This is what I served up to our volunteer historical interpreters this weekend. On Saturday, it was served up as a stew, and on Sunday I turned it into a lovely chicken soup. This is one of those early fall recipes that sticks to your ribs, is simple enough to throw together anytime, and delicious enough to make once a week. You can also vary the flavorings easily enough, to make it a slightly different meal each time! This recipe serves five people, with enough leftovers the following day to make soup.
Ingredients:
bone in, skin on chicken thighs (8 pack)
2 large onions, diced
1/4 cup butter, margarine, or olive oil
whole wheat flour
salt and pepper to taste
fresh herbs (whatever you have on hand)
dried thyme, garlic, and nutmeg to taste
3 to 4 cups of seasonal vegetables, cut into chunks
This case involves California’s one gun per month infringement.
On Dec 18, 2020, nearly 4 years ago, Michelle Nguyen and others filed a complaint against Xavier Becerra, the Attorney General of California asking for injunctive and declaratory relief.
Because this happened before the Bruen opinion issued, it is couched in terms of Heller and levels of scrutiny. Remember, arguing that interest-balancing was wrong was a losing argument at that time.
They claimed that their rights were being infringed because “arms” is plural and limiting the purchase of guns to just one per month is singular. Thus making the law unconstitutional, on its face.
This case was a series of motions and counter motions. Both parties trying to limit what the other party could present as “evidence”. On Dec 6, 2023, three years after the case was filed, a motion hearing was held. This is the place where the parties argue why their motions are better before the judge.
On March 28, 2024, the court issued its judgement. This brings this case to completion at the district level.
The court found for the plaintiffs. The good guys. The court issued an injunction against California Penal Code §§ 27535 and 27540(f) as violating the Second Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Knowing the state would appeal, Judge Hayes put a 30-day administrative stay on his ruling. This is perfectly normal.
The state filed their appeal the next day.
The Ninth Circuit administrative panel, continued its unbroken record in Second Amendment cases, issued a stay pending appeal.
Appellants have established a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits of this appeal and made a sufficient showing on the relative equities to justify a stay pending appeal.
This is pure spite. The Supreme Court has said, on multiple occasions, how the Winter’s factors are to be addressed. First, the merits of the case, second that irreparable harm, third the balance of equities, and finally that the injunction is in the public interest.
The order by the administrate panel did not address the merits of the case. This is an instant showing of a rogue court.
If the case is a civil rights case, and the party seeking the injunction is likely to win on the merits, the analysis is over. The denial of a civil right is “irreparable harm”. The balance of equities always tips to the party being irreparably harmed, the public has no interest in enforcing an unconstitutional law.
Thus, this admin panel did a crackerjack job of ignoring the law.
The administrative panel issued their stay on April 24, before the administrative stay expired.
The case is then calendared to be heard by a merits panel.
That took place on August 14th, 2024. It was a complete disaster for the state.
There are more than a few channels that have done reviews of the oral arguments.
So how bad were the arguments by the state? Their stay pending appeal was reversed.
The order (Dkt. 9) granting Defendants’ motion for a stay pending appeal (Dkt. 3) is REVERSED. Before: Owens, Bade, and Forrest, Circuit Judges.
It took the merits panel less than a day to issue the order reversing the stay pending appeal, in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
This is a good time to buy stock in heater vendors in hell, it has done froze over.
Americans know pasta. We eat tons of it every day. Of course, most of that is pretty boring or down right nasty stuff that comes from a box.
I know that my childhood was replete with box after box of Kraft’s Mac and Cheese. Bring your water to a boil, dump in the box of elbows. Cook until “right”. Drain the water, add butter and milk. Then add the powdered cheese.
The American “Alfredo”. Yes, it is as cheap and nasty as it sounds. And American’s seem to love it.
As a cheese wanna-be snob, I order Parmigiano Reggiano DOP every few months. Much better than the powdered stuff in a can.
So why and article on Pasta? Because I like to make my pasta by hand. Well, I call it that, but it wasn’t really “by hand” per the definitions that the real snobs use.
There is this trope in story telling of the vagrant, hobo, bum, or cartoon character steeling a pie from a windowsill.
It is good story telling. But, in my opinion, we forget what is actually happening.
We can go to the supermarket and buy a decent, almost edible, pie for 5 dollars or so. We are going to put that price at 15 umms.
Let’s take a step back in time. It is the late 1800s in the rural outback. It is a 20-mile trek to town to get supplies. But you have your homestead, there is food in the larder, there is food in the pantry, and there is food in the root cellar.
