Author: Kim du Toit

Some Detail Required

Law and Order, Surveillance Society

In the above post, I refer to the FBI “fusion centers”.  For those who went “Huh?” at the term, here’s a good background piece, framed inside an overall theme of the militarization of the police (which I’ve ranted about often before, as it happens).  Here’s an excerpt:

Fusion Centers are hubs for local, state and federal police to share information. They’re effectively intelligence-gathering done by various police agencies who pool their resources. While this isn’t an uncommon practice, the Fusion Centers have virtually no oversight and are filled with zeal for the War on Terror. While its primary existence was to surveil in the fight against terrorism, Fusion Centers have quickly ballooned to gather intelligence on just about anything – and it’s not just the police. The military participates in Fusion Centers, as does the private sector, which means they’re a privacy nightmare.  

The federal government has pushed Fusion Centers and largely bankrolled them. Hundreds of FBI agents work with Fusion Centers, with the federal government providing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid. In the case of the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, the federal government created a Fusion Center at the state level, only eventually turning control of an ostensibly state agency to the state. 30 percent of these “state” agencies are physically located in federal office space.

Private sector companies collect, store and analyze data for Fusion Centers. This would be dangerous on its own, but the lack of any oversight makes it particularly troublesome. Even if a private sector has the best of intentions, malicious third-party actors could access some of your most sensitive data if it’s been datamined by a Fusion Center. A company without the best intentions can do all kinds of “government-approved” snooping into your personal affairs.

And there you have it, in a nutshell.

Read the whole thing, because while it may contain a whole bunch of stuff you already know about, there’s no harm in being reminded about it, as I was.

Prediction

Politics

Oh, here’s a headline which grabbed me:

Political guru predicts Trump White House will COLLAPSE within 30 days

Wait… what?  And which political guru?

Oh, wait… it’s James Carville.

Never mind.

But the best part:

The veteran Democratic strategist told Mediaite’s Dan Abrams that Trump’s popularity is sinking*, and he believes the administration will implode from a lack of public support.

‘I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion,’ Carville said. 

I believe he’s getting his dipstick into such “public opinion” sources like the Democrat National Council, or Kamala Harris’s pollsters.  In the meantime:

I’d be very curious to see how many people believe and support the above, as opposed to the “public support” that Gollum sees.  Oh, and Mediaite?  You have got to be kidding me.

Whatever, let’s see if his prediction outlasts the next thirty days… and no, I’m not taking bets nor offering odds.

*“Trump losing support among voters”  is just the new talking point for the Socialists.  Like so much of what they say, it’s not based on any kind of reality, but on wishful thinking.

Oh FFS

Housekeeping

Late Sunday night I saw a message in my “Notifications” that my Windows 11 needed an update, in that the “Security” was old or some damn thing.

I’d missed it because I’d ported a whole bunch of files onto my new laptop from the old, and over the past week or so I’ve been updating many, many files — deleting old ones, refreshing others, downloading newer iterations, you know the drill.  For ease of access, I’d stored most of the files on my Desktop

So I clicked on the “UPDATE” button, and seeing as the thing as going to take ages to complete the task, I went to bed.

When I logged on this morning, my Desktop was completely empty except for the Recycle bin, and I cannot find those files anywhere.

RCOB

All that work… vanished into the ether.

I actually don’t know what to do now.

Try to imagine that you have done a whole lot of research (back in the day before computers), and all your stuff is stored on bits of paper, some filed away, some properly typed out and filed properly — you know, the  way we used to do stuff.

Then some cleaning service offers to tidy up your room, and when you come back the next day, all the stuff you’d not yet filed away has been shredded.

I’m going to take a day or two to process what’s happened, and maybe try to re-create some of the work.  But if this is going to happen each time I subject myself to a Win11 upgrade, I’m just not going to do it, ever again.

I am so angry I could bite the head off a puppy.

Oh, and by the way:  OneDrive was re-installed.

Also, posting will be light for a couple of days.  Sorry, but that’s where I am right now.

Quote Of The Day

Bureaucracy, QOTD

“25 million individuals over age 100 remain in the Social Security database even though there are fewer than 100,000 people aged 100 or older alive in the U.S. today.” — DOGE

Let’s hear it for Gummint efficiency.  And if it’s not inefficiency… then it’s fucking fraud, and the recipients of said fraudulent payouts need to go to jail.

