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This evening's music features Texas blues piano player Big Walter Price. Enjoy!

"Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future."

-- Adolf Hitler

News and Opinion

Report: The CIA Is Directing Sabotage Attacks Inside Russia

The CIA has been using a European NATO country’s intelligence services to conduct sabotage attacks inside Russia since the February invasion of Ukraine, investigative journalist Jack Murphy reported on Saturday, citing unnamed former US intelligence and military officials.

The report said that no US personnel are on the ground in Russia but that the operations are being directed by the CIA. The US is using an ally’s intelligence services to add an extra layer of plausible deniability, and a former US special operations official told Murphy that layer was a major factor in President Biden signing off on the attacks. ...

According to the report, the covert campaign inside Russia has been years in the making. Two former military officials said that the NATO country’s spy services had hidden a cache of explosives and equipment in Russia more than a decade ago, and some of the gear has been used recently. ...

It’s not clear how many attacks the sleeper cells have been responsible for, but there has been a series of mysterious explosions at Russian military facilities, powerplants, and railways since the invasion. The report suggested that the saboteurs could have been behind an April fire at the research institute of Russia’s Aerospace Defense Forces, which killed over 20 people. ...

In his note at the end of the report, Murphy said that he published the story to inform the public. “Indeed, the Russian government knows perfectly well who is sponsoring these sabotage strikes. Moreover, the intelligence community wants them to know. The only party left in the dark is the public at large, left unaware of the shadow war taking place behind the scenes,” he wrote.

The Claim That The Ukraine War Advances US Interests Discredits The Claim That It’s “Unprovoked”

One of the most illustrative examples of how the mainstream worldview is based on narratives rather than facts is the way Republican officials like senate minority leader Mitch McConnell have been branded servants of Russia despite consistent track records as virulent Russia hawks.

“Moscow Mitch”, as Democrats absurdly titled him during the height of Russiagate hysteria in 2019, gave a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday arguing that the primary reason to back Ukraine in its war against Russia is because doing so serves US interests.

“President Zelensky is an inspiring leader,” McConnell said in his speech ahead of the Ukrainian president’s visit to Washington. “But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests.”

McConnell argued that backing Ukraine “will massively wear down the arsenal that is available to Putin for future efforts to use bullying and bloodshed,” taking a stab at the Biden administration for not requesting more money for this immensely useful proxy war.

“So I’ll say it one more time. Continuing our support for Ukraine is morally right, but it is not only that. It is also a direct investment in cold, hard, American interests,” McConnell said. “That’s why Republicans rejected the Biden Administration’s original request for Ukraine assistance as insufficient.

“Finally, we all know that Ukraine’s fight to retake its territory is neither the beginning nor end of the West’s broader strategic competition with Putin’s Russia,” McConnell concluded. “Increasing the pressure on Putin’s regime can and should be a bipartisan priority.”

You see US empire lackeys gushing all the time about how extraordinarily efficient and cost-effective the proxy war in Ukraine is for furthering US interests against Russia, which is funny because they spend the rest of the time talking about how this invasion was “unprovoked” and rending their garments about how horrible it is. The official imperial position is somehow simultaneously (A) “We hate this war and never wanted it,” and (B) “This war benefits us tremendously.”

The only way to reconcile these two positions is to believe that Vladimir Putin acted against the interests of Russia in the service of the United States by invading Ukraine, for no other reason than because he is too stupid and evil to do otherwise. The other choice is to do what most empire loyalists do and simply not think very hard about those obvious contradictions.

Alternatively, you can consider the possibility that Putin was pressured into choosing between two bad options by the many aggressive provocations the empire has been making for years. Empire apologists always claim that western provocations had nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine, but if that’s true then why did so many western experts spend years warning that western provocations would lead to an invasion of Ukraine?

Plainly the claim that the US is just an innocent bystander helping its good buddy Ukraine because it loves freedom and democracy is discredited by the claim — often made by those very same claimants — that this war serves US interests. But you hear them bounce seamlessly between the two all the time.

