The Fundamental Problem With Government

More and more, I am becoming convinced that the fundamental characteristic of government is that it cannot change its mind, cannot retreat, cannot cut spending. Why is this?

Well, obviously it issues out of the very nature of government, which I define as:

An armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

The point of this definition is that it covers every government from a criminal gang in an inner city, to a guerrilla group in the hills, to a modern national welfare state.

Now, as British politician Norman Tebbit argues, it is probably a good idea for a government to do a little more than that. If it has good laws to encourage enterprise, a stable currency, good roads, etc., this enhances its power and keeps the people from forming a head of rebellion.

But the basic thing that every governing class understands is defending its territory, rewarding its supporters, and getting the revenue to fund those two vital tasks.

Notice the basic parameters of this situation. The governing class needs that revenue, else the supporters may start to get restless. But the way to maximize that revenue is to promote a healthy, growing economy that throws off revenue like a dog shaking itself after a swim.

So the sensible thing for a cunning ruling class would be to limit the amount of revenue spent on the supporters, for this one very good reason:

If things go south, then where is the money going to come from to reward the supporters?

Hello Venezuela. Venezuela once had a prosperous economy founded on its oil resources. But the Chávez regime decided to ramp up the rewards to its supporters by looting its oil industry. The policy looked like political gold for a while, and every lefty in the world cited Venezuela as an example of social justice and redistribution.

Yet now Venezuela is a basket case; its population lost an average of 20 pounds each last year, and its economy has dissolved into hyperinflation. What went wrong?

Quite simply, the government promised more to its supporters than it could deliver. One fine day eevil American frackers, no doubt supported by the CIA, flooded the world with cheap oil and natural gas, and the price of oil dropped by 50 percent. Suddenly the Venezuelan government could not afford to reward its supporters as they had become accustomed.

Now if the Venezuelan government had been a business it would have declared bankruptcy, stiffed the shareholders, and paid the bondholders 25 cents on the dollar. And the workers would have found jobs elsewhere and the equipment and factories would have been sold off to other businesses.

But government isn't a business, so the Venezuelan government inflated the money supply, controlled wages and prices, seized businesses, jailed its opponents and armed its supporters and sent them out into the streets.

From this textbook case of national self-immolation you can see that there are three things a government cannot do.

A Government Cannot Admit It Was Wrong. I think this is because the real job of a government is to lead the nation in war, and a war leader cannot admit his doubts and mistakes. He must lead and inspire the nation to work and fight for the inevitable victory. Therefore,

A Government Cannot Change When Things Go Wrong. The basic fact of existence is that it is one thing after another. Whether you are a housewife or a CEO, things go wrong and you have to fix things and apply the lessons learned. But government cannot admit that things have gone wrong, except to blame them of saboteurs and wreckers, and therefore cannot seem to change.

A Government Cannot Cut Spending When Things Go Wrong. Check my definition above. The basic government program, indeed the only program, apart from defending the borders, is to reward the supporters. How can the government cut the rewards to the supporters? Chances are the greedy pigs would start looking for another armed minority to promise them the rewards withdrawn by the present armed minority.

What is the meaning of the three catch-phrases above? They tell us that the only business of government is war. If you are fighting a war then you cannot admit things are going wrong, because then people would start to lose heart and wonder if the war is really worth it. But that would defeat the whole purpose of the war, which is to win it, come what may. Then, if the government cannot admit that its war is going wrong, it cannot admit it when it sensibly changes strategy after the inevitable disasters and reverses of a war. And the government certainly cannot reduce spending on the war and its soldiers, not until the last coin from under the last mattress has been spent on furnishing and supplying the armed forces in the march to victory.

See how this notion tells us that the whole welfare state culture is horribly mistaken?

First, pensions. It is pretty obvious that the current pension model is broken. Our Social Security model was designed in the 1930s when the average life expectancy was 60-something instead of the present 70-something. But it is politically impossible to adapt the program, because people that have paid in all their lives demand the full benefit. Government cannot admit that there is a problem with Social Security, cannot admit it needs to be changed, and cannot bring itself to tell people that their benefits are going to be cut.

Social Security needs to be privatized, so that the pensioning of our senior citizens can constantly change and adapt to new realities. But that won't happen until it is completely broken.

