We Are Literally Living In The Last Days

Iraqi Army Downs 2 UK Planes Carrying Weapons for ISIL

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iraq’s army has shot down two British planes as they were carrying weapons for the ISIL terrorists in Al-Anbar province, a senior lawmaker disclosed on Monday.



“The Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee has access to the photos of both planes that are British and have crashed while they were carrying weapons for the ISIL,” Head of the committee Hakem al-Zameli said, according to a Monday report of the Arabic-language information center of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

He said the Iraqi parliament has asked London for explanations in this regard.

The senior Iraqi legislator further unveiled that the government in Baghdad is receiving daily reports from people and security forces in al-Anbar province on numerous flights by the US-led coalition planes that airdrop weapons and supplies for ISIL in terrorist-held areas.

The Iraqi lawmaker further noted the cause of such western aids to the terrorist group, and explained that the US prefers a chaotic situation in Anbar Province which is near the cities of Karbala and Baghdad as it does not want the ISIL crisis to come to an end.

Earlier today, a senior Iraqi provincial official lashed out at the western countries and their regional allies for supporting Takfiri terrorists in Iraq, revealing that US and Israeli-made weapons have been discovered from the areas purged of ISIL terrorists.



“We have discovered weapons made in the US, European countries and Israel from the areas liberated from ISIL’s control in Al-Baqdadi region,” the Al-Ahad news website quoted Head of Al-Anbar Provincial Council Khalaf Tarmouz as saying.

He noted that the weapons made by the European countries and Israel were discovered from the terrorists in the Eastern parts of the city of Ramadi.

Al-Zameli had also disclosed in January that the anti-ISIL coalition’s planes have dropped weapons and foodstuff for the ISIL in Salahuddin, Al-Anbar and Diyala provinces.

Al-Zameli underlined that the coalition is the main cause of ISIL’s survival in Iraq.

“There are proofs and evidence for the US-led coalition’s military aid to ISIL terrorists through air(dropped cargoes),” he told FNA in January.

He noted that the members of his committee have already proved that the US planes have dropped advanced weaponry, including anti-aircraft weapons, for the ISIL, and that it has set up an investigation committee to probe into the matter.

“The US drops weapons for the ISIL on the excuse of not knowing about the whereabouts of the ISIL positions and it is trying to distort the reality with its allegations.

He noted that the committee had collected the data and the evidence provided by eyewitnesses, including Iraqi army officers and the popular forces, and said, “These documents are given to the investigation committee … and the necessary measures will be taken to protect the Iraqi airspace.”

Also in January, another senior Iraqi legislator reiterated that the US-led coalition is the main cause of ISIL’s survival in Iraq.

“The international coalition is only an excuse for protecting the ISIL and helping the terrorist group with equipment and weapons,” Jome Divan, who is member of the al-Sadr bloc in the Iraqi parliament, said.

He said the coalition’s support for the ISIL is now evident to everyone, and continued, “The coalition has not targeted ISIL’s main positions in Iraq.”

In late December, Iraqi Parliamentary Security and Defense Commission MP disclosed that a US plane supplied the ISIL terrorist organization with arms and ammunition in Salahuddin province.

MP Majid al-Gharawi stated that the available information pointed out that US planes are supplying ISIL organization, not only in Salahuddin province, but also other provinces, Iraq TradeLink reported.

He added that the US and the international coalition are “not serious in fighting against the ISIL organization, because they have the technological power to determine the presence of ISIL gunmen and destroy them in one month”.

Gharawi added that “the US is trying to expand the time of the war against the ISIL to get guarantees from the Iraqi government to have its bases in Mosul and Anbar provinces.”

Salahuddin security commission also disclosed that “unknown planes threw arms and ammunition to the ISIL gunmen Southeast of Tikrit city”.

Also in Late December, a senior Iraqi lawmaker raised doubts about the seriousness of the anti-ISIL coalition led by the US, and said that the terrorist group still received aids dropped by unidentified aircraft.

