Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts

• ATT's Internet and TV services went out yesterday for most of North Texas due to a simple lightning strike at one building in Richardson. Doesn't make you feel very good about a cyber attack, does it? 
• "Rouge killers" got in the Saudi Embassy?
  
• And the Saudis are preparing to say he was killed because of "interrogation gone wrong." That's just a different version of "rogue killers". (People much smarter than me say this is the King Henry II defense in the death of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury.)
• Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is dead at 65. Steve Jobs died at 56.
• The U.S. embassy in Australia accidentally sent out this cat photo instead of a meeting invite. I support this. We could all use more Cat in Cookie Monster Pajamas Eating Cookies in our lives. 
  
• Things like this doesn't even get on our radar any longer: "Authorities in Texas have arrested one man and are searching for his father in the fatal shooting of four people -- a 62-year-old man and his three grandsons in their 20s -- at a toddler's birthday party."
• "I couldn't get back to sleep because it was raining too hard so I got up at 4:30 and decided to do this project: Look up all Dak's runs and determine if they were scrambles or planned." - The Ticket's Bob Sturm yesterday. And you thought you lived a a full throttle life.
• I had to turn the heater on last night. That has to the quickest I've ever gone from running the a/c to running the heat. 
• The jury is deliberating in this Tarrant County case. It was a three week trial and this is the first coverage of it that I have seen. 
  
• We always lag behind:
  
• Owners of the Gas Pipe were found not guilty in federal court of the most serious charges of knowingly selling illegal synthetic marijuana. The jury had a reasonable doubt as to whether they knew what they were selling was illegal because of ever changing and complicated laws that only a chemist could understand. Texas state law is no different and it is next to impossible to prosecute some simple user who has every right to think he is buying legal stuff in one of those places. 
  
• Greg Abbott has now gone to fear-mongering commercials about MS-13. Your chances of being killed on 114 are greater than meeting an MS-13 member. 
• Two companies you may have never heard of, Harris Corp. and L3 Technologies Inc., have agreed to a merger that will create a $33.5 billion company. What business are they in? Defense contracting. The Dallas Morning News has an article on how the ever growing American War Machine is worth billions to the private sector. 
• I say it from time to time: If you think the American economy is pure capitalism, you're out of your mind. Think of the number of people you know who work for the government (either directly like a teacher or cop) or indirectly (like an employee for Lockheed.)
• Right on cue for the midterms, Fox News is running with stories of "hundreds" of people from Honduras headed to the border. And now watch Trump jump on it. Oops ... it is already starting. He will never give up on the Fear The Brown People message.
  
• The Honduran government needs to "stop" them and taken them "back"? It's not a prison escape.
• Elizabeth Warren is taking it on the chin for being 1/1024th native American. I'd like to see 1/1024th of Trump's taxes.