State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.

America has always been the richest and most secure, and sometimes the most dangerous country in the world. In the early years, the danger was to everybody near us, slaves, Native Americans, Mexicans. It finally expanded in 1898 to the Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

The United States is the Godfather when it establishes edicts. Others had better live up to them, or else. We have to demonstrate that. So that's what the bombing of Syria was to have demonstrated.

Organization and education, when they interact with each other, they strengthen each other, they are mutually supportive.

A lot of countries break (or go against) the international law.

The American claim that the bombing of North Vietnam was directed against military targets does not withstand direct investigation.

More generally, independent farmers had to be trained to become docile workers in the expanding industrial system. It was necessary to drive from their heads evil ideas, such as the belief that wage labor was not much different from chattel slavery. That continues to the present, now sometimes taking the form of an attack on public education.