JOHNSTONE

The US military has been showering CNN's retiring Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr with effusive thanks and praise for her lifetime of service, giving some insight into the cozy working relationship between the media and the war machine inside the US empire.

Reading by Tim Foley.

You can't just conduct yourself as though these propaganda campaigns aren't a thing. If you live in one of the member nations of the US-centralized power alliance, you can't just pretend your expressions of support and solidarity mean the same thing as if they were coming from someone in Latin America, Asia, or Africa. You're not the same. You're speaking from within the most powerful empire that has ever existed, and you are always necessarily in some kind of relationship with that empire's campaign of global conquest and the propaganda operations which grease its wheels.

And you need to be responsible with that relationship. If you live in the US or any of its imperial member states like the UK, the EU, Australia or Canada, it simply is not possible for you to lend your voice to the cause of protesters in empire-targeted nations without facilitating the empire's propaganda campaigns about those protests. It cannot be done. You either have a responsible relationship with this reality or an irresponsible one.

Western leftists who go out of their way to amplify protests that are part of an ongoing imperial propaganda operation have an irresponsible relationship with that reality. They're not doing anything that actually helps the people in those countries, but they are absolutely doing something that could end up hurting them. And if they're really honest with themselves they know this. But they do it anyway because it looks good in front of their propaganda-addled leftish friends and followers.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Awakening from the lies of the news man,

the lies of the politician,

the lies of the teacher, the preacher, the pundit, the parent.

Awakening from the authorized worldviews,

the authorized narratives,

the authorized information,

the authorized ideas.

Awakening from dead thoughts written by dead men

on sheets made from dead trees.

Awakening from culture,

awakening from civilization,

from how-it-is stories,

from how-to-be stories,

from should and shouldn't stories,

from us and them stories.

Awakening from conditioning,

awakening from trauma,

awakening from subconscious dysfunction,

awakening from the heritage of pain and confusion

handed down through history from generation to generation.

Awakening from manipulation,

awakening from control,

awakening from grasping,

from pushing,

from pulling,

from hiding,

from holding life at bay,

from the inability to let life be as it is,

from the inability to let beingness play unmolested.

Awakening from identification with the body,

from identification with the mind,

from identification with any localized perspective,

from identification with the disembodied witness,

from identification with the field of consciousness,

from identification altogether.

Awakening from the illusion of separation,

from the illusion of the self,

from the illusion of the other,

from the illusion of time,

from the illusion of space,

from the illusions of the mind.

Awakening to truth,

whatever it may be.

Awakening to reality,

whatever its implications might entail.

Awakening to what is,

without caveat or precondition.

Awakening to peace.

Awakening to love.

Awakening to unconditionality.

Awakening to boundlessness.

Awakening to freedom.

Awakening for everyone.

Awakening for the whole world.

Awakening for humanity,

now and into the distant future.

Awakening together.

Awakening as one.

Opening each pair of eyelids,

one by one,

as we walk arm in arm

into the great unknown.

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Reading by Tim Foley.

Does it not seem odd to you that half of the ruling class has been getting half of the population to fixate on identity politics while the other half has been getting half the population increasingly panicked about "wokeness"? Does it not seem a little too convenient how all the mainstream right-wing politicians are making anti-wokeism a major part of their platforms, how all the mainstream right-wing pundits are doing everything they can to make their audiences more panicked about how "woke" everything is getting, and how you've got Elon Musk talking about "the woke mind virus" in exactly the same way more liberal-aligned oligarchs champion social justice issues?

This is because both anti-wokeism and identity politics serve the same establishment agendas, entirely by design. The more people are fixated on the mainstream culture war, the less likely they are to decide they want to do things like defund the Pentagon or take back everything the rich have stolen from them. Time you're spending yelling at the other side of the cultural divide is time you're not spending eating your landlord as God and nature intended.

Reading by Tim Foley.

You don't live in a free country. And no, it's not because they make you pay taxes or that time they made you wear a mask or whatever. The real reason you don't live in a free country is much, much bigger than that: you don't live in a free country because the minds of your countrymen are imprisoned.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Forcefully opposing the warmongering and imperialism of your rulers is the very first step toward political morality. It's not the only step, but it is the first step, because if you haven't taken that step then no other ostensibly moral politics you might espouse are meaningful. 

Your anti-capitalism is meaningless if you're not aggressively opposing your government's mass military murders for power and profit. Your anti-racism is meaningless if you're not aggressively opposing your government's butchery and exploitation of brown-skinned people overseas. If you're not forcefully opposing your government's warmongering and imperialism, then the rest of your politics are irrelevant, because they are false. A sincerely antiwar right-winger with all the wrong positions on all other issues is still a much better person than you are.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Bernie Sanders has withdrawn his bill to end US support for the Saudi war on Yemen following reports that the Biden administration was working to tank the resolution, with White House aids reportedly saying they'd recommend the president veto it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

A New York Times report has found that enrollment in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), a Pentagon-funded program designed to groom children for military service, is increasingly becoming mandatory in US high schools.

Reading by Tim Foley.

"So Stoltenberg is correct to be afraid. There absolutely are too many things that can go horribly wrong in such a standoff, and there are simply too many unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that this will not happen.

"And it's pretty crazy to hear Stoltenberg voice these concerns even while the Pentagon gives the go-ahead for Ukraine to begin launching long-range attacks on targets inside Russia in its war that is being backed by the United States, because those two positions would seem to be pretty strongly at odds with each other."

Reading by Tim Foley.

If you live in one of the so-called free democracies of the western world, the worst mistake you can make is to buy into the hype. To believe you are a free individual in a nation that respects and protects your freedom and individuality.

Reading by Tim Foley.