Bag a cat

Stewardship is not something that I read about every day, and the responsibility that Mr. Beagles has for his forest is above and beyond the call of duty.  Even us non-religious types would say he is doing the Lord's work, and indeed he is.  Have any fruit trees been introduced to the freehold?

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It must be more than twenty years since I watched The Falcon and the Snowman on VHS from the local video store.  I'm always curious about the movies that Uncle Ken mentions, even in passing.

So I watched it again the other day, wondering about the references to the 60s and how well the film held up after all this time.  It was a pleasant surprise seeing those young guys, Hutton and Penn, in their roles as amateur spies.

As Mr. Beagles said,  "Those weren't simpler times, we were just simpler people."  I liked it better when there was a clear delineation between amateur and professional.  Espionage has come a long way, baby, thanks to  Snowden, Assange, Manning, and folks of that ilk.  No more of that nonsense of sneaking around with documents hidden in newspapers or making marks on a lamppost to schedule a clandestine meeting.  Today everyone can be a spy; a quick encrypted text message, and there you go.  The cat is out of the bag.

I don't know if this is good or bad.  There is so much information flying around that it must be close to impossible to analyze it and make sense of it's meaning.  Maybe Google and Amazon Web Services are fronts for the NSA, or vice versa, and it's all a plot to make us buy more crap to keep the global economy humming.  Not the goofiest idea I've come up with, but it will serve.

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Viet Nam seems to be doing well these days, with a growing economy and industrial base.  That's what happens when you get bombed to shit; you wind up with new factories.  I used to joke that if the Axis powers won WWII we would end up driving German and Japanese cars.  Funny how things worked out.

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It's true that we 'Muricans don't pay much attention to the rest of the world, but I can't blame the Economist for my latest list of crises.  Those were just items found from various news aggregation sites, subject to change daily.

And they do...yesterday some bigwig at the EU was saying they should do away with all national borders.  Yeah, that should work well.