Obviously the same thing applies to health care. The provision of health care is an immensely complicated affair, and obviously needs to constantly adapt as problems arise, and as new technology, new techniques, new understandings about disease and ageing appear. But government is incapable of acting except in response to the needs of organized political interests. And the central issue in any change becomes what to do about the people that might lose their benefits.

In education the notion, over a century ago, was probably to spread literacy. Then it became training factory workers. Today? Yes, just what is the point of today's government education system? Inquiring minds would like to know. But the teachers and administrators demand that we should continue the current system without diminution.

And then welfare. We know that it is a disaster, but the Democrats cannot agree to change it because its recipients and its administrators are their supporters, and the purpose of a government is to reward its supporters.

When the next civilization arises out of the ruins of our own, I hope that its founders will assert that no collective task, except defense, should be assigned to government. Because look what happened to "Western Civilization."

This is not to say that everyone should be "thrown upon the market" without mercy. Not at all. I am just saying that there are plenty of ways to perform "collective" tasks without doing them with government. And I am saying that government is the last place to look if you are searching for mercy.

No doubt, as the #WeBelieve yard sign says, "Kindness is Everything." But Government is Force, and that is all it is.

The Agony of the French White Working Class

Notice the difference between the US and France? In the US the white working class has invaded the Republican Party and the Republicans, courtesy of Trump, have listened to its grievances.

In France the white working class is isolated in the Front National, and it is outside respectable French opinion. So after Round One of the French presidential election the "far-right" Marine Le Pen is isolated and the "moderate" Emmanuel Macron (who is a complete insider having held ministerial posts in the Hollande government) is the fusion candidate that all the other parties are endorsing for the final runoff.

Here is Macron's education:

[He] studied Philosophy at Paris Nanterre University, completed a Master's of Public Affairs at Sciences Po, and graduated from the École nationale d'administration (ENA) in 2004.

It's a shame, and it makes me realize how lucky the US is that all the folks tossed out of the Democratic Party over the years -- Southerners, Christians, pro-family, and now white working class -- were able to find a home without isolating themselves in a fringe party that could be easily marginalized by the establishment. Instead, by the magic of coalition, they have influenced the politicians in their new home to listen to their grievances.

I am trying to conceive of a catch phrase to symbolize the monstrous injustice that the left has perpetrated on the working class, first mobilizing it against the industrial revolution, the very thing that had saved the lower class from the previous centuries of starvation in the wake of the agricultural revolution; then acculturating the workers against embourgeoisement; and finally throwing them away as racist, sexist bigots. It is a Great Injustice to use people in that way, and the worst of it is that the left used the white working as cannon fodder in the left's reactionary movement against the new culture of the market economy in which prices not force is the foundation of society, a reactionary movement against science and common sense and justice that is bound to fail.

The left's culture is a culture of force, but the new post-industrial revolution market culture is a culture of cooperation. The person in the next village, or the next nation, is not your enemy, but your customer or your supplier.

The contribution of the market economy is, of course, in part in innovation, that nobodies can invent new ideas and product and sell them without getting permission from the ruling class.

But I am coming more and more to believe that the real contribution, the elephant in the room that nobody notices, is that the market helps most when things go wrong.

If you are a worker in a dying industry, or a company that can't make a profit, the market tells you in no uncertain terms to raise your game or get out of the game into another one. If you lose your job, or your company goes bankrupt, then you have to change.

But with government when things go wrong the only response is to double down on failure. Workers petition government to force employers to pay them the full amount they had in mind; industry groups lobby the government for subsidies to keep the good times going. And so it goes until the whole thing collapses.

In a company, declining profits soon force the company to abandon money-losing products and services and lay off workers. But when government revenue dries up it is almost impossible to cut spending, because people getting government benefits will riot in the streets rather than agree to a reduction in their benefits. So government has to respond to a reduction in revenue by the cunning of inflation.

Maybe my view is outside the mainstream because my family, going back to at least the late 19th century has been bourgeois and has responded to setbacks by taking its losses and moving on. One set of grandparents were in Russia during the revolution and had to get out with nothing. The other set of grandparents were in Japan in the run-up to World War II and sold their business in 1941ish, presumably at pennies on the dollar, to a Czech Jew. My parents found themselves in India at the time of independence and partition and went back to England, presumably taking quite a loss.

So when things go wrong you can sit where you are and hope that things get better; you can organize and try to force the government to bail you out, Or you can take your losses and start over.

