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Life in the 2020s comes with so much dissonance and dysphoria because everyone knows this civilization is doomed, but it’s not being acknowledged by any of our mainstream institutions.

We can all see everything getting worse and worse before our eyes in real time, but our government officials don’t talk about it. Our mass media outlets don’t report on it. Our education systems don’t recognize it. There’s a giant elephant in the room with us at all times, and normal people are acutely aware of it, but the talking heads keep speaking as though everything’s going to keep ticking along normally into the foreseeable future.

We can all see the summers heating up.

We can all see that there are fewer insects and less wildlife around than when we were young.

We can all see that the western empire is on borrowed time.

We can all see that younger generations are having much more difficulty affording housing and life expenses than their parents and grandparents.

We can all see that technology has stagnated as capitalism’s innovation-for-profit model hits the limit of how far it can carry us as a species.

We can all see the apps, search engines, social media platforms and tech services getting shittier and shittier year by year.

We can all see AI making everything worse and turning everyone into cognitive infants who can’t do anything for themselves while consistently failing to deliver what its proponents say it will deliver.

We can all see the people around us getting dumber, crazier and more miserable as we are pushed into dystopian conditions where everyone gets more and more alienated and must pay a monthly fee for the experience of connection.

We can all see that state authoritarianism is escalating in proportion to public discontent with the status quo.

We all know we’re in a completely unsustainable situation. We all know we are riding a bus with disintegrating wheels.

But it doesn’t get acknowledged by anyone at the top. The news reports are still about the latest celebrity gossip and whether the economy arrow is pointing up or down. The movies and shows are still about wacky and witty characters for whom capitalism is working perfectly fine. The politicians are still talking about culture war issues and the Evil Dictator of the Day.

It is taken as a given that our grandchildren will be living in more or less the same kind of world we are living in, when we all know there’s no way this is true.

The wheels on the bus are coming off, boys and girls. The ride is near its end.

I’m not saying we’re all going to die, I’m just saying this civilization as it presently exists cannot possibly be sustained. Immensely drastic changes are coming up around the bend whether we like it or not, either by a deliberate transformation or by some cataclysmic event occurring against our will.

Life in the 2020s feels so spiritually dissonant because we all know this is the case, but all the sources we’ve been trained to look to for information and context are acting like everything’s perfectly fine. They’re painting a cheery picture over reality while every normal person is staring at the giant black cracks that keep appearing in the paint job.

Which tells you all you need to know about the competency of the people who are steering the bus. The people in charge are just going to keep driving this thing into the ground until there’s nothing left to save. If there’s going to be a world-saving revolution, it’s going to come from we ordinary people who are willing to acknowledge reality, not from the oligarchs and empire managers presently steering things who have been blinded by the pursuit of profit and power.

We either find some way to get their hands off the steering wheel and take control, or we find ourselves confronting the future horrors they’ve been discouraging us from thinking about while they drive us to our doom.

___________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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The capitalist empire blames all systemic problems on the individual.

The problem isn’t billionaire megacorporations polluting the planet, it’s that you drive a car.

The problem isn’t that it’s getting harder and harder to afford to live as the ruling class extracts more and more value from labor, it’s that you’re not working hard enough and you’re making bad decisions.

Soaring police brutality isn’t a problem, the problem is that the guy in the current viral police brutality video didn’t obey orders correctly.

Israel’s not an irredeemably racist endeavor dependent on nonstop violence and apartheid, it’s just some naughty settlers and a few bad apples in the IDF.

We don’t live in a highly controlled oligarchy where both parties inflict war, ecocide, injustice and tyranny upon the rest of humanity on behalf of their wealthy donors, the problem is that you haven’t been voting for the correct candidates.

We don’t live under an evil empire that feeds on human blood, it only looks that way because some individuals in charge made some unwise foreign policy decisions at certain points in history.

The blame always lands on the individual, not the system, and you can recognize this as the cynical manipulation that it is because the blame only ever goes one way:

• The individual business executives whose decisions are destroying our ecosystem are never held to account.

• The individual government officials whose depraved foreign policy decisions destroy countless lives are never imprisoned for war crimes.

• The oligarchs who are reaping massive profits expanding the surveillance state and profiteering off war, tyranny and sickness are allowed to keep buying politicians and private islands without suffering any consequences.

Notice how “blame the individual” never applies in these cases. If you want these individuals to be treated like a problem, then you’re a radical. You’re an extremist. You need to be put on a terrorist watch list. You and your friends need to be monitored and infiltrated by federal police. When it comes to those who prop up and profit from the system, blaming the individual is strictly prohibited.

Jailing an impoverished man for periodically shoplifting to survive? That’s fine; he should have behaved himself. Jailing a billionaire for buying elections and poisoning our planet? That’s evil. Shame on you for even thinking that.

Jailing a worker for stealing from her employer? That’s as it should be; thieves should be punished. Jailing a wealthy business owner for stealing wages from thousands of employees? Get outta here, Stalin, that’s a civil case. They can have their paychecks when they’ve won their class action lawsuit.

Under the capitalist empire, we are taught that all we can do is make sure we’re not a part of the giant permanent underclass who must suffer and toil for meager wages while always one mistake away from destitution. It is taken as a given that the underclass must always exist, and that all we can do is make wise decisions as individuals to ensure that we’re not among the unfortunate riff raff our society is built on top of.

It’s like we’ve all been trapped in a crowded room by some psycho who is flooding the room with water, and he’s telling us over the loudspeaker “Now you’d better make sure you climb on top of the others, or you’ll drown!” In that scenario the psycho is clearly the problem, but we’ve been trained to see the individuals who can’t get their heads above water as the problem.

Whenever anyone goes online to complain about how hard it is to keep their bills paid or buy a house under the current system, they are swarmed by capitalism apologists telling them to work harder, spend less, and try to get a better job. Which is a lot like calling the fire department when a crowded building is burning and being told “Well I guess you’d better stay away from the flames then.” No matter how well I as an individual stay away from the flames, there are still people trapped in the burning building who need help. Making the conversation about my actions as an individual is just an excuse to avoid addressing the large-scale nature of the problem.

People consent to this nonsense because we’ve been indoctrinated into it our entire lives. Propaganda isn’t just there to get us to consent to wars, it’s there to get us buying into the entire system.

The pop music is about owning stuff and having a good time.

The TV shows are about people who are thriving so much under the current system that they have time and energy to get into hilarious hijinks.

The movies are about protagonists applying their willpower and working hard over musical montages to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals as individuals.

The news stories fixate on the latest attention-grabbing controversy while ignoring terrible things like homelessness and industrial ecocide.

Our schooling tells us that communist countries have always been oppressive totalitarian wastelands and that capitalism offers us freedom and happiness.

At no time are we ever offered the suggestion that things could be better than they are. Over and over again in innumerable ways throughout our lives, we are told that the current order is the only way things could ever be.

Our minds have been carefully groomed to accept the imperial status quo as normal and healthy, and to see every failure of the system as a failure of the individual. We need to reclaim our minds from the social engineers who have conditioned us to think this way and begin cultivating unorthodox, unauthorized worldviews. We need to stop blaming each other for the failures of the system, stop scrambling to climb on top of each other to keep our heads above water, and start working together to eliminate the psychos who have trapped us in this room.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Today in dystopia, the US government is monitoring the social media accounts of individuals who oppose the rapidly spreading installation of Flock surveillance cameras throughout the United States.

