First, I want to remark on Vice President Biden's recent comment on Russia's aggression in the Ukraine.  He said, "This is a test for America."  I understand his meaning.  Putin has been getting his way in his part of the world, exercising his "manifest destiny" over the former Soviet Union.  He doesn't want the Ukraine to join NATO or become a player in the European Union.  Post-Cold War Russians have been screwing with the Ukraine for two decades, including attempted assassination by poisoning a Ukrainian leader.  Thought of in terms of U.S. shenanigans in "our" hemisphere, this is nothing remarkable.  Guatemala, Cuba, El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua, have all received the advantages of CIA goodwill.
     Now, as Ukrainian citizens get shelled, do you feel it, Americans?

     Second, I recommend a movie I watched last night on Netflix: Radio Free Albemuth, based on a posthumously published novel by Philip K. Dick.  It's low budget, well-made, and faithful to the novel, which makes it a rarity in films based on Dick's novels and stories.  There's only one other movie I've seen based on his work that captures the full Philip K. Dick essence of humor, paranoia, and intricate plotting: Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. 
     Radio Free Albemuth takes place in an alternate America, run by a dictatorial President Fremont, who maintains his power by whipping up fear over a terror organization that may or may not exist, and anyway is certainly not the kind of threat he's making it out to be.  Nicholas Brady is a record producer who begins to receive visions, from God, or Something Else.  His best friend, Philip K. Dick (who wrote himself into the novel), a science fiction writer, is skeptical about his friend's claims, but becomes more and more convinced something big is going on, happening in a country dedicated to surveillance and control, where organizations like FAP (Friends of the American People) check up on and inform on people regularly. 
    
     Third, Brian Williams of NBC News is in trouble because of a "personal" story he's been telling about his time covering the Iraq War in 2003.  He was in a Chinook helicopter, embedded with some troops, when, he has claimed for over a decade, his ride was hit by a rocket propelled grenade.  The chopper had to land, the experience was harrowing.  There was a Chinook hit by an RPG in the vicinity, but, according to troops in that helicopter, Williams wasn't in it.  He's modified his story to being in a nearby helicopter, that he remembered the details wrong, like how a man who gets shot at doesn't remember that he wasn't actually shot at, but assumes he was, especially when the story is good to tell on late night television.
     This is a minor scandal, but the troops whose Chinook actually got hit have had to hear for many years some bozo from the news media attaching his combat virginity to their real war
experiences.
     Fox News Channel personalities have predictably latched firmly onto this story, among them  Sean Hannity, who, unlike Brian Williams, would never report from a war zone but loves America's war efforts as long as he can sit on his ass watching them from his studio.
     It sounds like a long time ago: 2003.  Williams in a helicopter, not the helicopter, but a military chopper traveling above Iraq.  2003, from the perspective of my memory, is not a long time ago.  I was thirty-eight when that war began.  I remember the seventies pretty well, so 2003 is like several days before yesterday.  From a warfare perspective, though, it's a long time ago.
     Nobody on the news covering the Williams fabrication added, "That was 2003 in Iraq.  We're still there," and that's the most important point, I think, dealing with the futility of America's endless immoral involvement in the Middle East.

                                                                            Vic Neptune