The white working class was taught to believe that government would always be there when something went wrong, that government, in President Obama's words, would "have its back." But government doesn't care about you, it only cares about your vote, and what your vote can do for it.

So the French working class has voted for Marine Le Pen, and is going to go down to defeat in the runoff. And nobody will help the workers to build a new life. Because they are all racists and sexists and bigots.

Why are "College Educated" Whites So Liberal?

If you read the reports on the recent special House elections in Kansas and Georgia, you know you are supposed to believe that Republicans have a real problem with college-educated white voters.

Or if you read about the fall of Bill O'Reilly at FoxNews you learn that his audience was the spawn of FDR, folks that grew up in the 1950s conservative culture in the warm afterglow of the New Deal. Whereas the new generation of "young, cosmopolitan right-wingers" finds O'Reilly rather embarrassing.

Now, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory this all makes sense. Today's Republican Party appeals to the middle, the People of the Responsible Self in between the elite, educated People of the Creative Self, and the subordinate workers and peasants of the People of the Subordinate Self.

But still, as a college-educated voter, I have a bit of a problem believing that my fellow college-educated Americans are that wedded to the Democratic Party. I mean, aren't we educated folks supposed to see behind the conceits of sauntering politicians and bureaucrats of the administrative, regulatory state? Doesn't "creativity" mean the belief in a life of trying and failing, accepting a risk proposition rather than the dull certainties of a salaried, benefited life?

Maybe I think that way because I am not that interested in power. But think about things from the point of view of a youngster on the cusp of college and work. You hesitate about launching into the rough-and-tumble of a business career, and you don't fancy a degree in the making and doing majors, the technology degrees. But if you choose a major in the pure sciences or the humanities you find that your career options are much better if there is a big administrative state that requires trained bureaucrats to opine and judge the actions of the workaday world. Regulatory bureaucracies require lots of economists to evaluate the effects of government policy. And environmentalism has been a godsend to the job prospects of pure sciences like geology, botany, and zoology.

Then there are educated women. It has been observed by Steve Sailer that women used to be much more interested in IT back in the 1950s when Grace Hopper was developing COBOL.

Her COBOL was notoriously verbose, the Chatty Cathy of programming languages, but it got an awful lot of work done. Not surprisingly, lots of women were COBOL programmers. (My wife was one for awhile.)

I'll say! So why aren't women interesting in tech careers any more?

[One] reason women have gotten squeezed out of programming is that government policy has responded to billionaires' demands that computer programming no longer be a middle class career appealing to American women. Instead, it should be a two-tier business with brilliant male programmers making death or glory bids to gain riches in Silicon Valley, while in the lower tier, American women are replaced by South Asian men via the H-1B visa. 

Or rather, that men are fighters and women are lovers, and men are more attracted to the forced march over rough terrain of the high-tech startup.

Then, when we remember that women are now 55-60 percent of college student bodies, we can understand that in the educated elite there is a much higher proportion of people that want a "middle-class career" with lots of jobs for Chatty Cathys that are eager to share and discuss with other Chatty Cathys over coffee that "I can't believe she said that."

In the late election, the trump card for Democrats was the Trump "pussy" conversation revealed as their usual October Surprise. The fact is that middle-class women in America are not to be soiled with locker-room talk, and will take strong action to put a stop to it. Trump's revelations that middle-class women are not above having their pussies patted by powerful alpha-males was not to be endured. What, modern educated women acting like hypergaming working-class secretaries flapping their eyes at their bosses? Not to be endured!

Of course, all political trends in America are presented as the death-knell for Republicans, so it is hard to get a sensible view of things. No doubt educated voters are trending Democratic. But all of a sudden white working class Americans are trending Republican. And what about working-class blacks and Hispanics? How long are they going to voting for a Democratic Party that keeps them in the back of the bus?

It really does make a lot of sense that many college-educated voters would trend Democratic. There are tons of jobs in and around government that require moderately educated workers.

It's a pity, though, that the settled science says that big government is death to a free and prosperous society. So I dare say that down the road we will be speaking of educated Americans dying of despair when the administrative state runs out of money.

But how does that explain an educated American like me? Why don't I have a #WeBelieve yard sign out front of my house waving in the liberal Seattle breeze?

