It’s not unusual. The current acting director, Elaine Duke, is the grandchild of Sicilian immigrants. Everyone in America comes from somewhere. Divided loyalties are as American as gluten-free apple pie.
I mention it because since 2006 when George W. Bush was president, the Secretary of Homeland Security joined those in the line of succession. The line of succession is now seventeen names long. None are Democrats. Not right now. A few are independents like General Mattis, the Secretary of Defense.
Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Elaine Duke. She is last in line to be president. Note by the Editorial Board: The churn of turnover inside the Trump government makes information inside links to presidential succession lists unreliable.
The Homeland Security Director is dead last on the current list. The current acting director, Elaine Duke, is (in my humble opinion) the only person in the group who is actually qualified to be president.
The USA’s crazy-Christian, comb-over president leads the list; he directs the country; he is on the top of the world. Like 81% of the fundamentalists who elected him, he is all-in for Israel. Whoever robs and kills in defense of Israel is fine with fundamentalists. They never criticize Israel, even in love. It doesn’t happen.
The president says that he is moving our embassy to Jerusalem. He lies a lot, so who knows? According to him, Jerusalem is now the exclusive capital of Israel; it is no longer shared with Palestine — no matter what modern history and world opinion have to say.
NOTE:On May 14, 2018 the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem.The Editorial Board
The USA has the power to make truth and justice on the ground whatever it wants it to be. No need for negotiation. No reason to compromise. And by the way, settlements built on land confiscated from losers are just fine, no problems. Come on. Moral qualms? You’re kidding, right?
Never mind that the Old City center of Jerusalem is segregated into quarters controlled and lived in by Armenians, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Never mind that the modern city is much larger; that nearly 40% of the population is Arab; that holy sites of all faiths abound.
The borders of biblical Israel and all the territories within are going to be re-established, just as they were three thousand years ago by God Himself. There is nothing to negotiate. No compromises will be necessary. Thank you very much.
Christians support Israel, because they believe God has a covenant with modern-day Israel validated by words written in the book of Exodus thousands of years ago. The United States and Israel are joined at the hip like Siamese twins on this one. Israel might as well be added to the collection of fifty states that make the USA.
The reality, though, is that Israel is more like Washington DC. It’s not really a state — it’s a country, obviously — but it is a wee one; one that has influence on America beyond its size by half. What goes on in Israel affects the United States in big ways (or bigly, as the president likes to say).
Israel is the size of Chicago and its suburbs and has about the same population. Right? Its grip on the United States is vice-like. It rides the U.S. shark like a remora fish. Without its shark for protection, the remora fish gets eaten, like any other small fish in a big ocean. It must be protected.
I’m totally on board. Israel has enemies. The generation that parented the Jewish people who live in Israel today were nearly exterminated by Hitler. The post World War refusal of the west to take in refugees added to their determination to go home to their ancestral lands.
The problem was that people already lived in Israel and had for centuries. Despite the good faith efforts of the nations to broker peace and safety, every Arab neighbor attacked Israel on the day of its rebirth.
Israel won the military contest and occupied lands that international agreements said they had no right to hold. Refugees who had crossed the Jordan River to escape the conflict couldn’t come back. Israel locked them out. It now had a Palestinian refugee problem that would never be solved.
Trust on both sides evaporated. The world today lives with the dangers, resentments, and hatreds that erupted from a failure to love one another during the years when it mattered most.
The Dome of the Rock is controversial within Israel and Palestine. Eighty kilograms of gold leaf cover the dome. At today’s close, the gold’s value is $3,600,307.60. The former King Hussein of Jordan sold one of his London homes in 1993 to raise the money. He died on February 7, 1999 at age 63 from complications of cancer.
The world owes the Jewish people a safe place to live. They have suffered enough. In the meantime, we need to build a fairer world. Jews, despite the horrors they have endured, do not have a monopoly on suffering. Many people, including Palestinians, have gotten a raw deal. It’s time to set things right.
I don’t see fundamentalist Christians as being helpful. I’m not feeling the love. I’m not seeing an effort to understand that God loves people who are everywhere. People who God loves are sprinkled like salt among the Palestinians and the Jews of Israel.
