well, they're going after the oil in venezuela, and that's the sign i was looking for to suggest this is serious, not a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

did trump re-open the government to start a war?

you could maybe ask the question of why they didn't go after venezuela in the first place; it's clearly an easier target than iraq. but, when america inherited britain's policy on iraq, it also inherited britain's strategic perspective - and a war to steal oil from iraq is certainly the more rational option, from london.

the timing of this is all very suspect. and, frankly, they may regret getting what they wished for - they find that whatever comes next is far worse for their own interests. maduro is completely reliant on america for everything; you'd think they'd want to keep it that way. but, american policy in venezuela is 99% about the oil, so when the sanctions come down it means they're following through with it. i've been saying for years that if they wanted regime change, they'd target the oil - and here we go.

the intent is probably to produce a military revolt, which is more likely to lead to a junta than an election. this kid they've got working the streets is a useful idiot. and, then you get the guerilla warfare for the next 20 years, like in columbia.

it's not very smart, tactically. but, the president's poll numbers aren't very good...

this kind of thing litters roman history, and we see what happened in the end. solidarity with the campesinos. your grandchildren will reap the rewards of their arrogance.

and, i think i figured out how to recover my deleted email, too.

so, what i have is three giant pst files, although i think there's mostly overlap. when you clear the deleted items folder, the data stays in the pst file until you "compact " it, which is something i did not do. the one at 1.9 gb reads about 35,000 emails but there some to be a large amount of inaccessible emails; i know there's 60,000 inaccessible emails in the 1.4 gb one from analyzing it with a commercial software that i couldn't find a key for, and i can't read anything at all with this one in outlook. i also have a 2.4 gb past file that is full of already deleted items that cannot be accessed at all. 

when i was trying to figure this out last week, the first thing i tried was to delete the index file using a hex editor, but i'm realizing i did it wrong. i actually deleted it outright; i should have zeroed it out. i guess that makes more sense, but you follow instructions when you're doing this kind of thing, and the hack said to delete it - so that's what i did. i've gone back and zeroed out the 1.4 one and it's picking up about 37,000 emails, which seems partial, but it's a start.

yeah, we're looking at actual winter here this week, and i don't want to think about going out in it.


i'm not going to actual file anything until i get a response from the investigation into the officer, anyways.

for right now, i'd rather be filing data.

so, i'll start making calls near the end of the week...

well, i have some good news if you want to call it that - i'm back up on the laptop and ready to get back to what i was doing.

the last part of rebuilding the os was reconstructing all of the symbolic links in the user directories. i was getting some weird behaviour, like the start menu not acting right, so i did a clean install to one of the new disks i've had sitting, in order to get a listing of the symbolic links. them, i build them all up from scratch using the command line. not complicated, but time consuming; it is now done, and everything seems to be working correctly.

as mentioned, this mess at least gets all of the stray data from the pc ready to be filed, which i should be able to get back to shortly.

i also found another pst file - 2.5 gb of deleted data. my missing emails are no doubt in there, and i know they're recoverable, it's just a question of finding out how to do it without paying for it.

so, that was the day - copying data around and reconstructing symbolic links. it's done. and, i can start fresh in the morning.