A State of War Now Exists Between Russia and the United States

This is not hyperbole: A state of war now exists between Russia and her allies and the United States and her allies. 

If there is anyone left alive to write history in a decade, today’s shoot down of a Russian fighter jet could very well be viewed as the trigger event which set off World War III.

Russian Su-24 Fighter Jet Shot Down Over Syrian Airspace

In a potential Archduke Francis Ferdinand moment, Turkey is admitting to shooting down a Russian fighter plane a few hours ago.

Russian governmental officials are claiming that Russia did not violate Turkish airspace and has mission data to prove this is the case. Conversely, RT is claiming that it’s confirmed that the plane came down in Syrian territory. If the Russians are correct, and the evidence appears to be on their side, then NATO just started World War III.

Regardless of how this incident is spun, the unmistakble fact is that Turkey, a member of NATO, intentionally shot down a Russian fighter jet involved in combat operations against ISIS terrorists is absolute proof that Turkey is coordinating with ISIS forces on the ground, but it is also providing air defense services ISIS on the ground. This event signals clear division of forces operating in Syria where now a state of war exists between Russia and her allies and the United States and her allies. 

At this point, it is important to note that the conflicts are still between the proxy forces of both Russia and the United States. However, logic would dictate that it is merely a matter of time until these “confrontations” begin to involve US forces and the Russian military. When that day comes, the events will quickly spill out of control.

Before the implications are unraveled in this article, it is important to put the facts into perspective with regard to common perceptions coming out of the Middle East and Russia. Below are two tweets which immediately frame the issue that the shoot down of the Russian plane was an act of NATO aggression towards Russia. I would remind the reader that I have taken a hard line against Putin who is a thug and a murderer. However, in this instance, the United States, through her proxy forces in Turkey that actively supports ISIS, just committed a bold-faced act of war.

Минобороны РоссииVerified account‏@mod_russia

#SYRIA Russian aircraft Su-24 crashed in Syria. According to the preliminary data, the pilots managed to eject from the warplane

• RETWEETS285
• LIKES54
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1:14 AM – 24 Nov 2015

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Bertramus ‏@BertramusN 59m59 minutes ago

@mod_russia@Syria_Protector Turkmen Al-Qaeda affiliated rebels sponsored by Turkey captured one pilot.

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This is the manner in which the Russian media is portraying this event. And I have concluded, that their position is the closest to the truth of all the accounts that are beginning to surface.

Breaking…… Twitter accounts are reporting that one of the two shot-down Russian pilots is dead.

Yury Barmin‏@yurybarmin

Yury Barmin Retweeted الاعلامي انس معراوي

One of 2 Russian pilots is dead. Russian helicopters tried to evacuate both of them but were shot at from the ground

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The events connected to this incident are spinning out of control. It has been announced that Putin will be addressing the world today. Please note, that he did not offer a public statement when the Russian airliner was shot down.

If one is naive and ignorant enough to believe that the Syrian conflict has not evolved into a war between Russia and the United States, then you might want to review your World War II history and review the Flying Tigers opposition to Japanese imperialism in China, prior to December 7, 1941. This is exactly what we are witnessing in Syria, only on a larger and more significant stage.

Implications

I predict what will be missing in the analyses of this event will be the absence of a solid conceptual framework from which to properly view the context of this event.

The BRICS have attacked the sacred Federal Reserve by undermining the Petrodollar.

It is important to note that the entire conflict over Syria was initiated by Russia, Iran and Syria when it was first discovered that Iran and Syria were selling oil for gold instead of using Federal Reserve Notes (i.e. the dollar which became known as the Petrodollar). Very quickly, Russia was joined in their undermining of the Petrodollar by China, India, Brazil and South Africa (i.e. the BRICS).

In response, the US tried to overthrow Assad, the leader of Syria by supplying Syrian rebels with weapons and CIA support. As this endeavor slowed to a crawl, the CIA, according to former Army Special Operations Officer, Scott Bennett, began to supply ISIS with sophisticated weapons and on the ground training.

