Puppet Masters
This is a film you should see. It's called Water Time, and if you go to banditobooks.com, you can watch it for free, by signing up on Allan Weisbecker's email list.
Allan is the director and the star of Water Time. He made a good living writing for Hollywood into the mid-90s (Miami Vice, Crime Story), when he quit the scene to live a different kind of life.
A much, much different kind of life....that culminated in going on the road to see what had happened to America. Driving his truck, with his dog Honey, with his surfboard, with his laptop, on which he'd stashed compelling evidence that key events in modern American history had resulted in a shadow takeover of the country. A coup d'etat.
That's one of the subjects of the film.
It's about a man who knows the truth and wants to talk about it with average Americans on camera, before your eyes. It's about a man who makes his own frontier, who mourns the loss of his childhood friend who died in Vietnam, a war made into a horror through the assassination of JFK.
All-in-all a must-read for westerners needing to understand what is really happening in both the Ukraine and the wider Anglo-US-NATO globalisation drive which it brings into sharp focus
Transcript below:
Of course, it is possible that Kerry really believed he was speaking truths, having internalized the assumptions that flow from U.S. "exceptionalism," which make words like "invasion," "aggression" and "international law" inapplicable to us as the world's police; and what might be a "completely trumped up pretext" if offered by the Russians is only a slight and excusable error or misjudgment when we do it. After all, the New York Times quickly used the word "aggression" in editorializing on the Crimea events ("Russia's Aggression," March 2, 2014), whereas it never used the word to describe the invasion-occupation of Iraq, nor did it mention the words "UN Charter" or "international law" in its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001 to March 21, 2003 (Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper).
A company-sized contingent of U.S. paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade will arrive in Latvia on Thursday, the U.S. embassy there announced Wednesday. A similar number of soldiers, about 150, are scheduled to land in Poland on Wednesday. Estonia and Latvia will also host American soldiers for joint training missions in the coming days.
U.S. troops will continue to rotate into the region "at least through the end of this year," according to the embassy.
"Russia's aggression in Ukraine has renewed our resolve to strengthening NATO's defense plans and capabilities, and to demonstrate our continued commitment to collective defense in reinforcing our NATO allies in Central and Eastern Europe," Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon.
John Kerry delivered the confrontational call in a speech to the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, DC. He said the stand-off in Ukraine had resulted from a "uniquely personally-driven set of choices" and is "a wake-up call" for NATO. He added that now the military bloc must turn the page on two decades of focusing on expeditionary operations and take a stand against "Putin's Russia."
"After two decades of focusing primarily on our expeditionary missions, the crisis in Ukraine now call us back to the work that this alliance was originally created to perform," Kerry told the audience.
Comment: "Our expeditionary missions"?! Wow, is that statement ever dripping with imperialistic hubris! In one phrase, Kerry has let slip the mask of 'humanitarian intervention', 'Right to Protect', 'War on Terror' and all the other BS Western liberal paramoralisms to acknowledge that the bombings of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere were in fact military operations 'out there on the periphery of our empire'.
As regards "what this alliance was originally created to perform", NATO was originally the military occupation by the U.S. of Western Europe once WW2 ended. The only thing that has changed is that its sphere of influence has extended right up to Russia.