These are the people that Christ Jesus gave his life to save. I’m not feeling the respect for Christ’s vision from the fundamentalists who right now have an opportunity to comfort the fearful and dispossessed on all sides. All sides. Believe it.
For Jewish people the stakes are particularly high given a history that repeatedly shows that when they don’t have safe haven, haters attack them.
The United States and France can be safe places for the most part, but Israel is special. Israel is an established safe haven for Jews, period. They need one. The world, through the United Nations, established it. A lot of history backs the decision to help, some of it recorded in the Bible.
That said, no follower of Christ Jesus, no one who has read the Bible — New Testament, the Torah, the Prophets — believes that Israel was chosen by God to rule the world.
I don’t have to quote the Bible. People know what the LORD requires. He asks people to love mercy, act justly, and walk humbly with their Creator.
Does anyone believe it?
Jesus didn’t immolate himself on a Roman cross because people are good, but because they are wicked. People chosen by Jesus don’t rule; they give up everything they have to serve and love others. It’s simple, really.
It’s not easy. Some say it’s impossible apart from the kind of love that was shown to us by a messiah who suffered.
When I studied Hebrew at a local Hillel school many years ago, a girl in the class actually said that Jews were chosen by God to rule the world. Israel would save the earth and bring light to dark. The rabbi nodded his assent. I asked what she thought about the concept of forgiveness. The rabbi waved his hand, and the group moved on.
After class, the teacher pulled me aside. Grace is a Christian concept, he told me. Grace has no place in Judaism.
The instructor locked eyes with me and explained in no uncertain terms that a fundamental tenet of my faith was crap. He intended to make an impression, and he succeeded.
At about the same time a geneticist and his wife came from Israel to America to study at a nearby university. They had young kids the same age as mine. Somehow we met and liked each other. We became close friends. We visited their apartment from time to time. I noticed that they read the Bible to their children, so I asked about it. It’s our history, Yossi explained. We are atheists. But our children must learn who they are.
A few months later we attended a summer dinner at a kiva on campus where a Jewish writer gave a short talk on Israel. We dressed-up and took the kids. Yossi, his family, and mine walked together on the pathway that led to the building.
I was surprised to learn that to get into the event we had to make our way past a line of about a hundred Palestinian demonstrators. It was like walking a gauntlet.
The protestors held signs, but the odd thing was they didn’t speak. They stayed quiet. It was eerie. More than a few wore ski-masks. They stared through eye-holes in silence. No smiles. I felt afraid. My stomach churned. I smelled fear in my nostrils, but Yossi seemed unfazed. I reached for my children and held their hands.
Weeks later, Yossi brought his family to visit at my place. To make polite conversation I asked Yehudith, his wife, about life in Israel. What was it like living there? She said that she didn’t want to go back. The air-raid sirens in Israel frightened her. When they wailed during the day they triggered panic attacks.
Yehudith and her husband were Sabras—native born Israelis. Born and raised in Jerusalem, they didn’t travel, because they had no money.
They knew no other life. I too was poor then. I was raising two children by myself and living in a small house. It was a thousand-square-feet with an unfinished basement. When Yossi and Yehudith first visited they said the house must be a mansion. Yehudith marveled at its size and amenities.
She couldn’t believe how well-off we were. She marveled at how much stuff we had. Yehudith gasped at the size of our yard. In Jerusalem people didn’t have yards.
Yes, we had a big yard. No one nearby had one that came close. It was lush and green. Its size was an accident of good fortune — the result of bad planning by developers.
I decided not to tell Yehudith that we were poor. I didn’t have it in me to make her feel worse. She wasn’t going to believe it anyway.
Update: March 25, 2021 Today, Japanese public broadcaster NHK News(the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) reported that the intruder detection sensors at the Kashiwazaki-Karina Nuclear Power Plant have been broken for at least one year; inspectors and regulators rank it a terrorism risk at the “most serious level”.
The plant has not operated since the Tsunami of 2011, which damaged and closed many of Japan’s nuclear power plants including the catastrophic meltdown and fires at Fukishima — which remain on-going. Sensor readings at the complex suggest that one of the reactors could re-ignite. The area of concern is inaccessible.