Anyone who ever doubted Scott Bennett’s revelation of the inseparable relationship between ISIS and the CIA is not paying attention. As already revealed in this article, NATO member Turkey has just shot down a Russian fighter plane engaged in combat operations against the US backed ISIS. I have learned a great deal about the personality of Putin in the last several years. He is at the end of his rope. Expect Russia to draw a line in the sand.

I am the New World Order!

Putin has already called out the United States for supporting ISIS. Expect Putin to commence military operations against ISIS forces operating within the territorial boundaries of Turkey. This would denote a Russian attack upon NATO and the world will see its prospects for peace reach the proverbial point of no return.

Summary

It is not a matter of if, but when World War III goes hot. The forces are aligned. I would just caution the readers about one thing. I would not go waving my flag because the MSM will soon tell you to do so. Instead, I would ask you to recall what Einstein said about World War III.

Credit to Common Sense

Execution Of Russian Pilots While Parachuting Caught On Tape

If Putin was angry when Turkey shot down a Russian plane, which may or may not have crossed Turkish territory - reports on both sides are conflicting - he will be absolutely livid to learn that, according to Turkey's Dogan News, the Russian pilots who had parachuted in an attempt to save their lives after the plane was shot down, had been executed while parachuting down by local rebels, which considering the video released earlier belonged to the Free Syrian Army, are same "rebels" who are funded directly by the CIA.

Fercan Yalinkilic @FercanY

Both Russian pilots shot dead while parachuting down says Dogan News Agency citing Turkmen opposition commander

As Telegraph points out, the above tweet is from CNN Turk's Foreign Editor who tweeted that the Turkmen rebels DHA spoke to said: "We hit at the two pilots after they parachuted."

This, as many have already pointed out, is a war crime.

The only question is whether this, together with the provocative action by Turkey which many can see being an act of war, will be deemed as such by Putin.

The parachuters can be seen in the second half of the clip below:

For those who missed it, here is the video uploaded by the Free Syrian Army of at least one dead parachuter.

And here is the video of rebels opening fire on Russian pilots:

As one commentator notes, in the video one person shouts over the gun fire, "don't fire. Let's take them prisoners. Don't fire. Prisoners" but it was not meant to be.

Credit to Zero Hedge

The U.S. Dollar Has Already Caused A Global Recession And Now The Fed Is Going To Make It Worse

The 7th largest economy on the entire planet, Brazil, has been gripped by a horrifying recession, as has much of the rest of South America.  But it isn’t just South America that is experiencing a very serious economic downturn.  We have just learned that Japan (the third largest economy in the world) has lapsed into recession.  So has Canada.  So has Russia.  The dominoes are starting to fall, and it looks like the global economic crisis that has already started is going to accelerate as we head into the end of the year.  At this point, global trade is already down about 8.4 percent for the year, and last week the Baltic Dry Shipping Index plummeted to a brand new all-time record low.  Unfortunately for all of us, the Federal Reserve is about to do something that will make this global economic slowdown even worse.

Throughout 2015, the U.S. dollar has been getting stronger.  That sounds like good news, but the truth is that it is not.  When the last financial crisis ended, emerging markets went on a debt binge unlike anything we have ever seen before.  But much of that debt was denominated in U.S. dollars, and now this is creating a massive problem.  As the U.S. dollar has risen, the prices that many of these emerging markets are getting for the commodities that they export have been declining.  Meanwhile, it is taking much more of their own local currencies to pay back and service all of the debts that they have accumulated.  Similar conditions contributed to the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s and the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.

Many Americans may be wondering when “the next economic crisis” will arrive, but nobody in Brazil is asking that question.  Thanks to the rising U.S. dollar, Brazil has already plunged into a very deep recession…

As Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff combats a slumping economy and corruption accusations, the country’s inflation surged above 10 percent while unemployment jumped to 7.9 percent, according to the latest official data. The dour state of affairs has Barclays forecasting a 4 percent economic contraction this year, followed by 3.3 percent shrinkage next year, the investment bank said in a research note last week.

The political and economic turmoil has recently driven the real, Brazil’s currency, to multiyear lows, a factor helping to stoke price pressures.

