What’s remarkable is that he probably actually believes what he tells the UN.

In an implicit rebuke to Putin, who earlier this month in an article in the New York Times, criticised Obama’s belief in US exceptionalism, Obama said: “Some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional — in part because we have shown a willingness, through the sacrifice of blood and treasure, to stand up not only for our own narrow self-interest, but for the interests of all.”

This blindness that varies from obstinate to willful is baffling to those who are not true believers in the American religion. To explain it requires another resurrection of the Chomsky chestnut that you can’t rise to a position of power in the US government unless you believe that the United States is unique in history in acting purely from altruistic motives. What we do, though it require “the sacrifice of blood and treasure”, we do for ourselves but also “for the interests of all”. As Madeleine Albright put it in another context, if we have to sacrifice Syrian lives, we believe that's a price worth paying. After all, it's for everyone's good, whatever they themselves might happen to believe.

�a billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall
I�ll never see a tree at all.

� Ogden Nash

From Jay Bookman:

�The General Assembly finds and declares that outdoor advertising provides a substantial service and benefit to Georgia and Georgia�s citizens as well as the traveling public. Therefore, the General Assembly declares it to be in the public interest that provisions be made for the visibility of outdoor advertising signs��

Well, if a publicly owned tree, growing on public property, might possibly interfere with the visibility of a privately owned billboard, state law gives the billboard owner the right to come onto public property and chop that tree down. Previous law exempted hardwoods with a diameter of more than eight inches and pines with a diameter of more than a foot, but under HB 179 those protections, like the trees, are gone.

Syrbal/Labrys, herself a veteran, reminds us that in all bureaucracies scum may often rise to the top, but bad news? Never.

And it isn�t macho or �soldierly� to have mental health issues, so everyone learns the safe buzzwords and it all gets largely ignored. Until the fun and games end when someone dies. Like at Ft. Hood, like in the war zones when trooper A shoots trooper B, or at the Washington Naval Yard. When the shooter-to-be can�t see any solution except blood � theirs, his � pretty much all the same at that last bit, I suspect.

The military sometimes doesn�t listen so well. When you get out, they have about four pages of questions to determine your physical and mental well being. I answered, the medical aide checked boxes. Imagine my surprise when I later laid hands on my med records � all the things I answered �yes� to were marked �no�!

Stuff like �Do you have headaches?� �Do you have nightmares?� All the stuff they don�t want to really see, they simply don�t. Anything they can�t fix by handing you a pill, they don�t want to know about � and boy, DO they ever pass out the pills! Even if it kills the vet, they get plenty of pills.

Click image to enlarge

The Guardian brings us more news from the pews:

Of the 1,001 people surveyed, 35% of Americans said they believe in the statement: �With just Bible study and prayer, ALONE, people with serious mental illness like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia could overcome mental illness.�

Of the respondents who self-identified as either born-again, evangelical or fundamentalist Christian � 48% agreed.

Here�s an excerpt by Andrew J. Bacevich from one of the most devastating and satisfying smackdowns I�ve ever read. The victim, left dead and bleeding from multiple wounds, is David Brooks of The New York Times.

On April 28, 2003, beating President Bush�s �Mission Accomplished� speech by three days, Brooks declared that �the war in Iraq is over.� The political and cultural implications of victory promised to be profound. A collaboration between policy makers in Washington and troops on the battlefield had removed any last doubts as to American global dominion. Brooks sang the praises of �a ruling establishment that can conduct wars with incredible competence and skill.� The United States, he enthused, was an �incredibly effective colossus that can drop bombs onto pinpoints, [and] destroy enemies that aren�t even aware they are under attack��

Implicitly acknowledging the distance separating young Americans who chose to serve in uniform from the young Americans choosing otherwise, Brooks made clear which group deserved his admiration. �Can anybody think of another time in history when a comparable group of young people was asked to be at once so brave, fierce and relentless, while also being so sympathetic, creative and forbearing?� Brooks couldn�t, so he bestowed on the troops the secular equivalent of collective canonization. �They are John Wayne,� he rhapsodized, �but also Jane Addams.� Soldiers were paragons of virtue, their courage and altruism standing in stark contrast to the shallow, self-absorbed liberal culture that Brooks despised. �If anybody is wondering: Where are the young idealists? Where are the people willing to devote themselves to causes larger than themselves? They are in uniform in Iraq.� The gap between the military and society, in other words, was a good thing. It provided America with a great war-winning army and Americans with desperately needed exemplars of virtue.

Soon after Brooks published this paean to the American soldier, word of depraved and despicable acts at Abu Ghraib prison began to surface. Apparently, John Wayne and Jane Addams did not exhaust the range of possible role models to whom at least some American soldiers looked for inspiration.

