JOHNSTONE

"Relish the gaps," said the old woman at the nursing home, grabbing at my hand as I walked past.

"I'm sorry… do you need your nurse?" I said, reluctantly giving her my hand to hold. 

Her bones felt frail. I wasn't there to see her. I didn't know this woman. 

"Everyone lets life pass them by," she said urgently, ignoring my obvious discomfort. "They're always focused on attaining and accomplishing, meeting their goals, winning people's approval. Then before they know it they're sitting in a place like this, wondering where it all went."

Reading by Tim Foley.

The New York Times has published another CIA press release disguised as news, this time aimed at whipping up paranoia toward anyone who criticizes the US proxy war in Ukraine.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Last year liberals were calling their political opponents Nazis and comparing Putin to Hitler. This year they're defending Nazis and saying you can't hate someone just because he swore allegiance to Hitler.

Reading by Tim Foley.

As opposition to funding the US proxy war in Ukraine increases on Capitol Hill, empire apologists have been frantically churning out think pieces about how much the war serves US strategic interests in order to manufacture support for its continued backing by Washington. Such arguments flatly contradict the propaganda messaging we were inundated with at the beginning of the war that this was an "unprovoked invasion", but empire managers don't seem particularly interested in defending that narrative anymore.

Reading by Tim Foley.

"That's why I propose that the People's Liberation Army should begin militarily encircling the continental United States with Chinese war machinery as quickly as possible, in order to deter future US aggression around the world."

Reading by Tim Foley.

There's been an astonishingly brazen propaganda push to normalize war profiteering in Ukraine as Kyiv coordinates with the arms industry and western governments to convert the war-ravaged nation into a major domestic weapons manufacturer, thereby turning Ukrainians into proxies of the military industrial complex as well as the Pentagon.

Reading by Tim Foley.

That's the main tool in the empire apologist's toolbox these days: arguing with reality. If you point out the reality of where people are at in Moscow and Beijing with regard to western provocations on their nations' borders, their only answer is to say "Yeah well that's not how things should be so we're going to keep doing what we're doing." 

It's like being warned that you'll get punched if you keep yelling ethnic slurs in public but doing it anyway because you believe people should respect free speech, and then melodramatically clutching your broken nose and yelling that what happened should not have happened. Reality doesn't care about your ideological shoulds and shouldn'ts; as far as reality is concerned, there's just what happens and what does not happen. If you actually want to avoid certain outcomes, you can't just heap a bunch of conceptual shoulds and shouldn't on concrete circumstances - you've got to actually conduct yourself in a way that steers clear of those outcomes.

Reading by Tim Foley.

There's a heartbreaking graphic going around right now showing the almost microscopic changes that have occurred to the frontline of the war in Ukraine this year despite nonstop death and destruction of unfathomable horror the entire time.

Reading by Tim Foley.

I don't mention it often but I actually have a degree in journalism. I graduated with distinction from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2003, and while it would be another 13 years before I'd ever put my degree to any use, the experience played a massive role in forming my opinions about the mainstream press.

Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.

So while I am talking about a future civilization that sounds utopian, I am also talking about the only kind of future civilization that can possibly exist. If there are future generations, they will necessarily be living in a society that functions in a completely different way than our current one does.

Reading by Tim Foley.