Puppet Masters
Former prime minister Ehud Barak was a "frequent guest, almost a fixture" at convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's mansion in New York before Epstein's death in 2019, according to a new book by journalist Michael Wolff.
Too Famous: The Rich, The Powerful, The Wishful, The Damned, The Notorious - Twenty Years of Columns, Essays and Reporting, to be released on Tuesday, features Barak's relationship with Epstein in great detail.
According to Wolff, Barak worked hard to rehabilitate Epstein's image following a Miami Herald story in 2017 that broke the allegation of rape, molestation and sex trafficking of underage girls that turned into an arrest in July 2019.

Members of the youth wing of the Indonesia Communist party (PKI) are guarded by soldiers as they are taken by open truck to prison in Jakarta, in October 1965.
British officials secretly deployed black propaganda in the 1960s to urge prominent Indonesians to "cut out" the "communist cancer".
It is estimated that at least 500,000 people - some estimates go to three million - linked to the Indonesia Communist party (PKI) were eliminated between 1965 and 1966.
Comment: The UK in collaboration with other Western nations has a long history of skullduggery that has destabilized nations and enabled them to exert power and control. See also:
- Mali Massacre: Police marksmen had British backing via EU scheme despite Brexit
- The British-American coup that ended Australian independence
- Leaked Whitehall files reveal how London secretly controls both pro- and anti-government NGOs overseas
- UK supported the coup in Bolivia to gain access to its 'white gold'
- How MI6 & the CIA backed "right-wing religious fanatics" in Afghanistan
- John Pilger: The Great Game of Smashing Nations
- From Belfast to Baghdad: New Evidence Emerges of British False-Flag Operations in Ireland