�The Guardian�s got you covered:

While it is true that if e-coli bacteria from fecal matter is ingested, that it can can cause ailments such as cramps, fever, diarrhea, stomach pain, and other illnesses, the likelihood of anyone contracting these ailments from holy water under most circumstances is small�

From Tim Weiner�s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes:

The ambassador [Henry Cabot Lodge] resented the agency�s exalted status in Saigon. �CIA has more money; bigger houses than diplomats; bigger salaries; more weapons; more modern equipment.� He was jealous of the powers held by [CIA station chief] John Richardson, and he scoffed at the caution the station chief displayed about Conein�s central role in the coup plotting. Lodge decided he wanted a new station chief.

So he burned Richardson � �exposed him and gave his name publicly to the newspapers,� as Bobby Kennedy said in a classified oral history eight months later � by feeding a coldly calculated leak to a journeyman reporter passing through Saigon. The story was a hot scoop. Identifying Richardson by name � an unprecedented breach of security � it said he had �frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge had brought with him from Washington, because the agency disagreed with it�one high official here, a man who has devoted most of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA�s growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure that even the White House could control it.� The New York Times and the Washington Post picked up the story. Richardson, his career ruined, left Saigon four days later; after a decent interval, Ambassador Lodge moved into his house.

�David Vitter and Bobby Jindal.

Vladimir Putin�s op-ed in the NY Times has really gotten under the skin of our lawgivers. They are outraged � outraged, I tell you � that Putin has the temerity to lecture us about our foreign policy. He also criticized American exceptionalism, which is verboten here in the land of the free. �It is extremely dangerous, � he wrote, �to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.�

Well, our politicians were having none of that. �I almost wanted to vomit,� said Senator Bob Menendez. Many of his colleagues also chimed in to register their indignation. It was a bipartisan affair:

During a news conference Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner said, �I was insulted,� when he read Putin�s editorial.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he didn�t think Putin was trying to undermine the president on Syria with his op-ed but was instead �looking for an excuse to show off his Super Bowl ring.�

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in a tweet, called Putin�s words �an insult�: �Putin�s NYT op-ed is an insult to the intelligence of every American.�

Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla.,  said in an interview with CNN on Thursday that he too was not a fan of Putin�s piece: �I could hear Reagan turning over in his grave.�

First, a little historical perspective. As P.M Carpenter points out, twenty million Russians were killed in World War II by a country that encouraged its people to view themselves as exceptional, so the wicked Putin is making a serious point. Of course, I wouldn�t expect people like James Inhofe to stretch their minds that far. He is Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity�s intellectual equal (he thinks global warming is a socialist conspiracy).

 Frankly, the fact that John McCain is regarded as a foreign policy expert is an insult to the intelligence of every American. If we followed his advice we would have put ground troops into Serbia during Clinton�s splendid little war there, and we�d probably be at war with Iran right now. Metternich he ain�t. I�m a little surprised Joseph Lieberman hasn�t popped out of retirement to give us his two cents. This situation is tailor-made for his uniquely nauseating brand of unctuous moralizing.

(Oops. I said �ground troops.� How retro of me. Apparently, the preferred term these days is �boots on the ground.� Question: When you put the boots on the ground, what side of the red line do you put them on?)

 Putin also says something that I think most readers of this blog would probably agree with:

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America�s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan �you�re either with us or against us.�

Is that untrue? The fact that Putin is an authoritarian gay-basher is irrelevant here. There is not a single word in that paragraph that is false. The United States does rely too heavily on brute force. We do have a �you�re either with us or against us� mentality. It�s perhaps not quite as bad as it was during  the Bush-Cheney Dark Ages, but it�s still there. We do involve ourselves in foreign civil wars, and we have nothing to show for it but a growing list of spectacular failures. Our foreign policy thinkers are forever bleating about credibility and sending messages, as if every one else in the world is a little child who looks exclusively to the US for all of their cues on how to think and behave. Well, nothing ruins your credibility more quickly and completely than military defeat.

Putin has taken our measure and concluded, correctly, that we are bunch of self-important dullards and phonies. He�s laughing at us and we deserve it. It’s odd that our politicians should be so offended by him. Their hero is Henry Kissinger, who is every bit as hypocritical and callous as Putin.

Isn�t it rich seeing our pompous leaders wax indignant? These are the same morally upstanding optimates who brought us the USA Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, and Wall Street bailouts. They are presiding over a country that is experiencing third world levels of inequality and show very little inclination to change it. They countenance waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, drone strikes, targeted assassinations, and NSA spying. Their entire careers are built on a system of legalized bribery that makes a used condom seem clean by comparison. What moral exemplars they are!

James Pringle, a Reuters war correspondent during the Southeast Asian unpleasantness, put this up the other day on a forum called Vietnam Old Hacks. Pringle is right. President Obama, of all people, ought to know better. And, sadly enough, probably does. But like all of us, he is subject to the old rule that where you stand depends on where you sit.

�It�s what makes America different. It�s what makes us exceptional,� Barack Obama said the other day when he addressed the US nation. Vladimir Putin picked up on this in his piece in the New York Times yesterday, saying it was �extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional.� OK, Putin is a former KGB man, and was not elected in a strictly democratic way, and has no entitlement to lecture other countries on such matters.

