Written by Peter Diekmeyer, Sprott Money News

U.S. GDP grew at a 4.6% clip in current dollar terms during the first quarter, according to U.S. Government officials at the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

On the surface, the data makes sense.

Businesses across the country saw sales rise. Workers got salary increases. Trump must be right, America is becoming great again, the experts seem to suggest.

But are they right?

Not if you measure U.S. economic output based on the number of Big Macs the country’s annual GDP can buy.

Measured that way, America has been in a Great Depression for the past decade.

Burgernomics: the Big Mac index applied to GDP

“Burgernomics” is hardly new. The Economist Magazine’s Big Mac Index has been using the famous hamburger as a light-hearted proxy to determine the purchasing power parity value of global currencies for decades. The idea is to see whether the market values of existing exchange rates adequately measure what people can buy with that money.

A Big Mac, which is made the same way in most countries around the world, and whose recipe has changed little during the past thirty years, provides an excellent tool.

However, the Big Mac also provides a good proxy for how much Americans’ real national output has changed.

In addition to its famous ingredients (two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame seed bun), the burger also contains substantial inputs related to rent (purchase entitles the buyer a seat at the restaurant for an hour or so), labour and taxes (which comprise a huge portion of business costs).

America is in a Great Depression right now

Measured in official terms, U.S. GDP came in at $19.4 trillion in 2017. That’s a 33% increase over the $14.5 trillion recorded in 2007.

However, those $14.5 trillion could buy 4.25 trillion Big Macs back in 2007 when they cost just $3.41 each.

By 2017, the price of a Big Mac had risen to $5.06, so the $19.4 trillion in GDP that year equated to only 3.83 trillion of the burgers.

That suggests that U.S. GDP, as measured in Big Mac terms, fell by 10% between 2007 and 2017.

ShadowStats, stagnant wages and the two-income trap

The idea of measuring U.S. GDP in Big Mac terms is, of course, far from fully-baked.

However, the results tie in with a lot of other anecdotal data points.

John Williams, of ShadowStats, for example has for years tracked how the U.S. Statistical agencies have changed their data calculations. The reasons cited by the officials always sound good, but their net effect is to make government statistics look a lot better than they actually are.

Williams calculates that U.S. inflation (which came in at 2.36% during March) was running at 5.9% based on the way the government calculated the data back in 1990, and at 10.1% based on 1980 methodologies. The official U.S. unemployment rate of 4.14% during March is actually 21.7% when calculated using ShadowStats’ alternative measure.

Other research, also by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, shows that real wage gains for U.S. workers in many categories have actually fallen during recent decades. For example, a typical 27-year-old man earned more in 1969 than he did three decades later.

Trust the experts?

That said, questioning the methodology of U.S. government experts is tricky business.

Academic economists and those that work at the big banks all use the numbers, generally with little or no question.

Those that do question the numbers, such as ShadowStats and the economists at the Mises Institute in Auburn Alabama, tend to be ignored or shut out of mainstream media.

For example, the latest BEA data release saw no prominent experts rise to question the data.

As such, average Americans will need to do their own calculations to figure out whether their government’s numbers are trustworthy.

Those that do so in a booth at their local McDonald’s will get a relatively good indication as to which way the wind is blowing.

Note: neither the Economist Magazine, nor McDonald’s Restaurants responded to requests to confirm data and findings done for this article.

Big Mac index suggests America in decade-long depression

Jonathan Revusky’s website is: HeresyCentral.com

Dead Chinese flight attendants tell no tales. Or do they?

A couple of years ago, maybe in a fit of nostalgia, I recalled the fearless Chinese superwoman, Betty Ong, and was looking for information about her. She has a Wikipedia page with a short (very short, minimal) biographical blurb. Betty was born in San Francisco on 5 February 1956 and, after a rather uneventful life in which she never married or had children or, apparently, much of a social life, made a phone call from a hijacked plane, and then died.

Now, at this point in the exposition, I shall make no bones about the fact that I quickly developed great doubts regarding whether this Betty Ong is a real, flesh and blood person. As much as I looked, I could not find any description of this person that sounded like it was written by somebody who really knew her. The Wikipedia blurb is one thing, but the memorial website maintained by her ostensible family is another. It jumped out at me that whoever had written the description of Betty on that site, obviously never knew this person.

Now, from the point of view of 9/11 Truth investigations, the only important thing to establish regarding Betty Ong is whether the phone call she allegedly made is real. Whether Betty Ong herself is real hardly matters. The general view in the 9/11 Truth community is that all the phone calls allegedly made from hijacked airplanes on that day, including Betty’s, are plainly fake.

My own view is that, while Betty Ong being a real person is not of any importance regarding 9/11 per se, the issue has a more general significance. If you can establish one case of an invented vicsim in a synthetic event, then there are surely other cases in other synthetic events and narratives. (And probably in the 9/11 narrative itself.)

The Elusive Betty Ong

[. . .]

Well, Betty’s life history is rather sparse. One thing that she is alleged to have done is to have graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco in 1974. This datum occurs in various places.

I got in touch with the school’s alumni association, representing that I was an alumnus from that time period, and was very interested in getting my hands on some old yearbooks.

“Oh, the memories…”

My contact there told me that there was a long waiting list to get any original yearbooks. However, she did add that there was a project afoot to digitize them all and put them up on the Internet. So there was little more for me to do on the yearbook front.

I also scoured social media looking for anybody who both claimed to have known Betty and, in particular, described this person in a way that it seemed like they really knew her. I could not find anything. I also discovered that there were very few photos of Betty available and what few there were all seemed to have been photoshopped.

