The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall

Seems to me the world would be better off if the US empire collapsed quickly and without a major war. Sadly I don't see it happening with just a whimper. The global banking and oil cartel will not go quietly into the night.

The empire expends so much of its wealth and energy on mass scale narrative control via propaganda not because it wants to, but because it needs to. This tells us that the best way to oppose the empire is to help debunk, discredit and break public trust in the narratives it works so hard to circulate.
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When a sociopath does something wrong, they rearrange narratives to try and make it look like they did something right. How our rulers handled Iraq says which one they are.
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It’s nuts how the US is circling the planet with military bases, waging nonstop wars, sanctioning children to death and flirting with nuclear war and people are still like “We really need to do something about Cuba”.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/03/24/debunk-and-discredit-the-empires...

Krystal explains how the WaPo is simply reporting CIA taking points. (6 min)

There are so many sources spouting propaganda in an effort to promote the war machine...

Bellingcat’s carefully crafted public image as an “open source” outlet is belied by its extensive NATO government ties and a conspicuous pattern of conduct in line with its state sponsors’ interests. Bellingcat has hauled in grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-funded CIA cutout. Leaked documents reported by The Grayzone revealed that Bellingcat has collaborated with a UK Foreign Office operation that aims to “weaken Russia.”

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/24/author-bellingcat-opcw-whistleblower/

China, the rising world power, threatens US hegemony. As CB suggests, the dragon will whoop our ass if we keep ginning up this bellicose nonsense. Can we avoid the Thucydides trap? The propaganda machine is sure trying to make them our enemy.

Max and Stacy look at the Thucydides Trap and Cantillon Effect starting to show up in the data and the geopolitical drama.

In 2015, Harvard political scientist and professor Graham Allison identified a scenario he calls the Thucydides Trap. Basically, the Thucydides Trap says that as a rising power challenges the dominance of an established power, that dominant power is likely to respond with violence. It's a model for predicting when warfare is likely between two nations, but also a way to propose alternative solutions meant to prevent warfare. After all, the whole point of identifying a trap is to avoid it.

Cantillon provided an advanced version of John Locke's quantity theory of money, focusing on relative inflation and the velocity of money. Namely, when you print money, it causes more pounds to chase fewer goods, pushing up the average cost resulting in inflation. His theory has been dubbed ‘The Cantillion effect’, and is a lesson to us all on the effects of inflation ‘financing the financiers’.

(In the second half, Max interviews geo-economic analyst, Dan Collins, about the aftermath of the Alaska Summit and what next for the US-China relationship.)

The head of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that the command launched a new task force to focus on information (I would say, propaganda) operations to counter China in the Pacific.
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The Biden administration has made it clear that countering Beijing is its top foreign policy priority. The task force shows that Washington’s campaign against Chinese influence will be played out in many theaters.

https://news.antiwar.com/2021/03/26/us-military-launches-task-force-to-f...

Top US admiral warns war with China over Taiwan “much closer than most think”

The US Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. John Aquilino, testified this week that he regarded a Chinese attack on Taiwan as the most threatening flashpoint for war in the Indo-Pacific region and advocated a further build-up of US military force in the western Pacific to counter China. His remarks underscore the mounting bipartisan clamour in Washington against Beijing and the accelerating danger of the Biden administration, not China, provoking a war.

Chris speaks with journalist and writer May Jeong the deep American roots of the Atlanta shootings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_BiS9ozDUM (26 min)
May Jeong's op-ed The Deep American Roots of the Atlanta Shootings - The victims lived at the nexus of race, gender and class, was published in The New York Times on May 19, 2021.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/opinion/atlanta-shooting-massage-sex-...

Greg Palast demonstrates the anti-Asian voting suppression in Georgia...
https://www.gregpalast.com/voting-gangnam-style-the-rise-of-kim-crow/

President Biden vowed that he would not allow China to become the world’s
“leading” country during his first press conference on Thursday. His comments come as US-China tensions are soaring, and the two countries’ relationship is at its lowest point in decades.

https://news.antiwar.com/2021/03/25/biden-vows-to-stop-china-from-becomi...

But there is another factor at work as Biden and his lieutenants unfurl their foreign policies, and I have already suggested it. This is the problem of incompetence. I mean this two ways: There is personal incompetence, and there is institutional incompetence. What a time, with numerous large policy questions looming, to come face to face with such deficits as these.

Neither the president nor those closest to him are demonstrably qualified to conceive of, manage, or execute a foreign policy that meets the 21st century’s numerous and complex new demands.

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/03/23/patrick-lawrence-the-blundering-bi...

Hey let's generate more conflict. Poke the bear in the eye.

Russiagate is back! That’s right. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei meddled in the 2020 U.S. election. But not only they: Lebanese Hezbollah, Cuba and Venezuela did it too.

I know what you’re thinking: Where is the evidence? Well, the ODNI report doesn’t show any. But phrases like “we judge,”“we assess,” “probably,” and “likely” are used dozens of times. Apparently for corporate media, that’s good enough.

Never mind that, way down on the last page, the report says “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/22/odni-russia-colombia-election-interfe...

Oil seems to be at the center of so many problems from environmental pollution to war.

What hypocrisy...

