Trump attorney Cohen is being investigated for possible bank fraud, campaign finance violations

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So, we bought a 3M pouch laminator (TL901C) back in December. It's been fine for us, we've laminated score sheets and assorted for our collection of board games.

This week, I got an email from where we ordered it, that said there was a "recall for refund, stop using immediately" because of an overheating issue. (Melting lower cases, no injuries yet.)

Where I get into the annoyance is that they've set it up so that you have to call in. 3M is in Minnesota. I live in Denver. They specifically list hours of 8:00-4:30 central time. I work 8:00-5:00 mountain time, with a 1 hour lunch.

I tried calling the 800 number for the recall on my lunch break. I had to hang up, still on hold, as I ran out of lunch. So I sent them an email via their contact form.

While they've sent me the steps they'd like to see for recall participation in terms of evidence (cut cord, photo of model label with cut cord, invoice from purchase), they expressed that they'd prefer me to call them to participate in the recall. And that call volume means it's going to take longer than normal to get through to them.

Note: This is a $20 product. I've already sunk an hour into this. Basically, it feels like they don't really want to give me money back, they'd just prefer that I throw it away after providing the proof they need to show the recall is showing results, and let them keep the $20, which is why they've achieved my "do not buy" list.

So, thoughts, do I just send them the evidence and consider the money lost? Do I not give them evidence of the lamintor's destruction, and make noise that I need to be provided a better way to get that refund before I do so? I'm already at the point I don't want to sink more phone time in, and I work at a job that waiting on hold while I'm working is pretty much impossible. We are planning on not using the laminator and sourcing a (non-3M) replacement.

So, two weeks ago I decided to scrap my Facebook account and re-invest that time into getting back into the habit of reading books.

Before 2013, I used to read between two and four books per month and plan to build up to that again, hopefully.

Right now I am finishing Cal Newport's Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World which actually was the kick in the pants I needed to finally kill the Facebook hydra.

Feel free to add books you are currently reading to this thread or any recommendations. Me? I read biographies, religious studies, philosophy (Love the ____and Philosophy books), manga, graphic novels, sci-fi, fantasy, science, even romance novels if they are interesting enough.

Can also add audiobooks if that is your preferred way to consume them.

Starting April 6 - tomorrow! - all 4G LTE cellphones in Canada will automatically get AlertReady warning messages. So don't be surprised if your phone starts making that annoying alert noise that the radio alerts always start with.

For the geeky types amongst us: All cellphone companies in Canada are now required to deliver federal, provincial, and local emergency messages via cell broadcast to all WPA-compatible LTE devices. Messages will be targeted geographically (each tower will only broadcast alerts pertaining to the area that the tower is in) and cannot be suppressed except by turning off the phone altogether. (Yes, this means you might get an alert at 3AM - but it's a frikkin' emergency, folks!)

Alert types: Fire, Tornado, Flash Flood, Earthquake, Hurricane, Tsunami, Thunderstorm, Storm Surge, Landslide, Dam Overflow, Magnetic Storm (although I can't imagine how this type of alert would get through - if a magnetic storm's powerful enough for an alert, it'll have already fried phones' electronics), Meteorite, Lahar, Pyroclastic Flow, Pyroclastic Surge, Volcanic Ash, Biological hazard, Chemical hazard, Radiological hazard, Drinking Water Contamination, Explosives, Air Quality, Falling Object, Terrorist Threat, Civil Emergency, Animal Danger, Amber Alert (abducted child), 911 Service Disruption, Test.

More than 460 people have died in encounters with police in Canada since 2000

CBC News has done the investigative journalism, crunched the numbers, and come up with a picture of fatalities in police encounters in Canada that appears to agree with what everybody is saying is happening in the USA... and it's been happening for the last two decades.

Quote:The rate at which Canadians die in encounters with police has nearly doubled in the last 20 years.

Quote:The number of people who struggle with mental health and die in these encounters is steadily climbing at a similar rate.

"Oh, it's definitely getting worse," said Jennifer Lavoie, a criminologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ont. Lavoie said the dissolution of traditional large-scale residential care facilities and a lack of resources for the mentally ill has contributed to the rise in incidents between police and those in emotional distress.

Lavoie believes the stigma of mental illness contributes to the use of lethal force in these cases.

"I think officers likely have the same kinds of attitudes towards people with mental illness that the public does, which is the attitude that people with mental illness tend to be more unpredictable, more dangerous than the general population," Lavoie said.

It's like a fic search thread, but for published novels you can only remember vague bits of.

The one that drove me to post this was (as almost always the case for me) sci-fi, with two main plot threads. One dealt with a human colony world that ran into difficulty when the previously quite earth-like conditions changed due to the sun suddenly dimming and dragging them off at relatively high acceleration, the other dealt with energy-being aliens who lived in stars discovering the joys of killin' and one of them setting a bunch of comfy stars up to fly off through space as a decoy while trying to pick out the one the killer was using and snipe it. Stuff happened, the colony got set up to survive an indeterminate length ice age and the viewpoint energy-being decided to lay low for a while until it was sure it'd gotten the psycho. Timeskip.

It's been a long time on the colony world, no one in living memory has seen the world like the old stories describe it or the stars as anything but a thin rainbow over the equator, until suddenly the rainbow spreads out again... then vanishes, nothing left but black. They have figured out that the planet-covering machinery on the local Mercury-equivalent seems to have been what was tapping the sun's energy and moving it along, but the rest of the universe vanishing is quite the shock, until somebody remembers time dilation and guesses that they may be into what is otherwise the heat-death of the universe.

