Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

Bernie Sanders has withdrawn his bill to end US support for the Saudi war on Yemen following reports that the Biden administration was working to tank the resolution, with White House aids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.

"I can't imagine a US intelligence official would be wrong on this." Can you imagine not being able to imagine a US intelligence official being wrong? This would be an unacceptable position for any educated adult to hold, much less a journalist, still less an editor, and still less an editor of one of the most influential news agencies on earth. These are the people who publish the news reports we read to find out what's happening in the world. This is the baby-brained level of thinking these people are serving the public interest with. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's still funny that the entire US-controlled world has been raging at Russia all year for doing something the US does routinely. Reading by Tim Foley.

Un-banning a few famous people will drum up a lot of headlines and online chatter and make it look like you're really doing something, but in the end all you've done is reinstate a handful of Twitter accounts. You haven't done anything to meaningfully scale back the speech restrictions on your platform. Reading by Tim Foley.

Euthanizing the poor is just capitalism finally being honest about itself. After all these years of falsely pretending to have real solutions to the problems it creates, it finally presents a solution entirely in alignment with its values that actually works.Capitalism's answer to "What about the poor?" has always been "They should work harder," and its answer to "What about those who can't work?" has always been "They should die quickly." But until now it's always been spoken wordlessly in the policies enacted and the societal structures put in place. Now it's just right there, completely undisguised. It's refreshingly honest. Reading by Tim Foley.

I met a fox last night who was carrying a dead possum. Foxes, unlike possums, are not native to Australia, but neither are white people so no judgement. I got here the same way she did. Her ancestors came here because rich Englishmen wanted to have fox hunts in the bush, mine came here because rich Englishmen wanted a distant prison colony. We are all where we are on this planet because of the dances our ancestors did with rich Englishmen and native possums. I walk on stolen land under a sun that burns my pale skin, ripping the dead ideas of dead men out from my skull like thorns. If you ever need to find me just look for the trail of rosary beads and communion wafers, of Murdoch papers and nice guy rapists. If I am dead when you find me please weave fairy lights through my bones and leave a sign that reads HERE LIES EMPTINESS. Maybe lizards and frogs will play in this ribcage. Maybe native flowers will grow in this skull. I don't know what any of this is or where any of it is going. I'm blown through this

A surprisingly frank article by The New York Times titled "Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons" describes how the imperial war machine is capitalising on the US proxy war to test its weapons for future use.  Reading by Tim Foley.

Two false news reports have gone viral in recent hours due to sloppy sourcing and journalistic malpractice. As usual they both featured bogus claims about US-targeted nations, in this case Russia and Iran. Reading by Tim Foley.