Long before China embraced capitalism, I said that communistic governments and capitalism actually belonged together. Since the embrace, look what they have accomplished. Unlike Japan, where the population seemed more enamored with all things American after WWII, basically submerging their national identity over the identity of the victors, the Chinese still retain their national identity. Of all things, that scares me the most.

Please note I am referring to the populations of these two countries, and not the governments.

3000 years of maintaining a national identity even after the numerous and, it appears often times, violent government changes (even from one Emperor to another) indicates a people with the will to endure.

If I had wanted cream and sugar, then why order the damn coffee?

is that it never looks or feels like overreach when it happens...but to a select few who are watching very carefully.

I picture it like Wily E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner and running off a cliff. He doesn't fall until he stops churning his legs and looks down. We're churning with all our might and simply refusing to look down, but that doesn't change our position relative to the edge of the cliff and the ground below.

Nobody gives up an empire willingly. Very rarely have nations even been willing to read the writing on the wall and act on it proactively. The Netherlands to a great degree did and Britian to a lesser degree. But that's the stark choice: go down with the empire or give it up to preserve what you have at home.

I have a hard time imagining the US taking the latter option if only because it's been so many decades of believing in the unadmitted empire. We can't even have a national conversation about it because we pretend that it doesn't exist. Soft fascism will keep it on life support for a while, but forces of opposition are certainly arraying and without the economic power of the last half century, we really do not have the military might to keep the world in our order. (shy of launching nukes because we're pissy)

My simplistic analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that it had overspent, overarmed, and overextended. Then it took a reasonable fellow like Gorbachev to rein in the Russian empire and its overreach.

I have always worried that we would someday find ourselves in a similar collapse: overreached, overspent, and nothing to do but curl in and decline. Like the Soviets we spent similar inordinate sums -- $5.3 trillion alone on nuclear weapons so far -- so we really have to at least curl in our military spending and reach. Yet with that decline we will also have to reduce expectations for Social Security and Medicare, which account for more than half of the budget.

Tom Robinson

We can't talk about the military and the empire and corporate contracts because it is invisible. Moreover, negative comments about all this are taboo - the military has done a marvelous job controlling the dialogue, monopolizing the concept of patriotism, making the phrase "thank you for your service" mandatory whenever you meet one of their employees, forbidding any pictures of people being killed or wounded overseas, and conflating what goes on in Iraq and Afghanistan as somehow indispensable to preserving our freedoms. No one is allowed to ask why our trillion dollar annual budget for the military could not stop the 9/11 terrorists who spent $200,000 on their attack.