Puppet MastersS


Snakes in Suits

Poroshenko schedules "great purge" of Ukrainian authorities for summer of 2016

Poroshenko
© Unknown
Petro Poroshenko will inspect employees of his administration and other senior officials. "The great purge" is scheduled for the coming summer. The procedure shall take place in accordance with the law "regarding the cleansing of power". This was reported on the website of the Ukrainian President.

It is already known who Poroshenko decided to check first: the President's press Secretary, assistants and advisers, and a representative of the Ukrainian President on Crimea and its deputies, and also head of Secretariat of National tripartite social and economic Council and Chairman of the National service of mediation and reconciliation.

Comment: If Poroshenko were serious he'd probably start the purge with himself. But he's obviously not serious, and it looks like NATO's doubling down on their strategy of burning Ukraine in the hopes that Russia catches flame as well. Also see:


Bomb

Move it or lose it! U.S. whines that Iran conducted live-fire exercises near their aircraft carrier

US aircraft carrier
© AP Photo/ Fabrizio Bensch/Pool
A US aircraft carrier came within about 1,500 yards of Iranian rockets in the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, US military officials said.


Comment: "How dare Iranian territory get so close to our warship! I mean, really, just who do they think they are? Us?!"


As the USS Harry S. Truman was transiting the strait, which connects the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were conducting a live-fire exercise, officials told NBC News.

The Truman reportedly was being escorted through the strait by a US destroyer and a French frigate. Other commercial traffic was in the area as well.

Comment: Iran conducted a live-fire exercise and advised all surrounding ships to stay clear. They carried through with the exercises, and their rockets landed 15 football fields away from the US aircraft carrier. Now the world has to listen to the US whine about how 'provocative' an action this was - all while the US provokes and/or actively occupies China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Also see: South Front Digest: Syria, Iraq, Yemen war updates (VIDEO)


Play

South Front Digest: Syria, Iraq, Yemen war updates (VIDEO)

south front
International Military Review - Syria-Iraq battlespace (Dec. 29)


Key

Best of the Web: Creativity vs Entropy: China the new 'center of civilization'?

Eastern economic growth
I'm feeling more and more in recent months that, as difficult as it may be to believe, our world is moving away from seemingly endless wars. Make no mistake, we haven't seen the end of wars at all. The dynamic and the war energy is changing, however. Not without a frenzy of self-conceit does the so-called Western World throw forks, china, pots, pans, rolling pins - anything it can get its bloody hands on - like a spoiled child throwing a gargantuan temper-tantrum. It tries to deny this reality over which it has less control by the second. The world is moving away from wars, from an, if-you-will, patriarchal psychosis of control - a matrix of fear, shame, guilt, rage, hate. What is beginning to emerge in what we in the West have egoistically termed the East, is construction, building new great projects to uplift a sector of mankind ignored for more that a thousand years. This transformative positive motion is what, if anything, will save our humankind from the mass death and destruction some in the West so devoutly wish for us.

I want to illustrate this with recent developments out of what was centuries ago called in Chinese, "zhōngguó" or "the center of civilization." It may well become that again if present trends with China, Russia and other Eurasian nations continue.

China is moving forward with an impressive array of major international infrastructure projects, including with Russia and the other states of the Eurasian Economic Union, even on to the European Union. Beijing is, with customary Chinese speed, linking its economy by land and by sea lanes to all Eurasia, from the East China Sea to the Black Sea, from the Malacca Strait to the Gulf of Finland, to Piraeus in the eastern Mediterranean.

Pirates

Eric Zuesse: The Saudi Wahhabi origins of jihadism

saudis
Party like it's 1744.
The origin of jihadism is prohibited from being reported truthfully - this truth is prohibited by all of the Establishment 'press,' including almost all 'alternative news' sites - in the West, because it challenges all of the «sensitive» buttons (all of the bigotries, to put the matter in plain terms); and, though this fact (the Establishment's bigotries, and its hypocrisy to preserve and protect the bigotries even while condemning them) will prevent almost all of the news-media that I send this to from publishing it, nothing prevents me from writing it; so, here that is (in whatever media turn out to be gutsy enough to publish this Western cultural and political samizdat):

First, here's what the origin of jihadism isn't: It's not the «Arab-Israeli conflict», nor is jihadism a response to the West's support of the barbarous way that Israel's apartheid government (and the vast majority of Israel's Jews) treat, and historically have treated, Palestinians. Even without that Israeli-Jewish barbarism and its support by Western countries, jihadism would exist, not much different than it today is.

