Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

Russian diplomats reveal 'acute shortage' of essentials in North Korea caused by Covid-19 restrictions, embassies almost empty


RT
Thu, 01 Apr 2021 21:56 UTC
Russian Embassy in North Korea
© SputnikThe Russian Embassy in North Korea.
Diplomats serving in North Korea are enduring a shortage of goods and a lack of medicine, as restrictions to battle the Covid-19 pandemic have caused the already-secretive country to isolate itself even more than before.

Writing on Facebook, the Russian Embassy in Pyongyang revealed that 38 foreign nationals have recently left their diplomatic missions in the country, with representatives from the likes of the UK, Brazil, and Germany also flying home.

"The exodus of foreigners will continue," an embassy statement read. "There are now hardly any foreigners left - fewer than 290 in all. One can understand those leaving the Korean capital - not everyone can withstand the unprecedentedly strict total restrictions, the acute shortage of essential goods, including medicines, and the lack of opportunities to solve health problems."

Only nine ambassadors and four chargé d'affaires now remain inside the country, and most embassies are operating with a skeleton staff. However, despite the troubles facing those from Russia, the whole team is staying put.

"The white, blue and red tricolor still proudly flies over the building of the Russian diplomatic mission in the center of Pyongyang," the statement continued. "Of course, it is not easy for us as well ... but the capacity of the team is maintained in full."
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Pirates

'Dangerously misguided': Biden faces pushback on plan to tax corporations from business groups and Republicans

Zachary Halaschak
Washington Examiner
Wed, 31 Mar 2021 21:12 UTC
biden corporate tax hike
© ReutersPresident Joe Biden vowed on Wednesday to make companies like Amazon pay their fair share in taxes to fund his ambitious US$2 trillion infrastructure plan.
President Joe Biden's plan to raise the corporate tax rate by 7 percentage points has generated growing opposition in the business world and among some lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Biden hopes to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% in order to help fund his more than $2 trillion infrastructure spending package. The American Jobs Plan also increases the global minimum tax applied to U.S. corporations by increasing it from 13% to 21% and aims to generate more revenue by cracking down on tax avoidance by companies with foreign investments.

Matthew Dickerson, the director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that the proposed tax changes would slow economic growth and "threaten America's global competitiveness."

Comment: Rather than increasing tax rates, why not close off loopholes that let corporations and high income individuals hide their wealth? Oh, yeah. Maybe Biden is counting on the public's short memory?



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Biohazard

French pharma firm found guilty over diabetes drug that killed 2,000 people, left thousands more with debilitating cardiovascular problems

Kim Willsher
The Guardian
Mon, 29 Mar 2021 10:54 UTC
Mediator
© Fred Tanneau/AFP/Getty ImagesThe diabetes drug Mediator. As many as 5 million people took the drug between 1976 and November 2009 when it was withdrawn in France.
A French court has fined one of the country's biggest pharmaceutical firms €2.7m (£2.3m) after finding it guilty of deception and manslaughter over a pill linked to the deaths of up to 2,000 people.

In one of the biggest medical scandals in France, the privately owned laboratory Servier was accused of covering up the potentially fatal side-effects of the widely prescribed drug Mediator.

The former executive Jean-Philippe Seta was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of four years. The French medicines agency, accused of failing to act quickly enough on warnings about the drug, was fined €303,000.


Comment: A suspended sentence and a fine for his part in the deaths of at least 2,000 people??


Comment: As tens of millions of people submit themselves to coronavirus vaccine trials, in what is possibly the largest medical experiment the world has ever seen, this is yet another stark reminder of just what can happen:

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Eye 2

New Zealand tycoon pleads guilty to possessing child sexual abuse images


The Guardian
Thu, 01 Apr 2021 06:52 UTC
Brierley
© Jenny Evans/Getty ImagesRon Brierley was arrested at Sydney international airport in December 2019 over possession of child sexual abuse images.
One of New Zealand's most well-known businessmen has pleaded guilty to possessing child sexual abuse images, including some showing children as young as two.

Ron Brierley's pleas on three charges in an Australian court have sparked a rarely invoked procedure to strip him of the knighthood he received more than 30 years ago.

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern said she was initiating a forfeiture process for the honour, which requires approval from the Queen.

Comment: This makes a strange change, because usually the established powers don't bother to investigate the crimes of the pedophiles in their midst until they're dead. Although there's still a chance that claims of 'ill health' from this aged predator may lead to him serving no time in prison at all:

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Magic Wand

Do you believe in magic?

James Howard Kunstler
kunstler.com
Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00 UTC
four horsemen wagon
© unknownFinancial Apocalypse
The people pretending to run the world's financial affairs do. The more layers of abstract game-playing they add to the existing armatures of unreality they've already constructed, the more certain it becomes that they will blow up all the support systems of a sunsetting hyper-tech economy that now has no safe lane to continue running in.

Virtually all the big nations are doing this now in desperation because they don't understand that the hyper-tech economy is hostage to the deteriorating economics of energy, basically fossil fuels, and oil especially. The macro mega-system can't grow anymore. We're now in the de-growth phase of a dynamic that pulsates through history, as everything in the universe pulsates. We attempted to compensate for de-growth with debt, borrowing from the future.

But debt only works in the youthful growth phases of economic pulsation, when the prospect of being paid back is statistically favorable. Now in the elder de-growth phase, the prospect of paying back debts, or even servicing the interest, is statistically dismal. The amount of racked-up debt worldwide has entered the realm of the laughable. So, the roughly twenty-year experiment in Central Bank credit magic, as a replacement for true capital formation, has come to its grievous end.

Hence, America under the pretend leadership of Joe Biden ventures into the final act of this melodrama, which will end badly and probably pretty quickly. They are about to call in the financial four horsemen of apocalypse:
1) Modern Monetary Theory (MMT),
2) a command economy,
3) Universal Basic Income (UBI, "helicopter" money for the people), and
4) the "Build Back Better" infrastructure scheme.

Comment: Kunstler offers a concise set of observations on the rapidly encroaching financial disaster and our inevitable return to local economics.

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X

Biden earns 'Four Pinocchios' from Washington Post for false claim about Georgia voting law

Brian Flood
Fox News
Tue, 30 Mar 2021 00:00 UTC
Biden five
© Drew Angerer/Getty Images/KJN
The Washington Post Fact Checker knocked President Biden on Tuesday for falsely claiming a new Georgia law "ends voting hours early," giving him its harshest rating of Four Pinocchios for spreading the misinformation.

Biden repeatedly claimed last week a law signed by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, R., would make it harder for working-class people to vote. He said:
"What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick. Deciding that you're going to end voting at five o'clock when working people are just getting off work."
Biden doubled down the following day in a written statement:
"Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can't cast their vote after their shift is over."
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote Biden's claim couldn't be substantiated.
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Star of David

Israeli politics and the metaphysics of the shtetl

Gilad Atzmon
gilad.online
Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00 UTC
Yair Lapid /Netanyahu
© UnknownThe Shtetl: Yair Lapid and Benjamin Netanyahu
The ongoing political stalemate in Israel brings to mind an old recycled Jewish joke that reads as follows:

Q: How many synagogues are needed in a village with one Jew?

A: Two, one to go to and one to boycott!

Self-identified Jews, and especially non-religious one, are hardly defined by what they are but mostly by that which they oppose. They are basically defined by means of negation: the list of ideas, thoughts, philosophies and people whom they reject, contest and boycott.

This unique state of being describes accurately the political paralysis in Israel. Roughly two-thirds of Knesset members are hard-core right wingers. They agree with PM Benjamin Netanyahu on pretty much every crucial political matter including the most radical chauvinist interpretations of Jewish nationalism. In a normal civilized democracy this would be enough to form the strongest possible government. But in Israel they are already preparing for their fifth consecutive election, as they have failed to form a stable government in the last three years.

Comment: We might see how the Shtetl dynamics fit with psychopathy - another prominent factor determining Israel's political future.

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Target

World leaders call for pandemic treaty

Lucy Fisher
Yahoo News
Mon, 29 Mar 2021 12:03 UTC
Boris Johnson
© Holly Adams/AFPBritish PM Boris Johnson
The world needs a global settlement like that forged after the Second World War to protect countries in the wake of Covid, Boris Johnson and other world leaders have said.

Writing for The Telegraph on Tuesday, Mr Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said the virus pandemic had been "a stark and painful reminder that nobody is safe until everyone is safe".


Comment: Perhaps the dumbest statement ever.


Amid growing international tension over vaccine supplies, they called for an end to isolationism and nationalism in favour of a new era of solidarity.

Comment: Encased in 'feel good rhetoric' to get the public onboard for more (or worse) of the same, the upshot is: There will be no independent actions, protocols, statistical analysis nor treatment that is not rubber-stamped by the WHO. Its aim? Control via global consensus without deviation. Covid-19 revealed the anomalies.

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Bad Guys

Biden Admin announces new actions and funding to combat 'anti-Asian violence, xenophobia and bias'

Jeffrey Cawood
The Dailywire
Tue, 30 Mar 2021 18:34 UTC
Asian Lives Matter
© Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced new actions in response to "anti-Asian violence, xenophobia and bias" in the wake of recent attacks against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) people across the country. The moves come after a man was captured on video physically assaulting a 65-year-old Asian woman outside a New York City apartment building on Monday, and six Asian women were shot and killed at three massage parlors in Atlanta two weeks ago.

"We can't be silent in the face of rising violence against Asian Americans," President Joe Biden tweeted on Tuesday. "That's why today I'm taking additional steps to respond - including establishing an initiative at the Department of Justice to address anti-Asian crimes. These attacks are wrong, un-American, and must stop."

Comment: These initiatives aren't coming close to even identifying the reality of attacks on Asians, and we'll likely just see an attempt at integrating critical race theory into the mix.

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Black Cat

Her Majesty's useful idiot? Integrity Initiative-linked Scots Nats MP demands London spy agencies probe Russian 'disinformation'

Kit Klarenberg
RT
Thu, 01 Apr 2021 17:30 UTC
fireworks red square moscow Stewart McDonald britain
© Sputnik; WikipediaFireworks illuminate the sky over the Red Square during the New Year celebration, in Moscow, Russia. (inset) Stewart Malcolm McDonald
The British Parliament's most enthusiastic Russia-basher wants UK intelligence services to formally instruct MPs on alleged "foreign propaganda." His odd biography for an SNP representative and deep state links make it notable.

Stewart McDonald's interest in Russia is quite remarkable. Until 2018, he showed little or no interest in the country at all, but then, following an opaquely funded and organized jolly to Ukraine, he suddenly transformed into an ardent opponent of Moscow. He also became a passionate supporter of the British establishment position on foreign policy. Perhaps it was the chicken Kiev that turned the lawmaker's head, or maybe something more organized.

During a House of Commons debate on March 25, he demanded UK Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove "arrange a briefing for MPs and political parties, on appropriate terms, with the security services, so we can all better understand the threat [of disinformation] and ensure the integrity of our political discourse and democracy."

Comment: More background on the shadowy Integrity Initiative project:

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