• Hey folks, quick update. Current estimate for power is 10/8. We were better prepared than a lot of other folks so we’re doing okay. There are rumors of looting going on and fights over gas. I haven’t seen any, though I also haven’t ventured far from home and only went out once for diapers. Areas around us are totally flooded out but we’re on higher ground and not having to worry about that.

    Please folks, check your supplies and be prepared! This has definitely opened our eyes to a couple of weak spots in our preps.

    Hope everyone is safe.
    — Liberty Doll

    This is from a screenshot from Facebook or X. I have not verified the source, but it sounds like her.

            

  • There are foods that I consider to be autumn foods. Squash, pumpkin, sage sausage, and soups in general come to mind. I love cooking seasonal foods, partly because it tends to be a cheaper way of eating, and partly because there’s just something scrumptious about picking up a squash that was in a field 2 hours ago, and baking it up. Today’s recipe is for a stuffed squash, but I haven’t told you what type. The honest answer is, it doesn’t really matter. I found Sweet Dumpling Squash on sale today, but had originally gone looking for acorn. I will say that Spaghetti and Butternut Squash don’t do as well in this recipe, only because they don’t have a big hole in them to stuff full of yumminess. But if that’s what floats your boat, go for it! You do you, Boo!

    Varieties of Winter Squash

    Ingredients:

    • 2 winter squash, halved and cleaned of seeds
    • 1 lb ground sausage, sage/breakfast style
    • 1 small onion, diced
    • 1 small carrot, diced
    • 1 rib celery, diced
    • 2 to 5 cloves garlic, minced
    • 1/2 cup of COOKED rice, barley, quinoa, or other grain
    • spices, to taste (either sweet or savory, your choice)
    • cheese, for topping (optional)
    • walnuts, for topping (optional)

    Preheat your oven to 400F. Place the four halves of squash, open side down, onto a rimmed baking sheet. Add a bit of water (this helps by steaming the flesh of the squash slightly), and put in the oven for 30 minutes to an hour. Check after 30 minutes for doneness; you want the squash to be soft through, but not brown or caramelized at all.

    While the squash is cooking, brown up your ground sausage in a cast iron pan or pot. I prefer to use a nice sage sausage for this, because it’s my go-to flavor for this time of year. If you prefer sweet or hot Italian, go for it. If you don’t do pork, feel free to substitute in ground beef, tofu, TVP, venison, squirrel, turkey, or chicken. If you’re not using a sausage, pick up a good “sausage spice” to add to your ground meat, or it will be bland later. You don’t want bland.

    When the sausage is thoroughly browned but not yet crispy, use a slotted spoon to remove it from the pot. Leave behind as much of the fat as you can (add olive oil if there isn’t enough in the pan). Toss in your onions, carrots, and celery, and saute until they’re just soft and starting to brown up. Add in the garlic, and saute until it releases its oils, about 30 seconds to a minute. If there’s a decent amount of meat or veg stuck to the bottom of the pan, deglaze with a splash of red wine, using a wooden spoon to mix thoroughly. Add in the cooked grain, and stir to incorporate. The grain should soak up any excess liquid. Add in the meat, and then spice to your taste.

    When it comes to spicing this, you can go either savory or sweet. For savory, consider salt and pepper, oregano, thyme, and sage. If you go sweet, start with salt and pepper, then add in a bit of sweet paprika (get a GOOD type like Szeged rather than using glorified red dyed sawdust like McCormick). Then stir in either a bit of maple syrup (my favorite) or some dark brown sugar. If you go the sweet route, also consider tossing in some raisins and dried cranberries or cherries for a delicious flavor burst.

    Once the squash is ready, fill the hole with your meat mixture, adding an equal amount to each half. Top with cheese if you’ve decided on savory, or nuts and berries if you’re going sweet. Return to the oven and bake at 400F for 15 minutes or so, just until everything is hot through and the cheese, if used, is thoroughly melted.