Update: May 16, 2020 Today, NHK News announced that Japan has officially launched a Space Defense Unit, otherwise called the Space Operations Squadron (SOS). It’s mission is to protect Japan’s many satellites from debris and other space hazards and threats. A spokesman said that communication protocols between Japan and the US are yet to be worked out.
Update: May 11, 2018 In April Congress approved Japanese American Paul M. Nakasone to lead the National Security Agency, the Central Security Service, and the U.S. Cyber Command. Paul’s grandparents were Japanese citizens born in Japan. His father worked for Army intelligence services during World War II when Japanese Americans, many of them, were rounded up and detained in USA internment camps. Nakasone is an Army General appointed to lead an agency (the NSA) that has been led by a rotation of Navy Admirals, Air Force and Army Generals. The Editorial Board
47 TONS
While the Little Rocket Man and North Korea capture the world’s attention, our president is in Tokyo to deal with a threat that dwarfs anything we have faced since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 76 years ago.
The surprise attack against our Navy on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, started a cascade of retaliation against the Japanese that three-and-a-half years later resulted in 67 Japanese cities burnt to ashes during a few months of sustained “fire-jelly” attacks by hundreds of Boeing-29 Superfortress bombers and other aircraft. After napalming the cities to ashes and dust, the United States followed the horror with a “preemptive” nuclear strike against the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Nine million Japanese civilians were left homeless. The death toll has never been definitively calculated, but two million souls is a reasonable guess.
(Click map to enlarge.) The distance from Pyongyang, North Korea to Tokyo, Japan is 800 miles; Hawaii, 4,400 miles; Los Angeles, 6,000 miles; Seattle, 5,150 miles; Alaska, 3,200 miles. The border of North Korea meanders 25 to 50 miles from downtown Seoul,South Korea.
A few years after the stalemate of the Korean War, General Curtis LeMay — head of Strategic Air Command — claimed that his pilots had killed a similar number of Koreans by aerial bombardment — 20% of the population.
The United States killed an estimated million Iraqi civilians in the more recent wars in the Middle East, which included the Gulf War and the Iraq War.
It killed 2 million Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam genocide of the 1960s and 70s. In the region of southeast Asia, the USA killed 3.4 million souls, military and civilian, by the war’s end.
In August 1945, USA bombers killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Millions were burned alive in fire-jelly (napalm) bombings, which decimated 67 cities over several months. Evacuation of cities helped to reduce casualties.
Why am I bringing up a bunch of disturbing statistics? What’s the point? Why not leave unpleasant memories forgotten in a distant past where they can’t impact the happy lives we live now, not then?
What possible benefit can remembering the past confer upon our contented present? Why bother puking up a sour history that only the old-timers among us experienced?
May I ask one more question? Maybe thinking about the answer will help some to make sense of current events that seem to have no rhyme or reason.
Of the fifty countries against which we have directed our military wrath since World War II, which among them has a right to the biggest grievance? Who did we hurt the most?
Which country has been forced to endure the shame of a military occupation that never ends? Ok, maybe it sounds like more than one question. Deal with it.
America fights secret and not so secret wars against communist, Islamic, western hemispheric, and, it turns out, African countries all the time. We have conducted strategic operations against friend and foe alike since World War II.
We have meddled in the internal politics of super powers like Russia and China. The Dalai Lama of Tibet wrote in his book Freedom in Exile that the United States gave him millions of dollars to incite violence against China, for example.
The USA has attacked militarily one in four of the 190 countries on the earth during the modern era. Which country is the one most likely to harbor a secret ambition for revenge?
America keeps itself in a state of perpetual war to feed the appetites of voracious weapons manufacturers whose stockholders are among the world’s most affluent. The AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force against terrorists) passed Congress, and President Bush signed the bill in August 2001 for a reason — to fuel the ambition of arms dealers by freeing them from the inconvenience of securing approval of Congress to declare wars — which the Constitution demands. Only California’s Barbara Lee (no relation to Billy Lee) voted against it.
Since 1991 Congress has passed and the president signed four AUMFs, mostly to cut down on the amount of work and delays that are inevitable when large elected groups of representatives are compelled to go on record for or against any particular conflict.
