While everyone’s watching the markets and the election, the State Department – by now the Fannie Mae of foreign policy — is setting us up for the next crisis. That one is going to involve things possibly even worse than mortgage defaults, such as missiles and nuclear bombs.

At the core of that crisis, when things really start to crater, will be Iran. But in times to come, when analysts (working by candlelight in their underground shafts) get around to asking the ritual questions (you know them well: Who let this happen? Why didn’t we see it coming?) they will also point to the leading edge of the wreck. That would be the Bush administration policy of the past few years on North Korea. It is Kim Jong Il (dead or alive) who has been setting the pace for racketeering rogue regimes and wannabe nuclear extortionists everywhere. If — over the objections of the U.S., Europe, Japan and anyone else who wants to play — he can counterfeit U.S. currency, wheel and deal in missiles and nuclear technology, make and test nuclear bombs, offer a piece of the action to Syria and Iran, and get paid by America for his pains, well then, who can’t?

Here’s how Nuclear Extortion 101 works. North Korea tests some missiles, revs up its Yongbyon reactor, and America & friends pay Kim to stop. He pockets the bribe, reneges on the deal, and repeats the threat. We pay, he pockets… and here we go again: 

Word is leaking out of Washington that Condoleezza Rice is on the verge of removing North Korea from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, with an announcement imminent.

Why? It’s not because North Korea has gone out the terror business. If anything, Pyongyang –with considerable success — appears to be quite busy at the moment terrorizing the U.S. State Department. North Korea has learned that Rice and her special envoy, Chris Hill, baseball cap in hand, will do just about anything (pay, wait, fudge, dissemble, cover up, roll over, beg) to keep alive the pretense of a nuclear disarmament deal which from the start was about as solid as today’s mortgage derivatives market.

North Korea wants off the terror list. The State Department, having showered Kim with gifts since mid-2007, finally balked, for the very good reason that North Korea refuses to agree to any system that might let inspectors actually verify what’s going on with its nuclear ventures (let alone take away the bombs). So North Korea is now threatening to re-start its Yongbyon reactor, and letting out rumbles about preparations to test another nuclear weapon. This is a way of telling the United States to jump. And if Rice responds to this blackmail by taking North Korea off the terror list, what she and Hill and President Bush (is he still there?) will really be saying to Pyongyang is: How high?

Fox News is reporting that in preparing to caper to North Korea’s tune, State has cut its own verification bureau out of the loop. Looks like U.S. policy has morphed from “trust, but verify” to “trust, and pay the blackmail.”

The same otherwise worthy Fox report includes an interesting sentence, culled from the conventional wisdom of the diplomatic circuit: “Removing North Korea from the terror list would be a major step in mending relations between the reclusive communist nation and the United States, though it would also come amid concerns about North Korea’s weapons program.”

Aha… so it’s the terror list that’s caused all that friction between North Korea and the U.S.? Hey, if all we have to do to be safe from North Korea is take them off the terror list, a whole industry awaits. Make the whole world safe. Take everyone off the terror list. But why stop there? Just scrap the entire idea of a terror list.

I do have a suggestion for what we might create in its place. To play its part in the growing global market in nuclear extortion that the Condi-and-Chris legacy is even now engendering, America is going to have to do a lot of groveling, and appropriate a lot of tax money – for free food, free fuel (nuclear or otherwise) and other doo-dads — to pay off rogue regimes that are already lining up to cash in on this bonanza.

So how about State creating a public list of terror-loving governments to which America sends pay-offs in hope of stopping their nuclear weapons programs. Call it the Nuclear Extortion Racket List. That way, instead of Chris Hill cutting secret deals while back-slapping North Koreans in Berlin and touring Yongbyon, there could at least be some better planning, and accountability. There could be clear budgets assigned to how much in pay-offs  — whether in cash, kind or diplomatic concessions — should go to North Korea, to Iran, to Syria…or, well, imagine the possibilities.

Heck, the way U.S. policy is going, this has all the makings of a broad and deep emerging market. A sort of Subprime for Rogue States.

