• We’ve all heard it. That damned One Percent. If only they would share their wealth! If only the One Percent would pay their fair share! How dare the One Percent take away from me and mine!

    The outrage is real, but what’s behind it?

    The short answer is, greed. It’s more than that, though. There’s a sense of entitlement we build up for various reasons, and we, as Americans, have certain expectations. Someone, somewhere, told us that we deserve to own a house by the time we’re 30. Someone said that we ought to have a car by age 25. Someone implied that we should be able to afford lavish vacations by age 50. The list goes on.

    This elusive “someone” goes right back to the media, in my very strong opinion. Television shows and movies highlight the people who are exceptions to all the rules. That’s just film, after all. None of us are interested in seeing boring stuff on tv, right? You go to television (and books and such) to read about the extraordinary, the strange, the unusual. But when it’s force fed to us on a regular basis, it can seem like each of us, ALL of us, should have those things.

    The bottom line is, not all of us can afford to own our own homes. Not everyone can afford a car. Not everyone can afford to have one parent stay home and watch the kids. Not everyone can afford expensive medical care. It is (in some cases) a sad state of affairs, but it is the way of the world.

    The basic status of human beings is poverty. While we’re working on “extreme poverty” around the world (defined as not having the basic human needs of water, shelter, food met), basically about half the world population lives in poverty. It should be noted, however, that 90% of those who live in the worst poverty tend to live in African and Asian countries (World Poverty Statistics 2024 | Social Income. https://socialincome.org/en/int. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.).  In America, we consider a person to be living in poverty if they’re bringing home (before taxes) $14,580 a year (or roughly $40 per day). Elsewhere in the world, “poverty” is defined as bringing home less than about $7 a day (“Overview.” World Bank, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.).

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  • I wish this were easy. It isn’t.

    At issue is the number of people claiming that Donald Trump is a convicted felon.

    Like most things legal, the answer is never simple. The reason is that many laws have internal definitions that do not match the definitions in other parts of the law. And there is the use of the common vernacular.

    First, the common vernacular, and the language used by the court, is that a person is convicted when they have been adjudicated guilty. This is when the jury returns a guilty verdict or a judge, in a bench trial, finds a person guilty. This also applies to certain pleadings of the defendant, such as a pleading of guilty or nolo contendere plea.

    By this definition, Hunter Biden and Donald Trump are both convicted felons.

    Second, in some places in the U.S.C., they define “convicted” to mean when found guilty, when sentenced, or both. 41 USC § 8101(a)(3) uses this definition. Chapter 81 of 41 USC is the chapter on a drug-free workplace.

    In other words, the definition of convicted, when talking about a drug-free workplace, uses the “when found guilty”.

    The Kicker

    The Criminal Resource Manual (CRM) has the following:

    For fugitives who have been convicted and either escaped or otherwise failed to complete their sentences, extradition treaties dispense with the requirement of establishing the crime through affidavits. Instead, the treaties require proof of conviction. In United States practice, conviction means a finding of guilt (i.e., a jury verdict or finding of fact by the judge) and imposition of sentence. If the defendant fled after the verdict but before sentencing, he or she has not been convicted, and the prosecutor must supply the affidavits described in this Manual at 608, unless the treaty specifically equates conviction with a finding of guilt.

    The conviction may be proved by a certified copy of the Judgment and Commitment Order or the equivalent state form. Proof that the fugitive is unlawfully at large may take the form of an affidavit from the warden of the institution from which the fugitive escaped, or from the marshal if the fugitive failed to surrender after sentencing. The time remaining to be served (not counting reductions for good behavior) must be stated.
    —Justice Manual | 609. Evidence Of Conviction | United States Department of Justice, (last visited Dec. 4, 2024)

    So what does this mean?

    In my NON-lawyer opinion? Donald Trump is a convicted felon who is seeking reversal on appeal. Until he is sentenced, he is not convicted per international law.

    In addition, the judgement is currently stayed, pending the outcome of the appeal.

    Hunter Biden is a convicted felon who has been pardoned.

