Bless them all!

This is great, from Shane Harris at Foreign Policy: it seems that at the same time as General Keith Alexander was running the National Security Agency he was really busy speculating in commodities, potash and aluminum, with weird and unpredictable markets and connections to our favorite spying targets, China and the Russian Federation:

At the time, Alexander was a three-star general whose financial portfolio otherwise consisted almost entirely of run-of-the-mill mutual funds and a handful of technology stocks. Why he was engaged in commodities trades, including trades in one market that experts describe as being run by an opaque "cartel" that can befuddle even experienced professionals, remains unclear. When contacted, Alexander had no comment about his financial transactions, which are documented in recently released financial disclosure forms that he was required to file while in government. The NSA also had no comment.

I'll leave it to Marcy and the Paranoids to try to figure out what kinds of webs of corruption could be involved in these dealings, but there's something else in here that sorts better with my own idea of our intelligence apparatus, as a kind of Dilbert cartoon with heavy weaponry: that this three-star general overseeing an agency of 30,000 or 40,000 employees and a budget between ten and twenty billion dollars a year is spending his office hours at his computer, day-trading. And no doubt searching for good travel and hotel deals and checking eBay for whatever thematic tchotchkes his wife collects and, consuming his delivery pad thai at his desk at lunchtime, taking special NSA BuzzFeed quizzes: "Which of Napoleon's marshals are you?"

It's why I don't believe in any pervasive conspiracies: it's not exactly good news, that our national security is managed by clowns, but then again it's not exactly news at all; we've known it, in principle, since World War II at the least. ("Bless them all...") But the incipient totalitarianism we're all supposed to be afraid of is not in the cards, if only because our mysterious overlords are working too hard at pretending to be working.