This image came across my Facebook page this morning. It had the following rant attached:

Copy pasta:
Signal boosting.. CN: mentions the actions mandated by Ohio law to be taken by a doctor on the body of a girl suspected of not being “female enough” to play sports on a girl’s team, which plausibly verge on sexual assault.
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This is my daughter. She just turned 9. Here is why I would never allow her to play middle or high school sports if we lived in Ohio…

A few days ago, the Ohio Republicans passed a change to state law that was snuck in at the last minute, under the guise of “protecting” girls sports.
Am. Sub. H. B. No. 151 (various versions of it are here)

This law allows ANYONE to dispute the sex of an athlete on a school team. There are no safeguards in place to ensure that this is not used maliciously. Girls who do not look feminine enough, girls of color, girls who are “too good” are likely to be the biggest targets. But any girl could be targeted. Maybe someone doesn’t like her parents or maybe someone wants to make sure the opposing team doesn’t have enough eligible players.

So what does a girl have to do to prove she is a girl? First, the physician has to examine the girl’s external and internal reproductive anatomy. I have to emphasize that this will impact girls as young as 5th or 6th grade, ~10-11 years old. A year or two older than my daughter.

Step one to proving your correct sex is female: A doctor will need to spread open your labia and examine the size of your clitoris. A clitoris that is “too large” could be a sign that you are intersex and not female enough for sports. Step two to proving your correct sex is female: A doctor will then insert one or two gloved fingers inside your vagina, while pressing against your abdomen with their other hand, so they can feel your uterus and ovaries. This will likely be quite painful for these young girls, and extremely traumatic. There is no medical reason to do a pelvic exam on girls this young, absent any signs of a problem. This is sexual assault and will traumatize these girls. That is by design. This part of the exam would probably be covered by insurance, depending on how it is billed. But these next two steps would likely not be covered for most people. Step three to proving your correct sex is female: Your blood will be drawn and your testosterone levels measured. How much testosterone is too much? Unclear.
Does having “high T” give girls an advantage? No, not always. But this bill leaves no room for nuance. Step four to proving your correct sex is female: Your blood will also be tested to see if you are XX or XY. Except not everyone is XX or XY and there are XY women who have no advantage in sports because of the nuances of their genetics, but that won’t matter here 🤷🏻‍♀️

This bill offers protection from retaliation for people who report an athlete they suspect is not truly female. There is no requirements that they make these reports in good faith. There is no protection for the athletes accused of lying about their sex. Any athlete who suspects they were “harmed” by an athlete who lied about their sex can sue that school district. If that athlete’s parents are unwilling to have their daughter sexually assaulted, or cannot afford the testing, the district will have to pay $$ to the accuser. So from an administrative standpoint, you basically have to require that all female athletes do this testing in order to play interscholastic sports. Otherwise your district is in danger of having to forfeit games and losing litigation if you don’t have this paperwork up front. Interscholastic sports in Ohio will only be accessible to girls whose parents are willing to subject them to sexual assault and very expensive and unnecessary bloodwork.

Congrats to everyone trying to “save” women’s sports from your trans athlete boogeymen. Is winning the most important part of high school sports? Because setting aside the incredible trauma and expense caused by this bill, at the end of the day, the message is that winning is what matters the most. That’s not the lesson I want my daughter to learn from sports.

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People have a difficult time making hard choices.

The Trolley Problem brings is one of the ways that we explore ethical choices. The general premises are that there are five people that will die if you do nothing. There is one person, who is currently safe, who can be sacrificed to save the five.

Do you do nothing and let five people die, or do you throw the switch and kill the one?

What if we change the problem statement a little, what if the one was a child? What if the one was a woman? What if the one was a “person of color”? What if it was your wife?

Now take that same list of changes and insert it into the five. What if one of the five was a child, a woman, a person of color, your wife?

Ok. How about if your daughter was the one and your son was one of the five?

The problem hasn’t changed, but the emotional stress is greatly increased.

Politicians know this. They use it to their advantage.

The term is “Emotional Blackmail.”

Consider the following dilemma, you can choose to pay more in taxes or the school system’s proposed budget is capped at a half million increase rather than the 3.5 million increase they were asking for.

For me, that’s an easy choice. Cap at a 0.5 million increase. At which point the emotional blackmail begins.

