SCOTUS Watch: Snope and Ocean State Tactical
We are still in a holding pattern. At this instant, the January 27th order list has been released. Neither case is on it.
This means that neither case has been summarily denied certiorari.
They were not granted certiorari, either.
Later today, the dockets should be updated.
If they are relisted, we still have a chance of a decision in the 2024 term.
If they are not relisted, it suggests that there was a denial of cert and one or more of the justices are writing a “statement” dissenting with the denial.
Perspective. A case was conferenced on the 10th, 17th, and 24th. Today they issued the denial of cert. Thomas wrote a dissent, joined by Alito.
This is the same pattern as Snope and Ocean State Tactical.
I do not believe that certiorari has been denied.
If it is granted next week, the Petitioner’s briefs will be filed by March 12, 2025. This still gets us to oral arguments for the 2024 term.
According to my brief research, We are pushing oral arguments into May at this point. The Court doesn’t often hear cases in May.
Having said this, the Court sets their own rules. If they don’t set oral arguments soon, they will likely hear the cases in early October with an opinion out December 2025 or January 2026.
The Weekly Feast – Garlic Pull-Apart Bread
This stuff is crack. It’s worse than potato chips. You can’t just eat one. They’re so yummy that you won’t be able to help yourself. It can be made with margarine instead of butter and it turns out okay, but if you can digest dairy, use butter.
Ingredients for the dough:
- 1/4 cup warm water
- 1 tbsp active dry yeast
- 1-1/2 tbsp sugar
- 1 cup milk, warm
- 2 large eggs, beaten
- 1-3/4 tsp salt
- 1 cup butter, melted
- 5 cups bread flour
- no-stick spray
Ingredients for the garlic butter:
- 1/2 cup butter
- 8 garlic cloves, grated or minced very fine
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup finely chopped parsley
- 1 tbsp finely chopped rosemary
- 1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
First, gently whisk together the water, yeast, and 1/2 tablespoon of the sugar in a bowl. Let this proof until it’s bubbly and smells yeasty, at least five minutes.
To the yeast mixture, add in the milk, eggs, salt, butter, and the rest of the sugar. Beat these together with a wooden spoon or with a dough hook in your stand mixer. Slowly begin to add the flour, half a cup at a time.
Once all the flour is incorporated, knead the dough until it’s smooth and elastic. This will take 5 to 10 minutes in a stand mixer, or up to 20 minutes by hand. Always finish up your dough by hand, so you can tell when it’s ready. Place the kneaded dough into a lightly oiled bowl and turn it to cover all the dough with the oil. Cover with plastic wrap or a grocery bag with no holes, and let it rise until it’s doubled in size. This will take one to two hours.
While the dough is rising, make your garlic butter. Combine the butter, garlic, and salt in a small saucepan. Heat over a medium low heat and stir occasionally, until the butter is completely melted. Remove it from the heat, and stir in the parsley and rosemary. Reserve a tablespoon of the garlic butter for brushing on the finished bread.
Lightly grease two loaf pans (your favorite no-stick spray works great for this). Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface. Divide the dough into about 40 pieces. Shape each piece into a ball. Roll half the dough balls in the garlic butter, and arrange them in the bottom of the prepared loaf pans. Sprinkle with half of the Parmesan. Repeat with the rest of the dough balls. If you have any of the garlic butter left (except the reserved tablespoon), drizzle it evenly over the loaves.
Cover your pans loosely with plastic wrap or grocery bags, and let the dough rise until it has doubled in size. This will not take as long as the first rise, so plan on it being 45 minutes to an hour. Preheat your oven to 350°F during the last 20 minutes of the rise.
Uncover your loaves and put the pans in your preheated oven. Bake the bread until the tops are golden brown. If you have a thermometer, the interior should be about 200°F, which should take about 35 to 40 minutes to bake. Remove the loaves from the oven and brush the tops lightly with the reserved tablespoon of garlic butter. If necessary, reheat the butter to melt it.
Cool the loaves in the pans for five minutes, then remove the bread from the pans. Serve while still warm, with a side of pizza sauce!
This and That
Happy Birthday(ish) Ally!
It was her birthday, very recently, send her a Happy Birthday!
I am SOOOO upset
Here is the item description:
- [Support Mini ITX Motherboard] ITX Motherboard dimension 6.7*6.7in (17*17cm).
- [Support Flex Power Supply Unit] Flex PSU dimension 3.21*1.59*5.91in (81.5*40.5*150mm).