Of course, the startup costs for a nuclear weapons program are considerable. So maybe the World Bank and the UN Development Program could be recruited to figure out how to issue shares in the proposed nuclear extortion rackets of developing economies. We could have Cuba’s initial public offering, Khartoum extortion bonds. And there’s no reason for terrorist groups to be excluded from the action just because they happen to be part of the private sector. There is scope here for Al-Qaeda-Hezbollah extortion-racket swaps. And no reason that the American taxpayer should be cut out of this, if he wants to speculate on the chance of getting back some of his own money.

Welcome to the 21st century, State Department style. Congratulations, Chris and Condi. How long before we can sit at our computers and trade Nuclear Extortion Racket derivatives? .. at least until the lights go out.

Is he alive? Is he dead? Has he had a stroke? North Korea watchers are aflutter right now over a report that after a prolonged vanishing act, tyrant Kim Jong Il has popped up in public to watch a university soccer game.

“Report: North Korean leader watches soccer game,” says the Associated Press.

Ahh, but watchers beware. The only apparent source for this tale, the sole source doing the original reporting, is the Korean Central News Agency — which is an entirely state-run mouthpiece of the totally totalitarian North Korean government. As such, the KCNA does not necessarily interest itself in such basic news details as where and when. So, as the story now stands, Kim Jong Il made his soccer-watching public appearance under a fascinating set of conditions — namely, at an undisclosed location, on an undisclosed date. We still don’t know which rumors have been greatly exaggerated — those that he is dead, or alive, or in some awkward condition in between.

That doesn’t seem to deter State Department envoy Chris Hill, who just spent three days in Pyongyang trying to save the rotten and endlessly unraveling nuclear disarmament deal he triumphantly announced almost 20 months ago. Enroute back to Washington to report to Condi Rice, Hill stopped off in Seoul (where according to the New York Times, the intelligence service has so far been unable to verify the North Korean soccer report). In Seoul, while making no mention of Kim Jong Il, Hill told reporters that in Pyongyang he had engaged in “very substantive and very lengthy” talks about “the issue of the verification protocol… ” (that would be the protocol to verify the real extent of North Korea’s nuclear arms programs).

But is Kim alive? Is he dead? Who or what does Hill think he’s actually negotiating with?

Meanwhile, the New York Times has an editorial lamenting that “hardliners” in the Bush administration (who knew there were any left?) are wrecking Hill’s deal by refusing to take North Korea off the terrorism list until Pyongyang accepts a verification plan that would let nuclear inspectors see what they want and go where they choose. The Times opines that this is too much to expect of North Korea, and what’s wanted here is a “reasonable compromise.” So, for a country so shady that outsiders seem unable even to verify a state news agency report that the tyrant attended a public soccer match, the Times is recommending an inspection protocol under which inspectors looking for nuclear projects can’t really inspect?

Here’s a suggestion, simple, clear, and potentially verifiable in one easy step. Call it a one-stop-shop compromise: America could offer to take North Korea off the terrorism list as soon as there is clear confirmation that Kim Jong Il — alive or dead — has left North Korea and will never return.

Even for Washington, the chutzpah is off the charts. Following the Senate vote for the Big Bailout, Senators have been parading in front of the TV cameras, praising themselves and each other for their fine job Wednesday night of protecting the American financial system. Coming from some of the Democrats whose policies helped create this crisis, this show puts me in mind of a man who sets you up to be shot in an armed robbery, and then prides himself on bringing you a bandage and handing you back your empty wallet.

As Majority Leader Harry Reid bragged it up, ”We sent a message to America, all Americans, that we will not let this economy fail.” Reid lauded the Senators for having “worked together” (or at least voting 74 to 25) to protect ”those little side streets” as well as the ”mean streets” all across America.

For illumination on the earlier roles in this farce of Senators such as Chris Dodd, Barack Obama & cohorts, check out this post from one of my Pajamas colleagues, Roger Kimball – and if you haven’t already seen the video linked at the end, it provides some clarifying moments. The Wall Street Journal also offers a handy crib sheet of who said what  just a few years ago to defend Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and to shut down critics who were trying to save the financial system back when there was more of it to save. You can match up the names with who is now peacocking in D.C. as having saved us all.

Granted, by now Washington had to do something to keep the credit markets from seizing up like a car engine out of oil. Granted, also, it is not in the nature of politicians to make genuine apologies for horrendous mistakes. Their preference, to borrow the Clinton phrase, is to move on. But in this case — 451-page $700 billion bailout bill in hand — it would have been nice to hear the Democrats spend less time praising themselves as saviors of the little guy, and more time apologizing for the wreck and the Brobdingnagian tab.