While you are out working the fields, your wife is baking an apple pie for the family.
The basics going into that pie are flour, lard, water, apples, sugar, some cider, butter, salt, and spices.
She starts with pairing the apples. The apples are from last fall when she and the children spent a couple of days picking apples in the orchard, all three apple trees. Those apples were preserved and stored, they look ugly, but they will taste wonderful.
The cost of those apples is the cost of picking, cleaning, storing, and preparing them. Call it 45 umms.
The lard came from the pig they harvested last fall. There were many hours of tending the pig, feeding it, caring for it, then the slaughter, processing the pig, and rendering the lard. She’s only using a palm full of lard, so about 30 umms.
The flour came from the store. They grew their wheat. While the total labor that went into growing that wheat was in the 1000s of umms, again, she is only using a couple of cups worth of flour. 30 umms.
Sugar was purchased, the cost was 5 umms.
The spices were expensive, but because she is only using a small amount, 5 umms.
The pie is going to bake in the oven. That oven is heated with wood that was chopped from a tree they harvested. Total of 15 umms for the wood to heat the oven.
In total, excluding the preparing of the apples, she has 30 umms invested in this pie.
The total cost of that pie? 45 + 30 + 5 + 5 + 30 = 115 umms.
An umm is a Unit of Man Minutes. So that 115 is 2 hours of labor. At $20/hour, that is a $40 pie. When that vagrant steals a pie, they are stealing at least 2 hours of labor from that family.
This doesn’t even touch the cost of not having the pie for themselves. That might have been the last of their apples.
It could have been a meat pie instead of an apple pie. If it was a meat pie, it would represent meals for the family for a couple of days, at least.
As an aside, why did they put pies on the windowsills to cool?
Because it was hot in the kitchen!
You want the pie to cool, it isn’t going to do that as fast in the kitchen, plus, all that heat from the pie goes into making the kitchen that much hotter.
Honey is one of those items that many people have laying around the house, but not too many of them know its amazing properties. Used for sweetening, bug traps, wound repair, topical antibacterial, fighter of disease, and dozens of other things, honey is worth its weight in gold. From a prepping standpoint, honey is something I will always have in my “get home bag” because of its many uses.
I’d like to start with honey’s sweetening properties. Many people love the flavor of a bit of honey in some tea. It tastes great with peanut butter, or even alone on bread or crackers. You can use honey in the place of sugar in any recipe (though there are some rules to follow, and it isn’t a 1:1 trade off – Blue Flame Kitchen). Honey is popular when mixed with other herbs and spices, such as honey garlic spareribs, and honey and cinnamon french toast, or even honey mustard dressing. Use honey wherever you’d normally use sugar or other sweeteners. If you’re diabetic, there’s a few studies out that suggest using honey may allow you to use smaller amounts because it’s sweeter than sugar, and therefore you’d be reducing your glycemic index, but there’s nothing definitive at this point.
This weekend I was at the Fort at No. 4 again, and I ended up using honey to catch flies. For whatever reason, 18th century kitchens always seem to gather flies at this time of the year, and they’re a real nuisance. Unlike at home, when we’re playing in the 18th century, we can’t use electronic bug zappers or even fly tape, because neither existed in 1750. We have glass jars that you put honey or sugar water into, and the flies can get into them but not out. That works very well. One of the ladies suggested we coat a strip of linen with some honey and hang it out of the way near the flies, and hopefully they’d get stuck on it. It’s an interesting idea! I also had out a shallow bowl filled with honey water, with drops of modern dish washing liquid in it. The soap forms a coating on top of the water, and if flies go into it, they’re not able to get out. It all worked passably well, though the old fashioned method of attacking them with a wrung out wet dishcloth seemed to work best.
I think the biggest thing I’ve heard to-date is simply this: We need to focus on the candidates for president, not their VPs.
JD Vance is a better candidate than Walz, by far. No matter how much of a scumbag Walz might be, we need to focus on policy.
Kamala has not given an interview in 27 days? She has failed as VP, we need the people to know that she will fail as president.
There have been a couple of wins for the 2nd over the last week. Things are starting to break free. I think that one of the most significant changes in the circuit courts has been the dissenting judges being willing to stand up and call out the rogue judges for stomping on The People.
I’m working on decommissioning my Kubernetes cluster. I’ve already torn down the local “test” version. The cost is too high for the benefits.
The number of “supporting” containers is ridiculous. Each container takes a bit of memory. These containers suck the memory from the host nodes, causing instability.
