On July 21st, 1861, the first battle of the War of Northern Aggression was fought. Just weeks prior, a Major in the Yankee army wrote a heartfelt letter to his love, his wife, the mother of his children.

Because he was an educated man, his letter is educated. It still pulls at the heart, all these decades later.

He died at the Battle of First Manassas after his legs were shot off with a cannonball. This was a survivable event at the time. Unfortunately for the Yankees, they lost the battle and had to retreat.

Major Sullivan Ballou was left behind along with the other wounded. He died within weeks. His letter was found in his gear and sent back to Rhode Island, where the governor presented it to Sullivan’s wife, Sarah.

The letter was used by Goodnight, Texas for their song Dearest Sarah.

(1750 Words)

We live in a society of people actively attempting to pervert history.  We have evolved myths that have no true connection to historical reality.   The uneducated and under educated of the country then make decisions based on myth and emotion.  Often to the long-term detriment of our country.

There is a concept of the evil corporation.  Evil corporations are a stereotype that has very little relationship to reality.

We hear about the greed of the oil companies, taking advantage of the little guy at the gas pumps.  We don’t hear that the oil company is making pennies on the gallon while the state rakes it in.  You won’t get the rubes to strike for less fuel taxes.   What they strike for is to get the oil company to pay the taxes instead of them.

No corporation has ever paid a single penny in taxes.

Hard to believe?

Taxes are an expense. For a corporation to survive, they have to have more income than expenses. Since taxes are an expense, those taxes are baked into the price of goods and services. If the state raises taxes on a business/corporation, the business/corporation will just raise the price of their goods and services.

While the rubes have no problem with a company saying “The cost of steel went up 10%, we have to raise the price of our goods by 10% to compensate.” They might grumble, but they don’t get angry.

If a company says, “The state raised the cost of doing business by 10%, we have to raise the price of our goods and services by 10% to compensate.” The rubes have a meltdown. The EVIL corporation/business should just take those taxes out of profits.

If grandma has income based on dividends and the corporation takes the taxes out of their profits, then grandma gets less. Dividends are the corporation sharing the profits with the shareholders/owners.
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TL;DR; Go to DiveMedic’s site and read everything he has on radios and communications. He covers it much better than I can.
Area Ocho His website is on my “must read” daily list. He is quite knowledgeable in many areas.

Having said that, the next thing to know is that communications is shit in an emergency.

You’ve read J. Kb’s description of losing power. For me, losing power means I can’t work. It means I cannot monitor the servers and sites as closely as I would like.

Why does communications go bad in a simple power outage?

There are two “wires” that come into this house. One is for power, the other is for the internet. That second is fiber.

I can keep power to the networking gear and the fiber modem, even with extended power outages. That doesn’t help much when the fiber repeaters have lost power. The same was true back when I had cable for internet. Lose power to the town, and Comcast lost power to their stuff as well.

In the good old days of “landlines”, back when people just called them “phones”, every house had two pairs going into the house. The power to run your telephone comes from the phone company’s central office (CO). It was 48 volts, are low voltage. You only lose your phone service if the wires to your home are cut.

The CO had emergency backup generators, even if the entire town was without power, the CO still had their own power source.

There are fewer and fewer people using landlines these days. There really is no need. With cell phones and internet calling, everything is just possible without the phone company.

My home and office are on a software PBX. This is a digital phone exchange that lives out there in the cloud. When you call the office or the house, that call is routed over the standard phone system to my Voice over IP provider. The VoIP provider then forwards that call, over the inter net using SIP, to my PBX. My PBX then sends the call to my computer, my smartphone, the house devices or the office devices.

All of that call data comes in over the Internet.

One of the very cool things about using VoIP is that I can and do have phone numbers outside my state and country. My clients in Canada can call a local to them number, and it rings in my ears.

But what happens if the Internet goes down?

My backup is my cell device. I can use my cellphone as a modem, connect it directly to my router and the entire house or office is back online, sharing that one link to the outside world.

Except for running out of data, it works wonderfully.

For the geeks, this is not the same as using your cell to set up a “mobile hotspot.” When you do that, you are using an “extra” service from your cell provider. When I use my cellphone as a modem, it looks just like a single connection, so no extra charges.

The problem is one of bandwidth.

It used to be that Comcast would advertise these fantastic speeds, “Up to 10Mbit/second!” (Old days). Why “up to?” Why not just say “10Mbit/second?”

The reason was that it was a shared resource.

Think about it like a highway. The feeder road is a private road from your house, but once you get on the highway you are competing with all the other traffic on the highway. If there is too much traffic, everybody slows down.

