JOHNSTONE

The corporations are the government. If you didn't believe it before, believe it now that human rights lawyer Steven Donziger has effectively been sentenced to six months in prison by Chevron itself.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Oh dear god please let this be the peak of Jimmy Dore Derangement Syndrome.

Link to the Matt Orfalea video: https://youtu.be/IEUhvJdQjvc

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/shitlibs-literally-think-jimmy-dore

Reading by Tim Foley.

In Hollywood the Pentagon rewrites scripts about the military

to manufacture consent for a globe-spanning empire

to make US soldiers look like good guys

to make US wars look like good wars

to ensure continued recruitments

to ensure a steady supply of young bodies

to feed into the engine of a giant mechanical dragon

that is fueled by human blood.

They pipe our heads full of John Bolton brainworms

and Lockheed Martin dreams.

Our minds are colonized by shock and awe invasions

through a neighborhood in Los Angeles with no soul,

no art, no heart, no life, no love,

just cackling plastic smiles overmasking bestial snarls

and screenwriters with cocaine habits and nothing to say.

An invasive culture that is devoid of culture spreads across the globe

like the metastatic tendrils of a malignant tumor

saying "Isn't global capitalism working out great?"

and "This is all perfectly normal and sane actually!"

and "Hey maybe billionaires are crimefighting superheroes?"

and "This is definitely the nation that should be leading the world!"

Depicting an America with no homelessness or obesity,

whose streets are clean and whose people are not hanging on

by the skin of their teeth in squalor, poverty and dilapidation.

"Politics is downstream from culture" they say

as they manufacture culture in Hollywood, Arlington and Langley.

Conveyor belt culture.

Plastic culture.

Franchise culture.

Vulture culture.

They funnel death into our minds

so on election day we will vote for death

and we will buy death from our stores

and pump death into our atmosphere

from fuel pumps made possible by orgies of death in the Middle East.

The news man teaches us how to think and Hollywood teaches us how to feel.

They pour death and plastic over our hearts like concrete

to make us more like them,

to make us dim and unimaginitive,

to make us sharp-toothed and stitch-eyed,

to drown out the song of our planet,

the song which grows the trees,

the song which replicates the cells,

the song which swims the fish,

the song which chirps the sparrows,

the song which stirs the fetus in the womb,

the song which moves the energy up the spine,

the song which opens up the eyes.

They pour death and plastic over our hearts like concrete

to sedate our terrestrial intuition,

to silence our song,

to divert our sacred sexuality,

to stifle the thunderclap aliveness of our being,

to keep the holy hominid from opening its eyes,

eyes which do not recognize the authority of the mind mages,

eyes which do not recognize the validity of mind cages.

They pour death and plastic over our hearts like concrete.

But the movement of tree roots can make cracks appear,

and from within those cracks

sprouts emerge.

__________________________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

If Pompeo had not been involved in plots to kidnap, rendition and assassinate Julian Assange, he would have just said so. He wouldn't have engaged in all kinds of verbal gymnastics to squirm his way out of a difficult question, and he certainly wouldn't be calling for the criminal prosecution of his accusers for "speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Reading by Tim Foley.

Q: What is capitalism?

A: Capitalism is a system of transferring blame for society's problems from the people who cause those problems onto the people who are hurt by them.

Reading by Tim Foley.

I mean, is it not out-of-this-world bizarre that we just found out the CIA recently drew up plans to assassinate a journalist for journalistic activity, and yet we're not all unanimously demanding that the CIA be completely dismantled and flushed down the toilet forever?

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/how-is-the-cia-still-a-thing

The biggest and most widespread blind spot among those who oppose totalitarian control by the powerful is the assumption that it has not already been achieved.

We've been so busy watching out for the next overtly totalitarian dictatorship that wants to put the jackboot on our necks we never noticed the covert totalitarians sliding the shackles around our minds.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/people-dont-understand-how-unfree

It says a lot that AOC wasn't even able to vote against an Israeli apartheid measure that everyone already knew would pass regardless of her vote. 

I mean, how far gone is your progressive revolution if you're not even allowed to have a perfectly safe performative "no" vote? If even the illusion of opposition is banned?

Reading by Tim Foley.

Some people think humility means thinking of yourself as lowly and inferior, but that's not right.

Evangelical Christian author Rick Warren attempts to correct this misperception with the famous saying, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”

But that's not really it either.

True humility is the realization that the very thing you've come to think of as your "self" is an entirely illusory construct. 

Reading by Tim Foley.

Featured image by David (Deddy) Dayag - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100182268

They give us the illusion of freedom, but as long as they chain our minds with propaganda we are not free. It wouldn't matter if they gave us every personal liberty imaginable if a critical mass of us were still thinking in ways which benefit the powerful, because those thoughts would cause us to act, organize and vote in a way that benefits our rulers and not us. 

Reading by Tim Foley.