Perfectly simple. I didn't get my education at college. I am an "autodidact." Which is Greek for self-educated. I went to university to get an engineering degree and only started my education after leaving school. The result is that I missed getting the proper indoctrination in ruling-class-approved ideas and narratives. The only time I've been back to school in the last 50 years is to take a class each in Aristotle, Plato, Hume, and Kant. That's because I felt I needed to get the official line on each of those philosophers, as a kind of intellectual ballast. As I have written, of the three teachers for those classes, one was a pompous ass, one was a horse's ass, and one was the best teacher I have ever had in my life.

Meanwhile, every educated person should know that civilizations mostly fail because they run out of money; they spend so much on rewarding their supporters that there is nothing left to put food on the table and defend the borders on the Champs Elysées.

How Little Darlings Get "Hurled" to Cultural Perdition

So here we are in a week that the great white hope of progressives, Jon Ossoff, failed to pick up a GOP seat in Georgia by the cunning trick of being about the only Democrat facing a slew of ambitious Republicans in a "jungle primary" which means that if you get 50% of the vote you win the election without going to a general.

Only he came in a couple of percentage point short. So that's all right.

Then we have Bill O'Reilly getting run off FoxNews for sexual harassment allegations. I guess that the Murdoch kids are determined to wreck the business that their father put together, as foolish young scions often do.

Note to ambitious young women wanting to make it at CBSNBCABCCNN etc. The sexual harassment gambit will not work for you, because everybody knows that only conservative white men are a problem on the sexual harassment front.

Well, everyone in North Seattle is convinced. #WeBelieve signs and "Hate Has No Home Here" signs are everywhere.

Er... I know what you are saying. Liberals are the biggest haters in America. So the funniest thing since sliced bread is for liberals (and especially gays) to pretend that they have nothing to do with hate.

Actually, the truth is that politics equals hate. Politics is about division, and hate is the way you divide. Liberals live and die by politics, so they must be haters.

But I am thinking of the bigger picture. I am thinking about where Democrats go from here. Because their culture war on everyone that is white and straight just doesn't make sense to the ordinary American that is living outside the yeasty inner-city gentry neighborhoods where only liberals (and conservative spies like me) can afford to live.

Today I am mixing together my "little darlings" notion into a major attack on the left and everything it stands for. As you know, my little darlings notion says that if you are presently the little darlings of the ruling class, there is nowhere to go but down, because one fine day the ruing class will get tired of you, or decide they don't need you as their clients. You are like soldiers being marched across Europe in some dynastic war. The day will come when you find yourself sitting abandoned on the route of march. And then...

Well, the first time this happened to the little darlings was reported by Karl Marx when he wrote that "the free proletarians were hurled onto the labour market" when their lords no longer needed them during the agricultural revolution. That, as far as I can see, was back in the 16th century.

That's a good line, Chuck. Let's try it out on the modern era.

In the 1970s, the liberals, who had heretofore loooved the white working class, "hurled them onto the global labor market by importing millions of third world immigrants into the USA." Finally, after 50 years, the white working class realizes that they have been had.

In the 1960s, the liberals, who had heretofore promised to make women the darlings of their politics, "hurled women into the chaos of the sexual revolution," expecting women to indulge in sexual libertinism like men, get careers like men, go into the armed forces like men, oh and also, in between more important matters, bear and raise children. At the present time, women still don't realize that they have been had.

In the 1960s, the liberals, who had paraded as the friends of African Americans, instituted a huge expansion of welfare and affirmative action that has "hurled African Americans into a cultural spiral dive." Poverty is high; educational attainment is pathetic, and low-income African Americans are daily persecuted by the kindly attention of criminal gangs while rich liberal philanthropists like George Soros fund openly racist groups like Black Lives Matter and teach blacks to hate.

Then there are gays and Latinos, the emerging little darlings of the liberals. We don't yet know how and when these groups will get "hurled" in Marx's felicitous phrase. But my little darlings theory says that it is bound to come.

Because politicians and activists do not care about people like you. They only care about your vote.

What they really care about is power: the power to tell you what to think, what to do, and the power to make you pay if you don't.

The Only Privilege In America is Liberal Privilege

The Lady Marjorie and I were out for a walk yesterday and ran into a former neighbor who now lives in one of those gi-normous block houses, very often with Hardie board siding, and with flat or shed roofs.

He was delighted as how his roof-top solar panels meant that electricity didn't cost him anything. A little later he drove past in his Prius.

Yes, liberals. I understand why the Trump ascension has you all so fit-to-be-tied. Why, that crude idiot might cut the subsidies on your solar panels, and even on your Priuses.

