UFOs have been in the news again. Routinely seeing headlines about this phenomenon in mainstream news outlets would have been unthinkable a few short years ago, but now it just shows up as one more feature on our continually expanding haunted hayride into infinite weirdness.
So what’s the deal here? Are they military aircraft? Are they a cold war psyop? Are they natural phenomena?
Or are they extraterrestrials?
The preceding questions are intriguing, but we all know that last one is what’s generating the most thought and discussion.
For me, though, it’s actually kind of the least interesting possibility…
Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called “Bountygate” story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Exactly zero percent of the world’s worst criminals are in prison. Imperialists. War profiteers. Ecocide profiteers. The very worst of thieves are financial elites. The system isn’t designed to protect us from society’s worst, it’s designed to protect society’s worst from us.
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I don’t write much about the specific individuals who drive the oligarchic empire because individuals are not the problem, the system is. Right-wing conspiracy analysts prefer to focus on specific corrupt elites because they like to think if you just got rid of them, capitalism would work fine. And it just wouldn’t. If you rounded up and…
A new “threat assessment” by the US intelligence cartel has named China the number one threat to the United States today, followed by Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This has of course led to blaring news headlines like “China poses the biggest threat to the U.S., a new intelligence report says” from The New York Times, instead of something a little less propagandistic like “Here’s who the CIA wants you to be afraid of in order to advance its geostrategic power agendas.”
The report makes a bunch of evidence-free assertions which serve no purpose other than to help manufacture consent…
I saw a line in a recent New Yorker article about America’s endless wars, and it’s been been rattling around in my head ever since:
“In Syria, McKenzie visited the Green Village, a community of decrepit apartment blocks near a bombed-out oil facility that served as the operational headquarters for the final push to erase the caliphate, in 2019. These days, the only military action there is from U.S. forces firing a 155-millimetre howitzer twice a week into the surrounding desert, at no specific target, ‘just to say we’re here,’ one officer told me.”
U.S. forces firing a 155-millimetre howitzer…
The planet is ruled by a tyrannical oligarchy which uses governments as weapons to destroy disobedient nations while churning out news stories about how those nations needed to be destroyed because they were tyrannical and undemocratic.
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The British royal family are murderous imperialists living on stolen wealth and dressing up like ridiculous Dungeons & Dragons characters and they deserve nothing but scorn, mockery and rejection throughout the entire world.
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Saying Trump wanted to end the wars but the military industrial complex wouldn’t let him is the same as saying nothing.
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When Bernie Sanders promoted the idea of…
“Concerns mount that US withdrawal from Afghanistan could risk progress on women’s rights,” blares a new headline from CNN.
“Concerns are mounting from bipartisan US lawmakers and Afghan women’s rights activists that the hard-won gains for women and civil society in Afghanistan could be lost if the United States makes a precipitous withdrawal from the country,” CNN tells us.
What follows is yet another concern-trolling empire blog about why US troops need to stay in Afghanistan, joining recent others geared toward the same end like this CNN report about how the US military will open itself up to “costly litigation”…
Aspire to greatness,
but not the kind they teach you about in school.
Not the kind where you can all be astronauts and presidents when you grow up
so long as you “apply yourself” (whatever that means)
and other such nonsense. …
Last year Senator Bernie Sanders led a public push to reduce the insanely bloated US military budget by a paltry ten percent. His push splatted headfirst against a bipartisan solid steel wall which shut him down definitively.
Sanders’ bill was killed in the Senate by a vote of 23 to 77, with half of Senate Democrats stepping up to help Republicans stomp it dead. It’s companion bill in the House of Representatives was killed by a margin of 93 to 324, with a majority of House Democrats (92 to 139) voting nay.
Contrast those numbers with those who voted to…
Have you ever seen a mainstream news report containing the phrase “the French regime”? How about “the British regime” or “the Australian regime”?
If these phrases look a bit odd, it’s because you’ve never seen them written down before. Ostensibly the word simply means “a form of government” or “a government in power”, but it’s generally understood that it’s got a kind of negative connotation to it just because of the way it tends to be used. …
Caitlin Johnstone
I write about the end of illusions.