We in America live under a lot of illusions. We tell ourselves a lot of lies about how wonderful we are and how everyone wants to be like us. Our enemies who fear us the most insist — some of them, anyway — that they love us; they want to live with us and be like us, and we believe them.
No one tells a command officer who is carrying an automatic assault rifle that he is a pig; the term “butt-wipe” is never used. No one wants to die for a no good reason like name calling. Our subjugates place flowers in the barrels of our guns and tell us they love us.
Everyone who has been shamed and humiliated prays for their day of liberation; the day of their revenge; the day the world is finally set right. It’s human nature. The desire to settle scores crosses cultural, religious, and geographical boundaries.
Few countries that have suffered cremation by fire of millions of their citizens forget. They don’t forgive. Not really. Think long and hard.
It’s true.
For almost a year Billy Lee lived where he could view Mount Fuji from his bedroom window during his two-year stay in Japan. The Editorial Board
The situation in Japan is dire; it is. The United States for some insane and goofy reason permitted the Japanese over the past 30 years to build the most sophisticated nuclear power grid the world has ever seen.
The USA sold the Japanese uranium-impregnated fuel rods. A by-product of their use, which is to produce the intense heat required to generate electricity, is plutonium. Instead of collecting and disposing the spent fuel rods, the Japanese built facilities to extract the plutonium. They promised to use the plutonium for fuel in advanced power generators called “fast reactors.”
Fast reactors are in principle cheaper and less complicated; they are also more volatile; more dangerous to operate.
After the earthquakes and tsunami of 2011, the Japanese abandoned “fast reactors”. They discovered during audits following the disasters at Fukushima and other facilities that their fast reactor safety records bordered on terrifying. They stopped using plutonium for fuel. With no place to “burn” what they continued to harvest, plutonium began to accumulate, bigly.
In the entire universe plutonium is found above trace amounts at one location and one location only: planet Earth. Plutonium went extinct due to radioactive decay billions of years ago.
Plutonium can be created during rare cosmic events, but the bomb-making kind — Pu 239 — is a manufactured element that does not occur in nature. It is a byproduct of nuclear fission reactions that hides within the matrix of poisons that make the remnants of spent fuel rods.
Plutonium is among the most poisonous substances known. The speck of plutonium dust that kills you, you will likely never see. Some scientists today have downplayed the lethality of plutonium 239. My advice is to be skeptical whenever vast amounts of money and power fuel a controversy.
Regardless of its lethality as a poison, no one argues that fourteen pounds is enough plutonium to make an atomic bomb of a construction so unsophisticated that a high schooler could fashion the necessary components in shop class. Sophisticated bombs require even less plutonium — a mere nine pounds.
This is what plutonium powder looks like. Japan has 94,000 pounds of it. 14 pounds are required for an unsophisticated bomb; 9 pounds for a sophisticated version.
Japan has harvested 47 tons (94,000 pounds) of high-grade plutonium from its nearly one-hundred or so nuclear power and processing plants, which include power plants, research reactors, fast reactors, reprocessing installations, and recently decommissioned facilities — decommissioned due mostly to safety concerns.
Japan’s production schedule is running at a frenetic pace — adding eight tons of surplus plutonium to its stockpile every year into the foreseeable future unless the United States is able to shut down Japan’s reprocessing installations with an agreement scheduled for negotiation in 2018. Our new president has said the old agreements won’t be changed.
By this time next year the Japanese will have accumulated enough high-grade Pu 239 to make as many as 12,000 atomic bombs. Should it ever make that choice, Japan will possess the world’s largest nuclear arsenal almost overnight.
Plutonium is heavy. Fourteen pounds of Pu 239 is the size of a softball. Nine pounds is the size of a baseball. It is exactly the right amount to construct the 4.38″ diameter ring used in a typical bomb. By this time next year Japan will possess enough plutonium to make 12,000. Depending on how the bombs are tampered, configured, and initiated such bombs can release an equivalent explosive power in a range from 20,000 to 100,000 TONs of TNT. The bombs can be launched by artillery, dropped from planes, or delivered by missiles, drone subs and boats.
