuch joined Kavanaugh in his dissent. Amy and John sided with the agenda driven left of the court.

Because Ocean State Tactical is in an interlocutory state, they will have at least another two bites at the apple. If this outcome is any indication, I do not expect a positive result.

On the better news front, Kavanaugh listed several cases that are making their way up the chain and will be or are seeking cert.

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I was in 2nd grade when I decided I was going to make a table and chairs. I had watched my grandfather make things. It couldn’t be that hard. With my mother and grandparents providing the material, I made a table and chair.

It was a success. Was it sturdy enough for an adult to stand on? No. Regardless, for a 2nd grader, it was very much a success.

As a 4th grader, I watched my father rebuild the engine of our VW Microbus. He used the original “idiot” book to do it.

From my father, I learned how to break concrete, how foundation forms were put in place, how concrete was poured and how to frame in a room. When I say, “I learned”, it means that I had my hands on the tools doing. I had the blisters to show for it.

A few years later, 6th grade or so, I purchased my first motorcycle. When it needed work, I am the one who tore it down and rebuilt it. And then got it back together and running.

That was my success. My father didn’t lay hands on that motor or motorcycle. It was mine, and I was going to do.

Did I mess up? You bet I did. I don’t remember the failures because they were mine. I learned from them. Then I went and tried again. Today, 50 years later, I can still hear the sound of that MX-80 screaming back to life.

My parents let me own my failures, they let me own my successes. They never stole my success nor my failures from me.

Years passed. It didn’t matter what it was, I was willing to try. I was willing to fail. I tried learning how to draw. I spent four months drawing hands. In the end, I decided that I preferred photography.

When my brother and I needed to work on the VWs, we pulled the engines ourselves. We could tear down and rebuild an engine on the side of the road. How do I know we can? Because we did. It was in a gas station parking lot. Bro and I pulled the engine from the VW, tore it down enough to get to the broken, removed and replaced the broken part. Put the whole thing back together and put it back into the bus.

We did it between 1700 and 0200, then we drove another 400 miles the next day to get to my grandparents.

“Can do” isn’t the correct version of our attitude, it was more like, “We’ll make it work.”

Today, children aren’t allowed to fail. Even in simple things. My son made a wonderful meal the other weekend. I was asking him what went into it. We are about done, but still discussing things, when my wife pipes up to tell me a spice that was in the meal.

I knew it was there. I wanted my son to tell me. She stole his success.

I’m lucky, my kids do know how to succeed because they also know about failure.

My second wife refused to try new things. She explained the reason thus:

As a child, her mother would look at what she was going to attempt to do, then her mother would tell her, don’t bother to try, you can’t do that.

How can you succeed if you don’t try? How can you fail if you don’t try?

It is said that Edison said, “We didn’t fail, we just learned another material that doesn’t work as a filament.”

We learn so much more from failure than we do from success.

Consider a class of 20 students. We can fit a bell curve to those students. There will be a mean and standard deviation for those students. From that, we can determine which will get As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs. It is standard statistics.

We do this by using an instrument to measure something about those students. If we have an instrument that gives every student a 100%, we know nothing. That instrument is useless.

We want an instrument in which nobody gets 100%. At the same time, we need to be careful of the outliers on the high end. If you have somebody who gets 100% on a test where everybody else is getting 50% or lower, you can’t design your test/instrument to have the outlier get a 95%

One of the interesting things my mentor taught me about digital cell phone communications is that the protocols strive to match a 90% raw error rate. If the error rate is higher than that, the phone uses more power to get a cleaner signal. If it is better than that, the phone reduces power until it is running at that 90% error rate.

At 90% error rate, the algorithms can repair the damage and give a perfect digital signal.

If we were running at 100%, we would never know when we were using too much power.

We live in a society where the ego of a student is much more important than long-term success. We give out participation awards. We have games where we ‘don’t keep score.’

There is an old joke: A man walks up to a baseball diamond where some kids in a youth league are playing. He asks one of the fathers/couches, “What’s the score?” “We don’t keep score. We play for the joy of the game.” One of the kids yells over from the dugout, “We’re ahead 5 to 3.”

My children know that if they ask for feedback, they will get honest feedback. If they don’t ask, they will get a proud parents’ response. My kid’s friends know the same.

It also means that when I give out a “well done”, it means something. My kids know that their mother will always praise whatever they do, no matter how bad it is.

“Everybody makes mistakes!” is something I’ve had shouted at me.

Yep, that’s true. But not everybody learns from their mistakes. You cannot learn from your mistake if you don’t know you made a mistake. You can learn from your mistakes if you’re not allowed to make mistakes.

I’m learning how to turn wood. I’ve learned not to stand in front of the work when I first apply the cutting tool. Why? Because that damn bowl coming off the spindle at 1300 RPM HURT. I’ve learned a little.

I have seen some people decock the hammer of a firearm with their thumb between the firing pin and the hammer. I thought it was stupid. It is how I do it now. I had the hammer slip one time with a loud bang when the hammer stopped moving. It will not hurt all that much to have the hammer fall on my thumb if it stops a round from going “that-a-way”.

