There are many times when a single act kindness can make a lasting impression. But often you may not know it. It is not about the immediate feedback that you might get from an act of kindness, but how your acts of kindness affect someone else.

Every year when I was growing up, our family would make the yearly pilgrimage from our home in St. Pete, Florida to my parents' home town of Indiana, Pa. about 50 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Indiana was a college town and in those days, also the home of the Rochester and Pittsburgh Coal Company. My grandfather and his father had both worked for the R & P Coal Co.

So we would make our yearly trek as part of my father's vacation every year during the first two weeks of July. It was without fail. In fact, every part of the trip was without fail. We would leave St. Pete very early in the morning and drive for eleven to twelve hours with just one pit stop until we made our halfway point in North Carolina just slightly north of the South Carolina border. Then we would do the same thing the next day until we got to my grandparents' home.

For my sister and myself, we loved this yearly trip. I found out later that neither of my parents were particularly excited about this, but that it was expected of them.

One of our fondest memories of these summer visits was Mrs. Couser. Mrs. Couser was a friend of my grandmother's and every year for many years when we went to Pennsylvania , she would take my sister and me out for lunch at a local tea room. We would get dressed up for her visit and for that afternoon it was just my sister and me with Mrs. Couser. What Mrs. Couser did for us is that she treated two elementary school girls like we were important young ladies. It was her wonderful act of unselfish kindness that both my sister and I recently recalled. It has been more than 55 years and we still remember her small gestures of kindness to two young girls.

So small acts of kindness can have a lifelong lasting impression on someone. I know that Mrs. Couser's did for both my sister and me.

Now on to some news tidbits.

All this war mongering by every single Republican Presidential hopeful who wants to send more troops to Iraq and Syria certainly is beyond the fiscal and logistical ability of the United States. Juan Cole takes a look at proposals by Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham in his Monday post.

Lindsey Graham has something of the same plan as Bush but is far more frank about the numbers. As Barrow writes, the number is 20,000, some 10,000 for Iraq and a similar number for Syria. He said, “I am going to destroy the Caliphate. We are going to pull it up by its roots.”

Of course reality shows quite the opposite.

The problem with Graham’s position is that the US had at some points like 160,000 US troops in Iraq, and they could not stop the civil war of 2006, nor could they defeat Daesh or its predecessors. So why would 10,000 each for Iraq and Syria be able to pull this off?

Which leads us to an article at TomDispatch by William Astore regarding the performance of the US military and its incestuous relationship with the military industrial complex. This is a long read but one very much worth reading.

Authority without accountability means no one is responsible. And if no one is responsible, the system can keep chugging along, course largely unaltered, no matter what happens. This is exactly what it’s been doing for years now in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Can we connect this behavior to the faults of the service academies? Careerism. Parochialism. Technocratic tendencies. Elitism. A focus on image rather than on substance. Lots of busywork and far too much praise for our ascetic warrior-heroes, results be damned. A tendency to close ranks rather than take responsibility. Buck-passing, not bucking the system. The urge to get those golden slots on graduation and the desire for golden parachutes into a lucrative world of corporate boards and consultancies after “retirement,” not to speak of those glowing appearances as military experts on major TV and cable networks.

Now on to a question that many people have been asking. Why does Black Lives Matter seem to be harassing Bernie Sanders? If you read the front page at another site, they would have you believe that it is because Bernie Sanders has a problem with black people. According to Jamelle Bouie of Slate, this may not really be the case, but something of a much more pragmatic nature.

Set those questions aside, however, and you have an easy answer for why Sanders gets the brunt of Black Lives Matter activity, at least among Democratic presidential candidates. Unlike his competitors, Sanders is simply the best available vessel for bringing activists’ concerns to the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

According to Bouie, Sanders is seen as being the most sympathetic and provides the easiest access of the main Democratic contenders.

In this environment, if you’re trying to make a splash, you go with Sanders, especially when he’s more open to change and adjustment than the alternatives. Disrupting Sanders gives you more bang for your buck: It keeps you in the news and puts indirect pressure on other campaigns that know they’ll have to answer to the movement’s questions.

Shades of Occupy and nearly every other popular movement, this news should come as no great surprise. The police are spying on and infiltrating Black Lives Matter. We continue to see an ever increasing infringement upon our Constitutional rights and it does not seem to be abating at all.

This appears to be the first documented proof of the frequent presence of undercover police at Black Lives Matter protests in the city of New York, though many activists have suspected their presence since mass protests erupted there last year over a grand jury’s decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner.

The protest surveillance and use of undercover officers raises questions over whether New York-area law enforcement agencies are potentially criminalizing the exercise of free speech and treating activists like terrorist threats. Critics say the police files seem to document a response vastly disproportionate to the level of law breaking associated with the protests.

The Atlantic has an interesting look at Jeremy Corbyn, the democratic socialist who is the front runner in Britain's Labour party and who may become the next prime minister of Great Britain. Some of his programs sound very familiar to those who have been paying attention to Bernie Sanders campaign speeches.

So what exactly is Corbyn’s worldview, and how might he govern if elected prime minister of the United Kingdom? Corbyn is a self-described “socialist” or “democratic socialist,” an old-school tax-and-spend left-winger who believes government spending—not austerity—is the key to economic stimulus. He wants to close the U.K.’s budget deficit by, in part, raising taxes on the rich and ending corporate subsidies.

Domestically, he wants to re-nationalize the country’s much-maligned railways, scrap university tuition, and introduce rent controls. Many of these positions enjoy widespread support, though another—his support of mass immigration to the United Kingdom—does not.

And finally, I never thought I would be linking an article about Donald Trump, but but even a blind squirrel.

There is, however, one major issue that both Sanders and Trump have been exposing in their own unique ways: The endemic corruption of America’s political system. Sanders has been critical of money in politics and corruption throughout his career, while Trump has been a corrupter of politics throughout his career. The New York billionaire has quite literally been bragging about how he has bought politicians on both sides of the aisle, which is absolutely true. Since 1989, he has contributed $584,850 to Democrats and $961,140 to Republicans, according to the Federal Election Commission and state election offices. Since 2012, it has almost all gone to Republicans — including, yes, many of his competing candidates.