Puppet MastersS

Eye 1

Surprised? Average citizen has 'near-zero' impact on US public policy

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© AP
A startling new political science study concludes that corporate interests and mega wealthy individuals control U.S. policy to such a degree that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

The startling study, titled "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Politics and was authored by Princeton University Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Professor Benjamin Page. An early draft can be found here.

Noted American University Historian Allan J. Lichtman, who highlighted the piece in a Tuesday article published in The Hill, calls Gilens and Page's research "shattering" and says their scholarship "should be a loud wake-up call to the vast majority of Americans who are bypassed by their government."

The statistical research looked at public attitudes on nearly 1,800 policy issues and determined that government almost always ignores the opinions of average citizens and adopts the policy preferences of monied business interests when shaping the contours of U.S. laws.

The study's findings align with recent trends, where corporate elites have aggressively pursued pro-amnesty policies despite the fact that, according to the most recent Reuters poll, 70% of Americans believe illegal immigrants "threaten traditional U.S. beliefs and customs," and 63% believe "immigrants place a burden on the economy."

Bizarro Earth

Defense Secretary says 'the world is exploding all over'

Chuck Hagel
Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel
Fresh off a trip to India and Australia, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel addressed a group of Marines in San Diego, California Tuesday, and may have delivered a line that will show up in Republican campaign ads this election cycle. After updating the troops on some issues in the Pacific region and the Middle East, Hagel took questions from some of the Marines and gave a stark assessment of the global security situation: "The world is exploding all over." The remark came in response to a question about the Obama administration's realignment of the military towards the Asia-Pacific theater:
Q: Good afternoon, sir. My question is that, given that the administration's primary focus is on the Pacific theater, how has all of the issues popping up in the world today, Russia, Iraq, Africa, the rest of the theaters pretty much affected that current mission? And how do you foresee that affecting the mission in the future?
SEC. HAGEL: Thank you. That's a -- go ahead, sit down -- that's a question I got often when I was in India and Australia. And the trip I just came from was my sixth trip to the Asia Pacific area in the last year-and-a-half. I've got four planned this calendar year. And so I get that question all the time. It's a legitimate question for the very reasons you asked.
The world is exploding all over. And so is the United States going to continue to have the resources, the capabilities, the leadership, the bandwidth to continue with the rebalance toward the Asia Pacific? And the answer is yes.
Hagel went on say that, despite the rebalancing towards the Pacific, the US will not be "retreating" from any threats elsewhere in the world.

MIB

Torture report release will spark violence - CIA


The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warns that public disclosure of a Senate report on the agency's torture methods will trigger violent street protests in the Middle East, endangering US embassies and personnel.

"The Mideast is a tinderbox right now and this could be the spark that ignites quite a fire," a US intelligence official who was briefed on the findings told Yahoo News.

That concern was echoed Friday by a former top US intelligence official. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out if you release a report like this at a time when terrorism is surging all over the Mideast you are handing the other side a recruitment tool," John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director, told Yahoo News. "It's blindingly obvious."


Comment: Interestingly, the fact that torturing people creates enemies of the state is not as 'blindingly obvious.' These officials see no problem with actual torture, it's disclosing that torture happens, that's the problem from their perspective.


Ambulance

Russians to the rescue? Over 250 trucks, carrying 2,000 tons of aid heading to Eastern Ukraine


A Russian convoy of 262 trucks packed with humanitarian aid is approaching the Ukrainian border amid fears that it might escalate the already tense situation in the war-ravaged east of the country.


The aid convoy was expected on Wednesday at the volatile Ukraine's border where pro-Russian forces and Ukrainian troops are engaged in fierce battles.

Russian media say some 2,000 tons of aid, from baby food to sleeping bags, was en route to east Ukraine, where some 1,300 people have been killed in fighting between pro-Russians and government forces.

Ukraine, however, on Tuesday pledged to deny entry to the Russian convoy, saying the mission could be a ploy to help pro-Kremlin forces.