One thing that I did learn meanwhile (from a correspondent in Colorado who had also taken an interest in our gal Betty) is that a site called sfgenealogy.org had all the George Washington High graduating class lists online. In fact, at the time Betty would have attended this school, there were two graduating classes per year: Spring and Fall. For example, the Spring and Fall of 1974 are available here and here.

No sign of Betty Ong. My Colorado correspondent pointed this out to me but then a little while later wrote me a new message to tell me that Betty was indeed on the Spring 1973 Graduating class list. Yes, there she was all right! Right in between Vivian Olsen and Jacki Ono! I have to admit that I was excited by this since it was the first somewhat official corroboration of any of Betty’s meager life history. Of course, she allegedly graduated in 1974, but decades later, surely one could misremember 1973 as 1974. It’s an easy mistake.

[. . .]

Betty, Betty, where are you?

Nearly two years passed, but I guess I never completely got over Betty. Not very long ago, I was idly typing Betty Ong related search strings into Google, not expecting anything new, but then, much to my surprise, I saw that the relevant yearbooks were now online! On a site called classmates.com. The site required me to sign up for an account which I duly did and I located the 1973 yearbook and eagerly looked for the Spring 1973 graduating class photos.

I assume you are on the edge of your seat by now, dear reader, and I will not keep you in suspense any longer. Here is the relevant yearbook page:

George Washington High, Spring 1973 Graduating Class. No Betty Ong.

As I pointed out above, Betty Ong should be right between Vivian Olsen and Jacki Ono, in the right hand page, on the second row. [. . .]

I was about ready to wrap up the Betty Ong high school yearbook investigation, when I did remember that there were two graduating classes in that year: Spring 1973 and Fall 1973. [. . .]

Consulting the Fall 1973 graduating class list, I saw that, if (contrary to fact) Betty Ong were there, she would have to be in between Wayne Ogawa and Betty Ow. So I located the appropriate page in the online yearbook and I discovered something absolutely extraordinary:

Yes, there was indeed an entry for Betty Ong in the appropriate page of the Fall 1973 graduating class! She’s right there on the right-hand page, second row in the center. However, I had been looking for the Chinese flight attendant Betty Ong, but now I had my first encounter with Black Betty! The Chinese Betty Ong was intriguing enough, but I daresay that Black Betty is even more fascinating!

Here is a close-up:

No Shit, Sherlock

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
Sherlock Holmes, famous (fictional) English detective

[ . . .]

Black Betty Found at Last?

Now, dear reader, I went the whole 9 yards on this investigation. I looked hard for Betty. Well, now, for either Betty, the Chinese one or the Black one. Aside from the page with Black Betty, there is no other Betty Ong — black, yellow or white — in the 1973 yearbook.

If our Betty Ong was there, she certainly kept a low profile. She did not play any varsity sports, no musical instrument. She did not sing in a choir. She was not in the Spanish club or the debate club… Well, there are a lot of people like that, who just do their course work and do not participate in any extra-curricular activities, but I felt it was still worth looking.

Betty, oh, Betty… where are you?

Finally, it occurred to me that if somebody was a senior in 1973, that person would be in their junior year in 1972 and would usually appear in the 1972 yearbook as a junior.

So I scanned the 1972 yearbook. It turns out that there is no Betty Ong at all there of any color of the rainbow. However, the two people who flank Black Betty in the 1973 yearbook photo, Wayne Ogawa and Betty Ow, both appear in the 1972 yearbook. Here is the relevant page:

Here is a close-up of the relevant part of the page.

Note that there is an extra unaccounted for person, one “Oka, L.”, in between Wayne Ogawa (whose name contains a typo here) and Betty Ow. However, I finally did account for him. That is clearly Lawrence Oka, who, it turns out, graduated in Springof 1973. He is both on the sfgenealogy.org list and in the 1973 yearbook as being part of the Spring 1973 class. I infer that, at this point, he was slated to graduate in Fall of 1973 but must have then assumed an extra heavy course load in order to graduate finally on time with the Spring 1973 class.

That is a little wrinkle, but Ogawa and Ow are exactly where one one would expect, listed as being in the class of Fall 1973 in both the 1972 and 1973 yearbooks. But what about Black Betty?

Well, on the list of the Spring 1973 graduating class in the 1972 yearbook, there is a black girl listed as “Ole, V.”. Now, I would be the first to admit that these digitized photos are pretty grainy and it is certainly hard to swear that “Ole, V.” from the 1972 yearbook is the same person as the Black Betty Ong in the 1973 yearbook. However, I think finally it must be the same person. In the intervening year, she would have changed her hair and lost some baby fat in the face.

Though I am not 100.0% certain, and it is not a sine qua non either, there are some strong indications. For one thing, “Ole, V.”, unlike the previous people, Ogawa, Oka and Ow, does not appear in the 1973 yearbook. Granted, she could have transferred to another school or dropped out entirely. Everything is possible. However, the simplest explanation is that she is in fact the black girl who is labeled as “Betty Ong” in the 1973 yearbook. Note that the surname “Ole” fits right between Ogawa and Ow and this seems like too neat to just be a coincidence.

By the way, I had never heard of the surname “Ole” before. It sounds vaguely Hispanic, but, in fact, it is a moderately common surname in Kenya.

So, this concludes the investigation of Betty Ong’s high school career. In fact, it looks quite unlikely that there was any Chinese ethnic student by the name of Betty Ong at George Washington High School in the early seventies. The one mention of a Betty Ong corresponds to the photo of a black girl, who is probably “Ole, V.” from the 1972 yearbook. Betty Ong’s name does appear on this Spring 1973 graduating list but, as I point out above, the name is pretty clearly inserted.

[. . .]

By firing missiles on Syria with its French and British allies, the strange President Donald Trump has managed to force the Western powers to accept the end of their unilateral domination of the world. The insignificant result of this demonstration of force drags NATO back to reality. Without having made use of its weapons, Russia now succeeds the Soviet Union in the balance of world power.

