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Minutes ago, Rush Limbaugh was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Then Trump praised the "heroes" at ICE, and told several sob stories about crime by illegal immigrants.

Now BSing about the middle east.

This ought to provide excellent media distraction from the Iowa SNAFU?

The Iowa Democrats should just decide to make Trump their party leader and get this troublesome ballot counting over, lol.

What. A. Cock-up!

Saginaw and Bay City News

Saginaw woman who led anti-violence march faces gun charges

SAGINAW, MI - Months after organizing an anti-violence march in the wake of a several shootings in the city, a Saginaw woman faces gun charges after police allege she threatened an employee at a salon.

Sparkle N. Roby, 34, on Wednesday, Sept. 18, appeared in Saginaw County District Court for arraignment on three counts of felony firearm and single counts of felonious assault, carrying a concealed weapon, carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent, and felon in possession of a firearm.

Prosecutors say Roby on July 22 had an altercation with an employee at Unique Styles Beauty Salon in Saginaw and said she’d come back with a gun. She left the business, then returned with a pistol and waved it around, yelling for the employee, prosecutors allege.

Roby left the salon when she heard police were being called, prosecutors said. No one was injured, but police said several people were in the salon at the time.

Authorities issued a warrant for Roby’s arrest on Monday, Sept. 16. The next day, police arrested her during a traffic stop.

Roby, speaking with MLive on Thursday, said she expects the case against her to be dismissed.

“They’re all false claims,” she said. “I don’t know the person who made the report.”

Earlier this year, Roby organized the Take a Step Walk. The June 1 march was in response to several shootings and two homicides that occurred in Saginaw in a few weeks’ time.

In May, she told how her life has been affected by violence in Saginaw.

In 2005, her best friend Brandy Boose, 20, was killed in a drive-by shooting as she slept in bed with her infant. Two years later, Roby’s 26-year-old sister Tekisha R. Curry — a mother of five children — was fatally shot during a late-night birthday party in 2007.

In 2015, Roby found herself in legal trouble for witness intimidation for twice threatening a female who was a witness against her brother, Brandon Sims, who is serving 26-50 years in prison for the 2014 shooting death of Keyonus Mobley.

“When I was put in that situation, I had never been in that situation, and I learned that I never wanted to be in that situation again,” Roby told MLive in May. “I was able to grow and learn from the experience.”

She ended up pleading no contest to one count of intimidating a witness by committing a crime and/or threatening to kill or injure. As a convicted felon, Roby is prohibited from possessing guns.

In 2018, she regained custody of her sons, who had been removed from her home in 2010. They also became motivation for her.

“I learned to use my time more wisely and started doing more positive things and ever since then things have been going more positively for me,” Roby said.

Roby, who has bonded out of jail, is to appear for a preliminary examination at 2:15 p.m. on Oct. 2.

https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-city/2019/09/saginaw-woman-who-led-anti-violence-march-faces-gun-charges.html

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)-“A Saginaw woman who organized an anti-violence march has accepted a plea deal her felony gun case,” Saginaw and Bay City News reported Saturday. “Sparkle N. Roby, 34, on Wednesday, Jan. 22, appeared before Saginaw County Chief Circuit Judge Darnell Jackson and pleaded no contest to single counts of felonious assault, felon in possession of a firearm, carrying a concealed weapon, and carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent.”

As part of the deal to get the plea, prosecutors agreed to drop three “felony firearm” counts stemming from an incident where witness testimony said Roby returned to a beauty salon with a gun to threaten an employee she’d had an argument with moments before.

That hardly lives up to the “authoritative” lecturing Roby gave the media when interviewed for her “Take a Step Walk.” Perhaps if “reporters” giving her free publicity had been more interested in doing a balanced job, they could have asked her on camera about her prior deal after threatening to kill a witness against her brother, now serving 26 to 50 years for shooting a man to death. She pled out on that too, making her a “prohibited person,” forbidden by law to have a gun. And just to re-emphasize, she had faced two charges for the death threat.

