I’m saddened when I read the blog of somebody I respect, I’m looking at you Divemedic, gets it wrong because it is everywhere.

The inferior district court judge has claimed (lied) that the Supreme Court agreed with him and that the Government had to “Facilitate the return of Abrego-Garcia”. The Supreme Court did not say this.

The Supreme Court used polite court speak to slap this inferior court judge around the block. The judge then decided to take a victory lap because he refused to read the Supreme Court’s ruling correctly.

What does that “polite court speak” require? First, it requires that you respect all parties. Second, it requires you to treat all statements by the lawyers as being truthful. And it requires that you treat any willful error by the inferior courts as being honest mistakes.

The District Court judge ordered the United States Executive Branch (Article II) to “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Abrego-Garcia. The judge was ordering the government to put Abrego-Garcia in his courtroom.

Under the standard legal dictionary meaning, facilitate means “get out of the way, do what you can do to help get this done.” “Effectuate” means “get it fucking done.”

The inferior court judge cannot order the Article II branch of the government to “effectuate” the return of Abrego-Garcia because the US Government does not have control of Abrego-Garcia.

Thus, the “effectuate” becomes an order to the government to start a war or otherwise do diplomatic things at the whim of the court.

Instead of saying, “You are a fucking arrogant worm. What the hell did you think you were doing when you ordered the Article II branch to do things? You are a co-equal branch, you don’t get to determine US policy, that is the job of the Article II branch.” Instead, the Supreme Court said, “We know you couldn’t have meant what you said, so you must clarify what you meant by ‘effectuate’.”

Sort of like when a little guy is starting to square up against a bigger dude and says something nasty.

Little dude, “Your mother wears army boots!”

Big dude, “I think I misunderstood you, you didn’t say my mom wears army boots, did you?”

This particular rogue judge decided to misunderstand. According to the documents that were available to me when I researched this article, the district court judge has not clarified what he meant by “effectuate”.

Instead, he has lied and changed “facilitate” to “effectuate” by claiming the Supreme Court said that the Article II branch must “facilitate the return of Abrego-Garcia”. Nowhere did the Supreme Court say that.

The Supreme Court told the government they had to talk to the judge and provide him with what information the government felt was acceptable to share.

I have always loved this song. I first heard it some 20 odd years ago, and it has stuck with me ever since. There’s a specific verse that comes to mind once in a while, when I’m feeling down or bad or wrong…

Now, depression’s not a million laughs
But suicide’s too dang’rous
Don’t go leapin’ out of buildin’s
In the middle of the night
It’s not the fall but landin’
That’ll alter social standin’
So go first and ask your father
And I’m sure he’ll set you right

I miss my father. I was always a daddy’s girl when I was young, and even as an adult, it was dad that I wanted to spend time with. My mother was an abusive cunt, and I had little interest in anything to do with her, and we’ll leave it at that. Dad made a hard choice, some years ago, when he chose to stick by his wife and to let go of his daughter. I barely talked to him the past 20 years, and he died a couple of years ago. It hit me funny. Until that schism, I could have gone to him with anything, and he would have shared good advice. I miss that.

Anyhow, this isn’t political, it was just… introspective. I hope you enjoyed.

I went to the Fort last weekend and I made an amazing pie. Cheshire Pie is one of the recipes shared by Hannah Glasse in her cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. The original recipe:

As you can see, it’s fairly sparse with its directions, which is a common theme among recipes prior to the early 1900s. One of the things I do is “redact” or recreate recipes from earlier times. I do this using my own skills as a cook, and it pleases me to no end when I find a great combination. This is one of those times, though I  can’t take the credit. I went to the class to learn how to make a good pie crust (and succeeded: that’s my actual pie in the header image), and learned the recipe along the way.

For the pastry, I don’t have an exact recipe. I was taught to measure by feel, because your crust turns out much nicer. As this was my first successful crust, I have to say I agree it works. 😉 Basically, you can either purchase a pie shell (you’ll need a top and bottom), or you can use your own recipe. Or you can try this one, which I’ll describe as best I can.