And as I mentioned above, Brazil is far from alone.  This is something that is happening all over the planet, and the process appears to be accelerating.  One of the places where this often first shows up is in the trade numbers.  The following comes from an article that was just posted by Zero Hedge…

“This market is looking like a disaster and the rates are a reflection of that,” warns one of the world’s largest shipbrokers, but while The Baltic Dry Freight Index gets all the headlines –having collapsed to all-time record lows this week – it is the spefics below that headline that are truly terrifying. At a time of typical seasonal strength for freight and thus global trade around the world, Reuters reports that spot rates for transporting containers from Asia to Northern Europe have crashed a stunning 70% in the last 3 weeks alone. This almost unprecedented divergence from seasonality has only occurred at this scale once before… 2008! “It is looking scary for the market and it doesn’t look like there is going to be any life in the market in the near term.”

Many “experts” seem mystified by all of this, but the explanation is very simple.

For years, global economic growth was fueled by cheap U.S. dollars.  But since the end of QE, the U.S. dollar has been surging, and according to Bloomberg it just hit a 12 year high…

The dollar traded near a seven-month high against the euro before the release of minutes of the Federal Reserve’s October meeting, when policy makers signaled the potential for an interest-rate increase this year.

A trade-weighted gauge of the greenback is at the highest in 12 years as Fed Chair Janet Yellen and other policy makers have made numerous pronouncements in the past month that it may be appropriate to boost rates from near zero at its Dec. 15-16 gathering. The probability the central bank will act next month has risen to 66 percent from 50 percent odds at the end of October.

But even though the wonks at the Federal Reserve supposedly know the damage that a strong dollar is already doing to the global economy, they seem poised to make things even worse by raising interest rates in December…

Most Federal Reserve policymakers agreed last month that the economy “could well” be strong enough in December to withstand the Fed’s first Interest rate hike in nearly a decade, according to minutes of its meeting Oct. 27-28.

The officials said global troubles had eased and a delay could increase market uncertainty and undermine confidence in the economy.

The meeting summary provides the clearest evidence yet that a majority of Fed policymakers are leaning toward raising the central bank’s benchmark rate next month, assuming the economy continues to progress.

Considering the tremendous amount of damage that has already been done to the global economy, this is one of the stupidest things that they could possibly do.

But it looks like they are going to do it anyway.

It has been said that those that refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

And right now so many of the exact same patterns that we saw just before the great financial crisis of 2008 are playing out once again right in front of our eyes.

A lot of people out there seem to assume that once we got past the September/October time frame that we were officially out of “the danger zone”.

But that is not true at all.

The truth is that we have already entered a new global economic downturn that is rapidly accelerating, and the financial shaking that we witnessed in August was just a foreshock of what is coming next.

Let us hope that common sense prevails and the Fed chooses not to raise interest rates at their next meeting.

Because if they do, it will just make the global crisis that is now emerging much, much worse.

Credit to Economic Collapse

In New Video, A Grateful Al-Qaeda Thanks US For Supplying Anti-Tank Missiles

On September 30, just hours after a three star Russian general strolled into the US embassy in Baghdad and told the staff to inform Washington that Moscow would begin airstrikes in Syria “in one hour”, the Western media was alive with accusations that The Kremlin wasn’t targeting ISIS, but rather other, US and Saudi-backed rebel groups fighting Assad’s depleted SAA. Here’s what WSJ said at the time: 

“Among seven areas that Syrian state media listed as targets of Russian strikes, only one—an area east of the town of Salamiyah in Hama province—has a known presence of Islamic State fighters. The other areas listed are largely dominated by moderate rebel factions or Islamist groups, such as Ahrar al-Sham and the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.”

Yes, “moderate rebel factions such as the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.” 

Put simply, the US had become so desperate to preserve whatever was left of the strategy to overthrow Assad, that Washington had the mainstream media floating trial balloons to see if the public would accept the characterization of al-Qaeda as “moderate.” 

