Puppet MastersS


Pistol

French ex-govt minister Luc Ferry calls on security forces to shoot Yellow Vest protesters dead

luc ferry
"I am a French philosopheur, so what I say eez importante"
A former French minister today called for the police to able to use live fire on rioting Yellow Vest protesters.

The words of Luc Ferry, the 68-year-old conservative, highlight the growing law and order crisis facing the country.

Mr Ferry, once an Education Minister and now a full-time philosopher, said: 'What I don't understand is that we don't give the means to the police to put an end to this violence.'

When it was suggested that guns might lead to wounding or worse, Mr Ferry said: 'So what? Listen, frankly, when you see guys beating up an unfortunate policeman on the floor, that's when they should use their weapons once and for all. That's enough!'


Comment: Well, at least he's honest about where he stands - against the people, and with the deviant class.


Network

Estonia no longer a NATO puppet? PM calls for improved relations with Russia

Juri Ratas
Estonia’s Prime Minister Juri Ratas
Estonia's Prime Minister Juri Ratas hopes to improve relations with Russia, the Estonian government's press service said in a statement released on Tuesday.

"At the meeting today with Russian ambassador Alexander Petrov, the prime minister expressed the hope of improving bilateral relations. Ratas thanked the ambassador for the New Year's wishes from Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, noting that he also sent a card to his Russian counterpart," said the statement on Facebook.

In addition, Ratas expressed his concern about the fate of the Ukrainian seamen and ships detained during the Kerch Strait incident, adding that he awaited their release.

On November 25, warships Berdyansk and Nikopol of Ukraine and tugboat Yany Kapu illegally crossed the Russian sea border as they sailed towards the Kerch Strait, the entrance to the Sea of ​​Azov.

NPC

CBS deletes fact-check that proved Trump was right

donald trump AOK
CBS News on Tuesday deleted a "fact check" of one of President Trump's claims during his Oval Office address to the nation after it showed the president was right.

"Women and children are the biggest victims by far of our broken system," Trump said about the explosion of illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. "One in three women are sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico."

CBS was running a live "fact check" of Trump's speech, and posted this:
Fact check: 1 in 3 women sexually assaulted while traveling to cross the border

CLAIM: The president claimed one in three women have been sexually assaulted traveling to the border.

FACT: Between 60 percent and 80 percent of female migrants traveling through Mexico are raped along the way, Amnesty International estimates.
That's right, Trump said 33%, but the real number is at least twice that.

Vader

Delusions of Empire: British 'defence' minister wants to build military bases all over the world

gavin williamson
© Julian SimmondsThe actual photo the Telegraph published with this article. Ye olde globe, check. Churchill, check. Union Jack, check. Toff Defence minster 'looking relaxed' at Whitehall, check.
Britain will open two new military bases in the Caribbean and South East Asia as the country looks to step up its military presence overseas after Brexit, Gavin Williamson has revealed.

The Defence secretary urges Britons to stop downplaying the country's influence internationally and recognise that the UK will stand tall on the world stage after leaving the European Union.

In an interview with The Telegraph in his Ministry of Defence office, Mr Williamson says: "We have got to be so much more optimistic about our future as we exit the European Union.

"This is our biggest moment as a nation since the end of the Second World War, when we can recast ourselves in a different way, we can actually play the role on the world stage that the world expects us to play.

Comment: The UK can't even feed much of its population, and could potentially collapse from Brexit, but its managers are planning global, expensive military expansion??

They seem to be more anxious about no longer being able to war and plunder overseas than they are about the imminent loss of their country.

Big business in the UK is also preparing to jump ship. Maybe it's for the best. The people can rebuild a more humane culture on the ruins left behind by the imperial class.


Alarm Clock

SOTT Focus: The Real 'Russian Trolls': Hamilton68 and The Alliance for Securing Democracy

moore putin
American deep-state dezinformatsiya
Given that most people have already taken a position on the topic, it seems a bit late in the day to be pointing this out, but there is now clear evidence to suggest that the 'Russia hacked our election' claim is not only entirely false, but the people who made the claim in the first place - members of the US intelligence, political and corporate establishment (as well as other ideologues) - were and are themselves the creators of the only "Russian troll" social media accounts that have actually been shown to have done any 'hacking'.

