Puppet MastersS


Black Cat

Best of the Web: Facebook execs suppressed Hunter Biden laptop scandal to suck up to Biden-Harris admin: bombshell report

hunter joe biden drugs laptop
Hunter Biden photo recovered from his laptop
(inset) President Joe Biden
The FBI warned major US tech companies ahead of The Post's first reports on Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020 that Russian agents were preparing a strikingly similar document dump — and once the scoop materialized, Facebook executives discussed calibrating censorship decisions to please what they assumed would be an incoming Biden-Harris administration, a congressional investigation found.

The new details — contained in an interim report by the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the weaponization of government — are emerging as former President Donald Trump leads in polls ahead of the Nov. 5 election and as his allies urge a house-cleaning at the FBI and possible new regulations or antitrust actions to punish and restrain platforms like Facebook.

"FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge," an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote on Oct. 14, 2020, the day The Post published the first in a series of bombshell stories on the Biden family's foreign dealings, according to the congressional report.

Comment: The effort at covering up the smoking gun pointing to the Bidens' decades long corruption was prodigious.


Whistle

Whistleblower: Obama FBI ran off-the-books 'honeypot' op on Trump campaign in 2015

obama comey
Former President Barack Obama and former FBI Director James Comey
A whistleblower has told the House Judiciary Committee that the Obama FBI launched an off-the-books operation targeting Donald Trump and his campaign as soon as he announced his bid for the White House in 2015.

The operation, ordered by then-FBI Director James B. Comey, predicated the Crossfire Hurricane operation. According to an FBI agent involved in the clandestine criminal investigation, Comey sent two female FBI undercover agents to infiltrate Trumps 2016 campaign at high levels, who were directed to act as "honeypots" while traveling with Trump and his campaign staff on the trail, the Washington Times reports.
According to the disclosure, which The Washington Times reviewed, the investigation differed from the later Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence operation targeting Russian collusion. It said the early off-the-books probe was a criminal investigation targeting Mr. Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign staff.

The agent "personally knew" that Mr. Comey ordered an FBI investigation against Mr. Trump and that Mr. Comey "personally directed it," according to the disclosure.

Pistol

Israel kills the journalists. Western media kills the truth of genocide in Gaza

Pal child
© unknownPalestinian child, victim of a humanitarian crisis
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as 'self-defence' and opposition to it 'terrorism'.
- Middle East Eye - 25 October 2024
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking. They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity - if they covered them at all - with a "Hamas claims" or "Gaza family members allege". Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.

Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.

For a year, the networks' most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.

That is why western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza - in what the World Court has judged to be a "plausible" genocide by Israel.

That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis - civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive - as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.

Stop

Trump told Netanyahu to end war - Israeli media

DT and BN
© Amos Ben-Gershom/Getty ImagesFormer US President Donald Trump • Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu • Mar a Lago, Florida
The former US president reportedly wants Israel's war with Hamas over by inauguration day.

Former US President Donald Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wants the war in Gaza over before he takes office in January, assuming he wins next week's presidential election, the Times of Israel reported on Wednesday.

Trump made the demand to Netanyahu when the pair met at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in July, the Israeli news site reported, citing "a former Trump administration official and an Israeli official."

Four months before the meeting, Trump told the Israel Hayom news outlet that "you have to finish up your war," calling the destruction of civilian homes in Gaza "a very bad picture for the world." Trump, who often touts his close relationship with Netanyahu and his support for Israel, said a week before the meeting that Israel should end the war "fast... because they are getting decimated with this [negative] publicity."

In his public statements, Trump has never set a timeline for Netanyahu to cease military operations.

Comment: Trump said: "Israel should end the war 'fast... because they are getting decimated with this [negative] publicity."' Israel should end the war for 2.3 million more important reasons.


Gavel

Musk summoned to court over election lottery

EMusk
© Golbeck/Keystone Press Agency/Global Look PressElon Musk • Trump rally • October 27, 2024
The Philadelphia district attorney filed a lawsuit against the tech mogul's initiative aimed at getting Trump supporters out to vote.

A court in the US city of Philadelphia has ordered Elon Musk to attend a hearing on Thursday over the election-related lottery that he launched earlier this month. The tech mogul said the initiative is aimed at mobilizing voters in swing states, while the lawsuit alleges that the initiative has participants "make a political pledge."

With the November 5 presidential election fast approaching, polls indicate that Republican Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, are running neck-and-neck in three battleground states - Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These three states, along with Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada, are expected to decide the outcome of the race.

On Wednesday, a judge in Philadelphia issued a summons to Musk and several other individuals, stating that "it is further ordered that all parties must be present at the time of the hearing" scheduled for October 31.

Nuke

US ready to back South Korea with nuclear weapons - Pentagon

Austin
© Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesUS Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin
Washington and Seoul have "an unequivocal nuclear based alliance," US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said.

The US is ready to support South Korea with both its nuclear and non-nuclear military capabilities, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated on Wednesday. The statement comes as tensions on the Korean Peninsula are on the rise - and just before North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile on Thursday.

Washington and Seoul will be ramping up their defense cooperation and large-scale military exercises, Austin said in a Pentagon press briefing Wednesday alongside South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun.
Austin said:
"I assured Minister Kim today that the United States remains fully committed to the defense of the ROK and our extended deterrence commitment remains ironclad. That commitment is backed by the full range of America's conventional missile defense, nuclear and advanced non-nuclear capabilities. The US and South Korea will be returning to 'large scale' exercises and strengthening our combined readiness and our interoperability."

