Like my old man always said..."half my friends are dead because of heroin".  That life lesson hit home and stuck...I'll never try it cuz I know me and I'd f*ckin' love it.

Radical self-medicating mixed with an extreme version of "male risk-taking behavior" (even though obviously females do it too)..

There seems to be almost a faddish aspect to it..

Substance abuse is a scourge on our country as well as others, but I'm under no illusions that the government's so-called "War on Drugs" has been anything other than an abject failure. Speaking for myself only, I think the question before us now is this:

At what point in time do we consider an alternative, a more creative and nuanced approach to this problem, rather than simply repeating the insanity of our previous policy failures, by constantly repackaging them for public opinion as though they were some "Greatest Hits" CD compilations to be hawked by Huey Lewis and Mickey Dolenz on late-night cable TV?

Now, I'm not arguing at all that there's an easy answer here to the escalating challenge posed by President Assad's deployment of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict. And quite honestly, I would not want to be in President Obama's shoes right now as he weighs our short- and long-term interests, and balances them against the various options and scenarios presently on his table.

But I'll be blunt. What happened in the Damascus suburbs one weeks ago, in which the Assad regime unleashed a massive nerve agent attack upon Syrian civilians, killing upwards of 1,300 of them that we know of and injuring untold thousands of others, really doesn't sit well with me at all. Nor does the direction of this particular discussion, which encompasses a topic deserving of far better debate than the present (and entirely predictable) round of Obama-bashing by Edger and lentinel.

Well, I don't think you guys should get off this easy today, so I'll take a contrary opinion. Given my own belief that the wanton deployment and use of chemical weapons constitutes a very serious war crime, I think this disastrous turn of events in the Syrian civil conflict certainly requires some form of forceful response from the international community, and perhaps even invites direct military retaliation on our part.

Again, strictly my opinion, but I also believe what happened in Damascus doesn't call out for a blind military flailing at various targets in an emotional retaliation. Rather, its ultimate success depends upon its delivery of a carefully crafted and targeted response which sends a very clear and unambiguous message to President Assad, specifically that he continues down this dubious path at his own physical peril, and that his fate as well as that of his family could very well depend upon his own clear-eyed and sober reassessment regarding what he's doing presently.

In the meantime, as you respond to my challenge, I would like to remind all of you that evil will usually triumph whenever otherwise good people start grasping at various reasons and rationales for doing absolutely nothing even when its presence is clearly in our midst. So, please consider specifically:

• If we don't do something about Assad's use of chemical weapons now, then when should we;
  
• If the Syrian civil war is really none of our country's concern -- as a few of you, and please correct me if I'm wrong, seem to be suggesting -- then when should the deployment of chemical weaponry against a civilian population become our concern; and
  
• If we're not willing to get serious about this issue today, then what happens tomorrow, most likely somewhere else?

Instead it was arranged for him to go to Stockholm Sweden, a first, and meet with Nordic and Baltic leaders - including the Norwegian PM who, even as the Nobel Peace Prize is supposed to be unpolitical, I have never doubted was instrumental in picking Obama as the recipient in 2009.

So is that meeting for him to bask in the adulation of true friends and being reassured of their never ending loyalty? Even when it comes to attacking Syria?

Call me naive, but I would have preferred for him to stick to the meeting with Putin and discuss the possibilities of a future peace conference. That would have shown him as at least trying to live up to the obligations of being the NPP-President.

In the matter of Syria: I know that my initial & secondary reactions is to hold back as long as possible or even to say that we should do nothing under any circumstances.  Like you, I find it hard to make a moral argument about which type of dead is better than another.  I also reject siren calls to involvement in military conflagration ever since coming of age during the Vietnam human debacle that we gradually allowed ourselves to be sucked into.  Further, I did not support our immediate invasion of Afghanistan; and, I was vocal & publicly outspoken against our disastrous invasion of Iraq.  

There are times, imo, that the matter is not so clear.  Despite the players (including the uncertainty of the rebels' agenda) that situation may be what the world's countries are witnessing contemporaneously today ... massive chemical killings.  Granted that was the kind of claim used by Bush & his deceitful crew when they kept referring to Saddam as having "gassed his own people" ten to twenty years earlier. But what do you do when someone is performing such actions at the same time TV cameras now show it?  What is the philosophy? What is the reason?

I want to be clear that my own reasoning on the Syrian matter is clouded and unresolved.  While I do not see a difference between dead & dead, there can arise in human society an horrific line that goes beyond that obvious conclusion ... the Nazi gas chambers as a methodology for mass killing in WWII is the most familiar example.  Would the alleged situation in Syria resemble that in any significant way?  

Understand that I don't know the answer; but, there is a feeling on a level that I cannot describe that says some form of intervention (not the boots-on-the-ground nor massive indiscriminate killing on our part/the UN's part, etc.)may be warranted.  I don't know where the "humanitarian" line is, just that there comes a time when we as humans might see that line crossed ... when it is more than the ugly, but usual, part & parcel of conflicts & dead-is-dead modern combat that societies so often experience.  In that vein, and in retrospect, I still wonder whether the US should have done more in the way of intervention to alleviate the Rwandan horror.

lentinel: "It is a proven and established fact that people who are killed by drones and bombs are measurably less dead than those who have been chemicalized."

That sort of moral equivocation, offered as it is in the face of a brutal war crime like a chemical attack on unarmed civilians, is simply reprehensible.

I know very few people here, Jim and Slado possibly excepted, who adopt a consistent "my country, right or wrong" approach in these sorts of discussions, regardless of the evidence presented. Certainly, I've never claimed that our country is blameless and perfect. I know that in many ways, we've been exposed as having some very significant policy flaws, if not inherent flaws in our national character.

But conversely, why must you consistently maintain a default position that the United States is somehow always the evil party and always at fault, and that whatever our leaders do is always to be considered far worse than what anyone else does, regardless of the situation at hand and the evidence presented?

I've said this before, you're really no better than Jim's and Slado's perpetual chorus of "God Bless America" when your criticisms of this administration devolve into a tedious litany of false equivalencies for every occasion. Rather, you merely become the leftist equivalent of the right-wing clown car.

This is not a black-and-white world where things can be categorized accordingly, and further, yours is hardly the definitive view of U.S. foreign policy. And whenever you talk like this, it's frankly rather hard to consider you as someone who should be taken seriously. So get real, and stop acting like a morally pretentious left-wing cartoon.

And speaking of nowhere to run to, Mme. Zorba, it's only exactly 13 more hours until we can finally get out of American Samoa, not that anyone's counting. The Samoan people are very friendly, and the terrain and vegetation are remarkably similar to that found on the windward side of Oahu, but Tutuila Island is only one-tenth our island's size, and we've since driven almost every single mile of roadway there is to be had here.

Talk about island fever! Is this what I have to look forward to on my week-long business trip to Guam in October? It's been a long time since I've been so anxious to go home. There are only three weekly nonstop flights between Pago Pago and Honolulu (M-W-F), and we leave tonight at 11:20 a.m. and arrive tomorrow morning at 5:40 a.m. HST.