The state has stepped up and opened their mouth in an Amicus brief in —ECF No. 74, Caleb Barnett v. Kwame Raoul, No. 23-1825 (7th Cir.) (not a good cite). The gist of the case is that the state of Illinois had a Bruen tantrum and created a new assault weapon and magazine ban.

Now the United States DoJ is sticking their oar in the water. Ugh.

Yeah, I’ll believe that when the cows come home.

The United States has strong interests in ensuring that these questions are correctly resolved; Now, isn’t that weasel words?

that the Second Amendment is not treated as a second-class right; and that law-abiding Americans in this Circuit are not deprived of the full opportunity to enjoy the exercise of their Second Amendment rights.

Wait, WHAT?

Yes, the Supreme Court did say, in Heller and Bruen that the Second Amendment isn’t a second class right.

Exactly, Illinois passed a “Bruen tantrum bill”. They did not get the message.

…the key question under the Second Amendment’s text is whether the banned semiautomatic firearms are “Arms”

Well, Doh, of course AR-15s are “Arms” under the plain text.

Please note that the quote comes from the S&W v. Mexico was written by Justice Kagan. In other words, we now have two lefty Justices writing things that are pro-Second Amendment.

Ok, what happened? The DoJ are the bad guys, aren’t they?

Exactly, if the plain text of the Second Amendment interacts with the conduct, bearing assault weapons in this case, then the Second Amendment’s protections presumptively apply to that conduct. The state bears the burden of proving a history of historical regulations that are a match.

Furthermore, while many said that Rahimi was bad for The People, it keeps showing up in positive ways in these court cases. Now if the rogue courts would just follow simple instructions.

The DoJ goes on to correctly apply the “in common use” process. The Supreme Court has already done the work of determining what this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulations are in reference to firearm bans. They determined that for an arm to be banned, it must be both dangerous and unusual.

If an arm is in common use among The People, it is not unusual and cannot be banned.

One of the things the DoJ points out, that I had not noticed, is that these rogue, inferior courts, have decided that Heller severed the Second Amendment’s prefactory clause from its operative clause. These rogue courts were then able to argue that if a weapon was militaristic, the operative clause did not protect it.

This is just BS. The Supreme Court actual recognized that the Second Amendment also protects the right to keep and bear arms for individual self-defense, but also collective self-defense.

My gosh, the DoJ just said that suppressors are “arms” under the Second Amendment and thus fall under the “in common use” shortcut.

Conclusion

The United States of America Department of Justice just filed one of the most powerful motion, supporting the Second Amendment, I’ve ever read. It calls out the rogue inferior courts. It says that rogue inferior courts are wrong in how they are interpreting the Second Amendment.

In general, parties to a case are careful in their wording to not offend the court. This is why you don’t normally read statements in a motion saying the court got it wrong.

This motion did precisely that. It called out the Seventh Circuit court for intentionally reinterpreting the Supreme Court to get their agenda-driven results.

Israel is in the process of turning Iran into an ashtray, like Jimmy Carter, may he burn forever in hell, should have in 1979.

Unfortunately for Israel, they have to do it with conventional weapons.

The normal blood vultures are out in force, screaming about Israel is killing babies.

Unfortunately for us, this raises the possibility that Iran will activate terrorist cells in the United States (and other countries) to attempt to harm us. Keep your head on a swivel.

Here, in my sleepy little rural town, the mostly peaceful protesters are planning to riotprotest this morning and afternoon. I’m hoping they stay on the peaceful side of things.

We are not in the town center, but we are on one of the main roads leaving downtown. Yes, we call the two traffic lights, “downtown”. The rifles will be loaded and ready. The LBV will be out and ready.

Just because you live in a small town that is patriotic doesn’t mean that you won’t see protests. At issue is the high probability of outside agitators being bussed in.

Keep your head on a swivel.

If your particular state requires a permission slip to exercise your rights, attempt to get one. And make a decision, which is worse, to be carried by six or judged by twelve.

Final note. Before you put that firearm on your hip, decide if you are willing to take a life. If you are willing, in what circumstances? I re-evaluated my principals after I watched the George Floyd video. My initial response, when watching the video, was “I’m glad I wasn’t there, I don’t know if I would have killed the cop or not.” Today I know that the cop was in the right.

