Shariah Law Advances in US

The anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks seemed like a good time for an update on religious extremism.  Even without those emails from your crazy uncle, you should know that fanatics are working tirelessly to warp the American legal system with their primitive beliefs.

Okay, it's not exactly "Shariah" because the religion involved isn't Islam, but the chief objectives of all those Abrahamic preachers are the same: the subjugation of women and the de-eroticization of sex.  Leading the American jihad are Evangelical Christians, aided and abetted by conservative Catholics and orthodox Jews.  With the ascendance of the Tr*mp Administration, they have attained unprecedented prominence and power.

Much like the rulers of Saudi Arabia, they know that women are temptresses who lead men into moral peril, and hence must be denied birth control and abortions as a means to regulate their unbridled lust.  Babies will keep them at home, ready to satisfy the physical needs of their husbands and unable to tempt upstanding men like Mike Pence into the sin of adultery.

Speaking of Mike Pence, homosexuals are even more threatening than women because their only motivations for sexual activity are animal lust and immoral gratification.  Worse yet, the transgendered may be especially adept at enticing Mike Pence good Christians into carnal sin.  The Holy Warriors are determined that vulnerable members of the armed forces and bakers of wedding cakes will be spared temptation.

Health and Human Services and the Justice Department have attracted the most attention so far, but the fanatics are in all departments: the drive for "school choice," for example, is a campaign for publicly funded religious education.  Religious extremists are pervasive in the Republican Party, at all levels of government, working to deprive the rest of us of out civil rights.

No local stonings nor autos-da-fé have been reported from Kansas or Alabama so far, but religious extremists enjoy close cooperation with the NRA.  They are extremely well-armed.

North Korea

So Pence has been rattling Tr*mp's saber in another exercise in ball-swinging as foreign policy.  Sad to say, there are those in Washington dumb enough to think that may be an effective strategy.  Far more, I suspect, are not so optimistic.

Lots of Republicans are happy to revel in the short-term political popularity that chest-thumping inevitably elicits from all too many Americans, and plenty of Democrats just wish it were Hillary tweaking Kim Jong-un's button nose.  Wiser heads, though — people who actually have been paying attention since Kim came to power at the end of 2011 — are aware of a few basic truths:

• Kim has absolutely no reason to give up his nuclear weapons, and only major concessions will persuade him to suspend development of his missile program.  He will not disarm.

• China cannot "control" Kim Jong-un.  North Korea is a greater threat to China than to the United States, and its economy already is so dreadful that more Chinese sanctions cannot make it notably worse.

• The government of North Korea long has considered its citizens expendable in pursuit of ideological purity and political survival, so regime change only can be accomplished by total devastation — inevitably accompanied by similar devastation of South Korea and Japan, not to mention the American troops stationed there.

So what's to be done?  Not much.  We could hope for a political revolution, but those always begin with the middle class — and North Korea doesn't have one.  Anyway, Kim is enormously popular with his people, having elevated populism to levels Tr*mp only can dream about.

We could hope for a coup d'etat, but Kim started his political career by killing his uncle and anybody else in his government who might threaten his control.  Recently, he even took the trouble to eliminate his largely innocuous half-brother.

So here's an admittedly outlandish idea: we could work to fully integrate North Korea into the world system of trade, elevating living standards and raising popular expectations.  Interdependence works a lot better than sanctions when it comes to drawing a rogue nation into the international community — and at this point, it's the only strategy we haven't tried.