 It's a big club and you ain't in it, notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. Brian Stelter went from a mainstream media gig to a gig at Harvard. Jen Psaki went from a gig in the Biden administration to a gig in the mainstream media. Mike Pompeo went from a gig in the Trump administration to a gig with a DC think tank. It's a big club and you ain't in it. I'm actually less disdainful of the British royal family than I am of all the sniveling sycophants who are worshiping them right now. The royals were born into this ridiculous charade. These losers are choosing it. Brits who lived their whole lives thinking it was their free choice to have a royal family have been getting a rude awakening these last few days. Here's a tweet from Darshna Soni saying new. The 22-year-old woman who was arrested after holding up this anti-monarchy placard at St. Giles Cathedral has been charged in connection with a breach of peace. Police in Scotland confirm. Will appear at Edinburgh Sheriff's Court at a later date. Here's a tweet by Lowkey. A man was arrested in Oxford yesterday, reportedly for asking who elected him at the proclamation of Charles as king. Here's a tweet from Paul Powelslend. This went to Parliament Square and held up a blank piece of paper. Officer Cayman asked for my details. He confirmed that if I wrote not my king on it, he would arrest me under the Public Order Act because someone might be offended. Here's another tweet from an account called Black and Black. Rory arrested for shouting at Prince Andrew on the royal mile in Edinburgh. Powerful men shouldn't be allowed to commit sexual crimes and get away with it. Rory is facing a stiffer penalty than Andrew got, for actually being an accused nonce and paying off his accuser. The Australian Football League was going to have a moment of silence for the Queen, but cancelled it when they realized it was the AFLW Indigenous Round, meant to honour Indigenous Australians. Which actually tells you everything you need to know about the Queen and Australia. Oh wait, it's the Indigenous Round. We probably shouldn't celebrate Her Majesty. Oh yeah, why not? Well, you know, on account of all the genocide and killing and stealing and oppression and brutality. Wait, so you're saying it would be okay to honour people who did those things at any other time? Yeah, sure. It's like saying, we were going to have a moment of silence for the Hitler family, but then we realized it's Yom Kippur and we didn't want to be disrespectful to Jews who might find honouring Hitler offensive on that particular day. Of course the US Empire wanted the war in Ukraine. That's why it knowingly provoked it and actively intervened to prevent peace from breaking out in the early days of the conflict. It's been using this war to advance its geostrategic interests in Eurasia at very little cost to itself. From 2016 to 2019, mainstream liberals were indoctrinated with hatred of Russia using a conspiracy theory born of the US intelligence cartel that the US White House had been infiltrated by the Kremlin. Now a deliberately provoked, totally unrelated war leverages that hate. Hmm. Spinmeisters now act like the discredited Trump-Russia collusion narrative never happened. This narrative, which monopolized the news media and greatly altered public perception of Moscow on totally baseless grounds, has been memory-hold, while its propaganda effects live on. We're looking at a war in Ukraine that was knowingly provoked by the very same people whose propaganda engine just spent years manipulating the public into hating Russia for reasons that were A. false, and B. completely unrelated to Ukraine. And now those very same liberals, who spent years insisting that Trump's entire family and cabinet were moments away from being dragged from the White House and chains, are all waving blue and yellow flags and shouting, Slava Ukrainy. Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. If we were being told the truth about this war, they wouldn't be banning Russian media. We wouldn't be hearing propagandistic messaging, like unprovoked invasion at every mention of Ukraine. And those expressing skepticism about all this wouldn't be swarmed by astroturf empire trolls. My critics are like, you're not a real anti-imperialist. If you were, you'd be assisting the propaganda campaigns of the most powerful empire that has ever existed to help it subvert and conquer the nations which disobey its commands. I will not mitigate my criticisms of the empire I live in by equating them with the lesser crimes of other countries. Why would you even want me to do that? The only honest reason I can think of is that you want me to go easy on your cognitive dissonance. No. Fuck off. Face it. Turn and face the horror our empire inflicts on the world. Of course it would be easier for me to shake my fist at foreigners rather than demand change in the empire that my country is a part of. Duh. That's why you do it. I will not. People want me to equate the full magnitude of the murderous butchery and weaponized starvation that our western empire is engaged in with these piddling crimes of other countries so they don't feel bad. Fuck that. Feel bad. Feeling bad means you'll need slash want to change it. People defend capitalism on the grounds that it creates abundance. And in a sense they're right. Capitalism is an effective way to drive up production and consumption. The problem is there's no wisdom guiding it, so the world is being choked with garbage while people go hungry. Haves, exploiting the labor of have-nots, will indeed get the gears of industry creating lots of stuff. But now we're creating too much stuff, so much that it's killing our biosphere. Even as vast inequalities remain, and far too many people go without the basic necessities in life. The invisible hand of the free market is worshipped as a sentient entity who always knows what's best, but in reality it's completely bereft of wisdom and intelligence and cannot move in harmony with the real needs of the real world. It's a mindless force that is driving us to disaster. This isn't a problem you can just ignore. You can't keep waxing on about how much stuff capitalism has been able to create while that stuff is destroying our ecosystem and making this planet uninhabitable. It's a problem that earned it urgently needs solving, and capitalism can't solve it. Capitalism offers no solution to the problems of ecocide and inequality. As long as exploitation remains profitable, exploitation will remain. As long as ecocide remains profitable, ecocide will remain. Human behavior cannot remain driven by profit. We need something new.