No one is born knowing everything

 Graham Platner has generated a lot of press coverage because his evolution as a person has been preserved in digital media over a span of many years. By all appearances, he has refined his beliefs and behavior since he separated from military service and the particular model of masculinity that culture tends to cultivate.

All-male organizations orient themselves around dick-measuring and pissing contests. They certainly don't reward sensitivity. Vulnerability is something that you hide while you try to eradicate it in yourself. In the day to day you have to get along where the discourse is frequently dominated by the most coarse and assertive assholes in the group.

The armed forces ceased to be all male in the latter part of the 20th century, but male dominance permeates them anyway. The women who serve hold their places not by the respect that the hierarchy has developed for their unique perspective, but by being able to push back in the long established format.

In a volunteer force, applicants are likely to be athletic types who feel confident of their ability to fight if necessary. Some of them even look forward to it. Much of the organization serves in support roles essential to keep a fighting force in the field, but everyone picks up a rifle and marches at some point in their training. The job is to kill when required. Serving even as support personnel in some bases puts you at risk of enemy action, as we've seen recently when Iran has struck US bases in retaliation for the Trump regime's foolish war. As a member of the armed forces, you are part of the nation's department of targeted violence. It is better to give than to receive, as they say. But some of it is bound to blow back. So there you are: in a culture of toughness where you have to be ready to match an opponent's brutality at least, and exert your own if so ordered.

PTSD happens when a participant's ability to withstand the broad array of negative aspects falls short of their expectations. Behavior adapts to cope in the culture and to deal with the after effects when you leave it.

Just attending an all-male prep school for a couple of years in the 1960s, and growing up in the 1960s and '70s in general imprinted a generic sexism on me that functioned in spite of my overlaid intellectual support for the rising power of women and the gradual recognition of differing sexualities. After that prep school I made a point to avoid boys' clubs like the military. Military service wasn't all that attractive to a cohort that had watched fathers and older brothers chewed up in the Vietnam War. I knew people -- mostly young men -- who embraced it. Hard to say whether they were really gung ho or just felt safe acting that way now that we had no large-scale conflicts going. Militarism fits well with macho cosplay.

After September 11, 2001, recruitment surged as an angry nation set out to make someone pay for bursting our bubble of perceived invulnerability. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wore on, participants learned about their own personal ability to deal with the horrors that go with the job. As a multiple amputee British commando vacationing in Wolfeboro said when one of our shop staff offered sympathy over the loss of his legs, "It's just part of the job, I guess." He wheeled himself back out to his rented motor home and we saw him no more, but the flat matter-of-factness stuck with me. I have often wondered how much he really believed that and how much was just deflection to get people to stop talking about it.

High ideals will always conflict with low compliance. The best we can do is pick ideals that seem to advance the greater good, whatever the hell that is. If you say that a man is kind to women and animals, you've put women in the same category as animals, or at least subject to the whims of men. If you believe that society should be run by the strongest, you accept the hierarchy of physical violence. If you believe that society should be run by the richest because they're clearly the smartest, any staircase you leave in place for new players to climb has tall, fortified risers. Concentrated wealth defends itself. If you believe that "the people" should rule, you have to persuade huge numbers of them to agree to something and stick with it, over and over again.

On some level we all have known for decades that the stakes are high as we set our course for the future. The future keeps turning into the present, which makes it seem ordinary. A person's evolution doesn't come with chapter headings and episode titles. It might advance and retreat, and follow a curving path. Before social media and densely packed digital records of emails and chats, much of that exploration went undocumented, vaguely remembered if that, unless some incident was particularly intense to one or more witnesses. Even then, testimony depended on their recollection and whatever notes might survive. No one could be Googled. Hop in a time machine, bop back to 1983 and tell someone to just Google something.

The information environment we live in now is so completely normal to generations born into it that they have no concept of what life was like before. Even people who lived much of their lives in the time before have grown accustomed to the convenience. There it is again: we're led by our bias toward convenience. It is great in many ways. But it also makes us vulnerable. We have to learn how to deal with the flood of information that we can get about anyone who happens to become prominent for any reason. Those reasons grow more numerous with the wide access to global exposure. It can make you feel like you were born knowing everything. In seconds, you can find support or refutation for any point of view. Then you have to assess the validity of the new information.