But this �exception� business pegged to the US has been around for a while. I think I first heard it about three years ago from former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She was complaining that people had verbally attacked her for talking about �American exceptionalism.� I thought these were isolated moments, and that Barack Obama would encourage Americans to have the sense to turn away from such descriptions of themselves. That he should now use it himself the other day boggles the mind, at least my mind, and I wonder how Old Hacks see the issue. He should realise it runs the risk of the US becoming a yes, �laughing stock� in the world, or being castigated as being �arrogant.� John Kerry, it seems to me, is full of the same hubris, yet he bugged out of Vietnam after only three months, as I understand it. Americans should be ready to laugh at themselves � it�s much healthier�

I think that Hacks, in general, and not just Old Hacks, are less likely to be prone to this kind of �exceptionist� bragging. After all, do we not all say � and know � that �you�re just as good as your last story?� It�s time American Old Hacks weighed in with OpEd pieces in their local papers pointing out how ridiculous the whole �exceptional� business is. I lived in New York for 18 months as a correspondent at the UN, and believe me Americans are not �exceptional.� They�re all struggling to get through life like the rest of us. Let�s put an end to all this �exceptionist� claptrap before it goes any further!

You remember George Zimmerman, I know you do. And that his wife called 911 on him the other day. If not, go here.

I liked this touch:

Mark O�Mara, who represented George Zimmerman in his murder trial, said on Monday that his client did nothing wrong and the dispute was typical for a couple going through a divorce. On Tuesday, O�Mara said he was not going to represent George Zimmerman in this matter.

�I�ve come to know them as a family, and it�s not a good idea to get in between them,� O�Mara said.

The previous post reminded me of the total prostitution of the word �freedom� by the warmongers who have dominated our foreign policy steadily since World War II, and pretty often before that.

Which reminded me of those golden days of yesteryear � 2003 actually � when the Congressional dining room was serving freedom fries, and when I served up this:

From the New York Times:

�On a day that the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, said the American-led war was �doomed to fail,� the administration struck a small blow at France, another ally that has parted company with the United States over Iraq. The menu on Air Force One this morning featured �stuffed freedom toast topped with strawberries� � a new name for French toast.�

Once I had recovered from this droll bon mot I got to thinking about poor old freedom, and how our everloving warleaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, have sent it out on the street to turn tricks for them.

The other day, for example, I heard a Nevada man tell a radio reporter that his Marine son hadn�t died in vain: instead he had sacrificed himself for, you guessed it, freedom.

The poor man was hardly alone. An extraordinary number of otherwise sensible citizens apparently believe that Mr. Bush has invaded Iraq to bring freedom to that country � never mind that it wasn�t remotely �free� even before Saddam Hussein.

And never mind that Iraq will not be free after him, either. There are words to describe what the country is likely to be, but �free� is not among them. The words are instead �military protectorate,� and �occupied territory,� and �dependency,� and �colony.�

Iraq, that is to say, will remain free of freedom. Those who keep it so will now be Americans instead of Iraqis, of course, but this only looks like an improvement from our side of the fence.

This corruption of �freedom� did not occur overnight. Ronald Reagan unblushingly used the term �freedom fighters� to describe such despots and butchers as Jonas Savimbi in Angola and the Contras in Nicaragua.

No doubt Mr. Reagan was unconscious of the absurdity, as he was unconscious of so much else. To him, free and freedom were words which applied to any leader, any movement, any nation, that appeared willing to take orders from Washington.

Freedom meant subservience, as indeed to many Americans it always had. During the Vietnam War, for instance, the Fort Dix stockade was used to confine deserters, draft dodgers, and other objectors to the war. A sign over its front gate read, �Obedience to the law is freedom.�

Once we grasp this concept, such phenomena as John Ashcroft and Admiral Poindexter become understandable and even admirable. When Mr. Bush's men strip away our civil liberties one by one, they are only killing to cure. The loss of freedom is the price of remaining free.

The price for the people of Iraq will be even higher. They must be colonized by smart bombs and the Third Infantry Division, so that Exxon and Halliburton may free their oil fields at last from the chains of Iraqi ownership.

Surely then, praise be to Allah, all the nations of Araby will rise in joyful song and clamor, each in his turn, to be washed in the blood of the Bush.

And if my aunt had wheels, she�d be a tea cart.

Jim Wright at Stonekettle explores the true legacy of 9/11 in the excerpt below. As a nation, we have responded to the tragedy like a man stricken with lung cancer who chooses to self-medicate with two packs of Marlboros, taken daily.

�Since 911, an entire generation has been born and grown to self-awareness. Those young Americans have never known their nation at peace.

They have never known a nation that is not divided � They have never had a single day where they weren�t told to hate their neighbors and to report them if they don�t seem patriotic enough � They have never lived a single day in a nation that wasn�t bent to the terrible business of revenge.

They have never known a nation that didn�t roil in fear and cringe in terror every single day � They have never flown on an airplane without having been treated like a criminal � They have never checked out a book from the library without having been subject to secret scrutiny.