What follows next in this essay is the scary part. Some readers might want to bail and maybe find a good comic book to occupy their imaginations.
Despite agreements with the United States that followed World War II, Japan has one of the largest military budgets in the world. The country spends 42 billion dollars per year on its military. This expenditure does not include its civilian nuclear power system or its civilian space exploration programs.
The Japanese consolidated three civilian rocket launching companies into one (named JAXA) in 2003. They are launching rockets into space all the time. JAXA designed, built, launched, and maintains the largest module on the International Space Station. The Japanese have spacecraft in the asteroid belt and spy satellites in Earth orbit. These are civilian programs.
The Japanese have, over the past fifty years, resurrected RIKEN, the laboratory complex used in their atomic bomb program during WW2. The lab employed two cyclotons, which the United States destroyed in a bombing run in 1945.
Today RIKEN labs sprawl across the islands of Japan in dozens of complexes that are impossible to police. The labs are involved in so many areas of research that no one can keep track of it all even if they wanted to. Some of the research is diabolical. One administrator was found hanging by the neck in his office in 2014. Enough said.
Although the military budgetof the United States seems huge, people might want to consider that the USA spends one-third of its military dollars on salaries and pensions. No other military spends as much. It maintains 800 military bases in 70 countries at an expense of $200 billion — an expense that other militaries simply don’t have. Japan spends about the same amount on defense as England, France, and Germany. A controversial argument can be made that the combined military might of Russia, China, Japan, and North Korea exceeds that of the United States. It is an argument that is hard to prove, because countries lie about their military expenditures, war-fighting readiness, and technical capabilities. The chart above is misleading in another important way, because it doesn’t include expenditures on nuclear weapons — their production, maintenance, and modernization — which are state secrets in all the countries that possess them.
The Japanese don’t have to make bombs from their plutonium stores to wreak havoc on an adversary. They can pulverize the metal into aerosols and release plutonium dust into the air over cities.
They can load plutonium into drone subs like rumors say the Russians have done and set hundreds of them in the coastal waters of our country. The subs can lie in ocean sand and silt for decades before releasing their poisons, should it ever become necessary.
Their advanced missile technology might enable Japan to overwhelm our defenses by launching multiple warhead missiles over our homeland. It might take a few months, but poisoned populations would eventually succumb to the release of toxic dust.
And, should they choose to make bombs, well, any country with the resources of a country as sophisticated as Japan can turn high-grade plutonium into bombs in a few days; they can possess the capability to create hell on Earth in the blink of an eye, anytime they choose. With the right (or wrong) leadership they can unleash a nightmare of suffering far worse than the inferno we inflicted on them 72 years ago.
This plant is the place where the Japanese extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods. The Japanese have admitted on NHK television that they have 94,000 pounds of plutonium, which they have no use for nor any place to safely store.
Plutonium is an artificially produced killing material that no human being, company, or country should ever be allowed to possess or use. It is a forbidden apple of physics that can only bring anguish to whoever uses or shares it with others.
Japan has the potential to threaten the world with the same level of terror as the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, and who knows what other countries. Many countries are conducting (in secret) diabolical engineering even now and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.
What could be worse? Believe it or not, our predicament might already be much worse than anyone in the USA is willing to think about or imagine.
What about the possibility that North Korea and China are playing a game of good cop / bad cop with our military planners? What if Japan is toying with the idea of leading an unholy alliance? Behind our backs? Do we really have enough Japanese-speaking spies to keep track of all the secret Samurai cults that might be conspiring at the highest levels of government?
Do we?
What if Vladimir Putin thinks: The United States lied to me. I helped to elect an American president who is ineffective — a buffoon who can’t help me the way he promised. Let’s get ’em!
Imagine an alliance of China, North Korea, Russia, and Japan; an alliance led by the one country that has the greatest lust for payback; the strongest ache to settle scores once and for all.
A HunkpapaLakota holy man, Sitting Bull, had the vision that led to the defeat of the USA’s 7th Calvary Regiment on June 26, 1876 — one week before the USA’s 100th anniversary. Five of seven battalions were decimated — one led by Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. Sitting Bull became a celebrity who worked in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Later in life he became a leader of the Ghost Dance movement, which terrified whites, because it prophesied the exodus of white people from native American lands. Ten days before Christmas — on December 15, 1890 during an arrest by police on reservation property — Indian Affairs agents shot Sitting Bull in the head and chest in front of his family and friends. Agents removed his body to Fort Yates, where they buried him in a makeshift coffin.
