Puppet MastersS


Wolf

Ukraine 'condemns persecution of journalists' in Belarus as it raids press and opposition party offices at home


RT
Mon, 22 Feb 2021 21:04 UTC
Kiev
© Reuters / Valentyn OgirenkoFILE PHOTO: A rally in solidarity with Belarusian opposition in Ukrainian capital, Kiev.
Ukraine has condemned a series of searches in Belarus targeting journalists and rights activists, but the scolding comes amid Kiev's own full-blown crackdown on opposition press and politicians at home - fully supported by the US.

Strongly denouncing the recent events in Belarus "where authorities continue (to) pressure and persecute journalists," Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko lashed out at Minsk in a statement on Sunday.

"The entire democratic world recognizes mass media as the fourth estate and does not interfere with their professional activities. Attacks on freedom of speech, endangering the lives and well-being of journalists in Belarus, constitute outright violations of these basic principles," the statement reads.

Comment: Similar moves are occurring in Latvia: Latvia threatens fines for citizens watching recently banned Russian TV channels

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Bad Guys

Biden claims arms freeze on Saudi Arabia as Lockheed signs 'major defence & security' deal with Kingdom

James Tweedie
Sputnik
Sun, 21 Feb 2021 21:12 UTC
jet lockheed
© REUTERS / Peter Nicholls
US President Joe Biden announced a halt to arms sales and operational support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen — which began when he was vice-president to Barack Obama in 2015 — earlier this month, followed by the removal of Yemen's Ansarallah movement from the US list of terrorist organisations.

US President Joe Biden's vaunted freeze on arms sales to Gulf Arab kingdoms has been belied by a deal between Lockheed Martin and Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) announced a joint venture with the US aerospace and defence firm on Sunday to develop Riyadh's "domestic defence and security capabilities".

Comment: Despite Biden's claim that he won't support the war on Yemen, either his administration doesn't want to stop the slaughter, or it can't, either way, "by their fruits": Why Victoria Nuland is dangerous and should not be confirmed as Biden's Under Secretary

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X

Trump's done playing nice: Reports confirm he is about to declare 'war' on Republicans

Kyle Becker
Becker News
Sun, 21 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Trump
© Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesFormer US President Donald Trump
Donald Trump is ready to go to "war" with the Republican Party.

Multiple reports from senior advisers and members of Trump's inner circle indicate that the former president is done playing "nice" with the GOP establishment.

Politico reported:
"According to three people familiar with the planning, Trump will soon begin vetting candidates at Mar-a-Lago who are eager to fulfill his promise to exact vengeance upon incumbent Republicans who've scorned him, and to ensure every open GOP seat in the 2022 midterms has a MAGA-approved contender vying for it.

"Trump already has received dozens of requests from prospective candidates seeking to introduce themselves and nab his endorsement, and formal meetings with them could begin as early as March.

"Now that Trump has survived his second Senate impeachment trial, he has shifted his focus to post-presidential activism — a venture mostly bankrolled by his new leadership PAC, Save America, which had $31 million in its coffers at the start of this month."
Senior Adviser Jason Miller also disclosed the plans for Trump to screen candidate endorsements on Sunday.

Comment: See also:



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Footprints

Google fires top AI ethics researcher Margaret Mitchell

Megan Rose Dickey
TechCrunch
Fri, 19 Feb 2021 05:56 UTC
Margaret Mitchell
© unknownGoogle's Ethics AI lead Margaret Mitchell
Google has fired Margaret Mitchell, the founder and former co-lead of the company's ethical AI team. Mitchell announced the news via a tweet.

Google confirmed Mitchell's firing in a statement to TechCrunch; Google said:
After conducting a review of this manager's conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.
In January, Google revoked corporate access from AI ethicist Margaret Mitchell for reportedly using automated scripts to find examples of mistreatment of Dr. Timnit Gebru, according to Axios. Gebru says she was fired from Google while Google has maintained that she resigned.

Comment: Google employees note and respond to the firings:
Gebru's termination kicked up a storm of controversy among Google employees well beyond Mitchell, prompting an open letter signed by no fewer than 2,695 Googlers and some 4,300 "academic, industry and civil society supporters" demanding the company explain its decision to fire the researcher.

"The termination is an act of retaliation against Dr. Gebru, and it heralds danger for people working for ethical and just AI - especially black people and people of color - across Google," the letter said.


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2 + 2 = 4

Best of the Web: British Covid modellers predict 'severe flu next winter because lockdowns prevented usual herd immunity'

Sarah Newey
The Telegraph
Sat, 20 Feb 2021 16:09 UTC

Comment: ...thus exposing the fact that they have done the same for Covid-19: blocked natural herd immunity!

Clearly, they know that's what they've done. It's still mysterious as to WHY they insisted on doing so...


Netherlands lockdown
© REUTERS/Piroschka van de WouwFILE PHOTO: Tables and chairs are stacked on an empty shopping street as Netherlands is set to extend the lockdown continues in Rotterdam, Netherlands January 12, 2021.
Experts have warned the world may face a dramatic resurgence of flu next winter, after social distancing measures cut the virus to levels not seen for over a century.


Comment: With a rather dubious 98% drop in flu cases, it's more likely that the flu was in fact recorded as coronavirus.


Scientists fear that falling immunity levels to influenza - normally sustained by seasonal circulation of the virus - could now pave the way for one of the worst flu outbreaks for years.

"If I had to gamble on it, then I would guess that we are likely to get a more severe epidemic in the coming winter - assuming restrictions are fully lifted by then," said Prof John Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a member of the government's Sage committee of scientific advisors.