- [Support 1 Single Slot Full Height PCI-e Expansion Card] To add video card or network card or more.
- [Come With 1 Front USB 3.0 or 2.0 Port] 2 in 1 cable only plug one connector to motherboard.
- Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
- On Monday, the State Department convenes an interagency task force with DoD, NSC, DEA, INS, ICE, Commerce, Treasury and Homeland Security.
- The task force meets for four days and develops a position paper.
- The position paper is rejected by the Secretary of State, who is unhappy that insufficient equity considerations are built into the process.
- The task force reconvenes a week later to redevelop three new, equity-centric courses of action and create a new position paper.
- The process is delayed a week because Washington DC gets three inches of snow.
- SecState approves the new position paper for interagency circulation, and considerable input is received from the heads of other departments so the task force must reconvene.
- The original three proposed responsive courses of action are scrapped in favor of a new, fourth course of action that achieves the worst aspects of the three prior courses of action but satisfies the interagency.
- Someone in State who disagrees leaks to the Washington Post, who writes a story about how ineffective the Presidential administration is.
- The White House Chief of Staff sets up a session three days later to brief the President, who approves the new fourth course of action.
- Over a month after the issue is first raised, the State Department Public Affairs Officer holds a press conference announcing that Colombia has agreed to try to send fewer criminals into the US and everyone declares victory.
- Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
- After a par-5 third hole where he goes one under par, Trump uses his iPhone to post on social media as to how the USA will destroy Colombia’s economy if they do not do what the USA demands.
- By the time Trump gets to the par-4 sixth hole, Colombia’s President has agreed to repatriate all the illegal Colombians in his own plane, which he will pay for.
- Trump finishes three under par and goes to the clubhouse for a Diet Coke where he posts a gangsta AI image of himself and the new FAFO Doctrine.
- Winning.
Two MAJOR issues for me. First, it doesn’t support a 170x170mm motherboard. No, it supports a 170x167mm motherboard. If you put a 170×170 in the case, there is not enough room to put the cover on.
That lead to time in the shop grinding off the offending metal.
The clearance for the board is very tight under the four disk bays. I had to get a different CPU cooler that was low profile. That’s ok. Everything went together once I got the fan in place.
Then I went to install the PCIe 10G SFP+ card. There is no space in the back for that card! They put the damn full height opening in the worng place.
FAFO
I’m stealing this from X. I was going to write about this, I had multiple sources. I was going to quote published documents. Instead, I’ll let this stand for itself.
To fully understand just how remarkable today’s exchange with Colombia was, you need to understand how Washington DC has traditionally worked through these sorts of issues, and the different way it works now under Trump.
I’ll illustrate.
Traditional Approach:
Trump Approach:
See the difference? It’s called LEADERSHIP.
For a little bit of clarity on how heavy handed Trump 2.0 was, Colombia exports around a billion dollars worth of roses every year to America. In order for those roses to be sold, they have to get expedited inspections. They also have to be reasonably prices.
With the 25% tariffs, Trump was going to put the hurting on 31% of their economy. But it is better. If Colombia had not caved, the tariffs were going to go up to 50%.
In addition, Trump ordered full inspections of everything being imported from Colombia. That means that many of those roses would have wilted in transit.
Oh, did you remember that Valentine’s Day is coming up? And that is the biggest sales day in the country for roses.
Whining on X
I could write a dozen articles about whining liberals over on X. The most common whine is, “a bad thing is going to happen. This is what you morons voted for. Don’t you feel stupid now?”
One Step Forward n Steps Back (geek)
I’ve known about “System On a Chip” and “System On a Board” for many years. I have one of the early embedded software development kits, including some TI chipset.
The most common style of these today is likely the Arduino class of SoC. These things are incredible.
An idea I pitched years ago, for potential military use, was a swarm of small single purpose computers that could be dropped in mass from an aircraft.
Something about the size of a quarter with one or two sensors, a mesh Wi-Fi system, GPS, and a battery. These would drop like the “helicopter” seed pods, scatter over an area, then set up a monitoring network. Using spread spectrum, low power, and burst transmissions, the network might be difficult to detect.
As the sensors detected “things”, they would report to a transmission unit, which would then send a report to home base.
This was all based on a small battery. We figured we could get these things in mass and get them ready to toss out the back of a C130 for less than $100 each.
Today, I can buy a chip that will do that, put it on a custom board with all components for less than $20 in low unit counts.
So SoC, way cool.
