Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

The war in Ukraine is so aggressively marketed and PR-intensive and so interwoven with US corporations we should just call it the McProxy War. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US military has been showering CNN's retiring Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr with effusive thanks and praise for her lifetime of service, giving some insight into the cozy working relationship between the media and the war machine inside the US empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

You can't just conduct yourself as though these propaganda campaigns aren't a thing. If you live in one of the member nations of the US-centralized power alliance, you can't just pretend your expressions of support and solidarity mean the same thing as if they were coming from someone in Latin America, Asia, or Africa. You're not the same. You're speaking from within the most powerful empire that has ever existed, and you are always necessarily in some kind of relationship with that empire's campaign of global conquest and the propaganda operations which grease its wheels. And you need to be responsible with that relationship. If you live in the US or any of its imperial member states like the UK, the EU, Australia or Canada, it simply is not possible for you to lend your voice to the cause of protesters in empire-targeted nations without facilitating the empire's propaganda campaigns about those protests. It cannot be done. You either have a responsible relationship with this reality or an irresponsible one

Awakening from the lies of the news man, the lies of the politician, the lies of the teacher, the preacher, the pundit, the parent. Awakening from the authorized worldviews, the authorized narratives, the authorized information, the authorized ideas. Awakening from dead thoughts written by dead men on sheets made from dead trees. Awakening from culture, awakening from civilization, from how-it-is stories, from how-to-be stories, from should and shouldn't stories, from us and them stories. Awakening from conditioning, awakening from trauma, awakening from subconscious dysfunction, awakening from the heritage of pain and confusion handed down through history from generation to generation. Awakening from manipulation, awakening from control, awakening from grasping, from pushing, from pulling, from hiding, from holding life at bay, from the inability to let life be as it is, from the inability to let beingness play unmolested. Awakening from identification with the body, from identification with the mind, f

Does it not seem odd to you that half of the ruling class has been getting half of the population to fixate on identity politics while the other half has been getting half the population increasingly panicked about "wokeness"? Does it not seem a little too convenient how all the mainstream right-wing politicians are making anti-wokeism a major part of their platforms, how all the mainstream right-wing pundits are doing everything they can to make their audiences more panicked about how "woke" everything is getting, and how you've got Elon Musk talking about "the woke mind virus" in exactly the same way more liberal-aligned oligarchs champion social justice issues? This is because both anti-wokeism and identity politics serve the same establishment agendas, entirely by design. The more people are fixated on the mainstream culture war, the less likely they are to decide they want to do things like defund the Pentagon or take back everything the rich have stolen from them. Time you're spending yelling at the ot

You don't live in a free country. And no, it's not because they make you pay taxes or that time they made you wear a mask or whatever. The real reason you don't live in a free country is much, much bigger than that: you don't live in a free country because the minds of your countrymen are imprisoned. Reading by Tim Foley.

Forcefully opposing the warmongering and imperialism of your rulers is the very first step toward political morality. It's not the only step, but it is the first step, because if you haven't taken that step then no other ostensibly moral politics you might espouse are meaningful.  Your anti-capitalism is meaningless if you're not aggressively opposing your government's mass military murders for power and profit. Your anti-racism is meaningless if you're not aggressively opposing your government's butchery and exploitation of brown-skinned people overseas. If you're not forcefully opposing your government's warmongering and imperialism, then the rest of your politics are irrelevant, because they are false. A sincerely antiwar right-winger with all the wrong positions on all other issues is still a much better person than you are. Reading by Tim Foley.

Bernie Sanders has withdrawn his bill to end US support for the Saudi war on Yemen following reports that the Biden administration was working to tank the resolution, with White House aids reportedly saying they'd recommend the president veto it. Reading by Tim Foley.

A New York Times report has found that enrollment in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), a Pentagon-funded program designed to groom children for military service, is increasingly becoming mandatory in US high schools. Reading by Tim Foley.

"So Stoltenberg is correct to be afraid. There absolutely are too many things that can go horribly wrong in such a standoff, and there are simply too many unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that this will not happen. "And it's pretty crazy to hear Stoltenberg voice these concerns even while the Pentagon gives the go-ahead for Ukraine to begin launching long-range attacks on targets inside Russia in its war that is being backed by the United States, because those two positions would seem to be pretty strongly at odds with each other." Reading by Tim Foley.

If you live in one of the so-called free democracies of the western world, the worst mistake you can make is to buy into the hype. To believe you are a free individual in a nation that respects and protects your freedom and individuality. Reading by Tim Foley.

Everyone's talking about the hit series Proxy War, an astronomically high-budget production based on an actual military conflict whose season finale is set to air this month. Reading by Tim Foley.

I don't desire a future for humanity like the ones imagined by our culturally designated future-imaginers. I don't want humans living in Elon Musk Mars colonies or Jeff Bezos space cylinders. I don't want us to fly out into the stars, to disappear into virtual reality universes, or to move away from our humanness by becoming cybernetic organisms. Not yet anyway. Not for a long time. Not until we've done what we need to do here first. Reading by Tim Foley. Image by Adobe Stock.

Michael Parenti has said that "Poor countries are not 'under-developed', they are over-exploited." The west tends to look down on the rest of the world for reasons that either directly or indirectly relate to the poverty in those nations, which is silly because that poverty comes largely from western theft and exploitation. It's like mugging someone and then scorning them for their empty wallet. If you boil it right down and get real about it, most of the pride in western civilization is ultimately pride in being better at killing and stealing than other people. We're still morally at the level of invading and plundering nations while claiming it's justified because we are stronger than them, it's just procedurally a few clicks removed from doing that directly. Reading by Tim Foley.

One of the most under-discussed topics in the world right now is how governments have been incrementally pacing the public toward accepting the use of police robots that kill people. The city of San Francisco has voted to legalize the use of killbots in specific emergency situations like active shooters and suicide bombers, with high-ranking officers making the call as to whether their use is warranted.  Reading by Tim Foley.

Every year around my birthday I've been tapping out an explanation of where I stand and what I'm trying to accomplish in this humble little slice of the digital universe here. As a crowdfunded writer it seems important to be fully transparent about what I'm doing and where I'm coming from so that people can decide on their own if my strange operation is something they care to support, and since my readership has grown a fair bit over the last year I figure I should repeat the yearly tradition. Reading by Tim Foley.

The recent push to expand NATO in Ukraine along with nations like Finland and Sweden as justified by "Russian aggression" is a good example of what professor Richard Sakwa has called the “fateful geographical paradox: that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.” As the late scholar on US-Russia relations Stephen Cohen explained years before the Ukraine crisis erupted in 2014, Moscow sees NATO as an "American sphere of influence," and the expansion of NATO and NATO influence as expansion of that sphere. It reacts to this with hostility just as the US would react to China or Russia building up aggressive military alliances on its borders, and arguably with vastly more restraint than the US would. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Guardian has joined The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País in signing a letter from the five papers which collaborated with WikiLeaks twelve years ago in the publication of the Chelsea Manning leaks to call for the Biden administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange. The Guardian's participation in this letter is particularly noteworthy, given the leading role that publication has played in manufacturing public support for his persecution in the first place. If The Guardian really wants to help end the persecution of the heroic WikiLeaks founder, the best way to do that would be to retract those many smears, spin jobs and outright lies, and to formally apologize for publishing them. Reading by Tim Foley.

Facts: - There are Chinese people with real grievances against their government. - The US empire's propaganda machine will spin current protests in China to advance imperial agendas. - Western intelligence agencies will become more and more involved in these protests the longer they go on. Reading by Tim Foley.

I will never get used to living in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously pontificate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists. Reading by Tim Foley.