Jeff Culbert

Literature is humanity’s longest conversation with itself about what it means to be alive. It has been going on for thousands of years. You are not late, you are not unqualified, you are not too much or too little or too broken. Pull up a chair. This conversation was always about you.

Banksy has unveiled a new sculpture of a man stepping off a stone base with his face obscured by a flag. The overnight installation in Waterloo Place, London, was revealed in a video shared by the artist, and has drawn fans of his politically charged works.

WOW! The Iranian AI Lego team has another video out. They are doubling down on building bridges between Americans & Iranians while depicting the US gov and "system" as the real enemy. The music, lyrics, and imagery are all designed to appeal to disillusioned Americans.

Yeah this position is patently absurd but it’s emerging consensus among Dems: Israel committed genocide but is simply Too Big To Fail and you see how much of this debate, such as it is, is raw uncut ideological dogma. This is why One Bad Man theory remains the go-to evasion line

Stunning lyrics by Siba Alkhiami, a German-based artist, against Israel's repression of Palestinians.

Let the record reflect that not one former living president denounced Trump’s genocidal pledge to destroy an entire civilization Like Obama, they’re inconsequential moral cowards who worry in the back of their minds about being held accountable for their own war crimes

You won't hear a better 55-second description of MAGA and Trump than this: in terms of the perspective of any minimally honest MAGA supporter:

NEWS: Bette Midler just released a remake of Woody Guthrie’s classic protest song “All You Fascists Bound to Lose,” updated to fit the current moment and urge action ahead of the midterms. You have to listen to this.

Excuse me, what? That “ally” being the government that’s been threatening to annex us, that vows to destroy our economy, that is giving aid and comfort to the people trying to break up our country? That ally? And we’re going to stand by them — put troops in harm’s way—in the service of this reckless folly?

LEWIS: "[Carney's] a smart guy and he's very popular in Canada right now because he has a diagnosis about where we are in history. We're at a turning point. But what he wants to do is make us into a militarized petro state, a junior arms dealer on the world stage."

Second City sent around this hilarious supercut of the brilliant Catherine O'Hara on SCTV. #RestInPower

Capitalism 1, Socialism 0

Here are my picks for President Donald Trump’s top 25 lies of 2025: cnn.com/2025/12/27/pol…

As Labour splits seemingly deepen by the day, the Greens are rolling in cash, signing up new members and surging in the polls ... huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/green-su…

Cristina on Twitter asks, “Can you please write another of your beautiful posts about hope. I am not sure I have any left. We need hope.” I don’t understand how anyone can be without hope right now, personally. The imperial propaganda machine is crumbling in ways we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. They wouldn’t work so hard on shoring up narrative control if they didn’t need it, and their narrative control is falling apart. Look at Israel. This is an arm of the empire that understands the importance of narrative manipulation so acutely that they’ve got their own term for the practice, “hasbara”, with countless systems in place for influencing the way westerners view the Zionist entity. But they’re losing. Israel and its supporters are more keenly aware of how important it is to control the narrative than maybe any other population on earth, and yet they are losing control of the narrative. Worldwide support for Israel is plummeting, with more American voters sympathizing with the Palestinians than the Israelis for the first time in history. And Israel is panicking. They’ve been ramping up spending on propaganda and influence operations while billionaire Zionists like Larry Ellison use their fortunes to shore up more control over social media platforms and mainstream news outlets. They wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t feel the need to, and it won’t even work. No amount of propaganda is going to cause people to unsee two years of live-streamed genocide. Propaganda is a powerful tool, but it isn’t magic. The Zionists in the White House are panicking as well. Donald Trump has stated that his goal in securing a ceasefire was to rescue Israel from the PR crisis created by the Netanyahu regime, saying, “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back.” These sentiments were echoed in a recent 60 Minutes interview with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who said that the president “felt like the Israelis were getting a little bit out of control” and needed to rein them in, not for the sake of Israel’s victims but to “stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests.” So we’re already at a point where elements of the empire are starting to change their behavior in response to public perception of the empire’s actions. They are not doing this because they suddenly evolved a conscience, they are doing it because they need to maintain perception management. They understand that if the public turns against them past a certain point, they’re in some very dangerous territory. Every time history has seen the public rise up against their tyrannical rulers and lop their heads off, the world’s oligarchs and empire managers have sat up and taken notice. The rich and the powerful are always urgently aware that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them and that we can use those superior numbers to get rid of them whenever we want to, so they have an existential interest in preventing us from wanting to. That’s why Israel, the United States and their allies have poured so much energy into sustaining the most sophisticated propaganda engine ever created. They know that the empire they operate depends on the ability to manipulate the way normal people think, speak, act and vote, continuously steering us toward convenient thoughts and behaviors and away from inconvenient thoughts and behaviors. This entire dystopia is sustained by mass-scale mind control, and the mind control machine is getting weaker and weaker by the day. More and more people are waking up to the fact that we are ruled by tyrants, that our politicians and media have been deceiving us, and that everything we were taught to believe about our nation, our government and our world was a lie. So while in the short term things might look darker than ever before, what’s spelled out in the trends we are seeing tells us that the bars of our cage are made of melting ice. We are freeing our minds from the artificial delusions that have turned us into docile and obedient gear-turners, and awakening the healthy animals within us. I find it impossible to feel hopeless under such circumstances. I don’t feel certain that everything will work out perfectly fine, but I find it impossible not to have hope. They’re on the back foot. This has never happened before. We’ve got a real shot at winning this thing.

I scrolled through the @1stForAll's gallery of print front pages for local coverage of "No Kings" protests. Here are some of the standout papers, starting with @DailySentinelGJ:

Bill Maher: “A cult is really a cult when the leader asks you to turn on friends and family…Which brings me to America, suddenly saying to our closest friend in the world, you know what? ‘Fu*k Canada,’ for no particular reason…”

Something mesmerising about this.

Trump claimed he had a great strategy to end the Ukrainian war before the election that we couldn't hear. What was it once in office? "Give up."

America today is living through a hostile takeover by bullies and billionaires. It is rampaging unopposed because leading Democrats don't know how to fight. Step up, own the failing, and change -- or make way for the fighters in your ranks. FULL VIDEO: the.ink/p/milquetoast-…