At some point, in our representative democracy, we have to elect someone and give them the power that pertains to the office we have given them. We are currently suffering greatly under the abuse of power and gross incompetence among the majority of office holders and appointees. As suffering goes, it ain't shit compared to the parts of the world where we have allowed, neglected, or promoted suffering in order to support our own consumerist lifestyle, but morally we are wounded by the cruelty and greed that we have exalted over ourselves. It will only get worse if we do not place people in office, flawed though they may be, who are at least striving toward a more evolved society that cares for people and the planet.

Some people do appear to be almost perfect. Even deeper digging fails to disclose the buried skeletons of past evil. However, there aren't enough of them to field a baseball team, let alone run a government. We have to accept the rejects of perfect righteousness to find the majority of willing workers who try to be better people and make a better world. We have to trust that they are actually trying as hard as they say they are.

Dueling Insurrections

 In the 250th year of our existence as a declared independent nation, we are fighting the final phase of the war that launched us.

The Declaration of Independence set us against the British government. The new nation was born in insurrection. The signers were united in their agreement that the new country would govern itself on the stated principles of equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Publicly the document was all inclusive. Privately it was understood that slaves remained slaves and women remained inferior. The "all men" who really mattered would be free of the British yoke, to chart their destinies and that of the great new country. We would show the world how it's done.

Capitalism gets bad rap, and rightly so, since its corporate form does seem to love slavery. But in the initial concept of the United States, inventive (white, male) people would be allowed to come up with new ideas and perfect existing ones, and maybe earn a pile of money in return for creating things that benefit society as a whole. The proof would be in the sales figures.

We all know how that falls apart. Slave plantations were a corporate business model with a captive labor force that also served to suppress wages among the poor non-slaves trying to work in the same region. It was a three-tiered society, but the lower two sat far below the ruling class. Racism was used to bind the "white trash" to the agenda of the self-proclaimed aristocracy. Outside of slave country, a start-up might be subject to pressure from investors. If you couldn't bootstrap your startup, you would need to attract venture capital. At the least, you had employees if your idea was big enough to need more than just one dreamer working his ass off.

The rise of the United States further depended on the established parameters of success recognized throughout the rest of the world: money and power. Could we generate, from our own soil, native-born fortunes to rival those of Europe? Worth as a human being in this country became even more tied to money than it was in the nations from which we had broken away, because no free person had an excuse for falling short other than their own poor character, or perhaps bad luck. Some were already more equal than others, but that was obscured behind the generality that nothing in the law was designed to hold you back.

At the time of the bicentennial celebration in 1976, the country was moving toward greater social equality, under programs established in the 1930s and reinforced thereafter, that supported a strong middle class. The wealthy have always thought on the plantation model. They have no need for a strong middle class. So they looked for leverage to divide the prosperous middle and aspiring lower levels from each other, to drive wealth and power to themselves. They chose insurrection.

The symbols of the American war of independence and the later war between the states roused unthinking enthusiasm in these later generations who had no direct experience of either conflict. Especially in a nation still dominated by one race, the fighting prowess of the South could be admired and celebrated by the North if you didn't really give a shit about the failure of Reconstruction. Hell, by 1976, anyone regardless of color could get served at a lunch counter or sit anywhere on a bus, right? We're good, we're fine, we're moving forward.

Clearly not. We did for a while, but the self-appointed aristocracy will never be satisfied.

The people holding power and jackhammering away at the constitutional rights of individuals still manage to style themselves as insurrectionists, heirs to the founders and their revolutionary principles. This power group even admits to the embrace of slavery and sexism, but insist that those are understood in the poorly-worded founding documents and the social norms of the 18th century. They hold that we should model ourselves on that period while conveniently blending it with the norms and values of the robber baron period of capitalist excess. 

Those of us on the other side also claim the mantle of insurrectionists, revolutionaries, fighting the good fight on behalf of individual rights, as written in the constitution. Fight the power! Outvote the suits! Refuse to cooperate. Take to the streets!

It's all very inspiring. Both sides are warriors for justice as they see it. But the ownership class still insists on global domination by wealth alone, while the more collective side looks at the planet as an island in space, precious for its lifegiving conditions, and shared among us all. We can't both be the righteous rebels. And arguing over who deserves the title gets us nowhere. We need to be discussing policies as they relate not only to survival but quality of life. What can we realistically enjoy without robbing later generations of their chance to have a good time, too? It very much comes down to the definition of a good time and a clinical assessment of available resources.

