Michele and I watched The Bourne Legacy a couple of days ago. If you haven’t seen it, the conceit is that – through a secret Government program called Treadstone – several top operatives have been chemically enhanced. They are both mentally and physically much more capable than the usual super-capable, James Bond type agent. Very early on, in the movie establishes that the people involved in running Treadstone are ruthless  and evil. When the program gets exposed, to cauterize the leaks and save their own asses, the project heads start trying to kill everybody involved.

Dr. Marta Shearing is a brilliant scientist working on the project because the science is so interesting. She semi-doesn’t know how bad and evil the project is (part of why she doesn’t know is because she really doesn’t want to know). This science that, presumably, could be used for good purposes is – in Treadstone – being used to make enhanced killers.

I just read the The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics will reprint a series of articles on space exploration that were first published in Colliers Magazine in 1952.  Wernher von Braun, along with several others, wrote the articles and I would have been about twelve when I first saw them. The articles were spectacularly illustrated and, as a twelve-year-old, that was probably their biggest attraction but what ever the reason, they drew me into the world of rockets and space travel (if you are interested, the AIAA will reprint them in their entirety).

It wasn’t until years later, when I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, that I learned von Braun earned his chops designing V-2 rockets for the Nazis. Like Marta Shearing, he was a brilliant scientist who was willing to sell his soul to pursue the intellectual work he was interested in. According to Wikipedia, According to a BBC documentary in 2011, the attacks [V-2] resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, while 12,000 forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners were killed producing the weapons.  The forced labor was not von Braun’s concern and he makes a strong case that he really didn’t know about it and an even better case – although inadvertently – that he didn’t want to know.

A couple of days ago, Richard Taylor sent me a New York Times article, Data You Can Believe In, that talks about a singular breakthrough in the field of television ad buying. Working on the Obama campaign, Larry Grisolano and Chauncey McLean, among others, developed cutting edge technology to much better identify where to spend television dollars to get maximum effect (using social media, it is also much more intrusive than conventional, now old-fashioned, methods). Without going into detail – that I don’t know -a pretty good argument can be made that they were instrumental in Obama winning the election. The problem is that the election is over, the need – in Obama’s case, at least – is over and Grisolano and McLean want to keep working on the technology.

That is where Caesar’s comes in. This is exactly the kind of technology that Caesar’s can use to get casual gamblers to make more trips to the tables and working for Caesar’s allows Grisolano and McLean to keep doing what they love. According to the article McLean treated his shift from selling Obama to selling Caesars as a small discomfort that was necessary if he wanted to keep working on the technological advancements he and his colleagues developed on the campaign.

Seeing these three separate stories at about the same time got me thinking about them as different sides of the same coin (will that analogy hold up?). Good people, brilliant people, moral people, doing immoral acts with almost no repercussions. Dr. Marta Shearing did evil work because it was interesting and, in the movie, she is forgiven and becomes Aaron Cross’s accomplice and consort. When Wernher von Braun came to the United States, all his past sins were excused.  He worked on our space program for NASA, and was instrumental in the Apollo Program. In 1977, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Most people won’t even think Grisolano and McLean did anything wrong by going to Caesar’s and they will make alot of money working for the gambling industry.

I am not saying that these people are evil – hell, Shearing isn’t even real – but their acts hurt people. I don’t want to say that working for Caesar’s is comparable to building a rocket that, more or less, randomly killed people, but, while not as dramatic, what Larry Grisolano and Chauncey McLean are doing is contributing to ruining lives.

Capitalism has become our state religion and, if it is legal, what is done in and by the private sector is sacrosanct. It is never looked upon as evil, no matter how much devastation is done; maybe thoughtless at times, maybe evil as a byproduct, but decidedly not evil in itself (at least not by the same people who get upset at the government). There are honest reasons for holding private companies to a lesser standard than government. After all, governments can do alot more visible damage than the private sector and the people getting it done to – or on – them are usually not willing participants. Google knows more about us than the national Security Agency but Google can not put a person in jail for smoking pot, Google can not take away a person’s children for letting them ride in a car without a safety seat; our government has done both.

