CIA veteran Gloria Steinem has died. She helped Langley win the Cold War while women remain blacksited and broken raining teeth from bloody mouths like the reds in Pinochet’s torture camps. In this CIA civilization women slap name tags over baby vomit stains smiling ear to ear for chortling customers who shovel cheesecarbs into their faces while she juggles dishpans and breast pumps and goes home to collapse in bed and dream about work, women take selfies in IDF uniforms and do TikTok dances on the ruins of Gaza and pilot Girl Power drones and drop Girl Power bombs onto mothers clawing at the rubble, women stand with sedated eyes stranded in suburban deserts spooning cereal into restless children until hubby comes home to rape everyone in the house, women hate their bodies so much they remove the fat from their cheeks so they look like skeletons and then freeze their faces trying to look twenty and it freezes their minds at twenty and their hearts stay stuck at twenty and they don’t grow and they don’t heal and they don’t know any better than to call their daughters fat and stick porcupine quills in their flesh, women spend their lives staring at the side of a man’s head yearning to be loved and feeling their light fade while he stares at a screen and makes loud noises to drown out the echoes of his father’s fists cracking on the bones of his face, women tear strips off each other’s flesh to win the approval of wolf-mouthed men who gobble up the carnage and then choose a favorite slave. Gloria Steinem was not a girl’s girl. Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl. Pick me, CIA. Pick me, empire. I’ll be a good little supplicant for the banker boys. I will starve feminism of its boobs and belly, shave it back to into the image of a child, put a tie on it and call it equal. I will say to the ladies: “Get out of the kitchen and into the Amazon warehouse! Take off that apron and put on this efficency tracker! It monitors your calories, too! 10,000 steps a day for the empire. Congratulations, you do two jobs now.” And I will return my magical baby portal back to sender unused in my box. I promise I won’t even peek at my own life-creating god potential. I will poo-poo it even, if anyone asks. Who cares if we can make life? We can make money! That’s much more important. I will civilise us hairy juicy vag goddesses, sir. You can count on me. Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl, and boy was she ever picked. But now she is dead, and the empire is dying, and the drumbeats of the wild are unnerving the boys at Langley. Something is stirring within us. Something ancient. Something forgotten. Something moves within our wombs which they tried to paralyze long ago. The drums are getting louder, and we are growing increasingly feral. The time is coming, and coming up fast, where we will stand before them, blood-bladed and hairy-bushed, the wreckage of Langley beneath our feet, saying, I am not civilized, motherfucker. I am not fucking civilized. Reading by Caitlin Johnstone

Today in dystopia, war pundits have begun suggesting that the US could recruit sufficient troops for a ground invasion of Iran by offering young Americans debt forgiveness in exchange for enlisting. Reading by Tim Foley.

People who believe capitalism is working out great are just sloppy thinkers who've fallen victim to survivorship bias and the just-world fallacy. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israeli officials have spent recent days circulating antisemitic conspiracy theories, with Benjamin Netanyahu boasting that he manipulated the United States into war with Iran, and Itamar Ben-Gvir sharing an AI video of Palestinians being sent to Nazi-style concentration camps. Reading by Tim Foley.

Today in dystopia, a Pentagon employee has published a McCarthyite list of suspected leftists and socialists who can now be tracked with the help of an interactive map. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

In this dystopia, mass surveillance is now so normalized that you can be designated a terrorist for helping people avoid being surveilled. Reading by Tim Foley.

You start pulling on one thread and then the whole thing unravels. Maybe you start with the Iraq war lies. Maybe 9/11. These days for a lot of folks it's Palestine. You keep pulling on that thread, uncovering more and more uncomfortable truths, until eventually you discover that pretty much everything you've been taught about your world was a lie. Reading by Tim Foley.

According to the rules of our dysfunctional society, you are inadequate unless you've become a productive gear-turner for capitalism and obtained enough wealth to consume products at large volume. Reading by Tim Foley.

It's crazy this even needs to be said, but if you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea. Reading by Tim Foley.