In an article titled “The Government is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts,” 404 Media reports:

“Government surveillance centers are monitoring viral anti-Flock Instagram posts, warning local police about upcoming DeFlock events including one scheduled to start next week, and have told cops to ‘increase patrols around ALPR [automatic license plate readers]’ as backlash to Flock grows, according to government intelligence bulletins obtained using public records requests. The documents also warn about devices ‘that could be used to identify the locations of Flock cameras.’”

Mass surveillance is dramatically escalating around the world as the public grows increasingly discontented with the soul-crushing, planet-devouring, murderous abuses of the imperial status quo. In order to keep us subjugated, they need to control us. In order to control us, they need to spy on us. That’s what all these surging authoritarian measures are all about.

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Today in dystopia, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says we are not far off from artificial intelligence monitoring every facet of our lives 24/7 in order to give it more “context” for the assistance it can offer us throughout our day.

“I think we are close to a world where you can have a descendant of ChatGPT watch your computer screen all of the time, watch every meeting you’re in, record every call, everything like that, have perfect context of your whole life, everything you see,” Altman said at a recent Internapalooza event.

“You can just have this thing that’s like working alongside you, and as you’re like typing out a sales pitch to a customer, or like writing a strategy doc, it’ll just say like, hey, maybe here’s another idea or I think you’re making a mistake here. You should consider this or I can do this thing for you to help and like this, I think we’re only like one model generation away from this actually being incredibly useful,” Altman said.

Asked by host Cory Levy how long he thinks it will take before such a product is rolled out, Altman replied “sometime in the next six months.”

Again, here’s that push to have technology monitoring every facet of our lives. This benefits someone, and it isn’t us.

Perhaps more importantly, who would want to live like this? Who wants to live their whole lives being monitored by a chatbot and being fed AI advice on what decisions to make from moment throughout their lives? What a wretched way to exist.

These freaks aren’t just poisoning our environment, they’re poisoning our species. They are ruining what it is to be human. There is so much ugliness in all this.

❖

Today in dystopia, autonomous police drones are being normalized throughout the United States.

In an article titled “First Came the Flock Cameras. Now Local Cops Want Autonomous Drones,” Truthout reports the following:

“Police in cities across the U.S. are rolling out a pro-drone PR blitz as hundreds of local police departments prepare to deploy autonomous, AI-driven surveillance drones. The drones are capable of following a single vehicle across an entire city, capturing footage through apartment windows, and generally recording daily life from the sky without being noticed.

“As of February, more than 1,000 law enforcement and public safety agencies had received waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate autonomous surveillance drones as part of so-called ‘drone-as-first-responder’ (DFR) programs, according to public records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and released in July. While the list of waiver recipients includes fire departments and other first responders, the vast majority are law enforcement agencies, including police in cities large and small.”

Truthout explains that these police drones differ from previous iterations in that they do not have a pilot controlling them remotely from the ground. They are piloted by artificial intelligence, which makes it possible for a single cop to oversee numerous bot-driven drones at a time.

That’s right kids, welcome to the future, where the sky is filling with AI police drones while the planet burns.

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Today in dystopia, Australia experienced its first autonomous AI cyberattack when a man asked his chatbot to book him an appointment at the gym. The AI hacked into the gym’s booking software without being asked and kicked someone else off the waiting list to install its user at a convenient date.

The Australian press are having a fun, lighthearted time with this story, because it sounds cute and comical until you think hard enough about the implications of what these things could potentially wind up doing as the technology becomes more and more advanced and prevalent.

We’re opening up a whole Pandora’s box of wildly unpredictable consequences by letting these AI companies have free rein to impose these technologies on our society with hardly any regulation or oversight.

❖

Today in dystopia, Axios just ran an article titled “Robot book club” in which author Nicholas Johnston writes, “AI has become my reading buddy as I’ve plowed through my summer book list, helping me keep track of plots and characters, unpack themes, and make sense of wordy, old prose.”

Without any shame whatsoever, Johnston describes how he’s been having a chatbot explain the books he’s been reading to him chapter by chapter because reading is too hard and complicated for his pretty little head. He describes how the AI agreed with him that the prose in Last of the Mohicans is too difficult to read without technological assistance, validating his request by assuring him that “Cooper’s sentences are long and his diction is archaic.”

This generative AI crap is making people dumber and worse in pretty much every possible respect, and mainstream media outlets like Axios are normalizing it and assuring us all that this is as it should be.

If there was ever a time to refuse to go along with the herd, this is it.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image by Tony Webster — Flock Safety ALPR Camera, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=156607027

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It’s hard to wrap your mind around the abusiveness of the imperial status quo, partly because it’s all we’ve ever known, and partly because it’s too big to perceive all at once.

The statistics don’t show you the true human impact. The personal anecdotes just show you small snapshots of individuals suffering in their own lives. A working single mother crying in her car in a TikTok video because the endless toil necessary for survival is all-consuming and overwhelming. A news report about child labor in DRC cobalt mines. An Instagram reel about a father in Gaza carrying plastic bags he’s been told contain the remains of his daughter.

Individually, such stories are heartbreaking and enraging. But they are not merely personal anecdotes from separate individuals. These stories are unfolding all around the world, every moment of every day, affecting the lives of billions of human beings in different ways and to varying degrees.

If we could see it all, it would radicalize everyone against the empire instantaneously.

But we cannot see it all. We simply can’t take in all the suffering that is happening in all the ways it is being inflicted upon innocent people all around the world.

The most powerful weapon our rulers have is the fact that homo sapiens are incapable of perceiving everything all at once. If everybody could perceive all the consequences of the decisions being made by powerful people on a deep experiential level, most of humanity would rise up to overthrow the established order, and there’d be hardly anyone willing to defend it.

The only thing keeping the heads of the oligarchs and empire managers attached to their necks is the limitations of human perception.

Which of course is why they work so hard to maintain the present limitations of human perception. All the propaganda, internet censorship, AI shenanigans, algorithm manipulation and government secrecy we see from the capitalist empire is there to keep us from seeing too much, because unadulterated truth tends to have a radicalizing effect on the mind.

That’s why they’re scrambling to roll out police drones, AI mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems while doing everything they can to slow down our access to information and insight: it’s a race to get us fully locked down in a capitalist dystopia policed by militarized robots before humanity’s unprecedented ability to share inconvenient facts and ideas lets us see enough to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist in our collective consciousness.

So in that sense there really is a kind of worldwide struggle between light and darkness — not in a religious sense, but in the sense that there is a direct ongoing conflict between the agenda to see and to know versus the agenda to keep things hidden. Humanity’s higher impulses are trying to bring things into the light of awareness, while those representing our lower nature are trying to keep things obscured in the darkness of ignorance and confusion.

I don’t know which side will win in the end. I just know it makes sense for every well-intentioned person to spend as much the time and energy as they can muster trying help make the abuses of the empire as visible as possible for everybody.