Over the last few weeks, and for the first time in their history, the United States and Russia have mutually threatened one another with a World War. The totally disproportionate character of the crisis in terms of the subject of the dispute demonstrates that what is at stake here today no longer has any connection with what has been happening in the Greater Middle East since 2001, but exclusively with an attempt to maintain the current World Order.

After the gigantic massacre of millions of people over seventeen years, from Afghanistan to Libya, the manner in which about fifty people in East Ghouta (Syria) are said to have died seems almost ridiculous. And yet on 14 April, this was the pretext chosen by Washington, Paris and London to launch a three-party aerial attack.

Let’s avoid getting distracted by the circumstances, and get straight to the heart of the matter – the Western powers are attempting to maintain their domination over the rest of the world, while Russia and China are breaking free of it.

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, did not hesitate to tweet to Russia that he was going to fire missiles of a new generation on its soldiers in Syria. The Russian ambassador, Alexander Zasypkine, immediately responded that these missiles would be intercepted and the planes and ships that fired them would be destroyed. The Turkish Prime Minister, Binali Yıldırım, expressed his astonishment at this « street brawl » and called the participants to reason. All of the actors then began to back-pedal.

The naval group of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman left its base in Norfolk, apparently to take position facing Syria. It will take several weeks before it is operational. The question of the confrontation between the United States and Russia, in other words the Third World War, will then be raised again.

It goes without saying that the preparation of this naval unit and its 6,500 soldiers began well before the affair of the Ghouta which serves as a pretext for its deployment.

The question is therefore to understand whether, by firing a deluge of missiles on a few abandoned buildings, Washington and its allies have postponed the confrontation in order to occupy a more efficient position, or, on the contrary, have given up on direct warfare and are preparing for a new form of conflict.

The result of the bombing on 14 April is astonishing – 103 missiles are said to have been fired by the Allies. 71 of these are said to have been destroyed in flight by Syria. A decommissioned military laboratory was apparently destroyed, and the installations of two aerodromes were damaged. This deluge of fire allegedly wounded only three people and killed none. If Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May had intended to show their power, they in fact showed themselves to be powerless.

Seen from Damascus, the message was clear – Syria is in the process of freeing itself from the jihadists, but will not enjoy peace for all that, and will not be able to count on any help from the West for its reconstruction.

The Allies pretend that Syria kept stocks of chemical weapons, despite its membership of the Convention which prohibits them. They claim that they targeted only areas linked to these weapons. And yet, for example, they fired four missiles at the international commercial airport in Damascus, an exclusively civilian target. Happily, the Syrian Arab Army managed to intercept them all.

In total, the Syrian Arab Army, which was only in possession of S-125’s, S-200’s, Buk’s, Kvadrat’s and Osa’s, managed, single-handed, to shoot down two thirds of the Western projectiles. Finally, despite themselves, the Allies had just fought the first battle of their history in which they killed not one enemy. France, which tested its new naval Cruise missile for the first time in a combat situation, was unable to boast of a success to its potential clients.

Of course, the Allies limited themselves. They carefully avoided hitting Russian or Iranian targets, and these two states did not participate in the operation. Nonetheless, the Western armada no longer has the capacity to impose its will on middle powers as long as they are protected by Russia.

Everyone has understood that, as from now :
the United States and Russia – just as in earlier times the USA and the USSR – will refrain from any direct confrontation in order to avoid nuclear war ;
and that the middle powers allied with Russia will not be significantly damaged by the West.
The only military superiority possessed by Washington, London and Paris resides in their capacity to manipulate armed groups and use them as proxies.

By bringing France and the United Kingdom into the fray, President Trump has forced them to accept the reality they were refusing to see.

This grand show, then, was no more than a futile gesture. After a quarter of a century of unilateral domination by the West, its three main military powers have just been down-graded. The world has returned to a bipolar situation like that of the Cold War, although the new rules still need to be defined. The Third World War will have to wait.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation Pete Kimberley

Source Al-Watan (Syria)

Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

The Donald took to some bragging during yesterday’s annual tax filing moment – assuring America’s oppressed taxpayers that happier times beckon. In fact, he insinuated that MAGA is not just a slogan. By his lights, apparently, we are already living the dream. To wit:

On this Tax Day, America is strong and roaring back. Paychecks are climbing. Tax rates are going down. Businesses are investing in our great country. And most important, the American people are winning.

So our purpose in this multi-part series is to beg to differ. Profoundly.

The Donald is not leading America to the promised land.

Instead, he’s leading it to war abroad, fiscal and economic calamity at home and a crisis of governance that pales Watergate into insignificance.

To be sure, these baleful outcomes were baked into the cake when Trump took the oath 15 months ago, and there was never any rational reason to think he could reverse the tide.

As we have said from the beginning, the Donald’s historic role is to function as the Great Disrupter—tying the system in knots and causing the malefic Washington/Wall Street consensus to become irreparably fractured and thoroughly discredited.

But he can not possibly fix anything because he has no agenda, no mandate and no capacity whatsoever to lead.

His domestic program boils down to crude protectionism, nasty xenophobia and epic fiscal profligacy; his foreign policy is a function of who he talks to last among his worsening team of failed generals and bloody-minded neocons; and his notion of White House leadership consists, self-evidently, of early morning tweet-storms from the East Wing Residence.

The single thing that the mainstream media acknowledges as a “success” is the Christmas Eve tax cut, but that will soon prove to be the most counterproductive and irresponsible fiscal policy action in modern history–or even ever.

After all, the Donald inherited a real bad boy—a $700 billion deficit for the upcoming fiscal year (FY 2019). But the King of Debt was nonplussed, electing to pile on $300 billion of tax cuts ($285 billion revenue loss plus interest) for next year alone.