Meanwhile, lest in the excitment of all these bailout billions, Washington somehow forgets… the threats to this country don’t stop with the home-made money mess. There is still Iran with its pet Hezbollah terrorists and its nuclear bomb program; the Saudis with their wahhabi habit; an increasingly sinister and aggressive Russia; and Syria; and North Korea; and Venezuela, and Hamas, Al Qaeda, etc.

What’s really crazy, though far less conspicuous than the credit debacle, is that American foreign policy too often ends up providing, in effect, subsidies and on occasion (for instance, such unnatural disasters as state-induced famine in nuclear North Korea) bailouts for some of the same crowd listed just above. This tends to be advertised as aid, or diplomatic carrots, or development programs, or projects for climate modification … whatever … often channeled through the world’s leading anti-American clubhouse, the financial black box known as the United Nations, for which Congress OKs billions of U.S. tax dollars every year.

This setup is quite bad enough already — akin in some ways to subprime lending, or worse; inviting market-warping frameworks throughout the developing world, and in some cases funneling support to some of America’s worst enemies. Barack Obama would like to turn such practices into an even bigger global entitlement program, bankrolled by an automatic and greatly increased flow of American tax dollars — much of which would be administered by a UN that makes subprime mortgage lending look like a model of financial integrity. Some thoughts on this in my column this week for Forbes online: The Other Bailout.

If the Senators who previously championed subprime lending cannot now bring themselves to apologize for the current financial crisis, they might at least have the grace to exercise better oversight of the billions America keeps pouring into the UN. Rescuing the country from some of the mistakes now piling up on that front could end up taking a lot more than just money.

When do taxpayers finally get angry enough to tell Congress that with the big bailout, the subsidy bonanzas stop here and now?

Someone I know was planning to buy a house. But after calculating the likely tax hit from the $700 billion mortgage crisis bailout, he’s not sure he can afford it anymore. His mistake was that instead of borrowing and spending beyond his means, he has been a thrifty, hard-working American, supporting a wife and a couple of kids, paying his bills in full and on time, and forking over a big whack of his earnings every year to the tax man.

Congress has repaid him with policies that produced the current financial crisis. For him, the bottom line is that he will now be so busy working to pay for other people’s houses that he may no longer be able to afford one of his own. So he’s written a letter to his congressman, giving one of the best summaries I’ve seen of the problem, the cause, and, what it means for him, as a member of the American Middle Class. With the names edited out, here it is – 

Dear Congressman,

I am a Professor of Economics at a college in your district, and believe I understand the current economic condition at least as well as most. The root of the current crisis lies in the Community Reinvestment Act, which is essentially an income redistribution plan. I have been taxed heavily over many years. Based on the ratio of the current plan’s cost to total annual tax receipts taken in by the federal government (about 27%), and my tax bill last year, I estimate the bailout will cost me, personally, $20,000. After all, money for this comes from me, the taxpayer, and I do not expect congress will have the guts to find $700 billion in cuts to offset the cost of this program. At the same time, I will need to buy a house next year in your district as I am no longer eligible for college-subsidized housing.

To put this simply, I can either afford to bail out irresponsible lenders and borrowers created by a huge redistribution policy I have already subsidized in the past, or I can buy myself a house. I don’t think there is room in my budget for both. How should I feel if the federal government decides on the former?

Best wishes,

An American Taxpayer

Economists can tell you — and on this one they are usually right — that when you raise the rewards for a specific form of behavior, you tend to get more of it. Suppliers will increase production, and potential suppliers will enter the market, all trying to profit by satisfying the increased demand. For example, when the U.S. government provided a de facto taxpayer guarantee for risky home loans, there was a boom in this kind of lending — and so we got the subprime mortgage crisis.

To take a simpler example of incentives at work: If a schoolchild kicks his classmates, and the teacher responds with a gentle chiding accompanied by a piece of candy in diplomacy, (in the world of soft-power diplomacy, this is called carrot-and-stick) do not be surprised if the rest of his classmates try kicking each other. After all, whatever the teacher’s intentions, the message is: kick someone, and at relatively low cost, you will get a piece of candy.

