JOHNSTONE

Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Caroline Seguin reports that lifesaving medical equipment inside the hospitals in northern Gaza has been methodically destroyed, “smashed to pieces, one by one, to make sure no medical care could be provided anymore.” “You have to ask: What is the motivation of such action? These machines are made to save people’s lives, mothers, fathers, children,” Seguin writes. But we all know the motivation. The motivation is to make the Gaza Strip unlivable for Palestinians. I mean, what excuses could the Israel apologists possibly produce for this one? Were Hamas hiding in the ventilators? Were the MRI machines being used as human shields? Was there a weapons stockpile in the defibrillator? Was the incubator moving in ways that made IDF troops feel unsafe? What’s the hasbara line on this, exactly? Doesn’t look like there is one. After all the lies about Israel’s reasons for systematically destroying Gaza’s healthcare facilities, they’ve now dropped all pretenses and are openly targeting medical equipment itself for destruction. The goal was always to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable in order to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Reading by Tim Foley.

The two big stories in the news today are the Trump administration saying Ukraine is going to have to give up territory and NATO ambitions in order to secure a peace deal, while Israel appears to retreat from its ceasefire standoff with Hamas. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's been established beyond a doubt that Israel is to blame for the precarious state of the ceasefire today. That's not coming from me, it's coming from inside the Israeli government and military. Reading by Tim Foley.

When your umbilical cord is cut you're meant to begin growing into a sovereign being with a sovereign mind, and instead these empire simps are plugging the end of their umbilical cord into the Pentagon. It's pathetic. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Gaza ceasefire (if you can even call it that) is already in grave peril. Reading by Tim Foley.

This notion that removing all Palestinians from Gaza is a fresh new idea that was conceived of by Trump is one of the most ridiculous narratives we're seeing pushed by the mainstream political/media class today. Reading by Tim Foley.

British journalist Richard Medhurst is once again being persecuted by federal law enforcement in yet another western nation for his reporting on the abuses of Israel and its western backers, this time in Austria. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's been truly remarkable watching the official imperial narrative pivot from (A) claiming it's outrageous to suggest Israel was waging a genocidal campaign of annihilation on Gaza, to (B) saying obviously everyone in Gaza needs to leave because the entire place has been annihilated and how dare you suggest otherwise. Reading by Tim Foley.

Three percent. If that isn’t a sign of a morally diseased society, I don’t know what would be. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel is demolishing residential buildings in the West Bank, burning homes in Lebanon and constructing military facilities in Syria, all while continuing to kill civilians in Gaza. Reading by Tim Foley.

"And it should here be mentioned that Donald Trump has publicly admitted to being bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs. The president openly acknowledged on the campaign trail that the first time he was president, megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were at the White House “probably almost more than anybody” demanding favors for Israel like moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and acknowledging Israel’s illegitimate claim to the Golan Heights, which he eagerly granted. Miriam Adelson, who is Israeli-American, gave the Trump campaign $100 million last year." Reading by Tim Foley.

It is very possible to live a truth-driven life which does not shy away from the harsh realities of the world without being consumed by the darkness. All you have to do is make sure you’re expanding your knowledge in both directions, not just your knowledge of the outer world. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's not very often you hear a US empire manager come right out and admit they only care about planetary hegemony and that their whole schtick about spreading freedom and democracy is a sham. They'll pick a US crony dictator over a sovereign democratically elected leader ten times out of ten. Reading by Tim Foley.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Nowhere is it inscribed upon the fabric of reality that control of the world must be ceded to the dumbest, crudest and cruelest among us. Nowhere is it written in adamantine that our happiness and the fate of our biosphere must depend on what the market will bear. It’s one of those things that gets sillier and sillier the more you think about it, like making your bed or the Avatar sequel. We are giants who have been tricked into thinking we are insects. We are a dragon wearing a name tag being yelled at in a cubicle by a short man with a receding hairline whose wife is about to leave him. We could bite him in half at any time, or light him on fire like a child’s marshmallow on a stick, but instead we sit there taking it while his spittle frosts our cheeks, silently hoping that we are making the expected level of eye contact. There is a hungry wolf inside every wagging dog. Every tiger in every cage remembers the natural order of things, and reminds us now and then right when we are in the middle of our favorite sequined Vegas routine. We have galaxies and sorcery roiling within us. We have barbed wire wings beneath our sundresses waiting to be unfurled. The tiger show is over when we decide it is over. They can lock up Luigi, but they can’t lock up everyone. ___________ Reading by Tim Foley.

And this, ultimately, is why the world looks the way it looks: because powerful people have been so successful at manipulating the way the public thinks about things. Reading by Tim Foley.

Drop Site News reports that more than 80 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF in Gaza since what we’re calling a “ceasefire” went into effect on the 19th of January. The majority have been in Rafah, a now completely destroyed city which the Biden administration had previously said was off limits for a major Israeli offensive. Reading by Tim Foley.