“If you don’t give use the extra three million dollars, we will have to fire teachers.”

Is that really the only choice?

That is the question I posed a teacher. What other things in the budget can be cut, before we have to fire teachers.

Now, I’ve been told that I’m against teachers. That I oppose her. Why? Because I don’t want to cut teachers?

For her, there are only two choices, pay or cut teachers. If I don’t want to pay more in taxes, I must hate teachers and want them fired.

So I asked her about programs in the budget that could be cut instead. In our first iteration, there were no programs she was willing to cut.

The problem she has is that every cut is equally bad. Every choice is equally bad. Since all the choices are bad, the only option is to get the 3 million dollars out of the stone of taxpayers.

We had a similar issue at a family level years ago. We had a 16k windfall. We all agreed we would put that money into the homestead. The problem was that nobody could agree on what we should do.

Should we get new siding for the house? Should we replace one of the vehicles? Should we pay off a loan?

It wasn’t even that simple, there were about a dozen different projects or expenses we were considering.

By default, humans will spiral rather than make a hard decision.

I had to listen to people tell me that project A was more important than project B, but B was more important than C. And C was more important than A.

It was a circle. Everything was more important than everything else.

The first process was having everybody create an ordered list of by importance.

They couldn’t do it. They all had situations where they had multiple things with equal importance. Or worse still, some couldn’t do it because they couldn’t choose.

The method that did work was creating binary choices.

We lay out a grid, in that grid we compare every item to every other item, asking if item row was more important than the item in the column.

Once that grid is filled out, we can create an ordered list. Once we had ordered lists, we could present and come to an agreement as to what our priorities were.

From this table, we can create an ordered list

1. Roof
2. Foundation
3. Gutters
4. Siding
5. Paint
6. Truck
7. Car
8. Computer

The problem we have with our school budget is that every program is equally important. In the end, they will likely fire teachers and programs.

For my lady:

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of attending, vending at, and cooking at the Northfolk Nightmarket in Phillipston, MA. This was its first year, and wow, it was amazing. I did pretty well, and I had a blast. Since this event is Viking themed (though “fantasy” Viking more than historical, they delved into the mythology of Beowulf in a day-long roving play), I decided to both dress as and cook as a Viking woman would. That meant coming up with meals that could have been served in Grylla’s mead hall. I decided to make a pork roast with apples, and a green soup. The soup was delicious, but the pork… It was divine. The following was food for about four or five people (but we were hungry from being out in the cold all day).

Ingredients:

• 1.5 lb pork loin, plain
• 4 apples, rough chopped
• 2 red onions, rough chopped
• 24 oz beer or ale (light, NOT dark)
• salt, pepper, oregano, marjoram, about 1/4 tsp each
• 1 tbsp dried rosemary

Get your fire quite hot and make a good bed of coals to cook in (alternatively, set your oven to 350° F). Over a quick flame (stove burner set to medium high), heat up some olive oil and toss in the apples and onions. Saute them until they begin to soften, but before they start to crumble. Place the pork loin over the vegetables, and sprinkle with the salt, pepper, oregano, and marjoram. Add in the beer, a little at a time so it doesn’t bubble over, until the pork is almost covered (you may need to add more beer later if you don’t cover your pot). Sprinkle the rosemary liberally over the top of the roast, and pop it over the coals for 2 hours.

Check on your pork every 30 minutes or so (or every time a patron asks you what you’re cooking and why does it smell so damn good?), turning it so that every side spends time under the liquid. If the liquid boils out, add more beer or some broth. Continue to cook until the roast is ready to fall apart when poked with a fork. If you’re cooking it in the oven, cook for 2 hours at 350°, then an hour hour or so at 250° while lidded, for the best result.

Remove the pork from the liquid and slice into coins. Using a slotted spoon, pull out the apples and onions and serve them alongside the pork, with a side of rice.

Notes:

I used old apples I’d found forgotten in our crisper drawer. They looked like apples that had been sitting around since autumn, which worked well for my event. Because of that, they were a little older, a little softer, and a little sweeter than a fresh apple. I highly recommend this, because the result was incredible. This came out moist, and absolutely bursting with the flavor of the beer and rosemary. It has a little bit of a sweet immediate taste, with a lovely savory flavor that hits you after.