Pro-Russia gunmen in an administration building in Luhansk, eastern Ukraine.
Oleksandr Turchynov said numerous Ukrainian military and security personnel had defected to the rebels, taking their arms with them. Using the language of defeat, he told a meeting of regional governors: "I will be frank. Today, security forces are unable to take the situation in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions quickly under control."
His comments came after anti-Kiev militants seized a string of official buildings in the eastern city of Luhansk on Tuesday. Only the city's police station remained under nominal central command.
Standing outside Luhansk's police headquarters on Wednesday, Tatiana Pogukay was close to tears. "We are still here. We didn't surrender. But Kiev betrayed us," she said. Her emotion was understandable. The previous night she and her colleagues had fended off an armed attack by 50 pro-Russia separatists. The gunmen in fatigues attempted to storm the building. One fired warning shots in the air; some scaled the roof; others rammed the rear entrance with a Kamaz truck.
The way the situation in Ukraine is reported in mainstream media indicates that "unfortunately, the information machine of our Western colleagues is working at full capacity," Lavrov said following talks with his Chilean counterpart, Heraldo Munoz, in Santiago.
The US is trying to shape public opinion in a specific manner "because they are not concerned by the fate of Ukraine in the first place, but have strong desire to prove that it's them who decides how things should be - always and everywhere," Lavrov stated.
The foreign minister stressed that sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and its allies are the result of such a stance, and will have a costly outcome for Washington in the long run.
"The secondary reason for food aid is food," Rep. Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who introduced the bill, said in an interview Thursday. "The No. 1 reason is military readiness."
There we have it, that's the reason for a bill that's just been passed by the House. Who gives a shit about the people dying of starvation in other countries when we could screw up the system to make sure that we've got plenty of things that go bang?
The background to this is an absurdity called the Jones Act. This, among other provisions (for example, insisting that cargo between two US ports must be carried on US-owned, crewed, built and flagged ships) insists that food aid being sent off to the starving elsewhere must be carried on those US-built, owned, crewed and flagged ships. You'll not be surprised to find out that said US ships are rather more expensive than those using cheaper labor, or those using rather newer, more fuel efficient, engines.
But there we have it from the horse's arse, one of our elected Solons, that this is actually the point. We want to make food aid more expensive so that, for however much we decide to spend on food aid, we can alleviate less starvation.
The specific thing that this bill does is raise the percentage of such aid that must be carried on those Jones Act ships, thus making the food aid system even more inefficient. Quite rightly the Obama Administration opposes this change. Don't, however, think that this is a respectable Democrat arguing with idiot Republicans: the AFL/CIO is over on the Jones Act side here. It's not a party partisan dispute, it's one about the ability to use food aid to favor certain pockets instead of the purpose of food aid, to feed the hungry.

Snow-covered Alaskan tundra sprayed by a mixture of oil, gas, and water released from a BP well pad on Monday.
"BP Well Sprays Crude Oil Mist Over 27 Acres Of Alaskan Tundra"
A large pipe attached to a BP-owned well pad on Alaska's North Slope has sprayed an oily mist of natural gas, crude oil, and water over an area of tundra larger than 20 football fields, state officials confirmed Wednesday.
The discovery at BP'sPrudhoe Bay oil field operation comes one week after federal scientists released a report warning that the United States is woefully unprepared to handle oil spills in the Arctic.
A statement provided by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) said BP discovered the release on Monday during routine inspections, and that the spray was active for about two hours before it was contained. The pipe spewing the gas mixture was facing upwards while strong 30 mph winds blew, which ultimately caused the spray to spread over 27 acres.
It is unclear at this point how much of the mixture was released, the DEC statement said.
A spokesperson for BP did not immediately return ThinkProgress' request for comment Wednesday about its cleanup effort, but spokesperson Dawn Patience told the Associated Press that it is "still assessing repairs." Patience reportedly said it was too soon to determine long-term impacts from the release, but that no wildlife were impacted.
Federal scientists from the National Research Council recently confirmed the difficulty of cleaning up spills in the Arctic. According to their 198-page report, the Arctic's environment is uniquely challenging due to pockets of oil that get trapped under freezing ice, sealing it beyond the reach of traditional cleanup equipment. The Arctic also lacks a variety of infrastructure, including paved roads, which could make response time exponentially longer than typical spills.
That morning, a government official from the Bureau of Land Management told him to come down to a seizure site where the 132 cattle he owned were about to be impounded.
When he arrived, men brandishing handguns told him he couldn't get any closer than 250 yards from his cattle. He watched from a distance as the government loaded the livestock onto stock trailers.
Within a week, the cattle had been sold at a private auction - for what Yowell estimated to be a quarter of their market price. The proceeds belonged to BLM, officials told him, paying a portion of the grazing fees he suddenly owed. It wasn't enough to cover the full debt, and BLM sent Yowell a bill for $180,000.
Yowell has been fighting the BLM in court ever since, but while the case moves its way through the system, his Social Security check takes a hit every month.
The story, ranchers in Nevada say, is far from unique. Beginning in the late 1980s, BLM adopted aggressive tactics in the West, leading to large-scale cattle seizures and a disruption of life for ranchers that had utilized public lands for decades prior.












Comment: So, the Western military alliance, which the U.S. promised Russia would be disbanded with the end of the Cold War, not only expanded right up to Russia's borders, it blitzed numerous countries when its original raison d'état no longer existed, and now it's again being justified under the pretext of 'keeping the West safe from Russian aggression'.
Can there be any doubt that the Western alliance seeks world domination by 'containing Russia'?
Can there be any doubt that Russia gave the West a tremendous opportunity in 1990 to really end wars and build a humanitarian world system? But the U.S. regime instead took that opportunity to expand its domination - "full-spectrum dominance" - over the whole world.
All that has changed is that Russia now knows for certain that the U.S. regime is fundamentally untrustworthy.