So there’s a lot going on right now. Politically speaking, here in America we’re preparing for the “no kings day” bullshit. There are the usual California summer riots (pick your flavor), though it should be noted they’re only taking up a tiny portion of Los Angeles despite what the media would like you to believe. There’s the other protests and riots about immigration. On top of that, you have people who are boycotting the Fourth of July because of the bad orange man, and are instead planning funerals or some such. Israel just bombed Iran, which could get dicey. Ireland is having its own violent protests about immigration. On and on.

The shit may not hit the fan this weekend. It might not do so this year. Hell, it’s entirely possible it may never happen. That’s my favorite option, though I don’t ever count on it. I plan for “it goes down today” and hope for “never happens and you’re left with food in the basement for any other kind of emergency.”

I’m not doing anything special to prep for tomorrow. I’m over at my partner’s place, and we’re going to sit quietly at home. We might go for a walk in the local forest, but that’s about it. There aren’t any things planned for either his area or mine (btw, this is one of the reasons why I still have friends on the Left… so I know where and when shit goes down), but we don’t want to chance it. Sunday we have to go out of town to pick up a wall tent for 18th century and medieval events, but we’re going from one small town to another small town, all in one state in which he has a carry permit for. While he’s nominally Left(ish), he’s hella 2A positive, and he’s also not afraid to drive over someone to protect me or us. So I feel relatively safe. I know he won’t slow down if people are doing stupid stuff on one of the side roads we have to drive on.

No, I don’t carry. There are reasons, but frankly it’s nunya*. I fully support 2A, and I pick partners who are both 2A positive, and like to carry on the regular. I arm myself in other ways. Also, frankly… having boobs helps. Don’t ask, just accept. Anyhow…

My house has food. If the worst happened and martial law was called for, we’d just stay home with the doors closed and our ears open. We have eyes outside the house, so we don’t need to go out to check on things. We’re well armed, well stocked, and there’s no reason to leave. If it got bad, my partner would join us here, because we’re just better prepared than he is. That would leave us in a very comfortable position regarding keeping zombies at bay.

In all likelihood, nothing would happen near me. We live in the middle of nowhere (on purpose), BECAUSE of stuff like this. As a youngster, I longed for the bustle of a city. Today, I just want those damn kids to stay off my goddamn lawn. I’m glad of that, because it’s safer here. Safer, not safe, though. I have to always keep that in mind. There are always quiet people local to you, even in the middle of nowhere, that could be agitators or rioters in the right situation. So we stay ready, and we remember that we’re only as safe as we’re prepared to be.

We’re pretty safe, though.

If you haven’t figured out a way to batten down your hatches, spend time tonight doing so. If you live in a suburban or urban area, or god forbid a big city like NYC or Boston, make sure you are READY for tomorrow. It might be a big nothing burger, in which case you can laugh at me on Monday and I’ll gladly accept chiding. On the other hand, it might be a big something, and I’d like to know you’re all as ready as you can be. Go pick up some rice and beans, and a few cans of tuna and spam. Grab some bottled water. Just in case. It’s summer, and none of it will go to waste. You can have a bbq on July 4th and use it all up, if that’s what you want. But go get some extras. NOW.

I hope you all have a very quiet weekend. I hope it contains nothing more than mowing the lawn, having some steaks on the bbq, and yelling at the kids to stop letting mosquitoes in the house.

*nunya – nunya biznez, aka none of your business.

1. There will likely be runs on banks, grocery stores and gas stations no later than Monday.
2. Make sure your fuel tanks and propane bottles are topped off TOMORROW, meaning Friday (I’m writing this at midnight Thursday night.)
3. If you need groceries, get them TOMORROW, Friday!
4. Get some cash out of the bank and keep it on hand.
5. Traveling, especially air travel, should not be considered for the next week or so, until we see how this goes.
6. AVOID CROWDS AT ALL COSTS!
7. Above all, stay alert! Don’t assume or take anything for granted. If you see something that looks out of place, don’t ignore it, let someone know.
8. Some of you carry guns, some of you don’t. Right now would be a damned fine time to start!
9. This is in addition to the preparedness items that you should already have. If you haven’t started preparing yet, you’re too late, forget it.
10. I hope I stayed up until 1am writing all this for nothing, but I don’t think so. If it doesn’t apply Saturday, it might apply next week, or a month from now. But be assured, your efforts will not be wasted!

Minor edits for formatting and suggested grammar fixes.

Supreme Court Lessons

There are people who spend a lifetime learning how to predict what the Supreme Court is going to do. The short answer?

They get it wrong almost as often as us amateurs.

There are many moving parts involved with court cases. What is allowed and what is not allowed.

