Puppet MastersS


Network

Canada's Shopify, BlackBerry develop COVID-19 contact tracing app with local governments

blackberry canada
© REUTERS/Mark BlinchA Blackberry logo hangs behind a Canadian flag at their offices on the day of their annual general meeting for shareholders in Waterloo, Canada June 23, 2015.
Canadian technology firms Shopify Inc and Blackberry Ltd have been working with provincial and federal governments on a coronavirus contact tracing app expected to launch in July, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Thursday.

The app is set to roll out nationally after a launch in Ontario, Canada's most populous province, currently slated for July 2.

Test-and-trace programs have emerged as an important tool to identify and contain the spread of the coronavirus, becoming more urgent as Canadian provinces gradually reopen their economies after three months of lockdown. On Thursday, Canada officially hit 100,000 cases.

Comment: The app announcement is receiving some sharp criticism on Twitter:





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Cell Phone

Trump retweets his critic Max Blumenthal, who changes handle to slogans like 'US sanctions kill kids' for Trump audience to read

trump blumenthal tweet
© (L) Twitter; (R) Reuters / KEVIN LAMARQUE
On Thursday, followers of Donald Trump's Twitter feed were able to read scathing criticisms of the US president, thanks to a careless retweet of a post by journalist Max Blumenthal, who seized the chance to weaponize his name.

The trolling session of the US troll-in-chief started with Blumenthal attacking former US National Security Advisor John Bolton and the left-wing figures lionizing him for writing a book that makes his former boss look bad.

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Che Guevara

SOTT Focus: Carlson: A Democrat-backed Mob Has Taken Power by Force. Republicans Rolled Over, so Why Bother Voting For Them?

tucker carlson republicans voting
Here's a segment from Carlson's last show of the week (Friday 19th June).

He has been batting them out of the park for some time now - especially since the Establishment-approved 'color revolution' kicked off in the US at the end of May.

While Conservative Black activist Candace Owens encourages Black Americans to 'leave the Democrat plantation' and vote Republican instead, the real death-knell for the 'forces of permanent revolution' would occur if or when ALL Americans 'walk off the entire plantation'.

Lambasting the failure of Republican and 'conservative' leaders to stand up to the mob, Carlson concludes this segment by recommending to his (considerable) conservative audience that they no longer vote for the GOP. This crisis, he says, has "exposed them for who they are. And now it's time to find new leaders."


Eye 1

'Arch-Neocon' Bolton becomes democrats' latest 'ally' in rush to scorn Trump - Journo

bolton trump
© REUTERS / LEAH MILLIS
Democrats have been reacting angrily to accounts in former national security adviser John Bolton's new book as they attempt to score "cheap, short-term political points" against US President Donald Trump, Ben Norton, a journalist with The Grayzone, told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear Thursday.

The upcoming memoir, due out next week, is titled "The Room Where It Happened" and is described by its publisher Simon & Schuster as "the book Donald Trump doesn't want you to read." One particular passage occupying news headlines this week alleges that Trump told Chinese President Xi Jinping during a June 2019 summit dinner that his chances of reelection could be improved if Beijing increased its agricultural purchases from American farmers.

"Unfortunately, this is a continuation of a trend," Norton told host Brian Becker.

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War Whore

Cynicism and warmongering

Salisbury attack
© AP Photo / Andrew Matthews
The BBC plumbed the depths of hypocrisy in dressing up the final episode of the Salisbury Poisonings as a homage to Dawn Sturgess while systematically lying about the facts of her death, yet again to cover up the implausibility of the official narrative.

As I noted yesterday, the BBC drama appeared to show Charlie Rowley fishing the perfume bottle out of the charity bin at least two months ahead of when this really occurred, to make it more plausible that it had been dropped in there after the alleged attack on the Skripals. The question of how it had managed to sit in a charity bin for three months, when that bin was emptied regularly, was thus dodged.

The next alteration of a timeline by the BBC is just as crucial. The BBC had the discovery of the perfume bottle containing novichok happening before Sturgess's death, whereas in fact the perfume bottle was not "discovered" until 11 July 2018, three days after Dawn's death. The extraordinary thing about this is that the police had been searching Rowley's flat intensively for "novichok" for over a week before coming across a perfume bottle sitting on the kitchen counter. As they were specifically looking for a phial of liquid, you would have thought that might have caught the eye somewhat sooner.

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Attention

Beware the hijacking of US protests into a 'Color Revolution'

george floyd protests
The May 25th killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota shocked the world and set off mass protests against racism and police brutality in dozens of cities from the mid-western United States to the European Union, all in the midst of a global pandemic.

In the Twin Cities, what began as spontaneous, peaceful demonstrations against the local police quickly transformed into vandalism, arson and looting after the use of rubber bullets and chemical irritants by law enforcement against the protesters, while the initial incitement for the riots was likely the work of apparent agent provocateurs among the marchers.

Within days, the unrest had spread to cities across the country including the nation's capital, with US President Donald Trump threatening to invoke the slavery-era Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military and National Guard on American soil, federal powers not used since the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King case.