    Notes:

    If you have picky kids who are likely to eat the filling and then ignore the squash, do what we did: cut the squash up and add the filling to it. Make it into a casserole! This way, they have to eat the squash to get at the “good bits” and you get to feed them well. 😉

    This is one of those “do whatever you like” recipes that changes every time I make it. I’ve made vegan versions with Beyond Sausage, or with diced up vegan Field Roast sausages, or with tofu. I’ve made non-pork versions for friends who don’t do pig, and it’s turned out beautiful. If you want it to be a side dish, simply skip the protein entirely and stuff the squash with your grain and whatever veggies you have on hand. Shredded brussel sprouts are pretty good in this, especially when mixed with a Tex-Mex wild rice blend and raisins.

    Enjoy!

            

  • The Second Amendment should be a viable defense for anybody charged with a “gun crime”. Found carrying with an expired CCW? Second Amendment defense. Cross an imaginary line and your right to carry disappeared? Second Amendment defense.

    We should have seen 100s if not 1000s of cases over the years where the defendants argued that their actions were protected by the Second Amendment.

    The reason was actually pretty simple, the courts refused to give those defenses any weight. No defense lawyer was going to bring up a 2A defense when they knew it would just upset the court.

    Add to that the many circuit courts that had determined that The People had no right to keep and bear arms. The right to keep and bear arms was reserved for the militia.

    As it stood in 2007, private militias were illegal in most states, the National Guard was either formally or informally declared “the [state] militia”, the state AG was charged with bringing any state level constitutional challenges, AND the state AG was charged with defending state laws against constitutional challenges.

    In the Ninth Circus court of appeals, the only group that could challenge California’s gun laws was California.

    In 2008, the Supreme Court issued their opinion in Heller.

    This cut through the crap, said clearly that the Second Amendment was protecting an individual right. It went further, defining almost every word and phrase in the Second Amendment to absolutely define what the protected right was.

    Rogue courts immediately pivoted to a new reason to stomp on the rights of The People, the Second Amendment protected rights of The People were not as important as the important things the state wanted to do.

    Until 2022, this was the state of the right to keep and bear arms. For states that were not infringing, nothing changed. For states that were infringing, the rogue courts balanced our rights away.

    In 2022, Bruen was decided. Bruen reaffirmed Heller. It laid out, in kindergarten language that even a rogue court could not misunderstand, exactly how to apply the law in Second Amendment challenges.

    The two cases of interest that were not decided, but instead were Granted certiorari, the lower court’s opinion was Vacated, and the cases were Remanded back to the circuit courts to do over in light of Bruen were Duncan and Bianchi.

    It was my opinion, at the time, that we would have a decision from the Fourth Circuit court on Bianchi within 6 months.
    We got that opinion August 6th, 2024, two years after the case was GVRed.

    It took the Fourth Circuit court two years to get around to issuing their opinion after they were told to do it over again, correctly. Since they were outcome-driven, the results were, predictably, the same.

    With the respectful consideration and benefit of Bruen, we now uphold the judgment below. The assault weapons at issue fall outside the ambit of protection offered by the Second Amendment because, in essence, they are military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations that are ill-suited and disproportionate to the need for self-defense. Moreover, the Maryland law fits comfortably within our nation’s tradition of firearms regulation. It is but another example of a state regulating excessively dangerous weapons once their incompatibility with a lawful and safe society becomes apparent, while nonetheless preserving avenues for armed self-defense.
    —No. 114 Dominic Bianchi v. Anthony Brown, No. 21-1255 (4th Cir.)

    AR-15s and their ilk are not “arms” as defined in the Second Amendment. At least that’s what the Fourth says. Mind you, the option is around 59 pages long. The dissent is 120 pages long.

    The opinion is full of references to news reports, articles from all over the place. What it is lacking is references to this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. In addition, they misrepresented the Supreme Court’s holding in Bruen.

    The Supreme Court said that when the inferior courts were using the two stage means-end balancing method to find every state infringement “Constitutional”, they got the first part right, where they said “This is covered by the Second Amendment”, and the rogue inferior courts were getting it wrong when they balanced our rights away.

    The Fourth says that since the circuit courts were getting it right on the first part, and their first step was to find that assault weapons were not covered by the Second Amendment, even though they did means-ends, they still were right to declare assault weapon bans constitutional.

