Your state Supreme Court hates you and cheats.

Monday evening, PST, the trial court enjoined the unconstitutional magazine ban. As the judge wrote, you don’t use a magazine to spread butter, it is an arm.

The 2A community jumped into action. Since it was after hours, LGS (Local Gun Stores) opened up and the people flocked to buy magazines.

As a song put it, “The joint was jumping.”

Less than an hour and a half after the injunction was granted, a commissioner at the state Supreme Court issued a stay.

Here’s the thing, that commissioner did not have time to read the injunction before he stayed it.

Since this is in the state court system, I do not have good visibility into it. I’ve not read the injunction, nor have I read the stay. All of this is from my feeds.

At least the people of California got a full two weeks of freedom. The state of Washington didn’t even get a full two hours.

A song that my wife and I used to fall asleep to, after a bad day.

I’m happy to say that it has been a few years since it was required.

There is a style of communication called “mitigated speech”. I learned about it by watching a video by Malcolm Gladwell giving a speech about his book Outliers.

It comes about when somebody uses language that is designed to not offend, rather than to say things clearly.

One of the examples given, was of a co-pilot at Washington National Airport saying to the pilot something like, “Wow, there is sure a lot of ice coming down.”

The pilot, busy with pre-takeoff work load, replied, “yeah, it’s nasty out there.” and then proceeded with the checklist.

The co-pilot waited a little bit and asked, “I wonder if we should think about getting de-iced?”

The pilot didn’t do anything. A few minutes later, they were at take off speed, they rotated, came off the ground, and a few minutes later crashed into the Potomac River.

The co-pilot was using mitigated language. Instead of saying it clearly, such as, “I’m seeing ice build up on the wings. We should wait for de-icing”, he instead said things that did not make it sound like he was attempting to override the pilot’s authority.

Mitigated speech is also used when a person is afraid of the consequences of making a decision.

If you say, “I’m hungry.” You haven’t given a hint, you haven’t questioned anybody. You’ve “just” made a statement. In an environment which is trained to understand mitigated speech, this is a command to make dinner.

When somebody who is autistic, who is used to attempting clear communications, with a formalized response, “I’m hungry.” or “What’s for dinner?” are a simple statement or a simple question. They are not commands.

In the same way, if I hear those things, I am likely to acknowledge the statement and answer the question, I’m not going to take them as commands.

My wife used to use mitigated language, ALL, THE, TIME. It led to significant stress in our relationship.

I showed her the video, she asked me, “Why didn’t the pilot just do the de-icing?” I responded, “Why didn’t the co-pilot just say it clearly?”

She got it.

She has been working diligently to stop using mitigating speech. For her, that mitigating speech was pure protection. She could honestly say, “I never said that.” and be correct. If she said something and I read it correctly but was unhappy, she “never said it”. If I didn’t do it, I “wasn’t listening to her”.

It was amazingly safe and comfortable for her.

We are more balanced today. She’s put in the most effort. I listen for that mitigating speech and turn it into concrete speech with verification. Both of us put in an effort.

When It All Breaks.

A few years ago, my wife’s best friend realized that her husband had dementia. He went from the person in charge to having difficulties functioning. This hits me hard because of my mother and father.

My wife reached out, told her friend that she was there for her. My wife works constantly, but she was sending texts and messages to try to stay in touch. She offered help and had it turned down.

Today, my wife got a long text message from her friend. My wife was accused of being a horrible person, a horrible friend, a horrible mother. She was accused of not caring because she hadn’t brought dinners over. That she hadn’t stopped in.

It was mitigated speech that did this.

My wife was sending texts. Her friend wasn’t responding. In her friends “mitigation codebook,” it said, “not answering a series of text messages is a request for a visit.” Chapter IX, Section A, subsection g, paragraph 17. Right?

My wife didn’t have the same codebook, her codebook said, “not answering a text is an indication of being busy.”

She assumed her friend was just too busy to make time to text or message with her. And since she had made multiple offers to help with no response that wasn’t negative, she had done all she could and all her friend could accept.