Some of the usual suspects are using Zelensky's visit to whine about how expensive aid to Ukraine is, so it's a good opportunity for this CEPA report that notes that for just 5% of the US military budget, we've disabled 50% of Russia's military power. https://t.co/T4ksyeqx3M

— Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) December 21, 2022

There’s a viral thread making the rounds on Twitter right now by a historian named Brett Devereaux that exemplifies this perfectly. In the first tweet in the thread he’s enthusing about how “for just 5% of the US military budget, we’ve disabled 50% of Russia’s military power,” then in the very next post in the thread he’s weeping about what a humanitarian crisis the war is and how we just want peace, and then in the very next post after that he’s saying “from a pure realpolitik perspective, Putin’s war was a massive blunder that has strengthened the US global position, degrading Russian capabilities (which frees up resources for other threats) and strengthening our alliances.”

California representative Adam Schiff, who has been calling this war “unprovoked” since the invasion, was saying all the way back during the Trump impeachment hearings of 2020 that “the US aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

Another congressman, Dan Crenshaw, said on Twitter this past May that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”

“It is in America’s interests to help Ukraine defeat one of our most powerful foes,” tweeted The Atlantic’s David French in the wake of Zelensky’s PR appearance in Washington.

“It is in America’s national security interests for Putin’s Russia to be defeated in Ukraine,” tweeted warmongering senator Lindsey Graham.

US chauvinism & warmongering is so ingrained that @AdamSchiff can openly declare, in Jan 2020, that US uses Ukraine to “fight Russia over there,” and our elites applaud. Fast forward two years later when Russia fights back, and the same circle is outraged. pic.twitter.com/6B4QVFSZvV

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) February 26, 2022

Statements like these should fully discredit the official narrative that the US is helping Ukraine fight off an unprovoked attack by a reckless tyrant. These are mutually contradictory positions; either it’s a completely unprovoked invasion that Washington didn’t want, or it’s an excellent way of getting Washington everything it wants. It’s nonsensical and naive to believe both.

But of course they do not discredit the official Ukraine narrative in the eyes of the public, because the US has the most effective propaganda machine that has ever existed. The many glaring inconsistencies and misdeeds of the empire are simply airbrushed away with a little spin and sweet talk.

If it weren’t for the imperial spin machine, nobody would believe the US just coincidentally stumbled its way into a lucky proxy war that happens to help it advance its agendas of global domination.

Remember when the MSM told us that believing someone besides Russia might be responsible for the Nord Stream attacks means you're a crazy QAnon-Satanic-sex-trafficking-cabal conspiracy theorist? https://t.co/bjgriRlxSd pic.twitter.com/zdMpqXNFn8

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 21, 2022

Russia Now Says Ukraine Losing 2 Battalions per Day in Donbass, 2nd Ukrainian Drone Attack on Engels

Congress, Biden boost war spending at the expense of social programs

The massive omnibus budget bill passed by Congress and endorsed by President Joe Biden will cut social spending in real terms while increasing military spending and providing a further gusher of funds for the US proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. The omnibus legislation passed the Senate Thursday afternoon by a 68–29 vote, with all 50 Democrats and 18 Republicans supporting it, and 29 Republicans opposed. The bill raises domestic spending by $42 billion, or 6 percent, and raises military spending by $76 billion, roughly 10 percent.

The legislation accounts only for discretionary federal spending, which is subject to congressional action each year. An even larger sum goes to automatic outlays, so-called entitlements, which include Social Security and Medicare payments, other small retirement and benefit plans, and interest on the federal debt, which will rise sharply next year as the Federal Reserve raises rates.

Besides the top-line numbers of $858 billion for the military and $772 billion for domestic programs, there is another $80 billion in emergency spending, more than half for Ukraine, and the remainder to fund responses to US natural disasters like hurricanes, floods and wildfires. The White House proposal of $9 billion to fund future responses to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic was dropped.

Since the US inflation rate is 7 percent, the 6 percent rise in domestic spending is a real-terms cut, meaning fewer real resources for health care, education, housing, mass transportation and what remains of social benefit programs like food stamps and home heating assistance.

By contrast, the budget raises military spending by 10 percent, to a record $858 billion. There is an additional $45 billion in aid to Ukraine, which combines financial support to the bankrupt regime in Kiev and direct military support. Total war spending is thus well over $900 billion. An increase next year of similar proportions would put the military budget above $1 trillion for the first time, a truly staggering sum.