“The international coalition is not serious about air strikes on ISIL terrorists and is even seeking to take out the popular (voluntary) forces from the battlefield against the Takfiris so that the problem with ISIL remains unsolved in the near future,” Nahlah al-Hababi told FNA.

“The ISIL terrorists are still receiving aids from unidentified fighter jets in Iraq and Syria,” she added.

Hababi said that the coalition’s precise airstrikes are launched only in those areas where the Kurdish Pishmarga forces are present, while military strikes in other regions are not so much precise.

In late December, the US-led coalition dropped aids to the Takfiri militants in an area North of Baghdad.

Field sources in Iraq told al-Manar that the international coalition airplanes dropped aids to the terrorist militants in Balad, an area which lies in Salahuddin province North of Baghdad.

In October, a high-ranking Iranian commander also slammed the US for providing aid supplies to ISIL, adding that the US claims that the weapons were mistakenly airdropped to ISIL were untrue.

“The US and the so-called anti-ISIL coalition claim that they have launched a campaign against this terrorist and criminal group – while supplying them with weapons, food and medicine in Jalawla region (a town in Diyala Governorate, Iraq). This explicitly displays the falsity of the coalition’s and the US’ claims,” Deputy Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Brigadier General Massoud Jazayeri said.

The US claimed that it had airdropped weapons and medical aid to Kurdish fighters confronting the ISIL in Kobani, near the Turkish border in Northern Syria.

The US Defense Department said that it had airdropped 28 bundles of weapons and supplies, but one of them did not make it into the hands of the Kurdish fighters.

Video footage later showed that some of the weapons that the US airdropped were taken by ISIL militants.

The Iranian commander insisted that the US had the necessary intelligence about ISIL’s deployment in the region and that their claims to have mistakenly airdropped weapons to them are as unlikely as they are untrue.

Credit to Veterans Today

World War Three is underway, actually has been for more than year...

Oh, you didn’t notice that World War Three is underway, actually has been for more than year? Well, that’s because most of it has been taking place in the banking sector, which for most people is just an alternative universe of math. The catch, which many people either miss or don’t care about, is that the math doesn’t add up.

For instance, the runaway choo-choo train of linked European sovereign bond obligationswith its overloaded caboose of interest rate swaps and other janky derivatives of mass destruction. That train left the station in Athens a few weeks ago bound for Frankfurt. Ever since, the German government and its cohorts in the EU, the ECB, and the IMF have been issuing reassurances that the choo choo train will not blow up when it reaches its destination.

Few people grok that Greece is an entity with an economy not much bigger than North Carolina’s, yet it is burdened with roughly $350 billion of old debt that will never be paid back.The only thing at issue is how it will not be paid back, that is, what mode of pretense will be employed to disguise the inability to pay back this debt. The mode du jour has been the crude one of lending Greece more money to pay back the interest on the old debt. A seven-year-old ought to be able to understand where that leads.

It’s kind of up to the Greeks this week to possibly opt out of that farcical deal. They have at least two other present options: return to being a sunwashed semi-medieval backwater of olive farmers, shepherds, and inn-keepers, or perhaps lease out some cozy corner of their vast Mediterranean coastline to the Russian navy for enough annual walking-around money to keep the lights on for the aforementioned farmers, shepherds, and inn-keepers. Of course, that would drive the US and its NATO quislings batshit crazy.

We’ve already got our knickers in a twist over Ukraine, a so-called nation whose highest and best purpose over the millennia has been as a sort of lethal doormat in front of Russia, leaving adventurers like Napoleon and Hitler bleeding in the snow as they crawled back to their nations of origin. In short, Ukraine has worked so well for Russia that we must be insane to imagine that it would give up that traditional relationship. Yet the US and NATO persist in their foolishness and attempt to back up their Kievan intrigues with financial “sanctions” against Russia.

