And Now The EPA Is Suffering Hard Drive “Crashes”

Perhaps Obama’s computer infects them with a virus when he tells them to break the law to pursue his liberal agenda.

Republicans seem to have only recently become aware of the fact that computer hard drives aren’t 100 percent reliable, and become progressively less so as they get older. Hard drives do in fact crash, and in heavy use it isn’t at all uncommon.

Government-purchased desktop computers have sometimes come equipped with Seagate hard drives, because they’re often among the least expensive internal storage devices for computer manufacturers to buy. This keeps the total cost down. Seagates also have some of the highest failure rates. A recent three-year study involving a sample of 27,000 hard drives found that 1.5 terabyte Seagate hard drives have a failure rate of 14 percent over an average heavy use life span of less than one year.

The most reliable drives were made by Hitachi. The 3 terabyte Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 demonstrated an average failure rate of slightly less than 1 percent over an average life expectancy of 2.1 years in heavy use situations.

So, approximately 1 out of every 100 desktop computers can be expected to experience a hard drive failure over the course of 2 years, even if all 100 have been equipped with the best hard drive that’s commercially available. If all 100 have been equipped with Seagate’s lowest rated drive, expect 14 of them to crash over the course of only a year.

The IRS has provided the investigative committees with around 750,000 pages of documents. The investigative committee is only making useful speculations about what might have been in the unrecoverable material. They’re essentially claiming that some sort of evidence of criminal activity must have been there, since they haven’t been able to find it anywhere else, and putting the burden to prove otherwise on the people they’re accusing.

That might be the way a propaganda campaign works, but it’s not the way America’s constitutionally based legal system works.

@drjohn, #5:

All kinds of computers crash, and at relatively predictable rates, as the linked study in post #4 clearly indicates. The investigative committees have essentially subpoenaed everything from the IRS but their employees’ break room sinks. Consequently, their subpoenas have included relatively small amounts of unrecoverable data. The subpoenas weren’t initially specific to that missing data.

Of the 750,000-some pages of documents the IRS have provided to them, at considerable effort and taxpayer expense, republicans are now claiming that the damning evidence must have been in the relatively tiny segment that they haven’t been able to get their hands on. I see no reason why anyone should accept such an illogical claim. It essentially puts the burden on the accused to prove the investigative committees’ hypothetical evidence doesn’t exist.

@Bill, #7:

Yet, currently it seems only computers tied to Obama scandals are crashing.

No, those are the only ones that are discussed in the news.

The thousands of hard drive crashes that happen weekly aren’t generally reported or discussed, unless they happen to become the topic of a study such as the one linked in post #4. I’m guessing most people have never even heard of such studies, and are probably unaware of the frequency with which hard drives fail. I was surprised at the study results myself.

@Greg: But Greg… we should know how many fail on a regular basis because they are required, by law, to inform the data services personnel of a loss of data. Seems we only hear about when all other excuses are exhausted.

Next?

Darrell Issa, in particular, is a suspicious character. From an article that appeared last year in Crooks and Liars:

But probably the most suspicious and most uninvestigated event in Issa’s checkered past is the mysterious 1982 fire at his factory at a time where he was buying out the owner of Steal Stopper, the predecessor to Issa’s car alarm company. Issa quadrupled his insurance coverage and then boom! The place burned down. Lizza:

Joey Adkins, the former owner of Steal Stopper, provided the main evidence against Issa. On the afternoon of September 20, 1982, in a lengthy recorded interview with an insurance investigator, he described a series of suspicious actions by Issa before the fire. Adkins, who still worked for Steal Stopper, said that Issa removed the company’s Apple II computer from the building, including “all hardware, all software, all the instruction books,” and also “the discs for accounts payable, accounts receivable, customer list, everything.” According to Adkins, Issa also transferred a copy of every design used by Steal Stopper from a filing cabinet to a fireproof box. He also said that Issa put in the box some important silk screens used in the production of circuit boards. Insurance officials noted that, less than three weeks before the fire, Issa had increased his insurance from a hundred thousand dollars to four hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars. “Quite frankly,” Adkins told the investigator, “I feel the man set the fire.”

