IHT: Armed with an almanac? The FBI has its eye on you

This is just so bizzare! Coupled with the news this morning in response to the USA's demand that incoming visitors submit to being photographed and fingerprinted, some countries are requiring that American citizens submit to the same indignities on entry to those countries too, it just makes one aware of the extent to which a culture of fear has infected the most imaginative and innovative nation of recent times.

I was reading a Harry Turtledove book recently (one of his "Wordwar" series) and a comment about the physicist Jens Larson strikes me as being relevant to the USA as well. In that Jens had grown up being the best of whatever he had turned his hand to, but did not deal at all well when someone he thought was his was taken from him by a person he considered his inferior.
Of all the characters in the plot, Larson is the one that feels most victimised by being confronted by something outside his experience and instead of growing through it, seems to be more than willing to embrace the status of victim and use that as an excuse to be mean and nasty to everybody else he comes across.

I wish I didn't feel that in some ways the USA was doing the same ...