            

  •         

  • If you’re like me, you currently have a turkey carcass somewhere in your fridge, freezer, or on your (very cold) porch. Thanksgiving was delicious, and you’ve mostly picked that carcass clean. What’s left are the bits no one generally eats (wings maybe, or the bottom of the bird, the backbone, and perhaps the neck and giblets). Don’t throw those away, folks. That right there is Winter Gold.

    To make a hearty turkey broth is quite easy. You can do it in a crockpot, a Westinghouse (which is my method), or on your stove top. This can even be done over a fire, on a hearth, or on top of your wood stove, if you like. You simply need a heat source that will bring your liquid to a low simmer, but not a full boil.

    Whatever method you’re using, the preparation is exactly the same. First, denude your bird. Pull off ALL the edible meat (yes, even from the legs). Leave behind tendons, bones, gristly bits, and parts no one eats. Store the meat in the fridge for later. Now take your hands, a large knife, or a good pair of kitchen sheers and cut the bird into pieces that will fit into whatever you’re making your broth in. You want all the bones and bits to be submerged, so depending on your size of pot, you may need to chop up the bird fairly small. It’s perfectly okay to put the carcass into your pot then use a large spoon or a wooden mallet to shove and break it until it fits. For our purposes, it does not matter if the bones are broken.

    Once the bird is in the pot, you will begin to add your vegetables. If you want to be truly frugal, you should add in all the peelings and skins from Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t save all mine (though I have in the past), so instead, I’m adding in the following:

    • one whole onion, skin on, quartered
    • one head of garlic, cut in half so all the cloves are halved, skin on
    • 2 bay leaves
    • leftover carrots (carrot tops and skins are fine here, too)
    • celery tops (the leafy bits, rough chopped)
    • whatever herbs you prefer (my garden yielded the last of the sage, thyme, and some parsley)
    • whatever spices you prefer (at least the standards: salt, pepper, garlic)

    Add all these to your pot, and then pour in enough water to cover everything, but not to boil over. Bring your broth to a boil, and then put the temperature down to low and let it simmer for several hours.

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  • When I was a small kid, I would get in fights with the neighbor kid across the street from me. The parents were cool about it, but were unhappy with the bare knuckle part of the fighting. So, we were issued boxing gloves and went at it with all the grace of two gangly 3rd graders.

    Plenty of swings, plenty of hits, but no real damage. Jimbo won all but one of those fights.

    After every lose, I would think about what had happened and vowed to get better. Only to be beat in our next confrontation.

    It was soul crushing. At the same time, I was dealing with a bully who would chase me home after school, every day.

    After each battle, as I lay on the ground, crying, humiliated, he would taunt me.

    The last time we fought, I won. I had learned enough to actually beat him. When he was about to go down, I went at him even harder.

    He went down, and I took a step back, started to taunt him.

    His brothers and sister immediately stepped in to cool things off. It was about sportsmanship. Being the better man. Doing the honorable thing.

    As a 3rd grader, it was difficult, but I did manage it.

    That was our last fight. He was no longer interested in fighting, preferring to talk about it instead.

    President Obama listened to Republican gripes about his stimulus package during a meeting with congressional leaders Friday morning – but he also left no doubt about who’s in charge of these negotiations. “I won,” Obama noted matter-of-factly, according to sources familiar with the conversation.
    —Justice Manual | 609. Evidence Of Conviction | United States Department of Justice, (last visited Dec. 4, 2024)

    When the Democrats lost control of the congress, Obama was famously quoted as saying, “I have a pen and a phone.” Telling the world that he was going to use executive powers to do what congress had not authorized him to do, sort of like a dictator.

    From the moment that Trump was declared the victor of the 2024 election, there have been two loud groups of Democrats and leftists.

    The first is calling me stupid because of how I voted, cutting their hair to spite Trump voters (huh? I don’t get it), wishing that the economy will crash, and in general exhibiting all the standard symptoms of TDS.

    The other group is making speeches, telling me that we have to remember the other half of the country, that we have to work to end the divide between us, to allow the losers a place at the table.

    In other words, don’t do to them what they do to us, every time.

    Ally was very upset that Merrick Garland wasn’t given a chance to testify before the Senate Judicial committee, to find out if he was a good person for the Supreme Court.

    I pointed out that the best that Merrick could be was worse than anybody a Republican would nominate. She is still upset that he didn’t get a full hearing.

