New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern continued her crusade for the expansion of internet censorship during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, this time using the war in Ukraine.

Reading by Tim Foley.

New Zealand's PM Wants More Online Censorship For The War In Ukraine

The western political/media class has been dismissing as "conspiracy theories" all claims that the US is likely responsible for last month's sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, even while leveling the exact same accusations against Russia without ever using that term. Which probably says a lot about the way that label has been used over the years, if you think about it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

It's Only A 'Conspiracy Theory' When It Accuses The US Government

Back in 2013 The Atlantic published a solid article titled "The Real Cuban Missile Crisis," subtitled "Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong." Its author Benjamin Schwartz details how the crisis was peacefully resolved not because JFK was on the phone yelling "Try and die" at Nikita Khrushchev, but because he secretly cut a deal to remove the Jupiter missiles the US had stationed in Italy and Turkey which provoked the 1962 incident in the first place.

Moscow perceived that the only reason why that type of midrange weapon would be placed in such a way would be if the US was planning a nuclear first strike to disarm Russia, and Schwartz writes that that suspicion was entirely well-founded: the Kennedy administration had indeed strongly contemplated such a strike during the Berlin crisis of 1961. In response to this threat, as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Khrushchev moved ballistic missiles to Cuba, whose discovery led to the tense standoff which brought us far closer to nuclear annihilation than most of us care to contemplate. A secret deal was struck whose nature wouldn't become public knowledge until decades later, resulting in both sides removing their offending missile placements.

Reading by Tim Foley.

We Survived The Last Nuclear Standoff Through Compromise And De-Escalation

Everyone has lost their fucking mind. Propaganda has made madness look like sanity and sanity look like madness, has normalized cheerleading for nuclear world war and abnormalized calls for de-escalation and detente. It's truly as bat shit insane as anything could possibly be.

Over and over again we're being fed the message from the US and its proxies that this game of nuclear chicken can only escalate and never de-escalate. They are lying. They are playing games with all our lives in service of a dark god named unipolarism, and we gain nothing from it.

The only positive I can see in this mess is that any further movement toward madness will have to be a move into sanity, because we've taken madness as far as we can possibly take it and we'll necessarily have to circle back round again. You can only turn 180 degrees away from the light before you're turning back toward it again. You can only run halfway into the woods before you're running out of it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Opposing Armageddon To Trigger The Libs

The arrival of the human brain gave the universe the ability to experience itself through not only sensory organs and nervous systems but through thought and through science. Suddenly the stardust was able to not just look at itself but to think about itself. To philosophize about itself. To meditate on itself. To explore itself. To run experiments on itself. To know itself with greater and greater intimacy.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Once Upon A Time

None of this would be happening if this proxy war was as just and righteous as its proponents are pretending. If your proxy war demands nonstop perception management at maximum aggression to manufacture public consent for it, your proxy war is probably immoral and bad. If maintaining public support for a proxy war requires nonstop PR spin, aggressive propaganda from the mainstream news media, banning of Russian media, and giant troll information ops amplified by think tanks and government agencies, it probably shouldn't have public support.

If you need to aggressively psychologically manipulate a population to get them to support your agenda, censor their speech, and disrupt their online discourse with astroturf trolling ops, it's because you know your agenda is not something they'd choose to support on their own. If you need to manipulate people into supporting something, it's because it's not worthy of their support, and you know it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

A Good And Righteous Proxy War Wouldn't Need Such Cartoonish PR

Normal person: I think it would be good if everyone didn't die in a nuclear holocaust.

Crazy person: That means you love Vladimir Putin.

Normal person: No I just think it would be a good idea to try to prevent the horrific death of literally everyone.

Crazy person: How much is the Kremlin paying you to say that?

Fucking lunatics.

Resisting nuclear armageddon is the least partisan position that anyone could possibly have. The least one-sided. The least "campist". It's just being a normal human organism with the most normal human impulse you could possibly come up with. It's absolutely insane that anyone tries to spin it otherwise.

A society where opposing nuclear armageddon is treated as freakish and evil is the most backwards and insane society imaginable. Seriously, try to imagine anything crazier and more backwards than that. A society where everyone walks and drives backwards? That's less crazy and backwards. A society where the dogs own the people? That's less crazy and backwards.

This is it. This is peak crazy. A thinking species which regards as outrageous heresy any opposition to brinkmanship that can cause its extinction cannot get any more crazy. It's turned as far away from sanity as any thinking creature could possibly be.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Evolving Big Brains Only To Go Extinct From Stupidity

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow was open to talks with the the US or with Turkey on ending the war in Ukraine, claiming that US officials are lying when they say Russia has been refusing peace talks.

Lavrov's claim was given more weight when US State Department spokesman Ned Price dismissed the offer for peace talks shortly after it was extended, citing Russia's recent missile strikes on Kyiv.

Reading by Tim Foley.

US Rejection Of Moscow's Offer For Peace Talks Is Utterly Inexcusable

We're being driven toward nuclear war on the completely fictional claim that Putin is a Hitler-like megalomaniac who's just invading countries completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and won't stop invading and conquering until he's stopped by force.

The news media aren't telling people about the western aggressions which led to this war. They're not telling people the US is keeping this war going with the stated goal of weakening Russia and is rejecting peace talks and refusing to push for peace. All people are being told is that Putin is another Hitler who won't listen to reason and only understands violence. The world's two nuclear superpowers are being pushed closer and closer to direct military confrontation based on a complete fiction which omits mountains of facts.

Reading by Tim Foley.

We're Being Pushed Toward Nuclear War On A Fiction

The west is advancing the claim that Putin is distributing Viagra to his soldiers so that they can more effectively rape Ukrainians, which was a ridiculous propaganda narrative the first time the west used it to manufacture consent for regime change in Libya.

Reading by Tim Foley.

They're Recycling The Viagra Rape Atrocity Propaganda They Used On Libya

Of all the face-meltingly stupid narratives that have been circulated about the US proxy war in Ukraine, the dumbest so far has got to be the increasingly common claim that aggressively escalating nuclear brinkmanship is safety and de-escalation is danger.

We see a prime example of this self-evidently idiotic narrative in a new Business Insider article titled "Putin's nuclear threats are pushing people like Trump and Elon Musk to press for a Ukraine peace deal. A nuclear expert warns that's 'dangerous.'" 

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Profoundly Stupid Narrative That Nuclear Brinkmanship Is Safety And De-Escalation Is Danger

Readings of all Caitlin Johnstone's articles, usually by her co-writer Tim Foley.