If you can, I really do recommend cooking this one in cast iron over a fire. It was really easy, and it was very showy for when people came walking by. But the smell of it, and the slight background taste of smoke and ash, just really came together.

I will also say, we didn’t eat it with rice when we were at the market. We ate it with our fingers, dribbling juices into the snow and ice at our feet, and giving no f*’s. LOL… It was just so good!

The order list for today has come out. Snope and Ocean State Tactical are distributed for conference this Friday.

They are still live.

Today’s order list was 58 pages, including 30 or so pages by Thomas in different cases. I’d say a hundred cases were closed out.

This looked like an end of term broom, sweeping out the crumbs. There were a couple of cases that were granted cert.

Things are on hold for our 2A cases until next Monday.

Whenever I see a motion for a TRO, Preliminary Injunction or a Stay, the opinion of the court always includes a reference to —Winter V. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 172 L. Ed. 2d 249 (2008).

These are known as the “Winter Factors”. They must be addressed in order by the court before granting any of the above.

The first factor is the likelihood of success on the merits. Is the person requesting the TRO, PI or Stay going to win the case in the end? If it is more likely than not, then the first factor has been met.

The second factor is the question of the amount and type of harm being done. The key phrase is irreparable harm. In short, this means that the harm cannot be redressed by throwing money at it. All violations of Constitutionally protected rights are considered irreparable harm. You will never again have that opportunity at that moment of time with those people listening back again.

The third factor is the balance of equities. Who will be most harmed whether the motion is granted or not granted. If the motion being granted will force a business to close, while not granting it will impose an eyesore, the balance of equities’ favorers not granting the motion.

The final factor is what is in the best interest of the public. The public has no interest in enforcing unconstitutional laws. This always favors The People. The state will often argue that “keeping the public safe” is the correct scale to use for determining what is in the publics best interests.

The court did not use the Winter Factors.

And this is why she is using the Nken instead of Winter To be able to discount the likelihood of success because of the amount of harm. In other words, instead of having to prove they are likely to win on the merits, the plaintiffs have chosen to prove that they might be horribly harmed if some hypothetical comes true.

Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

IANAL. My opinion is that the first question to be resolved is if the APA law(s) passed by congress limiting the power of the President are constitutional. If they are not constitutional, then they must be vacated and there is no cause for the case.

Instead, the court assumes the APA overrides the authority granted to the President under the Constitution. She then turns the Winter standard on its head.

Even though the text reads To establish a likelihood of success on the merits, a plaintiff need not show that success is an absolute certainty. It need only make a showing that the probability of … prevailing is better than fifty percent.

The plaintiff bears the burden. Not the defendant. This judge says it is the States that bear the burden.

The gist of this is that the courts are planning to ignore the Constitutional issues as much as possible and instead base their opinions on laws that are unconstitutional.

Dellinger was fired. He went to the District Court the same day and demanded that he be reinstated, claiming the President didn’t have the authority to fire him. He did this at the end of the day on Friday. The judge in the case issued the TRO the same day.

The government appealed to the Circuit court, which kicked it back down because the case was in an interlocutory state. I.e., there wasn’t a final judgment in the case. If this status were to continue, this district court would have the ability to block the president’s authority to fire for the course of the case.

For rogue inferior courts and people like Dellinger, this is a win. All they need to do is drag out the case for as long as they can. Stopping The People’s agenda.

The TRO will expire on the 26th. The District Court will be hearing arguments for a Preliminary Injunction on the 26th. We can expect the District Court to issue their order on the 26th.

Given the activist tendencies of this judge, he is likely to grant the Preliminary Injunction.

If the Preliminary Injunction is issued, the President’s ability to fire anybody will be on hold until this case is fully resolved.

Any other challenges to being fired will be filed in DC District Court. They will all be assigned to this judge. This judge will then put them under the same PI until final judgment.

The Court has said that they will not issue an opinion until there is a Preliminary Injunction. This is still a live issue before the Supreme Court.

The two most liberal justices, Sotomayor and Jackson, would just have denied the vacatur.

Justice and Gorsuch would have issued an opinion, rather than waiting for the PI.