    There is no reason for the Trump administration to put wolves in with the flock. There is no reason for him to trust the olive branch that is handed to him. There is no reason to try to temper the response that is coming.

    Here’s the thing, it is time for a scorched earth response. It is a time to clean out the rat’s nest that is the unelected bureaucracy of the Federal Government.

    I’m looking forward to hearing about the RIFs that are going to happen. I’m looking forward to higher ups that are not fired, but offered positions in Nome, Alaska. I’ve been offered that choice, I could find a position elsewhere in the company, in the next six weeks, or I could resign.

    It is not fun. It happens to many people.

    I’m also looking forward to true investigations of the criminal activities against The People, against Trump, and against my country.

    I don’t remember what the statute of limitations is on mishandling classified materials, but if it is long enough, Mrs Clinton should be charged. She was investigated, the acting director of the FBI determined that she wasn’t guilty because her purpose was pure.

    Nobody else with a security clearance would get that pass.

    Or the serial leaker.

    Or the people who refused to show up for congressional subpoenas. I have a strong feeling that the Democrat party is going to have a tough few years.

            

  • The problem that people have been attempting to solve, for years, is the lack of space in the IPv4 addresses space.

    There are currently more devices attached to the Internet or “the network” than there are addresses in the IPv4 space. This requires address overlap.

    The smallest section of a network is the “subnet”. A subnet can hold anywhere from 2 to over a million devices.

    Consider a small business network. They have three networks, a network that is connected to the Internet, labeled DMZ, a network for the security cameras, labeled CCTV, and the working network, labeled Internal.

    They have a router between the Internal network and the DMZ. There is another router that takes traffic from the DMZ and transfers it to the Internet.

    The CCTV network does not need to ever touch the DMZ network, nor does it really need to touch the Internal network. So they run a completely separate physical network so that CCTV traffic is never available on the Internal or DMZ networks.

    This could become costly. Consider a situation where you need to connect multiple buildings. Maybe some of those buildings can be connected with fiber, but others are using radio links. Radio links are expensive.

    The traffic is low enough that there is no justification for a second radio link. Besides, it is difficult to run two radio links side-by-side.

    The solution that was implemented is the Virtual LAN, or VLAN.

    When you define a VLAN, you set a tag in the Ethernet frame, identifying which VLAN this frame belongs to. Now, we can put all the CCTV traffic on a VLAN and use the same physical network as we use for the Internal network. All is good.

    This isn’t a complete solution, it is possible to configure a network card to listen to a particular VLAN, even if that device isn’t supposed to be on the VLAN. It is also another configuration point which smaller devices might not support.

    As an example, I’ve never found a method to put my cell phone on a particular VLAN. It is likely possible, I’ve just never found it.

    Same with my CCTV cameras. They exist only on the default, untagged, network.

    One of the very nice parts of using a VLAN, is that you can have overlapping address space. I can have 192.168.88.0/24 on the physical network and 192.168.89.0/22 on the same physical network but with a VLAN tag of 87. They are overlapping address spaces, but they do not interfere with each other.

    The solution was to allow a L2 switch port to be tagged. Now, by device which only uses the untagged frame can be plugged into a tagged port. All traffic coming from that port will have a VLAN tag added to it. All traffic sent to that port will have the VLAN tag stripped from it.

    This means that a CCTV device sends and receives on the default (no tag) network. It reaches the switch and the packet is now on a VLAN. Another device on the Internal network is also on the same VLAN. That device, a monitoring station, can now see the CCTV footage.

    If a port receives a frame that is tagged, it drops the frame. This keeps VLANs from leaking from their approved segment.

    If there is a need for a port to accept multiple VLANs, it is configured as a trunk.

    Thursday, I attempted to move ceph to an OVN network. This would eliminate the need for a VLAN and would give me a single subnet across multiple physical subnets. It failed.

    Friday, I attempted to put a new L2 switch into place. The good news was that I didn’t need to break my entire network to do the testing.

    The test computer has two NIC’s. One is connected to the management physical network. The other to the back plane network. I was able to establish a connection to the management port.

    Once there, I could establish that I had full bandwidth to other nodes on the physical network, using the physical subnet. I could even reach multiple subnets using that same interface.