I gave my wife some guidance on language. Sent her over to her friend’s house. It worked. My wife came back with things to do for her friend. Which she was happy to do.

Kids got tasked to help out the friend, little things, like my 18yo boy collecting and taking the garbage out to the curb for her. Cost my son 7.25 minutes, I timed him.

Dementia is horrible

My wife was barely back home from shopping, including picking up stuff for her friend, when her friend called with an Emergency.

My wife was off like a shot.

It appears that her friend’s husband had “taken a handful of sleeping pills”. Wife got there, evaluated, called 911.

Police, EMT, Rescue all rolled on the code. The husband survived. He did answer to in the affirmative for wanting to kill himself.

I’m a little upset that he didn’t get a 72hr hold, but he’s still at home. Friend is still dealing with him. But at least my wife knows what is expected of her. The kids know what is expected of them.

Conclusion

I’m proud of my wife. When she received that first message, she broke. She went defensive. But with very little coaching, she turned it around, recognized that it was a plea for help. And was there for her friend.

For me, I have to make the time to call my father, every Monday. He needs that contact. I want to support him. I do not want him to feel alone.

For the rest of you, take the time to say “I love you” to those that you love. You might lose them, you don’t want to ever regret the last thing you say to a loved one.

The home shop if full of neat things that you can make. My primary tools are a 5×13 South Bend Lathe, shipped to the Reynolds Machinery Company on December 31st, 1947 and a Bridgeport mill from the late 50s

The rule of thumb for any hobby is that you will spend more on tooling than you do on the primary machines.

My F5 camera body cost about $2000. I then proceeded to spend $3000+ dollars on lens, film scanner, color charts. Speed lights and so forth.

My lathe, mill, horizontal bandsaw, milling vise, three chucks, a handful of tooling cost me $1500. The delivery charge was another $200.

Since that time, I’ve spent much more than that on tooling. Quick Change tool post, quick change toolholders, indexable tooling, measuring equipment. Well, you get the idea.

The thing is, that as you go through the shop making things that accomplish real goals, there is a never ending need to make tools for making tools.

BlondiHacks is doing a series on a tool holding tool to help you grind bits. I want to make it.

I have an indexing head that I made that is about 80% complete. That includes casting all the parts that needed castings. I’ve got a shaper started, but I was having trouble casting a couple of parts and went on to other things.

One of the weird things that has happened, is that things that were not available 5 years ago are now being made and are available. This has led me in a long circle where I want to make a backing plate for an ER-40 collet chuck.

Before I spend anything on that project, I intend to make my “casinator”. I have drawings that are “good enough” to get started. But here’s the deal, I need to make a couple of counter bores.

These counter bores have to be to 0.0005 inches in size. If they are too big, the bearing will fall out. If they are too small, the bearing won’t go in. If they are just a little too small, the bearings might not function correctly. I have to get those bores nearly perfect.

The tool used for this is either the lathe, a pain for a rectangular piece of plate, or a boring head.

I actually have two boring heads. One for micro boring bars and one for large bores.

To use a boring head, you create a hole. It can be a through hole or a partial hole. The hole needs to be large enough for your boring head to fit.

The boring head is already positioned correctly because you have not moved it since you put the clearance hole in place.

You then adjust the position of the boring bar, You adjust the depth it will go. Then you start the mill to make a cut with an automatic down feed.

When the quill reaches the correct depth, it stops, and you can retract the boring head/boring bar. Carefully measure the size of the hole, adjust the boring bare, cut again.

This up and down motion will make the bore the correct diameter. You can hold very tight tolerances with quality boring heads. Which I have.

The problem, is the base of the hole doesn’t look good. As I write this, I realize it doesn’t matter. As long as the bearing seats fully, the surface finish doesn’t matter.

Now, the point of all of this, is that I wanted to upgrade to a “boring/facing head”.

This piece of magic allows you to advance the boring bar as it is rotating. Instead of cutting a larger and larger diameter bore, moving down through the material, you put the boring bar at the correct depth and cut outward, “facing” the bottom of the hole smooth.