The other thing that has been happening is that the physical size requirements for a personal computer have gone way down. Whereas the original XT motherboard was 8.5×11 and the AT was 12×13, we are now seeing Mini-ITX at 6.7×6.7 and even Nano-ITX at 4.7×4.7.
My son found the Mini-ITX form factor computer a few years ago. A full computer that was the size of 3 boxes of .45cal. It weights less.
His computer came with 2 HDMI ports, 4 USB3.2 ports, a headphone jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 1Gb Ethernet. It had upgradable memory and at least one M.2 port. This thing just works.
What is cool about it is that it mounts to the back of a monitor. He needs his keyboard and two power supplies.
It is what I got my lovely wife for Christmas this last year.
Can I ditch the big boxes?
Things go in circles. My primary machine lives in a case I purchased almost 20 years ago. It has a new power supply, an extra video card, and a SAS controller. It is designed to handle 9 internal drives plus the optical drive. It can connect to external SAS cabinets.
It was designed to have 36 TB of storage in a ZFS pool. It is heavy. It requires big fans. It is a workhorse.
But, I’m moving away from ZFS. It is a great system, I love it. It just does not meet my current needs. I’ve moved to ceph, a distributed system.
Ceph does not use raid technology the same way that ZFS does. Instead, it depends on having many nodes with lots of redundancy.
With ZFS, my normal was one parity drive for every 4 data drives. So a 20% overhead.
In its fast mode, ceph has a 200% overhead. For every block of data stored, it requires two copies. There are modes that are more optimized, but they all seem to have higher overhead than a raid system.
But because I don’t need to create 5 drive pools, I can do something different. More boxes with just a few drives in each.
I don’t need all that motherboard. I don’t need all that memory. I don’t even need all that much CPU.
Some of the servers I’m using only support two SATA drives, but have an NVMe slot. Still, it is a big box.
My answer was to go looking. I found a cheap ITX-Mini motherboard. It would have been cheaper off the boat, but I found it on Amazon. A used i5 CPU. It will handle an i7 and maybe an i9. A cheap 128GB NVMe, and some DDR3 ram. Toss in a CPU cooler and it is a fully functional system.
It only has a Gigabit Ethernet, but it has a PCI slot. It has four SATA ports.
The cheap case I found has four hot swap bays for SATA drives. It takes a Mini-ITX motherboard. This thing is perfect for what I require.
So yes, this can do the job. I can downsize.
What else is cool about these Mini-ITX boards?
They really are designed with specific markets in mind. I found one with 2 2.5Gb RJ45 and 2 10Gb SFP+ ports. It has GPIO ports, comes in an extruded aluminum heat sink/case. It replaced the old router and everything got faster.
There are versions with multiple RJ45 ports. Different layouts. Different CPU designs. Some come with a CPU on the board, making them a SoB. Some are AMD, some are Intel based.
What I couldn’t find is a board with four SATA ports, a PCIe slot, and GPIO.
Which brings me back to PI
The board I want needs to have hardware-driven Ethernet, GPIO pins, and serial IO. It also has to be cheap. I think I found it in the Banana PI M2 Ultra.
It has everything I need, it was very cheap, less than dinner for three at the fast food joint.
My step backward? It requires power that I can’t give it. GRRR. So it requires a dedicated power supply.
Oh well, my NTP server is almost here.
It’s the Little Things, ICE at work
For the last 4+ years, I’ve been hearing about the horrible things that illegal aliens have been doing. Rape, murder, kidnapping, child rape, taking over apartment complexes.
The “eating the pets” might be true, or it might not.
The joke of “there are no stray cats near the Chinese Restaurant” has a reason.
What made me sick was the lack of response by law enforcement. There were politicians who showed up to say, “Nothing to see here.” There were politicians who showed up to beg law enforcement to do something.
What didn’t show up were the cops.
Three days into Trump 2.0 and it is obvious that ICE knew where to go and whom to pick up. Outstanding!
Listening to neighbors expressing loud gratitude to the cops is another good sign. They would not be making a sound if they thought those illegals would be back before dark.
I’m liking Trump 2.0.
Prepping – Fitness
I’m writing this while I pant heavily, sitting in my chair at my desk. I’ve just finished cleaning bunny cages and exercising, and I’m dripping with sweat despite it being a mere 58*F in my room. I’m exhausted and aching. I am not fit.
I’ve seen this topic touched on a few times in the prepping world, but not really in a practical manner. Fitness is something that doesn’t really exist in the “Rule of Threes” or in common prepping documents. It does matter, though. So much so, that I feel it belongs under “three minutes without air” because right now, I’m panting. I mentioned that.
