Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

The Twitter account of America's 44th president just casually shared some links to organizations providing relief to the victims of the terrible flooding in Libya, which as of this writing has already killed thousands of people. And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America's 44th president to do - had America's 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we're seeing in Libya today. Reading by Tim Foley.

Crazy, unrealistic people believe all our systems are rigged for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Rational, realistic people believe all our systems happen to benefit the rich and powerful by pure coincidence. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Wall Street Journal put an article out a few days back titled "In Defense of the Defense Industry" and subtitled "Populists of the right and left attack U.S. companies that make weapons. Who do they think protects us?" And it's exactly what it sounds like: the author defending war profiteers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin from critics of the military industrial complex. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US Air Force is clearing out jungles in the Pacific and replacing them with airfields for its coming war with China, because there exist people on this earth who look at a jungle and think, "This should be replaced with an airfield to prepare for a war with China." Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.

Vladimir Putin said at the Eastern Economic Forum on Tuesday that he wouldn't expect any meaningful changes in US policy toward Russia if former president Donald Trump secures re-election next year. Reading by Tim Foley.

Recent comments from a wealthy Australian property developer named Tim Gurner are going viral on social media right now for the unusual frankness with which he discusses the inherent conflicts of interest between the working class and employers, saying workers who've grown lazy and arrogant during Covid need to experience economic pain in the form of unemployment to rein them in and put them in their place. Reading by Tim Foley.

You dive down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, searching for the man behind the curtain. You've seen enough to be convinced that everything you've been taught about the world is false, and now it's just a matter of finding out who's really responsible for making such a mess of things. Reading by Tim Foley.

The world would be a much more healthy and harmonious place if the US really was the peace-loving, tyranny-opposing democracy that it and all its propaganda systems frame it as. But because the US government is actually the most tyrannical regime on earth and values nothing apart from its own ability to dominate as many members of the human species as possible, we live in a world of far greater peril and abuse than we otherwise would. Reading by Tim Foley.

During an appearance on ABC's This Week with Jonathan Karl, Secretary of State Tony Blinken explicitly said that the US would not oppose Ukraine using US-supplied longer-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory, a move that Moscow has previously called a "red line" which would make the United States a direct party to the conflict. Reading by Tim Foley.

Part of growing up is learning that laws do not exist to prevent wrongdoing, they exist to keep society moving in an orderly way for the benefit of the world's worst perpetrators of wrongdoing. None of the world's worst people are in prison. Most of them are quite wealthy and respected, because they benefit from the abusive status quo that laws are set up to protect. Reading by Tim Foley.

They make up fictional horrors because they don't want you looking at the real ones. They don't want you looking at the suffering of the homeless on the street. At the working poor flailing in endless toil unable to get their heads above water and relax for a minute. At the families in nations like Venezuela, Syria, North Korea and Iran struggling to obtain food and medicine because of imperial economic warfare. At the emaciated bodies of Yemeni children. At the shredded corpses of drone bombing victims. At the inconvenient facts behind the horrors in Ukraine. At Julian Assange languishing in a maximum security prison for the crime of good journalism. At the indoctrinated masses marching blindly to the beat of the imperial drum while being trained to believe they are free. At the biosphere we depend on for survival being poisoned and fed into the machine of global capitalism. At the nuclear holocaust dangling over our heads by an increasingly tenuous thread. Reading by Tim Foley.

During a speech at the EU Parliament's foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism. Reading by Tim Foley.

Holy shit did you guys hear the news about Obama? Turns out this nasty freak destroyed Libya, signed off on the destruction of Yemen, armed terrorists with the goal of destroying Syria, set the stage for the Ukraine war, and jailed more whistleblowers than any other president! Reading by Tim Foley.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to the information interests of the US empire would be for a critical mass of people to become aware that all this death and destruction in Ukraine could have been avoided by the US-centralized empire behaving less aggressively on Russia's doorstep, and that those aggressions were instead increased with the goal of advancing US strategic interests on the world stage. Reading by Tim Foley.

In March of 2016 the renowned Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger published an article titled "A world war has begun. Break the silence." which urgently warned of the US empire's aggressive escalations against Russia and China. Re-reading parts of it in 2023 is like watching someone placing flags next to recently planted seeds that would eventually grow into the towering problems our world now faces. Reading by Tim Foley.

The British billionaire-owned newspaper The Telegraph has an appalling new article out which reads like a paid advertisement for a missile manufactured by Lockheed Martin. The title even sounds like it was written by a marketing team: "A war-winning swarm missile will knock China out of Taiwan - fast", subtitled "Rapid Dragon is a military gamechanger that provides the US Air Force with a crucial edge in the Pacific". Reading by Tim Foley.

I'm seeing Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy building up a lot of credibility in some antiwar circles, which is ridiculous because he's clearly just another disgusting warmonger. He is not meaningfully different from all the other warmongers in the DC swamp. Reading by Tim Foley.

Modern western national security journalism is mostly just writing what a government official tells you to write and then calling it a "scoop" which you got from a nameless "source" in the government. Reading by Tim Foley.

The more inner work you do and the more awareness you bring to your own inner processes, the more you understand how thoroughly human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative. And the more you understand how thoroughly human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative, the more acutely aware you become of how much power someone could gain over other humans by controlling those narratives. Reading by Tim Foley.

One of the most glaring plot holes in the official mainstream narrative on Ukraine is the way US officials keep openly boasting that this supposedly unprovoked war which the US is only backing out of the goodness of its heart just so happens to serve US interests tremendously. Reading by Tim Foley.