Worth remembering -- a certain president of somewhere or other, no names, no pack-drills, in his first term, gave a speech to the staff of the CIA (carried on C-Span). Largely improvised, as most of his talks were. Talking about recent wars in the Gulf, he repeated over and over "you know, I would have kept the oil."
There's a profound, almost completely undescribed shift going on in American governance towards the corporatist model (I use the term as an analogue to "publicist"), which has profound implications for unwritten rules (e.g., jus cogens, internationally speaking) everywhere.
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Interesting year-end report from the Chief Justice of the US. The Declaration of Independence, and Common Sense. We might not yet have the end of this particular run of events in view.
As for me, "I have taken a seat in the grandstand of philosophical self-detachment to fall asleep watching the cannibals do their death-dance." (The Iceman Cometh)