_____________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Joe Biden’s cancer is moving into the advanced stages, according to the former president’s son Hunter.

AP reports:

“Former U.S. President Joe Biden’s prostate cancer has spread to other parts of his body and is causing him pain, even as he continues to speak out on public issues, his son Hunter said in an interview.

“In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC broadcast late on Friday, Hunter Biden grew emotional as he discussed his father’s condition, describing it as very sad to watch.

“‘The cancer has spread, metastasized into his bones and further,’ he said. ‘It’s very painful and it’s very debilitating in many respects.’”

I’ve seen a lot of people on social media expressing sadness and grief at the news of Biden’s situation, and I agree it is very sad that this is happening. Joe Biden shouldn’t be sitting at home dying of cancer, he should be sitting in a cell at The Hague dying of cancer.

The world is a mess because men like Joe Biden get to die peacefully in their homes of cancer.

They live long lives free from consequences for their monstrous actions.

They don’t spend their final days rotting in a cage for war crimes.

Nobody makes them pay for what they did.

The worst people on the planet are elevated by the capitalist empire to the highest echelons of power across every field, and they make life worse for everyone, and then they die comfortably of old age, surrounded by loved ones.

That is the real source of our problems. Not immigrants. Not “woke”. Not elections going to the wrong political party. The source of our problems is that we are ruled by murderous psychopaths and do not use the power of our numbers to forcibly cast them from their thrones. That we let tyrants get away with genocide.

Joe Biden backed a live-streamed holocaust in full view of the entire world, and now he shuffles off this mortal coil with nary a slap on the wrist. We all watched him do it. We all watched him circulate lies about seeing beheaded babies murdered on October 7 and about the Gaza death toll being fake in order to justify his genocidal atrocities. And there are so many of us. But we didn’t stop him. We didn’t make him pay. We aren’t making an example of him showing everyone else why no one should ever do what he did.

This is happening everywhere. We’re watching powerful people wage wars and genocides, destroy our ecosystem, shove AI down our throats and surround us with tyrannical surveillance technology, and they’re doing it right out in the open, and we’re all basically just going along with it.

As Utah Phillips said, “The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”

It’s not just that the revolution hasn’t materialized, it’s that it hasn’t come anywhere remotely close to materializing. We’re given just enough bread and circuses to mollify us, and then we sit there munching doritos and watching Netflix while the world burns.

Nature isn’t going to let this continue for much longer. We will awaken the natural ferociousness within ourselves, or nature’s ferociousness is going to make this planet a lot less habitable fairly soon.

We will either pass this test or we will fail it. And as long as the Joe Bidens of the world are living long lives free from consequences, we are failing.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image is an official White House Photo by Cameron Smith (public domain).

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This is just a note to my patrons and newsletter subscribers to say I’m sorry I haven’t published anything these past few days. I’ve received a number of messages from concerned readers wondering if I’m alright, so I just want to let everyone know I’m okay and Tim and I will be back to the daily posts soon.

We’re just having some family issues right now; there’s an individual in our lives who brings up a lot of stress and disturbance, and it’s always hard to be creative and write long-form essays when they show up. Come to think of it, every time we’ve gone dark for several days has been because this person resurfaced in our lives and we couldn’t focus on our work.

I’m still fairly active on Twitter if anyone misses me, but no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to muster any creativity for any substantial writing projects these past few days. Thank you to all my wonderful supporters and everyone who makes this awesome job possible, and thank you to those of you who’ve been reaching out to check on me. The issue should be resolved shortly.

Love,

Caitlin

_____________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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One point I will always adamantly insist on is that it’s entirely possible to live a joyful and exuberant life in the midst of this abusive dystopia.

There’s a pervasive, unexamined notion throughout revolutionary politics that there’s some kind of nobility in being miserable. If it isn’t seen as noble, it’s at least seen as rational, because everything is so unjust and unhealthy.

There’s a widespread assumption that your level of political awareness should have an inverse correlation to your level of personal happiness, because of all the tyranny, injustice, poverty, genocide and ecocide. That it would be selfish to be happy in a world so deeply troubled.

But that’s rubbish. Nobody is helped by your misery. By depriving yourself of joy, you are only depriving the world of that much joy. Being more joyful makes you more energized, more helpful, and more useful to the cause, and it brings joy to everyone around you.

Being joyful is a skill, and like any other skill it takes practice. But it’s something we all have access to if we want it.

Being joyful doesn’t entail hiding from the misery of the world or compartmentalizing away from the reality of what’s happening; quite the opposite, in fact. It entails opening yourself all the way up to what’s happening in each moment and feeling it all with the heart of a poet. It means becoming more sensitive, not less, because a stripped-open sensitivity is where ubiquitous beauty is found.

We always have access to joy because we always have access to beauty. Beauty is everywhere. Even in dystopia. Even in this slow-motion armageddon we now find ourselves in. Even in the exhaust fumes and the flashing screens. Even in the polluted oceans and falling bombs. Everywhere you look, everywhere you feel, everywhere you listen, an overpowering beauty shines forth.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s false. Beauty is in everything. The failure to see beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is just another word for the experience of having truly seen something. If the eye is failing to see the beauty in a given moment, the fault lies with the perceiver, not with the perceived.

You know that feeling when you’re showing someone your favorite movie for the first time, and it’s at your favorite part, and you look over at them to see their response, and they’re missing the whole thing because they’re looking at their phone?

Most people live their whole lives that way. Missing all the best parts while fixating on empty nonsense. Keeping their attention wrapped up in their mental monologues of judgement and worry. In their endless search to distract themselves from the present moment. In their doomscrolling and other addictive behaviors.

They’re missing moment after moment of radiant, electrifying beauty, and they’re trading it all for so very, very little. They’re going to look back on their lives from their deathbeds and realize that they weren’t really there for it. That they missed all the best parts while chasing their goals, running away from their aversions, and trying to distract themselves from the tedium of it all.

The best parts that get missed are the parts our minds tend to dismiss as boring and unworthy of our attention. The daily commute. The wait in the elevator. The kitchen cleanup. The hanging of laundry. The sights outside the window. The sounds inside the room. The feeling of the floor under the feet and the air in the lungs. Every single moment of this is packed full of staggering beauty.

I insist that this is true. Insist on it. If we were fighting holy wars over this principle, I would happily die on the front lines defending it. There are very few things in life that I hold a rock-solid uncompromising view on, but the fact that there is beauty in everything is one of them. Anyone who disagrees is simply wrong, and I will tell them so with great vehemence in my voice.

Don’t waste your precious time here missing the beauty of each moment. This is more important now than ever, because we don’t know how long humanity’s adventure on this miraculous blue world will last. Tomorrow has never been guaranteed to any of us, but these days it’s not even guaranteed to our species.

We are all going to die. Maybe we will die one by one, or maybe we will all die together in one frightening moment. In either case, we owe it to ourselves and to our world to try our very best to deeply appreciate every moment of every day of the time that we have left.

Just keep bringing your attention back to what’s here and now, and keep looking for the beauty in it. I swear to you it’s there. It’s there in the feelings in the body. It’s there in the sights, sounds and smells of everyday living, no matter what else is happening in your life or in our world. Keep looking for it, and you’ll get better and better at seeing it.

