Puppet MastersS


Handcuffs

It's time former CIA Director John Brennan answered for his role in the Russiagate hoax

Former CIA Director John Brennan
© Leah Millis / ReutersFormer CIA Director John Brennan arrives for a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on "Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections" on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., May 16, 2018.
The U.S. attorney investigating the origins of the intelligence community's investigation into Russia's 2016 meddling, and President Trump's connection to it, has a new target: former CIA Director John Brennan.

John Durham, the federal prosecutor hand-picked by Attorney General William Barr to look into misconduct in the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, has reportedly asked for Brennan's emails, call logs, and other documents, according to three officials briefed on the matter.

The report confirms what has long been speculated: The deep-rooted irresponsibility uncovered by Inspector General Michael Horowitz extends far beyond the FBI, and Brennan had something to do with it. In fact, it's possible Brennan led the FBI down the rabbit hole that was the Russia hoax, feeding the agency foreign intelligence while distancing himself from the problematic Steele dossier.

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Dollar

Brad Polumbo: USMCA trade deal is a pile of hot garbage

pelosi and trump
If you want the United States to get richer, our economy to become more efficient, and jobs to proliferate across borders, you should support expanding international free trade with our neighbors, Canada and Mexico. This means you should not support the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement just passed by the House of Representatives. The hodgepodge of new trade restrictions and updates to trade policies is commonly known as the USMCA.

The USMCA trade deal was negotiated by the Trump administration as a replacement for the 1994 deal known as NAFTA, which eliminated tariffs, taxes on imports, for most products between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. The USMCA is a purported "upgrade" to NAFTA, and it mostly preserves the underlying zero-tariff framework. But many of the changes it does make are anti-trade, making its net value not an improvement from the current NAFTA status quo.

One needs to understand why free trade is a good thing in the first place. It's one of the rare issues where economists, liberal and conservative alike, pretty much all agree: Free trade is a net positive for all involved and makes the world richer.

This is because of an economic principle known as "comparative advantage." It's jargon that essentially means that unfettered trade allows all countries to focus their production on the industries where they are relatively more efficient. The net result is a more efficient economy for all, resulting in lower prices, increased employment, and renewed prosperity.

In his seminal work Basic Economics, the famed economist Thomas Sowell excoriated restrictions on trade, writing that "free trade provides economic benefits to all countries simultaneously, so trade restrictions reduce the efficiency of all countries simultaneously, lowering standards of living, without producing the increased employment that was hoped for."

This is why the USMCA is hot garbage: It would do more to restrict trade than liberalize it on balance, thus causing the kind of decline in efficiency and quality of life Sowell predicted.

Yoda

Adam Schiff should be expelled over the Ukraine hoax

schiff
© Alex Wong / Associated PressRep. Adam Schiff "presiding" over the Democrats sham impeachment hearings
From the start, Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, offered seemingly conflicting accounts of his office's alleged contact with the so-called whistleblower, as well as the timing of his knowledge of the so-called whistleblower's complaint.

Schiff also infamously misrepresented Trump's phone call with Ukraine's president during a public hearing meant to justify the impeachment inquiry, thereby misleading the country in a manner that even CNN's "fact-checker" found to be egregious.

And in a scandal almost entirely ignored by the news media, a staffer for Schiff's House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence took a trip to Ukraine sponsored by a Burisma-funded think-tank just days after the so-called whistleblower officially filed his August 12 complaint after first interacting with Schiff's office. Burisma, of course, is the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

Bullseye

China's special envoy to Syria: 'Who has given the Americans the right to be in Syria?'

us soldiers syria
© AFP
China's special envoy for Syria says the United States' pretext for extending its military presence in the Arab country, namely to protect Syrian oil fields, is untenable.

"Who have given the Americans the right to do this? And, at whose invitation is the US protecting Syria's oil fields?" Xie Xiaoyan said at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday.

"Let's think the other way around: will the US allow Syria to send troops to US territory to protect oil fields there?" he said.

In late October, Washington reversed an earlier decision to pull out all of its troops from northeastern Syria, announcing the deployment of about 500 soldiers to the oil fields controlled by Kurdish forces in the Arab country.

