Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

Kiev trying to hide war crimes in Kursk region - Moscow


RT
Sun, 09 Feb 2025 08:59 UTC
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:

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Gavel

Warfare on Lawfare

James Howard Kunstler
kunstler.com
Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00 UTC
Trump
© John Pemble/FlickrUS President Donald Trump
"This feels like a national exorcism."
— Charlie Kirk

"It is axiomatic that those who are beneficiaries of waste, fraud and unnecessary government spending will be the most threatened by the cuts that DOGE is making in these programs. These beneficiaries of waste and fraud are also extremely worried about the reputational, legal and potential criminal risk they will suffer by being exposed by DOGE."
— Bill Ackman
I'm so glad that The New York Times explained what Kendrick Lamar was up to in his Superbowl half-time act because all I could make out was a grown man dressed-up like an eight-year-old hollering nursery rhymes in front of a flash-mob. Apparently, KL is engaged in a feud with another rapper named Drake, whom KL styles as a child molester. So, you see, the whole thing was just a bit of wholesome family entertainment. Thank The NY Times, for putting a grad-school spin on it:
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Speaking of metanarratives — and apart from the private vendettas on Planet Rap — a nice one is developing at center-stage of US political life: the Party of Chaos using federal judges to oppose the dismantling of their gigantic grift scaffold.

Comment: Lawfare is the use of legal systems and institutions to damage or delegitimize an opponent, or to deter an individual's usage of their legal rights. The term may refer to the use of legal systems and principles against an enemy, such as by damaging or delegitimizing them, wasting their time and money (e.g., strategic lawsuits against public participation), or winning a public relations victory.
-Wikipedia

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Attention

The greatest (geo-political) showman's 'inside out' political solution

Alistair Crooke
Strategic Culture Foundation
Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00 UTC
Putrump
© thenation.comRussian President Vladimir Putin • US President Donald Trump
Putin hinted this week that the Ukraine conflict could end in weeks, so Trump may not have a long wait.

How to do the impossible? America is instinctively an expansionist power, needing new fields to conquer; new financial horizons to master and to exploit. The U.S. is built that way. Always was.

But - if you are Trump, wanting to withdraw from wars on the empire's periphery, yet nonetheless wanting too, to cast a shiny image of a muscular America expanding and leading global politics and finance - how to do it?

Well, President Trump - ever the showman - has a solution. Disdain the now-discredited intellectual ideology of muscular American global hegemony; suggest rather, that these earlier 'forever wars' should never really have been 'our wars'; and, as Alon Mizrahi has advanced and suggested, set about re-colonising that which was already colonised: Canada; Greenland; Panama - and Europe too, of course.

America thus will be bigger; Trump will act with decisive muscularity (i.e. as in Colombia); make a big 'show' of things, but at the same time, shrink the mainstream U.S. security interest to centre on the Western Hemisphere. As Trump keeps observing, Americans live in the 'western hemisphere', not in the Middle East or elsewhere.

Comment: In line with other recent assessments, Trump is far beyond the average thinker and miles ahead of his competition. Has he in fact 'positioned' Netanyahu? Is he open to Putin's thinking? Perhaps.

See also two excellent articles:

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Star of David

Trump has a devious plan for Gaza

Tarik Cyril Amar
RT
Thu, 06 Feb 2025 21:00 UTC
DonNety
© Kyle Mazza/Getty ImagesIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu • US President Donald Trump
Help your allies destroy a place, then swoop in to rebuild, but first kick out all the locals and annex the land - that seems to be the idea.

What could Donald Trump and Bianca Censori possibly have in common?

Trump is the US president and bestie of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man wanted by the International Court of Justice (ICC) "for the war crimes of starvation [...] and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts."

Censori is a - very - visual artist and wife of publicly mentally unstable rapper Kanye West.

And yet both Trump and Censori have made a habit of staging attention-grabbing provocations for so long that they now seem to be running out of extremes in outdoing themselves.

For Censori, after full frontal de facto nudity at the Grammys, there's really only live intercourse left (she may not know she's long been beaten to that trick by faded Western "freedom/civil-society" favorite Nadya Tolokonnikova from ancient-history "Pussy Riot").

For Trump, you really have to wonder now: He has just delivered such a double whammy of sheer shock value that it's hard to imagine him topping it again (and yet he will, of course).

Comment: Trump's surface job is to direct and distract and he's obviously smart enough to 'keep them guessing'. Amar is.

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Arrow Down

'Diversity is our strength' is the 'dumbest phrase' in military history - Pentagon Chief


RT
Sat, 08 Feb 2025 21:10 UTC
SecDefense
© Celal Gunes/Anadolu/GettyUS Sec. of Defense Pete Hegseth • News Conference
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has slammed DEI initiatives and announced the termination of identity month celebrations.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke out on Friday against diversity initiatives in the armed forces, blasting the phrase "diversity is our strength" as the "dumbest" in military history. Addressing Pentagon staff, he said his leadership would focus on unity and fairness while eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Hegseth told the audience in the Pentagon auditorium:
"In this department, we will treat everyone equally. We will treat everyone with fairness. We will treat everyone with respect, and we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission."
Hegseth, a former Fox News host and US National Guard veteran, has moved to end DEI, arguing such programs are divisive. He has also halted identity month celebrations, such as Black History Month and Women's History Month. In his speech, he said such efforts "put one group ahead of another" and "erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution."

