JOHNSTONE

I just realized I've never really written about how I make a living doing what I do, which is odd because it's easily the most interesting aspect of my weird little operation here. I'll put the information out there just in case it's useful to anybody.

Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/my-experiments-with-hacking-capitalism

The US is not a puppet of Israel, and Israel isn't a puppet of the US. Saying one puppets the other is like saying Ohio puppets Nevada; they're both member states of the same undeclared empire ruled by uncrowned kings who use governments as weapons to kill and steal.

The lines between nations within the US-centralized empire are no more real than the official elected governments of those nations. It's just a single unified power structure which uses whatever narratives it requires to justify its continued campaign to rule the entire planet.

Reading by Tim Foley. Article with hyperlinks and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-us-isnt-an-israel-puppet-israel

Featured image via U.S. Embassy Jerusalem, Creative Commons 2.0 https://www.flickr.com/photos/usembassyta/27219252428

Our ongoing slide into the abyss of infinite weirdness may have eclipsed this from your memory by now, but there was once a time not too long ago when frequent mainstream news stories about the possibility of extraterrestrial aircraft in our skies would not have sounded like something from real life. Lately it's been a daily occurrence, and the president of the United States is now being asked about it at news conferences.

Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/everything-keeps-getting-weirder

Joe Biden is a corrupt, murderous empire lackey. He is also a very normal US president. The same was true of Trump. The same was true of Obama. The same was true of Bush. If you can't see this, it's because propaganda and partisan politics have warped your perception of reality. US presidents will always be evil because the US empire is evil and only evil people will be allowed to participate in its operation.

By far the single most important job of a US president is to take responsibility for decisions on empire management that would have been made regardless of who is in office, whether Democrat or Republican or tuna fish sandwich. Their job is to provide the illusion of democracy, letting you feel as though you "voted out" the perceived perpetrators of various misdeeds while leaving the actual power structure responsible for those misdeeds fully intact. 

It's like rectifying a corporation's misdeeds by firing the secretary. They just rotate in a new secretary every few years.

Reading by Tim Foley. Article: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/us-presidents-are-always-evil-because

1. You don't get to drop an entire colony on top of an inhabited country, grind those inhabitants into the dirt for generations, and then claim self defense every time they retaliate. That's not a thing.

Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links and sources: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/fifteen-thoughts-on-palestine

A poem. Reading by Tim Foley.

There are a lot of factors contributing to the growing awareness of Israel's brutality, but I think the main reason is very simple: there are only so many viral videos of unconscionable acts that can be dismissed with "Actually this is way more complicated than it looks." It is NOT more complicated than it looks. Clearly. It looks bad because it is bad.

Awareness is spreading of Israeli apartheid brutality for the same reason awareness is spreading of US police brutality: the internet combined with smartphone cameras. Seeing is believing. Seeing brings change. This is why the powerful are working so hard to censor the internet.

Reading by Tim Foley. Article with links, sources and videos: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-israel-narrative-is-crumbling

This is how propaganda occurs in the west. It's not that Jeff Bezos emails Washington Post reporters saying "Promote US wars!", it's that only reporters who support imperialism see their articles published and their careers rise. As Noam Chomsky famously said in an interview with Andrew Marr, "If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

Reading by Tim Foley. Article with hyperlinks, sources, and the Marr-Chomsky video:

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/if-you-believed-something-else-you

Because capitalist doctrine insists that humans are inherently greedy, self-centered and competitive, its believers cannot imagine any solution to our problems that isn't driven by greed, selfishness and competition. The idea that we can transcend our propagandized conditioning, our cultural mind viruses and our egoic thought patterns enough to move from our competition-based system into a collaboration-based one looks ridiculous to them, because they believe our nature can only ever be at war. At war with each other, and at war with our ecosystem. 

To a thoroughly capitalism-indoctrinated mind, the idea that we can transcend our self-destructive, exploitative, ecocidal patterning and move into collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem to create a healthy, harmonious world looks like childish nonsense. So instead they promote the far more mature and realistic idea that our world will be saved by greedy, union-busting tech oligarchs like Elon Musk.

Reading by Tim Foley. Article with sources and hyperlinks: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/capitalism-is-a-misanthropic-dystopian

Today's Caitlin Johnstone article has been replaced with a breaking news report from the National News Conglomerate. NNC: Obey.

Reading by Tim Foley. Article: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/palestinian-infant-sustains-punching