 Study U.S. foreign policy by looking at oil reserves, notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. None of the world's worst people are in prison. Most of them are fabulously wealthy and widely esteemed. Our systems are not set up to reward beneficial action and punish wrongdoing. At the scale that really matters, they are set up to do the exact opposite. One of the main reasons it was necessary to rehabilitate the popularity of George W. Bush was because otherwise it would be harder to get future presidents to do the kinds of things he did. Dave Weigel retweeting a sexist joke has ignited more controversy about the Washington Post than the fact that the Washington Post lies about every U.S. war and is solely owned by a plutocratic intelligence contractor whose interests diametrically oppose the public's. You can learn more about U.S. foreign policy from a casual glance at a list of the world's largest proven oil reserves than you can from a lifetime of consuming mainstream news media. A top 10 list of the world's largest proven oil reserves by nation reads as follows, 1. Venezuela, 2. Saudi Arabia, 3. Iran, 4. Canada, 5. Iraq, 6. Kuwait, 7. United Arab Emirates, 8. Russia, 9. Libya, 10. United States. So to be clear, emails were leaked showing a major British media figure conspiring with an intelligence operative to subvert everyone to the left of Tony Blair. Those emails were independently verified by that media figure, and in response to this, you're meant to get mad at Russia. I have no idea who Grey Zone's source was, but if Russian hackers are indeed exfiltrating authentic documents about the powerful and leaking them to the public, I say bully for them. It's not like we can get information about their dirty deeds ourselves. Authenticated private communications obtained by hacking are more trustworthy than public communications, not less. The latter only shows you what the speaker wants people to hear, the former shows you who they really are and what they're really about. Mason's leaked emails show him speaking with an intelligence contractor about using PayPal de-platforming to subvert empire-critical voices. Now two more have been de-platformed, Wyatt Reed and Jackson Hinkle. Empire managers know exactly what they are doing. This is a coordinated attack. Every government is comparable to Nazi Germany except the racist, genocidal, imperialist government who recruited Nazis after World War II and is currently arming Nazi factions to help it dominate the world. A liberal will make fun of a conservative for doing stupid bullshit to own the Libs and then immediately advocate World War III to own Putin. Liberals are fascistic tyrants and conservatives are whiny little bitches who run around looking for excuses to get offended. The progressive democrat strategy of slowly changing the system from within only makes sense if you A, pretend we've got several centuries to gradually push for drastic revolutionary changes that are urgently needed right now, and B, pretend the system isn't expressly rigged against change. Royal families are just the descendants of whoever was murderous enough to take the throne from whoever had it before. US intelligence is balls deep in Ukraine on every conceivable level, and the imperial war machine is trying to pretend it doesn't know exactly what's happening in its own proxy war. The New York Times tweeted, despite the flow of billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine, US intelligence agencies have less information than they would like about the country's war strategy and know far more about Russia's military according to officials. I still haven't found the right words to adequately express my disdain for people who act like they are brilliant, up punching anti-establishment critical thinkers and spend all their time mindlessly regurgitating CIA lines about China. Europeans set sail to conquer and colonize populations around the world. China built a wall. These are two very different cultures and values systems. The Western assumption that China wants to take over the world and give us all social credit scores is based on pure projection. The assumption is also premised on the absurd belief that Beijing has been watching the US empire rapidly burn itself out with its role as a unipolar hegemon and thinking, hey, that looks awesome. Let's definitely do that. The belief that China wants to conquer and colonize a bunch of white foreigners is about as well founded as the old belief that black people were trying to move into white neighborhoods to have sex with white men's wives. Not everyone wants what you have, dudes. You're not that enviable. Empire apologists love conflating criticism of US malfeasance and recklessness in Ukraine with criticism of Ukrainians. I see it every single day. It lets them feel like they are sticking up for the little guy instead of the very biggest guy. Pretending criticism of the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth is actually criticism of the victims of a brutal war reverses the real dynamic that's happening where they're actually siding with the most powerful empire in history. We all kind of know our situation is unsustainable. On some level we all know it whether we admit it or not. That's why post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows have done so well. But people can't face it directly so they just distract themselves with nonsense and shriek about Russia and Putin.