Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

The heroic whistleblower and peace activist Daniel Ellsberg is dying. In an open letter to his friends and supporters, Ellsberg announced that two weeks ago he learned that he has inoperable pancreatic cancer with a prognosis of three to six months. The letter is beautiful and inspiring, but it's also as heart-rending as anything you'll ever read, largely because within it Ellsberg makes it abundantly clear that he has extremely urgent concerns about the world he will soon be leaving behind. Reading by Tim Foley.

A recent US Chamber of Commerce InSTEP program hosted three empire managers to talk about Washington's top three enemies, with the US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns discussing the PRC, the odious Victoria Nuland discussing Russia, and the US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides talking about Iran. Toward the end of the hour-long discussion, Burns made the very interesting comment that Beijing must accept that the United States is "the leader" in the region and isn't going anywhere. Reading by Tim Foley.

The narrative that Russia and China are acting with unprovoked aggression actually prevents peace, because if your government isn't doing anything to make things worse, then there's nothing it can change about its own behavior to make them better. But of course there is a massive, massive amount that the western power alliance can change about its own behavior with regard to Russia and China that would greatly improve matters. Instead of working to subordinate the entire planet to the will of Washington and its drivers, they can work toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente. We're not going to get de-escalation, diplomacy and detente unless the people use the power of their numbers to demand those things, and the people are not going to use the power of their numbers to demand those things as long as they are successfully propagandized not to. This means propaganda is the ultimate problem that needs to be addressed. Ordinary people can only address it by waking the public up to the fact that the political

Things are escalating more and more rapidly between the US-centralized power structure and the few remaining nations with the will and the means to stand against its demands for total obedience, namely China, Russia, and Iran. The world is becoming increasingly split between two groups of governments who are becoming increasingly hostile toward each other, and you don't have to be a historian to know it's probably a bad sign when that happens. Especially in the age of nuclear weapons. Reading by Tim Foley.

The way the war in Ukraine allows mainstream liberals to play-act as rebellious anti-imperialists is a good illustration of how the empire gives people the illusion of fighting the power without their ever opposing the empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

Well it's another big day for Democrats doing Democraty things. Reading by Tim Foley.

After the fugue state clears, after this whole shitshow has been shitshown, after the stuffed shirts have become unstuffed and the talking heads have found their bodies, after the Beltway brainchildren have turned back into terrestrial primates, after the Pentagon has been pierced by the Roman lance and bled out F-22s and Reaper drones, after our headless corporate gods have been cast into the sea screaming "I'M MELTING! MELLLTING!!!", after Buddha Godzillas his way across our world, Earth will heave a deep sigh of relief, and we will truly hear the birdsongs for the very first time. The birdsongs like the full moon's light hitting your eyes after orgasm. The birdsongs like the gentle tickle of a sleeping lover's breath on your skin. The birdsongs soaring out of the silence like the opening notes of Sweet Child O' Mine, born of silence and received by silence, met by the baby's smile of silence, emerging in complete human stillness for the very first time. __________________ Reading by Tim Foley.

In an article published last week titled "US working with 'Five Eyes' nations, Japan on information warfare," a publication on military intelligence and communications technology called C4ISRNET reports that the US and its allies are collaborating "to share and sharpen information-warfare techniques in the Indo-Pacific" with the goal of "countering" the "increasingly aggressive China." Reading by Tim Foley.

Free speech is meaningless and worthless if you don't use it to oppose real power. In western "democracies" the majority of people are so effectively propagandized into speaking in alignment with the interests of the western empire that they may as well be taking orders on what to say at gunpoint. In totalitarian regimes you say what your rulers want you to say because they physically coerced you using the threat of violence. In "free democracies" you say what your rulers want you to say because they psychologically coerced you using propaganda. The end result is the same. Reagan once joked about Soviets thinking they are free because they're allowed to criticize the US government as much as they like, but really that was just projection. Westerners think they have free speech, but they never use that "free speech" to criticize the tyrannical empire they live under.  Free speech is held as an important human right because it helps the people put a check on power. If you're not using for that, you may as we

Whether you agree with Moscow and Beijing about their "red lines" or not, you must concede that there's a very big difference between the way they draw them and the way the US makes use of that concept. Russia and China are issuing these warnings about the areas immediately adjacent to their own territory, while the US issues them to anyone it likes about what they are permitted to do with their neighbors, even when the US itself engages in those very activities all the time. Washington literally thinks of this entire planet as its territory. It believes it is its divinely bestowed right to issue decrees about what may and may not be done anywhere in the world, and that any transgression against these decrees is an act of aggression against it.  Reading by Tim Foley.

