Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
The year is still young, but thus far, this may emerge as the greatest piece of proposed legislation unless there’s something I’ve forgotten that’s even better — which I don’t consider to be too likely:
A week after the IRS announced they could not produce emails from former Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois Lerner and six others because of a computer crash, Congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX) introduced “The Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Act.”
The language of the bill take a humorous approach to a serious issue.
The bill states, “All taxpayers shall be given the benefit of the doubt when not producing critical documentation, so long as the taxpayer’s excuse therefore falls into one of the following categories:
1. The dog ate my tax receipts
2. Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction
3. Traded documents for five terrorists
4. Burned for warmth while lost in the Yukon
5. Left on table in Hillary’s Book Room
6. Received water damage in the trunk of Ted Kennedy’s car
7. Forgot in gun case sold to Mexican drug lords
8. Forced to recycle by municipal Green Czar
9. Was short on toilet paper while camping
10. At this point, what difference does it make?”“The United States was founded on the belief government is subservient and accountable to the people. Taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to follow laws the Obama administration refuses to follow themselves,” Stockman said. “Taxpayers should be allowed to offer the same flimsy, obviously made-up excuses the Obama administration uses.”
For the uninitiated, Lois Lerner, the high-ranking bureaucrat who to all appearances is at the top of the conspiracy to deny tax-exempt status to Tea Party groups — well, let’s just write about this honestly, shall we? She ranks high enough that a narrative has already been scripted that, guilty as she may very well be, gosh darn it they just can’t find the evidence so it looks like she’s gonna get away with it. The narrative persists throughout all requests made by Congress that might result in shedding some light on the situation, and now it persists through their demands for Lois Lerner’s e-mails.
So the narrative demands that the e-mails have been irretrievably lost.
Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightning rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.
“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.
What makes this story fascinating is that, clearly, whoever contrived the narrative — or more precisely, whoever dictated that it should persist through the e-mail request — doesn’t know jack-diddly-squat about how electronic messaging works in an organization of any size or complexity. The excuse is not technologically feasible.
I believe the government uses Microsoft Exchange for their email servers. They have built-in exchange mail database redundancy. So, unless they did not follow Microsofts recommendations they are telling a falsehood. You can see by the diagram below that if you have three servers in a DAG you have three copies of the database.
:
If they are talking about her local PC, then it’s a simple matter of going to the servers which have the email and getting them from the servers. If the servers have removed the data you can still get them by using the backups of the servers to recover the emails.
But I remember where I saw it before: The Bellesiles scandal.
One of the fascinating subplots in the controversy over whether Michael Bellesiles committed scholarly fraud in his book, Arming America, is what he claims happened to some of his research notes. Bellesiles asserts that water damage from a broken sprinkler pipe in Bowden Hall, where the Emory University History Department`s offices are housed, flooded the building and “pulped” and “destroyed” the yellow legal pads on which he says he recorded in penciled “tick marks” the 11,170 probates he says he researched.
That one has a fascinating backstory too. It’s always fascinating when liars get caught. It’s always worth inspecting just how much power of persuasion they managed to achieve before their fall from grace.
I guess, from what I’m reading up above, I’m not the only one who remembers the mushy-paper-pad excuse. But yellow legal pads are not e-mails which, by their very nature, are messages from one person to another. You don’t get to say “they were on a hard drive and golly gee, it crashed, so we can’t comply with your subpoena.” At least, you and I would not be able to say that.
So now a question has emerged about whether justice will endure in America. If you’re going to get away with it just because you’re supposed to get away with it, even if the explanation doesn’t make any sense at all, then we can all turn in America’s card that says “nation of laws, not of men,” along with the one that says “no one is above the law.” Because that would prove, plainly, that the law first needs to figure out who you are before it can attend to the question of whether any evidence can be found to convict you.
Update: Yeah Paul, go get ’em. People need to understand how out-of-control this situation really is.
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- The Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Act » Musings of the Angry Webmaster | 06/21/2014 @ 10:32I have wondered why neither side has pulled out anyone with the slightest bit of technical competence. I mean, at what point does this go from “negligence so extreme it is criminal” to “obvious coverup?”
- P_Ang | 06/25/2014 @ 15:241.) a client with a hard drive that no attempt to recover was made due to “bad sectors”
a.) the client with “bad sectors” was destroyed instead of any attempt made to recover. Ok, a lot of companies would have not attempted to recover data around the bad sectors due to cost. None that I am aware of would “schedule the drive for destruction
2.) The email server. What happened to it? Where is it? The topic always is hijacked to “tapes” at this point, the server itself is not using “tapes” dammit.
a.) What massive company with a server does not have RAID drives for backup?
Ok, so the email server got filled up. They “overwrote” it.
3.) Federal law requires them to backup federal emails. They claim they do this by tape, and overwrite it after 6 months. No one uses tape anymore. Except Nixon. And he’s dead.
a.) Ok, so how long do they keep the emails on the server? 6 months? So really, there was a full year they have to use as an excuse? And these were requested when?
b.) Again…what massive company does not have RAID drives for backup? One that uses tape from the sixties, apparently.
4.) They signed a deal for cloud backup for emails. Ok, now were getting somewhere. Subpoena THAT company to produce the evidence. If that company doesn’t have it, at LEAST fire everyone that works at the IRS as a tech for being utterly incompetent and wasting our money. Seriously. Or figure out that this was an obvious case of destruction of evidence and file charges.