"We will not consider the possibility of any movement of the Russian column on the territory of Ukraine," Deputy Head of Ukraine's Presidential Administration Valeriy Chaly said on Tuesday.

Bulb

Best of the Web: Assad Speech: Why no 'Arab Spring' against backward, tyrannical Arab Monarchies?

In a short speech to government officials in July 2014, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad exposes the truth behind the 'Arab Spring' and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
"Were [the Arab Spring] a call for freedom, democracy, justice, it would have begun in the most oppressive and tyrannical states".

USA

Paul Craig Roberts: Washington chokes truth with lies

time to reevaluate
Are Western propagandists fooling anyone but themselves?

The latest absurdity coming out of Ukraine, the EU and Washington is that the humanitarian aid that Russia and the Red Cross are trucking into the former Russian territories that comprise eastern Ukraine is a trick, a deception, a pretext for Russia's invasion forces. Such a preposterous lie tells us that Western propagandists have no respect whatsoever for the intelligence of Western peoples.

Even a moron should understand that if Russia wants to send military forces into Ukraine, Russia doesn't need any pretext, much less a joint humanitarian venture with the Red Cross. The eastern Ukraine, following Crimea's lead, has already voted both independence from Kiev and in favor of rejoining Russia. If Russia needed an excuse, the decisions by the eastern Ukrainians made months ago suffice. But Russia needs no excuse to rescue Russians from being slaughtered by Washington's stooges like Palestinians in Gaza.


Comment: The widespread acceptance of all these ridiculous lies only proves that the PTB is currently winning in this information-war. But the war ain't over, and it is about time that we wake up to the fact that we also are, each and every one of us, combatants in this war.

From Asymmetric Warfare: MH17 False-Flag Terror and the 'War' on Gaza:
It's not raining rockets in Israel, and it's not going to rain rockets in Europe. It's not going to rain nuclear warheads anywhere either. Nor will NATO and Russian forces slug it out in Ukraine or anywhere else. This is not going to descend into 'full-scale ground war' with troops versus troops, or predator drones versus amphibious assault vehicles.

While actual, physical weapons rain down in Gaza and the Donbass, in Syria and Iraq, across North Africa, and in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there are no real wars - in the sense of two or more armies vying for top spot - happening in these places. Top spot belongs to one global superpower only, and has done since the 1920s. There are regional champions like Israel of course, but their pre-eminence relies on the superpower's pre-eminence.

These 'war theaters' are all examples of 'asymmetric warfare', defined as "war between belligerents whose relative military power differs significantly." We see the ultimate expression of this in the fact that the generally defenceless civilian population is confronted with the overwhelming military might of NATO and Israel.

Taking out random airplanes high up in the sky is part of asymmetric warfare. It hits people where they are most vulnerable. The terror, outrage and opportunities for emotional manipulation it offers - so the perpetrators believe - are much more cost-effective than conventional military and economic strategies. It certainly is in the short-term - more people hate Putin today than they did before MH17 was blown up. But in the long-term, it's a risky strategy because the more frequently it's deployed to maintain strategic advantage, the more likely it is that people will figure out the game being played.

The backdrop against which all this takes place is the global battlefield for people's minds. Billions of people are perilously teetering on the edge of an abyss, lambs to cosmic slaughter if they do not fundamentally shift their perception of reality away from the comfortable and crass lies of the Empire and its cronies, and towards the real common sense objective, if uncomfortable, truth.

We are in an information war, not a 'world war'. This is what the Pentagon was talking about early in the last decade when it introduced those strange new terms: full-spectrum dominance, total information awareness, info-crafting, cyberwarfare, and cyberterrorism. The US, UK and Israeli regimes are firing all they've got in this massive and sustained propaganda offensive that will not stop until people's ability to connect with their inner humanity - to think, feel, resist, and See - has been slaughtered.



Oscar

Robert Fisk: If the Nobel Peace Prize can be handed to Obama, why not hand it to the Israeli Defence Force?

idf
Now I know that the Israeli Defence Forces are famous in song and legend. Humanitarian, courageous, self-sacrificing, restrained, willing to give their own lives for the innocents among their enemies, etc, etc.

