This may be a bit scatter-shot; there’s a lot to cover, and I’m going to try to fold in some answers to comments on my previous posting on the topic. [stderr] I also want to predict the future, so I can say “I told you so!” when it happens.
To be frank, cybersecurity pisses me off so much whenever I think about it, that it’s almost painful to write about. But the questions are interesting and worthy of respect.
Some mornings, when your alarm clock fires off, you just roll over and slap the “snooze” button. If you do that long enough, you can get quite good at it; there have been mornings when I hit the “snooze” button 15 or more times in a row, pushing back my wake-up time by as much as 2 hours. I used to know someone who claimed that they could sleep-walk through their morning status meeting, effectively grabbing several extra hours of sleep.
The cries of “‘defund the police’ is harsh and may alienate potential allies!” are full-throated, and I am thoroughly sick of them. Police and police unions are manipulating politics shamelessly, and have demonstrated again and again and again that consent decrees and legislation are just something they will work around.
The last month has been eye-opening, indeed. Already a non-fan of representative democracy, I’ve learned that I was insufficiently cynical – when you have a system that has been designed to be corrupt, it’s rife with holes to allow corruption; such a system cannot withstand adverse gamespersonship. It is built-in.
Are you tired of this stuff? I’m sick of it, personally. It’s depressing. I feel like I’ve been wandering around blissfully ignoring how horrible nearly half of my fellow citizens and neighbors happen to be. To be fair, since I live in deep “Trump country” it’s more than half. What’s wrong with these people? [I actually have a fairly good idea but we don’t have time or inclination to do a class analysis of American history]
I made a posting the other day, about Rudi Giuliani and what a racist bastard he is. [stderr]
Doubtless, large swathes of this story are covered by blankets of classification; it’s one of the governments’ best tools for hiding incompetence. Because – not to mince words – the only way this thing could have happened is massive incompetence.
I did a bit of curiousity research following a comment by Commentariat(tm) member DrVanNostrand [stderr]
Soldiers would like to tell us that they are tough and manly, dripping with toxic masculinity juice that you can smell from miles away. Sometimes, that’s even true. But other times you’ve just got to stand back and admire the fashions (such as wearing a corset under all the tight napoleonic cavalry kit).
I am going to stand by my prediction that we won’t have a civil war. In fact, I grow more certain of that all the time. We may, however, have some civil unrest. That’s OK – we’re always going to have some of that, because Americans are violent and stupid, and our national identity depends on a form of violent, stupid, toxic individualism.
This is for any of you who’ve been part of a dysfunctional organization, and had to deal with someone who has whole-heartedly absorbed the marketing bullet points of ${something}.