Shortly thereafter, of course, he kept the government lights on by signing the Horribus appropriations bill. So doing, he traded $63 billion of higher domestic spending and more than $100 billion of unfinanced disaster relief for $80 billion of added defense money.

In all, the Trumpite/GOP has pushed the coming year’s borrowing requirement toward $1.2 trillion.This means, in turn, that the bond pits will be flooded with $1.8 trillion of “homeless” treasury paper after accounting for $600 billion of the Fed’s QT bond-dumping program.

Here’s the thing. No one has ever tried—or even contemplated—financing $1.8 trillion or 8.8% of GDP at the tippy-top of a business cycle that will enter record territory (124 months) before FY 2019 is over.

Indeed, the very idea of it is pure madness and it will shatter the entire Bubble Finance order before it is done.

By way of historical comparison, the Federal deficit was $160 billion or 1.1% of GDP at the top of the last cycle (FY 2007) and the Fed was still buying the public debt, not dumping it.

In fact, it bought $15 billion of Treasury paper that year, meaning the net burden in the bond pits was $145 billion or 1.o% of GDP.

So what looms just ahead is a flood of government paper into the bond pits which will be 9X bigger(relative to GDP) than was the case at the last cycle peak on the eve of the financial crisis.

Besides, the Chinese were still buying Treasury paper hand-over-fist back then. By contrast, among the many wars the Donald has on his mind is the trade war with the Red Ponzi that has now gone into full tit-for-tat. This week has already generated a 179% Chinese levy on US sorghum and a pending US levy on steel automotive wheels, and apparently they are just getting warmed up.

On that score, we have no way of knowing whether the Donald’s dictator friend, Xi Jinping, will deliberately dump any of his $1.5 trillion hoard of US treasuries (when you count what is in nominee accounts in the Cayman Island, Belgium etc) as the next step of the trade war.

But it actually doesn’t matter what the motivation or trade war strategy is in Beijing: The overwhelming odds are that it will need to sell, not buy or hold, US treasuries in the years ahead in order to counteract capital flight.

Indeed, as Mr. Xi wrestles with his $40 trillion debt bomb and the towers of speculation that have built up inside the Red Ponzi, he may well move to aggressively plug the foreign exchange loopholes and fill the jails with “enemies of the people”.

But that will only further motivate the flight of capital to places where the Red Emperor cannot seize it.

The same is true of the eurozone. The ECB will be out of the QE business by the end of this year, and into a German-led sound money pivot to QT by the end of 2019. Since the global sovereign bond markets are fungible and arbitraged, that shift too will reduce the central bank uptake of government bonds.

Indeed, the contrast between the ECB’s balance sheet at the least peak in 2007 and the present is startling. Back then it was $1.5 trillion and had ample headroom above; today it has ballooned to $5.5 trillion and has nowhere to go except smaller.

In other words, the $1.8 trillion of homeless US treasury paper in the bond pits of Wall Street is not an aberration and it’s not isolated. After the worldwide central bank money printing binge of the last decade, which t0ok combined balance sheets from $5 trillion to $22 trillion, it’s a universal condition.

And that get’s us to the heart of the MAGA delusion. The Donald has been sold a bill of goods about the efficacy of tax cuts—and that’s the only real basis for his mistaken assumption that the US economy is fixing to boom—by a motley combination of supply-side ideologues, GOP politicians pandering to their donor base and the K-street business lobbies.

But tax cuts are not efficacious if they are deficit-financed late in the cycle and thereby cause an off-setting spike in bond yields. And they are also not efficacious if they fund corporate financial engineering rather than investment in productive assets, or if on the individual side they are temporary and are delivered primarily through credits rather than marginal rate cuts.

Needless to say, all of the above negatives apply to the GOP’s Christmas Eve tax cut bill in spades. And foremost among these is the “yield shock” that lies dead ahead.

As we see it, if the U.S. economy doesn’t buckle first (i.e. tumble into recession and then all bets are off anyway), the 10-year UST yield will break through 4.0% before the end of FY 2019. Indeed, it is hard to see any other outcome when the household savings rate in the US is still in the sub-basement of history.

Moreover, the distinguishing characteristic this time, as opposed to the plunge in 2005-2007 shown in the chart below, is that there is a 8.8% of GDP net treasury funding requirement today compared to just 1.0% back then.

Accordingly, even in the case of today’s flat yield curve, the incremental debt service cost to US borrowers (households, business, government and financial institutions which collectively owe $68 trillion) will total $900 billion at an annual rate or roughly 3X the impact of the tax cut.

Yes, interest payments are circular: Someone gets interest payments from those who owe.

But that accounting identify will be of no consolation to the bottom 80% of US households, which are already leveraged to the gills; or to most US business, which are already lugging $14.3 trillion of debt compared to just $6.2 trillion at the turn of the century;

And, most especially, it will mean a nasty surprise for Uncle Sam. Owing to the Fed’s financial repression and its phony $85 billion per year “profit remittance”, the US treasury only paid $300 billion of interest this year.

But as yields move sharply higher and the Fed is forced to book massive mark-to-market losses on its hoard of Treasury and GSE paper, the carry cost on the public debt will skyrocket and the Fed’s profit remittance to the Treasury will disappear. Accordingly, Uncle Sam will be facing a $1 trillion annual interest burden far sooner than even the CBO now projects.

In fact, the coming yield shock will generate a fiscal bloodbath that would make mincemeat of MAGA—-even if the Donald were still around to witness it.

But as we will show in Part 2, we think a different scenario is now brewing. Namely, a route in the bond pits which will bring the stock averages crashing down, and the Congressional GOP in hot pursuit of a scapegoat wearing a red MAGA cap.

