B.L.U.F.
A look at how the state is attempting to restrict our rights by redefining what “The People” means.

(2450 words)

Heller was the first domino to fall in the restoration of our Second Amendment protected rights. McDonald was the next. After a long time, we had the third domino fall, Bruen.

After Heller there was a rash of cases that were filed. As these cases made their way up the court system, the infringing, rogue, courts profoundly erred in how they interpreted Heller.

They looked at the methodological processes that were used to decide cases in court. Two different methodologies were examined, and then adopted. The first was how the Supreme Court had addressed First Amendment cases.

They determined that the rights protected under the First Amendment were not absolute. There were exceptions. To determine if a regulation is constitutional, the regulation is evaluated using “strict scrutiny”.

Under strict scrutiny, the state must show that there is a compelling state interest, that the regulation is narrowly tailored and is the least restrictive means available to the state. Strict scrutiny only applied to content-based or viewpoint-based regulations. If the regulation was not abridging content or viewpoint speech, then intermediate scrutiny was applied.

This also matched the ways and reasons injunctions/stays were issued, likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, balance of equities, and public interest.

Given these two methodologies, the inferior rogue courts adopted a means-end methodology for Second Amendment rights. First, the court would determine that the regulation did not infringe the core right of self-defense too much, just like they determined content or viewpoint-based speech. The courts then looked at the state interest.

If the state interest was “compelling”, the court would use strict scrutiny. If the state interest was not compelling, the court would use intermediate scrutiny.

Having decided on the level of scrutiny, the rogue courts would assume without finding that the regulation being challenged was facially unconstitutional, and then rule it constitutional because the state had shown significant interest to justify the regulation under the level of scrutiny used.

This stopped progress in Second Amendment challenges. Just as the previous profoundly erroneous evaluation of the Second Amendment only applying to the militia.
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I caught this before my morning coffee.

Nashville teachers learn trauma care, chokeholds, and how to stop a shooter (newschannel5.com)

I did a double take at the graphic.

We doing Jet Li acrobatics now?

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — On their day off, dozens of Metro Nashville Public School teachers trained to take down an active shooter if one ever darkened the doors of their schools.

This placebo training, a tactical sugar pill and nothing serious to be used when it comes to actually stop a deranged killer. How do we know? Police do not respond to shooting incidents with empty handed martial arts but with superior firepower.

It was hands-on training as one demonstration, Defend Systems, showed teachers how to stop someone from bleeding out if they were shot.

This I have no beef against. In fact that is something we have been supporting for ages here and pretty much everybody in the Gun Culture community.

Defend Systems is the same group that did active shooter training at The Covenant School a year before their shooting. Police believe it saved lives. Tracey Mendenhall, the director of training and operations, is passionate about teaching educators how to fight back.

You draw your own conclusions.

MT. JULIET, Tenn. (WKRN) — Police are still on the lookout for several suspects after an online marketplace meetup resulted in a shootout at a popular Mt. Juliet shopping center Friday evening.

The Mt. Juliet Police Department said it responded to the Target parking lot at Providence Marketplace around 6 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 10 after reports of gunfire, including a bullet that hit the window of a nearby Red Robin. Two off-duty officers who had been eating at the restaurant jumped into action before other officers joined them at the scene.

Upon further investigation, police said they learned a Smyrna man and his wife drove to the parking lot to sell a firearm to someone they met online.

“While the husband, an adult male, was outside of his vehicle meeting the person to sell this firearm, he was ambushed by another person who began to shoot at him,” Mt. Juliet Police Capt. Tyler Chandler said in a Friday night press conference.

According to authorities, the seller grabbed a gun out of his car and began firing back. Three suspects took off in an SUV, which was captured on license plate readers and found later that night in Nashville.

Police warn of online marketplace meetups after Mt. Juliet, TN parking lot shootout (wkrn.com)

Being involved in a private cash transaction with a total stranger is always risky. The last one I did was in the parking lot of a gun range, and it was proposed by the other side to which I agreed. Still, I checked the person on arrival, and I am sure he did the same to me and we both were properly “attired.”

In New York cultural enrichers tear down US flag and replace it with Palestinian one. Where are the US patriots? pic.twitter.com/YOL24odcUb

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) November 11, 2023

Ripping down the local flag and replacing it with a new flag is what has been done by every conquering army in human history since people started carrying flags.

This is an act of conquest.