This is so. The energy being is still around, vaguely dreaming of the happy energy-flush days of yore when stars were abundant and planetoids were more than dead lumps of inert matter pulled perfectly spherical by gravity over a long, long time of nothing happening to perturb them, and no energy to use except the occasional burst of radiation form proton decay(?). Then it notices something appear, remembers about those decoy suns soooo long ago, and realizes it inadvertently packed itself a lunch for this future and only wished it had sent more of them along, since a single sun's lifetime is so short. Still, good news for the moment, right? It moves in at the reappeared sun and looks around at what's on the planets it dragged along. Huh, there's the drive stuff, but what's all this?

It's my impression that the humans had just managed to open some kind of communication with the alien critter when the book ended, and I recall being annoyed that that was it, they didn't actually do anything. Does anyone recognize this, or know of a sequel/expansion? Some fan fiction, even? It may have been a novella or longish short story rather than a full book in its own right.

CBC Opinion/Analysis: The anti-Trump resistance should stop bringing knives to a gunfight

Neil Macdonald was CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years - he has a good grasp of how things work inside the Beltway. Previous to that, he was CBC's Middle East correspondent for five years - he also has a good grasp of what sort of responses to power do and don't work.

He is not advocating armed opposition. He's advocating giving as good as the other side gives.

Here's the start of the article:

Quote:Poor Laura Ingraham, the delicate snowflake.

The Fox News Channel manure-thrower has taken some time off, having been blasted right out of her cable-TV battlefield command post by a bunch of high school kids.

Such a satisfying outcome. And Ingraham, accustomed to siccing Fox's army of far-right orcs against the liberals and moderate conservatives they hate with such slavering intensity, plainly didn't see it coming, which made it all the more enjoyable to watch.

Ingraham, who began her career in university outing gay students, probably thought David Hogg, a 17-year-old survivor of the recent Florida high school massacre, would crumple, or maybe start crying — you know, the way sensitive liberals tend to do — when she unleashed one of her ad hominem attacks on him, mocking him for being rejected by UCLA.

Instead, Hogg turned around and pasted her. He in fact out-Foxed her.

"Soooo, @IngrahamAngle, what are your biggest advertisers…" Hogg tweeted after her attack. He and his friends quickly assembled a list, and began a boycott.

It was exactly the sort of hardball that far-right activists play, and boy, did it work. Ingraham's advertisers began deserting her Fox show, even after she rushed out a sanctimonious apology "in the spirit of Holy Week," which was promptly rejected by Hogg.

Facing the sort of destruction visited on her former colleague Bill O'Reilly by an early form of #MeToo boycott, she abruptly announced she'd be taking a break to spend time with her family.

Over the weekend, Hogg tweeted: "Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week."

Fox News, with an utterly un-self-aware absence of irony, denounced the boycott as an "agenda-driven intimidation effort." When I read that one over breakfast, I nearly passed coffee through my nose.

Quote:Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members frittered away strong political traction by talking themselves to death, Hogg, Gonzalez and company clearly intend to weaponize theirs and adopt the tactics of their enemies, which is exactly what needs to be done.

America needs a real resistance, not slacktivists who talk about it.

Quote:Democrats who sat on their hands in 2016, arguing about the soul of the Democratic Party, the ones who just couldn't vote for Hillary Clinton because they found her "strident," have seen the result of their self-indulgence: a churlish chief executive who sits in the White House eating cheeseburgers, tweeting out inanities and insults, laughing at women who object to his serial sexual misconduct, inspiring white supremacists, persecuting innocent undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as infants, dismantling environmental and fiscal regulations, demonizing the FBI and the Justice and State departments and even the courts (and probably preparing pardons for his cohort and maybe even himself), and of course borrowing future generations into debt to grant America's richest people – his pals — the biggest tax cut in generations, against all conservative principle.

Of course, conservative principles, such as they are, don't concern Trump or his followers.

But money does, and power does, and the only way to thwart them is to take it away. It can be done.

CBC News: Trump says he wants military to help at U.S.-Mexico border

Has he never heard of the Posse Comitatus Act? Even I've heard of the Posse Comitatus Act, and I'm a Canadian.

May as well start a new thread for a new year (because I can't be bothered to dig down and find the old one).

The Ottawa forecast for tonight is for 60km/h winds with gusts to 90km/h - Beaufort 9 - and snow followed by freezing rain. Good thing I haven't put the shovels away yet, and I still have some ice melter.

(Kingston, Ontario is expecting gusts of up to 100km/h tonight - Beaufort 9-10. Being at the east end of one of the Great Lakes is a mixed blessing.)

So, a couple weeks back I found out that one of my coworkers is an avid reader of Harry Potter fanfic.  She and I have traded some emails, and she's promised me a rundown on what she's already read from a list of recommendations I made for her, and what she hasn't.

I very deliberately left Drunkard's Walk VIII off that list, partly from modesty and partly from not wanting to point her at a stalled story that will be some years yet before completion.  However, last week I reread all of the released chapters from the perspective of a first-time reader of anything in the Walk and realized -- I bobbled Doug's introduction.  DW8 completely assumes you already know who Doug is and what he's about.  It doesn't even give as much info -- or hints -- as DW2 had at the same point in its story, and in DW2 I was very deliberately playing a tease-and-tidbit game with Doug's backstory.  DW8, though, reveals almost nothing.

I'm thinking I have to change that, if only to make the story more accessible to those coming to the Walk for the first time through it.  So I'll be adding little bits here and there -- nothing huge or dramatic (I think), but definitely informative.  And I'm starting a thread about it because I want to start a bit of a debate about the mistake, as I see it.  And I admit, if anyone comes up with a good idea that I can use, I'm definitely going to steal it.  And also just to alert people to the mistake so folks will be aware, and call me on it if I do it again.