Roby evidently learning nothing makes Judge Jackson’s decision to allow her to be free on bond pending sentencing all the more curious. Based on results she has demonstrated extreme anger and cognitive dissonance issues and has shown a penchant for threatening to kill witnesses. Allowing a demonstrable menace unrestrained access to others is irresponsible and dangerous, although hardly unexpected considering how prosecutors and the courts have continued to show leniency to this repeat offender.

What’s also hardly unexpected is that so many “anti-violence” activists are violent themselves, particularly the ones who rail against guns and then end up using them. Cases in point:

        The anti-gun Democrat politician charged with shooting her husband to death.
        The “school shooter” who advocates for citizen disarmament.
        The “Stop the Violence organizers” who beat a man so severely he vomited blood.
        An “anti-violence” pamphlet distributor, working for the State of Illinois, who “accidentally” shot his accomplice in the head during a home invasion.
        The “anti-gun advocate” busted for illegally selling firearms.

Hell, for that matter, look at Leland Yee, or all those criminal Bloomberg mayors.

There are plenty more examples. Here are some I talked about 15 years ago for a GUNS Magazine column:

        The gun and ammunition straw purchasers for the Columbine killers who apparently decided going full anti-gun would make things easier on them.
        The Million Mom March sponsor who got a .45 and paralyzed a man she wrongly thought had killed her son.
        Another Million Mom Marcher, this one a chapter president, who was busted with drugs and a gun with a filed-off serial number by police investigating a drive-by shooting.
        “Long Island Lolita” Amy Fisher, who had her anti-gun epiphany after shooting her sex partner’s wife in the face.

Then there’s my personal “favorite” for insane hypocrisy, Columbine killer Eric Harris, whose “Guns in Schools” report concluded, “a school is no place for a gun.” And guess who agreed with him:

        “First, we believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America's schools, period … with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel.”

The projection in the gun-grabbers is strong, and it’s fair to surmise how much of not trusting others with guns arises from knowing what’s in their own hearts. In any case, that should not be allowed to have any bearing on the rights of those who suffer no such moral defects and impulse control issues, and the bottom line and undeniable truth is, anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian, a concept that evidently escaped Judge Jackson in the Roby case.

And unlike the gun-grabbers, “our side” even insists on full due process before meting out legal consequences.

https://www.ammoland.com/2020/01/anti-violence-organizer-pleading-out-on-gun-charge-reminiscent-of-others/

Justice Gorsuch Compared Nationwide Injunctions to the One Ring From ‘Lord of the Rings’

Justice Neil Gorsuch invoked J.R.R. Tolkien’s tri-part epic “The Lord of the Rings” in a Monday concurrence that suggested the Supreme Court may need to curtail the use of nationwide injunctions.

Gorsuch likened nationwide injunctions to the One Ring, an artifact of malevolent power whose destruction is the driving action of Tolkien’s saga. The justice alluded to the ring as he reviewed the history of litigation regarding the Trump administration’s public charge rule, which will take effect after the high court lifted two injunctions entered against it Monday afternoon.

A lengthy inscription on the band proclaims that the One Ring shall “rule them all.” Gorsuch found that domineering promise an apt descriptor for nationwide injunctions, which remain in force regardless of the outcome of other lawsuits on a given subject.

“Despite the fluid state of things — some interim wins for the government over here, some preliminary relief for plaintiffs over there — we now have an injunction to rule them all: the one before us, in which a single judge in New York enjoined the government from applying the new definition to anyone, without regard to geography or participation in this or any other lawsuit,” Gorsuch wrote.

Nationwide injunctions exceed judicial power, Gorsuch says

Gorsuch argued that nationwide injunctions raise fundamental questions about judicial power. The Constitution does not give federal judges freestanding authority to strike down laws or award damages. Instead, the courts are empowered to resolve specific “cases and controversies” that unfold in the real world between adversarial parties.