    Bianchi v Frosh has been going on so long that they had a change in AGs, the case became Bianchi v. Brown. The case is now seeking cert from the Supreme Court as Snope v. Brown. Dominic Bianchi moved out of Maryland and lost standing.

    Duncan is still stuck in the Ninth Circuit court, back in California. We are unlikely to hear anything from them in the next 6 months or more.

    But, we might see Snope make it back before the Supreme Court in the next session. Which means that it will be argued in the 2025 term, which starts in October 2025.

    It is my opinion that the Fourth Circuit delayed issuing their opinion until it was too late for Snope to request cert for the 2024 term.

            

  • The history of the race to the moon is amazing. There is so much that happened behind the scenes, out of sight of the public because it was that dangerous.

    My parents kept me awake for the moon landing. I remember watching Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.

    I am currently following Elon Musk’s personal goal of putting men on Mars. In 5 or so years, I hope to be watching man set food on Mars, to stay.

    The short of it, watch the movie. It does a good job of telling the story of Neil Armstrong.

    Then visit https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/apollo-11-what-we-saw to listen to the story of Apollo 11 or watch it:

    https://www.facebook.com/share/v/WGmyPedxhacbTcmu

    Well worth the time to watch all four parts and the movie.

    Enjoy!

            

  • Part of the task of making a High Availability system is to make sure there is no single point of failure.

    To this end, everything is supposed to be redundant.

    So let’s take the office infrastructure as a starting point. We need to have multiple compute nodes and multiple data storage systems.

    Every compute node needs access to the same data storage as all the other compute nodes.

    We start with a small Ceph storage cluster. There are currently a total of 5 nodes in three different rooms on three different switches. Unfortunately, they are not split out evenly. We should have 9 nodes, 3 in each room.

    Each of the nodes currently breaks out as 15 TB, 8 TB, 24 TB, 11 TB, and 11 TB. There are two more nodes ready to go into production, each with 11 TB of storage.

    It is currently possible to power off any of the storage nodes without effecting the storage cluster. Having more nodes would make the system more redundant.

    Unfortunately, today, an entire room went down. What was the failure mode?

    DHCP didn’t work. All the nodes in room-3 were moved to a new 10Gbit switch. Actual 4×2.5 2×10. The four 2.5Gbit were used to connect three nodes and one access point. One of the 10Gbit SFP+ ports was used as an uplink to the main switch.

    When the DHCP leases expired, all four machines lost their IP addresses. This did not cause me to loss a network connection to them because they had static addresses on a VLAN.

    What did happen is they lost the ability to talk to the LDAP server on the primary network. Because they had lost that primary network connection, no LDAP, no ability to log in.

    The first order of repair was to reboot the primary router. This router serves as our DHCP server. This did not fix the issue.

    Next I power cycled the three nodes. This did not fix the issue.

    Next I replaced the switch with the old 1Gbit switch (4x1Gbit, 4x1Gbit with PoE). This brought everything back to life.

    My current best guess is that the cat6 cable from room 3 to the main switch is questionable. The strain relief is absent and it feels floppy.

    More equipment shows up soon. I’ll be pulling my first fiber in 25 years. The new switch will replace the current main switch. This is temporary.

    There will be three small switches for each room. Then there will be a larger switch to replace the current main switch. The main switch will be linked with 10Gbit fiber to the 3 rooms in server rooms. The other long cables will continue to use copper.

    Still, a lesson in testing.

    The final configuration will be a 10Gbit backbone with OM4 fiber, the nodes will be upgraded to have 10Gbit NICs which will attach to the room switches via DAC cables. There will then be a 2.5Gbit copper network. The copper network will the default network used by devices.

    The 10Gbit network will be for Ceph and Swarm traffic.

    I’m looking foward to having this all done.

            

  • I’m all about prepping canned and dehydrated food in advance of any emergency. I’m more interested in learning to garden than in having 20 years of supplies on hand. My goal is to have enough food (“food” being defined as the proper ratio of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins to keep a person not just alive, but thriving) in my pantry that I can last for 18 months. That’s the longest time I would be without a garden harvest. These are good plans, but I also like to know what I can get from the world around me.