Comment: See also:

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Calculator

DOGE to audit Pentagon


RT
Sat, 08 Feb 2025 11:19 UTC
CapitolPentagon
© Tom Brenner/Getty Images
Elon Musk, as head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been tasked with revising federal spending, and has set his sights on the Pentagon and the Department of Education, US President Donald Trump has confirmed. The newly authorized audits come in line with a broad push to slash public expenses.

Speaking at the press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Friday, Trump said that Musk will go through "just about everything" while reviewing the budgets of the departments.
"I've instructed him to go check out education to check out the Pentagon, which is the military, and sadly you'll find some things that are pretty bad, but I don't think proportionately, you're going to see anything like we just saw. DOGE will find a lot taking into account how 'bad' it was with what we just went."
Earlier this week, Trump stated that billions of dollars have been stolen by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), highlighting that the lion's share of the funds were used to pay for positive media coverage of Democrats.
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Attention

Musk gets 'Go Ahead' to finally shutter USAID

Phil Butler
New Eastern Outlook
Mon, 10 Feb 2025 16:30 UTC
The Trump administration's move to shut down USAID, driven by Elon Musk's criticism of its alleged corruption and deep state ties, signals a major shift in U.S. foreign aid policy.
Musk and USAID
© New Eastern Outlook
Whatever else President Donald Trump does in the next four years, some of his first actions and appointments are reasons for renewed hope in America. Perhaps the best evidence of this was his putting the world's richest man in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The shuttering of the doors of the Washington, D.C. offices of the CIA front organization USAID certainly rattled the elites and deep state.

For the background, Elon Musk has been rampaging against USAID, the allegedly independent U.S. agency that was established under the Kennedy administration to administer economic aid to foreign nations. And now, according to the story from Fox News and Yahoo!, the administration is in the process of shutting down the agency repeatedly associated with the CIA, foreign terrorists, U.S. technocrats like Bill Gates, and the likes of Putin hater George Soros.
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: NewsReal: USAID DOGE'd: Undertaking Open-Heart Surgery on the US Empire is Risky Business


Sott.net
Mon, 10 Feb 2025 11:31 UTC
USAID DOGE Musk NewsReal
© Sott.net
All week long, US government agency USAID's 'charity work' has been laid bare, revealing (to those who've never seen it before) rank corruption at the heart of the US empire. Next week, the Federal Reserve? The Pentagon? Or will this 'line-by-line auditing' of the US government's bloated budget be limited to relatively tame items like small grants for 'trans operas'? If the Trump Avengers are serious about it, there are trillion$ to go!

In the meantime, what will conducting such open-heart surgery on the organs of US empire mean for that empire? For the US homeland? For global economic supply chains? Can it be 'saved'? Will it crash and burn? And the US' relationship with that godforsaken country in the Middle East; is it as cosy and eternal as it seemed when wanted war criminal Netanyahu became Trump's first head-of-state to visit DC last week?


Running Time: 02:06:17

Download: MP3 — 116 MB

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Bullseye

USAID set to be drastically reduced from 14,000 workers to just 294

Alex Woodward
Yahoo! News
Sun, 09 Feb 2025 21:44 UTC
Redundant USAID workers protest
© ReutersDemonstrators protested outside the USAID office in Washington, D.C. on February 3 as the Trump administration signaled threats to the global aid agency.
Trump team shreds humanitarian agency

Only 294 employees with the United States Agency for International Development have been deemed essential among more than 10,000 global staff members.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that crucial health and humanitarian aid will continue, following threats from Donald Trump and Elon Musk to dissolve the entire agency, but the administration intends to decimate its size, including limiting staff to only 12 people in Africa.

What appears to be an internal chart of the employee breakdown shared by a former USAID global health director also notes that only 21 people will serve the Middle East, with only eight people assigned to all of Asia and eight people assigned to Latin America.

Comment: The silence over the demise of USAID is deafening . . .





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Star of David

IDF withdraws from 'death zone' corridor which cut Gaza in half

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Sun, 09 Feb 2025 21:33 UTC
Netzarim corridor in central Gaza
© Israeli Defense ForcesNetzarim corridor in central Gaza
As part of the ongoing ceasefire deal Israeli troops have withdrawn from the militarized zone that cut Gaza in half, called the Netzarim Corridor, and have been removed to the enclave's eastern border, Al-Jazeera has reported. It has long commonly been called "the death zone".

The result is that for the first time in well over a year Palestinians can freely cross between the north and south of Gaza. The corridor stretched the Mediterranean Sea, and videos show large groups of people returning to their largely destroyed communities.

Israel's military has described that troops were "implementing the agreement" to leave the corridor in order to facilitate the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Comment: Israel's original plans for the corridor have gone badly awry: Israel's plan for Gaza comes into view

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