So it is with incentives in foreign policy. When the U.S. government offers North Korea rewards for scrapping its nuclear arms projects, U.S. diplomats — whether they mean to or not — are creating incentives for other rogue regimes to pursue nuclear programs, if only with the aim of then using them to leverage rewards from the U.S. and friends. Once this becomes the established pattern, there are incentives for lots of folks to try it.

Another word for this routine is nuclear extortion — and the higher the pay-offs America is willing to provide, the greater the incentives for rogue regimes to give it a whirl. Libya is a marvelous example of a regime that in exchange for surrendering a nuclear kit that it shouldn’t have had in the first place has been handed privileges — out from under sanctions, off the terror list, and seated on the UN Security Council – that Tripoli might otherwise never have obtained… at least not without reforms on which Gadhafi has not remotely embarked.

In theory, these pay-offs for denuclearization are coupled with penalties — not just carrots, but sticks, which on balance are supposed to reduce or negate the rewards meant to chivvy rogue regimes away from bad behavior. In Libya’s case, the potential penalty shoved in Gadhafi’s face in 2003 was the fate of Saddam Hussein — and that, at the time, was quite a stick.

But in recent years, the penalties have largely dried up. Since defying the UN to invade Iraq in 2003, the U.S. and allies have resumed trying to channel penalties through the UN, where the mix of an opaque and self-interested bureaucracy, and the conflicting interests of member states tend to water down measures such as sanctions into a big puddle of mush (remember Oil-for-Food, or note the more recent failures of three resolutions meant to stop Iran’s uranium enrichment extravaganza).

In the case of North Korea, carefully targeted U.S. Treasury sanctions were actually inflicting some pain a few years ago, but were then sidelined and effectively watered down by the State Department, as chief negotiator Chris Hill chose to brandish before Pyongyang as the main instrument of U.S. soft power a gigantic carrot. 

In return for paying out big rewards to the Pyongyang regime — cash, diplomatic concessions, fuel, food – the U.S. has gotten not much more in return than a big pile of paper (that would be the uranium-contaminated documentation of activity at the Yongbyon reactor, which North Korea is now threatening to fire back up). So, in the marketplace of foreign policy, as other unsavory governments weigh the costs and benefits of pursuing illicit nuclear weapons programs,  the State Department has effectively abetted North Korea in sending the message that there are big payolas waiting for any rogue regime willing to get into the nuclear extortion business. (Hello, Iran). In effect, the U.S. State Department has upped the demand for such stuff. More on that in my column this week for Forbes online: “A Clear and Present Nuclear Danger.”

At the annual opening of the United Nations, they’re just getting warmed up right now for another year of inserting themselves ever deeper into the lives of people everywhere, underwritten mainly by the taxpayers of America, Europe and Japan. You can count on a fresh torrent of programs so opaque and multitudinous that even UN officials themselvs can’t keep track, punctuated by scandals for which the UN, with its diplomatic immunities, has learned the perfect answer: Call an investigation, handpick investigators with old-boy ties to the UN, refuse to answer questions due to the ongoing and inevitably delayed investigative process, eventually issue a report accompanied by a press conference that declares exoneration, wait for everyone to get tired of it all, and move on.

But while we wait for such further dramas to unfold, it is already possible to glimpse in broad terms the world the UN plans for us all… or, as Ahmadinejad put it in his speech Tuesday from the UN stage, the “brilliant, desirable and beautiful future.” We have heard something about it already from — variously — Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, General Assembly President and once and future Sandinista Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, Iranian propagandist-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and President Bush.

In this beautiful UN future, as Ban Ki-Moon exhorts, we will all work in global “partnership,” putting the the world collective ahead of the interests of individual nation states. But it won’t stop there. As General Assembly President d’Escoto further explains,  there will be an end to selfishness, a quick and effective redistribution of wealth around the planet — presumably unhindered by the glitches that tripped up communism in the last century, since this time the redistribution will be engineered not by nation states, but by the bureaucracy of the UN.