    Eastern hemlock fir tree leaves
    Eastern Hemlock, a fir tree bursting with vitamin C.

    I live in New Hampshire, and there are lots of things to eat that can be foraged easily. Starting with the easiest, there are blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries pretty much all over the state. They’re largely free for the taking, and there aren’t any “look alike” poisonous versions. Eastern Hemlock is a type of fir tree that is indigenous to the area. You can tell it by its flat spines/leaves (see the picture). It contains a lot of Vit C, and makes a very nice tea. In the spring, dandelion leaves are a great source of fresh greens. While a little bitter, they’re full of vitamins and minerals, and can be added to salads and soups. Don’t forget fiddleheads, though they’re only available in the spring for a very short amount of time. Cattail (you know, the “corndog” like things growing in ponds and slow moving rivers) is also edible. Different parts of the plant are good at different times of the year.

    There are many mushrooms that are edible, but all mushrooms come with a caveat. Mushrooms, all of them, are edible… but some are only edible once. Meaning, there are poisonous mushrooms, and ones which will mess with your gut in bad ways even if they don’t kill you. As an example, I found a stand of amazing looking fungi at the base of a tree in my back 40. I asked a friend of mine, who is an expert mushroom hunter, if they were edible. They looked very much like an edible mushroom I know about. She laughed when she saw the image, because the shroom in the picture is more of a “draino” style medicine. Basically, if your stomach needs to be cleaned out entirely, it’s a really good mushroom to eat. It doesn’t harm you, but it goes right through your system, taking everything with it. I’m glad I didn’t make those into mushroom soup…

    (more…)

            

  • Personal

    It has been difficult for me since my Father passed. It isn’t that I interacted with him that much, it is that the safety net is gone. In addition, it turns out that my brother is pretty darn evil.

    This is as close as I’ve come to talking about his actions in public.

    In the midst of this, a client I work with stepped up as a friend. The 30 minutes of dumping and ranting made things a little better.

    Thank you my friend.

    What you don’t know (Nerd)

    I started doing network administration in 1985 time frame. We were using 10base2 and X.25. Most of our equipment communicated with the mainframes via 9600 baud connections.

    Having blazing fast 5Mb connections was spectacular. We used NFS extensively.

    Our long haul communications were done via a 56Kbit connection.

    When I started work in Maryland, we were still using 10base2 with a few 10baseT hubs. It was “fast enough”.

    Later, some of our machines started showing up with high-speed networking, 100baseT. With jumbo packets, we were starting to get there.

    Still later, we started using Fiber, this got us up to around 155Mb. This meant, for the first time, our network was faster than our local drives. Using NFS was no longer a bottleneck, for those machines that were fiber attached to each other.

    The house network has been a 1Gbit network for a few years. I found out in the last couple of weeks that my primary machine is actually 2.5Gbit. Unfortunately, all the switches and routers in the house top out at 1Gbit.

    Today I installed my first 10Gbit switch. It has 4 2.5Gbit RJ45 ports and 2 10Gbit SFP+ ports. This has 3 ceph nodes plugged into it. Those nodes will get NIC upgrades in the future to take them up to 10Gibit speeds.

    I have one SFP+ module, it is a 10Gbit RJ45 connector. This means that it connects back to the main house switch at 10Gbit. The main house switch only supports 1Gbit today.

    So what is the plan? I will be deploying a dual network system in the house. The server boxes/nodes will have 10Gbit NICs in them, each with two ports. One will connect to the high-speed network, the other to the 1Gbit network.

    The 10Gbit net will handle all the Ceph and Docker traffic. Locally mounted ceph file systems will use the loop back connection, or they will be attached to the 10Gbit network.

    This will make the ceph file systems seem much faster.

    This will be accomplished with 3 4+2 switches and one 8 SFP+ switch. It should all just work.

    Except, I had to learn all about fiber. I’ve decided to connect these switches with fiber. After far too many pages of documentation, I’ve decided on LC to LC connectors on OM4 cables. Some cables will be rated for outdoor, underground. This is basically an armored cable. The others will be properly rated for the areas they are in.

    According to my reading, these OM4 cables should be good to around 40Gbit with the right transceivers and switches.

