Rand Corporation

A report by Bruce Bennett and the RAND Corporation has brought attention to one of the most important issues for international politics. Ironically, despite being a region of vital interest within American foreign policy, there has been very little public discussion of what to do in the event of government collapse in North Korea. Bennett’s timely report provides a series of vital contributions to the discussion and further outlines the lack of preparation in political, social, economic and military terms. Yet beyond the critical end game for the Korean peninsula are deeper questions concerning how any international force might respond. Specifically, how can the U.S. and Republic of Korea effectively mobilize regional powers with their differing security and development goals? Preparing for the unthinkable is not a simple moral imperative, but responsible leadership in the twenty-first century.

The most likely path of collapse to take place within the U.S. includes economic destabilization caused by a loss of the dollar's world reserve status and petro-status.  This fiscal crisis event will likely not occur in the midst of a political vacuum.  The central banks and international financiers that created our ongoing and developing disaster are not going to allow the destruction of the American economy, the dollar, or global markets without a cover event designed to hide their culpability.  They need something big.  Something so big that the average citizen is overwhelmed with fear and confusion.  A smoke and mirrors magic trick so raw and soul shattering it leaves the very population of the Earth mesmerized and helpless to understand the root of the nightmare before them.  The elites need a fabricated Apocalypse. Enter Syria...

The globalists have stretched the whole of the world thin.  They have removed almost every pillar of support from the edifice around us, and like a giant game of Jenga, are waiting for the final piece to be removed, causing the teetering structure to crumble.  Once this calamity occurs, they will call it a random act of fate, or a mathematical inevitability of an overly complex system.  They will say that they are not to blame.  That we were in the midst of “recovery”.  That they could not have seen it coming. Their solution will be predictable.  They will state that in order to avoid such future destruction, the global framework must be “simplified”, and what better way to simplify the world than to end national sovereignty, dissolve all borders, and centralize nation states under a single economic and political ideal?

The greatest and most often exploited weakness of any revolution for freedom is the inability of the downtrodden populace to identify the true enemy. Even the most successful battles against despotism, like the American Revolution, often only had a distant sense of who they were really fighting against. In the coming years, the American people will face numerous threats; some real, some imagined in the sterile conference rooms of a black-hearted think tanks.  But, the most terrifying threat to our cultural roots of free thought, expression, and prosperity is wielded by a very particular and exclusive group of thin-blooded ego-maniacs.  Identifying them is not difficult.  Hiding their true nature is nearly impossible for a person or institution whose narcissism is so pronounced.  They adore their own insanity and wish to share it with the world.

In the ten years to 2010, the severely obese (Americans who are 100lbs or more overweight) increased about 70%. A new study from RAND Corporation (via ScienceDaily) found that "the proportion of people at the high end of the weight scale continues to increase faster than any other group of obese people, despite increased public attention on the risks of obesity."  On the bright side, as we noted here, the faster we get fatter, the sooner we die, and the lower the deficit (via entitlements) will be. Perhaps the way out of this fiscal mess is indeed to eat ourselves to an early death?

Military budgets are only one gauge of military power. A given financial commitment may be adequate or inadequate depending on the number and capability of a nation's adversaries, how well it spends its investment, and what it seeks to accomplish, among other factors. Nevertheless, trends in military spending do reveal something about a country's capacity for coercion. The following charts, from the Council of Foreign Relations, present historical trends in U.S. military spending and analyze the forces that may drive it lower.

As Americans mindlessly celebrate another Memorial Day with cookouts, beer and burgers, the U.S. war machine keeps churning. As we brutally enforce our will on foreign countries, we create more people that hate us. They don’t hate us for our freedom. They hate us because we have invaded and occupied their countries. They hate us because we kill innocent people with predator drones. They hate us for our hypocrisy regarding democracy and freedom. Just when we had the opportunity to make a sensible decision by leaving Iraq and exiting the Middle East quagmire, Obama made the abysmal choice to casually sacrifice more troops in the Afghan shithole. We have thrown over $1.3 trillion down Middle East rat holes over the last 11 years with no discernible benefit to the citizens of the United States. George Bush and Barack Obama did this to prove  they were true statesmen. The Soviet Union killed over 1 million Afghans, while driving another 5 million out of the country and retreated as a bankrupted and defeated shell after ten years. Young Americans continue to die, for whom and for what? Our foreign policy during the last eleven years can be summed up in one military term, SNAFU – Situation Normal All Fucked Up. These endless foreign interventions under the guise of a War on Terror are a smoke screen for what is really going on in this country. When a government has unsolvable domestic problems, they try to distract the willfully ignorant masses by proactively creating foreign conflicts based upon false pretenses.  General Douglas MacArthur understood this danger to our liberty.

“I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.”