The debate over the catalyst for the uprising into its period of lawlessness has drawn a range of theories. The suspicious placement of pallets of bricks in the proximity of numerous protest sites have spurred rumors of sabotage by everything from white supremacist groups to "Antifa" to law enforcement itself.

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Propaganda

No memes, no chill? Twitter flags Trump's fake 'CNN clip' intended as satire as 'manipulated media'

meme video trump banned twitter
© Twitter / President Donald Trump / screenshotTwitter's latest "manipulated media" tag on a tweet from the president.
Twitter has again slapped a "manipulated media" tag on a tweet from US President Donald Trump - a meme video mocking CNN - prompting cheers from the #Resistance, which apparently missed what many saw as an "obvious joke."

Shared to Twitter by the president on Thursday evening, the post played off an old viral video showing two toddlers, one black and one white, as they run to embrace one another. Parodying the adorable clip, Trump's tweet features a mock CNN chyron captioned "Terrified toddler runs from racist baby."

Twitter, however, apparently decided that netizens would have a hard time telling actual CNN news coverage from the satirical clip, warning users that the video may have been "manipulated." Indeed.

Comment: It's blatant hypocrisy for anyone with eyes to see it. Either the TDS mob is disingenuously pretending the video is meant to be serious, and not a parody, or they literally have no sense of humor. It's unlikely the video received the same treatment when it was posted by anyone other than Trump.

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Bad Guys

Rumors of wars: China, India, North Korea, South Korea, Israel and Turkey all move toward war

missile launch
As if we didn't have enough already going on in 2020, now we are facing the possibility that several regional wars may erupt. China and India had both been pouring troops into a disputed border region, and now there has been an incident where they were actually killing each other. On the Korean peninsula, North Korea just blew up "a joint liaison office" that it had used for talks with the South Korean government. And in the Middle East, Turkey is warning of grave consequences if Israel goes ahead with a plan to annex portions of Judea and Samaria. If a major regional war erupts at even one of these flashpoints, it will be another devastating blow for a global economy that is already imploding, and there is a very strong probability that the U.S. and other major western powers could be drawn into the conflict.

No Entry

No breakthroughs from US/China meeting to ease tensions

Pompeo met with China's Yang Jiechi.
On Wednesday, Pompeo met with China's Yang Jiechi.

He holds several high-level positions in Beijing, including CPC Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission director.

Both officials met in Hawaii, the meeting requested by Pompeo at at a time of dismal bilateral relations that risk rupture or possible confrontation.

Still, bilateral communications are better than cutting them off altogether despite no chance of resolving major bilateral differences.

For the US, they're all about China's unstoppable development, heading toward becoming the world's leading economy, already a prominent nation on the world stage.''

It's why the vast majority of nations want normalized ties, including most European ones.

The problem of dealing with the US diplomatically is that it doesn't negotiate. It demands, wanting other countries to bend to its will, even when harming their own interests.

USA

Warmonger Bolton paints Trump a peacenik

Wrestler Donald Trump
© FacebookEmbellished image of Donald Trump during his days as a World Wrestling Entertainment participant.
A career warmonger becomes the darling of limousine liberals just because he's ridiculing the president of the United States.

The current, convoluted spectacle in the hallowed halls of Empire is worthy of the most demented WWE scripts - as everything about Donald Trump has to be understood as a pile-up of professional wrestling plots. Here we have former national security advisor John Bolton playing The Undertaker with Trump trying to cast himself as The Rock.

Still, when we see the full 4K picture of the supposed leadership of the United States government, plus the Beltway extensions, mired in a swampland crammed with double-dealing vipers, it looks more like a catfight.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro - a rabid China demonizer - actually came up with the best description of what John Bolton is up to with his supposedly tell-all $2 million book deal: this is the DC swamp's "revenge porn."

Bolton's 592-page memoir, to be published next Tuesday, was conveniently leaked in advance by Simon & Schuster to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and an extract has been published by the Wall Street Journal.

Bolton wrote, "A president may not misuse the national government's legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guise of national interest."

A New York Times hack wrote, "Mr. Bolton sought to use his 17 months in the White House to accomplish policy goals that were important to him [italics mine], like withdrawing the United States from a host of international agreements he considers flawed, like the Iran nuclear accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and others."

So a certified warmonger - his track record fully documented - is entitled to get away with accomplishing "policy goals important to him" even as he accuses the President of equalizing his "own personal interest" with the "national interest."

What really matters here, for the self-described paper of record seems to be the unique chance to quote at will an insider source that simply cannot be checked for accuracy. The fact that Bolton is no more reliable as a source than any DC swamp peddler? That is conveniently shoved under the carpet.

The Washington Post, for its part, gloated that this is "the most substantive, critical dissection of the president from an administration insider so far," as it portrays Trump as an "erratic" and "stunningly uninformed" commander in chief.

The Post also takes Bolton at his word, as he describes Trump relying on "personal instinct" and playing for "reality TV showmanship." At least Bolton seems to have a vague clue about the WWE's preeminence - much as he got a clue about the obvious: The one thing that really matters above all for Trump is re-election.