Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

We still have time to mess this up!

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Afternoon Moment of Zen

Reader Interactions

97Comments

  5. 5.

    trollhattan

    They’re all staring at you! Do not make eye contact.

    Lily’s one cocked ear cracks me up, as if she’s about to deliver the punchline.

  6. 6.

    trollhattan

    Did no-one remember the “Argo” scenes with the roomful of Iranian kids taping together shredded US Embassy documents? How about you, Cohen?

    Federal prosecutors revealed on Wednesday in the Michael Cohen case that they will present to the court shredded documents that have been reassembled. During a hearing in federal district court on Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel Maimin said that prosecutors would provide “the contents of a shredding machine” in coming days, according to New York Daily News court reporter Stephen Brown.

    Former FBI Special Agent Asha Rangappa noted that the FBI has an “amazing” ability to reassemble shredded documents. “This will not end well for the defense,” she wrote on Twitter.

  7. 7.

    Yarrow

    Lily! And all the critters! Now that is a tonic. So cute.

    Does Lily chew on her bandage on her leg? Looked like she was going for it.

  9. 9.

    sukabi

    John…All I see is a bunch of lounging slackers…until there is a chase all through the house, under tables and over the bed you’re sitting in, with Steve doing the chasing, you’re unjustly accusing ‘the herd’ of interrupting your leisure time.

  10. 10.

    Nicole

    @trollhattan: Wow. I don’t commit crimes, and even I would know enough to burn documents I didn’t want to see the light of day, not just shred them. Man, criminals are stupid. And lazy.

  12. 12.

    JPL

    @LAO: The NYTimes story about Trump’s meeting with Sessions appears to implicate the asshole in chief to obstruction of justice.
    What do you think?

  14. 14.

    HeleninEire

    OK. So we all have had this conversation before. I am not a pet person (and by far not a cat person), but OH HOLY HELL that Steve picture is the best picture EVA!!

    ETA: Cole, and we’re gonna get a Lily chemo update today, yes?

  15. 15.

    LAO

    @JPL: I think it’s very, very bad for Trump. And, the fact that Trump continues to tweet about his desire to fire Sessions because he recused himself from the investigation demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the federal criminal justice system. Sessions could bury Trump — we will see whether he does or does not.

  16. 16.

    The Moar You Know

    Former FBI Special Agent Asha Rangappa noted that the FBI has an “amazing” ability to reassemble shredded documents. “This will not end well for the defense,” she wrote on Twitter.

    @trollhattan: I’ve seen people skate on gross and obvious spoliation before. Kinda depends on what’s in those documents.

  17. 17.

    rikyrah

    Going to say this again…

    It’s their house…they let you live in it because you feed them.
    LOL
    Casa Cole really would be a hilarious reality show.

  23. 23.

    MelissaM

    I love how Steve and Rosie look anywhere but the camera. They pulled some shit and you just haven’t found it yet.

  24. 24.

    germy

    Steve is a handsome boy. A handsome boy.

    And he looks nice and comfortable with that crew cut.

  25. 25.

    TaMara (HFG)

    In the midst of all this ugliness, it’s the critters that will save us. That one of Lily and Steve is just priceless. He’s HUGE. And I have a Maine Coon…and a tuxedo that swears he’s part panther at 18 lbs and Steve dwarfs them.

    I had ducks helping me this morning as I was relocating soil (long, humorous Scout story I will share later). I like to think it’s because they enjoy my company, but I know it’s really for the worms I was dislodging.

  26. 26.

    Mary G

    Those paws on Steve look ginormous with the hair shaved off the leg. You got all four of them in one video! Even Rosie!

  27. 27.

    germy

    “I find that a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced over whether or not I have bread.”

    ― Mitch Hedberg

  29. 29.

    donnah

    Lily looks wonderful! Steve is a handsome dude, but Lily just looks so sweet and pretty.

  31. 31.

    petesh

    Walks!

    Friendly amendment from Steve: And Food!

    Amendment carried nem. con.; main motion carried 3–1.

    Right?

  32. 32.

    danielx

    @John Cole:

    Yeah, Steve is telling you who you are and what you’re supposed be doing, all right – you ARE an insignificant furless food provider, and you ARE neglecting your assigned tasks. Or one of them anyway; the most important – FOODS!