So did the insurance company. They finally settled out of court for about $20,000, which was a fraction of what Issa had sued them for.

This is the guy who’s continuously throwing out unproven accusations about his political enemies, and who has been charged with getting to the bottom of things.

@Jay:

Nobody is “regurgitating” anything. I’m perfectly capable of doing my own thinking and drawing my own conclusions, which is more than I can say for some people around here.

If you would bother to read the letter the letter and attachment that the IRS sent to the investigative committee, linked around here on multiple occasions, you would understand that the IRS’s backup protocol for employee PCs was not the same as what you are describing. There is no universally followed protocol that applies to all data on all computers utilized by all governmental employees, any more than there is a backup protocol that is universally followed all across the private sector. (A significant percentage of private sector entities are still utilizing devices running increasingly risky XP software, so I wouldn’t be making any hasty comparisons regarding superior practices.) The IRS made it clear how it would have been entirely possible for email to have been lost when an employee reached their maximum space allocation for saved email. Material deemed not to be subject to legal retention requirements as official records might have remained nowhere other than on an employee’s local drive.

I’m certain the backup protocol regarding IRS case files and tax records is handled in an entirely different fashion from material such as employee email.

@Greg: Great excuse Greggie!! Likely they are though!! They are NOT the IRS. Did the IRS specifically requests computers?? With a $1.8 billion dollar budget maybe there would have been room eh?? Maybe rather than wasting their time on 0-blamacare and targeting the Tea Party they would have had the room eh??  You really are lost for any constructive excuses now!!

@Ronald J. Ward: Well, Ronnie, if you want to express some facts on the lying, dishonest nature of the Clinton’s and Obama’s, feel free. Perhaps you can display some of the as yet unheard-of integrity you might have.

As to my “proving” something about the multiple, simultaneous and convenient hard drive crashes, what would you like me to prove? That they happened? Or, that the occurrence is unlikely and suspicious? I think that has been my contention with Greg is that he is quick to sling such accusations as Bush lied about WMD’s without any back-up evidence but thinks a anyone with suspicions in this highly suspicious situation as crazed ideologues.

Apparently now you are no longer inclined to follow lock-step what the left wing propagandists direct and are more in aggreance with me. Good. About time.

@Greg:

All kinds of computers crash, and at relatively predictable rates, as the linked study in post #4 clearly indicates.

So what? I see computer crashes all the time. A hard drive crash isn’t the end of the world and the data can be recovered pretty easily. Many times you can get the hard drive to boot enough to initiate a copy to a new drive. If the drive is in really bad shape, putting it in the freezer for 12 hours will almost always allow you to copy to a new drive. In the rare instances that this doesn’t work, there are companies out there that specialize in data retrieval.
Guess the IRS just has crappy IT people. I bet they don’t lose audit files. I guarantee they have at least seven years of your records on file. Every single scrap of information.

@Ronald J. Ward:

The “Bush lied” argument has been beat to death and while no one can prove with physical evidence what Bush was thinking, it isn’t even arguable that he oversaw the twisting and manipulation of intelligence in order to sell the Iraq invasion.

Well, yes, indeed it is arguable that he did not lie since there is absolutely and definitely NO indication anywhere that anyone knows of that he DID. That would be, in my book, a pretty good argument. In other words, your argument is that he lied because, well, you don’t like him and think he lied. My counter argument would be that, in light of numerous investigations and a far left media that has had a vindictive score to settle since he first took office that has not been able to develop one shred of evidence (not a “smidgen”, if you will) that he, Cheney or any other person in the decision making loop lied about anything, you are actually wrong.

I think that argument would be won by me.

Now would be your opportunity to put on display the “lies” I have told about… well, anything. Have at it, buckaroo.

@Ronald J. Ward:

The only reason I’ve entertained your silliness is that you simply prove my point over and over again. But you, much like your protegees, are starting to become trite. I mean, what’s the sport of shooting fish in a barrel?

