STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC

h/t el gato malo

In industrial farming, quantity of food goes up, quality goes way down. From Colin Todhunter at countercurrents.org:

Supermarket shelves have never been fuller, yet diets have become poorer. Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories alongside widespread micronutrient deficiency, ecological collapse and rural precarity. 

This is the outcome of an agricultural model that equates food security with yield and mass production with nourishment. Sustained by billions in subsidies, industrial agriculture increasingly resembles a welfare state for agribusiness and retail giants whose profits depend on public money. 

Nutritional decline 

Corporate-driven industrial agriculture claims to feed the world but too often delivers empty calories while starving populations of nutrients. Consider that high-yield rice produces empty calories while becoming nutritionally impoverished. Since the 1960s, the concentration of zinc and iron in wheat and rice in India has fallen by 30 to 45%. In contrast, millets and pulses deliver far higher levels of protein, zinc and iron per square inch.   

This is not unique to India: Rothamsted Research in the UK has evaluated the mineral concentration of archived wheat grain and soil samples from the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment. The experiment began in 1843, and their findings show significant decreasing trends in the concentrations of zinc, copper, iron and magnesium in wheat grain since the 1960s. 

At the same time, nutritionally dense millet acreage in India has declined by 60% over the last seven decades. The decline is a result of structural shifts in Indian agriculture following the Green Revolution. 

In the UK, the logic is similar, albeit expressed differently. Ultra-processed foods dominate, monocultures deplete soil and calories are abundant while nutrition is undermined. Obesity coexists with micronutrient deficiencies; grass-fed livestock and diverse rotations have largely been replaced by input-intensive systems, while supermarkets dictate production priorities and shape farming.

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The U.S. is back to attacking weaker nations (which hasn’t gone too well since 1945). China and Russia have weapons that can obliterate most of the U.S.’s nonnuclear power, and of course they have nuclear weapons as well. From Ron Unz at unz.com:

One of the most flawlessly executed special forces operations of the last half-century took place in 1979 when Soviet commandos stormed Afghanistan’s heavily defended presidential palace, killing Hafizullah Amin and several of his top aides. This allowed Moscow to install a replacement government much more congenial to its interests, though the result was the long Afghanistan war against Muslim guerillas.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, elderly and decrepit and not long for this world, must have felt tremendous pride at that successful action, as did his equally superannuated Politburo colleagues. I’m sure they all believed it demonstrated that the Soviet Union and its powerful military were still just as robust and vigorous as all their propagandistic Pravda editorials always proclaimed.

But despite that momentary military success, the Soviet economy and political system continued to decay. Just a dozen years later the USSR collapsed and disintegrated, with its Russian successor state soon entering one of the worst periods in its entire national history.

I think that lesson of the past should be kept in mind as the Trump Administration and its mindless sycophants currently crow over their successful seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. The latter are now rather bizarrely being brought to trial in Manhattan federal district court, with one of the charges against that foreign head of government apparently being that he had been in possession of illegal firearms.

No Monty Python skit would have ever dared include such outlandish elements.

Our dramatic kidnapping of the Venezuelan president followed the recent blockade we had imposed on his country and the resulting seizure of various large Venezuelan oil tankers on the high seas, doing so based upon our unilateral declaration that they had been “sanctioned.” In proudly taking credit for those blatant acts of international piracy, President Donald Trump had boasted at his press conference a couple of weeks ago that he planned to keep the oil or possibly sell it.

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We make predictions about things with absolute confidence but about which we know very little. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Where things will stand in three years in unknown. A little humility might serve us well, for it is indeed too soon to tell about a great many things.

Recent events call two quotes to mind, one from Napoleon Bonaparte and one from Chou En-Lai.

Napoleon: “Do you know what amazes me more than anything else? The impotence of force to organize anything.”

Chou En-Lai: “It’s too soon to tell.”

The current backdrop is one of simplistic declarations presented as certainties because these are rewarded by the algorithms. Remarkably, few of those confidently declaring their implicit expertise ever acknowledge the limits of their own knowledge and the limits of the Ultra-Processed “facts” presented by the various interests seeking to control the context, narrative and agenda.

I reckon it fair to say that Napoleon was well-placed to survey the limits of force. That he is reputed to have observed “There are only two powers in the world: the spirit and the sword. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit” makes sense in the context of the limits of the sword and other manifestations of force.

The phrase in the long run brings us to Chou En-Lai’s “It’s too soon to tell.” Chou En-Lai (Zhou Enlai) was the People’s Republic of China’s first foreign minister and Premier, the statesman / diplomat who guided foreign policy while surviving Mao’s tumultuous purges.

In the usual telling, while meeting with American officials during President Nixon’s February, 1972 visit to China, Zhou was asked (in some tellings by Henry Kissinger, in others by Nixon) what he thought of the French Revolution, which occurred some 180 years earlier in 1789-1793.

Zhou’s reply–“It’s too soon to tell”–is presented as evidence of China’s long game perspective that reflects China’s long history and sagacious avoidance of rash judgments.