I won’t quote Gorsuch, but I love how his dissent is “When the plain text of the Constitution is implicated, it is the plaintiff’s burden to prove a tradition firmly based on this Nation’s historical regulations”. Gorsuch then cites numerous cases from the founding through until now which show a tradition of the courts not having the authority to reinstate fired federal employees.

When fired federal employees have sued for relief, they have been granted back pay, but never have they been reinstated.

I will quote the slap down of the rogue inferior district court:

That would be me.

Everything finally came together with the new system. Then I went and messed it all up.

The motherboard has a weak Ethernet. It is a 10/100 Ethernet, which is NOT a problem for a management interface. When I upgrade the box to have full redundancy, it will get a dual port fiber card.

What it does mean is that my Wi-Fi to it via a USB dongle is faster than if I were to plug it in.

Once the box was in position, I connected via Wi-Fi and finished configuration. I tested all the connectivity, and it all just worked.

At that point, I told it to join the cluster. It did with pleasure, and brought the cluster to a stop.

Did you catch my mistake? Yeah, I left that dongle in.

At the bottom of the barrel, we have 10base-T. I have some old switches in boxes that might support that. Above that is 100base-T, which is a good management speed. We can move data for upgrades and restores, but not the fastest. Some of my switches and routers do not support 100baseT.

Above that is where we start to get into “real” speeds. Gigabit Ethernet, or GigE. I’ve now moved to the next step, which is ports supporting 10G over fiber or cable, depending on the module I use. The next step-up would be 25Gbit. I’m not ready for that leap of cost.

Wi-Fi sits at around 200Mbit/s. Faster than “fast Ethernet” also known as 100base-T, but not at “real” speeds. Additionally, Wi-Fi is shared space, which means that it doesn’t always give that much.

So what happened? The Ceph(NAS) cluster is configured over an OVN logical network on 10.1.0.0/24. All Ceph nodes live on this network. Clients that consume Ceph services will also attach to this network. No issues.

When you configure an OVN node, you tell the cluster what IP address to use for tunnels back to the new node. All well and good.

The 10G network connection goes to the primary router and from there to the rest of the ceph nodes. One of the subnets holds my work server. My work server provides 20Tb to the ceph cluster.

On that subnet are also the wireless access points.

So the new node correctly sent packets to all the ceph nodes via the 10G interface, EXCEPT for traffic to my work server. Why? Because the 10G had a 1 hop cost, while the Wi-Fi had a 0 hop cost. By routing standards, the 200Mbit Wi-Fi was the closer, faster, connection than the 1 hop 10G connections.

When I found the connection problem and recognized the issue, I unplugged the Wi-Fi dongle from the new node and all my issues cleaned up, almost instantly.

For somebody who makes many grammar errors, who can’t speel worth a damn, and in general suffers dyslexia-driven writing issues, I am obsessed with communication.

My mentor taught me the “four parts of communication”.

1. What I say
2. What you hear
3. What you say
4. What I hear

If there is a mismatch between any of the two steps, then communication has failed. Only I know what I intend to communicate. Only I can do the work to verify, through what you say, and I hear, that I was able to communicate my concept correctly.

Part of the task of communication is agreeing on the meaning of words and of being able to identify what you are addressing.

If I use a word with one meaning, and you use the same word with a different meaning, it is unlikely that we are communicating when either of us use that word.

In the late 70s and early 80s, the feminists were becoming very vocal. They were making claims as to how good they were and how little they needed men for.

To put some perspective on this, in 1973, Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in a tennis match to prove women were as good as men or better. She was 29, at the top of her game. Bobby Riggs was 55 and most definitely not at the top of his game.

But, at the time, we couldn’t actually talk about how men were different from women and how some jobs were better suited to men. We couldn’t because to try to discuss the issue would get you slammed as a male chauvinist pig.

By controlling the language, the progressives were able to stop any dissent or even discussion about the issues from a male perspective.

It took a new term to come into existence before that discussion could take place. “Politically Correct”.

Once the term was available to us, we could actually begin the discussions that were needed, on equal footing.

Affirmative Action is another one of those topics. The phrasing is wonderful. Everybody wants to be affirmative.

How dare you want to discriminate against blacks by taking away affirmative action.

We can’t, or couldn’t discuss the harm that was coming from affirmative action because doing so would get you labeled “racist” or worse. The topic was forbidden. Not because it shouldn’t have been discussed, but because it lived in a protected state.