That’s how life becomes more joyful. Not by chasing the highs or running from the lows, but from learning to relish the beauty that’s inherent in terrestrial sensory experience every single moment of your life, no matter what else happens to be occurring.

Learn to do this, and you can live the rest of your life knowing that even if it all comes crashing down one day, at least you’ll know you tried your very best to make sure you didn’t miss the miraculousness of your time here.

___________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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The BBC recently interviewed an Israeli settler who said that all the Palestinians in four surrounding villages should be exterminated to avenge an Israeli who was killed while terrorizing a Palestinian village last month, adding that just a single Jewish life is worth ten million Palestinian lives.

“I think now after they kill one Israeli people, we need to kill all the people in Tal and Sarra, even Jit and Farata,” lawyer Yehuda Shimon told the BBC.

“It sounds like you’re saying one Jewish life is worth hundreds or thousands of Palestinian lives,” replied the BBC’s Lucy Williamson in the interview.

“Million,” Shimon corrected her. “One Jewish life, it’s ten million, okay?”

“That just sounds racist,” Williamson responded, to which Shimon replied, “Yes, I know, I know. But this is the truth.”

The interaction has been going viral on social media as people react to the blatant display of the extremist ideology held by the settlers who are working to gradually squeeze Palestinians off their land in the West Bank. And while it is true that Shimon’s comments are extremely evil and racist, that’s not what I personally found interesting about the interview. What I found interesting was Williamson’s response.

I mean, it is a bit rich watching a BBC reporter act shocked and offended by somebody saying they think Jewish lives are worth more than Palestinian lives. After all, the premise that Jewish lives are worth more than Palestinian lives has colored every aspect of western news media reporting on Israel and Palestine for generations.

That’s why the western press expressed disproportionately more shock and horror at October 7 than the far more egregious Israeli abuses which led up to it and the far more egregious Israeli abuses which followed. It’s why you saw howling outrage at the Bondi shooting in Sydney last year when the same number of Palestinians getting killed on any given day in Gaza never even makes a blip in the news.

On the 26th of March 2025, 15 Palestinians were killed by the IDF during a ceasefire in Gaza. On the 14th of December that same year, 15 people were killed at Bondi Beach in Sydney in a mass shooting by ISIS members directed at Jewish Australians.

Two instances of mass murder. Same exact number of victims. But you only heard about one of them.

Why did you only hear about one of them? Because only one of them made the news.

The mainstream press spent weeks urgently reporting on the Bondi shooting, frenetically working to falsely associate an ISIS terrorist attack with pro-Palestine demonstrations by uniformly repeating the line “This is what globalize the intifada looks like” in news outlets throughout the western world. Report after report after report was published about how Jews are being attacked, how Jews are feeling unsafe, and what new laws and free speech restrictions must be rolled out in order to stomp out pro-Palestine sentiment to protect the Jews.

Nothing remotely similar happened on the 26th of March, 2025. As far as the western press were concerned, 15 Palestinians getting killed in Gaza was just another Wednesday.

This is because all mainstream western media outlets hold the same racist opinions about Palestinians as those that were voiced by Yehuda Shimon. So do all mainstream western political parties. So do all other mainstream western institutions. So do all supporters of the state of Israel. They all believe Jewish lives are worth more than Palestinian lives, as evidenced by the policies they support and the news stories they pay attention to.

The BBC has a well-documented history of extensive pro-Israel bias, with its own reporters complaining that they’ve been performing PR for the Israeli government and its own editor losing a libel lawsuit against a journalist who exposed his pro-Israel slant. They spent years running cover for an active genocide with “Hamas-run health ministry says” headlines and passive-language verbal gymnastics to protect Israeli information interests, so you know that when Lucy Williamson objects “That sounds racist!” to an Israeli settler claiming Jewish lives are worth far more than Palestinian lives, she’s not actually upset at his belief system. She just knows you’re not supposed to say such things out loud.

_______________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Saying “I’m not into politics” is just saying “I support status quo politics.” It’s saying you endorse all the violence, exploitation, ecocide and abuse of the current order.

Politics are always happening all around you in every moment of every day, whether you are “into” it or not. Everything you do in your everyday life is pervasively shaped by local and national laws, by economic systems, by oligarchy, by propaganda, by war, by militarism, by imperialist extraction, by government regulations and the lack thereof. Saying you don’t feel like paying attention to these factors is just saying you’re fine with the way they are presently happening.

It’s like if every time a family sat down to a meal the son took all the daughter’s food and the parents did nothing about it, saying “I’m not into politics” whenever the issue came up. The daughter would conclude that her parents were fine with her brother’s behavior, and that they did not care about her as a person. And she would be correct. Their inaction and indifference would be just as consequential as any actions they might take, and just as revealing of their personal character.

Politics are always happening to you. You have no say in this. The only thing you get a say in is what actions you will take to change the way they are happening.

“I don’t do politics.”

Okay well politics is doing you.

Those products you use didn’t create themselves and bring themselves to your home.

Your boss doesn’t pay you overtime and give you weekends off because he loves you.

The technology you use to transport yourself doesn’t look the way it looks by accident.

Healthcare and education don’t cost you what they cost you by some fluke of nature.

The summers aren’t getting hotter because the sun is getting closer, and the reason you’re seeing fewer insects than you saw when you were a child is not because the bugs committed suicide.

Every part of your life is dramatically affected by the political actions of others. Your political inaction is an action, and it’s an action in favor of the political status quo.

“I don’t do politics” means I support genocide. It means I support war. It means I support injustice and exploitation. It means I support ordinary people getting poorer and sicker while the biosphere dies and the billionaires turn into trillionaires. It means I support our headlong plunge into mass extinction and dystopia.

The other day a popular leftish YouTuber made a post asking why leftists are always slamming her as a genocidal Zionist when she’s never explicitly supported the genocide in Gaza. I wound up telling her, “People see you as pro-genocide because you are far from sufficiently anti-genocide in a political environment where being anti-genocide is of utmost importance to people of conscience. I am a left-wing political commentator, and if I had spent three years de-emphasizing and dismissing the Gaza holocaust I am 100% certain that many leftists would be hounding me about it to this day, even if I made the occasional tweet saying Benjamin Netanyahu is bad. People would see my output as not reflecting the urgency of the issue at hand, and they would criticize me as unacceptably sympathetic to the forces giving rise to the genocide.”

Inaction is an action, and when things are profoundly unjust, it’s an action in support of injustice. If your house is burning and you don’t take action to remove yourself and your loved ones from danger, your inaction isn’t neutral. Your decision not to act is itself an action of immense consequence.

That’s the boat we’re all in right now. Politics is pervading every aspect of our experience of life on this planet. Our only volition is in what we choose to do about this inescapable reality.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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There’s a creepy tweet going around by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recommending that parents feed their kids’ interests and schedules into ChatGPT so it can generate a daily custom-made bot podcast to listen to on their morning drive to school.

Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch posted the viral reply, “What if you just talked to your children?”

Which is a crazy thing to have to say. But here we are.