It's comfortable to be a liberal in America. You get to reward yourself with free stuff, all in the name of diversity, or climate, or social justice. The utility pays you 44 cents per Kwh for your intermittent solar power (recently cut by one third in Washington State, apparently) while the utility charges you 11 cents per Kwh for their firm (but climate destroying) 24-7 power. Such a deal for liberals.

Then there is the subsidy on those cool Priuses and electric cars, tax credits amounting to thousands of dollars per car. Such a deal for liberals.

And then there are the special privileges obtained by university teachers and administrators, who basically can't be fired.

And then there are the subsidies for the arts. And then there are all the NGO jobs for the children of wealthy liberals that don't need the money from a real job. Not to mention the legacy places at college.

And so it goes.

Let's look at latest liberal hearthrob Jon Ossoff, the "investigative filmmaker and former congressional aide" who almost made it on Tuesday to be congresscritter from the 6th District in Georgia. From La Wik:

Born in Atlanta, Ossoff was raised by his parents in Northlake, an unincorporated community in Georgia's 6th congressional district.[7] Ossoff's mother Heather Fenton, an Australian immigrant,[1] co-founded NewPower PAC, an organization that works to elect women to local office across Georgia.[8][9] His father, who is of Russian Jewish and Lithuanian Jewish descent, owns a specialist publishing company.[1] Ossoff was raised Jewish.[10] 

Ossoff attended the Paideia School, a small private school in Atlanta.[1] While in high school, he interned for Georgia congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis.[1]

Can you spell "liberal privilege" and connections up the Wazoo? Of course the 30-year-old was selected by the ruling class to run for a special election for Tom Price's congressional seat. He is their kind of guy.

Let's look at Jon's opponent in the June runoff, Karen Handel. La Wik:

Handel was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.[4] After graduating in May 1980 from Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro,[5][6] Handel attended both Prince George's Community College and The University of Maryland, but did not complete any degree.[7] She then went to work for Hallmark Cards. Later, she served as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle's wife, Marilyn, where she worked to promote breast cancer awareness and research.[8]

Not quite the perfect life story. Oh, and she has said that she doesn't think that gay parents are quite the best thing for children. In other words, she agrees with American philosopher Harold Gosse, who said many years ago that all children want a mother and a father: their mother and father.

Don't get me wrong. I think that liberals are the nicest people in the world. And some of my best friends are liberals, bless their hearts.

But when you start to think about privilege in America in the spring of 2017, then the first thing you think of is "liberal privilege."

Or you have completely missed the point of Kant and critical theory, like the rest of your liberal friends.

Yes, Liberals, Critical Theory Applies to Your Ideas Too

Conservatives are chuckling about a worried New York Times article about how Trump is stealing the left's cookies on critical theory.

After all, if there is no absolute truth, as the left insists, then it's OK for Trump to lie his head off!

They quote lefty writer Bruno Latour:

Latour observed that conservatives had begun using methods similar to those of critical theory to muddy debates around issues, like climate change, that required immediate and decisive action. 

Oh really, Bruno. But what is your warrant for assuming that "climate change... required immediate and decisive action"? After all, might not the whole climate change issue be a pure case of power and privilege forcing its narrative on an innocent and marginalized American middle class which is not allowed to have an opinion on the matter?

Could we not say that "climate change" is a dominatory plan by the liberal privileged elite to force the ordinary middle class to live a more modest life style so that the liberal elite could feel good about themselves?

As the NYT's Casey Stone says, going back to dear old Kant:

The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.

Exactly. So when anyone, whether a church divine or an environmental activist, makes a statement that assumes that we can know that heretics are Satanic or climate change is catastrophic, we go back to Kant, who said that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances.

So critical theory is not supposed to be a weapon to demolish people you don't like for advancing stuff they believe in. It is supposed to be something you apply equally to yourself, to your ideas, and your science.

It is supposed to be used to say: well, my theory looks like the best thing since sliced bread, but it is, after all, just a theory, because I cannot know things-in-themselves.

Now the original application of critical theory, starting with Marx, was to critique the political and economic ideas of the bourgeoisie which, the Marxians felt, merely reflected the class interests of the bourgeoisie, and confirmed the bourgeoisie in its prejudices.

Then along came the Frankfurt School that proposed that the bourgeois ideas were in fact not just classist, and oppressing the working class, but sexist and racist as well, and oppressed non-white races and women and gays as well as the working class.