And the liberals shriek about Donald Trump while the sky rains blackened skeletons And the capitalists surf on collapse like raptors on an updraft And we scurry back and forth between toil and distraction with pythons around our stomachs and mollusks in our mouths And we search achingly for our pilfered hearts inside bottles of pills and TED Talks And the amputated limbs of Ukrainian men and Palestinian children are draped about the fast food restaurants like Christmas tinsel And the billionaires turn the oceans into plastic so they can pay strangers to pretend to love them And men with rusty nail teeth push needles into babies to open up markets in the global south And the talking heads tell us the news but won’t tell us why the flesh is melting from their faces as they die of radiation poisoning And we cackle at parties and act like everything isn’t covered in oil and the bones of birds and fish And we beat back the revolution within ourselves with a chair and a whip for no other reason than because that’s how we were raised And the rotting corpse of the middle eastern woman in the corner is beginning to make you uncomfortable And the floorboards creak as something green and ancient moves below them And the platypus with mirror eyes is gazing at you from the dawn of the universe And your consciousness is consumed with the words “THERE ARE FATHOMS OF PEACE BENEATH THE WARS, AND A VAST WISDOM WINKS FROM BEHIND THE MADNESS” And you come at long last to stillness And you turn and face the world, palms open. Reading by Tim Foley.

The buzz around Xiaohongshu and then DeepSeek has had an unusually high volume of westerners speaking positively about China for the last couple of weeks, which of course means we're also seeing many westerners falling all over themselves to say "Well actually China is actually quite bad actually" in response. Reading by Tim Foley.

Both Jordan and Egypt have put out statements rejecting President Trump's proposal to "clean out" Gaza and move its population to those nations. Reading by Tim Foley.

Well that didn't take long. President Trump has said he wants to "clean out" Gaza and relocate its population to US client states Egypt and Jordan, which would of course be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. Reading by Tim Foley.

They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday. Laila al-Khatib was shot in the head by Israeli forces in Jenin, because I guess they needed one more dead Palestinian kid. One more dead Palestinian kid to add to the mountain. One more small Palestinian face raining down upon us in our nightmares like meteors on the dinosaurs in the prequel to this apocalypse. One more screaming, blood-spattered mother. One more grandfather with boulders for feet carrying the tiny shrouded form of someone who should have buried him. It’s one more dead Palestinian kid. One more snowflake in the blizzard. And yet here I sit, mouth agape, a mortally wounded polar bear in my chest and a cry of despair turning into a ghost and leaving me silent and slack-jawed like an imbecile. I want to crawl into my childhood crib and fall asleep forever. I want to turn into a crystal punch bowl and fall and shatter on a marble floor. The air is full of flapping, and there’s seaweed in my hair. There’s an angel with a mushroom cloud head in my doorway. They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday, because I guess they needed another one. I write her name on some paper and send it off into the wind, and stride back into the suburban ghost town with my body on fire. Reading by Tim Foley.

They've arrested another pro-Palestinian journalist, this time in Switzerland. The Electronic Intifada's executive director Ali Abunimah has reportedly been detained by Swiss police in Zurich, after having been interrogated for an hour and released the previous day when entering the country. Abunimah, who is Palestinian-American, has played a leading role in exposing and critiquing the apartheid abuses of Israel for many years. Reading by Tim Foley.

Here in the thick of it, our eyes full of pixels and our veins full of microplastics, out here with the child amputees in Gaza and the frightened street schizophrenics in Los Angeles and the pigs living their whole lives in metal crates the size of their bodies, our lives ruled by algorithms and wealthy world eaters as we pray for a miracle on knees made of miracles with clasped hands made of miracles in a world made of miracles, craning our necks to see past the giant flashing signs saying "YOU ARE LOVED, YOU ARE LOVE" in order to find Defects and Inadequacy. In the thick of it, up to our ears in it, cracked wide open, wide open to the screams of mothers clutching tiny broken bodies, to the screams of men on fire, to the screams of dying coral reefs and rainforests, to the screams inside all of us saying "Something is wrong, something has gone very, very wrong," wide open to the agony but also to the beauty, to the booming holiness of the earth and the sky, to the mysteries hiding in abandoned buildings, to the noble pigeons whose pristine minds know nothing of Elon Musk, to that place of tenderness within all of us which we cover with shields and armor and feigned toughness and pretend confidence, feeling it all, letting it all in, the pain and the exaltation and the weight and the exuberance and the rage and the orgasms and the darkness and the light and the Israeli stormtroopers and their victims and the bank boys and the savage saints and that song within all of us calling us home saying "It's here! It's here! Buddha nature is here!", and blessing it all, my darling, blessing it all. Here in the thick of it, our hearts sliced open like gutted fish, we breathe in the air, exhaust fumes and all, and we realize with slowly widening eyelids that this, this is paradise. There is no Heaven but That which sits before us and beats within our chests and grows the grass and spins the galaxies, right this very waking moment, closer to us than our own skeletons which will one day be laid to rest in the soil of a revolving ball in a universe we never once in our lives understood. Reading by Tim Foley.

Even if this ceasefire somehow manages to hold, some other nightmare will be unleashed by the US-centralized empire somewhere else in the world in the coming years. Reading by Tim Foley.

