empire

He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.
– President Trump re Vladimir Putin after their meeting in Vietnam.

Chris writes:
For the last few months I have been battling some cognitive dissonance when making conclusions about the current state of U.S. foreign affairs. Ever since the Ron Paul days of 2008, I have been firm in my conviction that the libertarians are correct in this regard. I think on one hand that despite whatever disasters that may occur after a full military pull-out of all foreign countries, the situation couldn’t possibly be worse than allowing the U.S. government to continue the policy of the last century.

Apparently there are seven things that piss off the Christian God more than anything else.  And, not surprisingly, those seven things are all common traits in both those who worship Him and in those of us who doubt or deny His existence.  Real or imaginary, you’ve gotta give the man upstairs credit for His sense of humor.  Too funny…incorporate faults and flaws into our DNA, and then punish us for them.  Even threats of Hellfire and damnation don’t seem to carry much weight in deterring good Christians from lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, or pride.  One would strongly suspect tha

In his excellent “NATO, a Monstrous Institution” Karel van Wolferen writes:

If love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses.
— William Blum

Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men’s lives.
— Richard II’s lament from Act 5, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s eponymous tragedy

This is going to be an exercise in redefining fascism after meeting with socialists on the hundredth anniversary of the great revolution. In the early 1900s, the Italians who invented the term Fascism also described it as estato corporativo, meaning: the corporate state.

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
— Benito Mussolini

Then you have that great liberal, giver over of social goods from the rich, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once described fascism as

This week, the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which promoted giving Palestine to the Jewish people, will be celebrated in London. Around the world, there will be protests against it calling for Britain to apologize for the damage it inflicted.

Rumours of war and the lexicon of war permeate the culture of empires, and the US empire is not an exception. In a concomitant manner, the spectre of violent death pervades the imagery of the US’s entertainment industry and stalks the citizen’s dreams.
Present circumstances merge with the sleeping monster of history: Close your eyes and images of cross burnings, lynchings, mountains of bison skulls, flaring veils of napalm and blooming mushroom clouds rise from within.
All the bristling, military armaments of the Pentagon cannot turn back the raging storm.

… a nation in which 87 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four year olds (according to a 2002 National Geographic Society/Roper Poll survey) cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map and 11 percent cannot locate the United States (!) is not merely “intellectually sluggish.” It would be more accurate to call it moronic, capable of being fooled into believing anything …
—Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture, June 28 2001