  34. 34.

    Calouste

    @trollhattan: I wonder if those 1,000,000 pieces of evidence that were mentioned yesterday are 1,000,000 snippets.

    Having a scanner and some shape/character recognition software will speed up the process significantly, and I assume the FBI system is a lot more sophisticated than that.

  35. 35.

    Aleta

    It does appear to be a pet intervention. They’re concerned but polite, “It’s because we care.”
    They look so secure. It brings out their beauty.

  40. 40.

    Mike in NC

    Been in Florida nearly a week and it’s rained 90% of the time. Tomorrow we fly home where the weather is no better.

    Rental car is a Hyundai Elantra, and it’s pretty nice. Way back in ’89 I bought a Hyundai Excel and it was a total lemon. Have stuck with Hondas ever since.

  41. 41.

    jl

    Maybe the pets want a full-service master, but Cole cannot figure out the request.
    At least we commenters let you know what we require of a full-service blog.: a small cut of the fat sweet profits that blog racks in, and free samples in the recipe and garden posts. Is that too much to ask?.

  42. 42.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @trollhattan: Cohen being the criminal mastermind he is, I’ll bet he used the cheapo consumer grade shredder that just cuts it into strips. There are better grades of shredders that could make the job a lot harder.

    I have a cross-cut shredder at home for stuff I want to shred. And if I’m REALLY concerned about the sensitivity of something, I compost the shreds.

  44. 44.

    Miss Bianca

    @LAO: OMG, that is so fucking cute I am hurting right now.

    And JC, that look Steve is giving you is *intense*. I mean, I’ve *had* a Maine Coon and that’s almost too intense for *me*!

  45. 45.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Mike in NC: That happened to us when we spent a week in Galway, Ireland. Poured down miserable cold rain every day. But it just made it all the sweeter to slip into an Irish pub, sip an Irish coffee (good strong Irish tea for the Missus) and listen to some good Irish music. Hope you had a good way to warm up and dry off in Florida.

  46. 46.

    Immanentize

    I need zen! Great pix. I needed kitteh.

    My computer crashed yesterday. Looks like the hard drive is completely borked. Backup? No, not really. I mean there is an external backup drive somewhere that my wife ran not long before she died last summer, but neither I nor the Immp knows where it is. Maybe list all digital photos of life since 2000 and Immp’s birth forward. There is some hope for some recovery….

    Yes, I’m an idiot. Please restrain yourselves from reminding me. But it just was so low on the survival priority list. And no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

  48. 48.

    MomSense

    My maine coon cat used to look up at me with that same expression. Please give Steve some treats for me.

  50. 50.

    Peale

    @JPL: I had a tough enough time rooting for Comey and pretending he was some virtuous paragon who’ll rescue the republic from Trumpism.

    I’m not fucking going to salivate over anything that makes sessions look like the “last man of principal”.

  51. 51.

    Schlemazel

    @Mike in NC:
    Hyundai was almost out of business in the US because they were selling trash. They decided to upgrade the quality and now are are top notch. There was a time they were practically giving the things away trying to get the word out.

  53. 53.

    Peale

    @Mandalay: I remember reading a Time Magazine article on Iran back in the mid-80s where they displayed reassembled documents from the US embassy in a museum. They deployed oriental carpet weavers to the task. The technology has been available for 1500 years.

  55. 55.

    Immanentize

    @Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): yesterday I was suicidal. Today I’m more “oh well!” I may have freaked out the Immp a bit last night fretting about the lost photos. He seems unconcerned but he is 17. “Nothing you can do when a drive goes bad,” he said.

    Tru dat.

  57. 57.

    bluefish

    LOL! And sweet! I just gave that book to my 12-year old nephew over the weekend — for his b-day. Love the action there by the floor with those two as you film film film and put’em on blast! Like the pirates coming to circle you there, mate! Here we are, Man — willing to be patient but not indefinitely — expect you to get the message, all polite like, okay?

  58. 58.

    Immanentize

    @Yarrow: well I climbed down a bit after I realized I have a backup backup plan. The computer that crashed is about four years old only and sloth may save us as our old computer is just sitting downstairs in the basement with its intact hard drive (which we copied when we got the new machine). We just never got around to cleaning it up. So, worst case, loss of just four years of photos and NOT the sweet baby ones.

