No matter how deep a background check goes, no matter how thorough the inquiry is into a person's character, no matter how many interviews are made of friends and family, and no matter how many polygraph tests are performed, if a person is given a position that requires some trust there is always going to be a chance that this person is going to abuse the trust. Psychopaths and sociopaths the the scariest of these people because they have no problem with lying, are good at it because they are usually good at being manipulative, are often very well liked by family and friends, and can lie without end like a baby-kissing politician running for re-election and still pass a polygraph test.

Perhaps the problem is in the kind of people being sought for these jobs that require great trust. While a person needs to be squeaky clean to get security clearance, perhaps the squeaky clean requirement is causing the government to choose some from the wrong pool of candidates. My experience has been that you will have a better chance of finding an honest man (or woman) by looking at those who have messed up in his or her life, is genuinely repentent, and has demonstrated through years of clean and honest living that he or she is worthy of such great trust. The gratitude that comes from being given this second chance is an incredible motivator in steering a straight and narrow course through life.

Melville Dewey, the progenitor of librarianship in this country and the creator of the Dewey Decimal System for call numbers on books that is used throughout much of the world (including most public libraries in the English-speaking world), was an advocate for phonetic spelling. He often spelled his own name Melvil Dui. However, Dewey was kind of a harmless lunatic and, as I remember, not many took him seriously.

Honestly, can you imagine the difficulty that would be caused by having to learn how to spell words differently after having slogged through years of primary school learning how to spell them the "old-fashioned" way? It would be sort of like the revolution created by Kamal Attaturk created in Turkey by using the authority of the government to abolish the use of the Arabic alphabet for writing Turkish in favor of the Latin alphabet.

Anyway, this nut job who wants to create a whole new letter to replace an archaic one we ditched centuries ago because he's lazy should just go away and get a life.

And how many Americans give a shit about Canada, eh? All we want is your oil and natural gas in Alberta. ;-) You can keep the Mounties, Quebec, and the moose and mosquitoes. Oh, but send us your health care system. At least it works.

Today would be a good day to ponder another American Revolution, except that I'd rather not end up in Gitmo or some CIA black prison in eastern Europe being tortured. Besides, as history has shown, in nearly every case revolutions are revolting.

You Brits ought to be thankful for our independence. Without us you'd have been overrun by the Germans twice, be speaking their awful language instead of your own awful language but more flexible language, still bankrupt after two world wars, and would not have been blessed by the Pax American that followed. Given the alternative to a Pax Germania or a , the American version is much preferable I think.

So just what did we Yanks give you?
1. The computer revolution (although the Brits did contribute much in the beginning).
2. Peace.
3. Better tasting food (although an Indian or Pakistani curry blows everyone away).
4. Mark Twain, Steinbeck, Hemmingway, and Melville.
5. Winston Churchill (his mother was an American).

And what did the Brits give us?
1. Their language, complete with its idiotic spellings.
2. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Conan Doyle (well, that's a fair trade).
3. The Beatles (not so bad), Andrew Lloyd Webber (you should have kept him!), and Bob Hope.
4. The BBC World Service.
5. Downton Abbey.

I think you guys got the better end of the deal.

Unless my correspondents do as I do and keep most of the letters I receive.

In the days of yore when feather quills touched the surface of handmade rag paper people regularly did this. They also make copies of every letter they sent. That's why we have so many letters of people such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and his wife Abigail Adams. Even if the recipient didn't keep the letter, the copy survived.

I write a lot of snail mail. I correspond with people in jails and prisons which usually requires me to use snail mail. Furthermore, I've maintained a long correspondence with a friend. I have his e-mail address and his phone number but we choose to keep our communication limited mostly to paper letters, usually written by hand. I write mine with a fountain pen!

When I learned of the NSA's snooping I was comforted somewhat by the fact that my most private confidential communications goes through the U.S. Postal Service and is not subject to this. Well, I guess not! The supermarket (and the bank) knows what I buy when I use a credit card to pay for it. The various cities and states know where I drive because of cameras. The cops now are installing license plate recognition cameras to record license numbers. Facial recognition software makes it difficult for me to go anywhere anonymously even on foot. Verizon Wireless knows where I am because I keep my phone on most of the time. I'm waiting to have an RFID tag implanted in my forehead!
Pretty soon we're going to be living in a country like the old DDR (that's East Germany to those too young to remember the Cold War) and a spying apparatus like its Stasi. Watch "Das Leben der Altern" (The Lives of Others), a German film of a few years ago to give you an idea of just how invasive this spying became. And this movie is set in 1984. It's much easier now!

Given your user ID probably old enough to be the sperm donor of your sperm donor. And it was called being "hyperactive" when I was a kid. This was 1970, folks. What it means is that I have to really like what I'm doing in order to get into the "zone" to be productive. If I don't like something it has to be imperative with dire consequences if I don't do it for me to get around to doing it. That's ADHD.

There are many things to be afraid of. I think my biggest fear is being irrelevant, something I feel greatly sometimes as the young hotshots come up from below and as more gray hairs appear. And because of my ADHD and dyslexia, I fear not being able to use my intelligence when I need to use it because my brain refuses to work.

But there are more terrible things to fear. The wrath of my evil cat when I step on her tail and what she leaves in the kitty litter that I have to clean up are two such horrible prospects. And when I was married, my wife was quite scary at times.

But really, when one looks at the big picture, the only thing to fear is fear itself (as FDR said). Accepting life on life's terms and not wasting time on trying to change things that can't be changed is what's important to me.