Since the judicial power extends to those particular disputes, it follows that courts only have power to bind the parties before them, Gorsuch said. But when a judge-ordered remedy reaches beyond a particular case, Gorsuch suggested courts are transformed from venues for dispute resolution into something else entirely.

“When a district court orders the government not to enforce a rule against the plaintiffs in the case before it, the court redresses the injury that gives rise to its jurisdiction in the first place,” Gorsuch wrote. “But when a court goes further than that, ordering the government to take (or not take) some action with respect to those who are strangers to the suit, it is hard to see how the court could still be acting in the judicial role of resolving cases and controversies.”

What’s more, Gorsuch said nationwide injunctions are contrary to our legal tradition. When new legal questions emerge, many different lower courts reach their own conclusions — sometimes divergent — over a long period of time.

In turn, higher courts review those results, then announce controlling principles for future cases. The hope is that higher courts can issue quality, well-informed decisions with the benefit of multiple inputs from the lower courts.

Nationwide injunctions interrupt that process, Gorsuch said, turning ordinary disputes into emergencies.

“By their nature, universal injunctions tend to force judges into making rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions,” Gorsuch wrote.

“The rise of nationwide injunctions may just be a sign of our impatient times,” he added. “But good judicial decisions are usually tempered by older virtues.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined Gorsuch’s Monday opinion, sounded similar notes in a concurrence to the 2018 travel ban decision. Like the public charge rule, the administration’s travel sanctions were subject to multiple nationwide injunctions.

“These injunctions did not emerge until a century and a half after the founding,” Thomas wrote. “And they appear to be inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts. If their popularity continues, this Court must address their legality.”

Trump administration searches for solution

Nationwide injunctions have beset the Trump administration since the president took office. By the Justice Department’s telling, the federal courts have entered about 40 injunctions against the executive branch since 2017. In contrast, only 27 nationwide injunctions were issued in the entire 20th century.

Vice President Mike Pence said that the administration would look for an appropriate case to challenge nationwide injunctions in the Supreme Court during a May 2019 speech to a Federalist Society conference in Washington, D.C.

The question cannot reach the high court on its own. Rather, the justices can only address the question if it is part of an ongoing dispute.

That could leave the government in something of a bind, however, as it raises the possibility the administration would have to lose a case on the merits in order for the justices to reach the injunction question.

That’s because the high court has no reason to decide on an injunction when the government wins and successfully defends its policy. If the challengers lose, they aren’t entitled to anything. Only after the challengers prevail is the question of a remedy relevant.

Liberals and conservatives alike have obtained nationwide injunctions to attain their litigation goals.

Republican state attorneys general used such orders to good effect in the waning days of the Obama administration. Those injunctions, obtained from right-leaning trial courts in places like Texas, blocked an Obama-era policy on transgender bathrooms and a companion initiative to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

– – –

Kevin Daley is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Background Photo “The One Ring” by Rodrigo Olivera. CC BY 2.0.

https://tennesseestar.com/2020/01/29/justice-gorsuch-compared-nationwide-injunctions-to-the-one-ring-from-lord-of-the-rings/

Which is the most worsest?

A disaster of epic pacifications.
A disaster of epic paginations.
A disaster of epic palindromes.
A disaster of epic panhandlers.
A disaster of epic paragraphs.
A disaster of epic pedestrians.
A disaster of epic pejoratives.
A disaster of epic penetrations.
A disaster of epic penmanships.
A disaster of epic perfectionists.
A disaster of epic perforations.
A disaster of epic performances.
A disaster of epic permissions.
A disaster of epic persecutions.
A disaster of epic personalizations.
A disaster of epic perspirations.
A disaster of epic persuasions.
A disaster of epic philanderers.
A disaster of epic pigmentations.
A disaster of epic plagiarizations.
A disaster of epic polarizations.
A disaster of epic pollutions.
A disaster of epic polymerizations.
A disaster of epic pontifications.
A disaster of epic populations.
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A disaster of epic portions.
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A disaster of epic possessions.
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Other, please specify in comments.

