Puppet MastersS


X

Senate rejects Trump's military threats against Venezuela with war powers vote


The Associated Press
Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:58 UTC
House members
© GrayDCHouse members speak out against military action in Venezuela
The Senate advanced a resolution Thursday that would limit President Donald Trump's ability to conduct further attacks against Venezuela, sounding a note of disapproval for his expanding ambitions in the Western Hemisphere.

Democrats and five Republicans voted to advance the war powers resolution on a 52-47 vote and ensure a vote next week on final passage. It has virtually no chance of becoming law because Trump would have to sign it if it were to pass the Republican-controlled House. Still, it was a significant gesture that showed unease among some Republicans after the U.S. military seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid over the weekend.

Trump's administration is now seeking to control Venezuela's oil resources and its government, but the war powers resolution would require congressional approval for any further attacks on the South American country.

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, one of the five Republican votes, said:
"To me, this is all about going forward. If the president should determine, 'You know what? I need to put troops on the ground of Venezuela.' I think that would require Congress to weigh in."
The other Republicans who backed the resolution were Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Todd Young of Indiana.

Trump reacted to their votes by saying on social media that they "should never be elected to office again" and that the vote "greatly hampers American Self Defense and National Security."
Read More...
Attention

Whitewashing U.S. barbarism by smearing Russia and China

Finian Cunningham
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sat, 10 Jan 2026 17:46 UTC
Policeman DJT
© Strategic Culture Foundation
The Western media are doing what they usually do: minimizing and covering up the criminal aggression of the United States.

Trump's blatantly illegal military attack on Venezuela, the kidnapping of its president, the murder of foreign nationals, and theft of the country's vast oil resources are not being called out for the litany of grave crimes that such actions constitute. The aggression that the U.S. has carried out is the Nuremberg standard of "supreme crime".

Yet the U.S. and European corporate-controlled news media fail to report or comment on all this. Britain's BBC has banned its journalists from using the word "kidnap".

Instead of a forthright condemnation of Trump's multiple violations of the UN Charter and international law, the Western media have sought to distract with spurious smearing of Russia and China.

The New York Times, the US so-called paper of record, claimed: "President Trump's audacious nighttime raid in Venezuela sent a message: If you're strong enough, you can attack a country, topple its leader and perhaps get access to the resources you're after. The leaders of China and Russia, who have long shared a vision that divides the world into spheres of influence dominated by major powers, will be drawing their own conclusions."

How's that for diversion of public attention? The United States has just committed war crimes and brought the whole international order into disrepute in the most flagrant way, and yet the New York Times endeavors to focus concern on what Russia and China might allegedly do.

The Daily Beast and the Guardian both used the line, "the Putinization of US foreign policy."

They claim that Trump is now "emulating" Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These Western media outlets are trying to minimize U.S. criminality by making a false equivalence with Russia and China.
Read More...
Attention

Quick Take - The world is burning...but are the flames real?

Kit Knightly
Off-Guardian
Sat, 10 Jan 2026 17:37 UTC
Burning World
© Off-Guardian
I've had a cold, and as a cold Traditionalist, that means I've been sitting on the couch in my dressing gown, sipping herbal tea with honey in it. (The Zealots from The Church of New Colds would have me masking up and gaffer taping plastic sheets over my doors and windows, but they are odd people).

Naturally, it stands to reason that the first time I've been ill in years happens to be the same week the world decides to set itself on fire.

Or at least pretend to, but we'll get to that.

Maduro has been kidnapped. Iran teeters on the edge of an old-fashioned colour revolution with a new Shah waiting in the wings, there's talk of British troops on the ground in Ukraine and a US invasion of Greenland.

The New Year has dawned on a world bursting into chaos.

But is it genuine chaos? Or contrived chaos?

Regular readers know I would tend towards the latter. Fundamentally, I cannot reconcile the two worlds with which we are presented.

On the one hand, we have a set of nation-states wholly in concert on almost all the broader issues. They all work together to promote pandemics and climate catastrophes; they synchronise in passing near-identical legislation to tackle the same non-existent or heavily exaggerated problems.
Read More...
Vader

Best of the Web: You're not imagining things: Report finds 50% of pro-government social media accounts in Israel are bots


Source
Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:14 UTC
Accounts run from foreign countries said to like and share posts by PM, other politicians within seconds, even though videos they're sharing take minutes to actually watch
bots cyberwarfare psywar
About half of the politically active accounts on Israeli social media are not real people but rather bots, including many of those boosting posts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his right-wing coalition, according to an investigation by Channel 12 news.

The report, which aired on Friday night, found that Netanyahu and his allies use bots to "like" and share their posts almost immediately after the content is uploaded, in order to convince the platforms' algorithms to recommend it to other users.