Good point, Frankfurters, and we will take that under advisement. Actually, we did and now we have a whole bushel-load of civil rights laws that are supposed to lift women and minorities out of past ages of oppression and marginalization.

Only thing is, that the various lefties and critical thinkers don't seem to do much critical thinking about their own ideas.

For, instance, I've read a Marxist tome or two. What I do not encounter is any understanding that Marx's theory, that built upon the dichotomy in classical economics between use value and exchange value, has been utterly exploded by the marginal revolution of 1870.

Nor is there any notion that the critique of sexism and racism, which had a point when formulated by the Frankfurters in the 1920s to 1940s, and gussied up by Herbert Marcuse in the 1950s, has been answered. We now have tons of laws to mitigate and indeed reverse the marginalization of women and minorities that obtained before 1965.

But the left has not rested on its laurels; it has redoubled its efforts to winkle out oppression and marginalization.

Well, of course it has. The left is all about power, not about justice. And the left never gives its opponents the benefit of the doubt, or allows that the opponents are simply wrong rather than evil.

But how can they know? If Kant was right then we "can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power."

Claiming to know the truth about oppression and marginalization is therefore a kind of "assertion of power."

Which brings me back to my basic belief, which I do not claim to be certain, but I certainly believe to be useful and sensible.

The lesson of the last 200 years is that the left's program is all about power. And that is all. But the bourgeoisie, the white males, the corporate CEOs, the targets of lefty wrath, are not that interested in power.

The warrant for this is the actual record of middle class people and their observed behavior over the last 200 years. When the left demanded justice for the workers, the middle class responded with government programs. And the corporate chieftains usually retired from business at some point and devoted their declining years to philanthropy, or even building rockets to go to Mars!

But for lefty politicians and activists it is all about the game, all about the next program or the next protest.

But you gotta say, the lefties had themselves a helluva ride for the last 200 years.

Pity the Pore Norks!

What do you do if you are an economically dead-end socialist state and you want to stay in business, desperately.

We are talking, this week, about the  Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader.

(Funny how those socialist states go all-in on the fascist Führerprinzip. What is that all about?)

Well, the answer is obvious. If you are a dead-end socialist state that can barely feed your people you absolutely, positively have to have nuclear weapons. Otherwise the United States will one day invade you and put you out of business. As in Iraq, courtesy of Republican George W. Bush. As in Libya, courtesy of Democratic Barack H. Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That's why Iraq was pushing for nuclear weapons. Pity that Saddam Hussein buckled under and agreed to get rid of his "weapons of mass destruction." Maybe if he had kept them the US wouldn't have invaded, and Iraq wouldn't have descended into secular strife, and maybe we wouldn't have ISIS to kick around today.

That's why any tin-pot dictator in the world is looking at Libya right now and saying, the sooner I get nuclear weapons the sooner the US will leave me alone. That's why Iran just had to keep going on its nuclear program and that is why is was so convenient to have Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett in the White House to advise President Obama on the Iran deal.

Of course, these dead-end socialist states could abjure their famine-causing socialism (as in the famines in the 1930s Soviet Union, the 1950s Maoist China, the 1970s Cambodia, and now oil-rich Venezuela) and become dutiful client states of the United States like Japan or South Korea. But where is the fun in that? Where would you go to get your macho chest hair back?

The fact is that it takes real cojones to be a state that is aligned against the US. In a way Noam Chomsky is right. The US is the evil global hegemon, and you'd better not mess with it.

And here's something amazing. President Trump tosses a few cruise missiles at Syria, and all of a sudden the Democratic elite is taking him seriously and complimenting him just a little. What is that all about? I thought that Trump was a crazed maniac. How could his image have improved when he proved the critics right?

And what about China? Why would they want to "solve" the Nork problem? Right now it must be rather convenient to have a mad dog at hand to focus the attention of the United States. What would be the point of taking out the Nork regime, unify Korea, and bring the border of the US imperium right up to the Yalu River? I don't think so, if I am a Chinese leader.

I don't know what the Trump regime is planning with respect to North Korea. All I know is this. Every state that wants to be taken seriously by the "international community" needs to be a nuclear power, and be able to talk about tossing a nuke into the men's room at the White House.

Otherwise that state will be treated like a pawn, and one day might find US troops coming ashore to take care of the interests of the US world empire.