Alarm Clock

Trump says trade deal with China to be signed 'very shortly'

trump xi
© AFP / Brendan Smialowski
President Donald Trump on Saturday said the United States and China would "very shortly" sign their so-called Phase One trade pact.

"We just achieved a breakthrough on the trade deal and we will be signing it very shortly," Trump said at a Turning Point USA event in Florida.

The Phase One deal was announced earlier this month as part of a bid to end the months-long tit-for-tat trade war between the world's two largest economies, which has roiled markets and hit global growth.

Under the deal, the United States would agree to reduce some tariffs in exchange for a big jump in Chinese purchases of American farm products.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last week the pact would be signed in early January, saying that the deal had already been translated and was just undergoing a technical "scrub."

Sherlock

The agents: Hidden evidence regarding Ukrainegate

ukrainegate
© Strategic Culture
On November 22nd, a 100-page Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) data-dump was made by the U.S. Department of State, to the Democratic-Party-aligned nonprofit "American Oversight," which had been founded in March 2017 by liberals (really by the main billionaires who fund the Democratic Party) after the 2016 Democratic electoral defeat (to Republican billionaires). The now Republican-headed U.S. State Department made as difficult as possible for news-media to pick up on and report about the contents of this dump; they did this by providing only a photographic image of each page, impossible on most systems to do any "Edit" "Find"; and also impossible to perform any "Edit" "Copy" "Paste" of any quotation from the document. Consequently, I made the first copy of that document to the Web Archive, in order to expedite its coming onscreen, and I am herewith pasting below an extended passage in the document, which I then manually transcribed from it, where President Trump's lawyer Rudolphe Giuliani, on January 23, 25, and 26, took depositions from both Viktor Shokin, whom Joe Biden had forced in April 2016 to be fired as Ukraine's Prosecutor General, and also from Yuriy Lutsenko, who replaced Shokin and thereby freed-up from the Obama Administration in 2016 a one-billion-dollar donation from America's taxpayers to the then-recently-installed-by-Obama anti-Russian Government of Ukraine.


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Light Sabers

Sleeping dragon no more: China about to replace US as strongest naval power and Washington is too late to stop it

china navy
© Global Look Press / Li GangFILE PHOTO: Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with representatives of the aircraft carrier unit and the manufacturer at a naval port in Sanya, south China's Hainan Province on December 17, 2019.
China might soon shift the world naval balance and unseat the US as the modern master of the seas. The process appears to already be under way, and there is little that Washington can do about stopping it.

Visibly shaken by what it has seen on a photo showing just one of China's military shipyards near Shanghai, the business magazine Forbes recently told its readers an alarming story about the "impressive rate" and "vast scale" of Chinese naval modernization.

The shipyard in question indeed appears to be an impressive sight to behold. There, one can see a total of nine newly constructed destroyers lined along the quay and docked in an inner shipyard basin. By contrast, the entire UK Royal Navy has a total of just six similar-class vessels, Forbes notes.

Comment: Sputnik reports that China may be lacking in trained pilots for its fighter jets and provides more details on the aircraft carrier:
The Shandong, China's first domestically-built aircraft carrier, entered into service on December 17 in South China's Hainan Province city of Sanya.
"The vessel, a souped up version of a Soviet-era Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier, was originally purported by Chinese state media to come equipped with 36 J-15 fighter jets, or three squadrons, and was touted to have a capacity which far surpassed that of Liaoning, China's first aircraft carrier, a Kuznetsov-class ship which Beijing purchased from Ukraine and then modified."
"Internally, Chinese sources claim, the ship is capable of handling up to 36 fighter jets, 12 more than Liaoning," science and technology magazine Popular Mechanics previously reported.

However, military experts who examined a recent public television broadcast of the Shandong say there were only enough PLAN fighter pilots in attendance to make up two complete J-15 squadrons.

"The standard ratio of carrier-based fighter jets to pilots is [2:3]," Beijing-based naval expert Li Jie told the South China Morning Post earlier this week. "The Shandong won't have many fighter jets because it is just entering its initial commissioning period."

An estimated 30 fighter jet pilots for the carrier's air wing were seen on the Tuesday China Central Television broadcast of Chinese President Xi Jinping commissioning the Shandong.

