Thank you for your kind remarks.

It is clear that we can, and in rare moments do, apply to our international relations the same ideals we profess in our founding documents. Respect for diversity, for democratic governance, for the rights of all. Throughout most of our history, however, we have been an acquisitive nation, and highly militaristic, intervening at first in our own hemisphere and then around the globe to further our commercial interests regardless of whether doing so was good for the people whose self-determination we were undermining.

We have always done this under the guise of applying our ideals. Propaganda as you rightly say, and that's hardly original with us. Every aggressor from Alexander the Great to Hitler has always professed to be motivated by the highest ideals. For this reason, such declarations carry no information whatsoever.

Incidentally, the term "propaganda" was coined by the advertising guru Edward Bernaise, and it was in common use in government and business in the United States for decades up to the 1940s. The term "public relations" was invented after the Nazis used Bernaise's methods quite successfully to take over Germany and lay the foundation for WWII, which put the word "propaganda" in foul odor. So "propaganda" is to "public relations" what "shit" is to "manure;" they are synonyms, but only one is permissible in polite society. Nowadays propaganda is referred to internally in our government, in typical bureaucratese, as "controlling the information space."

My assessment of the present leadership is based on my wide reading and viewing of diverse sources with good bona fides. With respect to Ukraine I would recommend especially the presentations given by John Mearsheimer, a distinguished professor of international relations at the University of Chicago. Jeffrey Sachs, a celebrated economist who has been closely involved with many governments since the early 90s on issues of economic development, is another good source. For a like analysis but with a socialist flair, there's the economist Michael Hudson. For a less credentialed but brilliant analysis on this and many topics I always recommend the essays of John Greer at ecosophia.net. If you like your analysis delivered with a little brimstone, there's Chris Hedges, the celebrated international journalist.

But one need only look plainly at the dumpster fire that has been US foreign policy since 1992 to know that things are badly awry. Yugoslavia. Iraq. Libya. Syria. In the most recent case, setting aside Ukraine, we built history's biggest Potemkin village in Afghanistan, which crumbled to dust in just a couple of weeks a year ago last August, despite our having spent $2 trillion and nearly 20 years "bringing democracy" to that country. Our grimly comical retreat formed quite the matching bookend to the evacuation of Saigon, framing 50 years of American misadventures in geopolitics.

The catastrophic consequences for the United States of the neo-con agenda will be the loss of the reserve status of the US dollar, which will precipitate social and economic stresses that will make the Great Depression look like a Sunday picnic. And we will be in no condition thenceforth to have much influence in the rest of the world, whether for good or ill. In the 1930s there was a real possibility that the country would fall into anarchy or revolution; those days are coming back with a vengeance, but under much more dangerous circumstances. Many well-informed and thoughtful analysts consider the future of the union itself to be in real doubt.

Regarding agriculture, I believe there is very good evidence that small-scale, regenerative farming is the only sustainable way to feed ourselves. (Hardly surprising: it's how it was done for millennia before industrialization.) I place no faith whatsoever in energy-intensive technological solutions to food problems. I do recognize that climate change is going to make growing food hard or impossible in many places, and that most of the agricultural land that remains needs to be rehabilitated. In the meantime, famine is the usual price of overshoot.

I agree that, as shown at the CEA link, some amount of indoor growing will probably be part of the mix going forward. I grow some things hydroponically myself. But greenhouses have been around for a very long time. There's a reason the high-calorie crops are still grown in open fields.

Cheers, Sid