Ahmadinejad has further elaborated how all this will be powered by countries, such as his own, powered by peaceful nuclear projects. Helping out in the happy process of unselfish, collective partnership will be the the UN’s flagship agency, the UN Development Program, or UNDP. Never mind that the UNDP is so busy spending and transferring billions worth of nontransparent funds around the globe every year that UNDP administrators have no time to waste on such frivolities as disclosing, even to those who fund them, the findings of their own in-house audits — many of which, according to some of the UN’s own public records, have a tendency to be late or incomplete. The important thing is that the UNDP how houses the grand UN project known as the UN Millennium Development goals. These have replaced the old Soviet five-year plans as the cutting edge of central planning for impoverished nations — except unlike the five-year plans, the Millennium goals roll on for decades.

And lest anyone think the U.S. has no more voice in this process, President Bush has called upon the UN eminences to be “focused and resolute and effective.” Plus, now that he has called, again, for the UN to reform, no doubt they will.

See you in the beautiful future. 

Yes, it’s that time of year again — time for the annual Mahmoud Ahmadinejad roadtrip to New York, to which the annual UN General Assembly opening happens to be appended.

If only by contrast with the usual migraine-sustaining tedium of UN proceedings, these visits, involving their own special brand of totalitarian burlesque, are never dull. For four straight years now, Ahmadinejad has managed every September to come up with fresh antics. Who can forget his interest last year in dropping by Ground Zero? Blessed relief — that was foiled. But along with dining and whining with select members of the media, he did get to Columbia University for a speech in which he offered to his ivy league audience the epiphany that no one in Iran is gay.

One of my favorite Ahmedinejad roadshow moments came during his New York visit in 2006. Iran was at that stage in volation of the first in a series of UN Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran halt its program of uranium enrichment. Ahmadinejad gave a press conference in which he said that none other than Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General, had told him not to worry about it.

And of course in 2005, during Ahmadinejad’s maiden speech at the UN, there was the aura, or halo, which he was sure appeared around his head while he was at the podium, speaking to the eminences of the UN General Assembly.

This year, while fresh and surprising thrills might lie ahead, he has already come up with a proposal which, to my shock, I find I can entirely support. He’s actually on to something. The Tehran Times, getting a jump on the news, reports that “Ahmadinejad Proposes Moving UN to an ‘independent state.’ “ Apparently he has in mind someplace “where everyone can make comments… with no limitation.” That would seem to rule out Iran itself, where there are all sorts of limitations on what “everyone” can say. But wherever he wants to take the UN, the proposal would at least have the salutary effect of getting it out of the United States — thereby removing some of the credibility and maybe even some of the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that flow yearly into providing a global stage for Ahmadinejad and his ilk.

For the past two weeks I’ve been doing some traveling in the Far East, dropping in on some favorite old places and marveling at the broad leap in living standards achieved in the space of a generation — thanks to the same market forces that are right now causing such dismay. And every time I tune in to the news, it seems to be worse: “The foundations of U.S. capitalism have shattered,” screams Der Spiegel, “The world as we know it is going down.”

By way of contrast I’ve been hauling along a dog-eared collection of Somerset Maugham short stories in which characters of another age of the world spent years gently rotting in colonial outposts — the locals around them decimated regularly by smallpox and cholera. For the folks populating that long-gone Maugham universe, the main contact with the torrent of human events came  via the passing ships that brought outdated newspapers, precious letters and books, and the occasional visitor to sit late into the night on some colonial verandah, telling stories over whisky and cigars. These days, such tales sound surreal. The modern heirs of this crowd would be post-colonial sojourners, following the markets on broadband, and due to the eco-conscious regulations of a great many sovereign states wired in to CNN International, they’d have to choose between whiskey at the table, or cigars in the designated smoking area near an outdoor trashcan.

Maybe it’s our own era that too often seems surreal. While the settings and pace of our own stories have drastically changed, the character of man has not. It takes time to absorb big news, it takes perspective to make wise decisions. And these days, everything seems to be big news — at least for a week — from Sarah Palin’s hair and hacked email, to Woody Allen’s pronouncements on Barack Obama, to the meltdown of assorted U.S. financial giants and bailouts on a scale the average taxpayer can hardly comprehend (but soon will).

Technology has delivered to us the ability to track disasters in parts of the planet that just a generation ago were rarely heard from at all — and since the worst news usually generates the biggest headlines, one might conclude on any given day that the catastrophes of the human race, the perfidies of politics, the threats to the planet (real or hyped), are simply beyond coping. The flip side is, of course, the astounding extent to which human creativity, energy and ambition has provided better lives for billions of people — something which has been happening incrementally enough so that it does not tend to make for howling daily headlines.