(Somehow I didn't think this one would work very well as an SN Pole question.)

SpaceX Starship just aced another explosive tank test and Elon Musk has the results [video]

SpaceX has successfully repaired a leak in a Starship prototype, filled the giant tank with an ultra-cold liquid, and pressurized it until it (spectacularly) popped — and Elon Musk has the preliminary results.

[...] Musk recently revealed that the new steel Starship and Super Heavy designs will require tanks pressures of at least 6 bar (90 psi) to survive the stresses of orbital flight.

[...] We’ll have to wait for dawn tomorrow to see the extent of the damage, but it appears that Test Tank #2’s demise was dramatically more violent than its predecessor — a largely expected side effect of performing the pressure test with a cryogenic liquid. In fact, just minutes after it appeared to fail, Elon Musk revealed that the second test tank had burst around 8.5 bar (~125 psi), soundly trouncing all records set by earlier tests and suggesting SpaceX is unequivocally ready to begin building the first orbital Starships. Critically, Musk had previously indicated that if Starship’s tanks could survive up to 8.5 bar, SpaceX would have the minimum safety margins it needs to deem Starship safe enough for astronauts.

SpaceX is ready to build the first Starship destined for space after latest tests

As Musk himself noted on Monday, he is now confident that SpaceX can immediately start building the first Starship destined for spaceflight and further revealed that two of that particular Starship’s three tank domes are already nearing completion.

Known as Starship SN01 (serial number 01), there’s a strong possibility that the massive spacecraft will never reach higher than a 20 km (12.5 mi) flight test SpaceX intends to perform. The company’s rapidly changing strategy may very well mean that SN01 – now ‘go’ for production – could also support suborbital spaceflight testing and maybe even the first orbital Starship launch, although orbital launches will require a Super Heavy booster. Elon Musk, for one, has already christened Starship SN01 an “orbital vehicle”.

So, I'm setting up a RockPro64 to takeover email and apache duties for an aging server in the basement and in the process, I managed to do something incredibly stupid. So, I have the base OS installed and updated and I was setting up my ZFS partitions before installing and setting up services for the server. The plan was to make ZFS datasets on a mirror of SSD disks for /home /var and /etc. I first made the /home dataset, temporarily mounted it on /mnt, rsync'ed the data from /home to /mnt. Then I sudo rm -rf /home/*, unmounted /mnt, and remounted the zpool/home dataset on the /home directory. Everything looked good, so I added that change to the fstab and rebooted. System came up with the zfs dataset mounted on the /home directory. Perfect!

Next, it was time to do the zpool/var dataset. So I mount zpool/var to /mnt and cd into /etc, rsync it all over, unmount the zfs dataset and finally sudo rm -rf *. Next mount the partition...Ah crap, I copied the /etc data on the zpool/var dataset. No big deal, I'll mount the zpool/etc dataset to /etc and copy the data over--this should be no problem. So I attempt to remount the zpool/var dataset to get the /etc data, sudo mount -t zfs zpool/var /mnt.

sudo: you do not exist in the passwd database

Ah crap. I think I'm in trouble. Let me try root and fix all of this, su -.

su: user root does not exist

As you can figure, I'm pretty much screwed and am no longer able to do anything to recover this over ssh. I hope tonight when I get home I can pull the emcc module off of the board and one of the zfs drives, plug them both into the laptop and fix this. I'll probably mount both and rsync the /etc data back to the emmc device. Sure, I can likely reinstall at this point and start over, but I'd rather not have to if I can just pull the files from device and put them on the other.

If anybody thinks they have a way to fix this over the current SSH session, I'm up for suggestions. I'm pretty sure this ssh session is the last time a user can log into the system until /etc is restored.

If I learned anything from this, it is if the command has the potential to hose user logins, do it as root and never with sudo.

