The last dodo

Why is it so hard to understand what I said about the investigation accomplishing nothing substantial?

Be patient.  It's a very tangled web of individuals and organizations and any investigation that includes US government officials and Russians with ties to Kremlin intelligence operations and organized crime is bound to produce something substantial.  It may come to nothing (I doubt it) but I wonder why so much effort is made to impede such an investigation.

In this case, I think the original investigation into the Russian hacking of the past election has led to other things, other possibly criminal activities.  Money laundering, espionage, who knows?  But it is the responsibility of the investigators to follow those threads to see where they lead.  Criminal acts beyond the original scope of the investigation can not, and should not, be ignored.  But I am not a lawyer.

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It was my impression that any unauthorized intrusion into any computer system was illegal, even if only a simple invasion of privacy.  I don't think that any secrets are posted on the internet but secrets can be accessed through the internet if network security is weak, which is why many secure systems have no internet access at all.  No phone line connection, no WiFi, no nothing.  If you want to access the system you have to plop your butt behind the keyboard and start typing.  A real good system won't have removable media or accessible ports like USB or SD card readers, either.

If you're lucky you can send stuff to a printer, but a lot of modern printers can be tracked.  They leave almost indistinguishable little dots in a pattern that will reveal the printer's serial number and the date and time of day the print was made.  I think some copiers do the same thing, so be careful when you go to Kinko's to copy those secret plans you stole from Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems.

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A new product has been advertised lately, at least new to me, one of those CPAP gizmos.  I had to look that one up, what the hell is CPAP?  Well, it stands for "Continuous Positive Airway Pressure" and it is used to resolve problems with sleep apnea.  Did sleep apnea always exist or is it like peanut allergies, something new?  Our modern way of life seems to have a lot of problems.  I've read that sperm counts are down 50% over the last thirty years, but that's only in Western nations.  Folks in South America, Africa, and Asia are fine.

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A while back Mr. Beagles inquired about the nature of the Russian people and since then I read something interesting in a review of The Unwomanly Face Of War, a book that has accounts of Soviet women in WWII.

It can be hard for someone not born in the former Eastern Bloc to grasp the extent to which the memory of World War II seeped into every aspect of Soviet and post-Soviet life, or to fully understand the toxic effects of the heroic myth of capital-V Victory, which put the realities and unresolved traumas of wartime in a no-zone, akin to the irradiated woodland around Chernobyl.

Even after more than seventy years I don't think Russia has fully reconciled with Germany.  And could Russian antagonism with the US stem from the fact that the US helped rebuild Germany (at least Western Germany) and ignored Russia because they were Godless Commies?

In discussion of the historical beefs in the Middle East I've forgotten about the other beefs in Europe, and I wonder how well matters are settled.  There may still be issues that are neither forgiven nor forgotten.

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Useless fact of the day: The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in 1662.