This is the section of the 14th Amendment which says that the children of former slaves and former slaves are citizens of the United States.

This needed to be done because before the slaves being freed, they were not citizens. The defeated southern states were investigating how to disenfranchise former slaves.

It was ratified on July 9, 1868.

Text and this Nation’s historical tradition of regulation

When evaluating a modern regulation, when the Constitutions plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.

In this case, “Is the child of an illegal alien born in the United States a United States citizen?”

The plain text of the Constitution clearly covers the individual’s conduct, becoming or acting as a US Citizen.

Since the plain text covers the conduct, the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of regulation.

What is the regulation?

This is fairly simple. You are a US Citizen if your mother or father is a US Citizen. You are a US Citizen if your mother or father is a lawful permanent resident when you are born.

Being whelped on US grounds does not make you a citizen.

Is this interpretation consistent with giving former slaves citizenship?

Yes. Former slaves were naturalized (I Believe). So they were citizens.

Their children were born to citizens or lawful permanent residents.

What does “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” mean?

We know what it meant in 1898. In March of that year, the Supreme Court issued their opinion in —United States V. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). This is barely 30 years from the ratification of the Amendment.

Wong Kim Ark was the child of Chinese parents. Those parents were NOT naturalized and were subjects of the Emperor of China.

When Wong Kim was 17 years old, he took a trip to China. He returned with no issues. He claimed to be a US Citizen.

In 1894, four years later, he took another trip to China. This time, when he returned, he was not allowed to disembark. Instead, he was detained.

The District Court for the Northern District of California found that Wong Kim Ark was a US citizen by virtue of his birth and had him released. The government appealed to the Supreme Court.

This is preciously the question the new EO brings forth.

That’s old time speak for “plain text” and “historical tradition of regulation”.

So a child must be born not only within the country, but within the “ligeance” of the country. If they are born of an occupying entity, then they are citizens of the occupying entity, not the country within which they are born.

When everything is said, the Supreme Court in 1898 found that if you were born of parents that were here legally, you were an American citizen.

Is that the end?

Not really, the issues are that of an invading force, or people that are here illegally. Do they have the same birth right as a child born of people here legally?

There is a strong argument to be made that illegal aliens do not gift their whelp with American citizenship merely by pushing them out while on US soil.

It is clear that if they were members of an invading army, their children would not be American citizens.

Standing

Mr. Wong Kim Ark was a person who claimed to be a US Citizen by birth. When the state refused him entrance to the United States, he was able to file a case arguing that he was a citizen and should be granted internee.

The state argued against him.

This means that Wong Kim had standing. The case was about him.

Now consider the current situation. Jose sneaks across the border with his wife Maria. Maria got knocked up by somebody, either north or south of the border, it doesn’t matter.

Maria and Jose show up at the hospital emergency room, where they are given “free” health care because they have no intention of paying for it.

Maria whelps Jose Jr.

Jose and Maria are handed a birth certificate for Junior. They are told they are the proud parents of an American Citizen.

You’re in the next bed and you hear that another illegal has their anchor baby.

You file suit claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t grant citizenship to foreign invaders.

The case is dismissed. You have no standing.

This is correct.

Who has standing?

The child, the parents, and the state.

If the state isn’t challenging the granting of citizenship and the parents are not, and the child isn’t, then there is no suit.

What does the EO change?

The EO says that if you are not here legally, whelping a child here doesn’t grant that child citizenship.

If Jose wants Junior to be a citizen, he needs to file suit. The state can now argue against birthright for invaders.

If Jose loses, he better stop. If he appeals, then the circuit court will hear the case. And the state will again argue invaders don’t get to make citizens.

If the loser of that case appeals again, it will be before the Supreme Court.

At which point we will have our second opinion on birthright citizenship being granted by the 14th. It might not turn out the way that the left thinks it should.

I am about to embark upon something on Facebook and possibly other social media. I am going to start posting up every second Monday, asking people what rights they have lost in the previous two weeks. I am going to make this a relatively serious question, because frankly, if someone actually *does* have their rights restricted, I want to know about it. Whether it’s gun rights, freedom of speech and/or religion, or whatever, we should be on top of that. More than that, though, I want it to be a *polite* reminder to my friends and acquaintances that they haven’t actually lost any rights.