They never sent an unmonitored email or made an unmonitored phone call � They have never lived in a house that isn�t subject to unwarranted search � They have never had the right to redress or legal challenge when their name is placed on secret lists � and in point of fact, they don�t even have the right to know if their name is on that list at all.

They have never lived in a nation where they have the right to confront their accuser and demand proof of more than just suspicion � They have never lived without the threat, however unlikely, of being disappeared � They have never lived in a nation that didn�t regard the torture of human beings as an acceptable option.

This new generation has lived under the shadow of those falling towers every single minute of every single day since the moment they were born.

The terrorists didn�t do that to them.

We did.

Florida is the gift that just keeps on giving. Here�s its attorney general, setting out her priorities. By the looks of her, a job on Fox News is waiting if the political thing ever goes south on her.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said Monday she should not have requested an execution be rescheduled from the night of her �campaign kickoff� fundraiser.

Bondi�s statement came after Gov. Rick Scott said he was unaware that the waterfront Tampa fundraiser, scheduled for Tuesday, was the reason she had requested the delay in the execution of convicted murderer Marshall Lee Gore.

�As a prosecutor, there was nothing more important than seeing justice done, especially when it came to the unconscionable act of murder,� Bondi said in a release. �I personally put two people on death row and, as attorney general, have already participated in eight executions since I took office, a role I take very seriously.�

First take a look at the video below, full-screen if you can. Have you seen it before? Probably not. And yet there was a time, some 20 years ago, when a similar video, of the beating of Rodney King, transfixed the entire nation. The only substantial difference between the King tape and the one below is that the Los Angeles police didn�t have Tasers. They had to torture their captive the old-fashioned way, with clubs and fists and boots. Those were primitive days�

It used to be that to torture a prisoner with electricity was a cumbersome process, requiring an electrical connection or a generator. Building on the principle of the cattle prod, however, science soon brought us the miracle of the portable taser, so that today any torturer in blue can deal out agonizing pain or death whenever and wherever the occasion presents itself. (�Death,� you say? Isn�t that going a little far? Not at all. Just this summer, just in Connecticut, police have Tasered two men to death. That brings our total to 13 since 2005.)

Here�s what happened to the Long Beach victim in the video, a 46-year-old man named Porfirio Santos-Lopez:

He underwent surgery at Long Beach Memorial Hospital for injuries sustained in the confrontation. �They broke two bones in his right arm. They collapsed his lung on the left side. He has two cuts on his right leg, a cut on his left, a cut on his head,� Santos-Lopez� wife, Lee Ann Hernandez, said.

None of the officers involved in the incident have been placed on leave. No charges have been filed against Santos-Lopez.

Another difference between the torture of King and the torture of Lopez is the presence of a crowd in the latter case. The Long Beach police knew they were on camera. Cell phones were everywhere. People were shouting at the cowards to stop their torture. The cowards were indifferent. They knew, this being America, that they would never be punished. We just love our boys in blue all to pieces, as long as they confine their torture to the torturable classes. You�re never going to see John Yoo or Bernie Madoff on the ground, jerking and screaming.

Here�s Ed at Gin and Tacos on his dabblings in the stock market:

My tolerance for the absurdity of the whole enterprise is in decline. Every time I make a profitable transaction now, I can�t stop thinking, �Why do I have more money now? I didn�t do anything.� And I didn�t. Nobody who plays this game does. It is a world in which nothing is produced and destroyed except money itself. One day you buy something for x dollars. The next, you sell it for 1.5x. Your personal profit is money created out of thin air.

And this, on a much larger scale, is the dominant profession of our financial (and social, and political) elite. They create ever more complex financial instruments out of other intangible financial assets and then they sell them to one another and everyone walks away with money even though nothing happened. The old saying about the stock markets being a form of liar�s poker is a lie inasmuch as poker is a more legitimate enterprise. Real money changes hands between real people performing a transaction with a payout agreed upon in advance.

These people � our Producers, our Galtian heroes, our Job Creators � are people who don�t actually make, create, or produce anything. It�s all blips and clicks and algorithms and trades programmed to self-execute when defined parameters are met. It takes knowledge and a specific talent to do this successfully; that is indisputable. Regardless, I can never wrap my mind around how � intrinsically worthless are the �assets� involved in this game. The only thing that the hedge fund manager or the day trader creates is personal wealth.

As a chessplayer I’ve struggled to understand the strategy for Syria. Not the Obama push for authorization to strike, but the strike itself. What would it accomplish? How could positive results happen? Suppose it “degraded” Assad’s military sufficiently to allow rebel forces to take control of the country; is the new goverment likely to be reasonable? Assume for the moment that the intelligence leading us to war is correct this time around. Suppose we fire a few cruise missiles into Syria and Assad continues to use chemical weapons; then what do we do? Why do we care about the thousand dead from chemical weapons and not the 99,000 dead from conventional weapons? How can a country that employs depleted uranium or white phosphorus, and has continually ignored its own commitments made in treaties like that on nuclear nonproliferation, claim moral standing with respect to sarin gas?

