What Do We Need Men For? A modest proposal

 

E. Jean Carroll is the long-term advice columnist for Elle Magazine, and she's the woman who is suing Donald Trump for rape when they had  an encounter at Bergdorf's Department Store in New York City. Previously, I had read a few of her advice columns. Now, I was curious to see what she had to say about herself and the current president. Admittedly, part of my interest came from having known Ms. Carroll and her family of origin. Her parents were great friends of my parents, and as a result, she occasionally came to my house for family parties, and I was in her parents' house for more parties. Our parents had very active social lives. On one occasion, my father actually saved her life when she was about four years old, but that's another story. Personally, I have not had any contact with her for at least 50 years, although I have a renewed relationship with her brother. Fittingly. the author has qualified her dear brother as an honorary woman, which is very high praise. That causes me some jealousy. I remember Jeanie Carroll as a stunningly beautiful woman who was always outspoken. 

This book reviews Ms. Carroll's long history of bad outcomes in her romantic relationships with men. She gives what appears to me to be an honest accounting of her encounter with Trump, a man she had known from earlier New York social events. The book was a quick read, and much of it was tongue-in-cheek with regard to her complaints about men. It must have been after filing the lawsuit against Trump that she took off on a nearly 5,000 mile journey as she asked many women in different circumstances what they needed men for. She told those stories in the body of her book.

If you're curious about her story, have a look at her book.

Deep State

 

Primal Calling

 

Deadline Vegas by Douglas Stewart

We have siblings Dax and Beth. Children of an abusive father who was more about money than family. While Dad is starting to show signs of dementia, the family is exceedingly well off from Dad’s business successes. But the money doesn’t erase what the kids and their mom endured.

 

Beth is (as I recall) an investigative reporter while Dax is a recovering alcoholic whose wife and child died a year or so ago. Dax now prefers fishing above all else. Beth has been looking into a connection to a member-only casino in London and a huge new casino opening soon in Vegas. She uncovers evidence that the London casino is laundering money for Vegas and doing so by cheating its customers who are too drunk or stupid to care that their winnings are being shorted and that the some of the games are fixed.

 

The heads of both casinos obviously don’t want all this to come out. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake as is the tentative opening date of the Vegas casino. Upon returning home to London from Panama after acquiring some crucial background details about the London operator, Beth is killed in a suspicious car accident. Then their dad is in another car accident and now almost fully incapacitated. Dax has to lay down the fishing pole, find care for his father and take up where Beth left off. A rich boy taking on the London and Vegas criminal heads of gambling.

 

His main tool for investigating is his very deep pockets and he spends freely on first class travel and even sets up his home office for roulette so he can study the game. A friend of a friend knows a guy who understands the inner workings of a casino (and if you’ve ever wondered yourself, Deadline Vegas if quite a good primer). This guy, himself a recovering addict, knows how casinos win, how they cheat, and how they can be beaten. Dax takes his no limit credit card and freely spends on tools to take down London and stop the Vegas opening.

 

This was a reasonable diversion for a week in the mountains. While the story was decent, it didn’t really grab me in and hold my attention for hours. Think my biggest issue was believing that a rich boy, despite his considerable bank account, would have the wherewithal to not only devise and pull off his plan but also to avoid getting himself destroyed by people who kill without blinking. But is certainly was a good way to see behind the curtains of just how a casino operates, legally and illegally.

 

ECD

 

Total Power by Kyle Mills

Governments are supposed to watch over the people. Make sure that bad things don’t happen. So they try to envision what could go wrong and plan how to keep such things from actually happening. Probably all the main offices of government are dreaming up how to bring down the country so it can be stopped before it happens. Or if it does happen, what can be done to protect the people.

The Department of Energy is doing just that. One of their doomsday scenarios is having the electrical grid go down. Not just a city or a region. The whole dang country. A Senate select committee has paraded dozens of electric company CEOs to testify. They all say it’s impossible. The DOE head of cybersecurity brings in a consultant (that’s what governments do . . . they hire consultants). John Alton, an MIT-educated genius in electrical engineering and computer networking, runs a utility security company and has gotten stinking rich in the process. In his thousand-page report, he tells Congress how easy it would be. Take out nine specific substations and the lower 48 is suddenly back in 18^th century. Projections of the carnage are in the 10s of millions. The economy? Gone. Not simply stunted. Gone. And with a little extra help, the American electrical grid could be down for as long as a year before those industry would even figure out what’s wrong. Those fat-cat senators dismiss Alton’s conclusions as unnecessarily hysterical.

Mitch Rapp is in Spain on the trail of the top cybermind in ISIS. Guy says he is going on holiday to tour NYC and DC. But computer nerds, be they Arab or American, aren’t trained to resist interrogation much less torture. With a little nudge, the guy divulges that he’s on the way to meet a contact known only as PowerStation.

Apparently, PowerStation also knows what Alton has predicted. But he needs some help to pull off the scheme. A sleeper Russian agent is sent to meet PowerStation to gauge his capabilities. She reports back that he seems credible, but she also thinks that he is unstable and untrustworthy. Russia isn’t interested out of concern for the eventual American retaliation. That doesn’t concern ISIS.

The sleeper agent becomes borderline obsessed with the American power grid, reading all she can about it. A few weeks later, she sees an internet article about substation security and with it, a photo with PowerStation in the background. Now she’s got a name, then soon an address. She plans to approach him about his intents and maybe even stop him, but instead ends up breaking in his home and cloning some of a laptop’s hard drive.

On a cold Christmas morning, PowerStation throws the electronic switch plunging the US into an electrical black hole. Within days, anarchy ensues. Food, medical care, dwindling water supplies, transportation, communication ceases to exist. Without electricity, nothing works. The government is hiding in a West Virginia bunker with no clue about what to do. During the shutdown, our Russian tries to get to the FBI but rioting mobs in DC prevent her getting in.

Rapp, his boss (Irene Kennedy) and Rapp’s crew of operatives work to piece together seemingly disconnected clues about what they can do about the power loss and the only real conclusion is that the person with the best information is PowerStation. Clues have them hopping from Idaho to western VA, the mountains of West Virginia, backwoods KY.

They come up with a risky plan with minimal chance of success to get PowerStation to come to them rather than try to keep chasing their own tails looking for him. 

And it’s a helluva plan.

This is #19 in Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series. As you might know, Flynn died in 2013. His publishers, Emily Bestler Books (a Simon & Schuster imprint – and I’ve said it here before and will again. Pay attention to who publishes a book. I’ve never read anything from Emily Bester Books that wasn’t first rate) enlisted Kyle Mills, already an accomplished thriller writer, to pick up Flynn’s mantle and continue the Mitch Rapp saga. This is the 6^th Mitch Rapp book by Kyle Mills.

And it’s a whopper. Not Rapp crawling around some shithole for a dirtbag terrorist bent on bringing down the Great Satan. Rapp is fully engaged on American soil to prevent the US from plunging into a bottomless hole from which it could well not recover. If you weren't already a prepper, the thought of this scenario actually happening just might convince you to start looking at mountain property for your own bunker against anarchy.

Savage Road

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women