I am including the first draft of the message below. I’m posting it here, because I’d like your feedback! Note, this is meant to be a reminder yes, and some people may see it as snark, but I’m trying to make this serious and real, as well. I want it to resonate with people, and maybe make them feel just a little bit uncomfortable. This is for *the person*, not “someone they know” or “that random group over there.” I may choose (but haven’t yet decided whether) to allow folks to include close friends in their reports (defined as “someone you know personally, face to face, have hugged, laughed, and cried with”).

The message:

Dear friends, family, acquaintances, followers…

There are a lot of people feeling vulnerable and concerned right now. I understand your feelings. I want to understand better, during Trump’s first (and possibly subsequent) year as President, what rights are being infringed upon by either Trump or the government (at any level). This question is put out there for YOU, the person reading it. It is not there for other people. I don’t want you to speak for other people (though I heartily encourage you to let other people know about my little experiment, and invite them to join in!). I want to know what YOU are losing or having infringed. 

This is a serious question on my part. I currently have a “research set” of one: me. That’s not enough. I need to hear what other people are experiencing, first hand. But I also need you to understand, I will research this stuff. I WANT to research this stuff. If a claim is made, and it doesn’t match reality, I will explain why and provide any related information I have access to. My hope is that this will encourage conversation, logical thought, and mental and emotional organization on my own part, and the part of others. I have other folks who are very interested in rights that have been infringed upon, and I will pass along information to those others who may have the ability to enact changes or challenges. 

As an example, I firmly believe (and have quite a bit of paperwork and research to back me up) that banning TikTok was and is an infringement of my First Amendment rights. While it affects other people, I am touting it as something that hurt/damaged/impinged upon ME individually. I lost MY right to speak freely on an app of my choice. 

So I ask you, what rights of yours have been infringed upon since President Trump took office on January 20, 2025?

Alright, what do you think? I realize many of you may believe it’s pointless, and you might be right. But it was questions like this that caused ME to change my mind on things. I owe it to other people that I love to ask again and again for them to apply logic, even when it’s painful.

I’m behind enemy lines, and I don’t like it. SIGH

So as a member of the renaissance faire community, a lot of my acquaintances and many of my friends are to the Left. Since I’m selling my goods to them, I have a reason to keep politics out of my social media, and out of my business. I’m a firm believer that no one should do political stuff at their business… you’re there to sell stuff, not stump for your favorite politician. Do that on your own time. But I digress.

I can’t just “be Right.” This puts me in a very uncomfortable spot. I suppose it’s useful for Vine, because I can bring information over here and let you know what’s being said off to the Left of social media, but I still don’t like it. This morning, it was everyone talking about how “the gays” will need to go back into the closet, and “I’m not going back into a closet!” Felicia, I don’t believe anyone told you to go into a closet, and Trump isn’t anti-gay, and has NEVER been anti-gay. But whatever.

There’s this need to lump sexual orientation (gay, lesbian, and bisexual) in with gender orientation (girl, boy, undefined). It’s how we ended up with LGBTQIA+++ instead of the original LGBT. Many of the gay folk and the “I changed gender because I had to, and I’ve stayed under the damn radar and WANT TO CONTINUE staying under the radar” crowd are pissed as hell with the TQIA+++ folks, because they’ve ruined a lot of stuff that the older people have worked damn hard for.

So when Trump said his bit about the government recognizing only two genders, male and female, I knew what he was talking about. His executive order on the topic, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism…, is very explicit. Forms, specifically government forms, will list biological sex. I can see that there may be some issues going forward, with long-standing people who changed their gender (not sex) many years ago and have been living discreetly and happily as the gender they’ve chosen, are suddenly being forced to change all their paperwork. It may be that the order will be understood to ignore those few people who sincerely make the transition. I like to think so. But nothing in the order says people can’t choose to be whoever and whatever they are. It just says that for government and federal forms (which include medical ones) and for single-sex spaces like changing rooms and bathrooms, biological sex will be more important. Again, this may be a problem for a few people who are well integrated into society in their new gender… I suspect no one is upset about a biological male who looks like, acts like, walks like, and sits to pee like a woman using a woman’s bathroom. We’re upset about bearded individuals with intact male genitalia hanging out, changing with our teen girls.