Floral tributes are seen outside the Houses of Parliament after British MP David Amess was stabbed to death during a meeting with constituents.
Police told the BBC Ali, a British national believed to be of Somali descent, was being held under the UK's Terrorism Act, after he was initially arrested at the scene on murder charges. Under British law, that allows them to keep him in custody until Friday before official charges must be filed.
Amess, 69, was killed Friday while holding a regular weekly meeting with constituents at Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, about 40 miles east of London. The Conservative MP, first elected in 1983, was stabbed multiple times.
Comment: This is just the latest incident where a potential terrorist is known to the security services, sometimes under constant surveillance, yet, somehow, they manage to 'slip' under the radar and go on to commit heinous crimes. Below are just a few examples of how this is a repeating problem:
- Knife attacker shot dead by police in New Zealand, man was under "24/7" police surveillance - UPDATE (September 2021)
- Austrian attacker was under surveillance as known jihadist but 'mistakes' led to investigation being dropped (November 2020)
- Strasbourg Shooting: Everybody Knows Where Terror Comes From (December 2018)
- Behind the Headlines: Manufactured Terror: Busted Wide Open
- Behind the Headlines: Terror in Nice, attempted coup in Ankara
- Behind the Headlines: Paris Terror Attacks - Strategy of Tension
Zero Covid is dead. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said as much last week, finally accepting that the delta variant has made it impossible for one country to eradicate a disease which has become endemic elsewhere.
For the moment, New Zealand persists with its miserable cycle of lockdowns, but, with cases rising anyway, Jacinda Ardern must surely soon bow to the inevitable.
We are destined, though, to go through the same cycle with Zero Covid's cousin, Net Zero carbon emissions. Both have similar ideological underpinnings: a belief that by mandating something to happen, the means to achieve it will magically come into existence. Both involve a refusal to balance huge, open-ended costs against other considerations, and both are driven by a desire to control the population via puritanical strictures.
Some have already demanded that similar measures be applied to Net Zero as were applied to the messianic pursuit of Zero Covid: "stay local" orders, flight bans, smartphone apps to track our behaviour.
During the Trump Administration, many of us criticized the President for commenting on pending investigations and crossing the line on seeking to influence the Justice Department. A chorus of legal experts declared such public comments to be an attack on the rule of law and the integrity of the Justice Department. Those voices have been largely silent on Biden's own comments.
Any contempt prosecution would be handled by the Justice Department. I have long been critical of its handling of such cases. However, Biden's call ignores the fact that most of the Democratic leadership in the House supported the Obama Administration in refusing to even submit contempt cases to grand juries. That was the case with Eric Holder who was in flagrant contempt of House subpoenas in the "Fast and Furious" investigation. If the Democrats seek the prosecution of these Trump officials, they will have to step over a mountain of hypocrisy on such cases.
Comment: Biden is a reaction machine - the change agent Dems are counting on.
'Nedogovorosposobnyi' is a Russian word with no English equivalent, describing somebody or something that is incapable of reaching agreements. There can be many reasons why a person or an organization is like this but, whatever the cause, talking to them is a waste of time. It's never going to get anywhere.
Ukraine's political leaders are nedogovorosposobnye, says Medvedev, who was president of Russia from 2008 to 2012 and now serves as deputy chairman of the Security Council. In a blistering article published in the newspaper Kommersant on Monday, Medvedev assaulted Ukraine's leadership and laid out four reasons why speaking to them was pointless.
Comment: There is strength and wisdom in restraint.
It looks like we're free. We don't get thrown in prison for criticizing our government officials. We can vote for whoever we want. We can log onto the internet and look up information on any subject we're interested in. If we want to buy a product we have many brands we are free to choose from.
But we're not free. Our political systems are set up to herd people into a two-party system that is controlled on both sides by plutocrats. The news media that people rely on to form ideas about what's going on and how they should vote are controlled by the plutocratic class and heavily influenced by secretive government agencies. Internet algorithms are aggressively manipulated to show people information which favors the status quo. Even our entertainment is rife with Pentagon and CIA influence.
How free is that? How free is your speech if there are myriad institutional safeguards in place to prevent speech from ever effecting political change?
It doesn't matter what you're allowed to say if it doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter if you're allowed to call the oligarchic puppet put in office by the last fake election a dickhead. It doesn't matter if you're allowed to Google any information you want only to find whatever information Google wants you to find.
What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has a system in place which prevents dissent from having any meaningful impact?
There is none.
At least two dozen lawsuits have been filed around the U.S., many in recent weeks, by people seeking to force hospitals to give their COVID-stricken loved ones ivermectin, a drug for parasites that has been promoted by conservative commentators as a treatment despite a lack of conclusive evidence that it helps people with the virus.
Interest in the drug started rising toward the end of last year and the beginning of this one, when studies — some later withdrawn, in other countries — seemed to suggest ivermectin had some potential and it became a hot topic of conversation among conservatives on social media.
The lawsuits, several of them filed by the same western New York lawyer, cover similar ground. The families have gotten prescriptions for ivermectin, but hospitals have refused to use it on their loved ones, who are often on ventilators and facing death.
Comment: The hospitals are covering their collective asses, understandably so - it's in their best interests to avoid lawsuits. No one is theoretically better off if these bastions of treatment are shut down. Factor in negative narratives, the financial boon to controllers of the vaccine industry and the leverage over the people of governments that support it, means they get to choose. We get to obey.
Bastian said announcing a plan to get all employees vaccinated, without enforcing a mandate, has worked, allowing the company to reach a 90% vaccination rate. The CEO, according to Fox Business, said:
"The reason the mandate was put in by [the] president, I believe, was because they wanted to make sure companies had a plan to get their employees vaccinated. A month before the president came out with the mandate, we had already announced our plan to get all of our people vaccinated. And the good news is the plan is working.Back in August, Bastian's memo warned unvaccinated employees enrolled in Delta's health care plan they would be subject to higher premiums to cover increased costs associated with COVID.
"I acknowledged that there will need to be religious and medical accommodations made for those who wish to remain unvaccinated while avoiding having to threaten employment status. By the time we're done, we'll be pretty close to fully vaccinated as a company without going through all the divisiveness of a mandate.
"We're proving that you can work collaboratively with your people, trusting your people to make the right decisions, respecting their decisions and not forcing them over the loss of their jobs."
Comment: Whether down to earth or up in the air, airlines are bowing to Biden one way or another. Hurrah for the 'appearance' of choice.
"A year ago, people were in their homes, 10 percent of people were unemployed. Gas prices were low because nobody was driving. People weren't buying goods because they didn't have jobs. Now, more people have jobs, more people are buying goods, that's increasing the demand. That's a good thing.Watch:
"At the same time, we also know that the supply is low because we're coming out of the pandemic and because a bunch of manufacturing sectors across the world have shut down, because ports haven't been functioning as they should be. These are all things we're working through."
Comment: Higher prices for less goods? Industry inflation is hostage to whomever/whatever controls supply and demand.













Comment: Epstein and Israel were practically joined at the hip, as was Ghislaine, despite all her protests.