This is it. This is the real story. This image, right here. Ignore all the fake drama. Forget all the campaign rhetoric and kayfabe conflict. This is what's real. This is what deserves your attention. They do not hate each other. They do not see one another as an existential threat to the nation. They are not enemies. They're barely even opponents. When the show is over they hug and kiss like boxers after weeks of phony trash talk made solely to sell pay-per-views. One may say his opponent is the next Hitler, coming to end democracy and take everyone's votes and destroy the country. The other may say his opponent is a communist dictator, come to do the same. But when the play is over the performers hold hands and bow, and then they go out and have a drink together. They each pretend to be fighting against each other in defense of you and your interests, when in reality they're on the same side, fighting against you, in defense of the interests of oligarchy and empire. You can see it right there. They're not hiding it anymore. They don't have to. It was all a show, and they're openly admitting it. A friendly match, like two rich ladies playing tennis at the Hamptons. They can show it openly because they know most of you won't pay attention to what you are seeing, or if you do you'll forget all about it and get swept up in the heat of the next election cycle. There's so much messaging reinforcing the illusory partisan divide that these tacit little admissions tend to go completely overlooked. Don't get me wrong, the depravity of Trump himself is not illusory. Real people are going to suffer and die under his administration, just as real people suffered and died under Biden's. But they themselves know they have nothing to fear. They and the powers they serve will go completely untouched by the imperial murder machine. They will die of old age surrounded by wealth and luxury, completely free from any consequences for their actions. It was all a sham. Always is. The elections are fake and the game is rigged. The empire will march on completely uninterrupted and entirely unchanged, served by one fraudulent president after the next until its eventual collapse. Stop buying into the performance. Stop screaming for your favorite political pro wrestler and notice that the blows aren't connecting and the whole match is just a show. If you want to fight the power, focus your opposition where the real power is. The war machine. Imperial power structures. Intelligence agencies. Plutocracy. Capitalism. Fully unplug your emotional energy from the illusion of electoral politics and dedicate your attention instead to the concrete movements of weapons, resources, and wealth. As long as they can keep us clapping along with the puppet show, we're never going to pay attention to the forces pulling the strings. We're never going to bring enough awareness to the real problems to find actual solutions and carry them out. We're never going to be able to bring real opposition to real power. And that's the whole idea. That's why this silly puppet show keeps coming back every four years. Stop clapping along and start looking around the theater. You know where the empire managers want you to place your attention, so start looking where they don't want you to look. Wake up.

We're Basically Being Asked To Believe That The Palestinians Are Genociding Themselves One of the dumbest things we are asked to believe about Israel’s genocide in Gaza is that all these civilians are being butchered because the Palestinians are evil and not the Israelis. That it’s the victims doing evil things and not the perpetrators. That’s all this gibberish about “human shields” and “self-defense” is meant to do, you know. To make it look like the victims of siege warfare and carpet bombing are the ones responsible for all the death and destruction we are seeing and not the people who are actually doing it. Can you think of anything more insulting to your intelligence? So self-evidently counter to common sense? They’re seriously asking you to believe that the people who are being starved, shot and bombed to death are the perpetrators of their own genocide, and that the side which has attacked every hospital in Gaza are just the innocent bystanders responding to unprovoked acts of aggression in the most ethical and responsible way they can manage. Off the top of my head I really can’t think of anything more absurd. Reading by Tim Foley.

From Aaron Bushnell To “I’m Speaking” In Five Months I can’t really find the words to express how depressing it is to watch the life get sucked out of the anti-genocide movement in the United States because one of the candidates running for president this year happens to come from the administration that’s been overseeing said genocide. Kamala Harris shouted down protesters against the US-backed incineration of Gaza during a campaign rally on Wednesday, responding to their chants of “we won’t vote for genocide” by telling them they’re helping Trump win. The Hill reports: Demonstrators in the crowd at Harris’s Detroit rally repeatedly shouted out as the vice president spoke to an airplane hangar packed with supporters, “Kamala, Kamala you can’t Hide, we won’t vote for genocide.” The crowd booed and drowned out the protesters with chants of “Kamala.” “I’m here because we believe in democracy. Everyone’s voice matters, but I am speaking now. I am speaking now,” Harris said to applause. As protesters continued to interrupt, Harris delivered a more blunt warning. “You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win then say that. Otherwise I’m speaking,” she said. The crowd thunderously applauded the comments from Harris. Social media is full of Democrats sharing the footage of the interaction and fawning over what a commanding girlboss she is. Like I said. Depressing. Shortly after Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris I noted that we were “already seeing some strong ‘shut up shut up SHUT UP about Gaza’ energy from Kamala supporters toward those to their left,” and since that time this phenomenon has been growing steadily worse. Now we’ve got this freakish dynamic where criticizing an administration that is guilty of the crime of genocide will get people telling you “Hey, nobody’s perfect!” like it’s some petty little quibble. And I can’t help watching all this and wondering what Aaron Bushnell would think. On February 25 Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington while screaming “Free Palestine” to draw attention to the horrors his country was helping to inflict upon the people of Gaza, and now the cause he gave his life for in the most agonizing way possible is being intentionally subverted by people who claim to care about justice and human rights. What would this look like to him? If, before igniting the accelerant, Bushnell had been granted a vision of Harris silencing anti-genocide protesters to the applause of her followers months in the future, would he still have gone through with it? Or would he have cast his lighter aside and collapsed in a fit of despair while Gaza burns, like the rest of us are doing right now? Five months. In a bit over five months we went from seeing an active-duty airman light himself on fire to turn America’s eyes toward Gaza, followed by a highly energized student protest movement against their country’s facilitation of genocidal war crimes, to seeing those student protests crushed with the approval of the current president, and then his would-be successor telling anti-genocide protesters to shut the fuck up and fall in line so that Democrats can win. Every time a light gets sparked in the darkness, the empire scrambles to snuff it out. Which wouldn’t be so depressing if not for all the brainwashed masses falling all over themselves to help them do it. Ah well. The fight goes on. Even if these pricks are going to set the whole world on fire, we can still at least try to make it difficult for them.