But people on the Left have grabbed onto that and are in a froth. I am not.

Read More

Correction(s):
I made the mistake of trusting Google’s AI answer.

Speed of light:

Sorry for that. A pepper grain is the size of a picosecond. A nanosecond is around 11.7 inches, which makes much more sense.

My mentor, Mike, had so much to teach me. Coming from University, I knew I was the best programmer on campus and better than anybody I had met.

That changed the day I met Mike. After being introduced to him, I went to my boss and said something like, “That is the most arrogant man I’ve ever met.”

Greg replied, “He’s earned it.”

When I had an opportunity to work with him, I found that yes, he was that good.

He was the first person to stretch my abilities in computer science. I will forever be thankful to him for that.

He had the privilege of meeting Admiral Grace. He was one of the many that were handed her “packet of Nanoseconds”.

This was Grace’s way of getting across to people just how fast computers were running.

In 1 ms, light will travel 299.79 meters. This is a reasonable rifle shot.

In 1 us, light will travel 0.2998 meters (299.8mm), or about 1.2 inches.

In 1 ns, light will travel 0.2998 mm. This is about the size of a single grain of ground pepper.

Just how fast?

My Cray X-MP/48 had a memory bank cycle time of 38ns. This means that light would be able to travel about 10mm or a little less than 0.5 inches.

My memory said that we had a 85ns wait time from accessing memory to having loaded that word into a register.

Your PC likely runs faster than that X/MP. It surely has more memory.

Frames of Reference

As stated above, my world was baby sitting a Cray Super Computer. We worked in nanoseconds. We were trying to optimize code to shave a few nanoseconds out of a loop.

Saving grains of pepper.

When I purchased some study lights for doing photoshoots, I didn’t buy the fancy radio controllers. Instead, I bought “slave” style lights.

With the slave style, you could tell your study light to fire when it detected the flash of another strobe.

Before I purchased these study lights, I went to Mike with concern. I had done the math.

From the moment my flash fired, a long sequence of things had to take place. The light had to travel from my strobe to the detector on the study light. There was a delay while the photoreceptor energized and “fired”. There was still more time as that signal propagated through the circuitry, and finally that light would fire.

My studio lights would be at different distances, we couldn’t even predict the sequence that they would fire.

According to my simple calculations, we could be talking as much as 2ms from the time my light fired until the last study light fired.

Mike pulled me back to the ground. My shutter speed would be set to 1/60 of a second. That is 16.6ms. If the study lights fired anytime while the shutter was open, I would get a good photo.

I was so focused on my reference frame, nanoseconds, I lost sight of the real-world application that was running in 10s of milliseconds.

pkoning Brings Reality to the Clocks

Here is the magic of GPS. It works by knowing the time and then calculating the distance to different satellites.

The more accurate the clock, the more accurate the location.

Communicating that time to an external device is where it gets interesting. The definition of NMEA tells use exactly when the second mark occurs during the transmission of the NMEA message.

Most GPS units default to transmitting at 9600 baud. Which for us is the same as 9600 bits/second. Each 8 bit byte sent requires start and stop bits. My rule of thumb is 10 bits per byte.

This means that it takes around 83ms to transmit one 80 character NMEA sentence from the GPS to the computer.

The instant when the second starts aligns with the edge of a signal of one of the characters in that sentence.

Now my issue was that I thought that the GPS unit had time that was “wrong” it was offset from the real world.

This is not the case. The real reason for the delay is in the time it takes to process the sentence. That should be fixed to the computer, not to the GPS unit.

Which brings us to PPS, or Pulse Per Second. This is a signal that indicates the start of a second. Depending on the GPS unit, this can be at ns accuracy. Even cheap units will get you sub us accuracy.

The processing time to handle the pulse is much lower than to handle a full NMEA sentence.

A PPS can be treated as the “real” time, without fear of being too far away from reality.

A couple of grains of pepper.