Leon Uris's Exodus - a racist, fictional account of the birth of Israel in which Arabs are rarely mentioned without the adjectives "dirty" and "stinking" - was one of the best pieces of Socialist-Zionist propaganda that Israel could have sought. Even Ben Gurion agreed, claiming that it was "the greatest thing ever written about Israel", although he correctly dismissed any literary qualities this nonsense might have possessed.

But when the Israeli ambassador to the US told us (after almost 2,000 Palestinians had been slaughtered, most of them civilians) that the Israeli army should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its "unimaginable restraint" in the Gaza war, I had to glance at the calendar. Was it 1 April, perhaps? Was this some kind of gargantuan joke, so obscene, so grotesquely inappropriate, that it contained some inner meaning, some kernel of truth, which I had missed?

The Nobel Prize for "unimaginable restraint", according to Ron Dermer, should have been solemnly handed out to an army which much of the world believes guilty of war crimes.

Comment: Sure the IDF deserves the Nobel Peace Prize since Obama got it. They both "kill unarmed civilians for breakfast" at the top of their Good Deeds of the Day lists. Kissinger got it too. All birds of a feather.

If you can stomach it, here are some of IDF's deeds....


Pistol

The weaponization of language: Torture by any other name

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© AFP/Getty
Language is the great tool of the tyrants. It always has been, and always will be. Patriots are expected to abide by a PATRIOT Act that destroys their Bill of Rights, support "surgical strikes" against "enemy combatants" by the Department of "Defense," and cheer the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to those who wage war.

Find out more about the doublespeak that underpins our political unreality on this week's edition of The Eyeopener report.


Airplane

Ron Paul: U.S. hiding truth about MH17

MH17
The crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 in east Ukraine.
Former US lawmaker Ron Paul says Washington is "hiding" the truth about the downing of a Malaysian passenger plane in eastern Ukraine last month.

"The US government has grown strangely quiet on the accusation that it was Russia or her allies that brought down the Malaysian airliner with a buck anti-aircraft missile," Paul wrote in an article published by Voices of Liberty on Thursday.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, killing all the 298 people on board. The Boeing plane was en route from the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, to Kuala Lumpur when the accident happened at an altitude of 10 kilometers above eastern Ukraine.

US officials claim the plane was downed by a missile fired by pro-Russian forces in Ukraine but Paul says that claim is baseless because the US has not provided any evidence for it.

Comment: They've 'gone quiet' because they have absolutely no evidence, and they know any 'evidence' they produce would quickly be exposed as fake.


Ambulance

Pathetic psychopathic projection: US says Russian humanitarian aid convoy pretense for invading Ukraine

ukraine aid
Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Danylo Lubkivsky said that there would be no need for humanitarian aid.
The United States says Russia is preparing to attack Ukraine under the pretext of sending humanitarian aid to the country, according to an American official.

"We are concerned that Russia could try to use a humanitarian or peacekeeping operation as a pretense for inserting elements of its military force into Ukraine," the unnamed official told The Hill on Tuesday.

Nearly 300 Russian trucks have set off from Moscow, carrying 2,000 tons of aid, including medicine, food, sleeping bags and power generators. Ukraine, however, rejected the convoy.

Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Danylo Lubkivsky said that there would be no need for humanitarian aid.

Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren said on Tuesday, "If this is some sort of Trojan Horse, it would be illegal."

During a press briefing on Tuesday, State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf condemned Moscow's aid move.

"Russia has no right to move into Ukraine unilaterally, whether under the guise of humanitarian convoys or any other pretext, without Kiev's permission," she said.


Comment: Notice how the U.S. catapults its propaganda with zero evidence, using only suggestion and conjecture: "could try", "if", "would be", "guise of". Harf's inner psychopath comes out here. Only a monster would condemn humanitarian aid to the people of east Ukraine.


Comment: Kiev rejected the convoy because it wishes Novorussians to suffer and die. The U.S. says Russia wants to invade because the U.S. is itching for war.