Russia is doing what it has always done in the face of adversity, which is to suck it up. And, anyway, these western financial monkeyshines don’t hold a candle to ordeals like the siege of Stalingrad. What’s more, the Russians, despite their peculiar alphabet and thuggish demeanor, are at least as clever with computers as our code jockeys. We (in the USA) think just because we’ve made it possible for everyman to drool over Kim Kardashian’s booty on an iPhone screen that we have some kind of immunity against cyber counter-attack from way out east.

It seems to me that Russia (with China and others) is very busy constructing an alternate financial network that will allow for international money transfers and other necessities for conducting normal trade operations, outside of systems like the SWIFT code, which the US has been using as a knout against our imagined enemies. The upshot will leave America high and dry in a lot of what remains of international trade, especially in oil.

Meanwhile we continue to tell ourselves the false and idiotic story of “energy independence,” based on the shale oil Ponzi scheme that blew up last fall — the consequences of which won’t really be felt for about another eight months, when all those wells drilled and fracked in 2013-14, start to fall off their production cliff, and the replacement wells will not have been drilled. We’re still importing almost 8 million barrels of oil a day, contrary to all the fairy tales we tell ourselves. What happens when the sellers decide they won’t take US dollars for it? Hmmmm...

Credit to Zero Hedge

American economic fairy tale....

Paul Craig Roberts

According to the official economic fairy tale, the US economy has been in recovery since June 2009.

This fairy tale supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image that keeps the dollar up, the stock market up, and interest rates down. It is an image that causes the massive numbers of unemployed Americans to blame themselves and not the mishandled economy.

This fairy tale survives despite the fact that there is no economic information whatsoever that supports it.

Real median household income has not grown for years and is below the levels of the early 1970s.

There has been no growth in real retail sales for six years.

How does an economy dependent on consumer demand grow when real consumer incomes and real retail sales do not grow?

Not from business investment. Why invest when there is no sales growth? Industrial production, properly deflated, remains well below the pre-recession level.

Not from construction. The real value of total construction put in place declined sharply from 2006 through 2011 and has bounced around the 2011 bottom for the past three years.

How does an economy grow when the labor force is shrinking? The labor force participation rate has declined since 2007 as has the civilian employment to population ratio.

How can there be a recovery when nothing has recovered?

Do economists believe that the entire corpus of macroeconomics taught since the 1940s is simply incorrect? If not, how can economists possibly support the recovery fairy tale?

We see the same absence of economics in the policy response to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. First of all, the only reason that there is a crisis is because instead of writing off that part of the debt that cannot be paid, as in the past, so that the rest of the debt could be paid, creditors have demanded the impossible–that all the debt be paid.

In an attempt to achieve the impossible, heavily indebted countries, such as Greece, have been forced to reduce old age pensions, fire government employees, reduce social services such as health care and education, reduce wages, and sell-off public property such as ports, municipal water companies, and the state lottery. These austerity packages deprive the government of revenues and the population of spending power. Consequently, consumption, investment, and government spending all fall, and the economy sinks lower. As the economy sinks, the existing debt becomes a larger percentage of the GDP and becomes even more unserviceable.

Economists have known this ever since John Maynard Keynes taught it to them in the 1930s. Yet there is no sign of this foundational economics in the policy approach to the sovereign debt crisis.

Economists it appears have simply vanished from the earth. Or, if some are still present, they have lost their voices and do not speak.

Consider “globalism.” Every country has been convinced that globalism is imperative and that not to be part of the “global economy” means economic death. In fact, to be part of the global economy means death.

Understand the economic destruction that globalism has wreaked on the United States. Millions of middle class factory jobs and professional skill jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology have been taken away from the American middle class and given to people in Asia. In the short-run this drops labor costs and benefits the profits of the US corporations that offshore the jobs, but the consequence is to destroy the domestic consumer market as jobs that permit the formation of households are replaced with lowly paid part-time jobs that do not.

