JOHNSTONE

Another cartoonishly ridiculous anti-China propaganda piece has been published in the western mass media, this time by The Guardian, which at this point could arguably be labeled the single most destructive promulgator of empire propaganda in the western world. It is authored by Simon Tisdall, who could most certainly be labeled the single most destructive promulgator of empire propaganda at The Guardian.

Reading by Tim Foley.

They are killing Julian Assange. Experts agree that they are killing him. Assange's stroke is just another item on the mountain of evidence we already had for this.

The US-centralized power alliance is murdering a journalist, as surely as the Saudi regime murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The only difference is that Khashoggi was killed quickly by live dismemberment via bone saw while Assange is being killed slowly by lawfare.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Assange case is the most powerful government in the world defending its right to lie to you.

Reading by Tim Foley.

A Republican senator who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee stated on a Tuesday Fox News appearance that he strongly supports keeping US military action on the table if Russia invades Ukraine, up to and including a first-use nuclear attack.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The most powerful people in our world pursue power for its own sake and do so with amoeba-like levels of wisdom and insight. Don't attribute any higher order of decision-making capability to them than you would to any random acquaintance in your life. If anything, attribute less.

Most people are deeply unconscious and patterned. Ruling elites are no exception, and in fact they are more unconscious. It's a common error to think of these people as rational actors; really their minds are running on autopilot in response to conditioning put in place long ago. 

That's why you'll see them continuing policies which destroy the biosphere they depend on for survival or escalating military aggressions between nuclear powers. They're not making cool, rational decisions, they're acting out impulses within themselves that they don't understand.

You'll hear people say "They wouldn't nuke themselves, it's irrational" or "If the climate situation was really that bad they'd have taken drastic action long ago," but this assumes you're dealing with rational minds and not what are essentially neurological computer programs. Really you're just looking at highly traumatized organisms mindlessly acting out patterns set in place much earlier in their lives to cope with distress and gain a feeling of safety and security. And virtually none of those patterns are useful for running the world in a sane way.

Any analysis which holds that elites wouldn't do something simply because it's not rational is an analysis which omits the important fact that, as Robert Heinlein put it, "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal."

These people are not gods. They're barely even humans.

Reading by Tim Foley.

When the nukes start flying,

when we see the mushroom cloud growing on the horizon,

when reality comes crashing down in the most overt way possible,

when the realization slowly dawns that this really is the end,

none of our old stuff will matter anymore.

It will not matter if you are American, Russian or Chinese.

It will not matter if your skin is darker or lighter.

It will not matter if you feel like a man or a woman or both or neither.

It will not matter if your politics are left, right or center.

It will not matter who you voted for.

All that will matter, in that final moment,

is that it is ending.

We will behold that final moment

standing alongside progressives and conservatives,

racists and radlibs,

socialists and soldiers,

communists and cops,

and all our irreconcilable differences

will suddenly dissolve into nothing.

Against the suddenly visible backdrop of total annihilation,

the existence of any human anywhere is a miracle,

and the existence of life on this planet is a priceless gift.

We won't even care whose fault it was,

whether it was deliberate or accidental,

or whether it was the result of some malfunction, miscommunication, or misunderstanding.

All we will care about is that it is ending.

And in that final moment we will hug our loved ones tight,

whether we are Christian or atheist,

Jew or Arab,

Indian or Pakistani,

anti-vaxxer or Antifa.

And in that final moment we will say,

in our heart of hearts,

with our innermost voices,

"Oh, I see it now!

I see how easy it is to stand together!

I see how small our differences are compared to this great commonality!

I see where we went wrong,

and how very easy it would be to fix it!"

And in that final moment we will say,

"We see it now!

We see the mistakes we made,

and made and made and kept on making!

We understand our fundamental error!

Just give us one do-over and we can correct it immediately!

Could we have a do-over please?

Could we have a do-over please?"

In that final moment,

we will ask,

"Could we have a do-over please?"

____________

Reading by Tim Foley.

Every year around my birthday I like to write an article where I try to articulate as clearly as I can who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do here. I do this for three reasons:

1. Because as a crowdfunded writer it's important to be fully transparent about exactly what it is my patrons are supporting here.

2. Because I find it's good practice to continually hone my ability to distill the entirety of my message into a single article as lucidly and concisely as possible.

3. It's also good practice for me to annually kind of renew my vows and remind myself of my mission here.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Gotta keep dropping bombs because they gotta keep making bombs. Gotta keep making bombs because they made the entire economy dependent on bomb-making. This is the only type of system that could possibly work.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has resigned as CEO of the company, leading anyone who's been paying close attention to the rise of Silicon Valley internet censorship to voice concerns that the platform's relatively lenient attitude toward speech compared to other major social media services may be drawing to a close.

Reading by Tim Foley.

To have a healthy world we're going to have to metamorphose into a species which is not driven by fear and greed and us-versus-them othering. Which doesn't see my own suffering as meaningfully separate from the suffering of my neighbor. Which doesn't see the struggles of a population on the other side of the planet as meaningfully separate from the struggles of the population on this side of the planet. Where we collaborate with each other and our ecosystem instead of competing and killing and exploiting and destroying.

This is the humanity that's trying to be born.

There's a whole, whole lot of future ahead, and if we play our cards right we're going to get to be a part of it. If we survive to see that future, humans will look back upon the stretch of history as we know it today as a kind of embryonic stage in our development. Where an animal species not unlike any other evolved a lot of brain mass in a fairly short time but still hadn't shed the fear-based kill-or-be-killed survival impulses of its evolutionary ancestors, so there was a confused, chaotic transition phase between animal life and true humanity.

Reading by Tim Foley.