 Their similarities matter more than their differences. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. As a result of the New York Times's McCarthyite hit piece on anti-war leftist groups last week. One, a U.S. senator has called for government investigations of American leftist groups. Two, a leftist news site has been banned from Twitter. And three, Neville Roy Singham's Wikipedia page is now a mirror of the New York Times piece. None of this was accidental. This was a blatant imperial narrative management operation. There will be more. The New York Times is a shitty militarist propaganda rag that somehow wound up setting the news agenda for the entire western world. It's still forbidden to say that the U.S. empire knowingly provoked the war in Ukraine, even though there's mountains of evidence that the U.S. knowingly provoked the war in Ukraine, and even though U.S. officials constantly talk about how much the war in Ukraine benefits the U.S. As a tweet by Aaron Mate, Mitch McConnell defends the proxy war in Ukraine. We haven't lost a single American. Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the U.S., replenishing weapons. So it's actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead. If people really understood just how much suffering and destruction is unleashed by U.S. foreign policy, they'd stop making such a big deal about the minor differences between two political parties who always come together to support the most destructive U.S. foreign policy decisions. The human suffering caused by the minor differences in domestic policy between Democrats and Republicans is dwarfed by the suffering caused by foreign policy bipartisanship by orders of magnitude. The ways they are the same are vastly more significant than the ways in which they differ. The main misconception about U.S. presidents is that they are proactive leaders when they're really reactive facilitators. They're not proactively leading the government in accordance with their vision and ideology. They're responding to and facilitating the various needs of the empire from year to year. That's what the empire managers and their administrations are doing with their daily intelligence and national security briefings, explaining to them what the needs of the empire are on that day, and what must be done to facilitate those needs using whatever language will make a given president receptive. The main difference between U.S. presidents often comes down to the narratives that the empire managers, who they surround themselves with, will use to explain why they need to advance the interests of the empire. Progressive president, you need to kill Syrians to advance human rights. Conservative president, you need to kill Syrians to protect national security. Presidents who are unfamiliar with the workings of the empire surround themselves with empire managers who understand how to keep the gears of the imperial machine turning, and those empire managers explain what needs to be done in ways that the president will listen to. This is a big part of what keeps the empire moving the same way from administration to administration. Every president is being advised, meaning directed, by DC swamp monsters who all went to the same universities and moved through the same revolving door employment circles of government agencies and think tanks and party politics and military industrial complex, advising, slash lobbying, and media punditry, who all understand what's required of the U.S. president to facilitate the perpetuation of U.S. unipolar planetary hegemony. These swamp monsters are part of the permanent government structure that stays in place regardless of the comings and goings of electoral politics, and there are always balls deep in literally every presidential administration, no matter how rebellious or anti-establishment that president pretends to be. That permanent government structure is why the large scale movements of the empire don't change when a president is replaced by a new president of an opposing ideology. America's official elected government may have changed, but its real government did not. NATO leftists are like, I strongly oppose the U.S. empire and its warmongering, but we need to completely 100% support the U.S. empire's nuclear brinkmanship in Ukraine and scream at anyone who talks about everything the U.S. empire did to provoke and prolong this war. All major international conflicts and negotiations ultimately boil down to the U.S. working to stop the rise of China and China working to circumvent those efforts. Middle East policy, Russia policy, Africa, Australia, South America policy, it all ultimately comes back to China. And here's a quote from The Wall Street Journal saying, in exchange for significant U.S. concessions to Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration is trying to secure assurances from Saudi Arabia that it will distance itself economically and militarily from China. That's why it's silly when right wing populists act like anti-war heroes for saying the U.S. should stop warmongering with Russia in the Middle East in order to focus on China. It's all about China. It's all the same agenda. They're not on different sides from the Democrats. This was all said in motion decades ago when the U.S. established a policy of ensuring that no rival superpowers emerge after the fall of the Soviet Union, none of which would necessarily be a problem if the U.S. was a force for good in the world, or even just a force for good in the world relative to China. But that plainly is not the case. So now we're rapidly accelerating toward a horrific global conflict, all to ensure the continued domination of a power structure that demonstrably makes the world a much better place than it would be if powerful governments just got along with each other. The hope seems to be that China just taps out before it comes to hot war, that it just lets itself be absorbed into the U.S. centralized power structure like empire managers have been hoping it would for decades. But China doesn't look ready to tap. It seems intent on retaining its national self-sovereignty. It's so stupid how we keep talking excitedly about the possibility that there's non-human intelligence out there in the universe, while our own oceans are full of giant-brained whales whose inner lives we know nothing about, and who are being driven to extinction by human activity. The inner lives of cetaceans are completely mysterious to us. We have no idea what they're doing with those brains, or what their minds are like from the inside. The sperm whale has the largest brain in the animal kingdom. It doesn't take nine kilograms of brain matter to make a tail go up and down, yet there's almost no curiosity about what they're using it for, and we're killing them all off with pollution, ship collisions, ocean netting, overfishing, and sonar, while looking to the stars for intelligent life. It may end up being the case that we kill off a high level of non-human intelligence right in front of us, before we even understand it. We're stupid.