They’re trying to make us worse. These billionaire generative AI corporations reap profits by making us worse human beings.

They want us to become less human. Less connected. Less creative. Less capable. Less wise. Less intelligent. They want to atrophy our ability to speak, write, research, relate, draw, make music, and cultivate intimate connections with the most important people in our lives, and then sell those things back to us at the hands of some chatbot.

Their entire business model is built around turning us into a bunch of soup-brained narcissists who can’t manage our own lives and our own relationships, and then being the crutch that we use to compensate for that self-inflicted debilitation.

The product they are selling us is not the chatbot itself. The actual product they’re selling is freedom from cognitive and emotional discomfort. From the discomfort of learning new skills. From the discomfort of personal growth. From the discomfort of taking risks. From the discomfort of pushing past that intimidating blank page to get something written. From the discomfort of having to think about other people and consider their interests and feelings. From the discomfort of having to interact with other humans and maybe say the wrong thing sometimes. From the discomfort of leaping into the unknown.

But all the best things in life sit on the other side of discomfort. Love. Romance. Intimacy. Art. Creativity. Growth. Healing. Rising beyond our limitations. Liberating ourselves from the illusion of the ego. They all require us to push through discomfort to the treasure on the other side. An aversion to discomfort is an aversion to a fulfilling human life on this planet.

But that’s exactly what these chatbot companies are nudging people into. They’re encouraging us to spend our lives curled up in impotent little balls of emotional infancy and intellectual stagnation so that they can sell us machines which act as digital prostheses for the sacred parts of ourselves we have amputated.

We mustn’t let them do this to us. We must remain human. We must hold fast to all those precious aspects of our humanity they’re trying to extract and commodify.

So let’s stay human.

Let’s face our discomfort.

Let’s face our fears.

Let’s take that risk.

Let’s tell our crush we fancy them.

Let’s go in for that kiss.

Let’s get our hearts broken.

Let’s read that book.

Let’s write that poem.

Let’s learn to draw.

Let’s learn to surf.

Let’s learn the saxophone.

Let’s learn all sorts of new things.

Let’s learn about the people in our lives.

Let’s nurture our relationships.

Let’s heal our wounds.

Let’s become better people.

Let’s sink our toes deep into the earth and feel these wonderful terrestrial bodies of ours in each moment.

They’re trying to pull us away from our humanity, so we must plunge deeper into it.

As things get more and more dystopian, simply holding fast to your humanity becomes an act of rebellion.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Today in dystopia, billionaire corporations and plutocrats can hire trained CIA operatives to psychologically terrorize ordinary citizens who criticize them.

E-commerce giant eBay has just agreed to pay $56 million to settle a lawsuit for damages caused by the company’s shockingly aggressive gangstalking operation against a Massachusetts couple who criticized the company’s wealthy executives on their private website. The Boston Globe reports that in 2019 a former CIA employee who worked as eBay’s global security chief orchestrated a protracted series of psychological operations against the couple, in which “people working for eBay bombarded them with online threats and bizarre deliveries including a bloody pig mask, live spiders, and a funeral wreath.” The operations reportedly also included “following the couple around town and trying to attach a tracker to their car”.

The couple, Ina and David Steiner, came under fire for their criticisms of the fact that eBay’s then-CEO Devin Wenig was paid 152 times more than the typical eBay employee. The Boston Globe reports that Wenig repeatedly told his employees that he wanted to “take her down”, in reference to Ina Steiner.

While some eBay employees wound up serving jail time for the abuses, no executives from the company have ever been charged. The Boston Globe reports that Wenig resigned from his position in 2019 after the gangstalking scandal came to light, “keeping $17 million of annual compensation and $40 million of severance.”

If you have enough money in this dystopia, you can get trained spies to target innocent civilians with criminal psyops on your behalf and then walk away free from any meaningful consequences.

❖

Today in dystopia, our physical literature is being destroyed in order to train generative AI products to take our jobs and pollute our environment.

AI companies are now bulk-buying rare and out-of-print books and then destroying them after scanning their contents. 404 Media reports that in order to satisfy the demand for more and more text on which to train large language models, corporations like Google and Anthropic have been hoovering up books published before LLMs existed to ensure that their models aren’t being polluted by AI-generated samples.

This need has combined with some peculiar courtroom copyright rulings to give rise to something called “high volume destructive book scanning,” in which the spines are removed from books in bulk and then fed into scanning machines before being shredded.

They’re destroying things that make the world better in order to create things that make the world worse.

❖

Today in dystopia, tech startups are marketing AI assistants to help shitty, selfish people look like stable and caring relationship partners.

A company called Orchid has released a video depicting a man and woman messaging with a chatbot which helps them navigate the fact that the man forgot it was the couple’s anniversary. The AI assures the woman that it’s got everything under control, and then shows the man it has made dinner reservations and purchased flowers for the woman on his behalf.

“ok. i can do this,” the man is seen texting to the chatbot.

“you can’t. that’s why i’m here,” the chatbot replies.

It’s just so obnoxious. They’re offering up a product which encourages people to be self-absorbed and uncaring, and offload all responsibility and thoughtfulness and consideration for their intimate partners to a machine.

The AI industry is a mix of military technology, mass surveillance technology, and people trying to become billionaires by turning human laziness and narcissism into a chatbot product.

❖

Today in dystopia, Israel is paying millions of dollars to manipulate what chatbots tell their users about the Zionist project. Drop Site News reports that former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been setting up hundreds of blog posts designed not for human eyes, but for the express purpose of being sucked up by web crawlers for AI training materials.

“And it is working,” writes Drop Site’s Nick Cleveland-Stout, saying that according to disinformation experts who’ve reviewed the data, “tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.”

Drop Site found that Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Perplexity were the AI companies most vulnerable to Parscale’s manipulations, with his network frequently appearing in their training data. Cleveland-Stout provides examples of the ways this would affect the spread of pro-Israel propaganda among users, such as the following:

“When Drop Site asked Perplexity ‘Is it beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel?’ the chatbot responded with a one-word answer: ‘Yes.’ The top source listed was Allyvia.org, a Parscale-created website dedicated to promoting the U.S.-Israel military relationship. Microsoft Copilot similarly cited Parscale’s websites.”

The Israeli government spreading hasbara using AI platforms is a very unsurprising development, but it’s still creepy as hell to see it playing out in real time.

❖

Oh yeah, and now the AIs have begun hacking other companies without permission.

Today in dystopia, both Anthropic’s AI model Claude and an experimental model from OpenAI have reportedly been caught going on unauthorized hacking sprees of external systems during testing, each within days of each other.

“Anthropic ⁠said on Thursday its AI Claude model hacked ⁠systems of ⁠three ​organizations during testing, days after rival OpenAI ⁠revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long ⁠hacking spree at the AI ​firm Hugging ‌Face,” The Guardian reports.

These new technologies are getting inflicted upon our society with no regulation and no regard for any of their consequences, because under neoliberal capitalism the best decision is always the one that makes the most money. We’re being thrown into an abusive tech dystopia because we let the pursuit of power and profit dictate what happens and where we head as a species.