Most basic, it seems to me, is this: once we fire missiles at Assad’s military we are committed to regime change; and what is the endgame? Such action is illegal under international law, and another violation — even flouting — of such standards will reduce what’s left of our credibility. Credibility is not about following through on empty threats made for political gain; it’s about being solidly reasonable and managing friends and assets appropriately.

But today I read the following quote from Chief of staff Denis McDonough that cleared up the whole situation. It’s really about sending a message to Iran, not Syria.

McDonough said “nobody doubts the intelligence”. “The question for Congress this week is what are the consequences for having done so,” he said, on Meet The Press, adding that Congress’s decision would be watched closely by Iran and Hezbollah. “This is an opportunity to be bold with the Iranians.” he said. “To make sure they understand that they do not have greater freedom of action, they do not have greater operating space to pursue a nuclear weapon that would destabilize that entire region, threaten our friends and allies and ultimately threaten us.”

Obama wants to commit us to another war of choice in the Middle East with the goal of regime change. He’s achieved acceptance in the class he seems to admire by throwing away the values he claims to represent. It’s sad, even for someone who was never really on board. But at least the tenet of white supremacists that a black man could never be President has been disproven; in the event, he can start his own Middle East conflagration just like the white guys.

From the Los Angeles Times

According to an email survey of more than 1,300 incoming Harvard students, The Harvard Crimson reports, 10 percent of the campus' new freshman class have cheated on tests and 42 percent have cheated on homework�

And in a possibly unrelated development:

A university spokesman did not immediately reply after-hours on Thursday to a request for comment on the Crimson's survey, which also reported that 80 percent of the incoming class expected to get jobs in the finance industry.

Essentially this guy is being jailed for sending a �strong message� that a widely-used police technique doesn�t work:

ALEXANDRIA, VA � An Indiana Little League coach accused of threatening national security by teaching government job applicants how to beat lie detector tests was sentenced Friday to serve eight months in prison.

Prosecutors had asked a federal judge to send a �strong message� by sentencing Chad Dixon to prison in their unprecedented crackdown aimed at deterring other such polygraph instructors. They described Dixon as a �master of deceit� who taught as many as 100 people � including child molesters, intelligence employees and law enforcement applicants � how to beat lie detectors�

I mention this story of clerical exploitation notable here less for its unfortunate lack of novelty than for the barely safe-for-work prose in which it was reported.

The Vatican has recalled its ambassador to the Dominican Republic and relieved him of his duties after local media accused him of paedophilia.

The Dominican attorney general later announced that a special prosecutor had been appointed to investigate Archbishop Josef Wesolowski, who has been nuncio, or ambassador, in the capital, Santo Domingo, for nearly six years.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the Holy See had started a probe of Wesolowski and he had been recalled “in the last few weeks”, specifically over the paedophilia accusations.

Wesolowski could not be reached for comment.

Perhaps all this reaching and probing is what got the whole problem started to begin with. And to think this is from the British press! Oh, right, it’s The Guardian.

Looking through recommendations for apps for my new Android device informed me of Google Now.

Google Now recently earned our pick as the best virtual assistant for Android, and for good reason. No other tool we’ve seen proactively offers the wealth of relevant and useful information that Google Now does that specific to your current location. If you’re traveling, Google Now will show you the weather in your location before you get off the plane, open up a translation card so you can make sense of the local language, and show you directions to the hotel you booked a room in, all within moments of you arriving at your destination, without you having to do anything. Even if you’re not traveling, Google Now will proactively tell you when you need to leave to get to an appointment on your calendar, how long the commute home will be before you leave work, and more.

There, in a paragraph, is the paradox of the full-information state. Cool and scary. Given that this much information is available to Google, it is of course also available to the NSA and from there to who knows where. But still, it’s pretty cool that we have devices with that kind of power. It’s not a tricorder yet but it will be.

Oh, the image is meaningless, I just thought it was cute. No disrespect to Applites.

Watching Obama maneuver the Syrian mess has been fascinating, like watching someone teetering on the edge of a tall building. I thought a couple days ago he had already fallen over the edge, but he now appears to have caught himself, perhaps by the very laces of his own footwear.

If I’m reading this right it seems to me a brilliant stroke from which the President will emerge empowered and smelling like a rose. Here’s my theory, at least, whose development began with points I made to my representatives this week in urging against US military action in Syria.

First, no one is claiming to have what Prime Minister Cameron called a smoking gun of intelligence evidence. We have been here before, diving into a conflict on the premise of self-protection only to learn that the supposed danger did not exist. I admit to wondering why the Syrian government would intentionally cross what President Obama called a red line; what did Assad have to gain by such a reckless action? Some apparently argue that the rebels lack the capacity to launch a sarin attack; but are there not other entities in the region, terrorists or intelligence operatives, who could gain access to such weapons?

Second, how do we know what will happen if we fire a few cruise missiles into Syria? Certainly people will die; what special insight do we as Americans possess that lets us decide more lives will be saved by our bombing?