**EDIT**

The system is back up. I pulled the emmc module and one of the SSDs from the zpool and mounted them both on my laptop. A quick rsync moved the /etc data from the zfs dataset back to the original /etc directory. All in all, this was good because it gave me a sanity check. Who puts /etc on a separate partition? How do you then read fstab if it is on a different partition than root without doing funny initramfs monkey business? So, if I really want to keep my etc config files backed-up, I either need to cron a rsync job or figure out how I'm booting a SBC with the root on ZFS. I think I could keep /boot on the emmc and move the rootfs to ZFS. I once saw a guide for installing EFI and grub on the emmc and installing Gentoo on a SSD. I could probably do something similar, but I'd have to figure how to do it with the Debian/Devuan tools as I have very little time to keep what will be a hobby/production server up-to-date.

CES 2020: Analogix Announces ANX2187 TCON With Gamut Rotation

We haven’t talked about Analogix in a few years, and we certainly haven’t talked about TCON announcements much at all. At CES 2020 Analogix announced the new ANX2187 TCON chip with little fanfare, but it could drastically change the way PC displays are manufactured and how end products end up in terms of their colour accuracy.

Analogix has been a leader in delivering TCON solutions to the PC and laptop market for many years, and the market has been relatively speaking quite boring when it comes to new developments. Analogix wants to modernise the display panel experience for monitors and laptops with the introduction of the new ANX2186 which promises to bring 3D Colour Gamut rotation to the PC market.

Display makers usually have a quite hard time in terms of producing accurate display panels using the “traditional” manufacturing methods. In the old way of doing things, a panel’s colour accuracy is largely dependent upon its manufacturing and if it comes out matching the target specifications, with it being very hard for display vendors to individually adjust the display controller firmware on each panel in order to achieve better calibrations and accuracy.

The ANX2186 is a TCON that features gamut manipulation in the optical domain – in essence it’s a calibration engine that sits at the TCON level between the display input and the DDIC and is able to transparently manipulate the gamut in its 3D space. This technology isn’t inherently new, one area it’s been present for years has been in the mobile space (Samsung’s mDNIe was first as far as I know) as well as in TVs by various TV SoC vendors.

What this allows is for calibration and manipulation of the colours fully independent of the DDIC firmware of a display panel. Display manufacturers can now very quickly with help of automatic tooling calibrate each individual panel in a product line, write the compensation/calibration factors as ROM data to the TCON, and not have to worry about fiddling with the much more complex firmware data on the side of the DDIC.

TCON = timing controller.

Virginia HB1627:

If any person, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, or harass any person, shall use a computer or computer network to communicate obscene, vulgar, profane, lewd, lascivious, or indecent language, or make any suggestion or proposal of an obscene nature, or threaten any illegal or immoral act, he shall be is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. A violation of this section may be prosecuted in the jurisdiction in which the communication was made or received or in the City of Richmond if the person subjected to the act is one of the following officials or employees of the Commonwealth: the Governor, Governor-elect, Lieutenant Governor, Lieutenant Governor-elect, Attorney General, or Attorney General-elect, a member or employee of the General Assembly, a justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, or a judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia.

You'd think they'd at least get the 2A out of the way before they go balls out after the 1A. Remember this shit next time you get butthurt because someone tells you the Democrats are authoritarian shitstains.

[Update]: Deathmonkey was kind enough to point out that this was in fact a Republican-passed bill from 2K that is being reaffirmed/reenacted by the Democrats, as well as adding the ability for the state to prosecute in Richmond no matter where the crime was committed if it's against state-owned property or a politician. Let's hear it for bipartisan fuckwadery! This would have been updated sooner but this is the first time I've looked at it since Thursday around lunchtime. Sorry, you're just not as interesting as The Roomie's kids who arrived a couple hours later.

(What, you thought I'd support it if Republicans had a hand in it? You must be new here.)

Tens of thousands of armed citizens came to protest in VA, said what they had to say, and harmed nobody at all. Then they left. But not before cleaning up after themselves. Talk about pissing the ones trying to sell the progtard narrative off. I did laugh.