Hamas supporters in NYC have surrounded Grand Central Station and are attempting to breach the outer doors to reach police officers sheltering inside. pic.twitter.com/7z2PoiQquJ

— @amuse (@amuse) November 11, 2023

The is a pogrom happening in New York City and the police are sheltering in Grand Central Station.

Uvalde.

The NYPD during the Maskim Gelman Joe Lozito stabbing.

The Palestinian Pogrom of 2023.

The police will run and hide from the danger.

You are on your own.

I am a computer scientist. I went to university to learn how to be a computer scientist. Some of the classes I took were named things like “data structures” “FORTRAN IV” “Assembly” and “Compilers”.

I’ve written three compilers, around four or five different interpreters, studied and understand bit manipulation.

I’ve done bit fiddling on a panel of switches to boot a computer.

With all of that, I’m a noob compared to Donald Knuth. This guy wrote the book, literally, on computer science. The Art of Computer Programming is that book.

What is more amazing than writing that book, is how that book came to exist. I’m telling this from memory, so I might get some details wrong.

At the time, the cost of publishing textbooks was high. If you wanted to drive the price up, just add a math formula to your textbook.

That little bit of math could add hundreds of dollars to the cost of making a textbook. Worse, it was typeset manually by people that might not get it right.

Donald didn’t like that. So he decided to just write some software to do it for him. But first, he needed to follow the concepts.

That concept is what we now call “write once”. You don’t define something in two different places. You define it once, and everything is built from that single source.

He wanted to write a program to typeset books that was self documenting and “did the right thing”. So he invented a new language, called “web”. He now needed a program to convert “web” files into something that a computer would understand.

He wrote “tangle”. Tangle takes a .web file and produces a PASCAL file (programming language) and a .tex file. The pascal program that was created can then read the .tex file and produce a typeset book, ready to print.

Donald taught himself typesetting. His programs and books taught me programming.

Donald needed to typeset and then print the book. To typeset the book, he needed to know the fonts that were being used and more than that, he had to know how each glyph in the font was positioned within a rectangle.

So as an example, consider the word “fit”. This word has three characters, but when printed in a professional font, the “fi” characters are combined into a single glyph that looks great to the eye.

Donald went out to get a professional font. Nobody would sell it to him for reasons. So… Donald learned how to create fonts. He invented an entirely new way of describing fonts. And wrote another book in “.web” to create metafont.

The fonts we use today are TrueType Fonts or derivatives of that format. TrueType fonts are based on the metafont format.

This is where I became interested in typesetting and fonts. I learned more than a little bit, and I’m still a noob about it.

Fonts have a purpose. Each font is designed for a particular purpose. For that purpose, they should do a good job.

There are “display” fonts and “text” fonts. Display fonts are used for big things, like headlines. Text fonts are for reading things.

If you look at the characters closely, you might notice that some characters have little “feet” or flourishes on them.

You should see the base on the bottom of the “q”. It has a sort of rounding to it. It flows nicely. These are “serifs”.

This font is based on URW’s New Century SchoolBook font. It is one of the most common fonts used in books. It is an easy-to-read font when you are looking at a wall of text.

When it is enlarged, like the image above, that readability is not as good. When we are using large characters, such as in a banner or headline, we want to use a “sans serif” font. A font without serifs.

The most famous of those is Helvetica. This is owned by Adobe. Microsoft created their version of Helvetica, called “Arial”. There are free versions that look nearly the same.

The default font that this site uses is a sans serif.

As I said the other day, I’m writing software to help with teaching English as a Second Language. We are using some texts designed for different levels. I need to be able to display text in a video meeting that was easy for my students to read.

So I picked one of the ugliest fonts I’ve ever found.

It just looks wrong. It looks like it is melted, it doesn’t have weight in any one direction. Sometimes a stroke is heavy on the left, sometimes on both sides. It is just wrong.

But its purpose is not to be beautiful. Its purpose is to be easy to read. It is.

The font is called “OpenDyslexic”. It is designed to help combat the issues of dyslexia. Since I have dyslexia, I should use it more often. I don’t.

The interesting thing is that all of my students using it were thrilled with it. They found it very readable.

Better still, my wife, the reading specialist, loves it. She loves it enough that she is going to get it installed at her school for her to use with her students.

Jews in New York being told to “shelter in place.”

Biden’s America. pic.twitter.com/dkSy5v5I0c

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) November 11, 2023

Cossacks in keffiyehs…