  60. 60.

    Immanentize

    @rikyrah: yes. That’s in my future too…. And a new computer. $$$. Well, as my uncle is fond of saying: “Ever see a hearse with a U-Haul?”

  61. 61.

    YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S)

    @Peale:

    reassembled documents from the US embassy in a museum. They deployed oriental carpet weavers to the task

    That may well have been the inspiration for the crosscut shredder.

  62. 62.

    Ohio Mom

    @Immanentize: Find someone who is an expert in this sort of recovery and pay him/her. Don’t torture yourself trying to do it yourself.

  64. 64.

    Yarrow

    @Immanentize: Well, that’s not quite as bad. Still, it sucks to lose four years of photos.

    Sounds like it’s time to call up your local tech guys and see what they can do to save your stuff. That sort of thing happening is an argument in favor of automatic backup to cloud storage.

  65. 65.

    jl

    I’ll look for Trumptweets about the sinister jack booted thug Federal Deep Shredder Piece Together and how it is unfair to him (though maybe not to Mr. Cohen, since Trump has said Cohen had lots of his own business stuff, whatever that was, Trump don’t know).

    Edit: or maybe it will be sinister jack booted thug Federal Deep Elmers?

  66. 66.

    Barbara

    @trollhattan: I once knew of a private detective who reassembled documents that had been shredded, except that they were in Hebrew. Obviously, he should have purchased the confetti shredder.

  67. 67.

    MattF

    @LAO: I think the key observations come from taking the words ‘Obstruction of Justice’ literally, without capital letters, as though they actually mean something. Is Trump trying to obstruct justice? Yes, obviously. He not only talks about obstructing justice, he laments that Sessions’ recusal prevents him from obstructing justice. How much clearer can you get?

  68. 68.

    Roger Moore

    @trollhattan:

    Did no-one remember the “Argo” scenes with the roomful of Iranian kids taping together shredded US Embassy documents? How about you, Cohen?

    There was something similar with Stasi files after German reunification. I think they can now do a lot of the reconstruction by scanning the shreds and having a computer do the reassembly, which is why the FBI can do it as quickly as it can.

  69. 69.

    Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)

    @Immanentize:

    Have you tried plugging it into another PC?

    In the past I’ve had drives that became corrupted and wouldn’t boot, but I could pull files off of them when connected to another PC.

    A USB hard drive docking station was a godsend when I used to work on computers.

  70. 70.

    Barbara

    @Mandalay: Okay, at the end of that article I found this paragraph to be awesome:

    During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, students and militants who took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran turned to local carpet weavers to reassemble classified CIA documents they found that had been shredded. These pages were later published in a set of about 60 volumes called Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den. And in 2002, former FBI agent William Daly took about an hour to reassemble a shredded page from the dictionary on Good Morning America.

  71. 71.

    Roger Moore

    @Calouste:

    I wonder if those 1,000,000 pieces of evidence that were mentioned yesterday are 1,000,000 snippets.

    That’s probably every file on every device the feds seized. When searching a computer, you have to look at absolutely everything, because a clever and competent criminal* might hide their important stuff using non-obvious names in non-obvious places. Still, the chances are most of the files are boring OS and application files rather than anything Cohen himself produced.

    *Yes, I know Michael Cohen fits in neither category.

  72. 72.

    Aleta

    @Immanentize: That’s good! Hope you run across the drive as time goes by. For me, lost things start turning up as my emotions settle down.

    Someone here erased a directory the other day. Days of painstaking work, no backup since 3 weeks ago. My friend said the worst loss in her house fire were the pictures. She was on a mission for the next few years, telling us all to “Grab the photos 1st!” or “Store copies out of the house!” We never did, but I’m reminded by you.

    Hoping for the best. Keep the faith.

  73. 73.

    Roger Moore

    @Immanentize:

    Yes, I’m an idiot. Please restrain yourselves from reminding me. But it just was so low on the survival priority list. And no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

    Not to rub it in, but this is why it’s best to have your backup process automated. At my work, we automatically back up everything every night. It requires no human supervision, but it does notify us if anything goes wrong. It’s incredibly convenient, and it means stuff keeps getting backed up even when we forget or go on vacation.

