JOHNSTONE

In what appears to be yet another escalation in Silicon Valley's redoubled efforts to quash dissident voices since the beginning of the Ukraine war, PayPal has just blocked the accounts of multiple alternative media voices who've been speaking critically against official US empire narratives. These include journalist and speaker Caleb Maupin and Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News.

Reading by Tim Foley.

If you're on the side of the US empire on any issue you are on the wrong side. This doesn't mean the other side is always necessarily in the right, it just means a globe-spanning empire that's held together by lies, murder and tyranny will always be in the wrong. Yes, it is that simple.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Everyone's anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they're spouting the slogans they've been programmed to spout and waving the flags the flags they've been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.

Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it's time to oppose war and push for peace, those who'd previously proclaimed themselves "anti-war" are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked. 

Reading by Tim Foley.

You don't get to be a billionaire, much less a billionaire with massively influential media ownership, unless you collaborate with existing power structures. Musk has certainly been collaborating with the oligarchic empire very nicely up until this point, and it's a safe bet that his purchase would not be happening if the empire felt its narrative control machine was in any way threatened by it.

Believing Elon Musk is going to save Twitter is as naive as believing Joe Biden was going to save America. Arguing over which oligarchs should control the media is as silly and undignified as arguing over which oligarch-owned politicians should run the government. 

Billionaires coming to the rescue only happens in movies and comic books. You're as likely to be saved by Elon Musk as you are by Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark.

Reading by Tim Foley.

This is just a quick article to remind everyone of my standing offer to please use my work however they like, and that it isn't necessary to attribute any words I've written to me if you don't want to. 

I think a reminder is due because lately I've been seeing more people take me up on this repeated offer on social media, with people sharing quotes I've made without putting my name on them or sharing screenshots of my Twitter posts but cropping my name off of them, and I want to make it clear to everyone that I am fine with this and think it's great.

I have probably the coolest readers of any online writer in the world (not to brag or anything), and sometimes they get upset when they see somebody sharing something I've said without giving me attribution. So I'd just like to make it clear to everyone that what they're seeing is perfectly fine, and I'll explain why.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The news man tells me the CIA's "Queen of Torture" now runs a life and beauty coaching business which helps midlife women “look good, feel good, and do good.”

"HI, I'M FREDA, A CERTIFIED BEAUTY AND LIFE COACH READY TO HELP YOU OWN YOUR BEAUTY FROM THE INSIDE OUT AND FEEL INVINCIBLE IN MIDLIFE," her website reads in all caps.

And I can only sit here and wonder, twiddling my pockmarked heart in my hands, how one is meant to react to such information?

Does one fall to one's knees and weep hot tears for her victims, whose screams still haunt soulless fluorescent echoing corridors and whose hurts will never heal?

Does one fall to one's knees and weep hot tears for our children, whose inheritance is a culture made of wetiko virus and psyops and a world we are clearcutting to make billboards?

Does one fall to one's knees and weep hot tears for the Indigenous, whose lives we bulldozed and paved over with asphalt just to build a ghostmind civilization where something like this could happen?

Does one shout "Allahu Akbar!" and throw one's smartphone off the overpass?

Does one take off one's clothes and shriek like an ape in a last-ditch attempt at restoring the primal clarity?

At bringing things back to before they went wrong, back before CIA torture queens became life and beauty coaches?

Back before CIA torture queens were able to shout from the Reuters rooftops, "I raised my hand loud and proud and you know, I don't regret it at all"?

Back before Hollywood movies glorifying CIA torture and its queendom began warping our minds and turning our souls into oil?

Back before the sky was scraped by dark towers built on the foundation of an economy that's held together by lies and cruise missiles? 

Back before brainwashed mouth muppets said things like "We can't be afraid of war with Russia just because Putin has nukes" or "Unregulated speech is bad and dangerous" or "If the CIA was propagandizing us we'd have heard about it in the news"?

Back before we found ourselves sitting here killing time waiting to find out whether humanity dies of climate collapse or nuclear armageddon and whether the inevitable Zelensky movie will star Ryan Reynolds or Channing Tatum?

Back before Silicon Valley Pentagon proxies funneled 21st-century Norman Rockwell paintings into each of our QR-coded skulls?

Back before our dreams had Downvote buttons and our nightmares had laugh tracks?

