JOHNSTONE

"China is a strange, backwards nation ruled by tyrants," said the nation founded by Puritans who used to execute women for witchcraft and just killed reproductive rights protections because they think Jesus told them to.

The world is dominated culturally, economically and militarily by a regime that just killed women's reproductive rights because they make Jesus mad.

Reading by Tim Foley.

All of our world's worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don't use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people's understanding of what's going on. 

Humans are storytelling creatures. If you can control the stories humans are telling themselves about the world, you control the humans, and you control the world. 

Mental narrative plays a hugely prominent role in human experience; if you've ever tried to still your mind in meditation you know exactly what I'm talking about. Babbling thought stories dominate our experience of reality. It makes sense then that if you can influence those stories, you're effectively influencing someone's experience of reality.

The powerful manipulate the dominant narratives of our society in approximately five major ways: propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism. Like the fingers on a hand they are distinct from each other and each play their own role, but they're all part of the same thing and work together toward the same goal. They're all just different aspects of the US-centralized empire's narrative control system.

Reading by Tim Foley.

"Because the Cold War is in the distant past, most people, especially younger people, haven't thought a lot about nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, and they tend to be quite cavalier in their comments about nuclear weapons, and this makes me very nervous," Mearsheimer said.

It makes me nervous too. Especially when we've got a steadily escalating proxy war which the standoff in Lithuania could easily see spin out into a direct hot war between Russia and NATO powers, and when we hear the UK's top army general telling troops to prepare for World War Three.

Hey I've got a great idea, let's start World War Three over a NATO country that most Americans don't even know exists.

Liberals learned the word "Lithuania" ten seconds ago and they're ready to nuke Moscow over it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Just for fun we all pretend to be strangers.

Just for fun we pretend we don't know each other on the street,

on the train, at the store, at the traffic light.

Just for fun we pretend we aren't locked in ecstatic union

and briefly ignore our intimate knowledge of the primordial secrets

behind each other's eyes.

We sit on the bus and try not to be the first to wink,

or to burst out laughing at the silliness of our game,

or to call out the goofy elephant in the room

about how we're all pretending to be strangers

just for fun.

Two spouses pause mid-coitus to shake hands and introduce themselves.

Two twins in the womb make awkward small talk about the weather.

The thumb and the index finger avoid eye contact on the elevator.

Two slimy babies squirt into the same universe,

made from the same stuff,

and then put on masks made of mind chatter

so we can pretend that we don't know each other.

My atoms are your atoms, and your atoms are mine.

We have danced this swirling energy orgy since before the Big Bang.

Playing positive and negative,

playing stimulus and response,

playing predator and prey,

playing mother and youngling,

playing enemies and lovers,

playing strangers on the internet,

just for fun.

I apologize, my timeless sibling,

for breaking character just this once.

Let us return now to our little game.

__________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Guardian has put out a smear piece on critics of the imperial Syria narrative that reads like propaganda made by seven year-olds without adult supervision.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Extraditing a foreign journalist for exposing your war crimes is as tyrannical an agenda as you could possibly come up with. The US, UK and Australia colluding toward this end shows us that these are member states of a single empire whose only values are domination and control, and that all its posturing about human rights is pure facade. Assange keeps exposing the true face of power.

There is in fact a strong argument to be made that even all these years after the 2010 leaks for which he is currently being prosecuted, Assange is doing his most important work yet. As important as his WikiLeaks publications were and are, none of them exposed the depravity of the empire as much as forcing them to look us in the eye and tell us they'll extradite a journalist for telling the truth. 

Reading by Tim Foley.

The mainstream worldview is self-evidently bullshit. If our media and education systems were telling us the truth about the world and our "democratic" systems actually worked, our society would be arranged to serve the interests of the many rather than an elite few.

You can tell the mainstream worldview is bullshit just by looking at its fruits. We're killing our ecosystem to serve an economic system that's creating greater and greater inequality while wars rage and nuclear brinkmanship threatens to wipe us all out and corruption rules the earth. 

The world is as it is because the way the majority of people in the most influential nations think, act and vote is being continuously manipulated by the powerful, for the powerful. The mainstream worldview is just a giant bundle of power-serving lies and manipulations.

Reading by Tim Foley.

If there is a purpose of human life, as near as I can tell from these severely limited sense organs and this very limited brain, it's to become as conscious as possible.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The White House has officially confirmed reports that President Biden will indeed be visiting Saudi Arabia in contradiction of his campaign vows to make the nation a "pariah" for its human rights violations, and everyone's acting like visiting a murderous tyrant is somehow beneath the dignity of a US president.

Reading by Tim Foley.