And while we’re there, the people responsible for checking for and preventing such anomalies should be fired.

Okay, Congressman

Anti-Gun Nannies, Resistance

Here’s an interesting take:

Congressman Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) reminded the country last week why the Second Amendment is so vital to the United States.

The former Long Beach mayor called on the Democratic Party to “bring actual weapons” in the “fight for democracy.”

So you’ll bring your “actual” weapons to fight for democracy — what you call democracy, at any rate.

Challenge accepted.  Be White, and make the first move.  We’ll see how this plays out.

Are they really this stupid?

5 Fings Wot I Done

Guy Stuff, Housekeeping

In keeping with the Musk Activity Report, allow me to list the five things I did last week — almost all of which, I’ll agree, I do every week.  Bearing in mind that I’m actually retired and not therefore required to do anything, here they are:

1) Prepared and posted about 30-odd articles for this here blog.  Some require little preparation — such as the Caption Competitions, Sunday’s Classic Beauty and Random Totty categories, of which I typically do a month’s worth in advance.  Others such as the Comment Of The Day also require little preparation other than formatting, but I typically do those as I stumble on them.  The heavy hitters (e.g.  Gratuitous Gun Pics, political analysis and social commentary) take a lot longer because in many cases they concern subjects with which I’m not familiar and require that I delve into the topic at some depth.  Reports on daily news take very little time, but commentary thereon does involve at least a little contemplation if not ancillary research, as does the weekly News Roundup.  As I’m committed to publishing at least four posts per weekday and one each for Saturday and Sunday, you can see how this all adds up, timewise.  And I count this as only one thing I did last week, and pretty much every week.  No doubt some Gummint bureaucrat would spin those out into at least a dozen things — such is the nature of make-work Gummint activity — but for me, it’s one.

2) Reading and answering mail.  I get upwards of two dozen emails a day from Readers.  Some require a response, some are FYI.  Whatever, thank you for all of them — regular correspondents know who you are —  and I value every single email.  (I don’t get much if any hate mail, but that’s fine.  If I wanted that kind of thing, I’d get a Twitter/X account.)

3) Grocery shopping.  Because New Wife works a day job (more on this below), it falls on me to keep the household running, and typically this involves about three separate trips per week (because I prefer to eat fresh foods rather than canned or frozen).  Once again, this I count as one thing not three.

4) Meal preparation.  There are two such activities.  Firstly, each night I prepare a “brown-bag” lunch for New Wife’s consumption the following day.  It involves a fresh garden salad, some kind of meat and a dessert (pitted cherries and full-milk yogurt).  Secondly, because she works five days a week, I see no reason why she should come home exhausted and then have to prepare us a meal;  so at least three nights a week, I prepare dinner for us both.  Friday nights we’ll either share a frozen pizza or whatever.  We don’t do takeout unless we’re desperate.  Weekend meals are an ad hoc  kind of thing — cheese or chicken toasties — unless we decide to treat ourselves to a roast, beef or lamb) which I typically do while she does household stuff like laundry.  (In passing, I keep the apartment tidy, bed made and the kitchen spotless because I loathe the alternative with a passion).

5) Range trip.  I view this as part of my civic duty.  Choice of guns depends on my mood or “rotation” (“damn, I haven’t shot Gun X for a while, it’s time”).  5a)  Maintenance.  I also clean and oil my guns once a week — not just those I fired at the range, but also one or two others on a rotation basis.  (I’m not compulsive about this because I don’t have to be.  While I have the cleaning kit out, in other words…)

Those are the five things I do every week, which I consider cumulatively as my “job”.  I didn’t include the voluminous reading  (paper and Internet), because that’s recreation.  Ditto the many WhatsApp messages to friends and family.

6) Ad hoc jobs.  Last week, I also fixed the headliner on the Tiguan — after only 135,000 miles, the glue weakened and the liner started flopping down, don’t get me started on quality control nowadays.  I also re-glued the gearstick shroud in New Wife’s Sputum (which had worked loose after only 26,000 miles because Fiat), and took it in for an oil change.

In government-worker terms, that list would probably exhaust most of them and require some time off.

On the other hand, I can’t get fired.