Since those of us you consider mentally inferior to you have become trite, why don’t you just toddle on off to another site where your self-perceived mental prowess is challenged? I promise you, you will not be missed.

Every regular FA lapdog here relies on abject stupidity, a profound disregard of reality, and an extreme refusal to accept anything that doesn’t promote your bigoted hate fest toward anyone that doesn’t bow to your plutocratic and Obama bashing agenda.

Well, there you have FAers. RJW considers himself so far above you mentally that you are now just subjects to be insulted and dispatched with his pejorative laced comments.

@Ronald J. Ward:

And you seem to not know when others are being addressed, and not you.

You are simply a troll who is tolerated here by the grace of the blog owner. Spew your bile somewhere else.

@Bill: uh, over here in the real world where anyone with the slightest bit of reading skills and an iota of comprehensive ability can quickly scan our conversation and deduce, it is you that’s come up short my friend.

@Bill: There you go again, changing the argument while running from being exposed as a liar. You asked me to identify a lie of yours (which you’ve been dodging) and I did. How can you blatantly lie about me, telling everyone what I think, while claiming that others are lying because they can’t “prove” what a person was thinking?

You are a liar, you are a hypocrite, you are a fraud, and now we can add coward to the list because you run like a whipped pup from your very own defeated argument, bringing us back to my very argument in # 9 that

After taking such an embarrassing asskicking in that debate, one would think you’d have at least the intelligence to finally stfu rather than remind us of the spectacular argumentative fraud that you are.

But I guess you won the argument and really showed me because, uh, you know, if you like your insurance you can keep it or, or, or something akin to such spectacular stupidity.

@Bill:

First let’s take inventory of who the coward is; that would be the coward calling everyone else names from the safety of their keyboard. The coward is he who can no longer face up to the reality of their poor choices based on their ideology. If sniveling, whiney little turds like you had the sense to see through a lying community organizer, THEN the intelligence to see that mistake AND the courage to admit it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

You do support the far left idiocy I say you do, so unless you can prove otherwise, go lick your Obama idol and rue the loss of your sack.

Got it!

You remind me a whole lot of Pete as awhile back in an argument, for some unknown reason, he started bashing Michelle Obama. I tried to get out of him what the First lady had to do with anything and his only response was, much like yours, attacking Dem and Barack Obama policies and ideologies. I continued to push for an explanation how Michelle was relevant and he would only bring up talking points like Benghazi, Fast and Furious, etc, etc. He, like you, cowardly ran from his Michelle bashing and tried to offset it with Barack bashing.

Now, about your response about “lying community organizer” and “bad ideology” and all that, again, I get that but that has nothing to do with our argument (which you cowardly ran from in the previous thread).

You tell us that “proof” and “evidence” of people’s motives are mandated in order to be true, as is the case of whether Bush lied about WMD. If a person says he lied, according to you, that person needs to prove it as it may have not been Bush’s true intentions. Understandably, that’s an impossible task. You tell us that your argument renders the person saying “Bush lied about WMD” as a “liar”. That’s a pretty weak tea grasp but if that’s what you think and the best you can do, so be it.

But you completely contradict yourself when you tell us that I support policies that I do not support and that I have have opinions and beliefs that I do not have. And even if you feel correct, you cannot “prove” or provide “evidence” as nowhere in my writings or public or private statements can this be confirmed. So by the very rules you set, the very argumentative tactic you use, by the your very own definition, you are indeed a “LIAR” as you are making accusations that you cannot prove.

Please prove my support for the policies and military protection that you claim. No, “Benghazi” is not an answer, nor is “Obama is bad” or “sniveling, whiney little turds like you”. All that sounds good and all and I’m sure you pride yourself and such but that simply doesn’t give credence to your accusations of me and it certainly doesn’t validate your contradicting hypocrisy.

Seriously, you’re sounding dumber than a sack full of Petes.