    It is all Trump’s Fault

    I’m getting disgusted by leftist idiots thinking that everything is Trump’s fault. Somebody shoots Trump? It is his nasty words and tweets that are the cause. Somebody sets up an ambush for Trump? His fault for pointing out that illegal immigrants are eating pets.

    Trump is doing a meet and greet at a grocery store. The lady checking out loses track of the total and goes over budget. Trump peels off some bills and hands it to the cashier to take care of that lady’s shortfall, as well as others in the store.

    The left accuses him of buying votes.

    The Supreme Court respects the law, the outcome-driven leftists on the court spit and sputter and the left screams that Trump, who is too stupid to tie his shoes, foresaw these cases and picked justices to rule in this way, per his bidding.

    If Trump were to run into a burning building to save a child, the media, and the left would scream he was stealing jobs from hardworking Firefighters.

    In the same vain, a group representing the immigrants in Springfield, Ohio have filed suit against Trump and Vance for defaming the poor hardworking immigrants.

    Note, they are “legally” in Springfield because they entered the US via a port of entry and claimed asylum.

    Take a look at —No. 114 Dominic Bianchi v. Anthony Brown, No. 21-1255 (4th Cir.) to see the probable quality of these immigrants.

    Assassination Attempts

    This is getting old. Trump is currently averaging two assassination attempts per month. This does count Iran posting a fantasy about how they are going to use their super high-tech equipment to kill Trump.

    Skills

    Ally was doing her look through Craig’s list and such when she noticed that somebody was giving away a floor loom.

    We are now the proud owners of a 4 shaft, 6 treadle 40″ floor loom in excellent shape. We will need to replace the reed, get some shuttles, and make a raddle and then dress the loom.

    I will need to dig up my weaving books and likely purchase a few. Ally wants to make some period dishrags and a Hudson Blanket. Both of those sound like fun projects.

    It Wasn’t My Fault!

    I’ve been fighting some new infrastructure and deployment things. In physical premises, we use physically different networking gear for isolation and redundancy. If we want to get fancy, we can set up VPCs and pretend that one physical network is multiple logical networks.

    I’ve been using VLANs to accomplish the isolation I want.

    On the cloud, I would like to use VPCs. The datacenter I use doesn’t support VPCs. They do offer VLANs. I choose to use them.

    The magic of their VLAN is that you create them on the fly. In the GUI, you say “attach a VLAN to interface ETH1”. It then asks you to name the VLAN. All other nodes then use the same name, and they are added to the same VLAN.

    The downside is that there is no explicit method to delete a VLAN. If all nodes that were using the VLAN detach the VLAN, then the VLAN is deleted.

    For testing, I have a script that deletes all my nodes and all the volumes associated with those nodes. This only takes a few minutes to run.

    After I verify that the nodes and volumes are gone, I can start the ansible script to provision the needed nodes, configure them, boot them, configure the OS, install ceph on 4 nodes, docker swarm on 3, and then install the database engines.

    Pretty cool. The process of provisioning an instance includes saying that I want a VLAN with a particular tag.

    When I ran the playbooks, everything worked correctly. Except that one of my nodes refused to talk to the other nodes on the VLAN.

    After escalating, it turns out that some nodes were attached to the old VLAN, which was in the process of being deleted, and the others were in the new VLAN.

    It is my belief this was cased by a race condition. Some nodes were assigned the old VLAN while the VLAN was being deleted. The other nodes requested the old VLAN and instead were granted a new one, with the same name as the old one.

    *ARGH.* That was many wasted hours.

    When was your last range day? What did you take with you

            

  • This story showed up in my feeds. I took note of it because, of course, they blamed the death of this poor black man on the conservative Supreme Court justices.

    The three liberals, would have granted the stay, but the six justices that insist on following the law did not.

    So what is the actual case?

    On August 11, 1998, F.G. was murdered in her home. A jury convicted Marcellus Williams of first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, and first-degree robbery, and two counts of armed criminal action.

    The court then sentenced Williams to death for the first-degree murder.

    The case was State v. Williams, 97 S.W.3d 462, 466 (Mo. 2003) (Williams I).

