Puppet MastersS


Russian Flag

Moscow's UN envoy says USAID's support of radicals no longer 'Russian propaganda'

Nebenzia
© Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty ImagesRussian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia
Recent revelations about the agency's activities have only proven that Russia's concerns were valid, the country's UN envoy has said

The recent revelations about the US Agency for International Development's (USAID) links to extremist groups and shady projects validate concerns long expressed by Russia, Moscow's ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told the UN Security Council on Monday.

In one of his first executive orders after taking office on January 20, US President Donald Trump suspended all US foreign aid, pending a three-month review. The decision is part of a broader plan to significantly reduce government spending. USAID is Washington's primary agency for administering foreign aid and political projects abroad.

Comment:
USAID involved in getting Ukraine coup up and running
Musk claims USAID funded bioweapon research


Footprints

Top CFPB leaders dismissed as Trump team begins to dismantle agency

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
© The HillConsumer Financial Protection Bureau to shut down for a week, as of February 10, 2025
Two top leaders of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were removed from their roles Tuesday — in the first staffing cuts as President Trump's team begins an ambitious effort to gut the 1,700-person agency, The Post has learned.

Enforcement director Eric Halperin and supervision director Lorelei Salas were placed on administrative leave by Mark Paoletta, the top lawyer at both the CFPB and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Halperin, who made remarks seen as defying orders from Trump's aides to pause all work, resigned six minutes after receiving an email informing him that he was being placed on leave "effective immediately."

Comment: The Hill, via MSN reports:
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has been recently attempting to crack down on the CFPB's activities. In a social media post late Saturday night, he said he had "notified the Federal Reserve that CFPB will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not 'reasonably necessary' to carry out its duties."

"The Bureau's current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment. This spigot, long contributing to CFPB's unaccountability, is now being turned off," Vought added.

NBC News has also reported that Vought sent an email to employees unveiling a series of directives for the CFPB that would instantly go into effect. Employees were told in the email to "cease all supervision and examination activity," "cease all stakeholder engagement," halt every pending investigation, not put forth any public communications and stop "enforcement actions," according to NBC.



Bad Guys

The Machine fights back

doge treasury investigation graphic
Inside Treasury's war against its own reformers

When DOGE found empty fields in Treasury's payment system, they uncovered more than missing data. They found a mechanism.

Simple things were left blank:
  • Payment categories
  • Payment rationales
  • Basic audit controls
The kind of fields any small business would require. The kind that let you track where money goes. The kind that stop a billion dollars of fraud. Every week.

Caesar

A pretender appropriate for the age: Donald Trump's Ersatz Caesarism

TrumpCaesar
© angiesdiary.com/KJNUS President Donald Trump and the politics of Caesar
The Rubik's Cube, like the chess board, can be counterintuitive to the noninitiated. A cube finished on one face seems closer to solution than one all mixed up, but cursory study of the many solution algorithms online teaches the opposite. With fixation on the facade, one misses more significant action elsewhere. Often, the creation of a good-looking face requires a contradictory mess of compromise at deeper levels, pushing the whole farther from solution. Solvers of Rubik's Cubes, chess masters, and the politically initiated understand the difference between a situation's superficial face and the substance behind it, allowing them to dazzle the naïve observer with prescient solutions or predictions of what comes next. It is precisely because most don't understand the inner workings that things like Rubik's Cubes are entertaining at all; when everyone knows the trick, there is no audience.

Enter Trump, a tall, blonde, brash businessman who doesn't apologize for his masculinity, who triggers passionate hatred in all of the right people. A man with a fitting facade, perfect because it is unpolished in just the right places, for the White man's president. Trump has already had a term in which he failed to deliver on his promises to his American supporters while over-delivering to Israel and even non-constituencies like the Black criminal class. But, like any cult of personality figure worth his salt, Trump inspires endless excuses for his failures, rivaled in number and convolution only by the many fantasies spun up by his unhinged opposition. Why does Trump resonate so, both positively and negatively, with the American and broader western public? Is it that he breaks the rules of engagement for presidential politics, speaking the truth for once on the big stage, or is he tapping into a deeper level of signs and symbols?

Comment: Author's critique of DT was prior his 2025 inauguration. Imperfections aside, Trump has done more for Americans in less than one month than Biden did in his whole term of office. For the concept, 'Political Caesarism' is well worth the read.


Folder

Scoop: FBI finds secret JFK assassination records after Trump order

jfk shadow
© Brendan Lynch/AxiosIn the shadow of JFK
The FBI just discovered about 2,400 records tied to President Kennedy's assassination that were never provided to a board tasked with reviewing and disclosing the documents, Axios has learned.
  • The still-secret records are contained in 14,000 pages of documents the FBI found in a review triggered by President Trump's Jan. 23 executive order demanding the release of all JFK assassination records.
Why it matters: The discovery — 61 years after Kennedy was killed in Dallas — follows decades of government reluctance to release all documents related to the assassination, which fueled a mountain of conspiracy theories.
  • The existence of the new documents was disclosed Friday to the White House, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submitted its plan to disclose the assassination records under Trump's order.
Zoom in: The contents of the newly found records are closely held secrets. The three sources who relayed their existence to Axios said they hadn't seen the documents.
  • But the discovery of thousands of records on one of the most scrutinized events in U.S. history is likely to raise questions about the procedures for vetting and releasing information across the entire government.
  • "This is huge. It shows the FBI is taking this seriously," said Jefferson Morley, an expert on the assassination and vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, the nation's largest source of online records of Kennedy's killing. He sued the U.S. government for more records.
  • "The FBI is finally saying, 'Let's respond to the president's order,' instead of keeping the secrecy going," Morley said.
Reality check: The remaining records to be disclosed — as well as the newly discovered tranche of 2,400 reports — are unlikely to definitively prove whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone-wolf assassin or was part of a broader conspiracy, experts say.

