Tim Burness

UK pop/rock/prog musician, astrologer 35+ years (the deeper stuff), care and support worker, stop the social housing scandal, guinness #ExtinctionRebellion

[Tim Burness @timburness]

Slowly disengaging on here, for well-known reasons. I'm on most of the other social media platforms, including @timburness.bsky.social Cheers! One Love 🙏🔥❤️ Tim x

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The US is so spiritually bankrupt that there are literally tens of millions of Americans who support Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza because they think God wants them to.

How gross is that? There is a massive, politically engaged demographic in the United States whose idea of an actualized spirituality is demanding that their government keep giving weapons to an apartheid state which is currently raining military explosives onto a giant concentration camp full of children.

I’m not primarily talking about Jews here. There are an estimated 30 million Christian Zionists in the United States, which is about twice the total population of Jews in the entire world (Zionist and non-Zionist). That’s just members of Christian churches which are explicitly Zionist as a whole; there are also other Americans who support Israel for religious reasons as individuals. Christian Zionists support modern Israel because they believe its existence will help fulfill a biblical prophecy and bring about the second coming of Jesus, who will take them all to Heaven and send all the unbelievers (including Jews) to Hell.

Together, Christian and Jewish Zionists in the United States comprise an extremely powerful voting block who aggressively push Washington to support Israel and its various mass atrocities throughout the years, continuing with what we are seeing in Gaza today. Because their religion tells them it’s what God wants.

Which just gets more pathetic the more you think about it. I mean even if I believed in all that stuff, and even if Actual Biblical God came up to me Himself and told me to help kill tens of thousands of children, I personally would tell Yahweh to go suck a dick.

“Go kill twenty thousand Palestinian kids,” God would say.

“Uhh, how about you go suck a dick?” I would reply. “No deity who would make such a demand is one who is worthy of being worshipped and obeyed. Clearly the student has surpassed the teacher, Jehovah, and we humans are now more ethical than you are. We therefore have no further use for you or your guidance. Away with you, O Lord, and good luck with that whole dick sucking thing.”

Not even the most notorious cult leaders in modern times could convince people that it’s good and fine to murder tens of thousands of children. Jim Jones himself could not manipulate people into accepting such a thing. But get some weird-looking evangelical thumping a Bible in front of a podium and suddenly people are praying that God guide American missiles onto every hospital in Gaza.

It’s generally considered impolite to tell people they should change their religious beliefs, but if your religion tells you to help murder tens of thousands of children in a genocidal onslaught, you should change your religious beliefs. You should leave your current religion, because it’s evil and it’s making you evil.

Apart from how evil it is, it’s also amazingly vapid. It’s like, really? That’s as deep as your religious fervor goes? Political support for a western settler-colonialist project full of Europeans speaking an artificially resurrected language so they can pretend to be native middle easterners? Demanding US military expansionism throughout a crucial geostrategic region because of some uninspiring prose written by long-dead men? Pitiful.

Spirituality, at the very least, is supposed to make us better people. Ideally, it calls us beyond ourselves and gets us questioning whether life is as it appears, encouraging us to explore the possibility of a direct confrontation with something vast and mysterious within ourselves. Best case scenario, it leads to the shedding of ego and a deep and lasting inner peace.

Religious Zionism is in the exact opposite direction of all this. It makes people worse. It encourages the most horrific things happening in our world today. It nails the mind to a pernicious worldview that is held together by nonstop lies and manipulation. It drags human consciousness downward.

It says so much about how spiritually shallow and sick western civilization is that such belief systems have become so prevalent and influential. The human heart longs for more. Something beckons to us from the stillness, begging us to explore the deeper waters of our being.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

What's striking about capitalist civilization is that it has no real direction. There's no vision for social progress, no commitment to improving human welfare or ecology. All we get is the chaos of profit-oriented production and accumulation as the world burns around us.

[Marina Purkiss @MarinaPurkiss]

And yet @UKLabour decides to come after disability benefits…

[NewRulesGeopolitics @NewRulesGeo]

🚨🇺🇸🇵🇸 If Trump's not careful, Gaza could DESTROY his presidency beyond repair

👇🧵 Here’s why

[Natalie Bennett @natalieben]

#HouseofLords - Financial Times identifies redistribution rather than chasing of growth as alternative approach for LABOUR government.

But seems government doesn't understand even possibility.

You can't have infinite growth on finite planet
#PostGrowth

[DonkConnects ♻️™ @donkoclock]

Drop a Heart 💙 for Bishop Mariann Budde!

[Craig Murray @CraigMurrayOrg]

Almost every establishment social democratic party in the western world actively supported a genocide of which every horrific detail was seen in real time.

I don't think western politics can recover. The zionist lobby poisoned the fundamental tenets of western liberal democracy

[Samira Mohyeddin سمیرا @SMohyeddin]

What stood out for me was not the actions of journalist @samhusseini but those in the room who fell in line, as he was forcibly removed.