A December 19th 2018 NY Times article revealed that a group of "Democratic tech experts" decided to use "similarly deceptive tactics" (as those imputed to Russian trolls) in the Alabama Senate race contested by Roy Moore in December 2017. An internal report on what is called the 'Alabama effort', obtained by The Times, says explicitly that it "experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections." The project's operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. And how was the division sown?

"We orchestrated an elaborate 'false-flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet," the report says.

One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia's social media operations in the 2016 election, and which was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Morgan said that the Russian botnet ruse "does not ring a bell," adding that others had worked on the effort and had written the report. He said he saw the project as "a small experiment" designed to explore how certain online tactics worked, not to affect the election. This appears to be a lie on both counts, given that, as the AL Senate race was in process, Morgan tweeted that the "Russian botnet" that he and others had created was "taking an interest" in the campaign.

Broom

SOTT Focus: New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics

facebook ads congress
© Reuters / Aaron BernsteinFacebook ads linked to a Russian effort to disrupt the US political process are displayed as Facebook executives appear before the House Intelligence Committee on November 1, 2017.
Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.

The release of two Senate-commissioned reports has sparked a new round of panic about Russia manipulating a vulnerable American public on social media. Headlines warn that Russian trolls have tried to suppress the African-American vote, promote Green Party candidate Jill Stein, recruit "assets," and "sow discord" or "hack the 2016 election" via sex-toy ads and Pokémon Go. "The studies," writes David Ignatius of The Washington Post, "describe a sophisticated, multilevel Russian effort to use every available tool of our open society to create resentment, mistrust and social disorder," demonstrating that the Russians, "thanks to the Internet...seem to be perfecting these dark arts." According to Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, "it looks increasingly as though" Russian disinformation "changed the direction of American history" in the narrowly decided 2016 election, when "Russian trolling easily could have made the difference."

The reports, from the University of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Research Project and the firm New Knowledge, do provide the most thorough look at Russian social-media activity to date. With an abundance of data, charts, graphs, and tables, coupled with extensive qualitative analysis, the authors scrutinize the output of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) the Russian clickbait firm indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in February 2018. On every significant metric, it is difficult to square the data with the dramatic conclusions that have been drawn.

Comment: See also:


Target

Brexit unleashes a British bulldog snarling at Russia

bulldog brexitch
© CortésBrexitch
Britain is dispatching some 1,000 marines to join NATO war exercises off Norway in "a show of strength to Russia". The move is but one of several military muscles being flexed by Britain in a bid to boost its international standing. Russia is designated as the convenient villain to justify Britain's renewed militarism.

To lend the madness some popular appeal, British media reported that "Prince Harry will join one of ­Britain's biggest war exercises against Russia in 20 years, as a warning to Vladimir Putin over his continued aggression."

Harry (34), the youngest son of heir to the British crown, Prince Charles, is said to be privy to secret battle plans taking place in Norway over the next 12 weeks "as the marines practice drills in a show of strength against potential military strikes by ­Moscow."

Russia's embassy in Britain dismissed the exercise involving the young royal as a PR gimmick to fire up public enthusiasm for what is otherwise a hackneyed ploy of provoking tensions with Moscow. "Apparently, the authority of politicians and generals is no longer enough to ensure public support for this policy," it said.

Indeed, a PR stunt is surely what it is going on. And the British media are showing themselves once again to be the disgraceful pro-war stenographers that they are by churning out official assertions of "Russian aggression" and "potential military strikes".

Comment: Last gasp? Britain is using aggression to cover its political ineptitude, financial distress and increasing irrelevance.


X

Still no collusion, indictment of Russian lawyer churns up a 'Trump Tower' twitter frenzy

Natalia Veselnitskaya
© Sputnik/Evgeny BiyatovRussian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya
When news broke that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was charged with obstruction of justice, all that Western media outlets and #Resistance could hear was 'Trump Tower,' even though the case had nothing to do with it.