It’s brutal keeping track of the criminality of the empire lately. I personally don’t see how anyone could do it without an accompanying discipline like healing work, meditation, mindfulness, self inquiry, or other forms of inner work. Whenever I talk about the importance of inner work with this stuff I’ll get people dismissing it as self-indulgent navel gazing nonsense and a distraction from the outer work of actually changing our material circumstances, but really nothing could be further from the truth. To have a consistent discipline of inner work is to take responsibility for your own psychological bullshit instead of spreading it around in ways that hurt the people near you and make the world a worse place. It is absolutely true that the world and the cruel systems which guide it urgently need to change, and it is absolutely true that much of the suffering and mental illness we see in our society is due to the material, financial and psychological stress that people are placed under in this sick capitalist dystopia we find ourselves in. But that doesn’t mean you get to shirk your own adult responsibility to do the hard work necessary to bring the unconscious mechanisms of your own suffering and dysfunction into consciousness where they can be healed. The truth is that even if you could snap your fingers and magically transport us into a socialist utopia where we are no longer ruled by tyrants and everyone has what they need, people would still find ways to make themselves miserable and would still act out their unconscious woundedness on the folks around them, because that’s just what the human mind does at this point in our development as a species. You see evidence of this all the time in the self-destructive behaviors and abusiveness of the rich and famous despite their having all their material needs taken care of. So, as well as it might play in some circles, it’s just not good enough to blame all our suffering on the system. Doing so just encourages people to keep masturbating their inner wounds on everyone around them instead of growing up and doing the hard, uncomfortable work of becoming a conscious human being. And conscious human beings are what we’re going to need if we’re going to win this thing. We’re never going to be able to bring about the actions necessary to topple the empire and create a healthy world if we’re still being whipped about by unconscious forces within us caused by early childhood trauma, maladaptive coping mechanisms, unhealthy belief systems and inaccurate assumptions about our reality and our experience, like the overwhelming majority of humanity is right now. Hell, if we were handed a perfect utopia today we’d destroy it in a matter of weeks just out of our own internal chaos and restlessness. It’s actually often the people most interested in fighting the world’s evils who are most in need of inner work and discipline. It’s just an unfortunate fact that activists are frequently some of the most unconscious and irresponsible people you’ll ever meet, often using their rightful opposition to injustice and systemic abuses to hide all varieties of inner dysfunction and act out their inner demons on the people within their own faction. Most of the internal feuding you see on the western left is nothing other than garden variety drama addiction, trauma reenactment and attention/approval-seeking masquerading as Very Important Discourse about a hot social justice issue or the correct understanding of Marx or whatever. Just as we all have a responsibility to help create a healthy and truth-based world, we also all have a responsibility to develop healthy and truth-based minds. We can make up any number of excuses for our failure to do so, or we can suck it up and do the work. This gives us the necessary inner stability to directly face the empire’s cruelty even in nightmarish hellscapes like Gaza, and it lets us move far more effectively in the world because we’re being guided by truth and compassion instead of flying blind guided by nothing but our own inner wounds. I won’t tell you what kinds of inner work you should do because only you can know what will work best for you, but I will tell you that becoming a conscious person with a serene and harmonious mind takes a lot of work, a lot of consistent dedication, and a lot of courage. What matters is your intention to uproot any untruth and disharmony within yourself, and a sincere curiosity about where such things might exist within you. As individuals none of us have the ability to single-handedly uproot all the unkindness and falsehood in our world, but we can each as individuals uproot the unkindness and falsehood within ourselves. And by doing so we make the world a kinder and more truthful place by just that much, because we tended the little plot of land we were given—our own personal slice of the human plight—with care and responsibility.