In general, the Court prefers to take cases that are important to the country or which the federal government wants them to take.

There are things that reduce the chances of a case being granted certiorari, the biggest being a case that is still in an interlocutory state. Interlocutory means that the fact finding part of the case has not completed. A final judgment has not been reached and all other means of redress have not been exhausted.

Four justices must vote to grant certiorari. Just because one side or the other has a majority, that might not be enough to get a case seen by the Court.

The question then becomes, what makes a case important to the country, in the eyes of the Court?

One of the big ones is a circuit split. The country is broken into circuits. Each court of appeals handles one circuit.

The famous circuit courts are the Ninth, Seventh, Fifth, and Second. If you want a good court for business law, the Second Circuit is the place to go. They deal with it constantly, being based out of New York City.

The Fifth circuit covers Texas and can be trusted to do the right thing most of the time. The Seventh Circuit is out of Chicago, and there isn’t an infringement they haven’t found constitutional. The Ninth en banc is currently around 250 to 0 for the state and against The People in Second Amendment cases.

To have a circuit split, different circuits must come to different conclusions given the same fact pattern. In this, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 9th Circuits have all been presented the same fact pattern regarding magazine bans and assault weapon bans. They have all agreed that such laws are constitutional.

The Fifth has not issued an opinion on that fact pattern because they don’t have any magazine ban or assault weapon ban challenges.

This means no circuit split.

The next thing the Court seems to be looking at is correcting past errors. We can look at the history of Roe v. Wade and Chevron and a host of other cases where the Supreme Court started walking back their original opinion shortly after it came out.

This happens when the inferior courts decide to apply the new case law in ways the Court did not intend. The Court will then take cases that touch on the original issue to “refine” their opinion. In general, the inferior courts seem to ignore this.

In the end, the Court will issue a new opinion declaring their old opinion revoked, and they will explain why. The Dobbs opinion, overturning Roe v. Way is an example of this. The Court had been limiting the extent of Roe v. Wade for a few decades before Dobbs.

Chief Justice Roberts prefers this incremental approach over more substantive changes.

This takes us to the “important for the country” cases.

Heller was a good example of this. After 8 decades, the Court heard a Second Amendment case. The purpose of the case was to reset the inferior courts.

The holding in Heller was that the Second Amendment was an individual right. In the process, the Court set up the rules on how Second Amendment cases should be adjudicated in the future. They defined almost every word of the Second Amendment, established the “plain text and historical tradition of firearm regulations”, and established the dangerous and unusual test for banning arms.

This last is sometimes stated as “in common use.”

If an arm is in common use for lawful purposes, then it is not unusual. Since an arm can only be banned if it is both “extra” dangerous AND and unusual, this means that an arm in common use cannot be banned.

When we look at Snope it was a slam dunk. Why? Because it was a repeat of Heller. There is nothing new in it.

The Supreme Court knows that repeating a past opinion will not change the inferior courts in a positive way.

To put it differently, if a case is granted certiorari, and then the lower court’s opinion is vacated, and the cases is remanded back to the inferior court to redo in light of some other published opinion and the inferior court reaches the same opinion, doing a full opinion isn’t going to make a difference.

When we were breaking up with a partner family, the other family came to the negotiation table with an offer of $16,000. They explained how they got that number.

I used their numbers to show that $16k wasn’t the correct answer.

The next meeting, they again offered $16k. The justification reason and numbers were different, the result was the same.

Again, I used their numbers to show that $16k wasn’t the correct answer.

The next meeting the offered the same $16k with still another justification and set of numbers.

“Your sister only gave you $16k to buy us out, right?”

“Uhhhhh, yes”

The rogue inferior courts keep coming up with the same answer with the same fact pattern with different justifications, every time. See the Fourth Circuit court’s handling of Bianchi v Brown, now known as Snope.

There are several Second Amendment cases that are currently seeking cert or that will file a petition for a writ of certiorari soon. One of those is Duncan v. Bonta.

This is a magazine ban case. Unlike Ocean State Tactical, this case is not in an interlocutory state. It should be ripe for taking.

I do not believe the Supreme Court will take it. It is not the slam dunk of an arms ban. It has too much extra baggage with it, regarding “is it an arm or is it an accessory.” The Court is more likely to take an arms ban because that is a slam dunk, and they can explain that accessories, such as magazines, are arms under the Second Amendment.

This leaves us some cases regarding the NFA, sensitive places, licensing requirements, and Second Amendment rights following you across state lines.

