[Urbane Guerrilla]

The Reagan Adminstration and the younger Bush's Administration, thank you. These do the sort of things I like us doing, and they don't mess with Americans' civil rights. The Clinton Administration failed in these and positively invited a gray cloud of corruption to hang over the White House, the senior Bush's Administration promised to continue acting like the Reagan but failed to, and the Carter Administration was simply weak.

Along with Robert Heinlein, I reckon it good to retain all options fully open in sociopolitics, even the comparatively unpleasant ones: as troubling as it is to shoot somebody, it's worse to suffer genocide at the hands of said somebody. This seems to me self-evident, but man, loud are the screechings when I voice it. There is such a thing as too much bowing to authority.

I seem to favor Administrations that are good at foreign policy -- and are assertive about it regardless of clamor sent up from foreign shores. Somehow, what we do never seems to destroy nations, despite their hollering.

Aliantha -- reading history. And I've spent a bit of time in my life surrounded by Eastern civilizations also: Japan definitely has its shit together, while Turkey is more iffy, more Third World -- but with much that gives me hope.