Landfill Empire The moonlight caresses the missile silos in Russia and the blown out hospitals in Gaza. The garbage plays in the wind like children. The exhaust fumes and the sounds of traffic feel like sex in your senses. You can meet the divine here. Here in the city. Here in dystopia. Here amid the smell of piss and the sleeping bags on the sidewalk. Here in the heart of a dying empire, whose cancerous tendrils sprawl like ivy across the dying face of a dying world. You can let the LED lights dance with the light at the core of your being. You can drink from the Great Mother’s breasts beneath a billboard for the latest iThingy. You can raise up your heart to the pigeons, and to all the other animal species whose lives we have not yet succeeded in extinguishing. For us, this is Eden. For us, this is the only place in which Buddha can be born. In the future, if there is a future, maybe the humans figure things out and create a healthy world. But that world is not our world. That world is not where we clocked in to do our daily work. We clocked in to this strange civilization, where headless robot dogs keep showing up in police forces and sniper drones play the sounds of crying babies to lure out Palestinian civilians. Where we have amputated our sacred connection with nature and land and affixed a prosthesis made of viral videos and sitcoms to the aching, festering stump. Where everyone’s eyes are darkened by unnatural mindings, and everybody’s always hungry no matter how much they eat. This is where we will make our stand. This tanglewire nest full of fast food wrappers and broken toys, this mess where everything smells like motor oil and despair. This is the manger in which Christ consciousness will be lain. This is the armageddon town that will become our paradise. This is the landfill empire where we will finally let sprout those mysterious seeds planted in us long ago. In this strange civilization, in their own secret language, even the buzzing drones over Gaza sing the holy name of Allah.

This isn't a war against Hamas, it's a military operation to facilitate an ethnic cleansing. Hamas aren't the targets, they're the excuse.

If western actions didn't provoke the war in Ukraine, how come so many western experts and analysts spent years warning that western actions would provoke a war in Ukraine?

The most distinctly American fact you will ever learn is that the piercing cry you associate with the bald eagle is actually a Hollywood invention. Imagine the sound a bald eagle makes. Got it? Good. Unless you’re really into birds, you probably got it wrong. The long, powerful cry you likely heard in your mind’s ear when asked to imagine the call of a bald eagle is actually the call of a red-tailed hawk, whose voice Hollywood studios have been dubbing over footage of bald eagles for generations. You can immediately understand why that is when you hear the actual call of a bald eagle. There’s nothing wrong with it; it’s just not particularly… powerful. It’s a series of high-pitched squeaks that sound kind of like a seagull on helium. To the bald eagle I’m sure it sounds like a sexy serenade or a fearsome demand for respect, but if you’re a human Hollywood filmmaker trying to convey strength and nobility in the symbol of your nation, it’s not quite what you’re going for. So the red-tailed hawk gets pulled in for an uncredited Singin’ in the Rain-style vocal overdub. This fact is the single most American thing in the known universe. It’s more American than talking loudly at tourist attractions. It’s more American than a Bible covered in ranch dressing fingerprints. It’s more American than a Marvel movie about superheroes drinking Mountain Dew in monster trucks. It’s more American than a deep-fried aircraft carrier. You simply cannot fit more America into a unit of information than this. The symbol of the nation which sits atop a globe-spanning empire held together by mass-scale propaganda, and the sound of its voice is itself a complete construct of propaganda. Hollywood overdubs the bald eagle with the red-tailed hawk in precisely the same way it paints over the United States with a fictional land in which capitalism is working perfectly, and the cities aren’t full of homeless people, and the citizens aren’t stressed out of their minds working multiple jobs and freaking out on TikTok all the time asking how anyone is getting by in this environment (spoiler alert: they’re not; Hollywood is just telling you they are). Hollywood overdubs the bald eagle with the red-tailed hawk in precisely the same way it depicts police officers as spending their time fighting crime, and depicts news reporters as brave muckrakers digging for the truth to expose the wicked and corrupt, and depicts soldiers as heroic defenders of the American people. Hollywood overdubs the bald eagle with the red-tailed hawk in precisely the same way it portrays the United States as a normal country with a normal government that functions exactly the way the teachers and news reporters told you it does, with democratically elected officials making decisions that they think are in the interests of the American people, instead of the hub of a murderous empire bent on global domination run by unelected oligarchs and operatives who remain in power regardless of the comings and goings of the official elected government. The call of the red-tailed hawk is freedom, democracy, truth and justice. The call of the bald eagle is empire building, mass military slaughter, propaganda brainwashing, omnicidal nuclear brinkmanship, capitalist exploitation and extraction, surging inequality and injustice, police militarization, censorship, surveillance and oppression. They hide the latter with the former to keep people from knowing the truth about the real United States of America. But they can only hide the truth for so long. Someday someone sees a bald eagle for themselves and notices they’re not hearing what they were told they’d hear. Someday someone gets the distinct impression that the talking heads on the screen are lying to them, and starts doing a little digging on their own. Someday somebody snaps out of the spellbinding trance of the movie, and realizes they’re just watching actors on a screen. Truth will come out eventually. It can only be so long before people start hearing the real bird.