Miscelaneous musings

I had linked to one of Andrew Greeley's R rated novels (Virgin and Martyr) in an earlier post, so I decided to dig into my library and reread the book "Irish Whiskey".

Even though it was written in 1998, it had a federal investigator framing the hero of the book because she hated all men after her husband left her and went on crusades against the bad guys:
 Except in this case, he was innocent, so she resorted to leaking the grand jury information.

Hmm... that sounds like a certain DA who went against the Catholic bishops (some say too aggressvily) but crashed and burned when she pulled these shennaigans against big city politicians who had connections and ended up in jail.

So was Greeley psychic?

The novel also has a scene where two FBI agents invaded the hero's apartment at 3 am to arrest him and search the place and pull
a gun on him.

If Greeley rewrote it today, he would have sent a fully armed SWAT team, complete with CNN cameras who just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Roger Stone, call your office.

And all through this subplot was the idea that the FBI and federal prosecutors would go after a fall guy who would run out of money and finally do a plea bargain (or in some cases, to save an innocent relative) in order to enhance their resumes of being crime fighters. Greeley mentions Dan Rostenkowski twice in the novel, but in today's news another name comes to mind.

Michael Flynn, call your office. They got your story here too,

I didn't notice any of these things the first time I read it, probably because the real plot is about a gangster's empty grave, and the novel is full of romantic soft porn, but never mind.

and I should defend the FBI, who did the murder investigations on "the res" (see the movie "Wind River") and tried their best in a very difficult situation. One hopes the upcoming book about the Osage murders will help their now flagging reputation.

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Afghanistan hasn't changed much in 2400 years. From Ancient Warfare podcast: Alexander (the Great) in Bactria (the present day Afghanistan):

“I am engaged in a land of a leonine and brave people, where every foot of the ground is like a wall of steel confronting my soldiers. You have brought only one Alexander into the world, but every mother in this land has brought an Alexander into the world.” – Alexander the Great, in a letter written to his mother Olympias from Bactria

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Wikipedia was down. Cyberwire discusses possible reasons.

but here is the real question:

Did your smart refrigerator take out Wikipedia?

An entity known on Twitter as @UkDrillas has claimed responsibility for the attack, though this has not been confirmed....]

Haaretz also quoted a tweet in which @UkDrillas indicated that the attack involved “testing some new IOT devices,” suggesting that the attack was carried out not by people or bots sending data requests from regular computers, but rather by a network of internet-enabled household appliances or “Internet of Things (IoT)” devices, such as “smart” refrigerators.

Well, it could be worse: Wait till China takes over the "internet of things".

The Huawei 5G (fifth generation) mobile broadband and cellphone system worries Washington. 5G is more than voice and video. This powerful system connects the "internet of things," "things" that could open your garage door or open a dam's floodgates. What if a terrorist or a saboteur were to open the floodgates? If the saboteur were a Chinese agent, would this be an act of war? As it is, hackers have successfully penetrated some of Huawei's broadband gateway systems. -----------------

Swine flu has hit the Philippines and is blamed on feeding pigs leftover food from restaurants etc.

Despite confirmation of the infections, Philippine authorities are in control of the problem and will further tighten quarantine checks, including in airports and seaports, and crack down on smuggling of imported meat to prevent large-scale outbreaks, officials said. They assured that pork supply and prices will remain normal.

italics mine. So someone is trying to export "double dead" meat from the infected pigs to the Philippines because they figure a little bribe will let them make money off of the bad meat instead of destroying the carcasses.

The disease has caused China to cull half their pigs, and VietNam is also affected.

this is why China just dropped their tariffs against American pork and soybeans.

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