Comment: North Korea's new relationship with Russia is a game changer. As for the US, nothing compares to the threat of next door nuclear weapons and on-site military drills to ease tension and create alliances.


Star of David

Flashback Best of the Web: How Jewish Is the War Against Russia?

Ben stiller zelensky
© Ukrainian Presidential Press ServiceHollywood actor Ben Stiller meets with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in June, 2022
Five years ago, I wrote an article entitled "America's Jews Are Driving America's wars." It turned out to be the most popular piece that I have ever written and I was rewarded for it by immediately being fired by the so-called American Conservative magazine, where I had been a regular and highly popular contributor for fourteen years. I opened the article with a brief description of an encounter with a supporter whom I had met shortly before at an antiwar conference. The elderly gentleman asked
"Why doesn't anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference and we all know it's American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn't we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?"
In my article I named many of the individual Jews and Jewish groups that had been leading the charge to invade Iraq and also deal with Iran along the way. They used fake intelligence and out-and-out lies to make their case and never addressed the central issue of how those two countries actually threatened the United States or its vital interests. And when they succeeded in committing the US to the fiasco in Iraq, as far as I can determine only one honest Jew who had participated in the process, Philip Zelikow, in a moment of candor, admitted that the Iraq War, in his opinion, was fought for Israel.

Better Earth

In Kazan, the order of the world changed

BRICS 2024 in Kazan
Russian President Vladimir Putin at an expanded meeting of BRICS leaders in Kazan, Russia, October 23, 2024
The nine heads of state and the governments of the BRICS member states.

The XVI enlarged BRICS summit was held in Kazan (Russia), from October 22 to 24, 2024 [1]. In addition to the nine heads of state and government already members of this organization, eleven others attended it, and around twenty additional states have applied for membership.

This event is the culmination of the strategy initiated in 2009 by the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of the Russian government, Vladimir Putin, the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Chinese president, Hu Jintao. These four men had imagined international relations, based on the Charter of the United Nations, allowing each country to develop. It was not a question for them to stand up against the Western Imperialism of the G8 (of which Russia was a member until the Western coup of the Maidan), but of exploring another way, without the Anglo-Saxons.

Vladimir Putin played a central role in the creation of this organ of economic cooperation like Tsar Nicolas II had played in the invention of international law, in 1899 [2]. It was he who organized the first summit in Iekaterinburg, even if it was President Dmitri Medvedev who represented Russia there.

In an interview on the occasion of the Kazan summit, Vladimir Putin, citing the words of the Indian Prime Minister, Narandra Modi, reaffirmed that " BRICS is not an anti-Western, but is a non-Western organization".

In their final declaration, the heads of state and government tackled four separate subjects [3]: - Multilateralism; - Cooperation for stability and security; - Economic and financial cooperation; - Interpersonal exchanges.

Comment: See also:


Attention

How to...Rig Your Rigged Elections

Five tips for the ambitious autocrat just starting out.
Rigged Elections
© Off-Guardian
Are you an aspiring oligarch, dictator or autocrat? Do you want to wield power whilst maintaining a façade of popular support and democratic mandate? Do you want to make your proles believe they have a choice?

Well then, welcome to the first of our "How to..." series. A selection of articles dedicated to teaching aspiring authoritarians how to hide tyranny behind a reassuring mask of freedom.

Here we'll go into the finer points of how it's possible to have "elections" that mean almost nothing.

What we talk about when we talk about rigging an election

First things first, we need to establish what we mean when we talk about "election rigging".

Controlling the outcome of an election is a comparatively simple, even vulgar, process. All you need to do is manipulate the count and/or simply lie about the result.

However doing this efficiently - rigging an election with as little effort as possible and disguising that fact is more difficult.

In short, if your rigged election is entirely reliant on simply forging ballots you have done something wrong. If you want to reliably and consistently control the results of your "elections" you need to be more creative than that.

The vast majority of your work pre-election will be dedicated to laying the groundwork, building infrastructure, and lubricating the public.

The vote itself is the final destination in a long journey that starts with...

Drought

Is the 'axis of resistance' to Israel cracking?

howitzer
© Ilia Yefimovich/Getty ImagesIsraelis artillery soldiers fire a mobile howitzer in the north of Israel, near the border with Lebanon.
With conflict escalating in the Middle East, Iran is at a crossroads: How to maintain influence in Lebanon while avoiding direct war?

The ongoing Middle Eastern conflict has significantly reshaped the balance of power, not only within the region but also beyond its borders. This conflict touches upon the key geopolitical interests of major regional and global powers, such as Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the US, and Russia, leading to shifts in diplomatic and military strategies, as well as power dynamics.

A recent example are the events of the past few days when Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati made an unexpected move, given the country's diplomatic practice, by issuing strong criticism of Iran. Mikati condemned Tehran for "blatant interference" in Lebanon's internal affairs, referencing recent comments by Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

The Prime Minister's main discontent stemmed from the discussion of UN Resolution 1701, which governs the situation in southern Lebanon after the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. The resolution mandates that only the Lebanese armed forces and UN peacekeepers are allowed in the area. However, Ghalibaf, in his remarks, suggested holding talks about the implementation of this resolution with France as a mediator - a proposal Mikati saw as an attempt to impose external control on Lebanon.