    Then I tried the VLAN. The VLAN failed. There was no network traffic passing through.

    It also looks like they do not have a large enough MTU.

    Conclusion

    I’m still black boxing this thing. It has been a painful trip. I have more than a few more tests to run. It is just overly painful trying to get there.

            

  • I did not want Jimmy Carter to win. Neither did my parents. When he was elected, we were willing to cheer for him to succeed.

    He didn’t. As much as Biden and Clinton messed up this country, no single President comes close to Jimmy. Most of the mess in the Middle East can be laid directly on him.

    When Clinton was elected, I was unhappy. He did not strike me as a good person for the job. Still, I cheered for my country. I wished him success in bringing good things to our country.

    It turns out that Bill is a morally bankrupt person. The rumors of people taking the “w” key from all the keyboards in the White House? My boss at the time was responsible for replacing all the vandalized keyboards.

    I was extremely disappointed when Biden won the election. Because numbers are a gigantic part of my life, I looked at the numbers and knew that these were questionable numbers. Not that they were proof of cheating, but that they were indications that the event should be audited.

    No court heard any of the Trump challenges on the merits.

    Larry Correia wrote a great article regarding how auditors find fraud, —Justice Manual | 609. Evidence Of Conviction | United States Department of Justice, (last visited Dec. 4, 2024).

    My issue was how it felt like “they” were out to punish “us” for speaking up.

    Still, I hoped that we would make it through 4 years of Joe without too much damage. We are still here.

    They Want Us to Fail

    An article caught my attention, A Trump judge blocked overtime pay for 4 million workers in TEXAS….

    Having been reading and following court cases, I was interested in what was going on.

    First, Trump appointed the judge. That doesn’t mean the judge was wrong, nor does it mean that the judge acted in a biased way. But they had to hang this on Trump, so “Trump judge”.

    To anyone in Texas that voted Blue and is affected. I am so sorry… To anyone in Texas that voted Red and is affected… Fuck you, you got what you voted for…

    I’m on salary… but I wanted yall to have it. But folks voted for this.

    Trump voters are about to find out the hard way and I will laugh the entire 4 yrs as their broke ass’s get on interviews begging for help!

    The actual ruling? Judge blocks Biden administration’s rule to expand overtime pay for millions

    Sounds to me like it was a judge following the law.

    Conclusion

    They want the economy to tank. They want everybody to be hurting more than we are now.
    They want it out of spite. They are evil and like most evil people, think they are on the side of good.

            

  • Speak softly and carry a big stick

    Trump might not talk softly, but he does have a big stick.

    While the left is melting down and calling us stupid, Trump announced that he would impose a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada if certain conditions were not met.

    The opposition party in Canada is yelling at the government to fix it fast, before January 20th.

    The Mexican President turned back a migrant convoy before it reached the US border.

    Turkey Leftovers

    My son made it home from collage late Wednesday. So my wife made a turkey for him tonight. To go with the larger turkey, we will have for Friendsgiving on Saturday.

    It was nice to have young muscles on call. I had him move the arbor press. I can now recover my table saw and work on some woodworking projects.

    It was pleasant listening to him talk about classes. It was a bit sad that I knew much of the theory of what he was working on/learning.

    He has decided he is going to get an internship to get some hands-on experience to go with his classroom and lab work.

    I’m proud of him.

    Nerding one: OVN networking

    I thought I had a handle on OVN networking. My tests were showing good connectivity. It should have just worked.

    I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around some concepts in OVN. One of them finally clicked, improving my life.

    When you create a logical switch, nothing is connected. You can create logical switch ports which must be attached to a logical switch.

    There are three types of ports I deal with, ports that are connected to virtual interfaces, such as a VM creates, ports that are attached to logical routers, and ports that are connected to the local network.

    It was my understanding that if I wanted a high availability network, I would need to configure a distributed gateway.

    When I did, I got dropped packets. If I reduced the HA gateway to a single node, no more dropped packets. Also, no HA.

    An article appeared. It indicated that I needed a different logical switch to make everything work.

    The issue was that the DMZ is a logical switch that is a part of the physical network. My logical router is attached to the DMZ, so attached to the physical network.

