JOHNSTONE

We are reminded that ol' Liz won't be around forever not just by the fact that her body is turning into Pringles chips but by the sudden uptick in the use of the phrase "future king" in news media references to Prince Charles, who will inherit the throne upon his mother's overdue demise. It will take a lot of prepping to get members of the British Commonwealth used to the idea that they are about to have a King, after all, because on its surface the very idea of it is so cartoonishly absurd.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Julian Assange currently sits in Belmarsh Prison waiting to find out if British judges will overturn a lower court's ruling against his extradition to the United States to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for journalistic activity which exposed US war crimes. War crimes not unlike those that were just exposed by The New York Times in its reporting on the Baghuz massacre.

The precedent the US government is trying to set with its persecution of Julian Assange will, if successful, cast a chilling effect over journalism which scrutinizes the US war machine, not just in the United States but around the world. If it can succeed in legally establishing that it can extradite an Australian journalist for publishing information in the public interest about US war crimes, it will have succeeded in legally establishing that it can do that to any journalist anywhere. And you can kiss investigative reporting like this goodbye.

This is what's at stake in the Assange case. Our right to know what the most deadly elements of the most powerful government on our planet are doing. The fact that the drivers of empire think it is legitimate to deprive us of such information by threatening to imprison anyone who tries to show it to us makes them an enemy of all humanity.

Reading by Tim Foley.

In a new article promoting the CIA's new mission center focused on China and the need to pour more resources into countering Beijing, Bloomberg also accidentally makes the case that many of the Chinese government's controversial domestic policies are entirely justified and completely necessary.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Western media are blaring headlines today about a rigged election, not in the United States or any of the other powerful nations allied with it whose elections are consistently fraudulent from top to bottom, but in the small Central American nation of Nicaragua.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Hi I'm a very serious news reporter. The Russians are controlling our thoughts with Facebook memes and scrambling our brains with invisible ray gun attacks. In other news, capitalism is working fine and our wars defend freedom and democracy. The government never lies. Here's Bob with the weather.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The world is dominated by opaque and unaccountable government agencies who are legitimized and normalized by the mass media. The Pentagon killed ten people, none of whom were combatants and seven of whom were children, tried to lie about it, got exposed, investigated itself and found that those who perpetrated the attack were not even guilty of so much as negligence, then classified the report and called it a day. And then the mass media legitimized this by calling it an "independent" investigation conducted by a "watchdog".

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/mass-media-hasten-to-help-pentagon

Meanwhile methane—a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon in the short term—has started hemorrhaging into the atmosphere from thawing arctic permafrost, and no one really knows what to do about it. This, like the albedo effect of polar ice loss and numerous other self-reinforcing warming effects that have been unlocking in recent years, can potentially cause the Earth to continue warming all on its own regardless of future human behavior.

That's all on top of the western empire ramping up world-threatening aggressions against both nuclear-armed Russia and nuclear-armed China simultaneously, a multi-front cold war the likes of which we've never seen before and which is only just barely getting started. And if we don't wipe ourselves out by climate collapse or nuclear war, we could still easily do it fairly soon with weaponized AI. 

So our species is facing existential threats on myriad fronts which could easily lead to horrifying extinction-level events which we could easily see unfold in our own lifetimes.

And it's just so very strange how we don't talk about that more.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/its-really-weird-how-little-we-talk

Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.

Reading by Tim Foley.

At a hotly anticipated remote keynote presentation on Friday, billionaire Jeff Bezos revealed the details of an exciting new virtual reality experience which he says will allow consumers to log on to an artificial fantasy world completely unlike our existing reality.

"We're calling it Mainstream Media, or MSM for short," Bezos told viewers. "MSM will allow users to interface with an alternate world of the imagination where capitalism is working fine for everyone, constant military expansionism is normal and desirable, Washington's enemies are all bloodthirsty monsters, and billionaires are just harmless job creators. Let's check it out."

Reading by Tim Foley.

Assange probably never set out on this journey with the goal of calling attention to the abuses of the US prison system as his foremost priority, but, as is so often the case with anything his journey touches, those abuses keep getting pulled into the light of public awareness anyway. His case is now no longer just about press freedom, US war crimes, corrupt governments collaborating to stomp out inconvenient truth tellers, and the malfeasance of US alphabet agencies, but about the abusive nature of the US prison system as well.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/from-press-freedom-to-prison-systems