First, take about 3 cups of good flour. We used a mix of all purpose, white, and bread flour (and no, I didn’t get ratios, so I’ll have to try it on my own), and put it into a large bowl. A pinch of baking powder was added in, and then we added “a bit” of Crisco vegetable shortening (you can also use butter or lard, but I’ve never had success with either and had GREAT success with Crisco, so I’m sticking to it), about a cup or so. Just plop it into the flour. Then, slowly use your fingers to rub the flour and fat together. You don’t want to handle the fat too much or it will melt, so you kind of scoop up a handful of shortening and flour and then rub gently but briskly between your thumb and across all your other fingers. It helps if you keep your elbows tight to your body while doing this. You continue doing this until all the fat is mixed in evenly to the flour. It will start to make little “peas” or look like coarse cornmeal. Add a bit more Crisco and keep doing it until the bits of dough are about pea sized. It took me about 20 minutes to do this by hand. At home, I think I’ll use my pastry cutter to do the early part, and just switch to hand mixing at the very end, which should cut the time down quite a bit. Two knives may also work, but I’d say that handling it at the end is important.

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A.A.R.P. are the initials of one of the plaintiffs. They are currently proceeding as John Does. This is the same with Trump vs. J.G.G., where J.G.G. are the initials of one of the plaintiffs in the inferior district court.

When Alito and Thomas are on the same side of an issue, your best bet on what is correct is to be on their side. Yes, I know I’ve been on the opposite side from them a couple of times. I lost my bet.

This case is moving rapidly, the Solicitor General had filed his response shortly after Alito published his dissent. This is “fast” in court terms.

Here we see the Solicitor General say much the same as Alito, with facts involved. Alito also stated in his dissent that the Supreme Court had spoken with the Fifth Circuit and knew that a decision was forthcoming from the Circuit shortly.

Nothing will happen today. The plaintiffs, (illegal aliens), will file a reply to the response. We might see some amicus briefs, but nothing is going to happen. The Court will have time to reflect and read the briefs.

We might hear something on Tuesday, but I don’t expect a response until laster in the week. The Supreme Court has given themselves time to move deliberately while instructing the parties to move rapidly.

This has been a tradition at our house for the last 12+ years. I was roped into doing the Easter Egg Hunt for my kids.

Easter Sunday, my wife tells me she’s going to be gone with the kids to church for a period of time, I’m to make an Easter egg hunt for the kids before they get home.

I did. Then played dumb when they came in asking about the eggs they could see. I think that was the year of the jelly bean rabbet poop.

Things became more elaborate over time. Once I remember clearly was the Easter where there was still snow on the ground. I used a sliding pitch to place eggs in places with no footprints. That cemented the belief that it was the Easter Bunny and not dad hiding the eggs.

By the time they were teens, the hunt had become something more. The first big hunt was about 100 eggs in the forest behind the house. This is not a “search to find eggs”, this is a challenge to find the next egg.

Each egg is carefully placed to be visible from the last egg found. Lose the track, you’ve lost the remaining eggs. In general, the eggs were placed in easy to see locations, IFF you were standing where the last egg was found.

Last year, there was a swarm of 9 teenagers on the hunt. My son bought a handful of cheap orange cones, to be able to mark found eggs so they could go back.

This hunt was different, there were written clues with either compass direction, distance, or both. This meant that they might not be able to see the next egg from the current egg.

Of course, they beat that. They used swarm tactics. The 9 of them just moved out in all directions, searching for the next egg.

3 hours to plant the eggs, 1.5 hours for them to complete the search.

Tonight I’m sore. I walked about 3 miles placing eggs. Then another mile or two while helping them get back on track. It took them over four hours to finish the hunt. And that was with a rescue from dad.

It appears that they lost the track, they attempted a swarm, picked up a part of the tail of the track, cleared those eggs, recovered the forward track.

What this meant was that when they got near the end, there were no eggs in sight to follow because they had already picked up those eggs.

From the egg count, they missed around 8 of the 100+ that were placed. There were a total of 201 eggs in the hunt.

10 went to a littles hunt for the 4yo across the street. The next 100 to 150 were hidden in the forest.

To give some idea, we located three eggs from last year when placing eggs this year.

The kids had another failure, I had placed 10 eggs on the ground, carefully laid out in an arrow pointing in the direction they needed to go. They got to the “cluster of eggs” and just picked them up.

The arrow was there because the next egg was not visible from the location of the arrow. Plus, that direction had a heavy thicket full of fallen trees. They should have had somebody maintain that point and sent others around the obstacle until they were in the right location.

I had fun, I’m sore, my legs hurt. I’m already planning next year.

Oh, I received permission to place booby-traps next year. This will be fun.