"When he posts a five-minute video in Hebrew, in the first 60 seconds, most of the shares are from abroad, and [those] posts happen within about five seconds," Jonathan Hasidim, of the Scooper research group, told Channel 12.

The report cited a negative post about the Brothers in Arms protest group and a reaction to the slaying of policeman 1st Sgt. Niv Peretz as examples of posts by the premier that were clearly boosted by bots.

He explained that in the latter case, "the initial [response] was very strong, 70% from abroad, and after that we see a decline." Hasidim told the network: "It's a trend-graph that's very characteristic of Netanyahu's tweets."

Additionally, whereas reactions to such posts are often negative, when the posts are shared they skew largely positive, indicating the use of bots, according to the report.

Comment: This is just part of the picture. Between the US, UK and Israel, no other country comes close to their psywar capabilities, and they've been doing this for a long time, dating back to the turn of the century.

Read More...
Snakes in Suits

Best of the Web: Paris court orders 6-month suspensions of 10 social media accounts over "cyber-harassing of Brigitte Macron"


Le Monde
Mon, 05 Jan 2026 21:27 UTC
brigitte macron
"Stop calling me a man!"
A Paris court found Monday, January 5, 10 people guilty of cyber-harassing France's First Lady Brigitte Macron. The court pointed to "particularly degrading, insulting, and malicious" comments referring to false claims regarding alleged trans identity and alleged pedo-criminality targeting Brigitte Macron.

Eight defendants were handed suspended terms of four to eight months, while a ninth man was sentenced to six months in jail over his absence from the hearing. They and a tenth person were ordered to follow a course against hate speech online. Three individuals considered to be the key instigators online also had their social media accounts suspended for six months.


Comment: Other than the guy who received a default, actual, prison sentence for being 'in contempt of court', that's the only real punishment here: temporary social media bans. The 'online re-education camp' sentencing one of them received is laughable. The media running with headlines about "10 Sentenced to Prison For Being WRONG About Brigitte" is just spin to obscure the fact that the Macrons still have not won a defamation case, and yet are also still unable to simply have people jailed for stating that 'the emperor has no clothes'...


The defendants, eight men and two women aged 41 to 65, were accused of posting "numerous malicious comments" falsely claiming that President Emmanuel Macron's wife was born a man and linking the 24-year age gap with her husband to pedophilia. Some of the posts were viewed tens of thousands of times.

Presiding judge Thierry Donard described the claims of the French first lady's "alleged paedophilia" as "malicious, degrading and insulting," saying the defendants had received sentences for "intentionally harming the complainant."
Read More...
Cruise Missle

Best of the Web: Russia's Oreshnik Strike on "Largest Gas Storage Site in Europe" in Ukraine's Lvov Region

Simplicius
Simplicius the Thinker
Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:07 UTC
oreshnik strike lvov gas
The moment of impact of one of Oreshniks multiple war heads on a gas intallation in Lvov, Ukraine, January 8, 2026
It has happened for only the second time of the war: the Russian Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile dubbed the Oreshnik was launched from the Kapustin Yar range toward Lvov, again providing the world with an eerie spectacle:


Zoomed footage:


Comment: Regarding the main event, namely the actual warheads knocking out Ukraine's military, NATO mercs and the power grid, Kiev's mayor is advising the city's population to leave, at least temporarily, for the duration of the cold weather.

But this 2nd display of Oreshnik remains just 'a sample': Lvov's mayor has said damage from the strike was minimal, and that there were no casualties, because the hyper-sonic missiles apparently, again, contained no actual warheads.



Read More...
Attention

Trump's turbo-charged rogue regime exposes pathetic European vassals


Strategic Culture Foundation
Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:54 UTC
MAGA Squeeze
© Strategic Culture Foundation
The international order is being trashed right in front of the world's eyes. The United States under Donald Trump has become a full-fledged rogue state, blatantly operating on the maxim that might is right. This was always the modus operandi of the US hegemon. With Trump, it has become turbo-charged.

Any pretense of rules-based order has been jettisoned. Trump is openly bragging that there is no such thing as international law and that there are no limits on the unilateral exercise of U.S. power.

In the space of a week, the Trump regime has:
  • Launched a deadly aggression against Venezuela, kidnapped its president and commandeered the country's vast oil wealth;
  • Seized cargo ships belonging to Russia and China in violation of maritime laws;
  • Threatened military assault on several sovereign nations, including Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba;
  • Threatened to forcibly annex the Arctic territory of Greenland, which is legally part of Denmark;
  • Escalated bombing of Somalia, the seventh country that Trump has bombed during the first year of his second terms as president;
  • Fabricated barefaced lies to excuse the extrajudicial killing of an innocent American citizen by U.S. federal agents, while warning Iran of military action if the Iranian government represses street protests, protests that many believe have been incited by American and Israeli covert agencies.
Of all the rogue conduct, arguably the worst is the multiple war crimes involved in attacking Venezuela which resulted in as many as 100 deaths. Trump's charade of combating alleged narco-terrorism has been brazenly ditched. He is now celebrating the take over of Venezuela's oil wealth for the benefit of U.S. Big Oil companies.

This barbarism is out-and-out imperialism with fascist arrogance. Trump has taken the world back to the early 20th century when gunboat diplomacy was openly wielded with cynical euphemism. During the 1900s, consecutive U.S. presidents routinely invaded countries in Latin America, massacring populations, installing murderous dictators, and running amok to expropriate natural resources. Trump has flagrantly touted the 1823 Monroe Doctrine as his prerogative, dictating to Venezuela and other Latin American nations to sever all ties with China and Russia.
Read More...
Skull

Best of the Web: State terrorism: UK regime has 'de-banked' millions of British citizens

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Fri, 09 Jan 2026 04:15 UTC

Comment: This is, functionally, as bad as a prison sentence. Without a bank account in today's world, you cant function. Not even the basics. And this has happened arbitrarily, with no judicial process, just... [Press DELETE] aaaannnnnddd it's gone...


Nigel Farage
© skynewsReform UK leader Nigel Farage
An estimated 453,230 accounts were shut down in the United Kingdom in the last year, a stunning figure that has drawn outrage from the country's leading conservative lawmaker.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called the shocking figure "appalling" and slammed European rules that he believes "makes it cheaper for banks to close accounts over unusual transactions." Farage, who was elected to the British Parliament in 2024 and leads the conservative populist Reform Party, is no stranger to debanking, having had his accounts closed by Coutts in 2023.

So what's the banks' excuse? "Financial crime reasons," they said, according to documents obtained by The Telegraph under Freedom of Information rules.

Comment: This is tantamount to "no man being able to buy or sell lest he take the mark of the beast."

The above-linked Telegraph article quotes James Graham, a senior researcher at think tank the British Prosperity Institute:
"Preventing crime sounds noble, but nobody believes another 453,000 people are financial criminals, on top of the 408,000 in 2024, and 317,000 in 2023."
No one believes the UK government that these half million accounts were 'fraudulent accounts of criminals'.

They've begun 'sanctioning' their own people, dissidents 'guilty' of 'WrongThink'.

Read More...
Arrow Down

Ushering in the age of impunity: Venezuela, Palestine, and the end of international law

Craig Mokhiber
Mondoweiss
Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00 UTC
US Air Force jet lands
© US Air ForceUSAF crew chief guides a F-35A lightning II following a large scale strike against Venezuela in Ceiba, Puerto Rico • January 3, 2026
The recent sound of explosions over Venezuela, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria are not merely the spasms by a declining U.S. empire. They are something much more terrifying — the dawning of the age of impunity.

On January 3, 2026, without provocation, cause, or legal justification, the U.S. bombed Venezuela, invaded its capital, killed dozens of people, and violently abducted the President and First Lady of the country, binding, blindfolding, and spiriting them off to the United States.

Surely, such a blatant violation of a whole raft of international laws, indeed, challenging the very centerpiece of the post-World War II legal framework that prohibits acts of aggression, would be met with universal condemnation.

Instead, it has been followed by equivocal whimpers by several Western leaders, a hyper-cautious response from the UN Secretary-General, rhetorical condemnation by members of the Security Council, but no action whatsoever, and enthusiastic cheerleading by U.S. and Western corporate media.

How could this be? Simply put, we are witnessing the dawning of the age of impunity.
Read More...
Bullseye

US will 'fix' Cuba and Nicaragua - Republican senator


RT
Wed, 07 Jan 2026 23:55 UTC
US Senator Rick Scott
© Andrew Harnick/Getty ImagesUS Senator Rick Scott
Rick Scott issued threats to the socialist countries after American commandos abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Republican US Senator Rick Scott has said that Washington would install a new president in Colombia, as well as "fix" Cuba and Nicaragua.

He made the remarks in an interview with Fox Business, just days after US commandos abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, during a raid in Caracas.

US President Donald Trump described the operation as his enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, designed to ensure Washington's domination in the Western Hemisphere and said American companies must gain access to Venezuela's rich oil reserves.

Trump's actions would "change Latin America," Scott told Fox on Wednesday:
"We're gonna fix Cuba, Nicaragua will be fixed. Next year, we'll get a new president in Colombia. Democracy is coming back to this hemisphere."

Comment: Sounds more like a Mockracy than Democracy:
Mockracy: A mock democratic government that attempts to maintain the front of democratic system, while it simultaneously serves the interests of only a small group or entity. A democratic government that largely ignores the rule of the majority in favor of special interest. Upon the the turning over of campaign finance laws, the US looked more like a mockracy than ever.


Read More...