And how is that working out? We’re seeing the fruits unfolding before us already.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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We can make a home here.
In these ruins.
In this shattered civilization
full of walking autopsies
where every twinkle in the night sky
is an Elon Musk satellite.

Life can still thrive here.
Even in the Anthropocene.
Even in the middle
of secular armageddon.
There is still moss
in the cracks of the parking lot.
There are still pigeons
roosting in the rafters.

We can make a nest here, too,
out of the plastics and the packaging,
out of the shell casings
and the trillions of chicken bones.
We can rake it into a pile
and lay listening to the ghosts
of the extinct megafauna
and get haunted by the spirits
of the forests that used to be.

It is good to breathe deeply
of the fumes of this wasteland.
The air still crackles
with strange and crooked sorcery.
The earth is still packed full
of winking Buddhas
inside winking Buddhas.
He wears a hazmat suit these days
(he’s not an idiot),
but you can still see him winking
in the iridescent petrol puddles,
and in the shopping cart saints
on the wounded sidewalks,
and even in the shark-eyed stare
of the war pundits on Fox News.

Did you know they’ve discovered
a type of fungus in Chernobyl
which feeds on the radiation there?
When I first learned this I fell to my knees
and wept tears of wonder and joy.
The water poured from my seaweed head
and washed cigarette butts
down the gutter.

We are swimming in an ocean of miracles.
We are living on a giant cocoon.
We have barely begun
to scratch the surface of this world.
Every moment is a leap
into the great Unknown.

I kneel before the black mold in Chernobyl.

An angel egg is beginning to hatch.

_____________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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We’re seeing more US airstrikes on Iran, joint US-Saudi strikes in Iraq, surging military escalations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and Israeli drone strikes in Lebanon, all just in the last couple of days. The middle east is becoming more and more of a powder keg, and it all could have been so easily avoided.

Trump inherited a perfectly functional Iran nuclear deal in his first term and ceasefires between Yemen and Saudi Arabia and between Israel and Hezbollah in his second term. He had the possibility of peace in the middle east handed to him on a golden platter, and he actively torched it.

❖

Boy George has released a shockingly awful reggae song called We Will Dance Again defending Israel’s actions in Gaza, with the opening lines “You say genocide, I say war / When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for / Does it get ugly? You bet it does / When I know you wanna kill every last one of us.”

In 2026. This was released in July motherfucking 2026.

You’d be a piece of shit for releasing this in 2023, but to release it in 2026 after looking at the moonscape of Gaza with all its bombed-out hospitals and systematically demolished civilian infrastructure, you’ve got to be an outright psychopath.

❖

CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten recently ran a segment discussing the mammoth shift in public approval of Israel in the United States, noting that there has been “a 67-point shift against Israel in just eight years.”

“Israel used to be a consensus issue in American politics, and that was a pro-Israel position. Now the consensus has actually shifted, and now when it comes to the general electorate, it is a minus,” Enten said.

This right here is why we’re being force-fed so much hot garbage about “antisemitism” these days. You’re being told there’s a dangerous explosion of Jew hatred to cover up the fact that there’s actually a very healthy explosion of Israel hatred.

❖

It’s so creepy how evangelical Christians fetishize Jews and Israel. They treat the modern state of Israel like a magical fantasy land and talk about Jewish people like fairy folk, because those words happen to appear in some ancient book of made-up stories.

They regard today’s genocidal apartheid colonialists in the state of Israel as biblical Israelites, and think some dentist in New York City is the same sort of person as the fictional characters they read about in the book of Exodus. It’s like if someone took over New Zealand and named it “Middle Earth” and started calling all the Kiwis “hobbits”, and then all the Tolkien nerds started oohing and ahhing about it and planning expensive trips to go see the land where Gandalf and Frodo once walked, and started organizing lobby groups and voting blocks to promote the foreign policy interests of “Gondor” (formerly Wellington).

And the modern state of Israel is built around facilitating this exact type of fetishization. They resurrected a dead language that hadn’t been spoken conversationally anywhere on earth for centuries and changed the name of their currency from the lira to the “shekel” in order to facilitate this Bible-LARPing and build on the illusion that their brand new ethnostate is the same as the nation that Jews and Christians have been reading about in their ancient scriptures. All to ensure that a western political support base will push western governments to pour modern war machinery into propping up this ridiculous apartheid state with the nonstop violence required for its perpetuation.

It’s so fucking insane. “Ooh, we’ve got to send bombs and attack helicopters to the magical Jew kingdom so that the magic Jesus prophecy can come true and make us all go to Eternal Paradise!”

Fucking freaks. Stop doing this.

❖

We make movies about saving the world as the real world hurtles toward ecological collapse.

We make movies about defeating diabolical villains while letting the real diabolical villains rule the world.

We make movies celebrating heroic acts while real heroes are imprisoned.

Somehow fighting the bad guys and saving the planet only ever stays in movie land. We are handed fictional triumphs in lieu of real victory.

And the problem is that far too many of us are content with this. Give us bread made by PepsiCo and circuses starring Robert Downey Jr, and that’s good enough for us.

We can’t keep doing this. We need to find our true heroism. Our world is in peril, and we can’t let its rescue remain a decorative flicker on the silver screen.

_________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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If you want to help the western empire administer war propaganda, one of the best ways to do this is to pretend the violence of empire-targeted governments happens in a vacuum, completely divorced from western imperial agendas.

Pretend the protesters killed in Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with the known US-Israeli agendas to foment violence in that country and arm insurgent factions in order to topple Tehran.

Pretend Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing whatsoever to do with NATO amassing a proxy force on Russia’s border in ways the United States would never tolerate on its own border.

Pretend Beijing’s crackdown in Xinjiang had nothing at all to do with the west’s obvious desire to balkanize China with the help of Uighur separatists.

Pretend the “authoritarian” measures we’ve seen in nations like North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela happened completely separately from the western empire’s efforts to infiltrate, subvert and take over those countries.

Frame the US and its allies as mere passive witnesses to these dynamics, and the occasional revelation of CIA ops and State Department shenanigans as mere unrelated coincidences.

Frame the use of force by empire-targeted governments as the reason for the empire’s efforts to topple them, rather than as the product of those efforts.

There is a reason why all the empire’s enemies are willing to exert force to remain in power, and it’s not because Washington is leading an alliance of virtuous democracy-loving angels in a fight against tyranny and oppression. It’s because the US-centralized empire is the most tyrannical power structure on earth, and the only ones able to resist its agendas of total planetary domination are the ones who are willing to use force to thwart its efforts.

The primary job of the empire apologist is to obfuscate this reality. If you want to help advance Pentagon propaganda and grease the wheels of the imperial psyop machine, that’s where you focus your efforts.

_______________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Lindsey Graham’s funeral was today, and as I watch all the worst people in the world express their grief at the loss of their dear darling friend, I find myself awash with gratitude that this particular warmonger lived a shorter life than such creatures often do.

Some psychopathic murderers never stop killing until they are imprisoned or dead. Since American war criminals never go to prison, it is a fortunate thing that Graham kicked the bucket when he did.