We call this a broadcast system. Every time one of your devices sends a message on the network, it consumes a tiny slice of the available traffic. Like our highway example, before your device transmits, it looks to see if there is any traffic. If there is no traffic, it sends. If there is traffic, it waits. After it sends, it looks to see if there was a collision. If there was, it retransmits using the same logic.

We’ve moved to point-to-point networking, for local networks. Your computer still checks to see if anybody else is transmitting, the answer is always “no”. It then sends. It uses different physical wires for sending and receiving.

Your device’s message is received at a switch. That switch then waits for a clear time to resend your message to the next switch/router until your message is received at its final destination.

Wonderful.

Comcast cable internet is a broadcast system. Once enough people are using it, the amount of space for your message drops. There is this tipping point where the people using a broadcast service go from “everything is fine” to “nobody can get anything to work.”

That is precisely what happens when the town loses power.

All those moms that live on the book of face switch to using the cell network. All the people taking pictures are using the cell network. The business that depend on network connectivity start using the cell network.

And the cell network melts.

The network is still there. It is still capable of moving the same amount of data. Your signal to the cell tower is just as good as it always was, the cell network just doesn’t have the bandwidth to support that many simultaneous connections.

I used to own an ISP. Dial-up internet provider. We were small, we only had a few points of access (main phone numbers). At each location, we had multiple digital modems.

Here is the deal, for every 24 incoming lines we need a T1 connection. 1.44Mbits/second. We had 5 of these at our main location, 3 at our secondary and 2 at our tertiary location.

The secondary and tertiary locations had a single T1 link back to the primary location. That means that we were stuffing 3×24 users down one of those links and 2×24 down the other.

All of that was then stuffed down our T1 link to our upstream provider.

That means we had 240 dial-up modems, requiring 10 T1s worth of incoming lines going into a single line heading upstream.

We had around 2000 customers using those 240 dial-up modems.

We had zero complaints about busy lines when people called in. We had zero complaints regarding slow data.

This is because of the multiplexing going on. At the time, most people didn’t actually move a lot of data. My computer, at idle today, moves more data than 200 of my customers use to in a day.

What this all means is that depending on your cell phone in an emergency is not a good plan.

I have 3 Baofeng 5ur radios. I will be picking up some antennas for them shortly to extend their range. Three was the smallest number I considered usable. I also have four Midland FRS radios. The FRS radios I can, and do, use. The Baofeng are for receiving only.

I just finished adding the channel 3 frequencies to all the Baofengs.

The following is the page I used to get my radios up and running. I used my google-foo to locate good frequencies in my local area. Do the research now, you won’t have internet in an emergency.

BaoFeng UV-5R - Emergency Communication & Frequencies

The BaoFeng UV-5R is a compact handheld transceiver that can quickly transmit on emergency frequencies and communication when disaster strikes. Learn the basic setup frequencies with our easy to use guide!

B.L.U.F.
Mr. Fraser is the lead plaintiff in a challenge to 18 U.S.C. §922(b)1. Normally, we are concerned about the different parts of §922(g), prohibited persons. §922(b)1 is the probation on those under 21 purchasing handguns or handgun ammunition.

We won. The case is held pending appeal to the Fourth Circuit court.
(1500 words)

Case History

The Plaintiffs (good guys) filed this case on June 1st, 2022. Just a few days before Bruen. The original complaint says §922(b)(1) “violates the fundamental rights of millions of responsible, law-abiding American citizens …”—ECF No.1

Nearly a half year later, the state responds with:

1. You can just get your mommy or daddy to buy a gun for you
2. We’ve always had the ability to deny the sale of firearms to people under the age of 21
3. At the founding, those under 21 were infants and minors
4. Their claim of Fifth Amendment violation fails because your age isn’t protected data.
5. Besides, the court can offer any relief to the plaintiffs, so there.

That bit about the Fifth is saying that you can’t incriminate yourself by giving your age. Therefore, it is not protected information. They, of course, fail to mention that it is incriminating when you would be inviolate of regulation by your conduct at a particular age.

As for “History and Tradition” they have 20 some pages of regulations, the earliest in 1856, the rest 1876 or later. Not really a history nor a tradition, but this is one of the early cases post Bruen where the state was still feeling out just how underhanded they could be.

And like a bad penny, we see Giffords, Brady, Everytown jump into to agree 100% that the plaintiffs don’t have standing.

In an interesting turn, they are suing Garland and Dettelbach in both their official capacity and as individuals.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of these state actors were actually held responsible for what they do?