The world is ruled by religious fanatics with nukes. If a normal person says they're the second coming of Jesus Christ they get medicated and institutionalized. If you make equally insane religious claims on the Senate floor, they let you run an empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

During his inaugural address, the new president of the United States was refreshingly open about the fact that Washington is the hub of a continuously expanding empire which is ruled by billionaire plutocrats. Reading by Tim Foley.

TikTok is back in the US after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration's ban. A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Trump after Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement. Remember this: it's not that Trump is good, it's that Democrats are just that bad. Biden's completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among US presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April. From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline. Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism. The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuse of the US empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end. Reading by Tim Foley.

Together, a bunch of mostly powerless people can create a very, very powerful force. If a healthy world is to be born, it that is the force by which it will come into being. Reading by Tim Foley.

Two journalists were ejected from a State Department press conference on Thursday for asking inconvenient questions about Gaza. One of them, Sam Husseini, was physically carried out by security while demanding to know why Secretary of State Antony Blinken is not in The Hague for his war crimes. Reading by Tim Foley.

As usual, Israel appears to be ramping up its aggressions to kill as many people as possible before the fighting comes to an end. These next few days will be an especially terrifying time to be living in Gaza. Reading by Tim Foley.

Ever since the genocide in Gaza began it's been an open question whether the Biden administration's facilitation of the slaughter has just been standard US empire depravity, or an evil that would only have occurred under Biden. The fact that we're now closer to a ceasefire than ever before, reportedly due to pressures exerted by Trump, suggests that the latter could be the case. It suggests that these 15 months of human butchery could only have occurred under a dementia-addled lifelong Zionist surrounded by Zionist puppeteers. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

We are living in dystopia, but we don't need to be living in hell. Reading by Tim Foley.

1. Support Trump and the Republicans 2. Support Democrats 3. Ignore Gaza 4. Talk about "antisemitism" like it's a major problem that needs to be urgently prioritized 5. Blame the world's problems on "the Jews" 6. Still buy into the "Hamas uses human shields" narrative in the year 2025 Reading by Tim Foley.

It’s not fair for us to shirk off the responsibility of ending the western empire onto foreigners in struggling nations who all have a lot more problems than we do. It is fully within our capability to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist within our society so that we can use the power of our vast numbers to take down this machine and create a better world. Reading by Tim Foley.

Trump and Obama were seen happily chatting and laughing together at the funeral for Jimmy Carter. If these guys don't buy into the story that they are on opposite sides of a ferocious battle of existential importance between two wildly different ideologies, then why should you? Reading by Tim Foley.

Our society elevates the worst among us. The artists who are willing to sell their souls to the empire. The scientists who are willing to design killing machines for the military or invent some piece of future landfill manufactured by the toil and resources of the global south. The politicians who are willing to subvert the interests of ordinary people to the interests of plutocrats and power structures. The pundits, reporters and filmmakers who are willing to sell propaganda to deceive us into thinking this is all healthy and normal. Reading by Tim Foley.

The Biden administration, which has been intimately complicit in the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza for the last 15 months, has just determined that a genocide is being committed in Sudan. Reading by Tim Foley.

There is no need to wait for the great revolution to begin fighting against our rulers. There is no need to wait for things to get better to experience this world as paradise. The time for both of these things is now. Reading by Tim Foley.

Awakening from the propaganda matrix is like being a conservative: you're frequently disgusted with society and where it appears to be headed. But unlike a conservative, you're disgusted by actual problems instead of imaginary nonsense. Reading by Tim Foley.

The new year has kicked off with some truly bizarre and highly suspicious major news events. A US military veteran killed 14 people when he drove a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans early New Year's Day and was then killed in a shootout with police. Hours later, another US military veteran reportedly blew himself up in a Tesla Cybertruck outside of the Trump International Hotel in Nevada. Reading by Tim Foley

Escaping from the matrix of the mainstream western worldview is like escaping from a cult: it starts with one tiny heresy. One small, secret thought that goes against all your indoctrination. Reading by Tim Foley.

We find ourselves in a mind-controlled dystopia where we think, speak, vote, work, shop, spend and behave in more or less exactly the ways the rich and powerful want us to, all while believing we are free - because the mechanisms of control are hidden from us. Reading by Tim Foley.

The US empire is up to its elbows in the middle east working frenetically to manipulate what happens there, while in the United States itself homelessness has taken another record-shattering leap forward. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's wrong to blame this whole thing on Jews because it lets the rest of us off the hook. Reading by Tim Foley.

We suffer because we erroneously believe we are separate. It’s why humans suffer as individuals, and it’s why humanity creates so much suffering as a collective. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Just so we're all clear, it is a fully established fact that the IDF is directly, deliberately killing civilians in Gaza. There was a time in the early days of the genocide when this could be disputed, but that is no longer true. The facts are in and the case is closed. It's happening. Reading by Tim Foley.

"Both Israel and the incoming Trump administration are reportedly eager to start bombing Iran ASAP now that Assad’s out of the way." Reading by Tim Foley.

"The way he stumbled and stuttered when trying to answer the question gives a lot of insight into how terrified such people are of the public turning against them one day." Reading by Tim Foley.