Puppet Masters
The negative growth rate of -2.9 percent is itself an understatement. This number was achieved by deflating nominal GDP with an understated measure of inflation. During the Clinton regime, the Boskin Commission rigged the inflation measure in order to cheat Social Security recipients out of their cost-of-living adjustments. Anyone who purchases food, fuel, or anything knows that inflation is much higher than the officially reported number.
It is possible that the drop in first quarter real GDP is three times the official number.
Regardless, the difference is large between the January forecast of +2.6 percent growth and the decline as of the end of March of -2.9 percent.
Any economist who is real and unpaid by Wall Street, the government, or the Establishment knew that the +2.6 percent forecast was a crock. Americans' incomes have not grown except for the one percent, and the only credit growth is in student loans, as those many who cannot find jobs mistakenly turn to education is the answer.
#1 The Bank for International Settlements has issued a new report which warns that "dangerous new asset bubbles" are forming which could potentially lead to another major financial crisis. Do the central bankers know something that we don't, or are they just trying to place the blame on someone else for the giant mess that they have created?
#2 Argentina has missed a $539 million debt payment and is on the verge of its second major debt default in 13 years.

Arseny Yatsenyuk has more in common with Ukraine's Neo-Nazi political parties Right Sektor and Svoboda than perhaps most people think.
Yatsenyuk made his comments amid ongoing fighting in the east of Ukraine, where Kiev is waging war upon fellow Ukrainians, shelling and bombing cities in provinces that refuse to recognize the regime's seizure of power during late 2013 - early 2014. After a significant loss of life during one of Kiev's many ill-conceived military operations, Yatsenyuk stated:
They lost their lives because they defended men and women, children and the elderly who found themselves in a situation facing a threat to be killed by invaders and sponsored by them subhumans. First, we will commemorate the heroes by wiping out those who killed them and then by cleaning our land from the evil.From fabricating an "invasion," to claims of "threatened" lives, to the labeling of Russians as "subhuman," Yatsenyuk has recited fully the script of Nazism used to justify its various historical crimes against humanity. Kiev's forces in eastern Ukraine are not fighting an "invasion," but constitute an invading force themselves, making incursions into eastern Ukraine and holding territory only through unmitigated brutality against local populations clearly collaborating with armed self-defense forces intent on resisting Kiev's authority.
Comment: Is it any wonder then that the mostly Russian population of Crimea called for a referendum that would bring them under the protection of the Russian Federation? And that those living in the eastern regions of Ukraine, who also have strong cultural and ethnic ties to Russia would be terrified of the new regime in power in Kiev? They have every right to be.
As The Times reports, based on documents which were turned over to plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Blackwater... According to the documents, the investigators found numerous violations, including changing of security details without the State Department's approval, reducing the number of guard details and storing of automatic weapons and ammunition in Blackwater employees' private rooms.
There were also discipline problems, with guards having parties with heavy drinking and female visitors, including one episode in which an armored Blackwater car was requisitioned by four drunken employees, who drove to a private party and crashed the $180,000 vehicle into a concrete barrier.
About a month ago, a Fatah-Hamas unity government was sworn in. Netanyahu warned/threatened the whole world not to recognize it because, he claimed, it 'opened the door to terrorism'. He also attempted to threaten Fatah by claiming it would be responsible for any 'rocket attacks' from Gaza into Israel. The real reason for Israeli aversion to a united Palestinian government however is that Israel has worked very hard over the past 40 years to prevent any form of Palestinian unity. A united Palestinian front committed to achieving Palestinian rights through peaceful processes would make it much more difficult for the Israelis to justify their Apartheid state built on the decades-long occupation of Palestinian land by force, not to mention the regular murder of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military.
The Police Federation briefing documents released on Friday showed that there will be one officer for every protester at the Celtic Manor Hotel, which will host the NATO summit on September 4 and 5.
"To ensure the safety and secure passage of the event a mutual aid authority has been agreed to secure the deployment of nearly 10,000 officers," it said.
This would be one of Britain's biggest police operations since the 2012 Olympics and the biggest in Welsh history.
Peace activists, who have pledged to descend on the summit venue to express their outrage at NATO's warmongering policies, criticized the British government's decision, saying it is spending millions to protect NATO leaders from peaceful protesters.
Comment: While cutting wages, ignoring mass unemployment, reducing social services and fleecing the populace with ever more taxes, the UK government is spending millions to "protect" corrupt politicians from peaceful protesters - that is, if they don't deploy their own troublemakers to "heat" things up, to give them an excuse to clamp down violently on protesters. All the while military spending is going through the roof and banks rake in record profits ... The "people" they are supposed to represent are an impediment to their plans, we are their enemy!
"We will attack and will free our land," Poroshenko said. The ceasefire officially ended at 19:00 GMT, according to a statement that appeared on the president's website shortly after midnight.
Since then, heavy shelling and intense shooting was reported in the city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region.
"The shelling started at 22:25 local time," American photographer Patrick Lancaster told RT by phone from Kramatorsk. "We are in the basement of the Kramatorsk Hotel. About two hours ago, mortaring started on the center of the city. Each wave lasted anywhere between five to 20 minutes, and there were three different waves of mortars. I don't have any direct information about wounded or killed, but there were so many explosions that I really think there is large number of casualties."

A man takes pictures with a Google Street View Camera in Plaza Sant Jaume in front of the town hall of Barcelona
Refusal on the part of SCOTUS to grant Google's request for an appeal from the high court now leaves intact an earlier decision handed down by a federal appellate panel in California.
The case itself surrounds the Google Street View platform, which for years has photographed huge swaths of the US and abroad by sending camera-equipped cars down roads around the world. Google was hit hard with litigation concerning that program in 2010 though after acknowledging that had accidentally collected payloads from unsecure internet networks, including data consisting of usernames, passwords and email contents.
Google said that it did not intend to collect the data and promised it would never be used, but the San Francisco-based Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals found the company at fault in 2010. Last year Google reached a settlement with 38 states in the US over the data collection valued at $7 million.
Comment: It is interesting to see that the US supreme court, which has been in bed with politicians and businesses until recently, starting to make these decisions against them.
Supreme Court limits President's ability to make appointments during Senate recesses
'Get a warrant' to search cellphones, says unanimous Superme Court Justices
Pastor Frank Stevenson told WTVF that he broke St. Luke's Primitive Baptist Church's "don't ask, don't tell policy" when he licensed 15 women to be ministers earlier this month.
That decision prompted church elders and pastors in the Cumberland Association of Primitive Baptist Churches to call a meeting on Thursday to discuss Stevenson's future. In the end, they decided to put the fate of Stevens in the hands of a committee, which will consider the case over the next few weeks.
Stevenson argued that the 100-year-old tradition of not allowing women in the ministry had no basis in scripture.
"I was actually preparing for this before we licensed the ministers," he explained to WTVF. "I knew that there were some that would again hold to tradition versus the spirit of God. So we had already been praying and looking at all the avenues and aspects that we needed to address this very biased way of trying to orchestrate ministry."
Stevenson said that his congregation backed the decision to license women ministers.













Comment: It is far better to be prepared for collapse than caught unaware.
See: Should one prepare for a collapse or not?
Also see our Forum thread here on Preparedness.