The bipartisan budget deal between Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer and Republican leader Mitch McConnell established for the first time that domestic spending would increase at a significantly lower rate than military spending.

Pentagon FAILS Fifth Audit IN A ROW As Congress INCREASES Budget

Chris Hedges: The Democrats Are Now the War Party

The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested. ...

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted present.

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.

U.S Troops Headed To Ukraine w/ Patriot Missiles?!?

Ukraine aims for UN-backed peace summit in February

Ukraine is aiming to hold a peace summit by the end of February – preferably at the United Nations with its secretary general, António Guterres, as a possible mediator – according to its foreign minister.

But Dmytro Kuleba said that Russia could only be invited if the country faced a war crimes tribunal first.

Kuleba also said he was “absolutely satisfied” with the results of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to the US last week, and he revealed that the US government had made a special plan to get the Patriot air defence system, which can shoot down enemy missiles, ready to be operational in the country in less than six months. Usually, the training takes up to a year.

Kuleba said during the interview at the foreign ministry that Ukraine will do whatever it can to win the war in 2023, adding that diplomacy always plays an important role.

“Every war ends in a diplomatic way,” he said. “Every war ends as a result of the actions taken on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.” Kuleba said the Ukrainian government would like to have a peace summit by the end of February, around the anniversary of Russia’s invasion.

Zelensky-Biden talks prove Ukraine, US not interested in peace — Foreign Ministry

The talks between Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky and US leader Joe Biden in Washington showed that Ukraine and the US seek not peace but further hostilities, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during a briefing Thursday.

"The talks in Washington showed that neither Ukraine nor the United States seeks peace. They are simply determined to continue fighting," the diplomat said.

Three Russian servicemen dead after Ukrainian drone attack, Moscow says

Three Russian servicemen have died after a Ukrainian drone attack on a crucial airbase deep inside Russian territory, Moscow has said.

According to the defence ministry, a Ukrainian drone was shot down on the approach to Engels base early on Monday morning but falling debris killed three service personnel.

The strike was the second recent attack on the airbase, located about 300 miles away from the Ukrainian border and more than 450 miles south-east of Moscow.

On the New Year’s Eve, everybody’s into making predictions

Many come up with futuristic hypotheses, as if competing to single out the wildest, and even the most absurd ones.

Here’s our humble contribution.

What can happen in 2023:

— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022

1. Oil price will rise to $150 a barrel, and gas price will top $5.000 per 1.000 cubic meters

2. The UK will rejoin the EU

3. The EU will collapse after the UK’s return; Euro will drop out of use as the former EU currency

— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022

4. Poland and Hungary will occupy western regions of the formerly existing Ukraine

5. The Fourth Reich will be created, encompassing the territory of Germany and its satellites, i.e., Poland, the Baltic states, Czechia, Slovakia, the Kiev Republic, and other outcasts

— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022

6. War will break out between France and the Fourth Reich. Europe will be divided, Poland repartitioned in the process

7. Northern Ireland will separate from the UK and join the Republic of Ireland

— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022

8. Civil war will break out in the US, California. and Texas becoming independent states as a result. Texas and Mexico will form an allied state. Elon Musk’ll win the presidential election in a number of states which, after the new Civil War’s end, will have been given to the GOP

— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022

9. All the largest stock markets and financial activity will leave the US and Europe and move to Asia

— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022

10. The Bretton Woods system of monetary management will collapse, leading to the IMF and World Bank crash. Euro and Dollar will stop circulating as the global reserve currencies. Digital fiat currencies will be actively used instead

— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022

Season greetings to you all, Anglo-Saxon friends, and their happily oinking piglets!

— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022

South Korea scrambles jets as North Korean drones ‘violate airspace’

South Korea scrambled warplanes and attack helicopters and fired warning shots on Monday after North Korean drones violated its airspace, the South Korean military said.

South Korea tracked the drones crossing from North Korea over what is known as the military demarcation line between the two countries after detecting them in the skies of the western city of Gimpo at about 10.25am (0125 GMT), the military said.

