I am going to tell you a tale. Stay with me to the end as it is not what you may think.

We live in a world in which many odd things have happened of late. Amongst them are the following:

 1. Solar Winds — Russian hackers — have cracked into the vast majority of US government computers and databases to an extent that we simply don’t know how deep they penetrated, if they left behind artifacts, and when they did it.

We do know our government didn’t tell us for a long time and they did not know about it for a long time. But, supposedly, the Russian hackers did not get the nuclear football codes.

 2. Russian hackers (DarkSide) shut down the Colonial pipeline which supplies almost half of the oil products to the east coast. Colonial’s CEO paid a ransom reported to be $4,400,000. Reports on the dark web say he paid a lot more than that.

At the same time as DarkSide was publicly assailing Colonial, they were also shaking Brenntag down for a similar $4.4MM.

Brenntag is a German chemical distribution company and the ransom attack was on its North American ops.

 3. Ransom attacks have become yawningly common place and no ransom attackers have been caught or brought to justice.

 4. A ransom attack shut down the Irish healthcare system.

 5. Hackers penetrated the bowels of a company called JBS that controls more than 20% of the US meat supply. [Some folks began to hoard meat. I bought a rib eye steak.]

 6. The US Department of Energy reports more than 150 successful hacks into companies making up the American electrical grid between 2010 and 2014. [I am unable to find more current info for some odd reason.]

 7. Russian hackers shut down 20% of Ukraine’s energy grid in 2016.

 8. You can get a copy right here of:

Crowdstrike Global Threat Report

 9. Big payments actually made:

CWT Global, July 2020 — $4,500,000 BTC

Colonial Pipeline, May 2021 — $4,400,000 BTC

Brenntag, May 2021 — $4,400,000 BTC

Travelex, Dec 2019 — $2,300,000 (company ultimately failed)

University of California at San Francisco, June 2020 — $1,140,000

OK, so what, Big Red Car?

Fine. Here is what I think:

 1. The combination of expert hacking and crypto currency has created an ignoble criminal enterprise that can reach anywhere.

 2. It’s the fucking RUSSIANS, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iranians. It is all of our natural enemies.

News flash — THIS IS GOING TO GET A LOT WORSE unless we do something about it.

The hackers are safe in their lairs and we are doing nothing to punish them. Or are we?

 3. There is no industry that is beyond the reach of these hackers.

Anything else, Big Red Car?

Yes, we are being asked to believe that amongst 3,143 counties in the United States that not a single voting machine was compromised. Not one.

This is in spite of the fact that all of the voting machine companies told us their machines were NOT connected to the Internet and now we know that all of them were connected to the Internet. Hello, America.

Bottom line it, Big Red Car

Why does America believe that the US voting system is not compromised when hackers can dig into the bowels of everything?

We are being asked to suspend logic and reason.

But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car.