As an example, there are three containers that run constantly to handle SSL certificates. They are needed once every 90 days per certificate and once when a new certificate is needed. That’s a bit of resources for something that isn’t really needed constantly. There are 23 running as k8s command and control.
My wife is a teacher. She is a darn good teacher. She has a couple of masters, is working on another, besides having a bachelors. She is constantly doing continuing education classes.
For years, I would talk about The Teachers Union in a negative light. She took that as a personal attack because she is a teacher.
When I was just entering 1st grade, they had just started a new language curriculum. It was a five-year plan. The gist was to move students through the k-12 process cleanly and with a good foundation.
At the end of first grade, we moved to Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, most kindergarteners arrive knowing how to read. I didn’t know how to read as a 2nd grader.
Later we went through “new math”. It did not bring much to the table. It did make it extremely difficult for parents to assist their children.
The Education Industry had managed to drive a wedge between children and their parents. Parents were made to look stupid because they didn’t know the new math methods. Read More
I was looking at voting trends over the past few years, and I find it interesting that so many people are choosing not to vote. Pew Research has a lot of information about voter turnout and flip flop on their site, and while they aren’t perfect, they do tend to do a pretty good job of reporting.
This got me to wondering… How do we fix the voting system? How do we fix the campaigning system? How do we encourage GOOD third party candidates to bring their best and enter the interview process (being President is a job, and We the People interview for that job)? There are so many questions, and way too many answers that only make sense in a single-use scenario. We desperately need results that help the country as a whole.
Right now, I’m fairly sure that Trump is going to win the election. Harris is a twit, honestly, and while she’s currently riding on a blue wave thanks to Biden, I suspect that it will bottom out pretty soon. She simply isn’t that popular, and she just hasn’t done anything with her four years. Trump has a proven track record, and even if there’s nose holding going on, I think a majority of people are going to vote for him. Of course, winning the popular vote isn’t enough. We’ll see what happens.
The problem that I have is that, if Trump wins, the country is going to burn. I fully expect there to be gnashing of teeth, false reports of racist/sexist/homophobic attacks happening, etc. Basically I expect what happened during his first election to be tripled or more, with false accusations across the country. And then the Dems and their violent machine are going to literally begin burning down the cities.
We live in a strange world. There is so much information at our fingertips that it is almost impossible to comprehend just how much of an information age we live in.
I’ve talked about this in the past, my mother was a telephone operator, as was her sister. They worked in a large town in Wisconsin.
There were two T1 trunks heading towards Chicago and two T1 trunks headed west towards Minneapolis. This means they could have a grand total of 96 long-distance calls going at any one time.
The grand total of the bandwidth for the town was 6.176 Mbit/second. That was it.
In the early 90s, we were mostly using 10base2 and 10baseT connections. That is, 10 Mb/s. The actual throughput was closer to 5 Mbps. So, about the same bandwidth as the entire town.
We were pleased when we upgraded to 100baseT. We were also using 125Mbps fiber connections. We actually had more network bandwidth than disk bandwidth.
Today, most of my boxes, at the office/house, are 1000baseT. I’m in the process of upgrading the infrastructure to 10Gbit/second. This isn’t for the servers, most of them will continue to be 1Gbps connections, but the inter-switch connections will upgrade to 10Gbps.
Why is this of any interest? Why am I doing this? Simple, I currently have 70 TB of storage at the home. This is about to get to nearly 100 TB. There will be 5 servers with 24 TB of disk each, 2 servers with 12 TB of disk. Those servers need to be able to move data very rapidly. The bottleneck has become the network, again.
This storage is for every movie I ever purchased plus daily backups, plus more software than I can shake a stick at.
Each of the primary servers cost $300 to stand up. $100 for the computer, $200 for disk drives. The other servers are multipurpose, so they have more CPU and more memory.
For you, old folks, you might remember the encyclopedias of your youth. This was the single largest collection of knowledge we knew. The Encyclopedia Britannica was 32 volumes in size. It was released on a two CD version. Each CD held 750 Mbytes of data.
1.5 GB total.
That encyclopedia would consume 0.00101725% of my storage. And I’m small compared to the bigger boys out there.
All of this is to say, there is nothing that has ever been digitized that doesn’t now exist somewhere on the Internet. Storage is cheap.
If you have ever sent a “dick pic”, it is on the Internet, somewhere. If you have ever sent a “bra pic”, it exists. It doesn’t go away.
If you have ever written a comment or posted an article, it exists, somewhere.
There are entities whose entire business model is to scarf every last byte from the internet.
To quote a great philosopher, quoting some stranger:
Dance like nobody is watching, Post like one day your tweets will be read in court.