In a free society, compliance has to be voluntary. That basic truth may doom us, as too many people want to have their cake and future generations' cake as well. How can they be forbidden their theft without having too repressive a government? Where do freedom and sustainability intersect? Can that line be fortified and electrified without creating genuine tyranny by accident?

Lack of ambition is good for human survival. Modest goals don't chew up as much real estate as grandiose empire building does.

To pick one example, where better to shop quickly than Amazon? Jeff Bezos didn't start Amazon to make people's lives better. He did it to get rich off of people's natural taste for convenience. He doesn't need enough money to rent the city of Venice or have his own space program. But he might as well, since he's not pissing it away on taxes and payroll. Convenient shopping is nice. The evil is just a side effect. 

I've harped on this concept before, but it bears repeating until everyone gets it: It's heartwarming when a billionaire does nice things with their money, like endowing some educational institution with no strings attached, or buying millions of acres of rainforest to preserve some fraction of the forest cover needed to produce a breathable atmosphere on this one and only place that supports life as we know it. And maybe it's the best we can do, given the vast amount of cultivated ignorance and stupidity that holds us back from collectively choosing to govern ourselves as better people. I hate to believe it, but we are stalled at the moment by just such a blockage. 

Choose your insurrection carefully. The government as written is not your enemy, but the government operated as a corporate subsidiary certainly is. The answer is to take control of the machinery of government away from the representatives of wealth, not to disable that government. Use the system of laws to redistribute the GDP to serve the overwhelming majority of citizens, not to secure and build the fortunes of the greedy few. 

Memorial Day, 2026

 Today we honor the valiant service members throughout our history who believed that the supreme sacrifice of their lives was a price worth paying to bring about a better world.

The world is indeed becoming a better place. Progress is slow and uneven. It is halted by ethnocentrism, greed, and ego in some places, while surging forward in others. Overall the ideals of human rights remain a beacon.

The United States as currently led has declined to take part in this better world. Our current leadership might as well be pissing on the graves of fallen heroes rather than laying wreaths. They view the military as expendable labor, a cost of doing business. And they're poor, wasteful  businessmen.

If we let the trend continue, every person who died from the Revolutionary War onward wasted their death. We don't honor the equality defined in the Declaration of Independence. We don't have a secular government allowing free expression, latitude for all faiths, and a free and inquisitive press. Current leadership seeks to rescind constitutional amendments that don't fit their view of the hierarchy that favors them. 

The massive casualties of the Civil War occupy acres and acres that could be turned into golf resorts for all that their courage matters now. Because the civil rights movement continued to press the issues of the Civil War against the tactics that replaced outright slavery, their casualties deserve to be remembered alongside the official war dead. And the current policies at the federal and state level continue the theme of erasing their gains.

Every war is supposed to push us closer to a time when we no longer need to send people out to give up everything else that they might ever have been and done. Every war fails us in that regard, because too many of us focus on the heroism and fighting skill, and not enough on what those people were fighting for: not to have to do this again.

Humans are a deeply flawed species. Various leaders will continue to rise and believe that they can conquer the world, or at least a good chunk of it. We will always have a need for heroes who will hold their ground and say no. Remember this: all that is required for good to triumph is for evil people to do nothing. You pick a side every day, multiple times a day. Which side are you on?

The technology of mechanized slaughter becomes ever more impersonal and heinous. There was never much glory in the mass murder contests we've conducted though the millennia, but there's ever less in the ways in which we can obliterate whole swaths of each other without even looking closely. And once a year we grow briefly solemn and say a few words before going to our various barbecues, weather permitting.

The inconvenience of being racist

Growing up as an airhead, oblivious to the forces in the world around me, I never realized how much my life overlapped with the era of the great civil rights movements until years later. I was a toddler when we got orders to Brownsville, Texas, for my father's first ship command, and moved steadily northward from 1960 to 1965, landing on mid-coast Maine for my father's second ship command.

In Maryland from 1960 or '61 to 1964, there must have been signs of segregation somewhere, but I didn't run into them. In fact, I remember a Black family in our church and school system. I had no idea how ground-breaking that was. Particularly socially inept, I wasn't mingling well with "my own people," let alone exploring across racial lines. I was still just figuring out toilet discipline and the proper way to dispose of boogers.

