Email Archiving! What a concept!

Came across this link on Instapundit.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/20/the-irs-had-a-contract-with-an-email-bac

The IRS has had an email backup solution since 2005 with a company that advertises as 'Email Archiving Done Right.'  Huh.  Either this company is going to take a major hit for such a huge - and growing - failure or it might say, "Here they are."

 

Again, the idea that the emails are lost is ludicrous and will only convince the ignorant or willfully blind.  This is an obvious cover-up.  I'm sure the media would be equally understanding if a Republican administration apparently used the IRS to squash opposition and then stonewalled a Congressional investigation.

You don't have mail

There are times when I am astonished at the stories the administration will tell.  As an IT guy who has a basic understanding of email, I look at the story of Lois Lerner's lost emails on account of a hard drive crash as an obvious lie.  We use Exchange at my work.  My email is not on my computer, it is on the Exchange server.  It is also in the inbox to whomever it was sent.  So, unless Ms. Lerner only sent email to herself, one hard drive failure can't destroy any of her emails.  Our server has multiple backups in case of failure and the data is backed up to tapes should the building burn down.  I was doing this sort of backup 16 years ago, which makes it unbelievable that the IRS isn't doing it today.  How many hard drives, servers, and offsite tape backups would have to be destroyed or fail to get rid of Ms. Lerner's emails?  A lot more than the one that is claimed.  This story is even worse since most people must see that it doesn't make sense.  Your average smartphone user can access email on the phone, or on the computer, or even on a tablet.  Most know that if their computer crashes, they haven't just lost all their emails.

If these emails really have been lost, it is because someone chose to lose them.  That would be a crime.  Why commit a crime to hold back these emails?  Much like Nixon's tapes, there is something in those emails the administration or the IRS doesn't want revealed.  If this same thing happened in a Republican administration, the media would be howling day and night.  This cover-up is so obvious as to insult the intelligence of anyone with even a moderate amount of tech savvy.

Obama Achievement: Iraq Collapse

Three years ago when the President pulled the entirety of US forces out of Iraq, Vice President Biden declared this a great accomplishment of the administration.  We skedaddled and left the Iraqis to fend for themselves; mission accomplished.  Well, as Reverend Wright might say, those chickens have come home to roost.  Mosul has fallen to a branch of Al Qaeda.

Whether one agreed with the mission or not, thousands of Americans died to secure a democracy in the heart of the Muslim world.  I myself did not like the plan.  Short of a McArthueresque dictatorship, I view nation building as a doomed project.  Nonetheless, we spent years doing it and had more success than I expected.  Then we left.  By leaving, we abandoned whatever 'investments' were made and we see the result.  After WWII, we stayed in Germany.  70 years later, we are still in Germany and it is a functioning Western democracy.  After Korea, we stayed in South Korea.  We are still there.  It is a hugely successful country compared to its neighbor, North Korea.  Look at the difference between the part of Korea where the US stayed and the part that we lost.  After Vietnam, we left South Vietnam.  Catastrophe followed.  The record is pretty clear.

The US has lost prestige under Obama and no one can trust us.  Obama has betrayed allies and appeased enemies.  He has abandoned the idea of US leadership in the world.  Putin has made a fool of Obama and Obama appears not to mind.  Here is a president who was dealt a Straight Flush, discarded it, and asked for 5 new cards.  It is hard to credit this as mere incompetence.  Is the destruction of US foreign policy intentional, thus crippling future efforts?  Who can trust the US now?  We might just elect another Obama and abandon whoever counts on us.

Iran-Contra Redux

For those of you old enough, do you recall the firestorm that ensued when it was discovered that the US was giving weapons to Iran, who then 'intervened' on our behalf to get hostages released?  Hostage-taking was a popular pastime for Middle Eastern terrorists in the 1980s.  This was THE big scandal of the Reagan Administration and it lingered for his second term and into the Bush presidency.  Reagan had proclaimed that the US did not negotiate with terrorists and yet Iran-Contra contradicted that.

 

The Obama Administration has gone one better.  Rather than trading arms to Qatar to get them to convince the Taliban to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (which would have been about equivalent to that aspect of Iran-Contra), the administration has released 5 terrorists from Gitmo who will spend a 1 year parole in Qatar before being released to resume their terror careers.  Much as Iran-Contra was a breach of the Boland Amendment, the Bergdahl-Taliban swap broke the law when Congress wasn't kept in the loop.  Now, if we were trading a handful of mid-level Nazis to get back a General Patton, I might be inclined to support the president.  Instead, we have traded an interior minister/Taliban co-founder, a chief of staff, a provincial governor, a deputy intelligence chief, and a member of a joint Al Qaeda-Taliban cell for a deserter who should be court martialed.  Well played, Taliban.  Well played.

 

Worse still, President Obama hyped this with a Rose Garden appearance.  He's running a victory lap over this?  Is he daft?  The president does stuff like this on a regular basis.  He distracts the media from bad news by provided some new bad news.  There are so many scandals that it is impossible to cover them.  Like a school of fish, it is hard to focus on just one.  The media, which has a short attention span, is never given the opportunity to delve too deeply into a scandal.  What were we talking about before Bergdahl?  Oh yeah, the VA scandal.  What ever happened to the IRS targeting scandal?  Fast and Furious?  Collecting phone records of the Associated Press?  Naming a reporter a co-conspirator to tap his phone?  "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" scandal?  Benghazi?  How about the collapsing foreign policy where the US is being played by Vladimir Putin?  It goes on and on.  There is so much that the populace has thrown up its hands.