@Ronald J. Ward:

Now, about your response about “lying community organizer” and “bad ideology” and all that, again, I get that but that has nothing to do with our argument (which you cowardly ran from in the previous thread).

OK, let’s go with that. You called me a liar because you say I “lied” about your positions. Apparently, you don’t know what a lie is. For me to lie about what you believe, I would have to KNOW what you believe and then KNOWINGLY misrepresent it. I think even a road apple like yourself can understand that.

So, since I do not (thankfully) actually personally know you, how would I be guilty of lying about what you believe? I can be wrong about it, but could not have, as yet, lied about it. What it appears more likely is that you are one of those brainless liberals that have no thoughts until they are delivered to them and have to demonize and personally attack any opposition to the thoughts they have been told to have.

So, apparently, I am wrong. You think Obama is doing a dismal job. You think the administration has lied about Benghazi. And, to the subject we are actually supposed to be discusssing, you think the administration is knee deep in this IRS scandal. Now, you correct me if I am wrong, but if you have the intelligence to carry on a worthy discussion, you can skip your “liar” diatribe. I have my prediction, though.

See, the difference is that, as in the case of “lying” about WMD’s, for instance, there is no evidence that Bush lied and there is ample evidence that he didn’t, as well as many examples of where the fantasy of the “lies” has been dispelled. Yet many on the left continue to carry that water, so they are LYING. There you go, Ronaldo… an example of how lies work and the difference between that and a mistake.

Though, until you clarify your positions on the above mentioned situations, I think my original assessment was correct.

@Bill: Well, thanks for finally manning up to your hypocritical blunder albeit rather weak tea, questionably coherent, and rather intellectually dishonest but I understand and appreciate your need to pull a rabbit out of your hat. Too bad it came out looking more like a turd than a rabbit . But, it’s a small step up from the regular nonsensical hyperbole.

Your distinction between lying and mistaking seems to be once again a product of your liking which you can define contingent on what suits your agenda. It doesn’t have to make sense or follow any rules of logic. It’s as if you were trying to teach me to play poker where your 3 of a kind beats my 2 pair until the next hand where your 2 pair beats my 3 of a kind. You’re insistent that heads you win and tails I lose and you don’t even try to hide it.

You say that in order for you to have “lied” about me you “would have to KNOW what you (I) believe and then KNOWINGLY misrepresent it” and there’s no way you could be lying because “since I do not (thankfully) actually personally know you, how would I be guilty of lying about what you believe? I can be wrong about it”. You didn’t “lie” as you could be wrong based on your data of me but Greg is hands down “lying” about Bush based on the data he has and that option of being wrong doesn’t apply to him because of something?

You almost make sense until you come to indicating you can only be wrong if I say Obama is doing a dismal job and that I buy into your fake Benghazi conspiracy at which point, your comment then becomes a “mistake”.

So let me get this straight. As long as you don’t know what one truly believes and since you don’t (thankfully) actually personally know them, well, then it’s fair game to openly aver their positions on policies, their views on political leaders positions, and their take on protecting America- and not just any particular method of protection but rather that they are “anti-whatever-America-does-to-protect-itself” unless they agree with your agenda whereas someone like Greg cannot argue that GWB lied because, well, you haven’t quite explained that.

You make a claim that one cannot say that “Bush lied about WMD” because he, uh, well, “there is no evidence that Bush lied and there is ample evidence that he didn’t, as well as many examples of where the fantasy of the “lies” has been dispelled”. So there! Case closed!.

I mean forget that he told us there was and then well, there we found nothing. Forget the 2003 SOTUA when GWB told us they’d positively found “38 cubic meters (10,038.54 US gallons) of botulinum toxin — enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent” which never materialized. Forget that we found no drones, no nuclear centrifuges, no gas, no biologicals, no nukes, no plutonium, no uranium and forget Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame and “yellowcake” and forged Niger Uranium documents, leaked documents from Prime Minister Tony Blair, ignoring CIA document, ignoring weapons inspectors reports, that allies such as Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and Russia disputed Bush’s claim,the damning George Tenet report, that Colin Powell later admitted “lies”, that CIA specialist that didn’t agree were removed, that Generals that didn’t agree were demoted or forced into retirement, and the list goes on.

