From Reader RobinB:
“Moving to a smaller apartment and sadly, can’t take my beloved piano with me. I would love to find it a new home where it will be played and cherished. Let me know if you want it or know someone who might be interested.”
Sadly, I have no room for a piano and I can’t play one anyway, so I’m out of the picture. If anyone else reading this wants a piano, contact me and I’ll forward that onto Robin.
Here’s something I can only describe as a wake-up call:
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R) is leading a coalition of GOP House members urging President Donald Trump to pick an Attorney-General who will “immediately” wipe away Biden-era ATF gun controls. Clyde and 32 other House members signed an April 21, 2026, letter, asking Trump to choose and A-G who will “immediately cease enforcement of Biden-era gun rules and secure permanent – not temporary – relief.”
Yes, yes, and again yes.
I’m getting heartily sick of a Department of [alleged] Justice which pays lip service to the Constitution — and especially to the Second Amendment — but either fails to redress wrongs through inaction or by continuing to slavishly enforce older regulations which tramp all over the Founding Document.
Clyde and his colleagues also ask Trump to choose an A-G who will reform and clean house at the ATF. They view this task as including:
That “purging the ATF of gun-grabbing bureaucrats” should only be a precursor to moving the A and T part back to the Treasury (where it belongs), and a complete deletion of the F, because fuck them.
Clyde and his colleagues pointed to the support Trump received from gun owners during the November 2024 elections, suggesting he should now support them as they supported him: “Mr. President, American gun owners have been some of your most loyal and enthusiastic voters. They delivered for you at the ballot box, and they deserve to see their constitutional rights respected in return.
“The roadmap above requires no new legislation – it only requires leadership, will-power, and a Department of Justice that is genuinely committed to your agenda rather than protecting its own institutional inaction.”
Clearly, ex-AG Blondie wasn’t up to the job. If I were Trump, I’d make Alan Gottlieb (of the Second Amendment Foundation) the AG, let him clean the place out for (say) two years, and then let him get back to doing his proper job at SAF.
Frankly, I don’t actually care what Trump does. What I want is for the DOfuckingJ to stop harassing gun owners and go after the real criminals. And to do it quickly. If DJT can achieve that with his choice of Blondie’s replacement, so much the better.
*The Tiahrt Amendment is a provision of the U.S. Department of Justice 2003 appropriations bill that prohibits the National Tracing Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from releasing information from its firearms trace database to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation. This precludes gun trace data from being used in academic research of gun use in crime. Additionally, the law blocks any data legally released from being admissible in civil lawsuits against gun sellers or manufacturers.
This is becoming an all-too-familiar event: an old rocker of enormous talent goes off to jam with Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck (both of whom knew him, and would undoubtedly welcome him into their band with open arms).
R.I.P. Dave Mason — one of the absolute best.
Once again, an alleged intruder allegedly tried to break into an alleged homeowner’s alleged home, and allegedly having been told to stop breaking in, allegedly continued to try to effect an alleged entrance, whereupon said alleged homeowner allegedly used an alleged firearm to end the alleged threat. The alleged shootee was then allegedly struck “at least once” with alleged bullet(s), and allegedly assumed room temperature soon thereafter.
The police alleged that “the [alleged] homeowner’s statement matched up with the evidence they found.”
Okay, ignoring all the legal caveats, a scumbag goblin was wasted by a Righteous Shooting, for which the following action should be taken:
Shipwreck off Cape Peninsula, South Africa 1981
One comment (on this article) got me thinking:
I’m speaking to my business’s IT people about getting a “cold storage” option, even just a hard drive sitting in a desk drawer we update once a week. I don’t know how much I trust our cloud based database now.
Back when I was running Grand Union’s customer management function, I was fearful to the extent of paranoia about protecting our customers’ data privacy. So fearful was I that I made several changes (against massive resistance from IT) in our data storage process.
As with all such nascent programs of the time, when customers applied for a loyalty card, we collected their personal data (name and address) and applied a unique ID number embedded in the card’s magnetic strip (no chips back then). Like everyone else, we delegated this task to our card provider, who included that service, plus a direct mail service in their product offering. I wasn’t too comfortable about having our customers’ data in the hands of a third party, but you have to trust somebody sometimes, and I figured that they had more to lose in the mismanagement thereof, which would keep them honest.
Then I found out that our company’s IT department had ordered the provider to send them those customer files over to us, as a “backup” and “security” measure (of course). I didn’t like having two sets of data out there, but being the new boy, I kept my trap shut.
Then I found out that Store Operations was in the process of setting up a little routine which would track our staff’s spending — all staff had cards issued to them (for the wrong reasons, by the way, but I’ll talk about that some other time). So I blew up at the Ops VP — the first time I had exploded at a senior member of upper management, but by no means the last — and uttered the words that became quite legendary at Grand Union.
“Let me make one thing quite clear. Just because we are housing the data, does not mean you can play with it. You know who owns the data? I DO. And only I will dictate how the data is to be used from now on.” (There were more words, calling them idiots for abusing our own staff when in fact we were getting free research from their behavior, but that too is a story for another time.)
The result of all this was that I took all the personal customer data off the mainframe, leaving only the unique IDs behind, and stored that data not on our department’s terminal — which of course was linked to IT — but on a stand-alone PC in my techie Kenny’s office, on which resided only the customer data (and IDs of course), and the necessary tools to manage it (I used Paradox as the database manager and query tool, and Quattro Pro as the spreadsheet program). Incidentally, the only way I got funding for the PC was by threatening to just buy one with my own money if I got turned down. The only way to get data off that PC was by diskette (remember them) and Jaz cassettes (once again, the best mass offline storage media at the time); and I had the only other Jaz drive in the company (and also the only other Quattro Pro software, but that was by choice because MS Excel was and still is an inferior product).
And absolutely everything was password-protected — only Kenny and I had admin privileges. It was unwieldy, and often frustrating, and time-consuming; but our data was secure, which was all that mattered to me. So when we were doing a direct-mail promotion to our customer-cardholders, Kenny and I would do the analysis, then send the promotional offer and list of customer IDs to our card provider to create the mail shot. (The “sending” of the promo details involved handing a Jaz cassette to our account executive to take back to their IT department: also unwieldy and time-consuming, but irrelevant to me. And the head of their IT department was a great friend of mine, so I trusted him to safeguard the data.)
And all that was in the mid-1990s, when data snooping was rudimentary, crude and easily blocked. Now? Fuggedabahtit.
I do know that had anyone in my department even suggested to me that I back up our data on some Internet-based “cloud” (for the usual “convenience” reasons), I would probably have fired them, for forgetting that when it comes to data — most especially private data — security matters more than ease or convenience. I eve refused to back up our customer data on the company’s own mainframe, so protective did I feel about the issue.
And I think that people need to feel more like that today, because in today’s world data security is more, not less fragile and indeed vulnerable.