The new language is “DEI”. We are trying to discuss it. But we are being shouted down as bigots, racists and misogynists.

Now consider a current topic, plane crashes.

First, if you look up the NTSB numbers for plane crashes, you will find that more planes crashed in January 2024 than in January 2025. Not what we are talking about.

One of the questions that came out of the crash in DC was the sex of the pilots.

Why?

It was because there are people, myself included, that believe that the pilots of the helicopter were not qualified to be flying that Blackhawk in that airspace at that time.

Why? Because they caused a fucking midair collision!

They messed up and killed people. We KNOW that the helicopter was above its max authorized height and had no pilot input to avoid the jet. We KNOW that the jet had nearly full elevators and a 9-degree roll to the left to avoid the helicopter.

So we ask, why were they allowed on that flight?

One of the first things that came out was that the pilot was female.

Was the collision because she was female?

There is nothing in the record, the facts, that indicate that her sexual organs had anything to do with the crash.

But that is only half of the question. The rest of the question is, “Was she qualified?”

This raises further questions, “Were the standards lowered to allow more women to ‘qualify’?” and “Were better qualified males passed over to have more female pilots?”

These are all questions that should be asked.

We are having trouble asking them because to ask them is to be yelled at for something that was not said.

What are we being accused of? We are being accused of saying that the crash(es) occurred because they were women.

The media talking heads make the claim that they have the secret decoder ring that allows them to translate our questions into what we “really” mean. And what we “really” mean is that women are not qualified to be pilots. We DIDN’t say that.

But it gets worse. That message gets out there. And some on the right are not careful with their words. They might be attempting to ask the same thing we are. But it comes out as “because they were women”.

As soon as that happens, there are a hundred NPCs to claim that that dogcatcher speaks for every conservative, for every Trump supporter.

And those on the left believe them. As Ally has pointed out, one of the difficult things for her to accept as being right of center, is that we aren’t in lock step. That we don’t support everybody with an R behind their name or a MAGA hat on their head.

That duffus over there can have his crazy ideas. I don’t agree with him.

It’s time to start thinking about gardening. This is not just a pleasant skill that yields tomatoes. It’s a post-apocalyptic skill that is absolutely necessary. Have you ever tried just hunting and gathering? If not, don’t bother; there’s a reason we cultivated plants. Learning to garden now, when we have ample food at the grocery store (because even a lightly stocked grocery store is ample, quite frankly), is imperative. This is not a skill you can learn after the fact. The learning curve is so sharp that it requires early adoption and constant practice.

There are lots of easy plants to grow in a new garden, and I’ll talk about them next week. This week, I want to talk about planning. First off, it’s the best part of this part of winter (the crappy, cold, damp, windy part). You get to huddle near the fireplace and look through seed catalogs (on or offline, your choice), and dream. Dreams are seeds of the mind, after all. Stage one of growing food is literally dreaming about it.

Make a rough map of your yard. This is important because there are several issues that you need to address:

• Where in your yard gets full sun? partial sun? no sun at all?
• What’s the type of soil you have (sandy, rich, damp, clay, etc)? You may have to amend your soil to grow anything, so you need to know this in advance.
• What kind of garden do you want to try (raised beds? containers? little pots? big pots? half an acre plowed by hand?), and how can you do it to best utilize the sun you get?
• What is your Plant Hardiness Zone? Find out on the USDA website. As an example, I’m 5b, which means something. More on that later.
• How much time do you want to spend on your garden? Remember it’s not just planting. You also have to factor in weeding, watering, fertilizing in some cases, weeding, helping plants with frames or structures, weeding…
• What will you eat? Don’t bother growing something you know your family won’t eat unless you have a very good reason for doing so. Plant what you’ll eat.

When you pick out your best spot (with 6+ hours of sunlight a day, if at all possible), you’ll want to sketch it out in a notebook or using a computer program. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life so I use programs online. There are several:

• The Old Farmer’s Almanac Garden Planner (7 day free trial)
• GrowVeg (this is the one I used when we had a big garden)
• myGarden Planner (okay, free, not as intuitive to use)
• VegPlotter (nice, limited free option, inexpensive if you decide to use it)

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