Take the above in consideration with GWB telling us that “We’ve wanted so many wars, and we didn’t get them. And we’ve wanted this one for years” and Paul Wolfowitz told us “For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on” while Colin Powell said “but long before the war started, there was plenty of doubt among intelligence analysts about Saddam’s weapons” and that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 (the British CIA ), told Prime Minister Tony Blair that the case for war against Iraq was being “fixed by the Americans to suit the policy” or that Paul O’Neil told us “from the very first instance it was about Iraq. I was all about finding away to do it. That was the tone of it: the President saying “go find me a way to do this”. ” And again, I could go on and on.

So as I’ve constructively argued above, there’s certainly plenty of data, statistics, and reasonable information to at least question GWB’s honesty in his abject failure of of taking us into his desired war. There’s at least room to argue that he certainly manipulated the data and intentionally mislead us in order to invade Iraq. And the above is just a tip of the iceberg of information available to those arguing Bush’s honesty.

But you tell Greg he’s a “liar” because he can’t “prove” what Bush was actually thinking while you openly making statements about me which you can not possibly know, only to say you you can lower that to some “mistake” status if I join your Obama lynch mob. You seriously become more of an argumentative fraud and your arguments become more hypocritically stupid each time you post.

Did Bush “lie”? I don’t know but the arguments are rather compelling. They certainly deserve merit instead of your dismissive gibberish. I’d say it’s certainly obvious he wasn’t 100% truthful in his mission.

Now, what was that justification again for telling me what I think and what policies I support without you actually knowing them?

One final quote about Bush’s handling of the Iraq attack.

All this was inspired by the principle — which is quite true in itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

Adolf Hitler

@Bill: Earth to Bill, Earth to Bill, come in Bill!! Tap! Tap! Tap! Is this thing on?

There you go again drowning in a sea of spin and hypocritical dishonesty to run from the fact that your entire argument has been identified as nothing but a sea of spin and hypocritical dishonesty which somehow in your imaginary world makes me the liar and hypocrite. Heads you win, tails I lose, regardless of reality or the very words that are in black and white in front of us.

So the long list of quotes, admissions from Bush himself, admissions from his staff, arguments from around the world, and the fact that he came up short on producing WMDs are me “propagating the same lie”?

You make less sense which each frothing post you make. Did I call Bush a liar? No. I simply presented a very long list of factual (or are you challenging that Plame, yellowcake, Tenet, Powell, his SOTUA statements, Wolfowitz, Sir Richard Dearlove, Blair, and the incredibly endless list of arguments are real) evidence that brings into question if WMD was his true rationale of taking on Iraq. But as you’ve deduced, that makes me guilty of ” want your hatred of Bush to be based on something of actual substance so badly that you don’t have the courage to admit you have lied about it for all these years. You are a liar that likes to lie. You cannot stop yourself from lying“. What the hell are you talking about?

And that means you “were right all along” now making your 2 pair beating my full house. You are simply an utterly stupid individual to try to converse with or as I said it that last thread where you similarly made a total ass of yourself, debating you is like trying to teach advanced calculus to a tree frog. Seriously, I think I could have a more intelligent conversation with a trash can.

You now inform us that I have a “desire to ride on the backs of working taxpayers” right after making accusations that you can’t back up right after calling Greg a liar for making accusations that he couldn’t back up after reviewing arguments backing up Greg’s accusations. And then you include me in joining Greg in his accusations that I never made. What, on God’s green earth is the hell wrong with you? Are you an imbecile unable to read the very words right in front of you? Where or how did you acquire such data to come to that conclusion? How does anything in our discussion disclose my finances or what I do for a living or what government assistance I may or may not have? And for that matter, what does that have to do with Bush’s integrity or lack of on Iraq? That’s simply your festered bigotry of anyone that doesn’t kowtow to you agenda frothing over which by your logic, means “I like to lie”! What the hell is that matter with you? You are simply compounding stupidity upon stupidity.