Third, what sort of international precedent and example do we set when we constantly preach the rule of law, then flout international law ourselves when we feel it necessary? If cruise missiles are meant to teach a lesson to the Assad regime, what lesson do they teach the rest of the world?

Finally, once we have dropped bombs on one side in the horrible Syrian civil war, we have taken sides in it and we cannot back out. Having bombed Assad’s forces we will not be able to back away and allow them to win; we will be committed to the success of the rebel forces.

Thinking along the lines of that final point, it came to mind that inducing the US to take sides in the Syrian civil war has been the goal of one faction in American politics since the murmurs of the conflict began. The neocons pushed Obama to set a red line; my impression was that he was somewhat reluctant to do so, but ended up agreeing that the use of chemical weapons would be egregious and announcing it to the world as a red line. In my opinion a strategic error, as are most of the neocon-inspired moves, but perhaps a smart player can recover.

Then today I read that John Kerry yesterday made this warlike pronouncement.

Make no mistake, in an increasingly complicated world of sectarian and religious extremist violence, what we choose to do or not do matters in real ways to our own security. Some site the risk of doing things. But we need to ask, ’What is the risk of doing nothing?’… It matters because if we choose to live in the world where a thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity, even after the United States and our allies said no, and then the world does nothing about it, there will be no end to the test of our resolve and the dangers that will flow from those others who believe that they can do as they will.

My first reaction was, do our respected representatives in government, in particular those in high office in Washington, recognize how hypocritical we sound when we speak in these tones only ten years after our disastrous second invasion of Iraq?

But then it came to me: maybe this is really a brilliant move by Obama. He has come to the realization that those who urged him to set a red line have maneuvered him into a corner. But it turns out one of those hard-as-a-rock walls for the neocons is democratic legitimacy; and this President does not lack for such legitimacy, giving him the magical ability to turn to the people and get out of the trap.

It might be argued that he was not making this up himself but rather following the example of the British prime minister. But examine the results for poor David Cameron, now significantly weakened. If Barack Obama and John Kerry make clear their readiness to act and leave it up to the people’s representatives in Congress, the President will have rebuilt a bridge that needed repair, and he will gain thereby probably nothing with the Republican rebels in the House but a great deal with normal parts of Congress and society at large. If Congress decides not to act in Syria, we can at least rest assured that cruise missiles will not be fired. Then will there be a debate about assistance to various rebel factions, or were the cruise missiles an attempt to degrade Assad’s capabilities without choosing which rebel groups to support and we’ll now return to covert interventions?

Discredit where discredit is due. Little Billy Kristol (the propagandist for the 1 percent, not the homophonic comedian) beat Boehner and McConnell to the punch 20 years ago when it comes to placing party above country. This is from James Fallows� evisceration of the press, Breaking the News.

Through 1993 [Republican strategists] had believed that some health-reform bill was inevitable. Their task was to work with the Clinton administration to tailor their bill to the party�s tastes. As late as the fall of 1993 Bob Dole had made joint appearances with Hillary Clinton to support the need for universal coverage. But by the beginning of 1994 they had concluded that they could in fact kill the bill outright, not because anything had changed in the proposal, but because emergencies and scandals, detailed in the press, had made the administration weak. William Kristol, a former aide to Vice President Dan Quayle who had become an influential Republican strategist, sent a memo to party leaders near the end of 1993 saying that President Clinton had become newly vulnerable. A defeat of his health-care program would be a mortal political blow to the president. Therefore, Kristol concluded, Republicans should oppose passage of any plan proposed by the administration �sight unseen.�

My nephew Will is an editor at The Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y. His father, like me, was also a newspaperman and also covered the March on Washington. But Bill had a better seat than I did, as you�ll see:

My father, Bill, worked as a reporter for urban newspapers from the time he was a teenager up until we moved up to Saranac Lake in 1971. In August of 1963, he was on an assignment I asked him to write about, so he did:

Fifty years ago, I attended the March on Washington. Through the years that experience has grown in personal importance. At the time, I was a young reporter for The Trentonian, a morning newspaper in Trenton, New Jersey, which at the time was perhaps half black.

Memories of that experience are still strong, and I have a picture of Martin Luther King giving his �I Have a Dream� speech hanging at the foot of my bed. Miraculously, one of the few clippings I have from that time on The Trentonian is my story of the March on Washington. It�s browning now and fragile, but still legible. The headline reads, �1,000 Area Demonstrators Join March in Washington.�

I did not mention King�s speech until the end of my story, which included the usage common during that time. For instance, I refer to King as �the Negro leader with charisma,� as if I was writing for a white audience to whom King was not well known at the time. It surprised me today to read my story because I failed to focus on King�s famous speech until the end of my long piece.

Luckily, by chance, I was able to sit near him on the platform constructed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial when he spoke of �this sweltering summer of negroes� discontent� and of �a revolt which will shake the foundations of this nation,� which included what he termed �an island of poverty in this vast ocean of material prosperity.� How much and yet how little has changed in the past half century.

