In his 1935 book, "War is a Racket," USMC Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler observed how commercial interests were too-well served by warfare.  He noted his own position in that machine:  "... I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."

Definition, one of many around:  Racket - An illegal enterprise carried on for profit.

To help your contemplative workload, it would be easier to ask you to consider some facet of life in the last 50 or so years that was not a racket.  Public, political, business -- everywhere, rackets. The noise of making money.  The noise of humans, alive:  What racket you in?

Meet someone worthy of as much awe, respect, admiration, and allegiance as it is possible for mere mortals to muster:  Marine Corps Major General Smedley D. Butler. He was under fire 120 or so times, and won the Congressional Medal of Honor -- twice.

Butler also stepped in to save this nation, first-handed, and personally, from slipping into the cesspool of fascism at the hands of scheming, traitorous bankers and financiers who had plotted to overthrow the United States government and take over power in a coup.

Tales from Uncle Remus (apologies to the author, the part of Brer Fox will be played by Brer Rabbit)

Brer Rabbit had a problem. He had been elected to be leader of the Free Forest after defeating grumpy old Brer Bear and his running mate Brer Cuckoo Bird, but lately it was a hard life in the forest. So Brer Rabbit set about first thing to fix the healthcare system of the forest. The ideas he was able to get passed by the Critter Congress weren’t all that good, but they were a big improvement over letting the predators run the system. They tended to eat the sick, especially the middle-class animals who they hated most awful.

The last unexplored frontier, along with space, is the junk drawer.  There may be six or seven here, but, it could be eight by now, the way these untrustworthy things self-replicate.

Some drawers have better tales to relay. Two showed up that were worth a recounting:  one involved lost jewelry worth millions; the other, priceless fossils collected by Darwin.  Some junk drawer.

Hereabouts, for some reason, it's all electrical tape, in dribs and drabs, spits and starts of it, on short-length, beat-up, battered old rolls.  Pens that don't work -- clicker or ink.  Some paperclips, a few pushpins, some thumbtacks, oddball and interesting bottlecaps, a couple of flaking "emergency-use-only" wine bottle corks.  A couple of pennies, some rubber bands -- elastics, if you please, if you're from, or on, the East Coast.

When diplomacy fails, there is always the leverage of war.  You can leverage yourself right into insanity.  You can lose your mind, lose your sight of the shore. Some have already been there. More will go still.

Waging war is about hazards, mostly to body, but just as surely of mind.  Some minds don't hold up well in jobs where signs of success are counting dead people, bodies heaped 'round. Uncomfortable yardsticks, echoes of home can intrude, "How many did you kill today, dear?"

$25 billion sounds like a lot of money, but when consider that there are individuals that could write a check for that amount, it’s not that much. Compared to the 150 billion in bonuses that Wall Street bankers take each year it’s really not much at all. Compared to the trillions in economic damage done by this grand conspiracy it’s just a rounding error.

Compared to the 4 million people who have lost their homes so far, do to the fraud of the Bush Crime Family, it works out to $6000 each. Enough to pay for a used car to live in, and really those people are only eligible for $1500 each, so it‘s just gas money for the “house.“ The rest goes to write-down mortgages, which means the money really goes to (wait for it) the banks.