If in fact, the US story is correct, if it is true that Syria used chemical weapons, then it wouldn't be a major crime to send a kind of shot across the bow saying you can't do this anymore. Not the best thing in the world, but not a major crime, either. So, I think at the very least there should have been an inquiry into what happened. But just joining the bandwagon about how we're finally standing up to crimes in Syria, that's ridiculous.

A default of the US government would not only be very harmful here, it would probably send the country back into deep recession, but it just might crash the international financial system.

Moves toward sovereignty in Iraq stimulate pressures first for human rights among the bitterly repressed Shi'ite population but also toward some degree of autonomy. You can imagine a kind of a loose Shi'ite alliance in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. And much worse, although Europe can be intimidated by the United States, China can't. It's one of the reasons, the main reasons, why China is considered a threat. We're back to the Mafia principle.

People tend to rally around power.

The educational system in the US was a highly predictable victim of the neoliberal reaction, guided by the maxim of "private affluence and public squalor." Funding for public education has sharply declined. As higher education is driven to a business model in accord with neoliberal doctrine, administrative bureaucracy has sharply increased at the expense of faculty and students. Cost-cutting leads to hyper-exploitation of the more vulnerable, creating a new precariat of graduate students and adjuncts surviving on a bare pittance, replacing tenured faculty.

I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to "educate them to keep them from our throats," to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education.

The world was warned of extremely severe dangers unless urgent steps are taken to deal with global warming.