A surprise attack by such an alliance would be nation ending. It might end like the Battle of the Little Bighorn. We don’t have enough soldiers or missiles or ships to fight a gathering of tribes who possess tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
The USA has the power to destroy the whole world if we must, but we can’t save ourselves; we can’t save our country; we can’t save the planet.
In the conflagration that took the hyper-alert Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer by surprise, all his ribbons and medals; all his accolades; all his friends in high places couldn’t save him, his men, or even his horses. The battle of the Little Bighorn was a massacre that dwarfed Custer’s reputation for being a really good person; a hero of the Civil War loved by every patriotic American.
To those who say, Billy Lee, you’ve gone paranoid on us… the Japanese would never organize an attack against America unawares… not a nuclear attack… they know how bad it would be… they suffered through one… they know better than anyone… and look at them, how they smile when we tell bad jokes. The last thing on their minds is revenge. The very last thing!
I say, you are so right! The Japanese would never hurt us. I lived in Japan for two years after the war. The Japanese have their quirks, yes, but most of them are not cruel or insensitive. They don’t enjoy watching torture videos for entertainment, most of them. Tying up women and twisting their bodies to prepare them for rape is not something most Japanese men would have any part in. Am I right? Of course I am.
The Japanese are not monsters. They are a kind and gentle people who don’t farm or ranch or mine, because they are resource impoverished. When I lived there our Japanese house-maids and yard-boys were as sweet as they could be. They meant us no harm. I see that now.
How on Earth are the Japanese going to get rid of the 47 tons of plutonium poison they have produced? And how will they dispose of the eight tons they plan to produce each year into perpetuity — plutonium which they admit has no longer any peacetime applications whatsoever?
Hayabusa2 Rocket on pad at the Tanegashima Island Space Center off the southern tip of Japan. The rocket landed a probe on the asteroid Ryugu on 4 October 2018. The Editorial Board
Everybody knows plutonium has a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years. It’s never going to go away. Someday, through inattention or from whatever other cause, plutonium containment structures are going to rot, and the poison will leach into the soils, the oceans, and the atmosphere to kill all living things. It is Earth’s best case scenario — the scenario where nuclear war never happens, the world disarms, and plutonium is tucked away out of reach and out of sight of war makers and other terrorists.
The process that will sterilize the planet of all life is already well underway and cannot be stopped — not over a period of tens of thousands of years. Read the essay, RISK, elsewhere on this site. Humans are likely to be extinct by the time the unnatural poisons of war and opulence first make their advance against the innocent, less intelligent life-forms that we will leave behind — like chipmunks and kittens, for example — who will never be able to understand what is killing them or why.
Our new president is in Tokyo as I’m writing this essay. Anyone who asks him will learn — because he’s not afraid to say it — he is really smart and bigly educated. He understands people and how best to manipulate them to maximize his advantages and get what he wants. You don’t believe it? Ask him — for the love of God — ask him.
Maybe we should help the Japanese store their plutonium in a safe place — a place much safer than their earthquake tormented islands that float within the largest fisheries of the Pacific Ocean. We could store the plutonium perhaps deep in a cave somewhere. Maybe we could store it beneath the volcanic calderas southeast of Yosemite — or some other remote location, like a trench astride the San Andreas fault.
Yeah, that sounds good. Let’s do that.
If we talk nicely, will the Japanese listen? Maybe they will, if our new president has the sense to ask. Does anyone have a better idea? For the love of God, tell someone.
Nikki Haley, UN Ambassador, told the world that North Korea is begging for war. Her statement reminds me of the rape defense that bad men used in decades past at trial before court—she was begging for it, they would always insist.
The victim—always a woman—exercised her constitutional right to dress any way she chose. A prowling lunatic observed her and believed instead that she was advertising a willingness to copulate with a grease-ball, so he attacked.
