JOHNSTONE

We definitely don't need to wait until the bastards have been defeated and we're feeling safe and secure in order to begin our healing journey. Reading by Tim Foley.

The blue whales have stopped singing because the krill are vanishing because the oceans are warming because we are ruled by long-toothed liars whose insides are full of dead leaves. The great whales have gone silent and my bird has gone blind and there are chatbots in the basement and corpses in the corn. Under the overpass it is dry and still. You would never know that everything is dying. You should come and visit me. Meet me over there under the sepia streetlights with the strangleporn perverts and fentanyl fallen, all the stillborn scar tissue extractions from the wreckage of a banished womb, the NAFTA-noosed factory towns full of deserted buildings and the window-snarling meth towns full of deserted people, where the cries of orphaned Palestinians mingle with the cries of the last baby orangutan ever born in the wild. Meet me under the flickering lights. Bring me some smokes and a sad luck story and let's stay up late by the freeway watching the traffic get sparse. Show me the spots on your skin where life has kicked you and I will kiss them and give you a flower. The leviathans have gone quiet and the turbines are getting loud, and everything has become so strange. So sit with me on this curb under my burlap wing and let's laugh and heal and mark beauty until sunrise. Reading by Tim Foley.

Trump campaigned on being a president of peace and continues to stake his personal reputation on big talk about peacemaking, but in terms of concrete action he's just as much of a warmonger as the psychopaths who came before him. Reading by Tim Foley.

If Maduro really was a monstrous tyrannical dictator the US would be selling him F-35s. Reading by Tim Foley.

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 world of fading wonder full of worthless beach trash. "He is wrong," you whisper  as the blood leaves your body. "There is treasure everywhere." Reading by Tim Foley.