U.S. Thirst for Russian Oil Hits Record High Despite Tough Talk
Even as Washington champions energy independence and warns European allies against becoming too dependent on Moscow, American refineries are buying more of the country’s oil than ever before.
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BOTTOM LINE - The U.S. is lecturing its European allies about their dependence on Russian energy exports at a time when Russia’s share of U.S. petroleum imports is at an all-time high.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-24/russia-oil-demand-hit...

While sanctions have become an increasingly popular foreign policy tool on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, they aren’t cost-free. The more Washington deploys secondary sanctions against a growing list of countries for a growing list of reasons, the more willing those countries, including U.S. allies in Europe, will be open to exploring alternate payment methods to get around U.S. restrictions. The aggressive use of U.S. sanctions exposes U.S. companies to retaliation, which takes the form of import restrictions or weighty tariffs. Penalizing European entities over a project some in Europe see as integral to its own energy interests would give European policymakers more justification to de-dollarize their economies. If stopping Nord Stream 2 comes at the danger of contributing to the erosion of the U.S. financial system, it may be best to leave the pipeline alone.

https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2021/03/25/maybe_washington_shou...

How to boost oil prices...
The whole system depends on it.

Oil prices rose sharply on Friday on mounting concerns that it could take weeks to dislodge a giant container ship blocking the Suez Canal, possibly squeezing supplies of crude and refined products.

Prices, however, were still headed for a third consecutive weekly loss, with the outlook for demand dented by fresh coronavirus lockdowns in Europe.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/26/fears-of-prolonged-suez-canal-b...

Video shows tug boats honking in celebration as they moved the lodged Suez Canal ship by 2 inches

Egypt's president orders preparations be made to unload Ever Given's cargo if refloating fails, a high risk strategy adding days of delay

A fuel tank caught fire at a Saudi oil facility after being struck in an attack by Yemen’s Houthis, Saudi Arabia said on Friday. The Houthis said they launched drones and missiles into Saudi Arabia on Thursday, targeting military sites and oil facilities owned by the state-run Saudi Aramco company.

Friday marked the sixth anniversary of The US-backed Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. Since then, coalition aircraft have regularly targeted civilian infrastructure. The vicious bombing campaign came with an air, land, and sea blockade that is still being enforced despite UN warnings that 400,000 Yemeni children will starve to death this year if conditions don’t change.

https://news.antiwar.com/2021/03/26/yemens-houthis-launch-attacks-on-sau...

Yes we are the bully, the bully of the world...

The US blocked an effort by Venezuela to request a review of US sanctions at the World Trade Organization on Friday. Venezuela hoped to challenge crippling economic sanctions that froze the country out of the world financial system on the grounds that they breached global trading rules.

The move demonstrates that President Biden is pursuing the same hardline policies towards Venezuela as the Trump administration. US Trade Representative spokesman Adam Hodge said the request was “illegitimate” since it was made by the Maduro government, which Washington does not recognize.

https://news.antiwar.com/2021/03/26/biden-administration-blocks-venezuel...

Now where is that fiddle?

Drop out, Tune in, and Turn on
Becoming food self sufficient... a nice basic approach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HmQqsTM8co (12 min)

For our society to become self sufficient we'll need a lot more farms like this...
This whole system approach is very similar to mine. (50 minutes)

In the early 90s, Mark and Jen Shepard bought a degraded corn farm in Viola, Wisconsin and began to slowly convert it from row-crops back to a native oak savanna that would become one of the most productive perennial farms in the country.

After 8 years homesteading in Alaska (arriving just as the Homestead Act was expiring) where they had been forced by low-paying jobs to discover “which trees, shrubs, bushes and vines we could get food from”, they arrived in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin ready to apply their knowledge of permaculture (“permanent agriculture”).

Over the past nearly three decades, Mark has planted an estimated 250,000 trees on the 106-acre farm. The main agroforestry crops are chestnuts, hazelnuts, and apples, followed by walnut, hickory, cherry, and pine (for the nuts). For short-term income, the couple planted annual crops, like grains and asparagus, in alleys between the fruit-and-nut-bearing trees. Cattle, pigs, lambs, turkeys and chickens act as pest control and free composters as they roam the savannas of the farm.

Not content to rely on commercially-produced seeds, Mark does his own breeding to find the best-adapted trees to his region using the method he’s dubbed STUN (Sheer Total Utter Neglect). He plants trees at a higher density than recommended and with as much diversity as possible (at one point they were farming 219 varieties of apples) and then lets pests and disease run their course. He fells diseased trees or those that don’t bear enough, or early enough, fruit. The result is orchards hardy enough to survive even Chestnut Blight.

As more and more of the alley crops have been replaced with trees and pocket ponds to help manage water on the farm, the land here has returned to the native savannas where the mastodon once grazed 12,000 years ago (in 1898 bones were discovered 5 miles down the road). New Forest Farm has inspired many other perennial farms, especially chestnut farmers in the region, and Mark hopes that every schoolchild will plant their own apple seeds (and perhaps subject them to STUN) and that every family can plant a backyard food forest.

https://newforestfarm.us/

Matt and Katie were pretty funny on their show this week, so let me close with them. May as well laugh! Ted Cruz, Penis Mishaps + Matt Stoller on Big Tech Monopoly & Surveillance Advertising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkqJmeVIWSQ (56 min)

Well another line of storms is on the way. It's been a wild weather month here in the SE, but we're out of any drought threat now. So good and bad with everything. Hope you're finding more good than bad in your life.
Have a good one!