Recommended by Micah Zenko, some more intelligent blogging on foreign policy

    

    Political Violence at a Glance

A Primer on USSC rulings hampering the quest for Justice from the Government

    

    How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops.

UK looking to strip citizenship of Britons who fight abroad

    

    UK Home Secretary Theresa May, in an article for the 'Daily Telegraph', wrote, "People who insist on travelling to fight in Syria and Iraq will be investigated by the police and security services. For those who have dual nationality, I have the power to strip them of their citizenship and exclude them from the country."

Source - India outlook

Compared to President Cleveland:

Many Cubans reside in this country and indirectly promote the insurrection through the press, by public meetings, by the purchase and shipment of arms, by the raising of funds, and by other means, which the spirit of our institutions and the tenor of our laws do not permit to be made the subject of criminal prosecutions.

Source - President Cleveland's last State of the Union - American Interests in the Cuban Revolution

There is No Oversight Without Root

On UNIX and Linux machines, which are the heavy hitters in the world of computer technology, the "administrator" account who can do anything is called "root."

I once had "root" account privileges on over 2000 machines, at Morgan Stanley, namely, all the machines involved in running equities trading, options trading, and market making. I wasn't so foolish to think that I could get away with criminal activity with my power. I assumed that lots of logging of any activities I performed as root occurred, and I'd need to hide all of it to do anything nefarious.

In fact, I behaved in the opposite manner, giving my all to keep Morgan Stanley operating during the worst strains on our system (one Chinese market swing of 9% in one day, the Amaranth hedge fund collapse, and the 3+ weeks when the markets went crazy, starting July, 2007, because of the sub-prime mortgage and other market bubble problems). I like to say I kept together the capitalist system, since I was the lead of the front lines of "monitoring" our systems for problems, a job I was allowed to handle as I saw fit. If we had failed, there is simply no way Goldman Sachs could have picked up the extra business we weren't handling, and the markets would have been frozen. Also, because of that monitoring, I got the best compliment I have ever received from a work activity. A peer later said "Monitoring went to shit after you left."

Guess who doesn't have root/administrator access on Defense Department computers? The President of the United States. When he reads reports from DoD, it's always whatever, and just, what they want to give him. It's an abomination, and perfectly suited to the current corrupt culture of military contracting that is just a part of the huge problem of Federal contracting.

The President should have/needs root access.

I want to be in Congress, too, by the way.

Seriously, @SenJohnMcCain, Shut the Fuck Up.

John McCain, on a Sunday Morning talk show, today:

ISIS “continues to make gains everywhere.”

Reality? Here is a sampling for ABC News.

Reinvigorated by American airstrikes, Kurdish forces retook two towns from Sunni militants Sunday, achieving one of their first victories after weeks of retreating, a senior Kurdish military official said.

Kurdish peshmerga fighters were able to push the militants of the Islamic State group out of the villages of Makhmour and al-Gweir, some 45 kilometers from Irbil, Brig. Gen. Shirko Fatih said. 

Do not click on link, quite annoying ad and then video.

Madeleine Albright Says It

    

    From "Is the World A Mess?" on VOA News.

She said two “huge game changers” have affected recent events.  One is the behavior of RussianPresident Vladimir Putin toward Ukraine.  The other is what has been happening in the Middle East, starting with the political unrest known as the Arab Spring.  She also noted what she called “the artificiality of the borders that were established after World War I.”

(emphasis mine).

It's nice, for me, to hear people acknowledge that this is a problem. Mostly I hear only about the value of territorial integrity.