  74. 74.

    BruceFromOhio

    Such fine, noble creatures. Thank you for sharing!

    This cracked me up:

    The manufacturer of Ambien issued a statement on Wednesday dismissing actress Roseanne Barr’s suggestion that the sleep aid was to blame for her racist and anti-Semitic tweets that led to the cancellation of her rebooted sitcom …. “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”

  75. 75.

    dmsilev

    A bit of good news out of California: The net neutrality bill, which is basically a raised middle finger to both Trump’s FCC and the cable companies, passed the State Senate. It goes to the Assembly next, and then (hopefully) to Gov. Brown for signature.

  76. 76.

    dmsilev

    @Roger Moore: It’s not too difficult to do at home either. A USB drive plus some easily available backup software (often just built in to the OS) is a no-muss-no-fuss way of protecting against drive failures and the like To protect against house fires and theft and so forth that could result in losing both original and local backup, you can sign up for a cloud-based backup service for not a huge amount of money. I’m currently using, and am fairly happy with, Backblaze, but there are several options.

  77. 77.

    Roger Moore

    @Immanentize:

    “Nothing you can do when a drive goes bad,” he said.

    It depends on what goes bad. There are companies that specialize in recovering data from damaged hard drives. If it’s just the motor or the electronics that went bad, they can remount the platters in a different drive case and get the data off that way.

  78. 78.

    oatler.

    Speaking of Gaiman’s “American Gods” series, Mr Wednesday is really Odin, while Loki is really…gee, isn’t it time for this series’ second season on Starz?

  79. 79.

    trollhattan

    @Roger Moore:
    I can’t begin to guess how many gazillion discrete files and fragments exist on my several multi-TB drives–it must be a mess for a digital forensic expert to plow through that stuff. Plus there’s the lack of user understanding an “erased” file on disc is simply flagged for eventual overwriting and not actually deleted in a meaningful way. Although I’m certain a super user like Cohen knows that, right?

  80. 80.

    Roger Moore

    @dmsilev:

    To protect against house fires and theft and so forth that could result in losing both original and local backup, you can sign up for a cloud-based backup service for not a huge amount of money.

    For off-site backup, I have a pair of portable hard drives. At any time, one of them is in my desk drawer at work, and the other one is at home. I’ll periodically back stuff up to the one at home, then swap it with the one at work.

  81. 81.

    J R in WV

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    @Nicole: Shred, burn, add water to the ashes, and stir.

    Shred, burn, add water to the ashes, and stir. Then flush, or pour into the river. FTFY!

  82. 82.

    dmsilev

    @Roger Moore: That takes effort. The nice thing about automated solutions is that you don’t have to remember to swap drives around or anything like that.

  83. 83.

    Roger Moore

    @trollhattan:

    I can’t begin to guess how many gazillion discrete files and fragments exist on my several multi-TB drives–it must be a mess for a digital forensic expert to plow through that stuff.

    There are going to be shortcuts a good computer forensics person can use. I would assume the first thing to do would be to do a clean install of the same OS and applications onto another computer, then update to the same versions the suspect was using*. You can then compare the files on the clean computer to the ones on the suspect’s computer; anything that’s identical (name and contents) on both machines can be ignored. Then you can use undelete software to check for everything that’s been deleted but not overwritten and do the same with it.

    *A serious forensics outfit like the FBI that has to do this stuff regularly probably already does this with common operating systems and applications, so they have a complete set of all the files (or file signatures) on hand to compare to.

  84. 84.

    Leto

    @Omnes Omnibus: One thing you have to remember during the burning process is to stir the material while it burns. If you have a lot of material that you’re attempting to burn all at once, only the outer material will burn while the inner core remains intact. Stir quickly, stir often.

  85. 85.

    Roger Moore

    @dmsilev:
    The problem for me is that cloud backup is impractical because my upload speed is too slow. I have over 1TB of files to backup, so uploading them all over my 5Mb/s upload cable internet is going to be impractically slow. Hmm. Maybe I could leach off my employer’s much faster internet…

  86. 86.

    trollhattan

    @Mandalay:
    I assume output from the crosscut shredders that create the little confetti bits that are commonly used now are a lot harder to recreate than those that did strips. Not trivial.