It is easy to see how stealing their successes can be bad. Stealing their failures is worse.

Every so often, it is worthwhile to just sit back and enjoy the show. Get more popcorn.

Friday was my first day of interpreting at The Fort at No 4. Volunteering can be just about anything helpful to The Fort, interpreting means attempting to bring The Fort back to life.

The first thing is that you are supposed to be wearing garb. I don’t have good garb. I’m embarrassed, but it is good enough for now. Better garb will be coming soon. I’ll soon have period correct shirts, vests, and pants. If I can find my moccasins, I will be all set.

It took a while to get into the process. I finally remembered something Mr. Pete, from YouTube said, “I’m not a machinist with 20 years of experience, I’m a machinist with 20 years of doing the same thing.”

I do not have to give a different presentation to each group that comes through. I can use the same one over again, changed to match the needs of this group.

We had multiple classrooms of 4th graders come through. My final presentation went something like:

Hellos

Making sure everybody is there, that everybody is paying attention, and that the responsible adult is in the room with us.

Engage

I start by asking them where they are, what the room they are in is used for. This led to some interesting suggestions, one student suggested that this is where somebody would sell the things the blacksmith was making.

Somewhere in there, I get them to look up in the rafters. We have two children’s coffins there.

Bring them into the past

The coffins are a good starting point for discussions. We talk about why there are children’s coffins. How many children died during the 1750s. We discuss how cuts, scrapes, illnesses can all lead to death. We end with how soap and water do a great deal to keep people healthy.

This is where I emphasize that coffins are one of the few things that we would actually be making, we just need so many of them. What we mostly do is repair things.

What do we repair?

We talk about how today, when we break something, we throw it away and replace it. How it only takes a day or so to get a replacement.

From there, we discussed things breaking in the 1750s. How if we were to throw it away and replace it, we would need to get it from Boston. One of the things that we figure out is how long it takes to get to Boston and back. Once that is in hand, we elaborate on the cost and the lost opportunity costs of going to Boston.

Once there, I pick a broken yarn counter and bring their attention to it. We try to guess what it might be. Finally, I tell them it is a “yard stick”, how it works and why it is used.

They then identify that it is missing spindles, which need to be replaced.

The Shave Horse

This is the point where we start doing some hands on. I’ll have one or two students come to the shave horse, teach them how to use the shave horse and a draw knife.

From there, once they are getting a nice shaving, I tell them “make it round.”

This almost always gets a response. They get started, then I tell them that we have to go faster because we need 6 done in the next hour.

This gets laughter as they suddenly understand that this is real work.

We stop, I put the draw knife away, send the student back to the group.

At this point, I hold up a fancy spindle and tell them that now that we have a round piece of wood, we require it to look like this.

The Lathe

Through questioning, they figure out that we need to use something else. Something that allows us to shape round things.

This is the introduction to the treadle lathe. We discussed a little about how it works. Then I have the responsible adult pick a victim to come be my apprentice. The apprentice is responsible for providing power to the lathe.

I let them figure out how it works, then get them positioned. They attempt to get the flywheel to go around. We had no successes this time, some came close, but we didn’t have a single apprentice get the wheel to make a full revolution.

At this point, I demonstrate getting the lathe to spin and show how that can be used to spin the work and get shavings.

Conclusion

It is more work than I expected. I made many shavings today, but didn’t actually accomplish anything. I’ll be back up there on Wednesday of next week and also Friday.

This is worth it. I hope you can find a place like The Fort at No 4 and find the time to help. Bringing history to life is an amazing rush, even if it is hard work.

When I prep, I store a variety of types of meals. I have a lot of rice and beans, as I can make those into dozens of different meals with very different spice pallets. There’s one type of meal that I do store at least a few of, for emergencies. That’s RTE, or Ready To Eat meals. These require either no prep at all, or just water and heat.

RTE meals are an important part of any prep for any situation. There are simply going to be times when you do not have the time or energy to cook, but you still need to eat. Having meals that require little to no preparation time will save you, time and again. I don’t mean for zombie apocalypse, either, though they work for that too. I mean for that moment when the power goes out right after you’ve finished 3 hours of snow blowing, and you’re exhausted and starving and now can’t use your stove. Or for when you’re backpacking, you get caught in a storm, and you’re stuck under a rock for a few hours for safety’s sake, and you need to eat.

While you can certainly go out and buy WiseFoods or any of the other “emergency bucket” type emergency meal kits, it’s very easy to assemble your own. Job Lots, Walmart, and even Amazon carry many very good options. It used to be that you’d save your cans of tuna for those emergencies, but now the tuna comes as part of an entire meal.

Starkist Tuna Snacks are the gold standard around here. We keep them in our go-bags, eat them as evening snacks, and they always go with me when I am camping away from the house. It’s fast and easy, and requires no heating. Simply slap the tuna on the cracker, and you’re ready to go.

Bumblebee Tuna Bowls are really yummy, and again, require no heating. There are three different kinds available on Amazon, but I’m told you can find a few more if you go looking. These include pasta, rice, and/or beans, and include vegetables as well. You’re getting a whole meal here. At 190 calories each, they’re a quick fix for a hungry person. They also do not contain any added sugars, so they can be eaten by diabetics. They are NOT good for people with Celiac though.