All of these cases will advance Second Amendment jurisprudence.

It Will Cost

My truck is 15 years old. It has a new frame and the motor appears to be strong.

Unfortunately, after 15 years, it is showing some of its age.

Yesterday I got the bad news: New pads and rotors in the front. New calibers on both sides for the front, new wheel bearings for both sides of the front. Replace brake hose crimp in rear right. Two broken brackets that need to be replaced, and a half dozen other things.

R and R for the wheel bearings is over $700 each.

The local parts store has everything in stock for me to do the break and bearing work. At over $1000 in parts.

Rockauto had all the parts available for $450 with $69 in shipping.

On the 21st I’ll be working on the truck to do all the work I can in the front. The only issue I really see is I might have to replace a short section of hard line.

Who wants to bet it will be raining that day?

Website Design and Coding

Tuesday I arrived at the next step in my museum website project. After three days of frustration, attempting to decide what I wanted to do, I took a step back, went and implemented the shopping cart.

Things just got simple in the backend. Simple in the front end. Just a small bit of coding before I find my next roadblock.

Question of the Week

What preparations are you taking for the “No Kings”, nationwide, mostly peaceful protests? It is taking place tomorrow, June 14th.

My internal infrastructure is getting better and better. Unfortunately, it is still not stable enough.

The router is having issues with memory. I need to add more memory to fix the issues. The problem being that I need to take the router out of production to do so. I’ve not been willing to do that.

The symptom is that connections time out. The fix, restart HAProxy.

HAProxy forwards traffic to the ingress service. This should be running on multiple servers, but it currently is not. There is an issue which I have not resolved where communications from the second ingress service gets lost, leading to the gateway not responding.

This means that when the server that runs the ingress service has to reboot, all ingress stops.

The network is broken into segments, each segment is on a different subnet. Ceph prefers to be on a single subnet.

My solution was to use OpenVSwitch to create a virtual network for Ceph. This works great!

This adds a dependency on OpenVSwitch, which should not be an issue.

The underlaying physical network depends on good routing. The reason I don’t use static is that some nodes have multiple paths and I want there to be multiple paths for every node. This adds a dependency on the routing stack.

Free Range Routing, or FRR, is the solution. It supports OSPF, which is the correct routing protocol for internal routing. It just works.

Unfortunately, FRR and the Linux kernel will stop talking to each other. When this happens, we lose routing of the physical networks.

When we lose routing on the physical network, the OpenVSwitch network stops working.

If the OpenVSwitch network goes down, then the different Ceph nodes can’t talk to each other.

All of this is to say, I’m sorry for the issues you have been seeing with this site. Thank you for hanging in there.

I had to find the sick FRRs and restart them. Once that happened, everything came back to life.

There are currently riots happening in Los Angeles and other California towns. I’ve so far watched a reporter FAFO and get shot in the leg with a rubber bullet, seen rioters dump rocks off an overpass onto cars below (police and non-police vehicles), witnessed “peaceful” folk set fire to cars, and heard about those self same “peaceful” folk ordering up driverless cars just so they could torch them.

Someone on Facebook posted this, and I decided to go and find out if it was true. At this point, if “someone posts something” (be it person, so-called legacy media, or new media) I simply don’t trust it and I research and verify. It took me a while. I had to go through an article by the Times of India, and a handful of other places before I finally found the article at the Blaze (which I recommend reading and watching). They posted the actual video in their article, so I can now verify that yes, ABC did actually say this on actual television/video. I am at a complete loss.

On Facebook, I carefully laid it out. If you said January 6th was a riot, and applauded the people being arrested, held without bail for unreasonable time, and given outrageously egregious sentences… but you say throwing rocks on moving vehicles is “peaceful protest,” just leave. I literally said, don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out. M’kay, byeeeeee.

I assumed most people would just delete me, if there were any left who’d bother to comment. I expected that. I didn’t expect to hear people coming in and saying that it was Trump’s fault for “…illegal use of the National Guard and deployment of the Marines,” or that “…it isn’t rioting for the sake of rioting,” or “I agree dropping …(rocks)… on citizens is not right. Dropping them on Humvees, Bearcats, is fair game. The military are illegally there.” I also didn’t think I’d hear, “I’ve seen a couple of articles that stated that at least some of the car fire were started due to the flash bangs that were deployed.” Oh, and, “…that some of the images and videos were from 2020 and not this past weekend.”

