Sydney Sweeney’s jeans: an American crime story
"You don’t need jeans or blue eyes."
“History is best told as a story of organized crime,” Luke Kemp says in Goliath’s Curse. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”
Consider just the current headlines in mid-August, 2025:
Israel Prepares for Gaza City Occupation
Escalating Gaza Crisis: Famine and Aid Distribution Killings
Trump-Putin Meeting in Alaska over Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Global Climate Disasters: Floods and Fires
Migration Tragedy off Yemen’s Coast
Brazilian Coup Plot: Bolsonaro Under House Arrest
U.S. Tariffs Impact International Trade
For much of the last 2200 years, Jewish national history has involved cycles of establishing a homeland—a certain territory and population—and repeated and ongoing attempts to reclaim ethnic autonomy. The Gezer Calendar, from Solomon’s Temple, records the earliest cycle of agricultural seasons and organized state management for planting and harvesting. The domestication of grain with predictable harvests enabled diverse tribes of Israelites to establish permanent settlements and organize land divisions among family groups, forming the basis for cultural and national identity—and hereditary kingdoms—overtly criminal or at least surrogates for organized crime in Kemp’s telling. Most of those kings were not nice guys. Leaf through the Old Testament story of Nebuchadnezzar, the “servant” of God sent to “discipline” the disobedient land of Judah (See: 2 Kgs 24:10-16; 25:1-21; Jer 39:10 and the Nevi’im and Ketuvim parts of the Hebrew Bible—Tanakh).
Now and then, the people being enslaved resisted. In the case of the Philistines, they were ethically cleansed and their name became synonymous with narrow-minded people hostile to culture, art, and intellectual pursuits. The current Commander-in-Chief of the largest global military epitomizes that version of Philistine, not the rebel-against-empire kind.
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| Population
of Gaza pre-October 7, 2024, compared with Tel Aviv and the West Bank. The large population in NW Jordan is Palestinian refugees of the Nakba. |
Fast forward to 1917, and Walter Rothschild, eldest son of the first Jewish Peer in England, Baron Nathaniel Mayer de Rothschild, from the prominent Rothschild banking dynasty (a story of organized crime spanning three centuries), prevails upon British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to partition Ottoman Palestine, recently gained by conquest. Separate regions of Arabs and Jews are created, and although vastly outnumbered, the tiny minority of Yishuv enclaves start recruiting Jews from Eastern Europe and Yemen to “make aliyah” and “resettle” the already densely settled Holy Land. Socialist experiments were, in 1917, afoot for two-thirds of the world’s population, and this small laboratory fit right into that zeitgeist.
On May 14, 1948, Israel declares independence, triggering the first Arab-Israeli war and leading to the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of large numbers of Palestinians, achieving the openly stated Zionist objective of the Balfour/Rothschild plan. Uniquely since then, there have never been any final, official borders drawn, because the Jewish Homeland Project is incomplete. Expulsion or genocide of 8 million Palestinians is only 20% accomplished. The most rebellious have by now been herded into concentration or labor camps, like the West Bank, or death camps, such as Gaza—iterating “one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”
Don Vlad and the Vory
Ukraine is a similar tale of woe. In my experience from frequent trips to Russia and the Baltics, a large subset of ethnic Russians consider ethnic Ukrainians stupid and useless. They are jeered as a narrow-minded people hostile to culture, art, and intellectual pursuits, like the Philistines or Palestinians. They do, however, occupy the naturally fertile and climatically favorable breadbasket that birthed the Soviet empire. In the months leading up to the empire’s collapse in 1991, over 90% of those Ukrainians voted for independence with strong majorities across all regions, including Crimea. The Belovezh Accords, which formally dissolved the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, established Ukraine as an independent, internationally recognized state. It retained its seat in the UN General Assembly because Ukraine was a charter member in 1948.
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| A map of Kievan Rus’ in 1054, from Uncharted Territories. |
However, when another organized crime family (NATO), moved to annex Ukraine, a rival gang led by Vladimir Putin and a cabal of Russian oligarchs correctly perceived the threat to their quasi-monopoly on resources and moved, militarily, to reoccupy “a certain territory and population.” Ukraine has since become the testing lab for AI-enhanced gadgetry of all the world’s militaries and thus serves such a valuable function in that regard that no number of summits in Alaska are likely to change.
Don Jair with friends in high places
Brazil’s failed coup has made a martyr of one of the Trump crime family’s capos, so Treasury imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports starting August 7, 2025, significantly affecting future prices for coffee and beef. This tariff move was openly linked to Jair Bolsonaro’s legal jeopardy. If Brazilia feels the pinch, perhaps he will be transferred to a Club Fed camp like Ghislaine Maxwell, and the tariffs lowered.
Still the Amazon burns. Everywhere, we have floods, fires and migration tragedies. In what way does climate chaos reflect “one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population?”
Answer: by the root of it all—the Sydney Sweeney Jeans ad campaign by American Eagle.
Sweeney and Clyde
Sweeney’s ad unscores the “us-versus-them” of Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, and USA/The World. Tribalism—the genetic selection process adopted by all herd animals for mutual defense—has been and continues to be weaponized by elite groups—master influencers—to create criminal monopolies on resources and power. Monopolies elevate criminals into billionaires. The bottom of the social order is thereby relegated to cannon fodder or consumption addicts whose only purpose is to sustain the grift. If grifters run out of things to sell, or their marks run out of places to store it, they can just pivot to cryptocoins and NFTs. They can even require those, as the new coin of the realm.
How we get out of this mess is, as Luke Kemp concludes, is by a paradigm shift. Kick out the crime families, whether they cloak themselves in royal garb or Bibles and Korans. Practice radical degrowth. Restore nature and recover harmony. Live sustainably and teach others to do the same. Not only can it rescue us all, but it is a happier way to spend your life. You don’t need jeans or blue eyes. Unplug from AI and just live more simply
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Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). I appreciate your support
And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
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#RestorationGeneration.
When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
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