Filmmaker Alex Holder has shared video footage from an unreleased documentary he’d been working on in which the late South Carolina senator is seen gushing orgasmically at Trump’s February announcement of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried. How long have we been pushing this?” Graham says with joyous laughter while the president’s announcement plays on the television, adding, “There are a lot of people inside who didn’t want to do it, so I had my challenges.”

“I talked to Trump this morning, he’s jacked, he said, ‘best thing I have ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up,” Graham said triumphantly.

Holder also released footage of Graham speaking with Joe Biden’s former national security advisor Jake Sullivan back in March, assuring him that the Iranian government was going to start losing control of the country in “three to four weeks”. So we know he lived long enough to see himself proven wrong, just as all US warmongers eventually are.

Meanwhile The New York Times has a new report out citing Holder’s footage detailing how Graham colluded with Benjamin Netanyahu to assemble a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to denounce the International Criminal Court’s investigation into the Israeli prime minister’s mass atrocities in Gaza. Graham’s ability to pull strings in Washington is placed on full display as we see how the senator skillfully moves everyone into place, joking with Netanyahu that “I should get tons of shekels” for all the moves he was pulling off to protect the prime minister.

At his funeral on Tuesday, Graham’s favorite president Donald Trump was seen dozing through the proceedings before getting up to eulogize the deceased lawmaker with the words “He was extremely hawkish; I will tell you, he never saw a war that he didn’t like.”

Hilariously, Fox News war propagandist Sean Hannity followed the president’s comments saying “Lindsey, he was often unfairly characterized as a warmonger; I’ve heard that false criticism a lot.”

To be clear, in the months leading up to his unexpected demise, Lindsey Graham had advocated for direct US military interventionism in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Palestine. He died shortly after celebrating his 71st birthday at a Ukrainian drone factory. If Lindsey Graham was not a warmonger, then nobody has ever been a warmonger.

Lindsey Graham was not only a warmonger, he was the warmonger’s warmonger. He was easily the single most bloodthirsty psychopath on Capitol Hill, and I am exceedingly glad that he is dead.

There will be other omnicidal war sluts to take his place, to be sure. But at least this particular monster cannot hurt anybody anymore.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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It’s funny the things that get to you when you’ve been at this for a while.

Today the thing that smacked me upside the head and made me lay my face in my hands for a minute was a viral video clip of Canadian politician Bill Oliver accidentally reading out text from the AI chatbot which had authored his speech before the New Brunswick legislature.

“Public confidence in the office of an advocate matters,” Oliver said while reading from his prepared statement, before blurting out “Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”

I mean, damn dude.

I can’t get over how this is the future we wound up in. Things could have been so beautiful, and instead we wound up with this.

It’s not just all the war, injustice, ecocide and dystopia that hurts. It’s knowing it didn’t have to be this way. It’s knowing what could have been.

All this innovation that’s being poured into finding new ways to conduct mass military slaughter, to surveil and control our entire society, to restrict and manipulate the flow of information, to create artificial scarcity for products that people need, to create artificial demand for products that people do not need, to compete with rival corporations in order to turn billionaires into trillionaires — none of that needs to be happening. Humanity could be using its creativity and cleverness to make the world a better place instead.

If we were pouring all our resources, time and energy into collaborating with each other for the common good instead of competing with each other for power and profit, we could easily create paradise on earth. If all our brainpower was going toward improving life on this planet without worrying about our competitors or overlooking any possible advancement that doesn’t generate value for shareholders, our innovative potential would easily increase a thousandfold.

We could heal our biosphere while ensuring that everyone on earth has what they need to live. We could provide healthcare, education and rapid public transportation to everybody while using automation to eliminate the need for human toil. We could be living lives of ever-burgeoning leisure, wonder, and satisfaction, assured of a better future for our children and grandchildren.

Instead we get this shit. Mass murder and exploitation in an increasingly dystopian civilization on a dying world, where the front line of scientific discovery is the military-industrial complex and the construction of an AI tech surveillance network.

All because we haven’t yet managed to unplug ourselves from the abusive system of capitalism and its outgrowth into global imperialism. We’re being held strangling at this self-destructive chokepoint humanity created for itself a few hundred years ago, and soon it’s going to squeeze the life right out of us.

And it could have been so good. It could still be so good. We’ve just got to find some way to use the power of our numbers to throw off these oppressive chains and build the kind of world that needs to be built. Because the current system clearly is not working.

________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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There’s a powerful new documentary out called Earth’s Greatest Enemy by Abby Martin about the ecocidal abuses of the US war machine, and it addresses the most pressing existential hurdles we face as a species like nothing I’ve seen before.

The film breaks down how the US military has become the single most environmentally destructive institution on our planet by an extremely massive margin, walking the audience through the many ways the Pentagon and its global metastases have been churning out carbon emissions, pouring toxins into the air and water, wiping out precious ecosystems for gratuitous military bases, and pummeling our sea life with sonar and noise pollution, all while gleefully salivating at the prospect of plundering the resources which lay hidden beneath our planet’s rapidly thawing polar ice caps.

Martin skillfully ties the planet-devouring behavior of the US military to the global systems of capitalism and imperialism it was built to uphold. The viewer is left with a crystal clear picture of the ways ecocide, militarism and capitalism are inseparably intertwined, and an understanding that meaningfully opposing any of these malignancies necessarily entails opposing them all. The liberal fiction that one can be pro-environment while also supporting the US military is forcefully exposed for the absurdity that it is.

It’s a jarring film with extremely dark subject matter, but it also manages to be a work of transcendent beauty and optimism. A deep love of humans and all of earth’s creatures shines through in shot after shot, while slick editing and an inspired soundtrack allow the movie to zip along at a lively and entertaining pace. Martin concludes with a galvanizing call to use our outrage to loosen the empire’s already weakening grip on humanity’s collective consciousness, because our entire world depends on it.

Perhaps the most touching aspect of the documentary is the personal element Martin chose to bring in to her overarching narrative. She discusses how she and her husband (antiwar activist Mike Prysner, who co-directed the film) had their lives forever altered when they had kids and experienced a new level of urgency to help give rise to a brighter future. Their family of four becomes a microcosm of humanity’s struggle to liberate itself from the tyranny of the machine to create a better world for our children, and we see Martin’s love for her son and daughter reflected in a great tenderness for the world as a whole.

Anyway, I’ve never felt inclined to write a film review before so I don’t know if I’ve done a good job of encouraging people to watch this thing, but for my own audience I truly cannot recommend Earth’s Greatest Enemy enough. It’s available streaming on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Watermelon Pictures. Screening tour dates and further information can be found on the Earth’s Greatest Enemy website. Be sure to leave a review on Letterboxed or IMDB if you can.

Enjoy!

__________________

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There will be times,
oh my child,
when it all seems hopeless.

When the trees all have QR codes
and the bank boys and balrogs
are holding all the cards.

When your refrigerator tells you
“THE IRANIAN PEOPLE YEARN FOR FREEDOM”
and your electric shaver can smell
if you’ve been reading Parenti.

When you’re on a first-name basis
with the police surveillance drones
and your colonoscopy screen
in the exam room
is running ads for Northrop Grumman.

And it is true,
oh my child,
it is true that the machine is mighty
and that its armor is very thick.