There were Black sections of town in Annapolis. I just figured they preferred it there. My own family lived in a weird little rental neighborhood called Rogers Heights. Our finances were artificially strained for the first ten years of my life because my parents were unable to unload the first house they'd bought, in an area of Connecticut they wouldn't live in again for another thirty years. The house did sell eventually, which bumped us up a few notches in the middle class from then on.

In all of our travels, from one duty station to the next, or to make regular visits to my grandparents and the cousins who lived in their vicinity, we just piled into the station wagon and went. Motels might be kind of nice or a little weird, but nothing interfered with our passage beyond the usual risks of travel by car.

Thanks to the Internet and social media, we get to see story after story of famous people who stood up for their Black companions looking for rooms and meals in various contexts during the long era of open and legalized segregation. Travel in white supremacist America placed challenges in front of Black and other minority citizens and visitors that could go far beyond mere inconvenience.

The white people who began to push back on segregation could have retreated if the situation escalated to violence. Only when white activists ventured into the deep South to mess with the foundations of political repression did they fall victim to racist murderers themselves. The movement never hinged on one specific act of white resistance. It built on each and all of them. In the case of entertainers and sports figures, the white celebrities used the leverage of their marketability to force the issue on behalf of Black colleagues. The conflict was much more dire in the trenches of voter registration and integration of general public spaces.

Everyone benefitted from the diminishment of segregation. I would say the end of it, but we know that it didn't end. Racists don't stop being racist when they no longer have as much legal right to express it openly and by force. But the freedom to mingle if you so choose and the convenience to travel in whatever racial mix you happen to collect makes your life simpler.

Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that racism and labor rights were entwined. He presented a threat to the economic order that went well beyond just free movement through the infrastructure of society. Aside from the uber-wealthy, we all benefit from dropping racial and ethnic concerns and talking instead about the division and distribution of resources and the fruits of our labors. The ownership class wants you talking about anything but that. They want you embracing the inconvenience of segregation again. Segregation cements a class structure that benefits the people on top no matter how they got there.

In the old world from which the Americas were colonized, aristocracy led to money -- until it didn't, as the 19th and 20th centuries converged, but that's another story. In the Americas, particularly the one the United States refers to as America, money conferred aristocracy. Fortunes were made, exploiting the land and imported labor, and conning the indigenous people with treaty after broken treaty.

Right now, the top job in the US government is occupied by an actual criminal, a convicted felon with a long history of fraud, wage theft, and bad debts. All signs indicate massive insider trading by the chief executive, his family, his cabinet, and many other elected officials. The corruption and bribery are off the charts, to the outrage of some and the admiration of others. The racism is just bait to keep a passionate minority of segregationists voting Republican. We're all getting screwed by the corruption and incompetence of the party in power.

I don't have Black friends, only Black acquaintances, and I've never been in a romantic relationship with a Black person, but I refuse to let the government tell me who I can associate with. It goes beyond me, to every citizen. I don't want this to be a country where race or political party become more important than human rights and full participatory citizen government. Anything less is just an unnecessary pain in the ass. The people who look back on the period of segregation as some kind of golden age are either idiots or calculating greedheads using bigots as a reliable voting bloc oblivious to the underlying financial motives.

I've written before about how democracy is itself a pain in the ass of a different kind. Government by the people requires that the people, generation after generation, pay attention to what their supposed representatives are doing. All government invites corruption, because officials have power as well as responsibility. Power is a drug. Responsibility is a burden. Which one sounds more attractive? But our only hope at some measure of control over corruption rests in the democratic process at some level.

James Madison believed that educated voters were essential to a thriving democratic republic. He wasn't wrong, although he overestimated the American thirst for education. By the time I came along, school was something to endure until you either dropped out or graduated and got down to the fun part, earning as much money as you could, to spend on self indulgence.

The government had been controlling our information since the Second World War, because of national security concerns. Students succeeded in the social settings of school in various ways, peaking at different times: the high school quarterback and the head cheerleader who went no further afterward; the brainy kid who went to an Ivy League college; the ones who became lawyers or doctors; the vast rabble who just found jobs of some kind and lived their lives while The Government operated in the background. Depending on your era, you might have had to perform mandatory military service, but the Vietnam War finally ended that. Little by little, government got turned into a separate entity, or so it seemed. Our grubby little hands didn't have to be pried off of the levers of power. We just let go.

