Anticipation

Here are a couple of points about kleptocracy I don't remember having developed before:

Kleptocracies need numbers. Sutter could have stopped two or three gold panners from stealing his gold, but not the thousands of '49s who overran his young country of New Helvetia. Once the US saw that the theft was multiply ratified, the US led the continuing theft.

Native Americans noted that the white land-grabbers were "like leaves on the trees." Had Crazy Horse been able to defeat the waves of troops that followed after he'd defeated Custer, still more troops would have been issued by Washington.

But the worst example of kleptocracy to my mind are the invisible thefts: thefts where the thieves don't even see that they're stealing: like the stealing of the basic public networking ideas of Ivan Illich into dating services, followed by Yahoo, Google, EBay ... like the stealing of the basic internets principals of yours truly pk, telling other networkers around the globe in 1971, 1972 that we should interconnect.

The universities, the media ... go along with the thefts, ratifying ignorance, shoring up misinformation ...

But once a majority sees free feeding on a victim, why it would be a sin not to join the orgy.

These days I enjoy imagining things that a God might do to kleptocrats on a Judgment Day. If Tom steals Becky's watch, God, or Becky's older brother, can make Tom give it back to her. If Tom stole Becky's watch and raped her and killed her, God, or Becky's older brother, can torture Tom, shove Becky's watch up his ass, then down his throat. But what could God do to Washington after Washington takes the gold in the Lakota Black Hills?

Even if I don't know, I sure hope that God does.

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This morning I jotted a note about the Lakota: what if Crazy Horse had defeated Custer and the replacement to Custer that Washington sent, and Washington's next replacement after that? What if Washington had decided that expansion west to too expensive after all? It could have happened. Answer this: how long could the Lakota have gone on raiding their neighbors and hunting bison before the Chinese decided that they needed a new continent?

I don't believe that restraint will ever be practiced by large groups of the current version of Homo sapiens. God eggs us on. I look to Nature to restrain both man and God.

PS: Don't bother to point out to me that my one use of the concept "God" is incompatible with some other use of the word "God": that was multiply analyzed at Knatz.com and multiply explained at my destroyed domain Macroinformation.org. Clarity would require semantic tags bigger than the phone book for each usage. If you don't carry such tags in your head, then it's all nonsense anyway.