    But the bottom line is the pages still physically exist.

  87. 87.

    trollhattan

    @Roger Moore:
    I “know a guy” who did computer forensics for the Secret Service and after retiring, offered the services as a contractor. He eventually stopped doing that because the needed software was so expensive it was hard to earn a living from it.

    We at one point discussed Adam Lanza’s destroyed hard drives and whether anything useful could be coaxed from them, he had strong doubts about that.

  88. 88.

    debit

    @oatler.: Either the production company or Starz itself decided to cheap out and cut Bryan Fuller loose. Gillian Anderson said “fuck it” and walked. I don’t know if I’ll watch season 2 or not. Shame, because one rivaled Hannibal for sheer amazeballs.

  89. 89.

    FlyingToaster

    Re: shredders.

    Most municipalities have a visiting truck shredders a couple of times a year; for ones that our (SOHO) crosscut just isn’t quite sufficient, it means that someone would have to scan a semi full of shredded paper to find our 100 or so… Also, we put the household shredded paper into the “PAPER” skip at the recycling center.

    I’m really shocked that a lawyer or real-estate guy doesn’t have a burn service; the second high-tech company I worked for (back in the 80s) had a burn service through our bank. They’d roll by once a week and take our shredded paper to be incinerated (there were like 5 companies in our building who all subscribed). They’d call up, we’d all haul our bins down the freight elevator and dump them off the loading dock into the truck.

  90. 90.

    Roger Moore

    @Leto:
    This whole topic reminds me of one of my grandfather’s WWII war stories. He was the intelligence officer for an artillery battalion. His job wasn’t as busy as the intel officer in an infantry outfit would have been, since they tried to stay out of contact with the enemy, but he was in charge of distributing and collecting maps from the firing batteries and forward observers. And they wound up with lots of maps, not just for all the places they had been but also for all the places they might have gone to but didn’t.

    Of course, maps were classified documents, so he couldn’t just throw them away. When they left somewhere, he had to collect the maps and store them. By the time they had gone all the way from Normandy to the German border, he had a 2 1/2 ton truck and trailer full of nothing but maps. When the army decided their logistical (and road space) requirements were too big, he had to give up his truck, which meant getting rid of his old maps.

    He tried turning them back in to higher up headquarters, but they didn’t want them; they had to get rid of trucks themselves, so they didn’t have any space, either. So how do you get rid of 6 tons of classified documents? As you pointed out, you can’t just burn them, even if lighting a bonfire that size wouldn’t have attracted unwanted enemy attention. He wound up burying them, on the theory they wouldn’t be valuable anymore by the time anyone had a chance to dig them up.

  91. 91.

    Mnemosyne

    @Leto:

    If you soak the bad report card with WD-40 before you light it, it turns to ash so fast that you don’t have a chance to stir it.

    Not that I would know, Mom. ?

  92. 92.

    Planetpundit

    Give Sweet Lily a collective hug from the Jackal Posse and everyone gets a treat.

  93. 93.

    Chip Daniels

    Instead of Mike Pence, we need to send Steve to the border wall of North Korea to stare them down.

  94. 94.

    J R in WV

    @Immanentize:

    There are so many failure modes on a hard-drive that do NOT involve a loss of data. Obviously, the more work needed to recover, the more cost, but even a lot of work shouldn’t cost more than a 3 digit amount of money.

  95. 95.

    Geeno

    OMFG Lily doggo – I’m dying from her cuteness.
    She would melt Kim Jong-un in a summit.

  96. 96.

    J R in WV

    @Roger Moore:

    ” If it’s just the motor or the electronics that went bad, they can remount the platters in a different drive case and get the data off that way.”

    Yes. I had an external hard-drive that failed. I gave it to a friend (now retired) who found that it was the USB connection that failed. He installed the actual hard-drive into a new case, with its own USB connectivity, and I still have that drive, backing things up. Years ago, that repair was.

    Obviously this won’t be the failure mode for Immanentize’s drive, but a similar problem could be the issue.

  97. 97.

    Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)

    @J R in WV:

    It could be the electronics, motor, or other issues with the drive itself, or it could be a SATA controller issue on the motherboard, a power supply problem, loose cable, etc.

    You really don’t know until you start troubleshooting.

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