As of 1100 Tuesday, we have heard that cert was NOT denied in Snope nor in Ocean State Tactical.

This means that when the dockets are updated later today, we are likely to see them Distributed for Conference of 1/24/2025.

This is as expected. NEXT Monday is when I become concerned, if the cases are relisted.

They have relisted both cases for 1/24/2025.

        

Released in 1986. What’s new is old.

Out with the old!  In with the MUCH bettere.

I was raised in a strict Christian, Republican household where my parents always voted Republican, and they passed their views down to us kids. My father passed away about 15 years ago, and my mom remarried—a Democrat. While I’ve mostly leaned conservative, with some occasional moves toward the center, my mom has changed a lot since my dad died. She now lives in a suburb of Chicago and regularly listens to news outlets that lean left.

I didn’t tell her who I voted for in the 2024 election because I didn’t want to start a political debate. However, I did ask her, “Do you think Dad would have voted for Trump?” She replied, “Of course NOT!” I knew deep inside that he would have.

Yesterday, I called her to check in, and naturally, the conversation turned to politics.

“Can you believe it? Trump is having his inauguration inside!” my mom exclaimed. “What a wimp! It’s not going to be that cold out!”

I responded, “I don’t see any problem with that. I wouldn’t want to stand out in the cold for hours, either.”

She continued, “Well, can you believe it? He’s also staying inside because he’s afraid of being shot!”

I replied, “I wouldn’t want to be shot either. Honestly, that just makes it even more understandable that he’s having the inauguration inside. I guess I don’t see what the issue is, Mom.”

I then tried to put it into perspective: “Mom, if I were planning to get married outside, I’d have a backup plan in case of bad weather. The same goes for the high school down the street when they have graduation outside—they always have a backup plan. So I don’t understand why you’re so upset about Trump wanting to be warm and safe.”

After my conversation with my mom, I mentioned her comments to my husband and sister. They pointed out that having the inauguration inside would limit the number of people who could attend. My sister added, “If you lived in Seattle, Washington, and were flying in to see the inauguration, it would be really inconvenient if there weren’t enough tickets.”

I can understand that perspective. It makes sense that some people might feel frustrated by the limited access. However, I still find myself wondering why the left is making such a big deal out of something so minor. It feels like they’ll latch onto any small issue to portray Trump as the villain. Honestly, it makes me question—don’t people have better things to focus on? There are so many more important issues at hand.

Happy Inauguration Day! A big relief to those of us on the right.

Meatballs are the ultimate feast food, in my opinion. There are as many ways to make them as there are cooks, and maybe more. This recipe was created based upon a video by Country Life Vlog in Azerbaijan, Turkey. While Aziza (the cook) doesn’t give you amounts or any real instructions, I pieced this together by watching her cooking the meal. It’s incredibly delicious!

Ingredients:

For the broth:

• 6 cups water
• 1 lb beef soup bones
• 1 lb beef, diced
• 1 lb pork, diced
• 1 head of garlic, halved across the middle, paper still on it
• 1 large onion, quartered
• 1 hot pepper (dehydrated or fresh)
• salt, pepper, bay leaves

For the meatballs:

• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 onion, minced fine
• 1/3 cup rice, washed well
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1 tbsp turmeric
• 1 tbsp dry mint (crushed fine)
• several dates, figs, or prunes

For the rest of the recipe:

• 3 large potatoes, peeled and split in half the long way
• 1 can chickpeas, well rinsed
• several threads of saffron

Make your broth first. Add the broth ingredients into a large pot and bring it to a boil. Reduce the heat and allow it to simmer for at least 3 hours, adding water as necessary to keep it from drying out. If you want to skip this part, you can use 6 cups of beef broth, and add the other ingredients to it, and let it simmer for 30 minutes before moving on.

While the broth is cooking, work on your meatballs. In a large bowl, add all the ingredients except the figs. Mix together by hand, until everything is well distributed. Let this sit, covered, for at least 30 minutes and up to 2 hours.

When the broth is ready, remove all the ingredients and strain it to be sure there’s no hot seedy surprises lurking in the bottom. Return the broth to the pot, and taste it. Add salt and pepper to taste. Bring the broth back to a simmer while you form the meatballs.

