JOHNSTONE

Headless hounds from Boston Dynamics.

Headless hounds from Raytheon.

Headless hounds in our nightmares huddled shivering under US flags

beneath a night sky whose stars were replaced by satellites and drones.

Headless hounds dashing voicelessly past buzzsigns flashing BUY BUY BUY

and buzzscreens shouting FEAR FEAR FEAR,

past the harmless homeless and overdosing angels,

past the skyscraper soul siphons and sane street schizophrenics,

past roadkill dreamguides and the freeway beasts who feed on them,

past suburban window watchers with opiate eyes,

past the cheering liberals who proudly support their hunt

(they make empire automatons of all sorts you know).

In this land we worship headless gods,

gods with logos instead of faces,

gods with quarterly statements instead of minds,

gods with profit margins instead of conscience,

gods who are legally required to act without morality,

gods who devour unthinkingly and destroy unfeelingly,

gods who eat ecosystems and shit suffering,

our gods have no heads and now neither do their soldiers.

We lurch headlessly, mindlessly, heartlessly, unconsciously

toward wherever it is we are going

like robots running a program written by a long-dead man

for reasons nobody can remember.

Headless hounds where our rights should be.

Headless hounds where our heads should be.

On an old wooden fencepost there sits a large crow.

It looks you in the eye

and stares without moving,

and just as you find yourself growing restless and uncomfortable,

you remember something ancient.

Something intimate.

Something that has more relevance to you

than any thought you've ever had.

You sit here, you and the crow,

and you remember where you came from.

_________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

The best way to live a life based in truth, and the best way to be of use to the world, is to expand consciousness both inwardly and outwardly. Deeply investigate your own consciousness, divest yourself of the misperceptions and erroneous assumptions around thought, perceiving and selfhood which are driving your behavior, and discover your true nature. Also, learn everything you can about what's going on in the world, how people are being subjected to needless suffering by abusive systems, how power is really structured, what the mechanics of our civilization's dysfunctions are, and where some possible solutions might lie. Do both of these things.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Ken Wilber video: https://youtu.be/5TUr949kmZk

We go balls to the wall,

laughing and screaming in nightclubs

with AI-generated twisted grins,

dance music pounding our ears so we can't hear our thoughts,

alcohol soaking our organs so we can't feel our feelings,

stomping down with all our might that small voice which calls out to us

from beneath the pile of corporate logos and dead birds

that we keep in the space where our soul used to be.

Then out,

out into the world vaping and smoking,

running down the sidewalk

jumping over homeless people with Super Mario Bros sound effects

screaming I AM ALIVE I AM ALIVE

against all evidence to the contrary,

moving as fast as we can to keep us

from ever catching up to ourselves.

We go balls to the wall,

consuming and being consumed by end-stage metastatic capitalism,

mainlining Empire Inc into the veins between our toes because the ones in our arms collapsed long ago,

plunging straws into our loved ones to siphon out the validation we cannot give ourselves,

stumbling with gig economy exploitation hangovers and mouths that taste like Microsoft

through a dead-eyed civilization of blaring screens and focus-grouped hearts

where young women are sacrificed to gods made of algorithms,

where our minds are stripped of anything that won't help billionaires become trillionaires,

where everything breaks after 18 months but takes millions of years to decompose,

where we're all conditioned to think the same thoughts but hate each other more and more.

Balls to the wall with no brakes on,

shrieking and whooping into the night

laughing joyless laughter through pleasureless coke highs

past the neon signs and 3D billboards

dodging drones and punching panhandlers

strangling starving men on the subway

and disappearing into the dark

and becoming the darkness

and embracing our true calling:

Disciples of Dystopia.

Agents of Omnicide.

Apostles of the Apocalypse.

Kiss the Pentagon on your necklace and floor it.

No brakes, baby.

No brakes.

____________________

____________________

____________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

I say we arm Russia against Russia. If it's bombing its own government buildings, its own pipelines, its own captured power plants, then it's the best proxy force against Russia we've got. Send the Russians tanks and F-16s immediately.

Russia's fighting Russia over there so we don't have to fight Russia over here.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Wednesday was World Press Freedom Day, and it saw US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Deputy State Department Spokesman Vedant Patel confronted about the glaring hypocrisy of the Biden administration's persecution of Julian Assange for the crime of good journalism.

Reading by Tim Foley.

This is what dystopia looks like. Like a bunch of thought-controlled automatons mindlessly marching toward ecocide and omnicide to a beat played out by screens who tell them every day and in every way that there is no higher purpose than this. Like military industrial complex-funded feminist rock operas about drone operators and Cookie Monster helping Samantha Power psychologically colonize Iraqi children. Like Bono coming home from singing a heartfelt number about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr to illustrate a cover for a war propaganda piece in The Atlantic.

Reading by Tim Foley.

I think it's probably a good thing when our idols get knocked off the pedestals we put them on. Chomsky. Bernie. The Dalai Lama. It's not healthy to elevate others to a lofty status above ourselves instead of seeing them as normal human beings who are as capable of error as anyone else.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The single dumbest thing the US-centralized empire asks us to believe is that the military encirclement of its top two geopolitical rivals is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Some people wonder why mental health conditions are so bad, while I marvel at the fact that they're not much worse. It's actually amazing anyone's functioning at all in a civilization that's ruled by exploiters and abusers who dominate the world using mass-scale psychological manipulation. It's a testament to human resilience that anyone is sane. When everyone's mind is always being pummeled with messaging that you're deficient if you can't thrive under our oppressive systems, that you're flawed if you don't look, think and act a certain way, that poverty is normal and acts of mass military slaughter are acceptable, it's a wonder we don't all snap.

When everyone's consciousness is being continually warped and twisted to suit the agendas of the powerful and keep us all thinking, speaking, working, shopping and voting in ways that advance their interests, it's surprising we're not seeing more suicides, more mass shootings, more substance abuse, more clinical depression and anxiety. In a totalitarian dystopia that's held together by mass-scale psychological abuse, it's entirely reasonable that people are finding themselves overwhelmed with despair, alienation, depression and anxiety.

Everything seems phony, meaningless and needlessly difficult because it is. This isn't a statement about human nature or life as it naturally exists, it's a statement about the artificially constructed systems we live under currently. Systems that were built by people and are being maintained by people. Systems which can be changed and restructured by people, too.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The US has been increasingly treating Taiwan like a sovereign nation with whom diplomatic relationships and alliances can be formed, in violation of its longstanding One-China policy that has kept the peace for decades. And I just think it's worth noting that the western media who've lately been condoning these moves became outraged at Donald Trump just a few years ago for doing the same thing to a far lesser degree.

Reading by Tim Foley.