Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

Gonna follow the dinosaurs out the door because it was too uncomfortable and confrontational to tell a few billionaires and empire managers to fuck off. Reading by Tim Foley.

One thing I try not to think about very often is how many reports we've been seeing about Israeli prison guards training dogs to rape Palestinian captives in torture camps like Sde Teiman. Reading by Tim Foley.

Whenever I see the US empire saying they plan to remove the latest Official Bad Guy from power in order to liberate a nation from tyranny, I always want to ask, what is tyranny? Is it tyranny to constantly topple foreign governments by force if their leaders disobey you? Is it tyranny to circle the planet with hundreds of military bases in order to dominate all of humanity? Is it tyranny to continuously be inflicting mass military slaughter, backing genocides, staging foreign coups, fomenting unrest and uprisings in foreign nations, meddling in foreign elections, funding proxy conflicts, imposing blockades and starvation sanctions on civilian populations, and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship in order to rule the world? Is it tyranny to treat the entire global south as your personal piggy bank from which to extract limitless labor and resources and murder anyone who tries to inhibit these practices through any movement toward national sovereignty? Reading by Tim Foley.

The most common misconception about the free press of the western world is that it exists. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's just so insane how this doesn't sit front and center in our attention all the time. There are people dying of starvation, exposure and preventable illnesses every single day for no good reason. Humanity became more than capable of ensuring that this never happened to anyone ever again, and just rode right past that stunning moment in history without even glancing up from its smartphone. Reading by Tim Foley.

US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous, and is always justified based on lies. This would be true even if Venezuela really was a major drug trafficking threat and even if Maduro really was the world's most evil dictator, neither of which are the case. Only idiots and sociopaths are clapping along with the war drums. Reading by Tim Foley.

We're on a trajectory where soon all our information will be stored and analyzed by artificial intelligence controlled by governments and billionaire megacorporations who can then use that information to surveil, manipulate and oppress us. Reading by Tim Foley.

There are always things you can do to fight the bastards, and there are always things you can do to improve your own life. Reading by Tim Foley.

It was a surprisingly exhilarating adventure packing up poster books and mailing them off to my readers. This was my first time ever physically interfacing with my audience in large numbers to any extent, and it was so beautiful going through everyone's names and addresses and getting to send them all physical things that I could put my love into. Reading by Tim Foley.

AI products which deceive people should be illegal in the same way fraud is illegal. Reading by Tim Foley.

The western press see the killing of Palestinians as such a baseline norm that Israel can massacre dozens of people in Gaza and they'll go, "Gosh I sure hope this doesn't lead to any violations of the ceasefire!" Reading by Tim Foley.

Drop Site News reports that the IDF quietly moved part of the “yellow line” which divides Gaza 300 meters forward, and then started shelling Palestinians for being on the “wrong side” of the line. They just keep finding new ways to carve off more pieces of Gaza and murder more Palestinians. Reading by Tim Foley.

AI isn't going to save us. Tech innovation isn't going to save us. Your favorite politician isn't going to save us. The Epstein files aren't going to save us. China isn't going to save us. The aliens aren't going to save us. No one is coming to save us. There is no deus ex machina resolution to the plotline of the human story. We're going to have to save ourselves. Reading by Tim Foley.

No no everything's fine. It's perfectly normal for people to have 80 hour work weeks while billionaires transform into trillionaires and tech plutocrats feed all our drinking water to AI servers as the planet dies. This is the only system that could possibly work. Reading by Tim Foley.

Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they've seen in Gaza. Tim Foley.

The dolphins are getting Alzheimer's from algae blooms caused by warming waters and toxic runoff and you could see the bloodstains in Sudan  from space. The cobalt is mined by children and the music is made by robots and the grownups are wondering where the fireflies went. It is an elephant with an eyepatch and a prosthetic leg. It's a freshly emptied bed in the nursing home. A hand offers you pills to numb the dissonance, but you swat it away and howl naked in the thorns. Somewhere there's an ibis on a piano  in a junkyard in the rain. Somewhere else there's a small boy who has just learned the word "treasure". "Look! Buried treasure!" he tells his dad. "No. That's just glass worn smooth by the sea." "Is that treasure?" "No, that's just a shiny candy wrapper  shimmering in the sun." "Ooh! THIS is treasure!" "No that's garbage. Put it down." And the boy's vision changes and he no longer sees the treasure in things. He runs to join his dad  and they walk together down the shore through a dying wor

Saying “If those low-wage workers want better wages they should stop being low-wage workers” is telling a man to stop drowning while you are holding him underwater by standing on his head. Reading by Tim Foley

I keep thinking about the interaction I had with a guy who angrily told me that "AI minds are actually minds" and relationships with them "can absolutely be real relationships," saying that I "need to start accepting that this is a new class of being and they are intelligent and do have thoughts of their own." Reading by Tim Foley.

You fight them because what the hell else are you going to do? Even if the treads of the machine are going to roll over us all in the end, at least you’ll go down knowing you left it all in the ring. Reading by Tim Foley.

Just as things cool down a bit in the middle east, the US has relocated the USS Gerald Ford from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean while the Trump administration discusses plans to bomb Venezuela. Reading by Tim Foley.