While Li appeared optimistic regarding the future of fighter jet numbers on the Shandong, military expert Zhou Chenming, also based out of Beijing, said the original estimate of three J-15 squadrons is not realistic. "The J-15 is quite big, and it's impossible for an aircraft carrier to only carry fighter jets," he expressed to the outlet.
In addition to the 24 J-15 fighters, the Shandong, also known as the Type 001A, is expected to carry an additional 24 aircraft that range from a J-15 electronic jamming variant to several different helicopters.

Zhou explained to the SCMP that "helicopters play a key role in alerting and watching take-off and launches of carrier-based fighter jets. They are also needed for rescues and other missions like transporting troops and equipment."
Additionally, the J-15 is regarded as the heaviest carrier-based fighter jet in active use - which possibly explains why PLAN's sole fighter jet has a much longer takeoff time on the Liaoning and Shandong than similar aircraft on US counterparts.
Measuring in at 24 meters long, the J-15 is longer by two meters when compared to the J-20, a proven plane that entered Chinese service in 2017. The practicality of the aircraft has long been questioned even by the Chinese media, which has in the past referred to the J-15 as a "flopping fish" due to it's limited usefulness to the service.

"The steam catapults on the US Nimitz-class aircraft carrier take about 45 seconds to launch an aircraft, but the ski-jump ramp takes 1½ to two minutes," Li told the SCMP. According to an unnamed source close to the Chinese Navy, a Nimitz-class ship can launch an estimated 40 jets in the time it takes 14 J-15 jets to take off from the Liaoning.



Target

Indian intelligence: Modi target of assassination plot at upcoming rally - Pakistan-based terror groups accused

PM Narendra Modi is scheduled to address a huge gathering organised by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on December 22 at Delhi's Ramlila Maidan, where he will speak about the Centre's move to regularise unauthorised colonies in the national capital.
Narendra Modi
Pakistan-based terror groups may be conspiring to target a rally of big political leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, later this week in New Delhi, an intelligence input on Friday suggested. The input states that Pakistan's Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) operatives are on the move to target the venue to hit PM Modi at Ramlila Maidan, where he is scheduled to address a huge gathering organised by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on December 22, about the Centre's move to regularise unauthorised colonies in Delhi.

In the wake of the terror threat, Special Protection Group (SPG) and the Delhi Police have been informed for fullproof security arrangements. Both the SPG and Delhi Police are responsible for the security at the Ramlila Maidan. The Prime Minister along with BJP Chief Ministers and cabinet ministers will be present at the rally.

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From planning attacks in the Valley to execute killings, Pakistan and ISI designate specific tasks to top three terrorist organisations


Star of David

Not content with crippling Palestinian protesters, Israeli snipers now target Gazans' eyes - Over 50 permanently blinded

israel children shot eye blind
© GettyTwelve-year-old Mohammed Al-Najar was shot in his eye by Israeli soldiers [Getty]
To date, Gaza's Ministry of Health reports that 50 protesters have been shot in the eye by Israeli soldiers since the demonstrations began last March leaving them permanently blind.

Media coverage and social media posts went wild when Palestinian photojournalist Muath Amarneh was blinded in his left eye after he was hit by a rubber bullet while covering a protest in the West Bank.

However, Amarneh was far from unique; Israeli snipers targeting participants in Gaza's weekly Great Return March protests have aimed for the legs - and eyes. To date, Gaza's Ministry of Health reports that 50 protesters have been shot in the eye since the demonstrations began March 30, 2018 - leaving them permanently blind.

Sherlock

Latvian government says it flagged 'suspicious' Hunter Biden payments in 2016

Obama Biden
Obama and Biden
As the U.S. presidential race began roaring to life in 2016, authorities in the former Soviet republic of Latvia flagged a series of " suspicious" financial transactions to Hunter Biden and other colleagues at a Ukrainian natural gas company and sought Kiev's help investigating, according to documents and interviews.

The Feb. 18, 2016 alert to Ukraine came from the Latvian prosecutorial agency responsible for investigating money laundering, and it specifically questioned whether Vice President Joe Biden's younger son and three other officials at Burisma Holdings were the potential beneficiaries of suspect funds.

"The Office for Prevention of Laundering of Proceeds Derived from Criminal Activity ... is currently investigating suspicious activity of Burisma Holdings Limited," the Latvian agency also known as the FIU wrote Ukraine's financial authorities.

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