I’m not going to pay north of $500 for one of these things. And I’m not willing to purchase unknown items from E-bay.

For the last bit, we’ve been talking about how the apparatchiks have been moving to try to redefine what the plain text step is in Heller and Bruen

The judge agrees with us, the Seventh Circuit judges, Wood and Easterbrook, looked at their two-step method and said, “The Supreme Court can’t be talking about us.”. Then said they got it right, and the Supreme Court’s opinion matches theirs.

Or as a former president put it: It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. If the — if he — if “is” means “is and never has been, that is not — that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. —Volume III:  Document Supplement, Part A, William J. Clinton

The Seventh feels it can define any word to mean anything they want it to mean.

Having defined the word to mean exactly what they wanted it to mean, they then claim that they have investigated themselves and found that they had done no wrong.

Again, Judge McGlynn takes the Seventh to task. … has come at this question from a different direction … by the Supreme Court.

But here is the kicker, he tells the Plaintiffs that they must brief both arguments. That of the Seventh’s ridiculous contention that you have to prove that an arm is protected under the Second Amendment before the state has an opportunity to prove a historical tradition of regulations. But the Plaintiffs must also argue using the correct methodology, as laid out in Heller and affirmed in Bruen of text.

The state is going to say: The Seventh has told you that LCM’s and Assault Weapons aren’t protected arms, so you can’t challenge the law on the ground that they are protected arms.

They will contend that the Plaintiffs have not met their burden of proving that the arms in question are arms. Since the Plaintiffs did not meet their burden, the state does not have to show a historical tradition of firearms regulation that is a match.

The Plaintiffs are being required to argue that “assault weapons” are protected under the Second. That is the only argument they need to make.

The court has warned the state, “Make sure you brief historical tradition, or you might lose.”

No matter how this goes, it will be appealed. I just enjoy bringing you news of courts and judges that do get it right.

There is every indication that this judge will do the right thing.

New Hampshire got a little more snow and ice yesterday and today. We were prepared for it, no big deal.

I was preparing to go to bed, doing that final sit of the day before showering, when the power went out. Grump.

Finished in the dark. Turned the flashlight on, pointed it at the ceiling, took my shower.

When I got to bed, I spent the 5 minutes using the power company’s app to report the outage. They asked if I was sure.

There were two reported outages. 15 minutes later there were 1000+ in my clump.

About two hours later, power was restored. We lost it again about 30 minutes later. 45 minutes after that, power was restored and has remained steady since.

My point in all of this was that it wasn’t a big deal.

This morning, I power cycled the Optical Network Terminator (ONT) and we had the Internet back. Turned my primary computer back on and went to work.

The discussion about lack of discipline in schools was very intriguing. My personal story of strong vs. weak teachers was in 7th or 8th grade. The first day of school, our French teacher was soft and kind to the students. Our civics teacher read us the riot act. Nobody liked him.

French class was a waste of time. The teacher never had control of the class. The kids did what they wanted, had little or no respect for her. Nobody learned a thing. The disruptions came from two or maybe three kids.

Same group of students in the civics class. No messing around. No disruptions. No issues. He had control of the class from the very first day. By the end of the first month, his class was laid back and fun. He never had to force anything.

Teachers have to be able to control their classrooms. They have to have the skill to do so. And they have to have the backing of the administration to enforce that control.

As one pundit put it in the comments, the admin should respond to parents saying “you can’t do that to my little angel” with “that’s fine, we’ll just suspend him instead, if their behavior after suspension is still unacceptable, we’ll expel him.”

I tried something new this week. Instead of quoting, highlighting and commenting, I instead quoted and highlighted.

That is a bit faster for me, but might require more effort on your part.

My wife is a teacher. She has been teaching for over 40 years now. When we were in Maryland, she taught at two different schools. One a rural school and one in Baltimore.

While she received extensive support from her admin while at the rural school, not so much in the Baltimore school.

Her most significant weakness, as a teacher, is not being able to command her classroom. She asked me to come and observe her at work in her classroom to give her feedback.