Boric Says Chile Will Open Embassy in Occupied Palestine

Palestinian officials and supporters welcomed leftist Chilean President Gabriel Boric's announcement this week that his country will open an embassy in the West Bank, which has been illegally occupied by Israeli apartheid forces for 55 years.

"We are going to raise our official representation in Palestine from having a charge d'affaires," Boric said at a Wednesday evening Christmas tree-lighting ceremony with Palestinian Christians.

"Now we are going to open an embassy of our government to give it the corresponding representation, to demand in all spaces something so basic, so simple that today is not being done, which is that international law is respected," the president added. "Nothing more and nothing less."

Who let the Ukro-nazis in?

More than 14,000 in Washington state lose power after energy station attacked

More than 14,000 people suffered power outages in Washington state on Christmas Day following burglaries and a series of vandalisms at different power stations.

The Pierce county sheriff said in two statements that no suspects have yet been identified for the incidents.

The Christmas Day outages add to an alarming and increasing list of similar incidents in the US. There were six attacks across power stations in Oregon and Washington earlier this month, following a similar attack on a power grid in North Carolina at the beginning of December.

In the attack in North Carolina, assailants shot gunfire into two stations, with some claiming that it was done in order to halt a local drag show.

While there are no suspects in the string of attacks, there are concerns that at least some of these assaults are carried out by extremists, motivated by online conspiracy theories and pursuing a far-right agenda.

The Guardian mostly lets Biden off the hook, blaming "Washington realities":

Biden promised to reform the police. Why has so little progress been made?

Two years to the day since George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Joe Biden stood in the White House and signed an executive order he argued should instill optimism and hope among reform advocates across the country. ... “This executive order is going to deliver the most significant police reform in decades,” the president said.

Biden had placed broad police reform as a central campaign issue in a bold criminal justice platform, but two years on, and despite the rhetorical optimism on that signing day, the issue remains as intractable as it is complex.

The executive order was signed after the administration abandoned its pledge to create a national police oversight commission, instead focusing efforts to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act through Congress. ... But the sweeping legislation, which included meaningful efforts to end the use of police chokeholds, mandate the collection of data related to fatal use of force and amend criminal statutes allowing for broader federal prosecution of police officers, has sunk amid partisan point-scoring and the slimmest of Democratic majorities in the US Senate. ...

For the most part, the administration’s order is a symbolic statement of intent or a reinforcement of already existing policy, without the bite to meaningfully affect the majority of America’s 18,000 local police forces over which the federal government has extremely limited oversight. It includes a new national database of police misconduct, mandatory for federal law enforcement but entirely voluntary for local, and a ban on chokeholds for federal law enforcement but little provision to encourage local police to follow suit.

Biden has actively criticized the polarizing notion of “defunding the police”, but nonetheless, some of the ambitious promises of his campaign have still collided with the reality of Washington. ... The total number of people killed by American police, about 1,110 a year, has remained near constant since media efforts to document them began in 2015.

Heh, I guess you can see what somebody's xmas wishes were:

January 6 panel’s body of work boosts DoJ case against Trump, experts say

After 18 months of investigating Donald Trump’s drive to overturn his 2020 election loss, the House committee on the January 6 insurrection has provided the Department of Justice with an exhaustive legal roadmap as it pursues potential criminal charges against the former US president.

Amid reports the committee is already co-operating with DoJ by sharing evidence garnered from 1,000 witness interviews and thousands of documents, former federal prosecutors say the panel’s work offers a trove of evidence to strengthen the DoJ prosecutors tasked with the formidable investigation into the former US president and his top loyalists.

The wealth of evidence against Trump compiled by the panel spurred its unprecedented decision to send the DoJ four criminal referrals for Trump and some top allies about their multi-track planning and false claims of fraud to block Joe Biden from taking office.

Although the referrals do not compel the justice department to file charges against Trump or others, the enormous evidence the panel amassed should boost its investigations, say ex-federal prosecutors.

Democrats Push To BLOCK Trump 2024 Run

The quality of candidates that the Democrat and Republic parties place before the people (and block all challengers to) is a danger to the American people...

Jamie Raskin: electoral college is a ‘danger to the American people’

Recent reforms to the laws governing the counting of electoral college votes for presidential races are “not remotely sufficient” to prevent another attack like the one carried out by Donald Trump supporters at the Capitol on January 6, a member of the congressional committee which investigated the uprising has warned.

