Puppet Masters
The mighty labour, late night flights and all, has brought forth a mouse. She gave it her best shot but she has now been decisively rejected by record parliamentary majorities on two occasions. In any normal polity the leader at least would already be gone.
But as she croaked - it is her misfortune that laryngitis strikes her at the least opportune times - her determination to carry on regardless one side of the Commons laughed at the comedy of it all and most of the other half sank into their seats.
The timing of Ross's ban, however, is more than a bit suspect.
"Learn to code" went viral in January after hundreds of journalists were let go from the likes of BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, and were promptly given the same career advice that left-leaning outlets gave to middle American coal workers who had lost their jobs.
After several complaints, Twitter deemed "learn to code" abusive behavior - suspending wide swaths of users who participated in the running joke.
Those banned in February included the Daily Caller's editor-in-chief Geoffrey Ingersoll. After he appealed the decision, Twitter admitted they had "made an error."
Comment: Perhaps it was a little bit from column 'A' and a little bit from column 'B'. See also:
- 'Offended' journalist has Twitter suspend user after being faux-outraged at 'learn to code' career advice
- Liberal d ark money org Fund for a Better Future funneled $2m to group working with Trump dossier fabricators Fusion GPS, Steele
- CEO Jack Dorsey admits Twitter was 'too aggressive' in targeting conservatives
"The Venezuelan National Assembly has decreed the suspension of crude exports to Cuba following the collapse of the national electrical grid. Insurance companies and flag carriers that facilitate these give-away shipments to Cuba are now on notice," Bolton tweeted.
Cuba is the closest regional ally of Venezuela and a major importer of its crude. The "on-notice" tweet is part of the latest escalation between Venezuelan and the United States after Washington slapped a fresh round of sanctions on PDVSA in January following Nicolas Maduro's inauguration for a second term as president.
Comment: Raising fuel price is one of the electoral issue in the Indian general elections scheduled for the months of April and May 2019. It is unlikely that India will yield to US pressure until the elections are concluded. See also:
Elliott Abrams orders India to stop buying oil from Venezuela 'or else The Mighty USA will sanction you!'