I was expecting to observe, I got put to work. My wife was the primary teacher, there was a secondary teacher and me in the classroom. There were 15 to 20 1st or 2nd graders.

What I observed was that the teachers would ask the children to do things. They would inform them that it was time to do something. They never gave an order. They never told the children what to do.

Not knowing any better, at one point I just said, “Sit Down.” 15 Second later, they were sitting where they were supposed to, attentive to the teachers.

There was no discipline in that classroom.

One year she was dealing with older students. She had run out of ideas for discipline. She couldn’t actually do anything.

I passed on a method I had learned from one of my employees, a former instructor at APG. “When a soldier needs to be disciplined, we’ll have them hold a quarter to the wall with their nose, their hands behind their back.”

My wife used it. Within a week, she had control of the classroom. No more tearful nights, wanting to give up teaching. Everybody in the classroom was better for her, having control over her students.

Wellll, all good things must come to an end. There were no complaints until a father got back from deployment, heard the “punishment” that was being used and blew a gasket. He went to the admin of the school and complained. The admin shrugged with it’s nothing, why are you so upset? He informed them that he learned about it in military training and there was no way his child was going to be treated like a soldier.

3 weeks later, the classroom was out of control.

When we got to New Hampshire, it was much better. When she started at her current school, it was wonderful. She had the full support of her admin, and classroom discipline was a part of the that.

Over time, that has changed. With the remote learning during the panic, it got worse.

Last year was pretty bad. This year has been worse.

It isn’t uncommon to hear her frustration of having had to clear her classroom because one student was acting out.

It isn’t uncommon to hear about “emergency” alerts being given to lock down the school because one of the animals was roaming the halls, destroying and disrupting.

It isn’t uncommon to hear about her having to comfort and help one of her friends and co-workers because an animal had ripped apart a classroom.

The school system is hemorrhaging teachers. Teachers are retiring that 2 years ago had no intention of retiring. Of course, the good ones go first.

I’ve heard stories of the Superintendent following one of these animals as they roamed the halls, trying to keep the child from disrupting other students. The good thing about that day? That student was suspended, for a day.

We aren’t the only people to notice.

Using data from several sources, including the WI Department of Public Instruction and the UW-Milwaukee survey of students, they found that lack of suspensions (discipline) is causing the schools to become increasingly dangerous.

• Suspension Rates Declined in Milwaukee After Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) Agreement.
• Reduced Suspension for African American Students Resulted in Lower Reports of Safety
• Suspension Rates for Other Student Groups Change in a more “normal” manner.
• African American Students Suffer the Most.

I’m told that the phrase “1350” is horribly racist. It refers to a claim that 13% of the population accounts for 50% of the crime. A more correct statement is that 6% of blacks account for 51% of all murders in the United States.

The problem with this statistic is that it is measuring based on numbers that could be misleading. Is that number of blacks that are proven to have murdered because society focuses on their crimes more? Is it that more blacks are falsely imprisoned? Is it some other unknown factor that causes these numbers to be so skewed?

The numbers say that it isn’t racism or “systemic racism”. The numbers and studies indicate that it is a result of behavior patterns that are group-centric.

When behavior is considered, the stop rates are the same between the different groups.

The report I was looking for was a civil suit filed against the PSP claiming that they were racist in choosing who they stopped for speeding. The raw numbers said that the PA state police were stopping more black drivers than expected by census/population density.

Fortunately, they were doing some traffic camera testing at the same time. Turns out that the cameras, which aren’t racist, were flagging speeders at the same percentages as the PSP were stopping people.

All of this is to say, there are normally other reasons that different groups perform differently than “systemic racism”. The more likely reason that African American students were being suspended at higher rates than European American students was because of behavior difference, not racism.

The problem was that to reduce the suspension rate for African American students, they had to stop suspending everybody.

It became an action of last resort. It was ok that 29 kids were in the hallway, not learning because one “learner” was acting like an animal in a classroom. Being such a physical threat that the room had to be cleared.

But we can’t offend Aunt Suzie’s little darling. He might get mad and destroy your classroom.