Veselnitskaya famously met with several members of then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign in July 2016, including his son Donald Trump Jr, supposedly offering "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. Proponents of the conspiracy theory that Trump "colluded" with Russia to somehow steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton have long claimed this meeting at Trump Tower is key evidence against the current US president.

Major media outlets - not just in the US - therefore made sure to include a "Trump Tower" reference in reporting on Veselnitskaya's indictment, which was filed on December 20 in the Southern District of New York and made public on Tuesday. Only a few bothered to note that the indictment has to do with a totally unrelated case.

The actual complaint against Veselnitskaya alleges that she "well knew but concealed from the court" that she had a hand in drafting a report on the case she was litigating in the US, "in secret cooperation with a senior Russian prosecutor" who was not named. This report, submitted by Russia under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) with the US, was then cited by Veselnitskaya in defending the real estate company Prevezon Holdings Ltd. from claims of money laundering by "Investment Company-1."

That company was Hermitage Capital, whose owner Bill Browder gave up his US citizenship in 1998 to avoid paying taxes on billions he was making on shadowy business dealings in Russia.

Comment: Talk about 'grooved' thinking! Like a crazy '8' - all reasoning returns to one central point: the non-starter Trump Tower Meeting.


Newspaper

Word wars: Bolton slams Erdogan's NYT op-ed on US withdrawal from Syria as 'offensive'

Bolton
© Joshua Roberts/BloombergUS National Security Advisor John Bolton
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier had an article on the US withdrawal from Syria published in the New York Times. The Turkish president, while describing the Trump's move as "the right call", noted that the withdrawal must be planned "carefully".

US National Security Advisor John Bolton has reportedly told Turkish officials that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's article, which was published on 7 January 2019, was wrong and offensive.

Bolton, who is currently on a tour of the Middle East attempting to convince US regional partners that they won't leave them to fend for themselves in the fight against Daesh, noted that Washington would oppose any mistreatment by Turkish forces of its Kurdish allies in Syria, Reuters reported, citing an unnamed senior US official.

John Bolton didn't believe that he had been disregarded due to the Turkish president's refusal to meet with him, as plans for bilateral talks had not been confirmed in advance, the unnamed US senior official said.

Previously, Erdogan, while commenting on Bolton's statement regarding a possible Turkish operation against Kurdish forces, criticized him by saying that Turkey could never compromise on the issue of the Kurdish YPG militia, as, according to the president, they had never actually fought against Daesh.

Comment: Bolton and Erdogan - sure to bring out the best in each other and provide rich pickings for such news rags as the New York Times. Meanwhile, the Kurds are bypassing these two hotheads to negotiate directly with Damascus.
See also: Erdogan: Bolton made a 'serious mistake'; Ankara refuses to swallow his comments on Syria's Kurds


Propaganda

Kremlin jokes: Don't read Israeli media's rumors of Russian meddling to keep 'tyrant Bibi' in power!

Netanyahu
© AIPAC
Israeli media outlets are awash with speculation that Moscow is preparing to meddle in April's parliamentary election to help Benjamin Netanyahu stay in power. The Kremlin advised ignoring these reports.

The speculation was started by Nadav Argaman, the head of the Israeli domestic security agency Shin Bet, who said Monday that a foreign power is preparing to interfere with the snap parliamentary election scheduled in April. The warning came during an event hosted by Friends of Tel Aviv University, but the broadcast was partially redacted by the Israeli military censor.

"I can't say at this point for whom or against whom" the intervention will be, "but it involves cyber[attacks] and hacking," Argaman was quoted as saying. He added that he was "100% [certain] that [redacted foreign state] will intervene in the upcoming elections, and I know what I'm talking about, I just don't know in whose favor."

The speech was attended by a large crowd, which makes the effort of keeping the identity of the foreign nation secret seemingly pointless. Censorship-restrained Israeli media resorted to referring to accusations against Russia in the 2016 election in the US or a report by Israeli security firms on how Russia could interfere in Israel to fill in the gap.

Comment: Accusing Russia is the Western diversion of 'Look there, not here'.