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“In fairness to Trump, most Democrats were as quiet as church mice when Obama and Hillary Clinton attacked Libya’s capital and military sites to achieve regime change without any authorization from Congress. They were also silent when Obama vaporized an American under this “kill list” policy without even a criminal charge. So please spare me the outrage now.” From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

It can fairly be said that the most precarious jobs in the world are those of a golf ball collector at a driving range, a mascot at a Chuck E. Cheese, and a Trump Administration lawyer.

That was evident at the press conference yesterday as President Donald Trump blew apart the carefully constructed narrative presented earlier for the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Some of us had written that Trump had a winning legal argument by focusing on the operation as the seizure of two indicted individuals in reliance on past judicial rulings, including the decisions in the case of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General Dan Caine stayed on script and reinforced this narrative. Both repeatedly noted that this was an operation intended to bring two individuals to justice and that law enforcement personnel were part of the extraction team to place them into legal custody. Rubio was, again, particularly effective in emphasizing that Maduro was not the head of state but a criminal dictator who took control after losing democratic elections.

However, while noting the purpose of the capture, President Trump proceeded to declare that the United States would engage in nation-building to achieve lasting regime change. He stated that they would be running Venezuela to ensure a friendly government and the repayment of seized U.S. property dating back to the government of Hugo Chávez.

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Protestors in the U.S. were protesting the hijacking of Maduro in solidarity with the Venezuelan people, but the Venezuelan people were dancing in the streets because Maduro was gone. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

and the path back to better

this is an interesting way to look at it and rings true with, to hijack in the funniest possible way, a term in wide circulation in certain circles, “my lived experience.” i suspect many of you hve enocountered this:

the emotional or dogmatic argument utterly impervious to logic.

i actually once had a woman i was arguing with at a party in SF tell me “logic is the tool of the oppressor!” as a final emotive bastion from being cornered by sense.

the need for reality denial, not just of facts but of its entire underpinning and structure was so acute that this episode has really stayed with me. this had to be more than just emotional thinking. it seemed fully existential, like some sort of limbic level fight or flight mechanism. and once you start noticing it, it crops up all over the place.

let’s take a little tour of the topic:

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“At the end of the day, Great Powers like the US (which is arguably still a superpower even if it was hitherto in decline till Trump’s return to office) always pursue their perceived interests but cloak them in the language of international law or norms, which is more palatable for the global public.” From Andrew Korybko at korybko.substack.com:

Trump 2.0 boldly explained how the US intends to restore its “sphere of influence” over the Americas in accordance with the new National Security Strategy, thus representing a Hyper-Realist approach in the sense of explicitly embracing the pursuit of power as a goal instead of denying it like before.

The US’ astoundingly successful “special military operation” in Venezuela, which aimed only at regime tweaking at this stage and not regime change like some mistakenly believe, has prompted a flurry of reactions from governments across the world. Venezuela’s strategic Russian and Chinese partners predictably condemned the US’ capture of President Nicolas Maduro while the US’ EU junior partner released a statement that lacked any criticism of the US but also didn’t endorse its actions either.

Therein lies the hypocrisy that was just exposed by the US’ “special military operation” in Venezuela since the EU would have certainly condemned Russia’s hypothetical capture of Zelensky in the harshest language possible. Their implied excuse for these double standards towards the US’ capture of Maduro is that he’s illegitimate, but Russia now deems Zelensky to be illegitimate too, so third parties’ assessments of other leaders’ legitimacy is ultimately subjective and this leads to the reality that was just exposed.

At the end of the day, Great Powers like the US (which is arguably still a superpower even if it was hitherto in decline till Trump’s return to office) always pursue their perceived interests but cloak them in the language of international law or norms, which is more palatable for the global public. The US previously relied on the “rules-based order” concept to justify its actions abroad, but this was eventually exposed by Russian media as pure hypocrisy, ergo why Trump 2.0 didn’t employ it this time.

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“Now it becomes clear: Trump’s adventure was little more than a callow vendetta against Maduro himself, with no further constructive plans for the actual management of the country or situation after Maduro’s fall.” From Simplicius at simplicius76.substack.com:

The questions we raised in yesterday’s piece have finally been answered by the Trump administration itself. The main and most important was what exactly is the real situation in Venezuela vis-a-vis US control? Was the Maduro grab an isolated event, with the US not actually in control of anything on the ground and in the Venezuelan government?

The answer came directly from Marco Rubio who openly stated that the situation in Venezuela has not changed at all. Maduro’s capture was just that: the removal of the sitting president, and the new Venezuelan leadership and military are in control of the country with the US merely “hoping” that they will do Trump’s bidding:

[see article for video]

BREAKING: U.S Secretary of State Marco Rubio admits that abducting Maduro did not solve anything:

“All of the problems we had with Maduro when Maduro was there. We still have those problems in terms of them needing to be addressed.

We are going to give people an opportunity to address those challenges and those problems. Until they address it, they will continue to face this oil quarantine.

They will continue to face pressure from the United States. We will continue to target drug boats if they try to run towards the United States.

We will continue to seize the the boats that are sanctioned with court orders.

We will continue to do that and potentially other things until the things we need to see addressed are addressed.”

In short, the situation remains as before with the US enforcing an economic blockade over Venezuela—or in other words, waging economic terror on its citizens.

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h/t el gato malo

h/t el gato malo