Bob and the Heap

#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor

So, Rachel Maddow is having something of a week, and in her latest scoop we might note an aspect about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation we probably don’t take enough time to appreciate:

“The ‘Documents and Responsive Materials’ covered by the request include but are not limited to”—I love this—”both in draft and final form, all emails, voicemails, documents, photos, text messages, instant messages, electronic handwritten and/or hard copy records, databases, telephone records, correspondence, transcripts, audio recordings, analyses, briefings, assessments, banner entries, user agreements, audit records, metadata, storage devices, notes, memoranda, diary and calorie entries, excuse me, calorie entries, calendar entries, visitor logs, meeting attendance records, meeting room reservations, meeting agendas, badge records records of entry or exit to any building, room or security facility, safe access records, video surveillance of public and non-public areas, and access logs, including of classified information.”

Also smoke signals, if you have any of those, any removed tattoos you’d like to submit for laser analysis, x-rays from that time you broke your thumb at the company softball game. Also, your children’s report cards dating back to birth and their sonograms. Like, this is serious, right? They are going to need it all: Preservation notice.

It ends by saying, “To the extent any of you or your staffs have relevant documents, please identify and preserve them, so we can then evaluate whether and how to provide them to the requesters.”

‡

This memo went out on May 26th. Comey was only fired a couple of weeks before then. So this memo goes out May 26th to all these people at Justice, telling them to hand over all this stuff about Russia and about the firing of Comey. This is nine days after Mueller was named special counsel, and this is new . . . . This shows the scale of the request for documents and communications even within the Justice Department for people who may have ended up being witnesses to a potential crime that took place within the administration when the president fired his FBI director for reasons that remain in dispute and under criminal investigation.

It gives you a sense of the massive amount of stuff that Mueller and his team are hunting through in this investigation . . . . This also shows you the massive amount of stuff that has been collected by this investigation that will need to be preserved and protected somehow as evidence if, in fact, the president ends up coming for the Special Counsel’s office.

The amount of data this investigation must survey is a breathtaking prospect. In January, for instance, the Trump presidential campaign submitted 1.4 million pages in response to Special Counsel requests. The list of materials in the retention notice is not so much insane in and of itself as necessarily incomplete, and representative of, well, an insane amount of data. Badge records? Including room entry and exit? As Maddow said, “They are going to need it all.”

And then some.

Midnight Music (Blk Diamond)

“Black diamond loaded up under pressure ....”

―Zebra Katz

Somewhere between awesome and, well, wait, what the fuck?^α is Zebra Fucking Katz.

Just sayin’.

The song is “Blk Diamond”, by Zebra Katz and Leila. Elvar Gunnarsson directed the 2015 video.

Sleep well.

____________________

^α See what I did, there? Or, you know, maybe don’t worry about it.

Image note: Detail of frame from music video, “Blk Diamond”, by Zebra Katz and Leila. (dir. Elvar Gunnarsson, 2015)

A Celebration of (Mary) Death

“Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you…I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death which all so dread because it launches us upon an unknown world would be a relief to so endless a state of existense.”

—Emily Dickinson

‘Tis the season, indeed, for that sort of morbidly delicious humor, and since I need to update the links, anyway, we might as well add the one and only Mary Death, drawn by Matt Tarpley.

And, you know, it’s also a fine time to remind that any Emily Dickinson poem, through the magic of meter and the flexibility of the English language, can be sung to the melody of the Gilligan’s Island theme song.

Well, probably not every poem, as I know there is some debate over how many meters Dickinson actually used, but that’s a debate left for those who refuse to accept that Coleridge is simply the greatest poet in the English language. Or something like that. It is easy to ridicule Dickinson as the goth prototype, but more than any technical accomplishment, her chief merit seems to be the sort of baring of the soul that isn’t the in thing to do.

Of course, any joke can go too far, and the rule of thumb for Dickinson jokes is that you cross that boundary as soon as you try to make a Dickinson joke.

Anyway, yeah. Mary Death. Enjoy.