I am actually good at this computer stuff. It is what I do. So I get frustrated when I order hardware and it doesn’t work.

A month ago, I ordered a Mini-ITX board. It was cheap, and it wasn’t 17×17 cm, it was 17x19cm. Which didn’t fit in the case. The low profile CPU cooler/fan I ordered was too tall, so I needed to get a shorter unit. It just wasn’t worth the fight.

I ordered a new Mini-ITX board. This was supposed to be the right size. Not only was it the wrong size, it only had 3 SATA ports, not the 4 on the board I ordered.

That was taken care of with still another motherboard purchase. This time all was good. And amazingly, I didn’t have to wait 2 weeks for the board to get here from China.

Everything is installed, I install the PCI SFP+ NIC, it won’t power up. I don’t know if the card is bad but I replaced the card and that machine is now in production.

Switches are the next big issue. I gave up trying to find a cheap switch, I ordered a new switch, the same as the last I purchased. It should just work.

This switch is an 8 port SFP+ unit, similar to the one in the featured image. It is powered by a 12v DC wall wart.

What arrived was a plastic box with 8 RJ45 connectors. Similar switches can be found on Amazon for under $8. To make it pass the Amazon inspectors, they threw in a free USB-A to USB-C connector. That was returned and a refund was issued.

So I ordered another L3 switch. It arrived in short order. When I powered it up, the power light came on. Then the SYS light started blinking.

Read the manual. Green blinken SYS light means the unit is starting up. Figure that it might be that the unit isn’t fully configured. No problem, I connected it to the network.

Still the blinken light. I scan the network where the device is supposed to be. No response.

Well, the instructions don’t mention the “console” port on the unit (missing from the image because they used the wrong image on the Amazon listing). I ordered a generic console cable to watch the boot sequence, maybe I can spot what went wrong.

What went wrong? Nothing.

The unit is working exactly as it should. I’ve configured it, ready to go into production. The documentation is wrong about what the green blinken light means.

Frustration with hardware, yet this time it is working correctly.

Once this device is in place, every machine, but one, will have at least on 10Gbit fiber link to the main back plain network. Every machine will have a connection to the management network.

As a side effect, it means that each data closet will have at least two fibers into the closet for redundant backup links.

Oh, this also means I can consider using bonded links to get 20G bit transfer rates. That will be cool.

Big news early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court “ordered Trump administration not to deport Venezuelans under Alien Enemies Act for now” — NPC News.

Or did they?

Yep, they did. But there are interesting things happening in this short order.

First, it was issued at in the early morning of Saturday. Second, the Solicitor General is invited to file a response ASAP. Not on a particular date and time, but now.

In A.A.R.P. v. Donald J. Trump, in his official capacity 25-CV-00059 N.D.TX., the district court judge found for the administration and did not grant the TRO nor the Preliminary Injunction.

They appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court, A.A.R.P. v. Trump, 25-10534, (5th Cir.). The Fifth Circuit denied the appeal because the case is at the TRO stage, and TROs cannot be appealed. Where have we heard this before?

What we are likely to see is the statements by Alito and Thomas in the coming days. From there, they will wait for the Solicitor General of the United States to file a response, so they have both sides of the argument, briefed.

At that point, they will likely say, “This is in an interlocutory state, we aren’t going to interfere.”

I noticed that we don’t see Garcia’s face clearly.  All the images are from the side.

There are some perspective issues when they are shaking hands.

Finally, they went from, “No, you can’t see him.” With the Senator getting stopped by the military 2 miles from the prison, to sitting and having drinks in a nice location.

This looks faked to me.  If not the images themselves, then in the setup.

I had the joy of staying at the Fort last weekend. Originally, the temperatures were supposed to be in the high 40s at night, and the 60s during the day. Perfect Fort weather! That didn’t turn out to be correct (go figure…). It was below freezing overnight Friday night into Saturday morning, and Saturday night into Sunday morning it was 33*F. Saturday was above freezing but very wet and raw. Sunday wasn’t bad, being in the mid 50s and overcast, but dry.

Staying at the Fort always gives me an appreciation for what our ancestors lived through. In one weekend (with albeit “white man fires” going full blast), we went through an entire bin of wood. Some of that was for cooking, because we ran into our usually spring thaw challenges with warming up the fireplaces. Some of it was because my cabin-mates were cold at night. The first was a necessary issue, but the second just left me flabbergasted. Regardless, if we went through that much wood in a weekend, how much wood would the entire fort community have gone through in an average month? It’s no wonder that the entirety of NH was essentially deforested during that period!