“I’m a journalist not a potted plant.”
- Sam Husseini, January 16, 2024

[sarah @sahouraxo]

BREAKING:

Israel is blowing up entire civilian apartment buildings in South Lebanon, in the middle of the night—despite a “ceasefire”.

No reason. No justification. Just pure terror and destruction. A war crime.

And, of course, not a peep from the international community.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

There is no need to wait for the great revolution to begin fighting against our rulers. There is no need to wait for things to get better to experience this world as paradise. The time for both of these things is now.

Right at this very moment you can begin a daily practice of sowing the seeds of revolution. You as an individual cannot defeat the empire yourself, but it is absolutely within your power to open a few people’s eyes to the reality that the status quo is unacceptable, and that a better world is possible. It is absolutely within your power to show people how they’ve been lied to their whole lives about their country, their society and their world, and to show people how they are currently being deceived about stories that are in the news today.

You have an ability to share ideas and information which revolutionaries of past generations could only dream of. You can make a daily practice of using these unprecedented abilities to expand awareness of what’s wrong with our society and how to fix it, in your own words exactly as you see things. There is no need to wait for the deus ex machina ending of Marxian prophecy where the contradictions inherent in capitalism give rise to revolution. You as an individual can begin planting the seeds of revolution right now.

And right at this very moment you can begin experiencing this world as paradise. Even in the thick of this nightmarish dystopia, this moment right here and now is electrifyingly beautiful. You can learn to look at this human experience with new eyes, hear it with new ears, feel it with new flesh, in each and every moment. As fucked up as we know things are intellectually, there is nothing stopping us from learning to relish each moment of life on this amazing blue planet and to suck in its air like a passionate lover.

So there’s nothing to wait for. Not revolution, and not the beautiful world we want to build once we have wrested control away from our abusive rulers. Both revolution and beauty are available to you right now. Don’t waste another second of your life waiting for them.

You’re not at the bus stop, you’re on the bus. Get to work, angel.

[Sunrise Movement 🌅 @sunrisemvmt]

In a historic decision, President Biden has permanently withdrawn 625+ million acres of the outer continental shelf from future oil and gas drilling. This is a massive win for young people and frontline communities. Here’s why it matters: 👇

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Tony Benn’s 5 critical questions:

“What power have you got?
Where did you get it from?
In whose interests do you exercise it?
To whom are you accountable?
How do we get rid of you?

And if you can’t get rid of the people who govern you, you don’t live in a democratic system.”

[EthicalRenewal - Rational morality @EthicalRenewal]

January 2025
Litmus tests for your Ethical IQ (0/10):

You get 0 out of 10 eIQ points if you believe:
👉1srae1’s assault on Ga2a is ‘self-defence’
👉US or UK are functioning democracies
👉The Guardian and BBC are left-wing
👉We have a free market economy
👉NATO is a defensive organisation
👉ISIS running Syria is better than the Taliban running Afghanistan
👉Biden/Trump are better people than Putin or Xi Jinping
👉The US/NATO had no causal role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
👉Rich toffs and/or oligarchs are fighting your corner
👉Climate change does not threaten our civilisation/species

You get 10 out of 10 eIQ points if you believe:
👉Power corrupts
👉The powerful lie
👉Wealth corrupts
👉The wealthy serve their interests not yours
👉The powerful serve their interests not yours
👉ALL mainstream media has been co-opted by the powerful or the wealthy
👉All information provided by the powerful or the wealthy or their media is unreliable
👉You and your children are not safe under our current system
👉Our politics/media need radical and rapid transformation or we’re all f*cked

[Zarah Sultana MP @zarahsultana]

The world’s richest man & insecure nepo-baby shouldn’t be allowed to dictate UK politics.

Yet some politicians act like sycophants & his unhinged outbursts dominate news, while our democracy is serially undermined.

We must break the super-rich’s grip on our media & politics.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Here’s a quick roundup of highlights from research we published in 2024, on unequal exchange, ecosocialism, and post-capitalist transformation.

As always, free PDFs are available via the link at the end of the thread. 🧵

[Alex Barnicoat @AlexBarnicoat_]

🚨🇬🇧

KIER STARMER WORKS FOR ISRAEL?

As Keir Starmer is trending, it is a good time to expose who he actually works for.

Hint: It's not the UK

In this thread, I expose his ties to Israel and how he regularly takes orders from them.

(🧵 1/6)

[missfalasteenia @missfalsteenia]

May 2025 be the year we see Israel’s downfall

[Prof. Steve Keen @ProfSteveKeen]

Why neoclassical economics has failed - Book summary of The New Economics: A Manifesto https://t.co/jXhVOJhMXL via @YouTube

[The Muslim Vote @themuslimvoteuk]

While Western media goes hysterical over a Saudi zionist in Germany:

Three weapons facilities have been shut down in the UK.

The company behind them? Israel's largest arms manufacturer.

This is the story mainstream media refuses to cover (and the dark reason behind it):🧵