If households cannot form, the demand for housing, home appliances and furnishings declines. College graduates return home to live with their parents.

Part-time jobs hurt the ability to save. People are only able to purchase cars because they can get 100 percent financing, and more in order to pay off an existing car loan that exceeds the vehicle’s trade-in value, in a six-year loan. These loans are possible, because those who make the loans sell them. The loans are then securitized and sold as investments to those desperate for yield in a zero interest rate world. Derivatives are spun off these “investments,” and a new bubble is put in place.

When manufacturing jobs are offshored, the US plants are closed, and the tax base of state and local governments declines. When the governments have trouble servicing their accumulated debt, the tendency is not to meet their pension obligations. This reduces retiree incomes, incomes already reduced by zero or negative interest rates.

This unraveling of consumer demand, the basis for our economy, was entirely obvious at the very beginning. Yet junk economists or hired corporate mouthpieces promised Americans a “New Economy” that would provide them with better, higher paying, cleaner jobs to take the place of the jobs moved abroad. As I have pointed out for more than a decade, there is no sign of these jobs anywhere in the economy.

Why did economists make no protest as the US economy was shipped abroad and deep-sixed at home?

Globalism also devastates “emerging economies.” Self-sufficient agricultural communities are destroyed by the introduction of large-scale monoculture agriculture. The uprooted peoples relocate to cities where they become a drain on social services and a source of political instability.

Globalism, like neoliberal economics, is an instrument of economic imperialism. Labor is exploited, while peoples, cultures, and environments are destroyed. Yet the propaganda is so powerful that people partake of their own destruction.

Credit to Paul Craig Roberts

Russia offers Iran new air defense missile deal

REUTERS - Russia has offered Iran its latest Antey-2500 missiles, the head of Russian state defence conglomerate Rostec said on Monday according to media reports, after a deal to supply less powerful S-300 missiles was dropped under Western pressure.

Sergei Chemezov said Tehran was now considering the offer, TASS news agency reported.

Russia scrapped a contract to supply Iran with S-300 surface-to-air missiles under Western pressure in 2010, and Iran later filed a $4-billion international arbitration suit against Russia in Geneva, but the two countries remain allies.

The United States and Israel lobbied Russia to block the missile sale, saying it could be used to shield Iran's nuclear facilities from possible future air strikes.
There was no immediate response to Chemezov's comments from Iran, Israel or the United States.

"As far as Iran is concerned, we offered Antey-2500 instead of S-300. They are thinking. No decision has been made yet," Chemezov was quoted as saying.

Rostec includes state-owned arms exporting monopoly Rosoboronexport, which has the sole right to export and import arms in Russia.

The Antey-2500 was developed from the 1980s-generation S-300V system (SA-12A Gladiator and SA-12B Giant). It can engage missiles travelling at 4,500 metres per second, with a range of 2,500 km (1,500 miles), according to the company that makes it, Almaz-Antey.

The S-300 missiles have 200 km (125-mile) range and Russia has stoked tensions with the West by trying to sell them to Syria and other Middle Eastern countries.

Chemezov told reporters conflicts in the Middle East had helped boost Russian arm sales, according to TASS.

"I don't conceal it, and everyone understands this, the more conflicts there are, the more they buy off weapon from us. Volumes are continuing to grow despite sanctions. Mainly, it's Latin America and the Middle East," he was quoted as saying.
Last year, Russian foreign arm sales totalled $13 billion, he added.

Chemezov was sanctioned by the U.S. government in April over Russia's role in the Ukraine crisis.

Credit to Haretz

To Obama, From Russia With Love... And 20 Megatons

As Russia celebrates 'Defender Of The Fatherland' Day, they had an interesting message on the side of the parade's missiles: "To be personally delivered to Obama."

h/t @rConflictNews

Credit to Zero Hedge

Genetic Modified Babies Could Soon Be A Reality