For a pound of ground beef, make 3 to 4 meatballs (yes, they are LARGE). Really manhandle the meatballs, slapping them from hand to hand to make them fairly solid. In the center of each meatball, place one fig, and form the ball around it. Set the meatballs aside.

Mix together a tablespoon of turmeric, a cup of water, and a dash of salt, and whisk to combine. Use this turmeric water to “wash” the outside of the meatballs. This adds a bit of flavor, but also smooths the outside of the meatballs to help them hold together better while cooking. As each meatball is done, place it into the simmering broth. Make certain the broth covers the meatballs most of the way. Cover the pot, and allow to simmer.

Peel and slice your potatoes in half now, and slide them into the broth around the meatballs. Add the rinsed chickpeas, a few figs, and the saffron, as well. Be careful not to squish the meatballs, as they aren’t firm yet and could fall apart. If there isn’t enough liquid at this point to cover everything, you can add a bit of beef broth or water, or even a dash of red wine, to bring it up high enough. Using a large spoon, gently nudge the meatballs to make sure all sides are getting evenly cooked, and they aren’t sticking to the bottom of the pot.
Simmer until the meatballs are cooked through and the potatoes are soft and just beginning to crumble a bit. You can check the meatballs with an instant read meat thermometer. They should register at 165°F when they are ready.

Serve up this delicious meal with a side of pickles or beets if you would like to be immersed in Turkish food culture. Alternatively, a slice of bread never goes wrong, either.

Notes:
When I made this soup, I found the broth to be so spicy that I couldn’t eat it. I used a dehydrated poblano pepper, and it was just too much for me. I’m not a big heat person. Family said that it was warm but not hot to them, so your mileage may vary! I served the broth in small bowls on its own, and then put the meatballs, potatoes, and chickpeas on a plate. That way, people could use as much or little of the broth as they wanted. This was a very hearty meal.

The Country Life Vlog video:

Is it Moral?

We all have a moral code. Some people have a moral code that is more restrictive than yours. Some people have a moral code less restrictive than yours.

Occasionally, a moral code is imposed by outside authorities. Such a moral code is unlikely to be “your” moral code. You might agree with all or some of that enforced moral code.

An example of an outside moral code is “Thou shalt not kill.” The original Hebrew was “Thou shalt not murder.”

If you are reading this, it is highly likely that your moral code allows you to violate the first rule, “Thou shalt not kill.” If you carry, if you are willing to use lethal force, you have already decided to violate that rule.

At the same time, you should still be within the rule of “Thou shalt not murder.”

Humans are not born with a moral code. We are taught a moral code by our parents and our community.

A big problem for many Muslims is that their moral code is incompatible with our moral code. We can look at the rape gangs in the UK and question, “Why would they rape children?”. It is because, to their moral code, they have done no wrong.

There are those among us whose moral code would revolt you. Their moral code isn’t thou shalt not commit murder. It isn’t thou shall not kill. Instead, it is closer to “are you willing to do the time? Is it worth it to you to kill this person?”

We joke about feeding pedo’s into the wood chipper, feet first, with tourniquets in place. The reason we make that joke is because there are many among us that have evaluated the cost and are willing to do the time.

To quote Chicago, “It was murder, but it wasn’t a crime.”

In a series I was watching, the cops show up at a dirt poor family’s home. It is obvious that they have been eating meat from animals harvested from the forest. The cops know, they cops aren’t going to do anything about it. Who’s moral code is correct?

Is it legal?

Harvey Silverglate wrote Three Felonies A Day, How the Feds Target the Innocent. The book boils down to the fact that in the course of going about your day, most people will commit 3 or more felonies.

There is an imaginary line a few miles south of me. If I am standing, with my normal gear, on the north side of that imaginary line, no issues. If I step across that line, I’m committing felonies.

One of the things that is often said, which I have not verified, is that everything Hitler did to the Jews was legal, under German law, at the time.

In some cultures, it is legal to beat your wife. It is legal to beat your children. It is legal to do many things that are illegal here.