To meet our constitutional responsibility, adult citizens need to think of ourselves as pre-legislators. The function of the system needs to occupy more of our time than we would like it to. Democracy in this country, or probably any country, has never received the attention that it should. The business of being human  is so much more compelling, and generally easier to connect with.

The citizens of the privileged majority have known intellectually that we have freedoms and powers legally guaranteed, but we leave them sitting, for the most part. The First Amendment protects the press and free expression in general. Provocative shit-stirrers troll the public to remind us that they can. The Second Amendment facilitates the gun industry and enables individuals to amass ridiculous arsenals of killing hardware to remind us that they can. All well and good, but the corporate press has decided to be more corporate than journalistic, and the arsenals will not stop moneyed interests from skewing financial policy to direct more and more wealth their way.

In November, remember that districts don't vote. People do. We don't have the luxury of more than two parties, and only one party is making the slightest effort to maintain and expand the progress we made toward a freer and more convenient society before conservatives started cranking us back the other way beginning in 1981 and ratcheting up steadily to the present crisis.

The paranoid electorate

 Your vote matters. It is still the first step by which officials gain their positions of responsibility and power. That's why it's worth billons of dollars to dark money groups seeking to install corporate tools.

Cynicism has eroded participation in elections, but so has anxiety based in paranoia. No one wants to vote for someone who turns out to be bad. Not just controversial. Outright bad.

As we see now, a certain core of voters will try to redefine badness as goodness through various filters. Others will just go quiet, still content to see how it plays out in their favor. But elections are not decided on the faithful. They're decided on the undecided.

Some people don't vote because they think it's pointless. Some of the ones who say that actually don't vote because they don't understand the issues, but believe that appearing cynical is cooler than appearing ignorant. I guess that's true, but either way you have handed off your fate to the people who do pick a side.

I didn't vote for a long time after I was old enough, because I wasn't intelligent and focused enough to study the candidates and the issues. In my family, we talked about policies and principles, but I seldom heard one of my parents tie the policies to a party. Because my father was a Coast Guard officer, he took his responsibility to present as nonpartisan very seriously. He took all of his responsibilities very seriously.

Observing the Republican Party from Nixon to Reagan, I had a strong inclination to favor Democrats, but I wasn't sure enough to place a bet. Then when I finally did, on Bill Clinton, he dropped the universal health care promise when corporate money growled, and then acted like a horny teenager in his second term, seriously handicapping Al Gore's stature going into the 2000 election. Thanks, Bill. His presidency was a net good, but not by as much as it could have been if he had had more courage and zipper control.

Bush 43 did nothing to shake my observation that the Democrats presented the less worse option, with strong potential actually to do good eventually. And the Republican Party since then has simply spiraled downward into a criminal syndicate in league with white supremacists and the Russian mob. However, the price of gas and groceries, blah blah blah, and boys who would be girls, oh my. Not to mention the undercurrent of racism in the depressing percentage of people who wouldn't actually initiate a lynching, but wouldn't do anything to stop one, either.

Political violence has always been with us, particularly in matters of race and labor relations. Domestic violence becomes political in its expression that women need to stay in their place and let their men do the talking. And violence scares most people. It scares more people than will admit to it. It keeps people from joining public protests. It keeps bystanders from interfering when they see it happening to someone else. Law enforcement uses the threat of it to intimidate witnesses. Criminals do the same thing. These forces aligned to do violence to each other live in that world. They express themselves only in that language. It's their medium of exchange. It's one more thing to fear: the violence of uncontrolled society versus the violence of over-controlling law enforcement.

Into this time of high-stakes decision making steps the paranoid voter, wondering if they'll have to answer for the spectacular failure of their champion. In walks the persnickety voter who doesn't want to listen to a woman's voice or annoying laugh for four years, who falls back on sexist tropes to justify voting for an obvious unrepentant criminal traitor to the nation, backed by religious bigots. Who makes a bad choice and digs in his heels -- or her heels, to please her man. We're tired of being embarrassed and let down. We want to believe that we could amass enough candidates to vote in a government that will change laws to control the bribery and violent coercion that have dug in and fortified themselves over a couple of centuries with only brief interruptions. Those interruptions were the template for actual improvements, but those lights need to be tended and defended against the powers of greed and class structure that seek to perpetuate the power of wealth as privilege without responsibility.