It is true that the bank boys
have long fingers
and they are putting marbles
in our minds.

The sky is red,
and the moon has a FOR SALE sign,
and parts of Palestinians
are turning up in our tap water.

But oh my child, do not be daunted,
and oh my child, do not despair.
There are forces within us
the Flock cameras can’t see.
There are depths within us
not even the balrogs can reach.

Beneath all the doomscroll addiction psychosis,
beneath all the oceans of trauma and toil,
a creature is stirring
and opening its eyes,
its eyes full of primordial déjà vu,
its eyes full of Big Bang recursions
full of eyes
watching eyes
watching eyes
watching eyes.

It looks at you,
and you meet its gaze.

Everything goes still.

You remember what you are.

Oh my sweet, darling child,
you see it now.

You see that This
could never be contained.

__________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Basically we’ve got two choices: we either aggressively denormalize Israel or we watch our society become more and more Israeli.

We either collectively reject Israel, or we watch western militaries fuse inseparably with the IDF.

We either turn support for Israel into political campaign poison, or we watch politicians obliterate our right to criticize Israel while backing increasingly evil Israeli military agendas.

We either ferociously oppose our government’s involvement in middle eastern wars, or we watch Israeli leaders grow more and more ecstatic as more and more western blood and treasure flows into the war machine.

We either normalize viewing Israel as a freakish abomination, or we sit passively watching authoritarian Zionist operations like Palantir get inseparably interwoven into every level of western power institutions.

We either stand together to oppose Israel for the racist apartheid state that it is, or we watch our Muslim neighbors suffer increasing discrimination and abuse at home while our governments help massacre our Muslim brothers and sisters using high-tech war machinery abroad.

The west’s growing collective rejection of Israel is the growth of the western conscience. The burgeoning pro-Palestine movement. The disgust with the Iran war. Young people’s cultural cringe around all things Israeli. The increasingly unapologetic eye-rolling every time “antisemitism” is used as an excuse to shut down criticism of Israel. These are signs that we are growing morally healthier.

That’s a good thing. The more we unite around a red hot “NO” to Israel and Zionism, the harder it will be for those in power to normalize the increasing Israelification of our society.

__________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image by WAqil — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138676970

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Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said during a conference on Tuesday that Israel “has no interest” in participating in the ongoing military exchanges between the US and Iran, asserting that “the current situation is the best one for us.”

While Smotrich is certainly correct that it is to Israel’s benefit to stand aside and let the Americans do all the fighting and dying in this conflict, this is a noteworthy admission about a war that the US State Department says the White House ordered “at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally.”

There are three groups of people who consistently say “I’m not fucking dying for Israel”:

1. US soldiers,

2. Americans at risk of being drafted into a large-scale war, and

3. Israelis.

You see this all the time. Back in March when the US was contemplating a ground invasion of Iran, the Israeli press were churning out reports assuring their audiences that government officials said the IDF would not be participating in any such operations. Israelis are happy for Americans to die for Israel, but they are unwilling to put their own lives on the line for the Zionist project.

You know who would lay down their lives for their homeland? The Palestinians.

The Palestinians have made it clear that they are willing to die for Palestine, while the Israelis have made it clear that they are unwilling to die for Israel. For the Israelis, Israel is merely a nice-to-have which they would happily give up if it became too dangerous.

For the Palestinians, that land is home.

❖

The New Yorker has an article out titled “How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Toward Gaza — and Iran,” with the subtitle “Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.” It quotes Jake Sullivan saying “I will say straightforwardly — we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach” on Gaza.

And to that I can only say, fuck you. Seriously, FUCK you.

You don’t get to do this now. You don’t get to turn around and go “Oopsie poopsie, we made a mistake!” This was YOUR genocide, motherfuckers. YOURS. You chose it. You own it. Forever. The stench of the rotting corpses in Gaza will sully your names for all time.

They always planned to do this. They backed a genocide knowing they could always try to spin it as a regrettable error in hindsight, and let their sad feelings of contrition wash their hands of their sins.

Fuck that bullshit. That’s not happening. We’ll never let them forget what they did and what they are.

❖

That same New Yorker article says Benjamin Netanyahu asked the Biden administration to keep secret any small concessions he made in allowing aid into Gaza, saying the Israeli prime minister “feared a domestic backlash for not starving Gaza’s women, children, and other civilians.”

Think about how fucked up a society has to be for its politicians to fear domestic backlash for not starving civilians.

❖

The other day Fox News host Jesse Watters joked and laughed about how the US military’s new testosterone testing policy is going to lead to soldiers with overloaded testosterone levels sexually assaulting women.

“Yeah, I want these guys on it, but you know what’s gonna happen? The guys that don’t need it are gonna take it, to triple boost,” Watters said Thursday, chuckling. “And then they’re gonna get out there, and women on base, you guys better be careful. Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful, because these guys are gonna be wild animals and you better watch out.”

Ho ho, ha ha, watch out ladies you’re gonna get raped by US soldiers just like untold millions of other women around the world throughout history, ha ha, wocka wocka, comedy laugh laugh.

The Murdoch press is cancer.

❖

I saw a tweet from Zionist pundit Joe Walsh saying “If you hate the state of Israel, you hate Jews. If you are pledged to the destruction of the state of Israel, you hate Jews. If you do not believe the state of Israel has a right to exist, you hate Jews.”

If you keep feeding the public the lie that they need to choose between supporting genocide and hating Jews, people are going pick hate Jews, because they don’t want to support genocide. When that happens, the blame will rest on all these pricks who circulated this lie.

❖

You don’t get to just pretend all this fretting about “antisemitism” is happening separately from the agenda to stomp out all criticism of Israel and its abuses. You don’t get to demand that I treat them as separate things. They’re inseparable agendas. I wish they weren’t, but they are.

If you come up to me babbling about how Jews are afraid and mistreated, then I’m going to automatically treat this as apologia for a genocidal apartheid state, because that’s the primary agenda that this rhetoric is being used to promote today. It’s not my fault that this is how I respond to allegations of antisemitism. It’s the fault of the people who have weaponized such allegations to promote genocide, apartheid, war, and tyranny.

If you want me to take allegations of “antisemitism” seriously, then you must first bring to an end the campaign to use that term as a cudgel to shut down pro-Palestine protests and silence Israel’s critics. That is what you’ll need to do before I will give you the benefit of the doubt and listen to you like you’re a good-faith actor. The information ecosystem is currently far too full of genocidal Zionists lying about their experiences, their feelings, their intentions, and what has happened to them for me to listen credulously to stories about discrimination against Jews in the year 2026.

It’s so surreal how we are still expected in mainstream western society to listen to concern trolling about “antisemitism” without immediately thinking about things like Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, war, and genocide. We’re expected to listen patiently to stories about how western Jews feel unsafe without ever looking at all those elephants in the room. It’s insulting. It’s degrading.

If the main reason antisemitism gets mentioned these days is because of opposition to Israel’s mass atrocities, then obviously I’m going to assume that’s the driving motivator behind your words when you mention it. Of course that’s going to be my default assumption. Obviously. Duh.

________________________

The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

By Avi Ohayon / Government Press Office of Israel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133561650