Starkist Smart Bowls are rice and beans with tuna, in a variety of flavors. These are the soft packs, so they stack easily in a backpack or go bag. They’re lower in fat and higher in carbs than the Bumblebee bowls, but neither of those are likely to be an issue when you’re dealing with an emergency situation.

At the slightly more bougie level, we have Cole’s Open and Eat Meals. These are a bit more expensive, but the quality is also higher. You get a larger meal, with more calories (250), and a variety of flavors. The reviews of them are pretty good, with the main sticking point being price. This is definitely one of those “you get what you pay for” moments.

And then there’s the ones I like best: Freshe Gourmet Canned Tuna. They have tuna and they have salmon, four flavors of each. You can buy them in bulk, and the price is a bit less than Cole’s. Each style has a different calorie amount listed, so you have to look at each of the flavors separately. Having eaten these both cold and warmed, I can say they are VERY yummy. I went out and bought a bunch of these at my earliest convenience after a friend introduced me to them.

There are chicken versions and salmon versions of all of the above. I would guess you can probably find ham and Spam ones, as well. I prefer to have the cans in my camping bin, because they can safely rattle around in the bottom of the bin and not be harmed. They will still be good to eat next summer, if I don’t get to them. The flat pack ones are best for backpacks and go bags. I usually slip mine into the front pouch of my backpack or in the interior flat area of my go bag, where they won’t be punctured.  Read More

Second Amendment Cases Seeking Cert

Yes, there are cases seeking cert.

No, there has been no real movement.

Yes, they are still there.

What does it mean? I don’t know. Mark Smith suggests that Snope being conferenced 16 times is a good thing. Certain controversial cases have been conferenced this many times, or more.

If they grant cert, oral arguments will not be heard until October. We would expect to see an opinion issue 3 months later. If cert is granted, the court must publish their opinion by the end of June 2026.

Why is there now movement on 2A cases?

Bluntly, everything is in a holding pattern. It doesn’t matter what happens in the different circuit courts, the rogue inferior courts have made their play. Bruen stopped the two-step shuffle and replaced it with a new two-step shuffle.

The old two-step was to first assume without granting that the plain text of the Second Amendment was implicated. Then deciding on what level of scrutiny was required. In rogue courts, the balance was always in favor of gun control. The Ninth Circuit is over 120 opinions in favor of gun control and zero in favor of The People.

Snope is the best vehicle forward we have. The Supreme Court can address the issue of what is an arm, slap down the gun bans and magazine bans, all at once. This leaves the sensitive places issue still to be heard.

Long Days

Wrapping my head around different concepts is not difficult. My problem comes in seeing how complex issues are tied together. Sometimes it is documented, sometimes it isn’t.

There are three templating languages that I know and use. Twig, Jinja2, and Django Templating Language. They all have similar syntax, and they all have the same basic concepts.

The gist is that you have a template which has “tags” and “variables”. When you insert a tag, it can render something, it can modify variables, or it can add programming structure. Variables just render the content of the variables as a string.

When we address forms, Django has a sophisticated system. You define a form by asking for a form to be built from a model (a record in a database) or by hand. Each field is identified. Each field is assigned a rendering widget.

In the simplest form, you can render a complete form with: <form method="POST" action="">{{ form }}<button type="submit">Submit</button></form> Which is wonderfully powerful.

The issue comes when you need something extra special. In my case, I needed to set a CSS class on a subwidget. I could not make it work. I read the code, I knew what it was doing, but I just could not access the context I required.

The issue? When a field from a form is rendered, a new context is created which is passed to the widget templates. My templates came before the field was rendered, making it impossible to access context which had not yet been created.

The Fort at No 4

I’m heading up to the Fort at No 4 today. We’ll be there most of the day, interacting with school kids there as classes. This will be my first time doing this. I have no idea how well I will do, or what I will be doing. I might just sit and comb wool.

Rogue Judges

We have now reached the point where administrative judges are issuing injunctions against the Trump administration.

We have a district court in Maryland issuing a standing order that any Habeus filing involving a criminal alien will automaticity find against the state.

Rogue inferior judges now believe that they have the power to supervise the Article II executive branch in all things.

Just tired of this…

More and more people are grumbling about being tired of this shit. People are no longer allowing themselves to be pushed around.

In my opinion, this is because they believe that the state will have their back. It is no longer Daniel Parry doing the right thing and then being forced to go through lawfare. There is a growing feeling that if you stand up for what is right, things will go OK for you.

Question of the Week

There were disturbing noises out back last night. When I went out to investigate, I took the R95 in .357 Magnum. This is more than enough for the small game I normally deal with back there.

As I followed the sounds, it sounded like small game. Then I heard what, I thought, was a wild pig. And I remembered that there had been bear sightings around here.

My question, if you were to see a boar or bear over the sights of a lever action .357 magnum, coming towards you. Do you fire? Do you try to retreat? Do you head back to get something bigger? Is 30-30 big enough? Or would you move up to 45-70?