Dollar

Ukraine sells US weapons to Mexican drug cartels - Tucker Carlson

Gun guy
© Karl Josef Hildenbrand/File/Global Look Press
Kiev resells up to half of Western military aid on black markets, the American journalist has claimed.

A significant portion of the weapons Washington has provided to Kiev as military aid in its conflict with Russia is ending up in the hands of America's "actual enemies," including Mexican drug cartels, US journalist Tucker Carlson has remarked.

As much as half of all weapons sent by the US to Ukraine end up on international black markets, the former Fox News host said on Monday during an interview with retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Daniel Davis.

Carlson claimed:
"The Ukrainian military is selling a huge percentage - up to half - of the arms that we send them. I know this for a fact. Washington is supplying Kiev with "hundreds of billions of dollars" worth of arms, a significant portion of which are being "stolen and sold to our actual enemies," including "drug cartels on our border."
He did not disclose his sources or provide specific evidence to support his statement. He also claimed that weapons from Ukraine could be easily purchased online, describing the situation as a "crime" and a "nightmare."

Cut

Baltic states cut last Russian energy link

Billboard
© Mindaugas Kulbis/APAn announcement near the Energy Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania, indicating that the Baltic States will disconnect from the Russian electricity grid to synchronise with Continental Europe
Ex-Soviet nations warn of sabotage and cyberattack threat as they cut power links with Moscow as part of an energy security plan that will see them integrate with the European Union network.

The grid operators in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania announced on Saturday morning that they have uncoupled their electricity systems from the BRELL network, which includes Russia and Belarus. The move comes as the three former Soviet states warily eye Moscow's aggression in Ukraine. The three countries will operate in "isolated mode" for about 24 hours before synchronising with the EU grid via Poland on Sunday.

Lithuanian Energy Minister Zygimantas Vaiciunas said:
"We are now removing Russia's ability to use the electricity system as a tool of geopolitical blackmail."
Rokas Masiulis, head of Lithuanian state-run grid operator Litgrid, which was the first of the Baltics to switch off from the Russian grid at 7:43am (05:43 GMT), said:
"We need to carry out some tests to assure Europe that we are a stable energy system."
The longstanding plan to integrate with the European grid gained momentum following Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and was accelerated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the leveraging of its role as a major supplier of oil, gas and power to cause an energy crunch in Europe.

Bad Guys

Kiev plotting to drag NATO into war - Moscow

war ships
The alleged plan involves staging a foreign vessel explosion in the Baltic Sea, according to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

Ukrainian special services, with Western support, are preparing a series of high-profile provocations to implicate Moscow and draw NATO into a direct military confrontation, according to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

In a statement on Tuesday, the SVR claimed that Kiev plans to use Russian-made naval mines to orchestrate an explosion involving a foreign vessel in the Baltic Sea. The alleged goal is to blame Moscow and prompt NATO to restrict Russia's access to the Baltic on the pretext of ensuring maritime security.

NATO has been increasing its military activities along Eastern Europe's borders in recent years, citing security concerns over Russia. Last month, it announced plans to expand its presence in the Baltic Sea, launching a new mission to safeguard undersea infrastructure following a series of disruptions and damage to cables between member states.

Comment: Ukraine and its Western backers are desperate and that could result in some provocations though it is unlikely to change the outcome of the conflict.


Attention

The War for Bankocracy

Brace yourself for another assault on the Constitution.
The War for Bankocracy
© BestEvidence
The first episode of The War for Bankocracy series is called "Warning Shot" and is now available for viewing.

Series Summary

Central banks appear to be poised for a major push to replace rule by democratic governments with rule by privately owned central banks. Their chief task in this regard is to free the U.S. Federal Reserve from its constitutional constraints, which prevent the bank from operating in secrecy and beyond the reach of congress and indeed law itself.

While the evidence supporting this conclusion is freely available from the public record, without some minimal working knowledge of central banks, the story would be extremely difficult to tell in a single video. Consequently, The War for Bankocracy series will lay significant groundwork and tell the story over the course of eight episodes.

Bad Guys

Kiev trying to hide war crimes in Kursk region - Moscow

Russian troops retriveing the bodies of civilians in the village of Russkoye Porechnoye in Kursk Region.
© Russia’s Investigative CommiteeRussian troops retriveing the bodies of civilians in the village of Russkoye Porechnoye in Kursk Region.
Constant shelling has complicated a probe into alleged atrocities against civilians by Ukrainian forces, a Russian diplomat has said.

The Ukrainian military is trying to destroy evidence of its war crimes in the settlements they have occupied in Russia's Kursk Region, senior Russian diplomat Rodion Miroshnik has claimed.

Last month, Russian investigators alleged that Kiev's troops had raped, tortured, and murdered Russian civilians in the recently-liberated village of Russkoye Porechnoye. They published gruesome videos of bodies piled in cellars in some of the homes inside the settlement. Several captured Ukrainian servicemen acknowledged committing the crimes under interrogation, saying they had been acting on the orders of their commanders.

Comment: See also: