Puppet MastersS


Radar

Russia will reinforce it's western border as US plans to install more troops in Poland


Sputnik
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 12:49 UTC
US troops
© AP Photo/ Alik Keplicz
Russia will reinforce its troops at the country's western border as a response to US plan to send additional troops to Poland, Vladimir Dzhabarov, the deputy chairman of the Russian upper house's foreign affairs committee said on Monday.

Russia would reinforce its troops at the country's western border, Vladimir Dzhabarov, the deputy chairman of the Russian upper house's foreign affairs committee, announced.

He stressed that Russia would retaliate if it faced an attack from the Polish territory.

"Poland seems not to understand this. Perhaps, it wants to be someone's military base ... In the meanwhile, US troops deployment will not anyhow contribute to the Polish security", Dzhabarov went on to say.


Comment: See also:

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Black Cat

Netanyahu's wife convicted of fraud and breach of trust, but slapped on the wrist with small fine


teleSUR
Sun, 16 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
Benjamin Netanyahu's wife, Sara
© ReutersIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wife, Sara, arrives in to the Magistrate Court, for a hearing on a plea deal over the misuse of state funds for meals, in Jerusalem
Sara Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wife was convicted of using public money for private spendings.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wife, Sara Netanyahu, appeared Sunday in court to admit criminal offense over the ill-usage of public funds to pay for expensive meals.

The court accepted a plea bargain in which she consented to admit having fraudulently exploited the mistakes of a government employee between 2010 and 2013, to spend more than US$100,000 of state funds on catering hundreds of meals delivered by expensive restaurants, all of this despite having an in-house cook paid by the state.

Under the agreement, a fraud charge was reduced to a smaller offense and she will pay the state 45,000 shekels (US$12,490) in reimbursement and a 10,000 shekel (US$2,775) fine in compensation. Yet corruption charges against her would be dropped.

Comment: By all accounts Benjamin Netanyahu should be convicted on corruption charges and jailed for all his misdoings. But even if he is, the sad truth of the matter is that Israel has a plethora of pathological and power-hungry politicos just waiting in the wings to perpetuate their policies of imperialism and destruction.

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Megaphone

Narrative management operations: How mainstream media shapes our reality

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
MSM brain, media brainwashing
What we take to be “real” about world events is information that we have taken into our senses and assessed as true. We’ll often put as much faith in these beliefs as we do in what we’ve seen, heard and touched for ourselves, but understandings of world events are made of narrative, and narrative can be manipulated in the interests of the powerful. And it is.

The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal has published the first part of an investigative series on how so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are being used to manipulate the narrative about what's going on in Syria by posing as impartial investigative bodies and circulating pro-imperialist disinformation to the western political/media class as objective fact. Part one is titled "Behind the Syrian Network for Human Rights: How an opposition front group became Western media's go-to monitor", and it documents a mountain of evidence that one of these "NGOs" is in fact very much state-funded and highly biased in favor of anti-Assad forces, yet still gets cited as an independent source by western mass media outlets in a way that just so happens to help make the case for western interventionism in Syria.

"Citing the Syrian Network for Human Rights as an independent and credible source is the journalistic equivalent of sourcing statistics on head trauma to a research front created by the National Football League, or turning to tobacco industry lobbyists for information on the connection between smoking and lung cancer. And yet this has been standard practice among correspondents covering the Syrian conflict," Blumenthal writes. "Indeed, Western press has engaged for years in an insidious sleight of hand, basing reams of shock journalism around claims by a single, highly suspect source that is deeply embedded within the Syrian opposition - and hoped that no one would notice."

I've taken to calling such things "narrative management operations" lately, because that's a much clearer illustration of their function than simply labeling them propaganda constructs and psyops (though those labels are certainly accurate as well). Countless operations have been set up both inside and outside of Syria to control the narrative about what's happening there, and now if a casual observer decides to find out more about the Syrian conflict they'll almost certainly be consuming information that has been filtered through narrative management ops that have been funded by governments within the US-centralized power alliance.

It's like trying to figure out what's going on at the other end of a large room that's been filled with smoke and mirrors.

Comment:

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Newspaper

US may delay release of Middle East plan till November


Sputnik
Sun, 16 Jun 2019 18:55 UTC
dome
© CC BY-SA 3.0 / Yourway-to-israel
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump described the Mideast peace plan as a "deal of the century". The plan is supposed to end the decades-long conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The US presidential administration may postpone the publication of the Mideast peace plan to November 2019, US special envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt said during an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

Mr Greenblatt added that the US peace team could have published the plan this summer, but changed its plans after Israel set the date for new elections in September, the newspaper says.

Comment: See also:

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Attention

US Govt's entire Russia-DNC hacking narrative based on redacted draft of Crowdstrike report

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Sun, 16 Jun 2019 14:55 UTC
Wasserman
It's been known for some time that the US Government based its conclusion that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on a report by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which the DNC paid over a million dollars to conduct forensic analysis and other work on servers they refused to hand over to the FBI.

CrowdStrike's report made its way into a joint FBI/DHS report on an Russia's "Grizzly Steppe", which concluded Russia hacked the DNC's servers. At the time, Crowdstrike's claim drew much scrutiny from cybersecurity experts according to former Breitbart reporter Lee Stranahan.

Now, thanks to a new court filing by longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone requesting the full Crowdstrike analysis, we find out that the US government was given a redacted version of the report marked "Draft," as reported by the Conservative Treehouse.

What makes the whole thing even more hokey is a footnote admitting that "counsel for the DNC and DCCC informed the government that they are the last version of the report produced."

crowdstrike request

Comment: See also:

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Attention

American troll farm: Outrage on Capitol Hill over 'completely unacceptable' US-funded scheme to shape Iran debate

Negar Mortazavi and Borzou Daragahi
Independent
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:01 UTC
Morgan Ortagus

'This is something that happens in authoritarian regimes, not democracies'

United States officials say they are outraged by a government-funded troll campaign that has targeted American citizens critical of the administration's hardline Iran policy and accused critics of being loyal to the Tehran regime.

State Department officials admitted to Congressional staff in a closed-door meeting on Monday that a project they had funded to counter Iranian propaganda had gone off the rails. Critics in Washington have gone further, saying that the programme resembled the type of troll farms used by autocratic regimes abroad.

Comment: See also:

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Attention

The Clash of Civilizations

James Corbett
Corbett Report
Sat, 15 Jun 2019 01:59 UTC
Clash of Civilizations
© Corbett Report
Readers will recall that last week's edition of this column ended on something of an intellectual puzzler. To wit: If the Tiananmen Square Massacre narrative that is routinely used to demonize the Chinese government on the world stage is demonstrably wrong (even by the admission of US diplomats and BBC reporters), then why doesn't the Chinese government say something?

As I concluded in "The Truth About Tiananmen":
"This type of silence in the face of attack is unfathomable to the Western mind. When someone is spreading rumors and easily debunkable lies about you, you speak up. You set the record straight. You fight back. You do something . . . don't you?"
Well, perhaps one key to unlocking this mystery is in the stipulation: The Western mind. We all understand that silence is consent and that anyone who remains silent in the face of accusations is thereby tacitly admitting to their guilt, right? But who is "we"? Does our shared understanding of the meaning of silence come from a specific cultural heritage? And if so, what is the shared understanding of the meaning of silence for the Chinese?

As it turns out, Asian cultures generally (and Chinese culture specifically) do have a very different perception of the meaning of silence. You can go all the way back to Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching for confirmation that, to the Chinese mind, silence is not a sign of guilt or weakness but, on the contrary, "Silence is a source of great strength."

This is not a trivial observation. In fact, it gets to the heart of one of the problems facing the would-be warriors of the new trade war between the US and China. Unlike other rivalries (economic, geopolitical or otherwise) that we can think of in the past-the rivalry between the British Empire and the Germans that formed part of the justification for The WWI Conspiracy, for instance-we are not facing a competition between two powers who share religious, ethnic, linguistic or cultural roots, but two powers who are completely separated in all those respects.
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Snakes in Suits

As east and west cooperation emerges, Martin Luther King's assassins try killing him again

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture
Sun, 02 Jun 2019 22:35 UTC
martin luther king
© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBISMartin Luther King delivers his famous "I Have a Dream" speech from the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963
A new assassination is now being attempted 51 years after the life of Martin Luther King was cut short by a bullet on the balcony of the Loraine Motel on April 4, 1968. A story has gone viral across the international media in recent days which promises to shed light on the dark perversity of Martin Luther King Jr.

The scandal was featured in the June edition of Standpoint magazine by internationally renowned Martin Luther King "authority" David Garrow and aimed at destroying the myth of King as a moral leader of America by showcasing the ugliness of King's true self as a an orgy-loving abuser who had over 40 affairs and laughed as a friend raped a parishioner. Garrow states that his expose "poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible."

The fact that so many news outlets are jumping on the bandwagon should cause one to wonder why is this happening at this moment in history? Could this strange hysteria over a mediocre slander piece have anything to do with the fact that the polarized cages of left and right are finally breaking down? Could it have anything to do with the fact that as America comes closer to a potential alliance with Russia and China, an era of cooperation and economic justice may awaken something within the collective psyche of Americans which many had thought was long dead?
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Passport

All illegal immigrants 'should be worried, no population off the table' - Trump's new border czar

Paul Bedard
Washington Examiner
Fri, 14 Jun 2019 20:21 UTC
ICE arrests oakland CA Feb 2018
Roughly half of those arrested by deportation officers have convictions for assault and battery, crimes against children, weapons charges and DUI.
President Trump's pick to be the nation's first-ever "border czar" is a longtime former cop and immigration official who takes a hard line on illegal crossings.

Former acting ICE Director Thomas Homan told Secrets early in the Trump administration, for example, that he views every unauthorized border crossing as a crime that can and should be punished.

"If you are in this country illegally, and you committed a crime by entering this country, you should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried," Homan told Secrets.

Comment: Fox News reports on another angle on tackling the border crisis:
Sponsors of legal immigrants to the United States received word Friday that they'll be on the hook "for every dollar" if those immigrants end up receiving welfare funds or other public support instead of earning a living and paying taxes.
Ken Cuccinelli Immigration services
© Associated PressKen Cuccinelli, a former Virginia state attorney general, is now acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The message came Ken Cuccinelli, a former Virginia state attorney general who last week became acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) following his appointment by President Trump.

"If the sponsored immigrant receives any federal means-tested public benefits, the sponsor will be expected to reimburse the benefits-granting agency for every dollar of benefits received by the immigrant," Cuccinelli wrote in a USCIS memo.

In addition, the same message instructed agents who work for USCIS to remind applicants and sponsors that "the Affidavit of Support is a legal and enforceable contract between the sponsor and the federal government."

According to Cuccinelli, all federal agencies dealing with immigration issues will be working to update or initiate procedures and regulations to make sure that immigrants who are ineligible for public benefits do not receive them, in accordance with a May 23 directive from the president.

"The President has made it a priority to ensure that every individual who seeks to come to the United States is self-sufficient, temporarily or permanently," Cuccinelli wrote. "The principle of self-sufficiency has been enshrined in our immigration laws since the 1800s, and we as an agency must ensure that immigrants who become part of this great country abide by this principle."

Cuccinelli took over at USCIS last Monday, coming to the job with a reputation as a hardliner on immigration issues. For example, he has been an advocate for denying citizenship to American-born children of parents living in the U.S. illegally and for limiting in-state tuition at public universities to citizens or legal residents.

He replaced Lee Francis Cissna, who reportedly had lost President Trump's confidence.


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Brain

How the deep state controls deep thinking and Russiaphobia

Phil Butler
New Eastern Outlook
Sun, 16 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
Putin composite
© Business InsiderAttitude defines perception for the clueless
As citizens interested in policy, we can learn a great deal from the quasi-academic studies on Russian foreign relations strategies. A cursory review of any English language archive of academic papers on Putin, Russia, or even the word "oligarch" will produce a score of experts with doctorates who "know" exactly what Russia and her president are "up to." My latest excursion into the knowledge vault at Academia.edu may be the benchmark for all future Russophobic genius.

In a white paper entitled "Putin's Grand Strategy and US National Interests", Dr. Christopher Marsh just comes right out and calls Russia a bunch of criminals led by an archvillain. From my perspective as an American citizen who actually studied Russia-US policy and detente objectively, it's discomforting to know the military and our military industrial complex hold this dangerous attitude. I'll explain why.
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