There are many dishonest bigots like yourself online that make it rather easy to prove what they are. If you give them a little rope, they usually hang themselves. You however seem to prefer to just yank it out of my hands to quickly hang yourself.

@Ronald J. Ward:

So the long list of quotes, admissions from Bush himself, admissions from his staff, arguments from around the world, and the fact that he came up short on producing WMDs are me “propagating the same lie”?

Well, I missed the quote where anyone said or showed that anyone lied about actually thinking WMD’s were there. I also missed the part where the Bush administration blocked, stonewalled, refused to cooperate with the multiple investigations and hearings on that very subject. In fact, the only person attempting to hide information was…. CLINTON!! Remember that? Sandy Berger stuffing Archive documents into his panties to keep them from being available to the committees…. I don’t recall Karl Rove stuffing his drawers with documents.

So, Ronnie, just sit down and shut up. You won’t own up to your positions and, as such, your gross mistakes in support of that failed far left agenda, so you don’t get to criticize the position that anyone else takes. Just shut up until you reach adulthood.

@Ronald J. Ward:

So, accounts from Plame, Wilson, Powell, Cheney, Rumsfield, , Wolfowitz, Sir Richard Dearlove, Blair, or the vast ocean of archives of the rationale for invading Iraq cannot be use in any form in arguing Bush’s honesty and cannot be taken into consideration because, well, I need to sit down until I reach adulthood?

Well, you can use them for whatever you want to use them for; fold them up and level a table, wipe, blow your nose or stuff a drafty crack. What they are useless for is to prove that Bush or the administration lied (LIED) about WMD’s. They didn’t lie. The intelligence (which, again, the Clinton’s believed and supported, not just Bush) was bad. While you cannot seem to grasp the difference of this, I do hope you can tell the difference between a YIELD and STOP sign, red and green traffic lights. I wouldn’t want you to kill some intelligent person who actually contributes to society.

@retire05: Maybe he should move to a more sophisticated blog more fitting of his elite intelligence. What about Huffington Post?

@Bill: So I’m reading your distraction and thinking to myself, “yeah, blah, blah, blah, is this guy for real”? I read more and I’m thinking “more blah, b;ah blah”.

And I’m thinking as I’m reading, “blah, blah,blah, we should be leading up to where he won’t explain how he can lie about know for fact that Bush didn’t lie because I didn’t answer some non sequitur question or some other really stupid shit”.

And then sure enough in your childish rubber/glue game that you play, you actually said “blah, blah, blah” while cowardly running from your very own dishonesty. And you actually found room to add dog-ate-homework.

It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

@Bill

: .and you won’t answer the very questions you made the original issue.

I don’t mean to split hairs here but I have no idea what you’re talking about and again, I and as any readers of reasonable intellect can easily deduce, you don’t either. Perhaps you can enlighten us? I’ve come to have pretty much given up hope on you and as we can all see from the thread itself, even the most loyalist of the loyalist here have pretty much abandoned you, hung their heads in shame, hell, don’t even know you. Why do you persist? And that not only applies here but from the very thread that, as my argument proves, you made an ass out of yourself from. Go figure!

Dead fish, with no conscience or dignity.

Uh, what??????????

I, uh, don’t speak for dead fish. ? Nor am I an authority of the psychological make up of them or, or whatever the hell you’re talking about, or, or however the hell you deduce that gives you psychological powers to tell us in a matter-of-factly fashion that “Bush didn’t lie” and that I support this and don’t support all while calling your opponents “liars that like to lie” because, well hell, anyone with common sense knows they can’t read minds! Or, or, goddamn man what the living hell are you trying to argue? You are seriously drowning us with stupid!

I’ve sent this thread to several folk because well, I just couldn’t help it. We are actually achieving enjoyment from watching how profoundly stupid the unhinged right has become. It’s better than a Gilligan’s Island or Mork and Mindy rerun.