 An Assange plea deal for what crime? Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. Whenever I talk about the need to dismantle government secrecy, I always get some know-it-all empire simp going, without secrecy we wouldn't be able to wage wars and coordinate against their enemies and have nukes, you idiot. And it's like, uh, yeah, that's kind of my point. They only use secrecy to do evil things and act against the interests of normal human beings. The lie is that the government uses secrecy in order to counter its enemies and win wars, when in reality the government uses secrecy to make enemies and start wars. Julian Assange said, the overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security. It doesn't exist for our benefit, it exists for theirs. It's so our rulers can keep doing depraved things with no accountability. That's why they keep expanding government secrecy and increasing the punishment of those who breach it, because they want to do more depraved things and remain unaccountable. It really is nuts how there's now talk of Julian Assange being offered a plea bargain for rightly exposing US war crimes. What's he meant to plead guilty to? Good journalism? The last time there was a credible military threat to the United States near the US border, the US responded so aggressively that it nearly ended the world. The reason people don't tend to get it when you compare Ukraine or Taiwan to a hypothetical scenario in which Russia or China were amassing heavily armed proxy forces on the Mexican border is because people literally can't wrap their minds around that happening. It's just too remote and unthinkable a proposition in today's world. But that shows how clear it is that the US is the aggressor in those standoffs. It's doing something so freakishly aggressive that people literally cannot imagine it happening on the US border. If you see amassing a heavily armed threat on the border of an enemy nation as normal and fine in one instance and literally unfathomable in another, that shows you your perception and expectations have been warped by propaganda. If a political commentator isn't routinely drawing outraged responses from both Republicans and Democrats, they're not talking about the world's problems accurately and authentically enough. Whenever you see someone with a high profile taking a stand against the establishment and whipping up rebellious populist enthusiasm in the US, just watch and wait. 95% of the time they'll get around to telling you that the best way to channel your revolutionary ideals is to vote for Democrats or Republicans. They might not do it right away. They might put a spin on it by telling you that you need to vote for the right kind of Democrat or Republican. But eventually they'll get around to telling you to feed your political energy into one of the two mainstream parties whose whole existence revolve around serving the interests of the very establishment they claim to oppose. In the hub of the US Empire, there's not just controlled opposition. There's controlled opposition to the controlled opposition. If you reject both parties, they corral you into supporting a fake anti-establishment movement within one of those two parties. As long as they can keep you playing the two-party electoral politics game instead of taking meaningful direct action to effect real change, they can keep you marching to that beat of the imperial drum indefinitely. There are many people who are helping them do this. Sometimes people express surprise when I talk about the reasons I am hopeful for our species, like when I point out how enlightened masters who've been teaching people how to wake up for a long time have been saying across the board that dramatic shifts in human consciousness have gotten more common in recent years. I guess I do talk about some pretty bleak stuff in this space from day to day. But I wouldn't be doing what I do if I didn't see many reasons for hope.