In today’s United States the grease-ball defense no longer works. Women (and countries) have rights. The courts protect them, most of the time. When they don’t, women have recourse to civil suits.
Nikki Haley is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India. Her mother once owned a clothing company, Exotica International, where Nikki worked as a bookkeeper starting at age 12. She served as governor of South Carolina until she became UN Ambassador in the Trump Administration. Note from the Editorial Board:Haley resigned her UN post on December 31, 2018.
All countries (and women) have the right to defend themselves. No one should have to say it. But the United States has mucked-up the waters of international affairs by waging preemptive wars against communist and socialist countries for the past seventy-five years. It seems like these wars will never end.
The policy of the United States is to undermine any country that espouses communism; it attacks using whatever methods are devised and recommended by the brilliant, depraved minds of our intelligence community. Despite all the evidence, despite all the complaints lodged against the United States before international courts and the United Nations, most Americans refuse to believe it.
The USA birthed its war-policy against collectivism in the early 1900s when the first communist revolutions undermined the noble classes of eastern Europe. The well-connected saw what happened in Russia and Hungary and decided to do something about it. Writers like Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), George Orwell (1984), and Ayn Rand (We the Living) wrote short, easy to read tracts that portrayed life under communism as a personality-destroying nightmare. The public ate it up.
After World War II, the job of suppression was handed over to our newly formed intelligence agencies who gave the fight its name: the Cold War. With the recent CIA assisted transformations of the Soviet Union and Red China into oligarchies (marking a putative end to the biggest conflicts) other terms have emerged from inside the intelligence community to describe how the USA is continuing to war against what few holdouts remain. The current buzz phrase is strategic strangulation.
Billionaires don’t look at the world in the same way as the disenfranchised and exploited. In the neglected and overlooked far reaches of the world where billionaires don’t live, common people sometimes try to organize themselves by producing wealth cooperatively and sharing it as best they can. Once they attract the attention of the powerful, the powerful send in missionaries and agricultural-aid workers to undermine and disenfranchise their leaders.
If God and food don’t work, they send in assassins. It’s true. Since WWII, the United States has gone to war with one out of four countries. It has overthrown (or co-opted) many states including Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Poland, Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens more.
Eventually, the USA sends in Coca-Cola and other first-line-of-attack companies to overwhelm the nascent economies of the sharers and cooperators. The wealthy move in to buy the arable land and lock up the country; billionaire power-brokers make it their business to bury every way of governance that might threaten their right to administer an economic empire built for one purpose only: to empower their own families and the families of their friends to rule unimpeded into perpetuity.
This billboard appears all over the island of Cuba. It says: BLOCKADE: THE LONGEST GENOCIDE IN HISTORY. It shows a Klansman’s noose strangling the island. Inside the USA intelligence community, it’s called strategic strangulation. Our leaders have enforced the embargo of Cuba for 55 years. Odds are it will never end.
The USA is good at undermining socialist countries. It’s why socialism doesn’t do well. When a communist country like Cuba manages to hold on somehow, they are tormented by embargos, infiltration by agents, sabotage, disinformation, slander, assassinations and so on. Radio Free Whatever is beamed into the targeted country to undermine morale and brainwash listeners with the most seductive psychological warfare techniques in our arsenal. It’s why communist countries seal their borders and jam our broadcasters.
The United States makes sure that no administrator can relax; none can kick back without constantly looking over their shoulder and keeping guard. As long as the privately-owned United States exists, countries of the opposite sex — that is, socialist countries — are going to get blamed for however the rich and powerful choose to hurt them. The better these socialist countries do for their people the bigger the target they become. Their success is their mini-skirt; their low-cut blouse. Obviously, they are begging for war as Madame Haley so eloquently put it.
Blaming the victim is as old as Cain and Abel. It’s as old as history. The bullies win. They put on coats and tails, send their kids to exclusive schools, learn to speak with a different accent, and set themselves apart. They tell wonderful stories about themselves on TV, movies, radio, books, magazines, and the internet until people start to actually believe deep in their hearts that wealthy people are more wonderfully made than themselves or their kids.