Proof the US would come in “third” in nuke exchange with Russia:

By South Front

76 Missiles hit here, the Pentagon says, before and after (below)

The attack involved the following means and launchers:

• The USS Monterey CG61 fired 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Red Sea.
• The USS Laboon DDG58 fired 7 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Red Sea.
• The USS Higgins DDG76 fired 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Persian Gulf.
• The USS John Warner SSN785 fired 6 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Mediterranean.
• The French frigate LANGUEDOC fired 3 Storm Shadow/SCALP EG cruise missiles from the Mediterranean.
• B-1B strategic bombers fired 19 AGM-158 JASSM air-launched cruise missiles.
• British Typhoon and Tornado fighter jets fired 8 Storm Shadow/SCALP EG air-launched cruise missiles.
• French Rafel and Mirage fired 9 Storm Shadow/SCALP EG air-launched cruise missiles.

According to the Pentagon 76 missiles hit “Barzah Research and Development Center”, 22 missiles hit “Him Shinshar Chemical Weapons Storage Site”, 7 missiles hit “Him Shinshar CW Bunker”.

However, during the official briefing the Pentagon declined to provide any evidence.

The Russian Defense Ministry provided more details how the SADF intercepted such a number of missiles simultaneously in one wave of strikes.

The experts suggested that the Russian military had possibly used its state-of-the-art electronic warfare systems to counter the launched missiles during the final phase of their flight path.

Another factor, which “highly likely” contributed to the effectiveness of the Syrian counter-measures, is that Russia had provided the Syrian military with operational data from its technical reconnaissance net, including satellites and other surveillance means. Likely, Iran had done a similar thing.

Using tracking data, Russian-made air defense systems like S-125, S-200, Buk and Kvadrat are capable of shooting down cruise missiles with a relatively high efficiency.

The 71 intercepted missiles of 103 launched are a decisive failure for the US and its allies. Some experts suggested that the 76 missiles strike on Barzeh announced by the Pentagon could be an attempt to explain where all the missiles had gone.

If the data provided by the Russian Defense Ministry is confirmed, this will be the first time in the history when a side was able to repel a massive strike of so-called modern high-precision weapons/missiles. If so, in the case of a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, the Russians will be able to intercept most of the US means of attack while suffering only minor damage, whereas Russia’s nuclear strike would be a crushing blow.

The infamous line from the movie ‘The Matrix’ – where Morpheus offers Neo a glimpse of the ‘real’ reality that is occurring, not the ‘manufactured’ reality that those whose rule want him to see – could not be a better analogy for what one brave (and clearly a treasonous Russian troll who should be banned from any and all social media forever) Twitter user exposes below.

"Jad" – @Jadinho123 – shows how the world has been lied to many times to create the current Syrian theater of war…

Remember this photo of a kid laying next to her ‘dead’ parents who were ‘killed’ by Assad and this photo went viral and got thousands of retweets and had people crying all over Twitter?

Well…

Oh and remember this photo of this child who was in the back of an ambulance after supposedly being attacked by Assad and his regime???

Well…

It gets worse… And worser…

And worsest…

And a little make-up for good measure… And a rehearsal for a false flag chemical attack…

Remember the girl "running to survive and All her family have been killed…

Well, it was a clip from a music video!!…

Oh, and remember that video of the Syrian boy ‘saving’ his sister from Assad forces?

Well, it was a lie too…

And here is the cast…

And one has to wonder if this is a ‘coincidence’ or is this girl just shit out of luck?

And CNN didn’t care…

Remember this harrowing scene from Syria?

Well it was Gaza…

Remember Bana? The young Syrian girl living in Syria who would post videos blaming Assad and the regime for her friends and families deaths.

Well, this is her dad…

Here’s Bana meeting Turkish president Erdogan. Because a man who funds ISIS is so innocent right???

h/t @Jadinho123

Finally here are two truth-bombs that actually made it to the mainstream media..

Before being cut off...

“Russia has an adequate response to any attempts by the US to pressure it with the use of force,” Vladimir Yermakov, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Department for Weapons Control and Non-Proliferation, said.

“The American myth of it entering the era of all-round and undivided domination existed for less than a dozen years, but is now in tatters,” he said, adding that Russia is back in its historic role of “one of the guarantors of stability and justice in global affairs.”

Washington has to begin talking to Russia as soon as possible because “the military-technological weight of the US keeps steadily decreasing on the international arena,” Yermakov said.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

The US’ recent multidimensional asymmetric offensive against all manner of Russian interests isn’t the random symptom of psychotic Russophobia that it’s being presented as, but is part of a comprehensive strategy for pressuring Moscow to abandon its close cooperation with China & Iran in exchange for a “New Détente”, a scenario that shouldn’t be ruled out if Trump gets his way during the upcoming meeting with President Putin.

Many people are struggling to find any rhyme or reason behind the US’ anti-Russian moves over the past couple of years, especially the ones that Trump was supposedly forced into by the “deep state” out of the mistaken belief that it would relieve the fake news-driven Russiagate pressure on his administration, but the answer to it all is a lot simpler than it appears. The fact of the matter is that everything that’s happening is intentional and part of a comprehensive strategy for getting Russia to abandon its close cooperation with China & Iran in response to the US’ multidimensional asymmetric offensive against its interests, although it’s proven itself to be a failed plan that requires urgent reform. Whether it’s the West’s “Russian propaganda” witchhunt or the Skripal chemical weapons false flag scandal, every single anti-Russian move that’s been undertaken in the last few years is designed to advance this objective.

