JOHNSTONE

The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as "America's backyard" and "waters the U.S. considers home turf" follows a recent controversy over the US president proclaiming that "Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” This provoked many references to the so-called "Monroe Doctrine", a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.

It also follows another incident in which Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the ongoing tensions around Ukraine that it is in America's interest to support "our eastern flank countries", which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America's eastern flank was not Eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States. 

Reading by Tim Foley.

If you "vote out fascism" and then the president you voted for turns out to have the same effective policies as the previous administration, it's time to start asking who the fascists actually are.

Reading by Tim Foley.

I think it would be a lot more efficient and straightforward if all English-language news media were just run directly out of CIA headquarters by agency officials in Langley, Virginia. This way news reporters could eliminate the middleman and drop the undignified charade of presenting unproven assertions by western intelligence agencies as "scoops" that they picked up from "sources".

I mean, right now the mass media are churning out stories about "intelligence" which says Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine very soon, citing government officials and anonymous sources. We are never shown the "intelligence", and we are never shown any evidence of its veracity; we're simply told what opaque and unaccountable government agencies want us to believe about a foreign government. We're not even reminded by the publishers of these CIA press releases that western intelligence agencies have a very extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing, and we're certainly not informed that Kyiv appears to be ramping up aggressions in eastern Ukraine.

Reading by Tim Foley.

They don't just teach us what to believe. They teach us who we are. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded.

These artificial constructs take up such vast portions of our personal psychology that people will live their entire lives completely enslaved to them, making them their entire focus. This enslavement is so pervasive that people will often even take their own lives based on what those made-up constructs tell them about who they are and what they're worth.

And it's all a lie. A dream world, made entirely of narrative, constructed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful. Things as intimate as the thoughts in our heads and the movement of our interest and attention are controlled and dominated with iron-fisted force, all for the benefit of some stupid made-up games about imaginary money and fictional authority.

Reading by Tim Foley.

So on one hand Gaetz is opposing warmongering against Russia and condemning the trillions spent on US wars in the Middle East, which by itself would normally be a good thing. But the fact that he only opposes doing that because he wants to focus imperialist aggressions on another part of the world to preserve US unipolar planetary domination completely nullifies any good which could come from his opposition to aggressions somewhere else.

This is a very common phenomenon on the right end of the US political spectrum; you'll hear a politician or pundit saying what appear to be sane things against the agendas of DC warmongers, but if you pay attention to their overall commentary it's clear that they're not opposing the use of mass-scale imperialist aggression to preserve planetary domination, they're just quibbling about the specifics of how it should be done.

Reading by Tim Foley.

I'm declassifying evidence that Nigeria is planning a false flag operation in Switzerland. Are you ready? Here it is:

Nigeria is planning a false flag operation in Switzerland.

See, the evidence is me asserting it. If you doubt this evidence, you're a propagandist for Nigeria.

What? You want proof? I just gave you the proof. I gave you my declassified intelligence assessment.

I mean obviously I can't give you the raw intelligence you're asking me for without revealing sources and methods and compromising intelligence officers in the field. Is that what you want? For me to compromise intelligence officers in the field? Do you work for Nigerian intelligence?

The evidence is secret. It's secret evidence. What I can give you is the information we've obtained through thorough intelligence gathering methods in which our intelligence agencies have a degree of confidence. You're free to doubt it and believe Nigerian propaganda instead, if that's the sort of person you are.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Back in November The Military Times published a Ukrainian intelligence claim, which was picked up and repeated by numerous other mainstream publications, alleging that Russia was going to invade Ukraine by the end of January.

Then in late January when the calendar debunked the Military Times incendiary headline "Russia preparing to attack Ukraine by late January", that same outlet ran a much less viral story with the headline "Russia not yet ready for full-scale attack says Ukraine".