I have informed those people that I am not interested in excuses. Having been lectured for four years about January 6th, which included very little destruction of property (and the proper, imo, charging of those who engaged in vandalism) and only one death (on “our” side, FFS), I am not interested in excuses about why it’s okay to drop rocks on moving vehicles. It’s not.

Read More

Ms. Google will try to get me to read “news” from different sources. Yesterday, she showed me one of many articles claiming that the Trump administration is reacting differently to the riots in LA than they did to the “riot” on January 6th.

Paraphrasing Mr. Dunn, “Orange man bad. He pardoned those evil J6ers that admitted to …”

This is an absolutely true statement. Many of the people who were detained for their actions on January 6th did plead guilty to multiple crimes.

What was not said was that these were people who had been crushed by the juggernaut of the Department of inJustice. These people were often arrested in S.W.A.T. type raids, early morning dynamic entry. They were then held without bond awaiting trial.

There are multiple reports of these people being held in horrible conditions for many months. There were people who served multi-year sentences before their trial even began.

They were offered a chance to plead out and if they did not take the plea deal their court date was frequently pushed back.

It was never about justice, it was about punishment and sending a message.

So people did plead out. They took the plea so they could get out of the damn gulag. They wanted their lives back. They knew that they would continue to be punished for maintaining their innocences.

One of the hard things for anybody to understand is that these were people that had never expected to be locked up. They aren’t prepared for prison/jail.

These aren’t gangbangers that expect to do a few years behind bars to gain cred.

These were just regular people that were abused by the inJustice system to make a despicable point.

This is one of my favorite songs. This version is visually great.

Boring visual, but the music, oh my, that sound. Duke Ellington.

Or a good video with wonderful sound, 2017: Edmonds Woodway High School. (Darn, I wish my kid’s high school band sounded like this).

We have to close this out with the divine Ella, with the Duke on the piano.

When the deep heat of summer hits, and the idea of cooking anything makes you queasy, this is the perfect meal for any time of the day. I adore gazpacho soup because it’s all the deliciousness of a salsa but in a soup. There are layers of delicate flavor that combine to make something incredibly special. Just don’t be like Rimmer on Red Dwarf and ask for it piping hot. 😉

Ingredients:

• 2 ½ pounds ripe red tomatoes (about 4 large or 9 small)
• 1 small Vidalia, sweet yellow onion, or red onion (½ pound), peeled
• 1 small cucumber (½ pound), peeled and seeded
• 1 medium red bell pepper, cored and seeded
• ¼ cup fresh basil leaves, plus extra for garnish
• 1 large garlic clove, peeled
• ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons sherry vinegar or red wine vinegar
• ¾ teaspoon fine salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• V8 juice OR tomato juice (optional)
• curly parsley, Italian parsley, cilantro, green onion (optional, garnish)

First, prepare your vegetables. You’ll need a blender or food processor bowl, a medium serving bowl, and a small bowl for mixing, all ready to use. Core your tomatoes and cut half of them up into about one inch chunks. The chunks go into your blender. The other half of the tomatoes should be chopped fine and added to the serving bowl. All of the juice and seeds can be tossed in the blender. Do the same with your onion, the cucumber, and the bell pepper, though discard the pepper seeds.

Add the basil, garlic, olive oil, vinegar, salt, and a half teaspoon or so of black pepper, preferably fresh ground. Put the lid on your blender and blend the contents, starting on the pulse and then gradually increasing the speed to high. You want the mixture to be completely smooth, and it will take about two minutes. If there isn’t enough liquid, you can add in a little V8 or tomato juice, a tablespoon at a time until it’s the right consistency and thickness for you.

Add the liquid to the fine chopped vegetables, and stir well. Again, if there isn’t enough liquid, feel free to add more V8 or tomato juice to make it “correctly soupy” for you. Add in a pinch of salt and pepper, to taste, and set in the fridge to chill. The gazpacho needs at least two hours and up to 24 hours to rest.

Before serving, give it another taste. It may need a bit more salt. If you like, you can top the gazpacho with finely minced parsley and/or cilantro, or sprinkle it with thinly sliced green onion or chives. Small basil leaves are also a nice addition.

Notes:

I usually serve this soup with a side of salad that includes a good protein such as chicken or shrimp. As a fun alternative, you can switch out the V8 and add in Clamato and a splash of hot sauce, and top the soup itself with shrimp for a “shrimp salad soup” that is really tasty. You can also consider adding miniature croutons, tiny shrimp, or even other summer vegetables such as corn, finely chopped zucchini, etc.