The scent of fresh Lenin

The way the class issues in America are coming up - food stamps, one percent, 47 percent, etc.  - sooner or later, seems to me, will coalesce not with the old Marxism we knew, but with what really may be an inescapable fact.  We and the Chinese and the other smart econo/socio/politico engineers are putting together societies with a huge, increasing gap in income and wealth.  It may be forever.  It may be inescapable. We all get the idea that free unregulated markets are a good way to balance supply and demand.   But are they a good way to balance wealth?  All the evidence says no.

Sooner of later we have to face the fact that there will be many more people than jobs, jobs that are worth a damn with incomes that are enough to raise and educate children and put away enough to create an annuity that will enable old people to live well.  Walk around in America.  Ask the working guys you know in their fifties and sixties if they are really going to accumulate enough money to do anything but work until they drop. And that's the middle class.  The poor folks will just look for handouts.

That's a really big failure, and I think it's coming everywhere, over the next few decades.  The way these things have been addressed in the past have always been through the Four Horsemen.  Are they the only ways out?

Seems bleak, I know, and I'm a basically pretty cheerful dude, but I really can't solve this one.  If this is how America looks, what about the rest of the world?  Asia's markets seem to be based on the US Federal Reserve System.  What?  Don't they have their own central banks?  Is it all here, all dependent on Harvard and Chicago grads?

 Trouble, my friends, trouble.  Right here in River City.

Terrorism, the label

The baby-gassing leader of Syria refer to his opponents as "terrorists" and it makes me wonder - is there a definition?  

Evidently there are hundreds.  And there is a big political issue baked in - can a state be a terrorist?  Can a state be the sponsor?  The answer is hell yes, with plenty of examples, like Lockerbie.  Or is a terrorist someone who is domestic, and only violates the law of the state?  Timothy McVeigh - was he a terrorist or just a criminal?

I'd say he's a terrorist, for two reasons.  The first has to do with the true origin of the term - it seems to come from the Terror, La Terreur, in the French Revolution, when the idea was to use terror to win at revolution and to rule.   Said Robespierre:

"We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

"If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs."

McVeigh thought this, that his action was somehow civic.  So did Bin Laden.  So, I suppose, do the Syrian revolutionaries.

But to me the second and equally necessary test is whether there is the deliberate slaughter of innocents. 9/11 yes, Oklahoma City yes, and now, Damascus - yes.   So it's Bashar Al-Assad, who's the terrorist. If the shoe fits, Mr. Baby-Gasser, wear it.