    What I required was a second router to be that gateway. It exists on the physical network on multiple chassis, but it is connected to the JOIN logical switch, which is stable. This fixed all my issues with that part of the networking.

    Another step in the right direction.

    Nerding two: Moving machines

    THE PSU for one set of machines is running near limits. I need to move at least one node to a different PSU.

    The correct method to use is to create a new subnet for the new location, feed it back to the primary router, and start moving from an L2 network to an L3 network.

    The issue is that Ceph wants all the data nodes to reside on the same network. The public side is also one network.

    The fix was in my hands, see above about OVN.

    I would move the OSD’s from the physical network to a logical network, and it all would just work. All testing showed it would work.

    I started the process, and it appeared that the OSD’s did not like living on two nets at the same time. So I moved to a single network, the new network address range.

    There were still some issues, so I moved all the hosts and the monitors to the new network.

    And lost access to the cluster. It just stopped responding.

    The indicated methods of bringing it back to life failed.

    I ended up having to manually edit about 40 files to restore a working configuration.

    Everything seems to be working now. But it is 0300 and I’ve been fighting this for 5 hours.

    Conclusion

    I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

    Question of the week

    The Department of Education was created by an act of congress. The President can’t dissolve it with the stroke of a pen. That would require another act of congress.

    What he can do is RIF the heck out of it, reducing the staff to a more manageable level.

    My question for you is: What tasks, if any, should the DOE still perform?

            

  • This is a special day for me. It has been years since we gathered as a family at my parents’ home for a Thanksgiving feast, but that is a memory I hold dear.

    No, this comes from something my mentor gave me.

    When he was in collage, he had many good friends. Friends he kept until his death. When that first Thanksgiving came around, his friends went off to their families, and he went home to his. There was no feast for them. There was no celebration of thanks among those friends.

    They took a look at the calendar and discovered that the second weekend in December would fall on the 10th. They decided to initiate the DEC-10 day.

    This is, of course, a pun. The Digital Equipment Company manufactured the DEC-10 computer. The DEC-10 is the computer they were using. It is the computer which my mentor used to write BASIC for the local schools to use.

    So today, the house is mostly empty, just the wife and I. The children arrive tomorrow. So there is no feast today.

    That happens on Saturday.

    We have Friendsgiving. This happens on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It is when we have all our friends over to enjoy each other’s company. It is a created family of sorts.

    We will also invite acquaintances that might have had a lonely holiday. Making sure they are welcome too.

    No matter where you are, which side of the political aisle you are on, please slow down, stop, and before you feast, give thanks for all you have.

            

  • I wanted to share this young man’s post on TikTok with you, because it says a LOT in a small space.

     

    @truscum_tr_nny Trans activists love to fuck EVERYTHING up for transsexuals. Thanks a lot. #Trump2024 #transsexual #Igbtrepublican #republican #conservative #LGBT #transgender #kamala #CapCut ♬ original sound – Nicholas

    So… long story short, Trump is going to stop public taxpayer money (ie Medicare/Medicaid) from paying for transition surgeries. The kid isn’t the least bit upset about that. No, he’s upset over the fact that when gender dysphoria was considered a mental disorder, it was treated as one. That means that necessary care, through a doctor who’d gone to the trouble of having you tested six ways to Sunday, was covered. Just like being diabetic was covered. Or being clinically depressed was covered. Now that “being trans” is a social movement and they’ve removed it as a mental disorder, it’s not covered.

    Now… I’m going to say something that would make the Left clutch its pearls, but y’all might just agree. I believe that gender dysphoria should be reinstated as a mental disorder. So should a few other things, but that’s another post. And then we, and by we I mean We The People, should get off our fucking high horses and stop making mental disorders so shameful for people.

    I have mental disorders. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder. If you met me, you probably would never know. It’s an invisible disorder, and I’m lucky that it’s well controlled  by medication. I don’t hide that I have it, and I often share with others who suffer from anxiety who feel alone or scared. Too many people want to demonize those who have mental disorders, and frankly, it irritates the fuck out of me. Here’s the thing… your body might not produce insulin, so you have to get it in a bottle. My brain over-produces certain chemicals, and I need meds to make it stop. It’s not a shameful thing. It’s just a thing.

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