War and poverty: A compromise with hell

It's so easy to paper over the real American security void with verbiage about strength vs. weakness and the endless need to upgrade the military.

Here's Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, for instance, quoted the other day in The Guardian: "It is incumbent upon us to field a more lethal force if our nation is to retain the ability to defend ourselves and what we stand for."

This is the cornerstone of The Great Lie, the foundation of global suffering and disorder: that all the glorious abstractions for which we stand -- freedom,