I get practical exercise every summer. I spent the weekends (2 to 3 overnights) living in a tent and cooking over a fire with cast iron. I’ve had some of our (very fit) fighters carry my cast iron pots to the table for me at the end of a long day, and they’re always astonished at the weight that I “seemingly easily” lug around all day. And it’s that weekly practice (or daily really) that makes it possible for my fat ass to haul this stuff over and around camp.
Our bodies were made to keep us alive under horrendous circumstances. The whole “fight or flight” thing is part of our basic human wiring. This means that our metabolism likes to find sugar, salt, and fat. We crave it! When you’re a Scotsman in the highlands above Edinburgh, dodging the English invaders, it makes sense. You need to find those things that will keep your body working. When you’re sitting at a desk typing emails all day, not so much. It works against us. We want to sit and do the things that stimulate our brains, but unlike even 20 years ago, pretty much everything that stimulates our brains is right here at our fingertips (with Doordash being a thing, doubly so).
It behooves each of us to get up off our duffs five to seven times a week, and move around. I don’t mean doing the dishes (though do those too). I mean exercise of the hot, sweaty, uncomfortable kind. If you’re very out of shape, going for a 20 minute walk five times a week will improve pretty much everything: mind, body, and spirit. Lifting weights for a similar amount of time will do the same thing. Ditto with using a ski machine, swimming, playing a physical game like tennis or soccer, going roller skating or ice skating, and running bases with your kids.
If you can’t do any of those things, chair exercises exist. That’s where I started, so don’t be embarrassed. You have to start somewhere, and no one needs to know. But you need to do it. This is a NEED, not a want or a desire. If you can’t pick up and go because of your lack of fitness, then the problem is 100% you. Please note, people with physical disabilities and such, who simply *cannot* do it, are exempt from this shaming. If you can’t, you can’t, and I get that. But if you can and you just don’t want to, that’s on you.
I really do get it. I don’t like getting sweaty except in one way. I don’t like it when my body aches. I don’t like being on a treadmill or bike machine. It’s boring and stupid and I hate it. But I need to do it, because if I don’t, I won’t be carrying even a half load in my pack, never mind a full load. If I can’t carry a full load, there’s not a whole lot of point in my bugging out, because I won’t get far.
So… what are you doing to make yourself more able, more fit, and more in shape?
Friday Feedback
SCOTUS watch
There are two important Second Amendment cases being discussed by the Supreme Court today. Snope and Ocean State Tactical
The questions presented are assault weapon bans and large capacity magazine bans. Both made up terms.
This is not the limit of what the opinion might cover.
This evening I’ll be checking for miscellaneous orders by the Supreme Court. I don’t expect anything. Later tonight or early tomorrow, I’ll see a video by Mark Smith telling me why I should panic.
Monday morning I’ll see the orders list issued by the Supreme Court. I expect to see the these cases granted cert. If not, I’ll find an update that evening on the dockets telling me they have been relisted.
My match suggests we have until about February 15 to have the grant in hand before I start to worry.
Trump is the President
It is a joyous week. The wins keep happening. The left is melting down in so many ways.
The Games Democrats Play
The Democrats are delaying the confirmation of some of Trump’s cabinet picks. Just game playing. It means we are delayed a week before Pam Bondi(sp?) is confirmed.
They Want Us To Hurt
I come from a place of “leave me alone. Get off my Lawn”. The left seems to come from the place of “I’m in pain, you should hurt more.”
I’m sick of it. Ally is sick of it.
Given any opportunity, they will hurt you.
The big one is Elon’s “My heart goes out to you.” gesture. The left decided it was a NAZI salute. If you argue that it isn’t, then you are stupid.
In Ally’s case, when that didn’t work, they told her that a dead friend would be rolling over in his grave over her not believing that Elon is an evil NAZI.
AI For the win?
I’ve taken to reading the short AI results for many of my technical searches.
This works well. Occasionally, it is a little off, but the summary is often good. And the links to the articles that it is summarizing are right there.
The other night, I asked it, “how far is 1ms at the speed of light?” It gave me an answer that was off by 3 powers of 10.
Because I had come to “trust” most of its answers and the numbers felt right, I didn’t bother to verify the match.
This lead me to telling the story of the picosecond but calling it a nanosecond.
Trust, but verify.
Question of the week
What is the best thing you’ve seen since Trump took office, again?