Venezuela's Communications and Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez at a press conference at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela October 17, 2018.
Venezuelan Communication and Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez says it is "false" that there were 79 deaths in hospitals across Venezuela as a result of the country's electrical attack as many mainstream media are reporting.
"Seventy nine deaths. This is false," declared Rodriguez in a Friday press conference.
Comment:
Venezuela - Three Total Blackouts In Three Days - Government Presumes U.S. Cyberattack
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After the first outage the government of Venezuela said that it was caused by a cyberattack on the automated control system but gave no further details:Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez said Maduro's government planned to bring "proof" of US involvement in the blackout to a UN Human Rights envoy who is set to visit the country in the coming days....
The Venezuelan government should contact the Russian cybersecurity specialists at Kaspersky Lab who are well known for detecting U.S. produced malware like the one used for the Stuxnet attack on Iran's uranium enrichment plant. Kaspersky is highly respected in the international cybersecurity scene. Should it confirm that a U.S. attack malware caused the problem the U.S. will find it difficult to deny.
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In 2003, during the northeast blackout, Mr. Abrams was a special assistant to President G.W. Bush. He did not blame "the mismanagement, the economic policies and the sheer corruption" the Bush regime when that much larger outage happened.
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It is quite possible that the U.S. is causing the outages in Venezuela's network. The second total outage yesterday and the third today could be explained by a malware hidden within the control system of the whole network or in some important side components. It took the Iranian government months to find the malware that again and again crashed its uranium centrifuges. Simply restarting the control systems did not help.
The U.S. is well know for cyberattacks as well as for attacks on electricity networks. In 2012 it knocked Syria off the internet when it 'bricked' the central router in Syria while attempting to install malware. In 2015 it systematically bombed Syria's power plants.
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A U.S. cyberattack on Venezuela's power grid will have taken some time to implement. One first has to understand a system before one can sabotage it without leaving obvious fingerprints. If the U.S. is involved in these incidents, it is likely that it prepared for this months if not years ago.
Attacks on electricity networks affect the civilian population. Hospitals are hard to run without electricity. Lives are endangered. Both , the Obama and the Trump administration, rejected international attempts to ban cyberattacks that "indiscriminate or systemic harm to individuals and critical infrastructure":The U.S. also rejected an agreement that would ban cyber manipulation of elections. The given reasons are of interest:All members of the European Union signed the agreement. Australia and Turkey joined the United States in declining.
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Israel, which along with the United States conducted the most sophisticated cyberattack in history, the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear enrichment program, also declined to sign.[T]he United States has interfered in foreign elections before, including Italy in the 1940s and Iran and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s, and some officials say that no American president should be forced to give up that tool if it could prevent a war.
Similarly, the Pentagon worries about commitments to avoid using cyberattacks as a prelude to military action. The United States had a secret program, code-named "Nitro Zeus," which called for turning off the power grid in much of Iran if the two countries had found themselves in a conflict over Iran's nuclear program. Such a use of cyberweapons is now a key element in war planning by all of the major world powers.
The Tory government lost a second crucial vote on Tuesday evening when a deal agreed with Brussels on how Britain would part ways with the European Union later this month was defeated. The EU agreed to slightly alter the deal compared to the previous version that was voted down in January, but it was still a far cry from what the British legislator would be willing to accept.
With just over two weeks left before the March 29 deadline, Britain is already late in bracing itself for the Brexit impact, according to Francesco Rizzuto, professor of European law at the Edge Hill University.
Comment: See also:
- Still Confused About Brexit? It's Actually Pretty Simple...
- Brexit: A Political Farce Based on a Public Lie
- NewsReal: Will Globalists' War on Nationalism Lead to Bloody Revolution?
- NewsReal: California Wildfires, Climate Change, And The Impossible Brexit
The option of a no-deal was first ruled out by MPs after an amendment originally tabled by Caroline Spelman passed by a close vote of 312-308.
The Spelman amendment says the House "rejects the United Kingdom leaving the European Union without a withdrawal agreement and a framework for the future relationship."
The MPs then voted on the main motion, as amended, passing it with an even greater margin of 43, with 321 voting in favor and 278 against.
Comment: Yes, our title is not explicitly what they did. But it's what they did.
It's all one big manipulation to restore the 'dictatorship of the parliamentariat' from 'those populist hordes who dare defy us'. They endlessly vote about voting, as if their form of democracy is in any way aligned with the popular will.
As we said on June 22nd 2016, the UK isn't going anywhere. The only way it is, is through fundamental change. Look to France for an idea as to how difficult it is to get politicians to listen to reason these days.
The origins of this pernicious, panic-inducing pestilence remain shrouded in mystery, but epidemiologists now believe that it began in the Spring of 2015, shortly after the resignation of Ed Milliband as UK Labour Party leader, and went global in the Summer of 2016, right around the time of the Brexit referendum and the nomination of Donald Trump. (Although the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, to date, there exists no conclusive proof that Russian bio-weapons designers cooked up the virus in a hotel in Salisbury and sprayed it onto anyone's doorknob.)
Virologists are working around the clock to map the genome of this scurrilous scourge, about which very little is known, other than that it has a sudden onset, and attacks the language center of the brain, causing the sufferer to express opinions about "Zionism," "globalism," "the Israel lobby," "banks," and other code words for "Jews." Patients appear to be unaware that they are spouting these anti-Semitic code words until they are told they are by the corporate media, or their colleagues, or some random account on Twitter, at which point their symptoms alter dramatically, and they suffer a series of petit mal seizures, causing them to repeatedly apologize for unintentionally advocating the extermination of the entire Jewish people and the establishment of a worldwide Nazi Reich.
The US Ambassador to Germany reportedly threatened the hosting country this week with a number of consequences for dealing with China, including withholding US intelligence information. The move was criticized by Schroeder, who is a long-time critic of Washington's habit of using political leverage on Germany.
"This is such blatant extortion," the politician said on Tuesday at an event organized by the business newspaper Handelsblatt in Berlin. Washington basically said: "Since you don't comply, we will not share with you," he added.
Comment: In threatening and sanctioning Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Turkey, some in the EU and all those who dare to do business with them, US belligerence is increasingly losing it's bite:
- China's Global Leadership List
- Finian Cunningham: Why China's over the moon
- Serbia greenlights expansion of Russia's Turkish Stream gas pipeline
- Demented US foreign policy pushes Germany into mutually beneficial deals with China and Russia

A burnt truck, used to transport humanitarian aid, is seen on the Francisco de Paula Santander cross-border bridge between Colombia and Venezuela, in Cucuta, Colombia, February 24, 2019.
Not once have we seen those Colin Powell vial moments as Washington's warmongers use unbacked claims or events as a rallying cry to drum up support for whatever regime-change operation is next on their list. This has been the case in Iraq, Syria and Libya, among others but, amazingly, few lessons have been learned.
In Venezuela, the border bridge that was 'closed' by President Nicolas Maduro to prevent the entry of US 'humanitarian aid' and the Maduro "thugs" who torched aid trucks have each been used for these propaganda purposes in recent weeks. Of course, thanks to journalists who actually do their jobs, we know the bridge in question had never been open to traffic and that it was opposition protesters who set the aid trucks alight while throwing Molotov cocktails at the police.













Comment: RT reports more on the crushing defeat of 'no deal' Brexit: Also see: