Puppet Masters

Russia's grand strategy: Fight for 20 years of peace

Andrei Martyanov
The Unz Review
Fri, 24 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC

We live in the world of models, all kinds of them. Some models are simple, others-very complex. The main task of those models is to predict how things, those models describe, will behave depending on the circumstances. Some of those models work brilliantly, others fail miserably. Worst models in terms of reliability are those dealing with geopolitics. A record of dismal failures of Western in general, and American in particular, geopolitical models to predict anything right is widely available for everyone to see. Time after time those models and predictions turned out to be wrong. In terms of "predicting" anything in regards to Russia, those predictions were not only wrong, they were downright dangerous.

No better demonstration exists of a complete breakdown in the process of predicting anything than the evolution of Russian military and economic power. As late as 2016, claims that Russia remained nothing more than, in the words of John McCain, a gas station masquerading as a country, continued to pour in by all kinds of "experts", who, despite a huge collection of facts to the contrary, continued to believe only Russia's nuclear forces keep Russia as some secondary factor in international relations. There are even some Russian experts who share this point of view. Their models and predictions turned out to be wrong. They lacked the most important predictor of them all.

When sources go quiet in Moscow

Philip M. Giraldi
Strategic Culture Foundation
Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC

The CIA admits that it knows nothing.

A quite astonishing article recently appeared in the New York Times, astonishing even by the standards of that newspaper, which featured Judith Miller and Michael Gordon in the Pentagon-sponsored lie machine that led up to the catastrophic war against Iraq. The article, entitled "Kremlin Sources Go Quiet, Leaving CIA in the Dark about Putin's Plans for Midterms," claims that the United States has had a number of spies close to the Russian president "who have provided crucial details" that have now stopped reporting at a critical time with midterm elections coming up. The reporting is sourced to "...American officials familiar with the intelligence" who "...spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal classified information."

After reading the piece, my first reaction was that Judith Miller was back but the byline clearly read Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg. Noms de plume, perhaps? The article is so astonishingly bad on so many levels that it could have been featured in Marvel Comics instead of the Gray Lady. First of all, if American intelligence truly has in the Kremlin high level human agents, referred to as Humint, it would not be publicizing the fact for fear that Moscow would intensify its search for the traitors and discover who they were. No intelligence officer speaking either openly or anonymously would make that kind of fatal mistake by leaking such information to a journalist.

Comment: Combining supportive secret CIA admissions with a creative 'fact'ory of accusations, Moscow must be exceedingly entertained.

CNN, citing intelligence gods, declares US has list of targets in Syria

RT
Fri, 31 Aug 2018 21:07 UTC

The US military and intelligence have already compiled a list of preliminary targets they would strike in response to another chemical weapons incident in Syria, CNN reported, citing the US administration officials.

The military are ready to "respond very quickly" at any moment if the US President Donald Trump decides to launch another strike against the Syrian government, one such official told CNN, adding that no decision to "take action" has been made yet. However, the intelligence experts already "assembled" targeting data of what they described as "chemical weapons facilities," the media outlet reported.

It comes as the Pentagon is seemingly engaged in an all-out information war, as it vehemently denies all statements referring to a potential false-flag chemical-weapons attack, which Russia says is being prepared by terrorists in Syria's Idlib. The US military has accused Moscow of spreading "lies" by revealing this information and suggesting that the attack could be used to justify a new US strike on Syria.

"Russia has recently launched a concentrated disinformation campaign to discredit the United States and international partners and allies... Specifically, Russia has suggested that as a pretext for United States strikes against the Assad regime, humanitarian organizations in Syria were planning a chemical weapon attack. This is absurd," a Pentagon spokesperson, Commander Sean Robertson said on Friday.

Comment: The US has become a one-trick pony for creating both cause and response. Will Russia's investigative efforts succeed and this go-around be different?

Media Research Center study: Online media companies guilty of suppressing conservative speech

Ashley Rae Goldenberg, Dan Gainor
MRC NewsBusters
Mon, 16 Apr 2018 09:06 UTC

Like it or not, social media is the communication form of the future - not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Just Facebook and Twitter combined reach 1.8 billion people. More than two-thirds of all Americans (68 percent) use Facebook. YouTube is pushing out TV as the most popular place to watch video. Google is the No. 1 search engine in both the U.S. and the world.

War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing - badly. If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media.

It's the new battleground of media bias. But it's worse. That bias is not a war of ideas. It's a war against ideas. It's a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation.

The Media Research Center has undertaken an extensive study of the problem at major tech companies - Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube - and the results are far more troubling than most conservatives realize.

Here are some of the key findings:

Trump nixes across-the-board 2.1% federal pay raise in favor of performance-based rewards

Niv Elis
The Hill
Thu, 30 Aug 2018 01:17 UTC

President Trump on Thursday announced that he would cancel a scheduled 2.1 percent across-the-board pay increase for federal workers, as well as locality pay increases.

"In light of our Nation's fiscal situation, Federal employee pay must be performance-based, and aligned strategically toward recruiting, retaining, and rewarding high-performing Federal employees and those with critical skill sets," Trump wrote in a letter to the Speaker of the House and the president of the Senate.

The proposal sets up a fight with Congress, which could effectively overturn the action in upcoming spending legislation. Without such intervention, the move would affect most of the 2.1 million federal employees around the nation, about 1.7 million of which live in areas outside of the Washington, D.C., metro area.

US stops funding UN Palestinian refugee agency, citing 'irredeemably flawed operation'

RT
Fri, 31 Aug 2018 23:50 UTC

The White House has announced it's withdrawing all funding from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, describing its approach to handling the issue as "unsustainable" and the US contribution as disproportionate.

The US State Department said on Friday that the installment of $60 million it allocated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in January was its last financial contribution to the organization, which helps provide healthcare and education to millions of Palestinians.

Outlining the reasons for its decision, Washington accused the agency of maintaining an unsustainable business model and practices, in particular providing assistance not only to the 700,000 people displaced from their homes in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but also to their descendants. The total number of registered Palestinian refugees qualifying for the UN assistance is over five million.

"The United States will no longer commit further funding to this irredeemably flawed operation," the State Department said. The US, which has been the agency's biggest donor, would no longer "shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden of UNRWA's costs," it stressed.

Comment: A manipulative ploy by the US to get the Palestinians to accept an upcoming Trump 'deal'?

See also:

The US is/was the largest country donor to UNRWA, but certainly not the only one. See here.

The US military is all over the African continent, and still expanding

Arkady Savitsky
Strategic Culture Foundation
Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC

Around 200,000 US troops are stationed in 177 countries throughout the world. Those forces utilize several hundred military installations. Africa is no exemption. On August 2, Maj. Gen. Roger L. Cloutier took command of US Army Africa, promising to "hit the ground running."

The US is not waging any wars in Africa but it has a significant presence on the continent. Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and other special ops are currently conducting nearly 100 missions across 20 African countries at any given time, waging secret, limited-scale operations. According to the magazine Vice, US troops are now conducting 3,500 exercises and military engagements throughout Africa per year, an average of 10 per day - an astounding 1,900% increase since the command rolled out 10 years ago. Many activities described as "advise and assist" are actually indistinguishable from combat by any basic definition.

There are currently roughly 7,500 US military personnel, including 1,000 contractors, deployed in Africa. For comparison, that figure was only 6,000 just a year ago. The troops are strung throughout the continent spread across 53 countries. There are 54 countries on the "Dark Continent." More than 4,000 service members have converged on East Africa. The US troop count in Somalia doubled last year.

Comment: US military involvement in Africa of this scale is certainly news to most Americans.

Gauleiter Kurt Volker sez US to rebuild Kiev's navy and air force

RFE/RL
Sat, 01 Sep 2018 10:02 UTC

The United States is ready to widen arms supplies to Ukraine to help build up the country's naval and air defense forces in the face of continuing Russian support for eastern separatists, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine told The Guardian.

Kurt Volker told the newspaper in an interview published on September 1 that pro-Western, anti-Russian sentiment was growing in Ukraine and that the Trump administration was "absolutely" prepared to go further in supplying weaponry to Ukrainian forces than the antitank missiles it delivered in April.

"They are losing soldiers every week defending their own country," Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, said in the interview.

"And so in that context it's natural for Ukraine to build up its military, engage in self-defense, and it's natural to seek assistance and is natural that other countries should help them. And of course they need lethal assistance because they're being shot at," he added.

How does Israel's right-wing maintain its grip on the country?

Danny Rubinstein
Middle East Eye
Fri, 31 Aug 2018 16:33 UTC

In these waning days of summer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed his certainty that in the approaching but not yet scheduled elections, the Likud party he heads will score a dramatic achievement: at least 35 to 40 Knesset seats.

He is not exaggerating by much. The situation for Likud, like that of Israeli right-wing parties in general, looks as good as it ever has since the founding of Israel 70 years ago. Political competition in the country today is not between right and left, but among the right-wing parties themselves.

Likud, which has become an established party for the masses, is contending against the religious right wing and the ultra-Orthodox right wing. Alongside these, barely afloat, is the nationalist party Yisrael Beiteinu, founded by immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Comment: Israel was always going to tend extreme-right; sending European Jewish colonialists into a sea of Muslim Arabs could turn out no other way.

Google, Mastercard secret deal tracks offline shopping to online ad clicks

RT
Sat, 01 Sep 2018 03:52 UTC

Google has reportedly partnered with Mastercard, the second largest credit card network in the US, to get millions of dollars worth of data on its customers, according to a bombshell report by Bloomberg.

The existence of a clandestine deal between the two market giants was first reported on Thursday. Citing "four people with the knowledge of the deal, three of whom worked on it directly," the magazine reported that the agreement, which is bound to stoke new privacy concerns, was the fruit of four years of negotiations.

The alleged deal allows Google to link ads that a user clicks to what they buy in stores using their card. If there's a match, Google provides feedback to the advertiser. The scheme works only if a customer is logged into a Google account and has not switched off Google Ad Tracking, a rather tricky process that takes several stages to accomplish.

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Puppet Masters

Russia's grand strategy: Fight for 20 years of peace

When sources go quiet in Moscow

CNN, citing intelligence gods, declares US has list of targets in Syria

Media Research Center study: Online media companies guilty of suppressing conservative speech

Trump nixes across-the-board 2.1% federal pay raise in favor of performance-based rewards

US stops funding UN Palestinian refugee agency, citing 'irredeemably flawed operation'

The US military is all over the African continent, and still expanding

Gauleiter Kurt Volker sez US to rebuild Kiev's navy and air force

How does Israel's right-wing maintain its grip on the country?

Google, Mastercard secret deal tracks offline shopping to online ad clicks

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