In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Maryland House representative Jamie Raskin on Sunday renewed calls echoed by others – especially in the Democratic party to which he belongs – to let a popular vote determine the holder of the Oval Office.

“We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else – whoever gets the most votes wins,” Raskin said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that electoral college that you have, that’s so great, we think we will adopt that too’.”

Can geoengineering fix the climate? Hundreds of scientists say not so fast

As global heating escalates, the US government has set out a plan to further study the controversial and seemingly sci-fi notion of deflecting the sun’s rays before they hit Earth. But a growing group of scientists denounces any steps towards what is known as solar geoengineering. The White House has set into motion a five-year outline for research into “climate interventions”. Those include methods such as sending a phalanx of planes to spray reflective particles into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, in order to block incoming sunlight from adding to rising temperatures.

The work is required by Congress. It is “not new research, but a report that highlights some of the key knowledge gaps and recommendations of priority topics for relevant research”, said a spokesperson for the White House’s office of science and technology policy, adding Joe Biden’s administration wants “effective and responsible CO2 removal” as well as deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

Several American researchers, somewhat reluctantly, want to explore options to tinker with the climate system to help restrain runaway global heating, even as they acknowledge many of the knock-on risks aren’t fully known. “Until recently, I thought it was too risky, but slow progress on cutting emissions has increased motivation to understand techniques at the margins like solar geoengineering,” said Chris Field, who chaired a National Academies of Sciences report last year that recommended at least $100m being spent researching the issue.

“I don’t think we should deploy it yet and there are still a ton of concerns, but we need to better understand it,” Field said. “Climate change is causing widespread impacts, it’s costing lives and wrecking economies. We are in a tough position; we are running out of time, so it’s important we know more.”

Previous attempts at running experiments for what is known as solar radiation management (SRM) have faced staunch opposition. Last year, an exploratory flight in Sweden of a high-altitude SRM balloon, led by Harvard University researchers, was halted after objections by environmentalists and Indigenous leaders. ... An open letter signed by more than 380 scientists demands a global non-use agreement for SRM; it also says that growing calls for research in this area are a “cause for alarm”, due to an unknown set of ramifications that will have varying consequences in different parts of the world and could scramble “weather patterns, agriculture and the provision of basic needs of food and water”.

Frank Biermann, an expert in global governance at Utrecht University, said he’s also disturbed that solar geoengineering will create a sort of moral hazard where governments ease off efforts to cut emissions and fossil fuel companies use it as cover to continue business as usual. Planet-heating emissions are expected to hit a record high this year, even though they must halve this decade if the world is to avoid dangerous levels of global heating. ... “Soon, everyone who is dependent on coal, oil and gas will jump on the solar engineering bandwagon and say, ‘we can continue for 40 years with fossil fuels’ now. This debate threatens to derail current climate policies. It’s a huge risk.”

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

NATO’s Ghosts of the Past Return in Kosovo-Serbia

Serbian President Vucic faces Neocon/NATO ultimatum

The McProxy War Continues: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Prosecution in Saab case threatens to undermine the principle of diplomatic immunity

New JFK/CIA Revelations & Our Alarmingly Secretive Security State

‘Miracles and heartbreak’: saving orphaned elephants as Kenya’s drought devastates herds

The Newborn King

Biden BOWS To Saudis While CRUSHING War Powers Resolution

U.S. Is TERRIFIED Of Losing Africa To China!

NATO Leader Warns Ukraine War Could Escalate Into WW3

Ukraine War Profiteers REALLY Don’t Give A Sh*t!

Inside NATO EXPANSION And The Origins Of Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine: Branko Marcetic

A Little Night Music

Big Walter Price - Get To Gittin'

Big Walter Price - You Better Run

Big Walter Price and His ThunderBirds - Calling Margie

Big Walter Price - Oh Ramona

Big Walter Price and His Thunderbirds - Junior Jumped In

Big Walter Price - Gamblin' Woman

Big Walter Price - Walter's Boogie

Big Walter Price & Albert Collins - My Tears

Big Walter Price - Pack Fair And Square