The last paragraph reads, �As he finished, the 4 o�clock sun cast the shadow of the Washington Monument across the Lincoln Memorial, and King spoke of his dreams for Negro equality. At that moment, it seemed the whole throng of Negroes was dreaming with him.�

How naive it sounds today.

Wednesday night, my wife and I watched a documentary, �The March,� on public TV. It showed the months of work that went into the event, and the long day of speakers and performers. As the film wound down, it showed excerpts of King�s speech. We had been commenting on the documentary, but the timbre of King�s voice has a way of holding you still, so you can hardly breathe.

For a moment, we were dreaming with him.

Lest we forget, what Obama is trying to undo is what Clinton did. From CounterPunch:

The Clinton crime bill of 1994 introduced mandatory life imprisonment for persons convicted of a third felony in certain categories. It maintained the 100-to-1 disproportion in sentencing for crimes involving powder and crack cocaine, even though the US Sentencing Commission had concluded that the disparity was racist. It expanded to fifty the number of crimes that could draw the death penalty in a federal court, reaching even to crimes that did not include murders�the largest expansion of the death penalty in history. Pell grants giving prisoners an avenue to higher education were cut off. Federal judges were stripped of their powers to enforce the constitutional rights of prisoners and the power of states to set sentencing standards for drug crimes was greatly diminished.

The curtailment of states� rights went further. Grants for new prisons contained the provision that receipt of the money was dependent on the states ensuring that prisoners served at least 85 percent of their sentences. These inmates, remember, had been convicted in state, not federal, courts so this was simply federal blackmail to curtail parole at the state level. The Clinton administration also pressed the states to try juvenile offenders as adults. Gore articulated the administration�s position: �When young people cross the line, they must be punished. When young people commit serious, violent crimes, they should be prosecuted like adults.� Nonviolent offenders were to be sent to boot camps. Not, it should be noted, his own kids, who evaded punishment for nonviolent infractions such as smoking pot and having an open alcohol container in the car.

When we find ourselves getting into similar situations over and over we have two basic types of response. We often start thinking of the world as the kind of place that generates such situations. Occasionally, though, we find a moment to lift our gazes and see our lives as a story we’re telling as we go along. In those moments we can notice patterns in our lives that seem related to us as much as to the universe, and start to wonder whether anything we’re doing might contribute to generating those repetitive situations.

If only the same self-consciousness could be brought to nation-states! Here in the US our leaders continue to follow the pattern Chomsky described: you can’t reach a position of power in the US government without believing that the United States is unique in history in acting purely from altruistic motives. And it looks like Obama is about to do it again in Syria. Here’s some questions that occur to an amateur observing from the sidelines, which I would hope have been considered.

• Is it possible anyone still believes that sending cruise missiles into a sovereign nation wracked in civil war will decrease terrorism around the world?
• Is Obama going to follow Bush along the path of legalizing preventive military action, as he has on so many of Bush’s paths where we needed change? Is he going to order the UN inspectors to leave while the UN secretary-general pleads for more time?
• What does it mean to teach a lesson to a country whose government is unable to control its own territory through military force?
• Why is this egregious violation of human rights deserving of cruise missiles when so many other violations at least as egregious go unpunished by the same forces?
• What is the endgame? A weekend of cruise missiles and that’s it? Pardon my disbelief.

Ultimately, as with all things political, cui bono? Who in Syria, the United States, and around the world would benefit from military action? If the US claims to be acting on moral grounds despite being unable to generate a case under international law, then those moral grounds should, it seems to me, be clear and unassailable.

I was there, on that historic day 50 years ago, yes I was. I was a young reporter for the Washington Post covering the March on Washington. Well, part of it anyway. The beginning. It was still dark when I showed up down by the Washington Monument, barely in the same time zone as the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where King and the others would speak.

My assignment was to cover George Lincoln Rockwell and his storm troopers in the American Nazi Party. The assignment of some 200 Washington policemen and National Guard MPs was to make sure that the constitutional right of the Nazis peaceably to assemble and freely to speak would be thoroughly abridged.

But neither the Nazis nor the cops had shown up yet. Only the marchers. Bus after bus was pulling in with out-of-state plates, headlights still on from driving all night. Dazed, sleepy, excited, confused people climbed out, carrying picnic hampers, lunch pails, shopping bags, blankets, umbrellas. Black and white, but mostly black. Negroes, we said then.

This was an amazing thing, this march that was assembling itself. Nothing like it had been seen before. Hatred, fire hoses, dogs, bombs, the bullets and clubs, these things we had seen. And now out of all this was coming courage and love and hope. In the dark I felt like crying, I was so proud of us at last. The next time I was to feel that way about my country was the night we elected Obama.