Generally speaking, most Americans didn’t notice, presumably because they were too busy ogling at Russian fighter jets and/or Islamic State’s latest Hollywood special (which at the time was a clip of an SAA fighter being run over by a tank), but for anyone who did pick up on the fact that the mainstream US media had just officially (and posthumously) labeled Osama Bin Laden a “moderate”, the farce was complete. 

To anyone who frequents these pages - and to anyone who has endeavored to question the official narrative - the fact that the US now counts al-Nusra as a de facto ally came as no surprise. The Saudis and Qatar have backed al-Nusra virtually from the beginning, and the US is all for anything that destabilizes Assad, even if it means funneling guns and money to the very same group that flew passenger jets into skyscrapers on American soil. And let’s not forget that this wouldn’t be the first time Washington has backed al-Qaeda. The US has had lots of practice in getting arms to the Mujahideen - see the Soviet-Afghan war, for example. 

None of this is a secret, which is what makes it so astonishing that the Western public is largely clueless despite the efforts of people like Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and Georgia Republican Austin Scott. 

Of course Washington isn’t as vocal in its support of al-Nusra as it is in its enthusiasm for the “moderate” opposition group of choice, the Free Syrian Army. As we’ve documented extensively,the FSA has received anti-tank weapons from The Pentagon over the past two months so that they may counter the advance on Aleppo by Hezbollah and the IRGC. Given that the very same Iran-backed Shiite militias the FSA is fighting in Syria are also fighting ISIS in Iraq, the fact that the US is supplying the FSA with weapons to kill them is nothing short of ridiculous. Here’s how we described the situation last month:

The US is now supplying anti-tank weapons and other munitions to the rebels fighting in Aleppo and those weapons are being used to kill these very same Shiite militiamen who are driving US tanks, fighting alongside the Iraqi army, and indirectly receiving US assistance just across the border in Iraq.

So thanks to Washington's twisted foreign policy, they are friends on one side of the Syria-Iraq border and mortal enemies on the other.

Well now, in what can only be described as an embarrassment of truly epic proportions, al-Qaeda has released a video thanking the FSA for supplying al-Nusra with American-made TOWs. Here’s Sputnik: 

The Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, has released a grateful video, where they openly thank the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which the US has touted as a “moderate opposition group”, for supplying them with US-made anti-tank TOW missiles (“Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided").

A recently released video shows an Al-Nusra Front field commander thanking the FSA commanders for giving his forces TOW missiles, according to a report released by the Iranian news agency FARS.

The agency reminds readers that the two groups, the Al-Nusra and the FSA, formed an alliance in March, the Army of Conquest, or Jaish al-Fatah in Arabic, to fight against the forces of President Assad.

Since then, they have fought together “at almost every single battle in Aleppo, Lattakia, Hama, and Idlib Governorates of Syria.”

Through this alliance several militant groups like the Al-Nusra Front and the Ahrar al-Sham movement have been given access to FSA's US-made heavy weaponry, which has been supplied to the militant group by the US, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

According to the agency’s estimates, Saudi Arabia sent 500 TOW missiles to Al-Nusra directly last month.

Obviously, this is the very definition of absurdity. It would be bad enough if the US were supplying TOWs to anyone in Syria. But this is Washington and Riyadh handing anti-tank missiles to forces that are firing them at the Iranians who are operating under cover of Russian airstrikes. Just to drive that home: the US is waging war against Iran and Russia with but one degree of separation. 

That's the big picture. 

But as mentioned above, this is also ridiculous because The Pentagon is killing the same people in Syria that the US-trained Iraqi army depends on to rout ISIS across the border in Iraq. And when we say "the same people", we mean the exact same Shiite militias. Every Iran-backed militiaman that's killed in Syria by a US-made weapon is one less militiaman that will return to Iraq to fight ISIS, which is of course fine with Saudi Arabia and Qatar because they're opposed to Iranian influence in Baghdad in the first place. 

Finally, the idea that the US is fighting al-Nusra in Syria is not only untrue, it's actually the complete opposite of what's really going on on the ground. 

Hopefully no one from al-Qaeda ends up firing a TOW at a Paris cafe.

Credit to Zero Hedge