    Williams then appealed to the supreme court of Missouri. After briefings were received, they issued a unanimous option denying Williams’s appeal and affirming the lower court’s judgement of convection and sentence.

    In 2013, Williams filed a writ for certiorari with the Supreme Court, which was denied.

    Williams asserted that DNA evidence would show that he was innocent.

    The case went up and down multiple times before that issue was put to rest. Remember, the lack of DNA does not mean that a person did not commit the crime.

    One of the most famous cases of this was the Central Park five. A young woman was stopped in Central Park by a pack of animals. They beat and raped her, leaving her severely injured. I do not remember when/if she died.

    Of that large pack of animals, 5 were brought to trial and found guilty. The evidence that convicted them was their confessions. These confessions were given with their mothers present.

    As an example, one of them stated, “I didn’t rape that woman, I just held her down while ??? raped her.”

    This is an admission of guilt of the crime of rape.

    Was his DNA found in or on the victim? No. It doesn’t matter. He admitted to doing the crime. He was found guilty by a jury of his peers.

    Later, a jailhouse confession by a man serving life sentence(s), with no option to ever leave prison, confirmed that the convict did rape the victim.

    This does not change the guilt of the original animals. The juries knew that there were unindicted individuals who took place in the gang rape. The juries knew that the animals on trial did not physically penetrate the victim. It does not matter.

    20+ years after the crime, they were set free. They were “innocent”. No, they were not.

    Back to Mr. Williams, his conviction was by jury. Multiple attempts to overturn that conviction happened. His case was before the Supreme Court, asking for a writ of certiorari 3 or 4 times. It was denied every time.

    In the latest trip to the Supreme Court, there were 6 conservative justices. There was a majority of liberal, results-based justices on the court when the case was appealed originally. Those majorities did not grant cert. either.

    The new appeal claims, not that Mr. Williams is innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted, no. It is a claim that he was only convicted because the prosecutor was racist.

    When a case is going before a jury, the parties get to evaluate the potential members of the jury. These people are formerly known as “venirepersons”.

    Each party has several peremptory strikes. These can be used to exclude any venireperson. No reason needs to be given. They can be excluded because the party thought they read too much, or too little. They are allowed.

    In addition to the peremptory strikes, the parties can challenge a venireperson for cause. “Do you know any of the people involved with this case?” “Yes, you prosecuted my little brother last year.”

    There were 131 venirepersons in total. Only 7 were black. The prosecutor struck six of them peremptorily.

    What was the racist thing that the prosecutor did? He dismissed one of those six men because he thought the two men looked similar.

    So, the left is very upset. They are very upset that a murder was executed for murdering a woman over 25 years ago.

    They have not proven that he was innocent. He had the presumption of innocents when on trial before a jury of his peers. In his appeals he has to prove that he is innocent or that new evidence, if the jury had known about it, would have caused them to reach a different verdict.

    This murder was long overdue, his chance to present his case to Saint Peter.

            

  • Update – Wed. Sep. 25, 2:39pm:

    So it turns out that each state has its own election rules, and there are several places that you cannot do what is suggested in the video below and the post. I encourage everyone to find out BEFORE the election what you should do if you find out someone has stolen your identity. Also, if you’ve had family members move out of state, pass on, or change voter status, make sure your local pollsters know that. It behooves us to ensure this stuff before each election, so that only the people who should vote, do vote.

    I also urge people who live in states that only allow mail-in ballots to change that. There should always be the ability for a citizen of the United States of America to step into a polling station and cast their ballot in person. Always.

    __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Original post, unedited:

    I’ve never had it happen to me, but I know a couple of people local to me were told at their polling place that they had already voted. This is, essentially, a form of identity theft. There are things you can do. What you should absolutely NOT do is harass the volunteers at the voting station. It’s not their fault and they are just following their rules. I was trolling on TikTok while I’ve been sick, and ran into this video, which I suggest you watch. The sound can be funky on it, not sure why. Works on my phone but not my computer.

    https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFjSh3rx/

    There’s a lot of other stuff on the video, such as advice on checking to make sure dead relatives aren’t on the rolls, and making sure that someone who’s changed their name (due to marriage or whatever) doesn’t have someone steal their pre-change identity.