Taking Apart The Multipolar Triangle

Iran:

There was right after Trump’s 2016 victory that his administration would try to split the Russian-Chinese-Iranian multipolar triangle in Eurasia, and that’s exactly what the President and his team are trying to do, albeit in a different fashion than what people might have expected. Trump rightly calculated that Obama’s unprecedented outreach to Iran through the 2015 nuclear deal was being taken advantage of by Tehran and that the Islamic Republic never had any serious intentions in agreeing to the tacit quid-pro-quo being offered at the time to replace Saudi Arabia as America’s preferred regional partner. Accordingly, he decided to pivot away from his predecessor’s policy and use nothing but “muscular means” to coerce Iran into submitting to the US’ military might, which is a work in progress and one that will certainly be made all the more difficult by Tehran’s mastery of asymmetrical responses.

China:

As for China, Trump also learned from the mistake of his predecessor who at one time offered the People’s Republic a global partnership through the so-called “G-2” or “Chimerica” concept but was rebuffed by a Beijing that’s both too proud to share world leadership with America and also reluctant into being tricked to take on responsibilities that it didn’t agree to or anticipate at the time. It wasn’t coincidental that the G-2’s failure was soon thereafter followed up by China’s announcement of its One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity in order to economically reform the structural basis for the “Washington Conesus” and consequently facilitate the emerging Multipolar World Order. Trump’s Kraken-like answer to this challenge was to continue with Obama’s Hybrid War policy in targeting the most vulnerable “Global South” transit states for China’s transnational infrastructure megaprojects simultaneously with the commencement of a trade war against the People’s Republic.

Russia:

Iran’s full-blown ideological resistance to striking a “deal with the devil” and China’s unflinching commitment to challenging the US’ unipolar dominance of the world mean that there’s no realistic chance that either of them will budge from their previous refusals to abandon the other in exchange for an alleviation of American pressure on their countries, thereby pointing Trump in Russia’s direction because he considers it to be the “weakest link” in this multipolar arrangement. After all, Russia has always insisted with total sincerity that it wants nothing more than an equal relationship with what it still continues to call its “Western partners”, which logically entails them respecting the country’s so-called “sphere of influence” in the former Soviet space. Previous US administrations smacked away Russia’s olive branch every time it was offered, but Trump seemed to actually be interested in cutting a deal with Moscow before the “deep state” intervened to stop him.

The “Deep State’s” Folly

Ironically, that move might go down in history as the last possible chance that the US had to realistically bring Russia back into the “Washington Consensus” by peaceful means, as Moscow signaled that it was prepared to enter into a so-called “New Détente” with Washington that would have obviously involved mutual “concessions/compromises”. That “lost opportunity” might never be regained because Russia’s resolve has since hardened after feeling betrayed by Trump and subject to his administration’s humiliating punishments for not submitting to America without any preconditions (“mutual concessions/compromises”), which is what the “deep state” wanted after making the massive error of judgement in convincing themselves through “groupthink” that President Putin would follow in Yeltsin’s footsteps and surrender if the powerful “oligarchic” class put enough pressure on him to do so in exchange for lifting the sanctions. That ship has sailed and what’s happening now is a combination of scorn and strategy.

The US will never forgive President Putin for refusing to bow down to the Obama-era liberal-globalist “deep state” that sabotaged Trump’s outreach plan, which is why it’s getting so nasty in carrying out witch hunts against Russian media and expelling the country’s diplomats on unproven pretexts. For the “deep state”, this is “personal”, though while Trump seems to understand the “effectiveness” of “playing dirty” as a form of psychological warfare against the Russian leadership, he’s never publicly swayed from his campaign pledge to cut a deal with Russia if it was possible (i.e. the “deep state” lets him or he goes around their backs). It’s with this backdrop in mind that Trump invited President Putin to the White House for a forthcoming meeting that will presumably be about “ironing out their differences” and advancing the presumably mutual goal of a so-called “New Détente”, albeit not on the one-sided unconditional terms that the “deep state” is obsessed with.

Describing The “New Détente”

Trump realized that Russia is digging in its heels by deepening its partnerships with China and Iran in response to the “deep state’s” multidimensional asymmetric aggression and that this policy has been nothing but counterproductive to America’s predominant New Cold War interest in “containing” China. Furthermore, the President seems to have convinced the “patriotic” and “pragmatic” elements of the “deep state” that this is the case and that it’s impossible for America to make any tangible progress in stopping the Silk Road if it has to multitask between “containing” China, Iran, and Russia in vastly different theaters and with completely different methods. It’s much better, the billionaire businessman likely reckoned, to walk back some of his administration’s unnecessarily aggressive moves in Europe and perhaps elsewhere as part of his country’s “mutual concessions/compromises” with Russia for a “New Détente” than to continue with this completely failed policy of pressure.

What the US wants from Russia in exchange is simple, and it’s that it expects Moscow to scale back its strategic partnerships with Tehran & Beijing and to not interfere with Washington’s “containment” campaigns against both of them. Russia is already passively allowing the US and its allies to “contain” Iran in Syria out of self-interested prudence in preventing World War III, but it has yet to pull back from its Silk Road relationship with China. It’s unclear exactly how the US envisions Russia doing this in a “plausibly deniable” way that mirrors the Iranian approach and avoids provoking a hostile reaction from China, but whatever it is that Washington has in mind, it hopes that Moscow will agree to it so that President Putin can forget about international drama and completely focus on fulfilling the comprehensive domestic reform agenda that he plans to carry out during his fourth and final term.

It’s impossible to speculate on whether Russia is even interested in such a scenario at this point in time given all that’s transpired between it and the West in the past year alone, but playing “devil’s advocate” for a moment, there might be another enticing reason aside from the domestic one why Moscow might decide to “play ball”. The increasing polarization of the world economic system into globalization-spreading China and protectionist-espousing America is broadly returning International Relations to its Old Cold War-era bipolarity in advance of its eventual transition to multipolarity, and it’s here where Russia could play a pivotal role in leading a new Non-Aligned Movement (Neo-NAM) that helps other countries “balance” their relations with both superpowers. The US might begrudgingly be forced under the current circumstances and the objective limits of its power to accept the relative curtailment of its influence over some countries by Russia so long as Moscow fulfills a similar role vis-à-vis them and China.