In the UK, it is illegal to say bad things about protected classes of people. In the US, there are people who want it to be illegal to say things that hurt their feelings.

What is legal and what is not legal is determined by the rules written in “The Book.” In the US, at the federal level, we need to have both houses agree to a bill and then have the president sign the bill into law.

In addition, the congress can pass a bill and have it signed into law telling some agency to create “regulations” with the force of law.

Is it Constitutional

To understand if something is Constitutional, we have to look at the regulation and determine if the regulation implicates the plain text of the Constitution. If it does, then we have to look to this Nation’s history of regulations on this type of regulation.

For most of the Constitution, we have historical jurisprudence telling us what each word and phrase means. This is so the inferior courts and the legislator can “get it right”. They don’t, but the Supreme Court does try.

The meaning of the words of the Constitution are locked in time. They mean today what they meant when the language was added to the Constitution.

For instance, the term “well regulated”, from the Second Amendment, does NOT mean “many regulations” or even “with regulations setting forth the boundaries of the right”. In 1791, “well regulated” means functioning well.

The phrase we are interested in, today, is Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech The full quote is above, I’ve expanded the clause to focus on the concept of “Free Speech”.

From the plain text, it is obvious that it is a limit on Congress’s authority to create regulations abridging speech. Any law that Congress passes that restricts speech implicates the plain text of the First Amendment.

Once we have determined that there is a Constitutional issue, we need to look at this Nation’s history of abridging free speech, at the time of the founding! 1791!

If you have a “hate speech” law that came into existence in 1950, that is not part of this Nation’s history of abridging free speech. The latest the law can exist and still be part of the original understanding of the law is around 1820.

Because this issue has been asked and answered by the Supreme Court, we don’t need to look for those laws. What the Supreme Court found was that there is a history in this Nation of abridging free speech.

What are those abridgments?

They fall into categories based on how much abridgment there is into the “core” right.

As an example, there are regulations limiting the use of the US Postal Service to distribute pornographic materials.

Does this intrude into “freedom of speech?” YES! It does.

How close to the core right does it cut? It is not political speech, for the most part, nor is it “educational” speech on the other. It does not seem to intrude into the core right.

On the other hand, if the State had anything to do with censoring conservative speech on Twitter, Facebook or any social network, that does cut directly into the core rights protected by the First Amendment.

Once the category is determined, the next step is to decide the “level of scrutiny” to apply.

If the abridgment cuts to the core protected right, then strict scrutiny is applied. Less than but still significant, then intermediate scrutiny applies.

There is another below that which I do not remember.

Using levels of scrutiny is giving our rights away. We should never agree to “levels of scrutiny” as it allows the State and rogue inferior courts to decide on the outcome by choosing levels.

In Bruen, the Supreme Court found that the inferior courts were intentionally misusing levels of scrutiny. As such, they said that levels of scrutiny were no longer allowed for Second Amendment challenges.

I highlight the phrase “shifting the burden” because that is an exact match to what was said in Bruen.

In Constitutional Challenges, once the plain text is implicated and strict scrutiny is invoked, the government must prove three distinctly different things:

1. That there is a compelling government interest in passing the regulation
2. That the solution proposed was the least restrictive possible
3. That the restriction was narrowly tailored to meet the compelling interest.

The government is not supposed to be able to just say they have a compelling reason, they need to prove it. Stopping murder? That is compelling. Stopping espionage is compelling. Stopping people from voicing their opinion is not compelling.

Having identified the compelling interest, the government must then show that they are using the least restrictive method to achieve the goal.

Increasing the penalty for murder? That is not restrictive. Banning all cell/mobile phones in businesses? That is not least restrictive. Banning people that might say something offensive is not least restrictive. Forcing a company to divest itself of foreign advisory control? That sounds like it might not be very restrictive.

Finally, was the law narrowly tailored to accomplish the goals?

Conclusion

Something can be moral and illegal. Something can be legal and immoral. Being Constitutional makes it “legal” but does not make it moral.

Remember that it was once legal and Constitutional to own slaves in this country. It was never moral.

We fought a war and amended our Constitution to make slavery Unconstitutional and illegal. It stayed immoral.