The poor and disadvantaged admire their employers, because no one is left to help them understand that they are slaves — fools before a noble class that thinks of them as having no more value than farm animals. They live in the cow-pastures outside the gates of the wealthy. A few unlucky cows get a glimpse from time to time of what has been stolen from them; most of the time they are too incredulous before the view to believe their own eyes.
Today, billionaires are planning as they have for the past seventy years to obliterate the North Koreans. Tens of millions of Koreans will die in the first hours. The North Koreans and their Chinese allies were the first countries to challenge America after WWII. Apparently, our arsenal of atomic weapons didn’t intimidate them. The USA has a long memory.
If we use nuclear weapons in a first strike, no one will live on the peninsula again. That this threat has been floated by our new president (fire and fury like the world has never known) makes it easy to understand what the USA is all about.
Despite denials in the press, America may in fact have neutron bombs in its arsenal which kill people but leave infrastructure intact outside the immediate impact zone. Only bunkers constructed from heavy concrete impregnated with barium sulfate can shield against both neutrons and the gamma ray by-products of collisions between neutrons and the proton-rich substrate of heavy concrete.
High level command bunkers are likely to be built with these materials. Otherwise elements like lead and heavy metals are the barriers of choice against most frequencies of nuclear radiation. But heavy metals tend to be transparent and ineffective against neutron bombardment.
Neutron bombs emit little residual radiation so they don’t contaminate the attack zone. An occupying force can be inserted with little risk of radiation poisoning. It’s possible the USA will use neutron bombs against civilians for the first time if the Koreans continue begging our country to kill them. A follow-on insertion of Marine and Airborne divisions would locate and destroy any surviving command bunkers.
The United States always seems to be first to try diabolical things. We used anthrax against Chinese troops during the Korean war back in the 1950s. Everyone knows about it but us of course. We have short memories when it comes to remembering our own sins like the genocidal Vietnam War and other cruelties such as the war against Iraq and the destabilization of the Middle East.
And no one seems to remember that it was a CIA agent (yes, he was disgruntled and no longer employed, the agency insists) who blew up the first commercial airliner and wiped out the Cuban Olympic fencing team. It was an act of terrorism that didn’t happen when you ask most Americans. Lee Harvey Oswald was also disgruntled and no longer employed, come to think of it.
Speaking of begging for war, is anyone out there begging for peace? The USA killed two million North Koreans during aerial bombardments approved by President Truman. What’s stopping us from doing it again?
During the first days of the Korean War, the South rounded up 100,000 of its own citizens and summarily executed them, believing that each of their victims might be a leftist sympathizer of the North. The Korean War was an atrocity — which I won’t devote blog space to explain or explore. Click on links, those who want to know more.
South Korea from North Korea’s point of view. A massive China has their back. South Korea’s capital is close to their border — a tempting target. (Click on map to produce full-size view in a new window.)
The point is, we aren’t listening to the North or South Koreans. Most want the peninsula unified. We don’t. Most folks want to live in a safe and fair place where billionaires don’t reduce the average person to poverty. South Korea doesn’t want us to sacrifice millions of its own citizens in a military strike against the North — possibly triggering a nuclear conflagration — to make a point. It’s simple, really.
The only sensible solution is to leave Korea and to assist reunification as best as we can if the sides invite us. We aren’t leaving obviously, because our policy is to topple socialism wherever it takes root.
In the past the USA demonized so many of its enemies that it has become more confusing for most folks to know who the bad guys are this time around. Immigrants to the Americas once labeled native Americans with the pejorative, savages. We exterminated their food supply (buffalos), then their men, women and children.
Right now, no one knows who to trust. With our new president we will never know what the facts are. We will never know for sure who is begging for war, us or them.
Billy Lee
From the EDITORIAL BOARD:
Billy Lee supports private and public ownership of property (a mixed economy) but advocates for internationally enforced limits on personal incomes and estate sizes to reduce the temptations that drive the wealthy to burn down democracy on altars of greed. Read Billy Lee’s essay Capitalism and Income Inequality.
Billy Lee opposes war on humanitarian grounds. During war people get killed and are maimed in huge numbers. It sometimes takes generations for both winners and losers to emerge from the trauma and horrors.
Billy Lee supports the United States during war but in peacetime reserves his constitutional right to pontificate freely.