The Great Unknown

It’s a risky gamble because a Russian-led Neo-NAM could just as easily tilt the strategic balance of global influence in the New Cold War towards China as it could towards America, but Washington is wagering that Moscow might conclude that its self-interest could best be protected by maintaining “harmony” between the two superpowers in Eurasia, thus enabling the US to focus more on destabilizing the Silk Road through Hybrid Wars in Africa and the parts of the supercontinent not covered by this “balancing bloc”. Russia’s low-cost but high-impact “balancing” investments could yield enormous dividends for its influence, while any prospective de-escalation in Europe due to the “New Détente” would free up the country’s resources to focus more on carrying out President Putin’s ambitious domestic reform agenda and delivering on the campaign promises that he made his countrymen in order to sustainably guarantee his legacy.

Concluding Thoughts

To reiterate what was just written, there is no way to know for certain whether the US’ latest gambit in trying to reach a “New Détente” with Russia will succeed or not, but it needs to be recognized that the multidimensional asymmetric aggressions that it’s waged against its rival’s interests will eventually take their financial toll and that President Putin might find it increasingly challenging to execute his comprehensive reform agenda on the home front unless he cuts some kind of deal. This doesn’t imply that Russia is at risk of “selling out” to the US, but just that President Putin is accountable first and foremost to his people and then only secondly to his country’s international partners.

If the Kremlin concludes that Russia’s interests would best be advanced through engaging in a series of “mutual concessions/compromises” with the US as part of a “New Détente”, then it won’t hesitate to make that move; likewise, if the savvy Russian leader recognizes that he’s being “taken for a ride” by Trump and that his “counterpart” is offering him a lopsided deal that’s doomed to make his country America’s “junior partner” in Eurasia, then he won’t think twice about walking away with no “deal”. Ultimately, everything depends on whatever deal Trump puts on the table and whether he can convince President Putin that his newfound truce with the neoconservatives translates into being able to get the “deep state” to abide by the terms of any prospective agreement.

If Russia is swayed by the carrot-and-stick combination of the Trump Administration’s possibly sincere commitment to a “New Détente” in exchange for an alleviation of multisided and sometimes humiliating pressure against it, then the geopolitical implications would be profound since Moscow would be ascending into the perfect position for “balancing” Eurasian affairs. It wouldn’t just have China’s tacit support for this initiative but America’s too because each superpower would appreciate Moscow becoming a “balancing” force vis-à-vis the other and freeing them up to focus on their rival in other areas of concern, mostly in Africa. As such, Russia could count on being courted by both of them and finally fulfilling its grand strategic goal to “balance” Eurasia, though provided that this speculative deal goes through in the first place and is actually respected by the US afterwards.

Readers’ Comments:

As a condition for being merely considered for a faculty position, Ohio State University requires that applicants avow their support for diversity and politically correct policies and that they provide proof that they had actively supported such things in the past.

My former colleagues don’t see any problem with this requirement.

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When I applied to become a New York City fireman in 1962, there was a very rigorous physical, including having to press seventy five pounds with one arm and fifty pounds with the other, to get a perfect score (one’s performance was given a mark and was averaged with the written test). The written exam was composed of arithmetic, science and civics. To make a long story short, the physical has been entirely degraded in order to recruit more women and these days it is not graded, one needs of only do the minimum to qualify. The old written exam was declared non-job related (and racist by implication since it seemed to bar so many blacks from qualifying) and these days it is a sort of psychological test that one would have to be a complete moron not to know what answer is being prompted. Finally, last year a black recruit who failed the probationary firefighter training period three times was given a fourth chance.

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A few years back the Washington Times had a great article about the culture within WMATA that has caused its collapse. Here’s just the beginning of that excellent article.

Ninety-seven percent of the bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black, with only six white women out of more than 3,000 drivers, according to Metro documents — a lack of diversity at one of the region’s largest employers that has led to an acknowledgment of failure in affirmative-action documents and spawned a series of lawsuits.

The homogeneity, interviews with dozens of current and former Metro workers indicated, is a proxy to a clubby culture of favoritism in which merit has little to do with promotions, and accountability, such as noting safety violations, is a career death knell. In typical examples, court and Metro records show, a black man who spent eight years in prison for dealing PCP was promoted to a high-level management position soon after his release, and whites in the same positions as blacks with far less seniority are inexplicably paid less.

With Metro’s budget chronically strained and reports of mismanagement coming more regularly than trains, interviews and internal records depict a likely root: an environment in which hardworking employees are actively excluded and those who rise are those willing to do the bare minimum — never causing a stir by flagging rampant safety violations, reporting malfeasance or proposing improvements.

“When the accident happened in 2009, I called a supervisor and said, ‘Is this the one we all dreaded?’ The way workers do their jobs, we all knew it was a matter of time. … The inept get promoted, and the capable get buried. Smart people were put in the corner, ostracized and given nothing to do,” said Christine Townsend, who sued Metro for discrimination and won.

It is a culture in which a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate, multiple staffers said.

“The average rider wouldn’t believe the things that go on. There are so many easy things we could do to make the system better,” a station manager said. “But they’d never put me in charge because they know I’d make sure others actually did their jobs. They don’t want change. It’s go along to get along.”

Metro is a quasi-public agency that receives funding from the federal government, Maryland, Virginia and local jurisdictions to operate a regional bus and rail transportation system in the national capital area, but is not beholden to rules that apply to fully governmental entities. With a $2.5 billion operating and capital budget for fiscal 2012, Metrorail serves 86 stations and has 106 miles of track, while Metrobus serves the nation’s capital with 1,500 buses.