To get there, we need a bunch of paranoid people to take a risk. It's a lot to ask, and we have a very short time to figure out how to present the request.

Calling them "critters" erodes democracy

 I love Heather Cox Richardson, and I'm extremely grateful for her work, but she uses a term that weakens the position of all of us trying to restore some level of respect to elective office and the citizen government established for us by the constitution that everyone seems so eager to wield in their own interest.

Back when government was all men, the term "congressman" served to describe the role in a neutral way. When women joined the ranks, "congresswoman" joined the lexicon. It doesn't flow as smoothly in speech, and now faces additional problems for gender oversimplification. So I understand the need for a gender-neutral, generic term for a member of congress. "Congressional representative" is bland, boring, pedantic, and takes too long to say. "Congrasshole" is not emotionally neutral or supportive of the institution. But "critter" makes them seem harmless, cute, and ineffectual. Either that or like vermin that you call an exterminator to eliminate because they're destroying your stuff.

Cynics will say that this term therefore accurately depicts members of Congress, because they are all those things. However, political commentators will also exhort us to go out and vote. Vote! It's your voice! Choose that candidate who will get in there and work hard to represent your interests! And magically transform into a critter as soon as confirmed in office, apparently. It makes the whole thing seem pointless and hopeless, which pleases both the oligarchs and the accelerationists who want to collapse civilization. Do you really want to live under the boot heel of robber barons or through the deadly chaos of civilization's collapse? If so, turn loose your last fingertip grasp of political control. Embrace the cynical resignation. Call your representatives critters and expect nothing more of them than you would of rats and roaches.

Oversimplification does not aid communication. Complex concepts are made up of simple parts, but they're made of lots of simple parts. Not everyone of voting age and eligibility has the patience to wade through all that. We're in the mess we're in right now because of decades trying to accommodate that on one side and exploit it on the other. The exploitive side has done all it can to undermine trust in experts. Education moves too slowly to keep up with the pace of events. That's why the brainiacs in the tech sector want to impose their own dominion over the common herd, because they're so much better than the rest of us. Can't boil an egg or change a tire, but they can design a surveillance system that knows how often you fart.

If we can't believe that we're able to find and vote for responsible people who will do their best for us in a tough job for what is actually fairly low pay, why show up at all?

Find a better term.

Trump hands the world to China and Russia

 The greed and corruption of the Trump regime was already well on the way to knocking the United States to at least the third spot in the world order, before his adventure in Iran sealed the deal.

Trump and Hegseth treated our weapon stockpile like a Hollywood six-shooter that always has enough bullets to outgun the bad guy. Their orgy of violence in Iran burned through a couple of wars' worth of expensive munitions that they can't just order on Amazon with overnight shipping.

In addition to the military depletion, our country has been reduced diplomatically to the foot-stomping and whining of a spoiled rich kid. This regime was put in power by pissed-off simpletons. As such, it is perfectly representative of its constituents. The rest of us just got dragged along.

The pissed-off simpletons include the ones who voted directly for the vile, bigoted, lying grifter and the ones who sat it out in a snit in 2024 because the Democratic candidate wasn't perfect enough.

Whether Trump is formally a foreign asset or not, he has acted perfectly on their behalf, with the full approval of most of the office holders in the party he captured in 2016. We can neither fight nor bargain our way out of the shit swamp that the entire passel of clowns have dumped us into.

The failure of Soviet communism wasn't communism per se. It was the power-mad, sadistic liars in control of the government. The same right wing people who continue to bleat about communism have no problem with the Russian heirs to the same power-mad, sadistic liars exerting control to this day. And now we have our own power-mad, sadistic liars in control of what remains of our democratic government.

We have one needle's eye left that we can squeeze through to oust the power-mad, sadistic liars and resume our zigzag march toward the inclusive and imaginative powerhouse that this country could be. It happens in November, 2026, when one imperfect party stands against a party monolithically devoted to stamping all that out and settling grumpily into their rightful place below a former communist empire and a current one. Because that's how it will be. Tough talk. Threats of global holocaust. No real leverage. But we can stay home and dominate our women and pick on minorities and paint the walls with our own shit, for all that the rest of the world will care.