JOHNSTONE

Planting angel eggs on a dying world,

at the feet of billboards,

in the clearcut wastelands,

by the rivers of tears from Yemeni mothers,

under highway overpasses where defective gear-turners sleep,

shambling from crater to crater on tree stump legs

wailing whale songs and praying to unprofitable gods,

planting them in the ashes whispering

"May there be kindness,

may there be seeing,

may there be artist lovers who are each other's muse."

Dancing a doomed dance,

a dance of holy futility,

the dance of madmen,

the dance of heretics,

the dance of censored saints,

of banished buddhas,

singing a song of hopeless hope,

irrational hope,

unscientific hope,

the hope of lovers and lunatics,

a lunatic's song sung to the moon.

Dance with us, gentle stranger,

through this world of Disney deforestation and unexplored abysses

with unauthorized choreography and wondermented eyes.

Let us hold the line against the empire of Earth eaters

for no other reason than that we're the only ones left

who are crazy enough to try.

There may be a hatching yet, gentle stranger.

Humanity is not broken

anymore than an egg

is a broken bird.

________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

The most powerful weapon the west has given Ukraine is not the HIMARS, it's the US propaganda machine.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Of all the face-meltingly stupid narratives that have been circulated about the US proxy war in Ukraine, the dumbest so far has got to be the increasingly common claim that aggressively escalating nuclear brinkmanship is safety and de-escalation is danger.

We see a prime example of this self-evidently idiotic narrative in a new Business Insider article titled "Putin's nuclear threats are pushing people like Trump and Elon Musk to press for a Ukraine peace deal. A nuclear expert warns that's 'dangerous.'" 

Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley

The west is advancing the claim that Putin is distributing Viagra to his soldiers so that they can more effectively rape Ukrainians, which was a ridiculous propaganda narrative the first time the west used it to manufacture consent for regime change in Libya.

Reading by Tim Foley.

We're being driven toward nuclear war on the completely fictional claim that Putin is a Hitler-like megalomaniac who's just invading countries completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and won't stop invading and conquering until he's stopped by force.

The news media aren't telling people about the western aggressions which led to this war. They're not telling people the US is keeping this war going with the stated goal of weakening Russia and is rejecting peace talks and refusing to push for peace. All people are being told is that Putin is another Hitler who won't listen to reason and only understands violence. The world's two nuclear superpowers are being pushed closer and closer to direct military confrontation based on a complete fiction which omits mountains of facts.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow was open to talks with the the US or with Turkey on ending the war in Ukraine, claiming that US officials are lying when they say Russia has been refusing peace talks.

Lavrov's claim was given more weight when US State Department spokesman Ned Price dismissed the offer for peace talks shortly after it was extended, citing Russia's recent missile strikes on Kyiv.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Normal person: I think it would be good if everyone didn't die in a nuclear holocaust.

Crazy person: That means you love Vladimir Putin.

Normal person: No I just think it would be a good idea to try to prevent the horrific death of literally everyone.

Crazy person: How much is the Kremlin paying you to say that?

Fucking lunatics.

Resisting nuclear armageddon is the least partisan position that anyone could possibly have. The least one-sided. The least "campist". It's just being a normal human organism with the most normal human impulse you could possibly come up with. It's absolutely insane that anyone tries to spin it otherwise.

A society where opposing nuclear armageddon is treated as freakish and evil is the most backwards and insane society imaginable. Seriously, try to imagine anything crazier and more backwards than that. A society where everyone walks and drives backwards? That's less crazy and backwards. A society where the dogs own the people? That's less crazy and backwards.

This is it. This is peak crazy. A thinking species which regards as outrageous heresy any opposition to brinkmanship that can cause its extinction cannot get any more crazy. It's turned as far away from sanity as any thinking creature could possibly be.

Reading by Tim Foley.

None of this would be happening if this proxy war was as just and righteous as its proponents are pretending. If your proxy war demands nonstop perception management at maximum aggression to manufacture public consent for it, your proxy war is probably immoral and bad. If maintaining public support for a proxy war requires nonstop PR spin, aggressive propaganda from the mainstream news media, banning of Russian media, and giant troll information ops amplified by think tanks and government agencies, it probably shouldn't have public support.

If you need to aggressively psychologically manipulate a population to get them to support your agenda, censor their speech, and disrupt their online discourse with astroturf trolling ops, it's because you know your agenda is not something they'd choose to support on their own. If you need to manipulate people into supporting something, it's because it's not worthy of their support, and you know it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

“First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have the threat of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going,” the president said. “We are trying to figure out what is Putin’s off-ramp? Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself where he does not only lose face but significant power?”

As though the US government itself has not played a major role in both provoking and sustaining this conflict.

Reading by Tim Foley.