Comment: It's likely that all illnesses will be more severe after 18 months of mask wearing, little exercise, fresh air and sunlight, excessive hygiene, an increasingly anxious, stressed and depressed population, and to add insult to injury, masses of people injected with experimental vaccines: COVID Mass Vaccination Experiment: Prepare For The Worst With This Health Protocol

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Info

Ocasio-Cortez visits Texas after raising millions


Yahoo! News
Sat, 20 Feb 2021 21:59 UTC
ocasio-cortez texas relief
After she helped raise more than three million dollars in assistance across the state for Texas relief organizations, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited the Houston Food Bank that is working to aid those in need. (Feb. 20)

Video Transcript

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: When disaster strikes, this is not just an issue for Texans, this is an issue for our entire country. And our whole country needs to come and rally together behind the needs of Texans all across the state. Disasters don't strike everyone equally. When you already have so many families in the state and across the country that are on the brink, that can't even afford an emergency to begin with, when you have a disaster like this, it can just set people back for years, not just for days. And so we have tragedy in this state.

Comment: You can almost see the virtue oozing out of her pores. A cynical person might say AOC is sending a message to Texas Senator Ted Cruz here, (who she seems convinced tried to murder her), or at the very least, trying to upstage him.

See also:

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Vader

Merrick Garland vows to target 'white supremacists' (Trump supporters) as attorney general

Martin Pengelly
The Guardian
Sun, 21 Feb 2021 13:11 UTC
Merrick Garland
© Kevin Lamarque/ReutersMerrick Garland speaks in Wilmington, Delaware, in January.
At his Senate hearing on Monday, attorney general nominee Merrick Garland will pledge to prosecute "white supremacists and others" who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January, in support of Donald Trump's attempt to overturn his election defeat.

The pledge was contained in Garland's opening testimony for the session before the Senate judiciary committee, released on Saturday night.

"If confirmed," Garland said, 'I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on 6 January - a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government."

Comment: More from Law&Crime:
Feds Are Investigating Capitol Rioters' Connections to Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones and Political Operative Roger Stone: Report

Officials with the Department of Justice and the FBI are investigating the role right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and political operative Roger Stone played in the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., the Washington Post reported Saturday.

Several people familiar with the investigation told the Post that authorities are looking into both the now-pardoned Trump advisor and the Infowars host as part of a wider examination of the Capitol rioters' "paths to radicalization." Although criminal charges against Stone and Jones have not been ruled out, it appears that the investigation may be particularly beneficial in helping prosecutors reveal the motivations and intentions of those charged in the insurrection.

...

According to the Post, video from the Capitol depicted Jones saying, "Let's not fight the police and give the system what they want." It later showed him apparently trying to trick rioters into leaving the Capitol building by telling them Trump was about to give another speech.
See also: Biden's AG pick Garland to prioritize civil rights, domestic terror

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Bad Guys

The greater danger of Israeli provocations in Syria

Brian Berletic
New Eastern Outlook
Thu, 18 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Israeli airforce
Continued airstrikes carried out by Israeli warplanes in Syria presents - at face value - an obvious and persistent threat to Syria. In a wider context, the threat runs much deeper and extends to Syria's allies in Tehran.

Israel has been an eager participant in the US-led proxy war on Syria beginning in 2011. It has provided safe-haven and support for Western-backed militants along and within its borders. It has also at various junctures carried out airstrikes in Syria in a bid to impede Damascus' ability to reestablish peace and stability within Syria's borders.

And according to US policy papers written before and after the beginning of the 2011 proxy war against Syria - Washington had long ago slated Israel a role in undermining and aiding in the overthrow of the Syrian government - and admittedly as part of a wider strategy to isolate and eventually target Iran.

The most likely current goal is to continue ratcheting up tensions with Iran - a nation that has committed significant resources and manpower toward the goal of stabilizing Syria and ending the highly destructive conflict.

Comment: See also:

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Bizarro Earth

Next up: Central bank-created global depression

Charles Hugh Smith
of two minds.com
Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Wall Street
This madness is now global, so next up: global depression.

A few days after the Covid pandemic was officially announced last year on 1/23/20, I prepared a chart projecting the course of the pandemic. In my view it still stands, with two updates: "vaccines months away" has been updated to "mass vaccinations months away" and "Wave 2" has been updated to "Wave 4." (see chart below)

The end-point--global depression--is up next. Very few are prepared for this eventuality because they put their faith in 1) central banks pursuing an insane folly and 2) a fragile, brittle global economy that was already teetering on the edge of destabilization before the pandemic.

Here's the central banks' insane folly in a nutshell: to create new enterprises and jobs, we'll blow the world's greatest speculative bubble into an even greater speculative bubble. So in other words, we'll further enrich the top layer of the Financial Aristocracy who own the vast majority of the assets we're pushing to the moon, and by some inexplicable magic, adding trillions of dollars, yuan, yen and euros to the wealth of this elite will somehow launch a thousand new thriving enterprises which will magically hire 500,000 new workers every month.

Comment: The financialization and bubble-creation of an array of markets will be corrected sooner or later. One would do well to prepare as much as possible for what seems like an eventual super-crash:

See also:

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V

Techno-Censorship: The slippery slope from censoring 'disinformation' to silencing truth

John W. Whitehead, Nisha Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
Wed, 17 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
1984
© WCAI/KJN
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."― George Orwell

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties. Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

Comment: See also:



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