Metro’s affirmative-action plan notes that the 1.4 percent of its bus and train operators who are Hispanic and the 25 percent who are female of any race are “less than reasonably expected.” It does not make note of the 1.5 percent who are white.

Even in entry-level occupations typically dominated by Hispanics, there are virtually none at Metro. Only one laborer out of 67 is Hispanic; of 540 landscapers, carpenters and cleaners, only 22 are Hispanic. In the national capital region, Hispanics make up 13 percent of adults and blacks comprise 25 percent; white women constitute 29 percent.

“The odds of such a disparity occurring by chance are statistically infinitesimal,” Ronald A. Schmidt, a lawyer representing 12 white women exploring a class-action lawsuit, wrote in a 2003 letter. “There appears to be an entrenched network of African-American employees at WMATA that is able to steer jobs, promotion, training and other career enhancing benefit to persons of their own racial or ethnic group.”

The average Metro worker had a $60,000 salary, which rises to $69,000 including overtime. That is more than 71 percent of area residents who had an income in 2010, including 62 percent of whites, census records show.

White and Hispanic employees who allege discrimination have found a deaf ear at Metro’s civil rights office, whose 17 employees are black. Until at least 1999, that office tracked complaints via a handwritten ledger on a series of taped-together sheets of paper, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. The system “made determining statistics impossible,” said a civil rights employee from the time.

In recent months, such antiquated record keeping has allowed employees to steal thousands of dollars that electronic systems easily could have detected — and in more than one case, a culture of complicity has kept prosecutors from trying those who were caught because they feared no clean witness or proper records could be found.

“There’s a strong sense of nepotism, and it is the culture of Metro,” the civil rights employee said. “It was more of a buddy system than it was merit-based.”

Metro did not respond to requests for information about workforce demographics.

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My understanding is that the NYC transit union is a militant Caribbean affair. In DC, 97% of the bus and train operators are blacks and marginal black engineers are promoted over whites with PhDs. This has resulted in a predictable outcome. The deteroration of Metro.

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This reminds me of something similar I experienced in Houston. At the time I employed programmers for contract work. I was contacted by a Nigerian who offered to broker two million dollars in City of Houston contracts to upgrade its computer systems. Altho I had an established and experienced organization, I could not apply to obtain such contracts myself due to the racial preference system. The Nigerian had no organization, no employees, no experience, and no citizenship. But he had a PhD in computer science, which he told me he had obtained online “for life experience” in exchange for $1500. This qualified him, a recent immigrant, to go to the top of the list of MBE applicants and be awarded exclusive rights to these city contracts. The subcontract deal he proposed was no surprise: my programmers would do all the work at minimum wage while he would collect all the payments from Houston at full professional rates while he himself contributed nothing.

I think this situation, which springs from the MBE scam (thank you SCOTUS for creating the scam) coupled with the Tammany Hall like strangle-hold that race-conscious blacks maintain over Houston’s city government, pretty well matches the increasing number of businesses in Houston that I see hiring Pakistanis, Mexicans, Indians, Blacks, etc., in short anyone with melanin and preferably a recent immigrant–but never whites. The people in these businesses, including some multinationals, in defense of this discriminatory employment policy against whites, reply “diversity”. This too I’ve been told personally.

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Likewise, an illiterate illegal can cross over, from a Latin American country that has ZERO connection to the culture or history of the United States–never suffered ANYTHING, and he or she is automatically given preference once “in the system” (including college entrances). That’s what the democrats are selling to white women. And white women are totally ok with that.

That’s totally cool with blacks, I get that–they don’t care and aren’t thinking about the future (or seeing it). But white women(?), they sit back and vote for this and agree with this. Their own kids will take a backseat in everything from hiring preferences, to college, to other federal, local and state benefits.

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Indians are not here to “save” America or even our tech industry. They are parasites here to turn the US into another shithole like India. If Indians were that smart, why is India such a shithole, did you ever think about that? Per the WSJ there are already at least 500,000 Indians in the US illegally. Search for “Microsoft tech support” on Google and call those mysterious 1-877-xxx-xxxx numbers all over Google search, 9 out of 10 are fecking Indian scammers pretending to be Microsoft tech support trying to download crap on to your machine to scam you. The more Indians we import, the quicker we’ll turn into another India. Go see for yourself what a shithole India is, then come back and tell us it’s a good idea to import more of these shit parasites to the US. “Best and brightest” my eye. It’s exactly because of clueless Americans like you that we are going down in flames.

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Southern farmers didn’t live with other Whites. They lived with their black slaves. Nowadays White farmers live surrounded by illegal Hispanic Indian workers and their families on welfare.

They send their White children to schools that are 70 to 80 percent 80 IQ Hispanic Indian.

Cheap labor rules over ethnicity and even their children’s schools.

And there are almost no Jewish farmers in this country.

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Actually, Whites did this. The 1968, the Affirmative Action Civil Rights Act was made law by a White male Senate and more than 90 percent White male Congress.

An all White male Supreme Court ruled against hiring of qualified Whites in favor of extremely unqualified Blacks in the Griggs vs Duke Power and Kaiser vs Weber cases.

Kaiser vs Weber was about the fact that Kaiser Steel mills required that applicants for foremen have a high school diploma.

All White male Supreme Court ruled against merit hiring in favor of unqualified non White hiring

It was a White male Government that did it. There were very few, almost no White women senators, cabinet members, judges, congress critters or even attorneys between 1968 to 1973 when affirmative action was implemented.

Blame your fathers and grandfathers generation, sometimes known as the Greatest Generation because it won WW2.