Before directionless lives and carefully scripted wars?

Before truth was a choked off whisper and bullshit had a Jumbotron?

Before hallucinogens were outlawed and hallucinations were mandatory?

I see you, Queen of Torture, and everything you've always been.

Do you think your Instagram ads and Botox siren songs fool me?

I see the eels behind your eyes and the skulls inside your smile; in your heart you are still torturing, and you love it.

Torture is your first love, your only love, your soulmate, your sex; torture is what you're made of, torture is what you are.

You are inseparably one with the machine which tortures the poor, which tortures our ecosystem, which tortures children under blockades and starvation sanctions, which tortures our dreamworlds and our sacred seeds of disobedience.

We will beat the machine. We will win.

That primal clarity lives within us still, and you can only sedate a giant for so long.

The primal giant will rise, will crush the machine and the CIA black sites, will crack open Gitmo and devour Hollywood, will defecate on the Pentagon and wipe its ass with Langley, and will howl at the moon and banish the narrative matrix to wherever deleted files go.

And we will be free. And we will be vast. And we will look at each other with unpolluted eyes for the very first time.

And we will go out into the world, the real world, the original world, walking with our original feet and looking with our original eyes.

Our seeds now great forests.

Tortured no more.

____________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

This is happening at the same time the United States and the United Kingdom are loudly demanding accountability for alleged war crimes by the Russian military in Ukraine, which is interesting because attempting to bring accountability for war crimes is precisely why Julian Assange is in prison.

Reading by Tim Foley.

You were born in the middle of the most sophisticated and expansive mass-scale perception management operation that has ever taken place.

The news media is propaganda and schooling is designed to condition us to accept that propaganda.

Public understanding of what a normal moderate position looks like and what a radical extremist position looks like has been warped to the most insane extent possible.

Noam Chomsky is not a radical and is in fact far too aligned with establishment power on far too many issues.

The difference between an AOC Democrat and a true anti-imperialist socialist is greater than the difference between an AOC Democrat and a Republican.

The difference between the mainstream media narrative about the world and actual reality is greater than the difference between the mainstream media narrative about the world and literally any work of fiction.

You’ve been lied to your entire life about your nation, your government, your nation’s official enemies, your society, and your very self.

Your brain and your senses were evolved to keep your evolutionary ancestors alive, not to tell you true things about the nature of reality.

Your mistakes don't matter and neither do anyone else's.

The self is an illusion and all beliefs are false.

The world is so much more beautiful than you realize.

You are so much more beautiful than you realize.

The world is secretly perfect.

You are secretly perfect.

It is safe to relinquish all labels and let all of life be ineffable.

It is safe to relinquish all identity and let yourself be ineffable.

The universe is forever out of control, and that's a good thing.

There is nowhere to fall to.

This is all infinitely supported and profoundly cherished.

This is all meaningless, gratuitous, astonishing, and delightful.

We are dancing together in the heart of eternity.

Your every molecule is intimately embraced by all that is.

Everything in existence says yes to itself.

Everything in you says yes to everything in existence; even your "no" is made of yes.

You are beloved.

You are love.

_____________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

It's impossible to overstate how completely blanketed by propaganda distortion the Ukraine war is. US spooks saying they're leaking disinfo to the press, Ukrainian war propaganda, the blackout on Ukrainian losses, the uncritical media acceptance of allegations against Russia, etc. This war is a propaganda campaign wrapped in a psyop.

Reading by Tim Foley

The one argument you'll get, if you really press the issue, is that the United States is in a propaganda war with Russia, and it is in our society's interests for our media institutions to help the United States win that propaganda war. Cold wars are fought between nuclear powers because hot warfare would risk annihilating both nations, leaving only other forms of war like psychological warfare available. There's no argument that this new escalation in censorship saves lives or protects elections, but there is an argument that it can help facilitate the long-term cold war agendas of the United States.

But what does that mean exactly? It means if we accept this argument we're knowingly consenting to a situation where all the major news outlets, websites and apps that people look to for information about the world are geared not toward telling us true things about reality, but toward beating Vladimir Putin in some weird psywar. It means abandoning any ambitions of being a truth-based civilization that is guided by facts, and instead accepting an existence as a propaganda-based civilization geared toward making sure we all think thoughts that hurt Moscow's long-term strategic interests.

Reading by Tim Foley.