Decline of the Empire: Bemused, bothered and bewildered by the American security state

A Canadian writer's take on the U.S.'s current level of dysfunction:

The tech sector is the only thing America has going for it these days. (Unless you count crumbling infrastructure, runaway debt, paralyzed government, or a trillion-dollar military bogged down in pointless faraway non-wars.) Unfortunately, the American government seems too dumb to realize this: so they maintain stupid visa laws, while ignoring smart alternatives; keep playing fast-and-loose, at best, with net neutrality; and, oh yes, plan to wiretap (and—thanks to Wikileaks—censor) the entire Internet, at great cost, apparently in the hope that bad guys will never discover the magic of public-key encryption.

The rest of the story: Letter From Canada: Why Is America So Furious About Wikileaks? by Jon Evans (TechCrunch 2010-12-11).