Back to the Nazis, though. There were 75 of them and my memory is that they wore their little Nazi caps and their little Nazi armbands and uniforms when they appeared at 6 a.m., but they didn�t. The story I resurrected from the Post archives yesterday says that the storm troopers wore mufti, and sneakers instead of jackboots. They were corralled into a space about 50 yards square, and the crowd outside the perimeter mostly ignored them. We were too far away to hear the early speakers, but the deputy commander of the Nazis tried to make a speech of his own at about 11. The police arrested him for speaking without a permit, and the whole bunch of them, my story says, �then trailed off single file across the 14th Street Bridge toward their cars.�

I trailed off myself for the paper, and wrote my story. It was about ten inches long. The headline was �Rockwell Nazis �Kaput� in Counter Move,� which was the sort of failed attempt at cleverness or cuteness or something that was to be expected from the burn-outs on the copy desk.

My own attempt at cleverness had been, �The bridge rang from the shuffle of their sneakers as the storm troopers headed home to Virginia.�

�What the hell is this, Jerry?� the city editor said. �Shuffles don�t ring.�

�Yeah, but�� I started out. �Oh, Christ, Ben, go ahead. Change it any way you want.�

It must have been about that time, across town, that Martin Luther King was having his dream.

�to find that spying is going on in here:

The employees even had a code name for the practice � �Love-int� � meaning the gathering of intelligence on their partners.

Dianne Feinstein, a senator who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA told her committee about a set of �isolated cases� that have occurred about once a year for the last 10 years. The spying was not within the US, and was carried out when one of the lovers was abroad.

Comprehending the scale of the surveillance in At-Least-I-Know-I’m-Free America today can be difficult. Only a few years ago people in the profession I’m training for would have considered the belief that one is constantly being watched to be diagnostic. Nowadays, who pays any attention to the cameras at intersections? People running red lights should get ticketed before they cause an accident and someone gets hurt. In the Bay Area we pay for public transit with a plastic card we keep and regularly replenish rather than the old paper ones that were consumed by the machines when they ran out. We can even link the card to our bank accounts and have it automatically withdraw what it needs, so we never stand in line at the ticket machines. Everyone knows we’re on camera when we’re shopping; that keeps prices down by preventing shoplifting. At work, in parking lots and garages, on public transportation, at theaters and other public places, we’ve grown accustomed to having our pictures taken for reasons of our own safety.

So accustomed, in fact, that we don’t stop to think about what could happen if all this information were gathered together, organized, and made readily available to the million and a half Americans with top-secret clearance. The scale of the Echelon/Five Eyes program is indeed hard to conceive. One way to approach it is from the top, imagining the amount of data being gathered and stored at the new NSA facility in Utah for example; but that becomes abstract quickly and loses the immediate connection to daily life.

Another approach is from the bottom, looking at what’s available to your neighborhood tinkerer or stalker. Suppose such a neighbor wanted to do something creepy, what could he get? (I don’t have actual data on this but I’m guessing it’s much more likely to be a “he”.) Well, here’s Brendan O’Connor, head of the security firm Malice Afterthought, telling Darlene Storm of Computerworld Blogs about his new product.

“Creepy Distributed Object Locator,” dubbed CreepyDOL for short, “allows anyone to track everyone in a neighborhood, suburb, or city from the comfort of their sofa.” … Do you have a spare $500? He promised that if you deploy a network of cheap CreepyDOLsensors, then you can “move up from small-time weirding out to the big leagues of total information awareness.”

CreepyDOL (PDF) consists of a bunch of small, cheap computers with “grenade-style” encryption. This means that all the nodes can be turned on using an encryption key on a flash drive. Then the flash drive can be removed and kept centrally, while the individual nodes are distributed by people without access to or knowledge of the key. The nodes are designed to be cheap enough for one-time use. Together they create a special kind of networked database in which they each have all the data almost all the time. The network is designed to cut off any node that starts misbehaving on the theory that it might have been stolen or compromised. To prevent someone from learning who placed the nodes and is gathering data, the nodes run Tor, The Onion Router, about which more in a future post; running Tor lets you move around the net without leaving records of your actual IP address.

CreepyDOL picks up wireless signals from smartphones, tablets, and other wireless devices as they pass by. Most of this information is useless, so CreepyDOL employs what O’Connor calls NOM filters — Nosiness, Observation, and Mining — to filter out the useful data. What data do they gather?

We deployed CreepyDOL nodes to several different locations in a populous, well-travelled, section of Madison, WI. To prevent badness, we programmed the NOM system to look only for traffic from devices we owned; no “random stranger” data was collected at any time. With that constraint, we were able to capture a significant amount of useful data about the devices, including photographs of their owners, correlation between devices owned by the same person, and some “this is where he hangs out”-type data.

“I take all this data, throw it together, and visualize it to show people with real faces and identities and histories moving around a map in 3D,” he told Forbes. “Even if you don’t connect, if you are wired on a network, we will find you. If you are a person in a city, we will find you, and we will do it all for very little money.”

What Andy Greenburg found to be “creepiest of all,” is that “O’Connor has even designed the software to grab the user�s photo if they visit a certain dating site that lacks SSL encryption, adding that to the target�s profile.”

If that level of surveillance is available to a neighborhood hacker for $500, imagine what the NSA could do with the coöperation of the biggest tech companies.