    So apparently there are people out there, professional looking people, telling the populace to fill in their voting oval, and then to draw a line to their candidate. Please know, that will INVALIDATE your vote. Do not do that! Just fill in your oval.

    If you make a mistake, do not scribble on it. Go request another ballot. Yes, it’s a hassle. No, it’s not stupid. Yes, it’s worth it.

    If someone makes any kind of mark on your ballot, request another one. You do not take a ballot that has been marked on by another person, because it can invalidate your ballot.

    For those who don’t do TikTok, here’s the step by step written explanations on what to do. Please note, I am not a lawyer, and I literally got this off TikTok. It “passes the sniff test,” as Chris often says.

    (more…)

            

  • Creating rules for anything, a game, a business, the interaction between parties, there can be negative rules, or there can be positive rules.

    You can have a set of negative rules. You cannot touch the ball with your hands. This is a rule in soccer.

    What was the original intention? We don’t know. What we do know is that it is legal to hit the ball with your head, knees and body, as long as you don’t touch the ball with your hands.

    This means that what is not forbidden is allowed.

    If on the other hand, the rules are written in a positive mode. You can only touch the ball with your legs from the thigh down. You have inverted the restrictions. What is not permitted is not allowed.

    You don’t have to state “you cannot touch the ball with your hands”. This is subsumed from the default negative. If it is not permitted, you cannot do it.

    Our Constitution was written as a set of positive rules for the government. The government is authorized to do X, Y and Z. They are, by design and default, not allowed to do A through W.

    When the Bill of Rights was ratified, we added negative rules. “Congress shall make no law…”

    There is no conflict between the amendments and the original Constitution. The Bill of Rights made explicit that which was implicit. The government shall not do C, G, and W!

    Unfortunately, this left the door open for the government to do evil. “Since the Constitution doesn’t say anything about A, B, and D, we can intrude in that area!”

    The explicit addition to our Constitution made this argument possible.

    Since the state always seeks to increase their power over The People, this is a fight that has been going on for decades.

    In Bruen, the Court made it clear that the state must …demonstrate that the regulation was consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. —No. 114 Dominic Bianchi v. Anthony Brown, No. 21-1255 (4th Cir.).

    The state bears the burden of demonstrating to the court that the law is consistent.

    Not the plaintiffs, (Good Guys), nor the court, but the state.

    For the state, this is a losing position. “Shall not be infringed!” is powerful language. They want that history to be as open as possible and as wide-reaching as possible.

    In the early post-Bruen cases, they through the legal dictionary at the wall to see what would stick. In Duncan, the first iteration of “historically reinvent” regulations ranged from the 1500s through the mid-1900s. They were forced to reduce that for their second iteration, I think it was limited to 50 or 100.

    Today, they are attempting a different path. Using the Rahimi language, Bruen was “not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.Missing citations for GE7W7FBY as amplified by Justice Barrett:

    Many courts, including the Fifth Circuit, have understood Bruen to require the former, narrower approach. But Bruen emphasized that “analogical reasoning” is not a “regulatory straightjacket.” 597 U. S., at 30. To be consistent with historical limits, a challenged regulation need not be an updated model of a historical counterpart. Besides, imposing a test that demands overly specific analogues has serious problems. To name two: It forces 21st-century regulations to follow late-18th-century policy choices, giving us “a law trapped in amber.” Ante, at 7. And it assumes that founding-era legislatures maximally exercised their power to regulate, thereby adopting a “use it or lose it” view of legislative authority. Such assumptions are flawed, and originalism does not require them.
    Missing citations for GE7W7FBY Barrett, concurring.

    Under Bruen, silence in the historical record indicates that the current has no support in this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. Now, the state claims that silence does not mean a loss. Instead, they claim that it just indicates that they didn’t wanna at the time. They could have, if they wanted to. Since they could have, the state is now authorized to do so today.

    This shifts the burden to The People to show that the state in 1791 not only didn’t want to pass such regulations, but instead were prohibited by the Second Amendment.

    Nasty stuff.