Humans, interestingly, fall somewhere between tiny-brained hive insects and the larger-brained mammals and birds in terms of self-preservation impulses involving violence, despite having the most advanced brains in the animal kingdom. We have the same instinctive aversions to putting ourselves at risk as those other animals, but that instinct can be overridden by putting a bunch of stories in our heads about how the enemy must be destroyed for this or that reason. A few false narratives about God and glory had humans marching off to fight and die in the Crusades like a bunch of mindless insects. This is because the capacity for abstract thought that our recently evolved brains have given us can be exploited by clever humans with a predisposition toward manipulation. Because we're often finding our way around in the world by thoughts and language rather than instinct, we can be manipulated into acting far more foolishly than a pigeon or a squirrel or a tiger ever would. Reading by Tim Foley.

If anti-war protests made no difference, the US empire wouldn't have completely abandoned full-scale ground invasions after 2003 and switched to sneakier, less effective means of warfare while launching unprecedented narrative management systems to suppress anti-war sentiments. They abandoned Bush-era Hulk Smash ground invasions in favor of drones, proxy warfare, covert ops and sanctions because enough people rose up and said "NO" to make them afraid of the masses beginning to wake up and begin turning against them and their institutions. And now people are even beginning to protest the proxy warfare. I  guarantee you that's making our rulers nervous about the possibility of losing the ability to effectively dominate the world with violence and coercion, and even losing the ability to continue to rule us. Reading by Tim Foley.

Imagine Chinese warships sailing around near California and Hawaii, in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, under the same aggressive "freedom of navigation" exercises that US warships routinely perform in waters near China to the anger of Beijing. Imagine People’s Liberation Army military bases in Central and South America, like the network of military bases the US has set up around China and continues to build up to this very day. Reading by Tim Foley.

You know, everyone's always talking about how the US military is only ever used to kill foreigners for resource control and generate profits for the military-industrial complex, but that's not entirely true. Turns out the US military is also used for shooting down party balloons. Reading by Tim Foley.

There's this Pink Floyd line that's been rattling around in my head, "You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to." Because it's so true; you can't deceive people who don't trust you. Propaganda only works if people don't know it's happening — if they don't think of its source as untrustworthy. That's why it gives me hope that trust in the mass media is plunging to historic lows: if people sufficiently distrust those who lie to them, then those lies won't take root in their minds anymore. Without trust, the propaganda machine can't function.  All our world's troubles are ultimately due to propaganda; people only consent to status quo systems which hurt their interests because their consent is manufactured via propaganda. And that propaganda only works because of public trust in the messengers. We can fight this by working to exacerbate public distrust in the institutions that manufacture our consent, spreading public awareness of the fact that everything we've been taught to believe about our nati

The US government is permitted to have nuclear weapons in Australia. What's more, Australians are not permitted to know whether or not this is happening. What's more, not even Australia's elected senators are permitted to know whether this is happening. It's assumed to be none of Australia's business whether there are foreign nuclear weapons in Australia. This was clarified during a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday, when Greens senators were condescendingly admonished by the Australian foreign minister for the very normal and appropriate attempt to clarify the government's policy regarding the presence of US armageddon weapons on Australian soil. Reading by Tim Foley.

In the latest escalation in Australia's increasingly forceful campaign to manufacture consent for war with China, the Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia has aired a jaw-droppingly propagandistic hour-long special which advocates a dramatic increase in the nation's military spending. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Washington Post has a weird new article out citing multiple anonymous US officials saying that the Chinese "spy balloon" we've been hearing about for the last two weeks was never intended for a surveillance mission over North America at all. Reading by Tim Foley.

US war planes have shot down three unidentified objects in North American airspace over the last three days, which is entirely without precedent. On Sunday an octagon-shaped object was reportedly shot down over Lake Huron near the Canadian border after first being detected some 1,300 miles away over Montana on Saturday night. On Saturday a cylindrical object was reportedly shot down over Canada's Yukon territory by an American F-22, and on Friday an object "about the size of a small car" was reportedly shot down after being detected over Alaska. Reading by Tim Foley.

“We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs,” WaPo was told by a source described as "a person in the Special Operations community." US special ops forces "employing Ukrainian operatives" to "take apart Russian propaganda" and "tell the true story on blogs" is just US special ops forces administering US propaganda online. Whether or not they actually see themselves as "telling the true story" or "taking apart Russian propaganda" does not change the fact that they are administering US government propaganda. A government circulating media which advances its information interests is precisely the thing that state propaganda is. Reading by Tim Foley.