Here’s the deal: the Fort is made of logs and flagstones and local stone and brick, in a rather haphazard way. In the 1700s, that fire would never have gone out. Ever. During the night it would have been banked, and during the day they’d have been cooking over it. It’s much easier to keep a fire going than to get one started, and that’s exactly what they would have done. When we leave the Fort in November, and it doesn’t get opened up again until March, it’s been sitting almost five months with no fire. Over that time, the damp and cold get into the stones in a way that would never have happened historically. It takes at least two days of heavy fire burning to bring the entire hearth and wood oven up to heat, so that cooking can be done. This was something our ancestors would never have had to concern themselves with.

No matter how you look at it, when we arrive, it’s going to be COLD at the Fort, and we’re going to have to work hard to change that.

This is what I do when I’m going on an overnight trip to the Fort (or anywhere, quite honestly):

• check the temperature for the time I’ll be there at least a week in advance
• keep checking the temperature to catch any trends up or down as the week progresses
• check the projected temperatures for my trip the day I’m leaving, and make appropriate choices for sleeping and clothing
• pack extra warm stuff, just in case

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Trump Before The Supreme Court

Thursday afternoon, the Supreme Court consolidated three cases on appeal from by the administration and scheduled oral arguments for May 15, 2025, at 10 a.m.

24A884, 24A885, and 24A886 are consolidations of 10 different cases, though some of those are duplicates as they came through the circuit courts.

In short, this is the vehicle for the Supreme Court to knock down the raft of inferior courts granting nationwide TROs and preliminary injunctions.

I don’t know if this will extend to final judgment, regardless, this is the case to watch.

Fort at #4 — Projects

I will be up at The Fort tomorrow to take some pictures. I just finished two woodworking mallets. Boy, I’m a poor wood turner. They look ok. I’ve polished one of them and put a sealing coat on it. On the other hand, I can see ever mis-cut and catch as I learn how to do this.

I’m hoping to get at least one of the spinning wheels down and into the cabins. This will give me something to do when I don’t want to be in the wood working shop.

Which means I need to finish the clamps for the clamp to hold my wool combs. I like the way wool spins once it has been combed.

I might even try spinning some carded wool. I’ve not tried that yet.

I have a reed in our big floor loom. We got the loom for cheap, but the reeds were rusted nasty things. I’ve not recovered them yet. I need to make a raddle to allow me to warp the loom. And I have to spin some yarn for the weft.

Computer Frustrations

There are two standard ways that power is supplied to computer type devices. One, they take a 110v AC into a power supply, which then generates 12V and 5V from that for the system. Two, they have a “wall wort” which generates 12V DC, which is then converted as required internally.

More and more of the small devices I’m picking up use the 12V wall wort. The issue? Space for the wall worts.

Wed, I went to plug in a new device. Accidentally unplugged the wrong wall wort, dropped my room switch until I got it plugged back in.

Once I had the correct wall wort removed, I found that I had 2 open outlets but the orientation of the outlets and the orientation of the wall wart don’t fit.

Now I’m dealing with another issue, A new switch that won’t come online.

Snope

The SCOTUS Friday Conference was moved to Thursday. Snope was conferenced again.

I really, really, want to see some forward motion on these Second Amendment Cases.

The reason I don’t update you on Ocean State Tactical is that it has been following Snope and I’m too lazy to have another tab open on https://www.supremecourt.gov

Tea!

I used to drink Coke-a-Cola. I stopped years ago, mostly because of the sugar content. I was converted to coffee.

I do drink tea occasionally. It is not my go-to drink.

In 1773, a bunch of rebels dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Approximately 92,000 pounds.

For much of my younger years, I thought they were talking about Lipton tea bags. I.e., loose tea in individual small filter bags. There was no way that you could get that much tea into just 342 chests. Then I found out about real loose tea. This was better.

Then I found that what was actually transported were bricks of black tea from the orient. These bricks were solid.

For use at The Fort, we ordered a brick of black tea. It is formed the same way it would have been formed in 1773. Our brick is 2.5 pounds.

The cool thing? It has a shelf life of 50 years. This is prepper paradise!

Question of the Week

What do you think will happen when Karmelo Anthony is convicted for murder?