Privacy

Don't believe anything the big tech companies tell you about protecting your privacy.  Yes, I know, both Apple and Samsung now are offering encrypted email.  Great.  Google, especially if you're signed in, is recording every site you visit.  (I doubt they'll care if you visit my site. Nobody much cares who comes and goes.)

Go here.  Download Tor.  Stay (probably) safe from the NSA and whatnot.

Meanwhile, Back in Syria...

So we are told that Obama administration personnel are "vetting" rebel groups in Syria to discover which are "moderate" enough to arm and train.  That may be unnecessary.  Lately, it looks like Bashir al-Assad is doing it for them.  Leaving fighting the Islamic State to the US and its "coalition," Assad's air force has been concentrating its efforts on eliminating the regime's other enemies — notably the less radical Islamist groups.  (Incidentally, the only secularists in Syria side with Assad.)

All the USofA can accomplish in Syria and Iraq is stirring the pot, and the best course of action for the USofA is to get the hell out, and let the regional powers — who have the most to lose — sort things out for themselves.

UK still U

The Scots have saved themselves a lot of very major hassles by voting "No" on statehood, and even more hassles for Alex Salmond, who now gets to, sort of, retire.  They really needed their own currency if they were going independent, and eighteen months would not have been enough time to get that organized.  Also, they would have needed to negotiate a relationship with the EU, figure out their new relationship with not-so-Great Britain, etc., etc.  Oh, yeah, and what about NATO?

Salmond is not entirely out of the picture, I suspect.  Those last-minute, craven crumblings by Cameron still are likely to demand some negotiation, and I can't see Salmond just staying out of it.  The Scottish Nationalist Party will need a bit of charismatic leadership, and Salmond fits the bill.

Here We Go Again

Yes, those guys from the Islamic State are truly terrible.  As you may have gleaned from my previous post, I was not terribly impressed by the beheading of those two American journalists — nobody is a war correspondent except by personal choice.  There have been a lot of other beheadings, though.  Every time ISIL overran some Iraqi army position, they sorted out the Shi'a "heretics" and lopped their heads off.  They made pretty convincing attempts at genocide against the Yazidis and the Maronite Christians.  I suppose somebody ought to stop them.

Somehow, though, I don't think the USofA can manage the job.  Yes, I know — we were the ones who broke Iraq, so, supposedly, we bought it.  Maybe it's time, however, to toss the broken pieces in the trash and move on.

Right now, we're arming and training Shite militias that were trying to kill us five years ago.  We're looking for "moderate" Syrian militias to arm and train, although that requires stretching the term "moderate" to include quite a few extremists.  Sadly, we seem pretty inept at the arming and training business, as witnessed by the collapse of the Iraqi army.

Air strikes seem to be the only approach the American public is comfortable with at this stage of the game, and you can't use air strikes without killing a lot of innocents, and radicalizing their friends and relatives.  Let's face it: nobody over there likes us, or really wants our presence.

Politically, though, Obama has to do something, so he will.  But it won't work.

Those Dead Journalists

Disregarding the messiness, beheading strikes me as a rather humane means of execution.  I know it has to be very upsetting to family and friends of the victims, but if I had to choose between beheading and lethal injection in certain states of the USofA, I think the beheading might be far preferable.

What makes a person a journalist?  Both Sotloff and Foley were freelancers, selling their reportage to many different news outlets.  They enjoyed no worker benefits — not life insurance, nor health insurance, nor any formal backup when they got themselves into very serious trouble.  Blame the Islamic State by all means — it is the very definition of terrorism — but also blame the news media, the deprofessionalizing of reportage, and a media culture that encourages young people to toss themselves into extreme danger for a small chance of "success."

The photojournalists and videojournalists are in more peril than the print journalists, albeit more likely to be killed outright on the battlefield than captured and used as propaganda tools.  Reporters of all stripes need much more professional training if they will work in war zones, and the media should accept that responsibility.

Obama's Foreign Policy

Second guessing Our President on foreign policy seems to be the new national pastime, but none of the second-guessers seems to have an answer to the question, "Well, then what would you do?"  I sure don't.

McCain and Graham like to dance around like Yosemite Sam and sing their "Get tough" song, but really — invade Iraq again?  Go to war with Russia, perhaps?  Sometimes the options come down to few or none.

Arm and train the "moderates" in Syria?  First you'd have to find some, and you probably couldn't find enough to have any impact on the situation over there.  Apart from the Kurds, the Iraqis are pretty much worthless when it comes to fighting ISIL, and Haider al-Abadi looks to me like Nuri al-Maliki lite.  Okay, it would be very nice if the Kurds didn't have to rely on Soviet era weapons, but arming them with something better risks pissing off the Iranians and the Turks.  (The Iranians and the Turks?  No wonder Obama seems more than a little burnt out lately!)

How about arming and training the western Ukrainians?  It yet may happen, but didn't we fight enough proxy wars against Russia last century?  And think how successful those were!

As you know, I'm not a big fan of Barack Obama, but as far as foreign policy goes, I suggest he's muddling through as best he can — and no worse than anybody else could manage, under the circumstances.  Let's all just take a step back, and let him muddle.

Race in America

It's not pleasant to be black in America, especially if you happen to be young and male.  It's not even especially pleasant to be a Harvard educated, dark complected President of the United States raised in a middle class white household who won office with a ton of Wall Street money.  The die-hard racist elements in American society don't make any particular distinctions.

 Black Americans were jubilant when the Hawaiian was elected and re-elected.  It seemed like some sort of turning point.  It wasn't.


I suspect the biggest problem is that so many white people (and Asians as well) think young black men are just too damned scary.  George Zimmerman thought Trayvon Martin was so scary he just had to follow him and shoot him.  Police officer Randall Kerrick thought auto accident victim Jonathan Ferrell was so scary he just had to shoot at him twelve times, hitting him with ten bullets.  There are plenty of other examples, so we don't have to speculate on why police officer Darren Wilson just had to shoot Michael Brown six times — twice in the top of the head, suggesting that he might already have fallen down face first after the other four shots.

So why are young black men so scary?  Well, part of the answer is that a lot of them want to look scary.  They want to look like those thug rappers, perhaps, or they want to look scary so other people will just leave them the hell alone.  Maybe, sometimes, it works.

Sometimes, though, it doesn't.