Still, private companies – the capitalist, or entrepreneurial system if you prefer – do major, systemic, long-term, damage . Damage to both the country and its citizens. Almost certainly, the private sector has done more harm than the government in the past – often aided or allowed by the government, it is true – and there is reason to think it will continue to. Few people think of McDonald’s as evil but McDonald’s has probably done more persisting damage to the health of this nation than all the people who are now in jail on drug offenses.

In the end, two idealistic guys – actually more than two – are helping Caesar’s get more money out of their customers because the work behind it is interesting and that just makes me sad.

When the Robert’s Supreme Court ruled that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional – Section 5 required that certain States and localities must get Federal permission for all voting law changes – it seemed to me that this was profiling and the Supreme Court was right in eliminating it. It seemed to me that the act said, in effect, Alabama is more likely to abuse people’s rights – especially people of color – than, say, Pennsylvania.

I have argued with several people about this since the Supreme Court decision, including Richard Taylor on the 4th, but now I realize that I was wrong. Yes, Section 5 is profiling, but it is like profiling Mohamed Atta, if he had been released from probation 50 years after driving one of the airplanes into the World Trade Center.

My change of mind is driven by two things, first a copy of the so-called literacy test Louisiana required black voters to pass in the 1960’s. It is a nasty test composed of mostly trick questions. A sample question is 21. Print the word vote upside down, but in the correct order. or 24. Print a word that looks the same whether it is printed forwards or backwards.  Click through; see if you pass the test, I didn’t.

The second mind changer was an article, entitled The Color of Law, Voting Rights and the Southern Way of Life  in the combined July 8 & 15 issue of The New Yorker. The article, which is really a review of several books and movies, goes into some detail on the struggle black people went through to get the right to vote in the first place. It reminded me that people died trying to get the vote.

Think about that. There were people willing to die to get the vote. They didn’t want to die, but they were willing to take the chance. This is not like soldiers sent to war, these are people willing to march for their vote even if it means they may get killed. I didn’t vote in 1968 because I was pissed at Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, reading this article made me ashamed.

I think that it is important to remember that this law suit,  Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, was brought by Shelby County (duh! it is in the title, Steve). This is the same Shelby County that fought for a hundred years to keep black people from voting, hell! they fought for a hundred years to keep black people from using a white water fountain. To believe that everything is fine now, is to live in a world of fantasy.

(Oh, those KKK idiots above, that’s last week in a different Shelby County, Shelby County Tennessee.)

I have so many conflicting thoughts on  Edward Snowden and the leaks from from the National Security Agency.

I think, Edward Snowden is a hero whistle blower and we need more people like him. I also think Edward Snowden seems sort of nuts and it is scary that people like him are able to get $200,000 per year jobs – supposedly – to protect us when they can’t even get themselves through Highschool.

I worry that this huge domestic spying regime is threatening our democracy. But I know that the government has been tracing our calls – duh! hasn’t anyone seen The Wire – for a long time, so what else is new? Sure, Snowden broke the law and abused the government’s trust in giving him a Security Clearance. But, he released information that everybody already knows, so No harm, no foul (and, lets face it, Google already knows all this information about me, or anybody who uses the internet for that matter).

And on and on.

Circling around behind all these thoughts – thoughts, bouncing around like a ping pong ball in a garbage disposal – is the awareness that the government is becoming stronger and more invasive and the people in power often puts their own interest above that of the People’s interest. And behind that, is the fear that Obama is worse than Bush in this regard or – atleast – has continued Bush’s polices and is more zealous in going after the whistle blowers. I am afraid that his promise of Transparency – that I so resonated with during the campaign – has been co-opted by the, increasingly, powerful Security State.

I also wonder what good this massive security apparatus is doing if they couldn’t even flush out a couple of amateurs like the Tsarnaev brothers who said they were Chechen and got the plans to their bomb from an internet site published by al-Qaeda in Yemen. Why weren’t their emails and searches picked up?

As my thoughts calm down, I realize that I am less concerned with the fact that we – my country – is wiretapping than the Administration’s reaction to the whistle blower. And that really boils down to What does Obama want to do and what does the Security Establishment want him to do?