In order to understand where jihadism really comes from, what's necessary first is to understand the relationship that the Sauds, who are the royal family of Saudi Arabia, have with their clergy, who are the Wahhabist Islamic preachers, a relationship between the aristocracy and clergy in that area, which began in 1744, and which was subsequently combined with the oil-for-weapons trade and an alliance with the United States, that began in 1945, and that then was ignited by the petrodollar after Richard Nixon's de-dollarization of gold in 1973. That's what laid the ground for it.

Comment: For a fledgling pathocracy like ISIS to take root, there are some necessary ingredients. Saudi Wahhabism provided the ideology. But without Western sponsorship, this backward barbarism probably would not have spread very far.


Red Flag

Foreign planes dropping military aid for Islamic State in Kirkuk

Plane drops Foreign military aid
Iraqi security sources disclosed on Tuesday that the ISIL Takfiri terrorist group has received military aid and other supplies dropped by unknown planes near the city of Kirkuk, Northern Iraq.

"After the US army's special heliborne operations in Southwestern Kirkuk, unknown planes dropped military supplies and other aids for the ISIL in the Southern part of Kirkuk," an Iraqi security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told FNA on Tuesday.

The official did not disclose more details about the identity of the planes, but said that it might have been US or Turkish.

Info

Putin enacts law limiting immunity of foreign states and their property in Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin
© Mikhail Metzel/TASS
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law regulating legal protection of a foreign state and its property in the Russian Federation, and the text of the document has been posted on the official website of legal information.

Russian legislation is currently based on the concept of absolute immunity, which means that the property of a foreign state is not arrested and a court ruling against it is not enforced.

The law for the first time sets the limits of immunity for foreign states and their property in the Russian Federation and defines cases when the state and its property do not enjoy jurisdictional immunity.

The document has been developed in line with modern approaches and court practice of foreign states, and its adoption will boost the efficiency of judicial protection of Russia's interests and property when considering disputes.

Cards

'Game of cards': Seymour Hersh on conflicting US policy in Syria

Syrian rebels
© Ammar Abdullah / Reuters
Journalist Seymour Hersh's new report on contradictions between President Obama and the US military regarding rebels in Syria was a bombshell. Hersh spoke with RT about the US military's view of Syria's Bashar Assad and Obama's relationship with Turkey.

Writing for the London Review of Books, Hersh reported that, in a classified document from Summer 2013, the highest echelons of the US military establishment outlined their opposition to the Obama administration's strategy of arming so-called "moderate" rebels to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad. From 2013 to September 2015, in an effort to truly counter extremists in Syria, US military leaders fed US intelligence to Russia, Germany, and Israel, which then sent it to Assad, he reported.

War Whore

How the Elites in the US rile up its suckers with lies and propaganda

statue liberty
A standard technique by the aristocracy and its agents is to pretend that the existing government is too progressive, that it's pandering to the masses, not doing the 'right' thing, which the 'superior' people know that it ought to be doing — and which, coincidentally, will boost the wealth of the rich (and this wealth will then trickle down to everybody, as aristocrats routinely promise will happen). Here's an example of it:

On December 10th, the far-right Rosemary Righter ("Righter" is her actual name, not merely her ideology), of Rupert Murdoch's London Times, presented an opinion-piece in America's Politico (which itself derives from Republican Joe Albritton's now-defunct Washington DC conservative newspaper the Star), titled, "NATO's 'Obama problem': The alliance is hamstrung by the least Atlanticist president since World War II."

Her point in it is that the current U.S. President, who calls himself a Democrat (and so is unacceptable to Republicans no matter how right-wing he might actually be), lacks the requisite passion for war against the 'threat' from Russia.

She says: "Obama, the least Atlanticist president in America's postwar history, viewed NATO as a Cold War relic and radically shrank the U.S. military presence in Europe." But, that, "Then, in March 2014, Russia invaded Crimea, annexing it within 30 days on the pretext of a referendum held under conditions of armed occupation. Having openly carved off one slice of Ukraine, Putin then set about fomenting and arming a separatist rebellion in the country's Donbas region, brazenly denying the involvement of Russian troops."

That's a string of lies; so, here are the facts, to show, from this example, how brazenly the agents of the aristocracy lie (and click onto the link here for anything about which you have any doubt regarding the given allegation's veracity):

Briefcase

Erdogan's family caught in yet another new scandal

Erdogan family
The clan relations principle has been a prime factor in business affairs for centuries in numerous Islamic and Middle Eastern countries.

Unfortunately, in recent months we've often witnessed evidence that in Turkey the family of Tayyip Erdogan has been transformed in some sort of carnivorous octopus that has not simply entangled the Turkish economy and politics, but has also extended its tentacles far beyond the state.