Valerie Plame Redux

Remember when Robert Novak mentioned Valerie Plame, wife of Joe Wilson, in an article.  This mention soon became a national scandal that put Scooter Libby in jail and painted the Bush Administration as bullying Wilson's wife to get revenge for his contrary report on Nigerian yellow cake.  As the story goes, Plame was a CIA agent and releasing her name made her a target.  Also, it's illegal to reveal the identity of an undercover agent.  Of course, she wasn't undercover and the law didn't apply.  Also, it was eventually revealed that Richard Armitage - not Scotter Libby - leaked her name to Novak.  But, as mentioned, that wasn't illegal and thus he was never prosecuted.  This faux scandal spawned a movie (Fair Game, 2010).  What we can glean from this is that the press takes it extremely seriously if a CIA agent is revealed, even if that agent is not covert.

 

Last week, the Obama Administration revealed the name of the Afghan CIA station chief, a person who is (was) covert.  Unlike Plame, this is a real leak.  Where is Patrick Fitzgerald?  Clearly, someone in the Obama Whitehouse needs to be jailed and the rest of the administration needs to be harassed.  What, the story is over already?  Didn't the Plame story go on for months and years?  Did someone at least get fired?  No?

 

It is good to see the press showing balance in how they treat a Republican administration vs. a Democrat administration.

 

 

Godzilla

I remember watching Godzilla movies fairly regularly as a kid.  In the early versions, Godzilla was a giant monster bent on the destruction of Tokyo and could not be stopped by any of the high-tech tanks and planes sent against him.  Later, Godzilla morphed into a hero, saving Japan from other wicked giant monsters.  I suspect there was some continuity to that which I have long since forgotten or perhaps never knew.  The new Godzilla is in the later mold.

 

The movie is mostly about the unluckiest family alive: the Brody's.  I suspect these Brody's are somehow related to Sheriff Brody of the Jaws movies.  Joe Brody and his wife work at a nuclear plant in Japan.  Though they don't know it at the time, it suffers a meltdown because of a giant monster nesting beneath it.  15 years later, Joe's son, Lt. Ford Brody, has just come home from a tour of duty - he is with Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) - when he gets a call that his father has been arrested in Japan.  He goes to Japan and ends up at the site of the meltdown just as a giant monster awakens and wreaks havoc.  Heading home, Ford stops in Hawaii, where he finds himself on the battlefield of giant monsters!  But he escapes that and gets back to California just in time to run into a giant monster!  His son is on a bus on the Golden Gate Bridge when a giant monster swims into the bay!  His wife is hiding in a subway station when giant monsters start fighting in the streets of San Francisco!

 

I did like that the monsters feed on radiation.  They like nothing more than some tasty nuclear waste.  Also, they have this natural defense of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) which dramatically limits the ability of the military to attack them.  There is a scene where aircraft just fall out of the sky and all the lights go out.  I still think a naval gun should be able to take them down but at least there is some reason why the military is confounded by them.  Godzilla is immense.  He is the biggest version to date.  I liked what they did with the jagged plates on his back but his face looks too much like a dog.  It was cool that his emerging from the ocean caused a tsunami.

 

The monster fights really take off in the final act and something about the action reminded me of those Godzilla movies of yore.  Though it was done with topflight computer graphics, the way the monsters crash into buildings just seemed like some guy was in a monster suit.  This was likely an homage to those original films.

 

I went into the movie with low expectations (I saw the last Godzilla movie with Matthew Broderick) and was quite surprise to find it was a good movie.  I expect that Godzilla will return to battle more giant monsters that plague the earth.  I can hardly wait.

Racism according to Kareem

It turns out that since his basketball career, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has become a contributor to Time Magazine.  Who knew?  He comments on how to tell if you are a racist.  If you've ever said that you don't care if someone is white, black, yellow, or purple, he suggests that's a hint you may be racist.  He says that the issue may be how we define racism.  Then, in the rest of the article, he fails to define racism.  Awesome.  However, he does list things that he thinks are racist.  Topping his list is that you deny there is racism.  Well, there's a straw man.  No one denies there is racism.  Racism was codified into the legal system prior to the Civil Rights Movement.  That was structural, wide-spread racism that needed to be stamped out.  Today, we have buffoons like Donald Sterling.  The magnitude of that change is profound but Kareem isn't having it.  See, the Supreme Court overturned part of the Voting Rights Act.  Racism!  The Supreme Court has weakened Affirmative Action.  Racism!  Bill O'Rielly says that discrimination is in the past.  Racism!  He offers a 2006 poll (couldn't come up with something more recent?) that showed 49% of minorities think racism is a big problem versus only 18% of whites.  Racism!

Racism today is a pale shadow to what it once was.  How else to explain that a black man is president, that a black woman was Secretary of State under a Republican president, that Oprah Winfrey spent decades as the most popular television personality?  Why is it that immigrant blacks do amazingly well within a generation while native ones struggle?  I would posit that the immigrants haven't spent a lifetime being marinated in talk of racism from people like Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Spike Lee, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  Stop telling blacks that they are victims of racism and slavery and The Man.  Instead, tell them that they can be President, Attorney General, Secretary of State, UN Ambassador, Supreme Court Justice, or whatever else.  Will there be hurdles?  Of course!  It certainly doesn't help that anyone who opposes the president's policies is automatically a racist.  If that is how you define racism, then you will find a lot of racists.  Worse still, any black person who opposes the president is an Uncle Tom or a Race Traitor.

 

To a hammer, everything is a nail.  To someone like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, everything is racism.