Amid this whirlwind, I still subscribe to the idea that when freedom matched with responsibility and fair rule of law is the basis of a political system, mankind can accomplish wonders – not least, the staving off of the apocalypse that seems chronically in one form or another to haunt the human imagination. If that sounds overly broad, of course it is — we live day to day in a welter of decisions and details, and politicians, nations, visionaries and madmen for better or worse can have mighty effects on our lives — all the more so in a world in which old institutions are struggling with evolving new crises. I’ll be exploring some of that terrain in a new weekly column on foreign affairs, running Thursdays on Forbes online, the first one here. 

Here we go again. With all the charm that has marked his previous three visits to the annual opening of the UN General Assembly in New York, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad picked the historically freighted date of Sept. 11 to confirm that yes, indeed, he’s coming b-a-a-a-a-c-k … to take the UN stage on Sept. 23.

There are plans for a “Wall of Shame” demonstration near the UN in Manhattan, with protestors calling for the Iranian regime to be held to account for its repression and atrocities. But that wall will end when Ahmadinejad steps inside the UN gates, to enter the sacrosanct UN-world, in which accountability is a concept reserved almost exclusively for the likes of the UN’s chief sugar-daddy, the United States. For Ahmadinejad, representing a terrorist-backing regime that is in violation by now of three UN Security Council resolutions meant to stop Iran’s nuclear bomb program, the UN will provide diplomatic entry to Manhattan, and a world stage with a golden backdrop in the grand council of nations.

This in turn will provide the usual springboard for Ahmadinejad to wine and dine select members of the media, give interviews, swagger around town and gloat over the “Death to Israel! Death to America!” vision to which Tehran’s mullocracy dedicates so many of its resources (never mind the economic trainwreck back home in Iran). Will Ahmadinejad make another attempt to visit the site of the World Trade Center? Will he make one of his trademark calls for the annihilation of Israel? Will he thrill to intimations of the apocalypse while addressing the eminences at Turtle Bay?

We need not wait long to find out. The Ahma-mushroom-cloud road show returns soon. And with it, the question – How, exactly, does it serve America’s interests to bankroll and host the UN (now enjoying a $2 billion headquarters renovation) in the heart of New York?

So now we have the mystery of the missing “Dear Leader” of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, who did not show up in public Tuesday for the 60th anniversary parade to mark the founding of the modern world’s most brutally repressive state.

Is Kim alive? Is he dead? Has he had a stroke? Who knows? There’s even a story making the rounds that Kim died five years ago, and well-trained doubles have been filling in for the rotund tyrant — in which case someone behind the scenes has been doing a thorough job of keeping alive the tradition in which Pyongyang ruling elite swill cognac, build nuclear weapons and extort aid, cash and concessions from the U.S. while millions of ordinary North Koreans starve.

Whatever’s become of the elusive Kim, his current vanishing act highlights the willful idiocy of U.S. policy that has sought, first under President Clinton, and again during the second term of President Bush, to strike nuclear disarmament deals with North Korea that depend on Kim’s promises of future cooperation. The problem is not solely determining whether Kim himself is alive or dead, but that nothing issuing from him (assuming it IS him), or his regime can be trusted, and as we are now observing, it cannot even be verified.

That hasn’t stopped the Bush administration, with the Condi Rice State Department blazing the way, from sending Kim — or whoever it might be in Pyongyang — $25 million in hard cash, re-starting the Clinton era shipments of free fuel, shoveling in aid (which North Korea can all too easily divert from hungry people to its massive military machine) and ladling out a series of dipomatic concessions in hope of pleasing Kim enough so that he will at least provide a full accounting of his nuclear programs — which North Korea has yet to deliver.

More than a year-and-a-half has passed since the State Department trumpeted a breakthrough nuclear disarmament deal with North Korea — which has turned into a debacle. Just last weekend, U.S. special envoy to the Six-Party Talks, Chris Hill, was back in Beijing nattering on about the need for North Korea to provide a “verification protocol” for its nuclear ventures.

Give us a break. Step one ought to be a “verification protocol” for who’s actually in charge, and where he/they are. Step two should be the end of that regime. Not payoffs and dignification of the mystery tyrant.