Commercial Sales And Purchase of Firearms That Are Not Unusually Dangerous Constitute Conduct Within The Scope of The Second Amendment. … ECF No. 28. Double emphasis added. This is horrible phrasing and every lawyer who uses it should be taken out behind the woodshed and given 50 lashes.

The correct phrasing is dangerous and unusual. “Unusually dangerous” is a subjective opinion. “Unusual” is an objective measurement, as stated in —Caetano v. Massachusetts, 136 S. Ct. 1027 (2016)

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There were a few big wins in the 2A world this week. We have a case out of Western Virginia, a class action suit, which found that all members of the class of 18,19, and 20-year-olds are allowed to purchase handguns, at a federal level.

This is a district court ruling, and the Judge made it a nationwide injunction. It doesn’t apply to two districts that are also hearing 18,19, and 20 year-olds are part of The People.

We had the District of Columbia surrender and agree to pay millions of dollars in a class action suit for denial of civil rights regarding handgun possession in the District.

The Feds are making pretzel makers look linear as they argue for that The People didn’t include this group or that group at the founding, based on racist laws. Their argument’s would be perfectly reasonable to deny Second Amendment protect rights to people of color.

In other words, the arguments they are making could just as easily be made to justify new racist regulations.

We had an outage earlier this week. We did lose some data. I lost all of my citations and WordFence tables.

Fortunately, those are trivial to rebuild, which we have.

There will be some downtime coming up as I move a boatload of data around. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

Meanwhile, the comments are open. Please let us know what you are thinking about, what you are interested in, what you’ve heard around the water cooler that might be of interest to us all.

This is a 99.9% win for the good guys.
(750 Words)

Back in 2015, Maggie Smith filed a class action suit against the District of Columbia.

She alleges that the District had created a total ban on gun ownership and a total ban on carrying outside the home. She points out that the District did this in such a way as to avoid the appearance of a total ban.

The District first put into place laws that required all hand guns and ammunition to be registered. Then they created so many obstacles to registering a hand gun that it became a de facto ban.

In addition, the registration scheme was only available to residents of the District, meaning that it was impossible for people that didn’t live in the city to be able to carry a hand gun.

For those of you that don’t know, DC used to be 100 square miles, 10 by 10. 50 square miles came from Maryland and 50 square miles came from Virginia. When Virginia seceded from the Union, it took back its land. Most of the remaining 50 square miles is filled with office buildings, government buildings, public buildings and some apartments.

There are also the slums.

Most of the people that work in the District commute into the District. They drive to just outside the beltway and then ride the Metro into the city proper. Fast, easy, convenient.

What this means is that most of the people you see in DC don’t live in DC. Under the District’s registration scheme, most of the people who worked in DC had no chance to legal own a hand gun.

Yes, it was that difficult. It made getting a CCW in New York City seem easy.

On Monday, we got some great news.

This is that big of a win because it won’t be appealed. Since both parties agreed to the settlement there is nobody to contest or appeal.

Every so often the good guys do win.

The alarm went off, I opened my blurry eyes and reached for my phone. Click… click… 03?!?!!?

I started looking. I log into my server from my phone, clicking away to get a status. The database engine is in a crashbackoff loop.

About that time, I noticed that Miguel had contacted me with a very polite 503? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

As I have talked about, I’m upgrading the infrastructure that GFZ uses. The previous round of downtime resulted in me opening tickets with Linode and escalating to the point where less than a week ago I got an update, “We resolved the issue you reported”. They had known about the issue for over a year. It just wasn’t important enough to fix until their client, me, raised a fuss.

One of the side effects of this upgrade process is that I’ve had to increase the number of nodes and the size of nodes. All of that is going well.

It is unclear to me why the database engine crashed, only that it did.

To that end, I have removed that database engine from production. Moved all the data to the larger, more stable, database engine. This database engine is using the new persistent (CEPH) storage engine. While it is not “crash proof” it is less prone to failures because of the way the data is now stored.

In addition, it is much easier to get backups of the data.

I’m going to take the plunge later today and move the assets from the storage it is currently using to the new storage system. This offers numerous benefits, not the least of which is that I can do rolling upgrades of the software.

Yesterday I upgraded ‘WordPress’ on multiple sites. With the new infrastructure being used by some of those sites, there was zero downtime. K8S started a new pod with the new software. When it was stable, it terminated one of the old pods. It then started a second pod with the new software. When it was stable, it terminated the last old pod. Zero downtime.

For GFZ, using the older infrastructure, the old pod was terminated, the new pod was started, once it was stable, service resumed.

Regardless, I’m hopping for a quiet day.