Now here in early February, the Murdoch press has put out a spin piece of a sort we're likely to see more of in coming days claiming that Russia has not invaded because the US and its allies have "ruined" Moscow's plans by telling everyone the invasion is coming. In an article titled "Ukraine-Russia tensions: Moscow's plans 'ruined' after US and Britain call out possible invasion", Ukraine's defense minister Hanna Maliar tells Sky News that Putin has not yet invaded because his murderous plot was thwarted by a plucky band of imperial states who would not be prevented from speaking their truth.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Sources say the system's working great,

and the government is your friend.

Commerce is the same as freedom

and wealth is the same as happiness,

according to sources familiar with the matter.

Sources say you should hate the Russians,

and also you should hate the Chinese,

and also you should hate Iran,

and also you should hate anti-vaxxers,

and also you should hate disobedient podcasters,

and really just hate anyone but your owners.

Sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, say we would never lie to you.

We've been speaking to you since you were young.

You can trust us with your mind.

If we were lying to everyone

everything would be a mess,

and the system would be a failure,

but it isn't,

so we can't be,

sources say,

sources say.

Sources say that you are finite,

and that a better world is impossible.

Sources say there is no magic coursing through your veins,

no miracles lurking in the great unknown,

no potentiality crackling within our species,

no leviathans swimming in our inner oceans, 

no dragons soaring through our mind's sky.

Sources say you are your body,

and you are your thoughts and your labels

and what you've been told you are since birth.

Sources say that small child's voice within you

whispering your primordial name

is a liar

and you should drown it in a bowl of Netflix and whiskey.

Sources say sources say sources say

look at this shiny thing over here,

look how interesting it is,

keep looking at this,

don't look within,

don't look without,

pay no attention to the gasping biosphere,

pay no attention to our nuclear Russian roulette,

pay no attention to that man starving from sanctions,

pay no attention to that man shivering on the street,

pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,

pay no attention to those angels in the attic,

pay no attention to the swelling music of the forgotten gods,

just look over here,

just stare at this vapid celebrity wankface nothingman,

look look,

he is doing a thing,

ha ha ha ha he is so interesting and so relevant to our present situation.

Sources say don't trust your own Sources.

Trust our sources; they are official and authorized.

The world is predictable and revolution impossible;

stomp down that light that's been emanating from your chest cave.

Your Source is a liar.

Your Source can't take care of you.

Your Source probably doesn't even own any aircraft carriers.

Our sources say no one else will ever love you.

Shut up and get back to work,

sources say.

Ignore your Source

and keep cranking that gear

for as long as your worthless body will let you,

and then get out of the way

and get into the hole

with the rest of the corpses

in our thriving corpse economy

on our spinning corpse planet

as we exterminate our way into paradise,

sources say.

______________________

______________________

______________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

Assertions are not evidence. A government declassifying itself making an unsubstantiated assertion is not "declassifying" anything. This is not the sort of behavior anyone would accept from anyone else, except perhaps a televangelist or a cult leader.

If I got on here for example and began drumming up publicity with claims that I have evidence that extraterrestrials are visiting this planet, and then after racking up millions of views and lots of publicity my evidence turned out to be a video clip of me saying "Extraterrestrials have been visiting this planet," I would be called a liar, a scammer, and a clickbait grifter, and rightly so. I could then claim that I can't provide any further evidence beyond my own assertion without compromising my sensitive sources and methods, but I'd still quite rightly be called a liar, a scammer, and a clickbait grifter.

But if I'm the most powerful institution in the world and have an extensive history of lying about exactly the sort of claim I just made, that's considered fine and normal within the mainstream western orthodoxy.

Reading by Tim Foley.

There's so much more to propaganda than just manufacturing consent for governments and wars. It trains us what to value. What to think a successful human being looks like. Where to place our interest, energy and attention. It shapes our very personalities. It warps our humanity.

Show me someone who doesn't think propaganda has much power and I'll show you someone who's been highly propagandized.

Reading by Tim Foley.