No nation can produce less of lesser quality, and squander more on infinitely greedy and corrupt elites, all funded by issuing trillions of new units of currency, and imagine that this asymmetry will never have consequences.

As I have often noted, historian Michael Grant identified profound political disunity in the ruling class as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Grant described this dynamic in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a book I have been recommending since 2009.

I've been writing about the fractures in America's ruling elites for many years, as well as the erosion of the foundations of society that lead to systemic collapse, for example, Collapse, Part 2: The Nine Dynamics of Decay (June 2015), Going to War with the Political Elite You Have (May 14, 2007) and The Conflict within the Deep State Just Broke into Open Warfare (March 10, 2017)

Politicians always couch power grabs in talk of safety or protecting children. If something looks too good to be true, that's because it is. Both of those truisms apply to the case of Facebook 'whistleblower' Frances Haugen.

Haugen came seemingly out of nowhere to testify before the Senate on Tuesday, yet she revealed nothing besides well-rehearsed bromides about the Menlo Park behemoth putting "profits over people" and somehow endangering Our Democracy by refusing to police misinformation, or something. Stunning and brave!

She also landed a 60 Minutes interview over the weekend, got instantly verified on Twitter, and received praise from the extremely online Democrats (aka the 'Resistance' during the Trump era) for her stunning bravery. Her advice to the Senate wasn't to break up Facebook, either, but to turn it into an arm of the government - for the "common good," of course, and to protect the children.

It's no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It's just a matter of time.

It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

The groundwork has already been laid.

Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government or objecting to a COVID-19 vaccine could get you labeled as a terrorist.

Before the Taliban takeover in August, the CIA reportedly evacuated thousands of Afghan commandos belonging to its shadowy Zero units. These outfits conducted deadly night raids and have been accused of committing "war crimes."

The agency flew out more than 20,000 "Afghan partners" and their families, according to two unnamed former officers cited in a recent Washington Post editorial. The US is thought to have gotten between 60,000 and 120,000 Afghans out of the country.

The airlift of as many as 7,000 Zero unit members and their relatives was an agency priority, The Intercept reported. An unidentified former senior US intelligence official told the investigative news outlet that most of the commandos were flown to Qatar, where CIA officers helped get them sent to the US.

Once upon a time the Israel Lobby destroyed critics of the Jewish state and its behavior by stealth. If a Congressman or Senator were speaking honestly about the lopsided relationship with Israel which required suppressing, it was done by making sure that individual was not reelected. This was normally accomplished by vetting an attractive opposition primary candidate who would do Israel's bidding, funding him or her generously and providing unfavorable press coverage of the incumbent.

One great victory for Israel using that technique was the 1992 defeat of George H. W. Bush by Bill Clinton. Bush had dared to withhold guarantees on loans sought to fund Israel's expansion of its settlements, clearly a genuine American interest as the settlements were a violation of international law. Going into the election, he appeared to be the much stronger candidate, but then the captive media starting to write about how the economy was in bad shape, which was not true, and switched over to deeply negative coverage of his campaign. The Lobby also heavily contributed financially to the Clinton campaign. George H.W. subsequently privately blamed the Israel Lobby for his defeat, a lesson his son George W. clearly absorbed in that he took pains to never anger Israel. He went rather the other way, surrounding himself with Jewish neocons as his national security policy team, which in turn produced Afghanistan and, quite plausibly, was the driving force behind the catastrophic attack on Iraq.

Officials from NATO have reportedly decided to slash the size of the permanent Russian delegation working to build ties with the US-led military bloc at its headquarters in Brussels, revoking the credentials of eight envoys.

Writing on Twitter on Wednesday, Sky News security editor Deborah Haynes wrote that "NATO has decided to halve the size of Russia's mission to the alliance."

According to Haynes, the move is "in response to suspected malign Russian activities, including killings & espionage."

The ruler of Dubai hacked the phone of his ex-wife Princess Haya using NSO Group's controversial Pegasus spyware in an unlawful abuse of power and trust, a senior high court judge has ruled.

The president of the family division found that agents acting on behalf of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is also prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, a close Gulf ally of Britain, hacked Haya and five of her associates while the couple were locked in court proceedings in London concerning the welfare of their two children.

Those hacked included two of Haya's lawyers, one of whom, Fiona Shackleton, sits in the House of Lords and was tipped off about the hacking by Cherie Blair, who works with the Israeli NSO Group.

"Whistleblower" Frances Haugen is a vital media and political asset because she advances their quest for greater control over online political discourse.

Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower" for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.

The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen's star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook's dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.

Any strategy that successfully manipulates public opinion is bound to be repeated, and we can now clearly see how the tobacco industry's playbook is being used to shape the public narrative about COVID-19 and the projected post-COVID era.

In 2011, after many years of raising awareness regarding genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and industrial agriculture, we decided we needed a new game plan. Educating people through our newsletter was great, but we realized the best way to expose Monsanto — a leading GMO advocate and patented seed owner at the time — was to get them to engage directly and ensure national attention.

To that end, Mercola.com funded the signature gathering in California that initiated Proposition 37, the right to know what's in your food by ensuring proper GMO labeling. We spent more than $1 million for the Prop 37 initiative, plus several million dollars more for GMO labeling initiatives in other U.S. states in the following years.

This initiative forced Monsanto to engage with the public directly to defend their toxic products and dangerous business practices, all while receiving national coverage in the process.

The Monsanto Case

Monsanto spent tens of millions of dollars attacking anyone in their way, but they did so indirectly, just like the tobacco industry did before them. This is the core take-home of what I'm about to describe next.

The leader of Russia's Communists has written an open letter to President Vladimir Putin bemoaning the arrests of his comrades and what he sees as the "unjustified brutality" of the police, warning that trouble may lie ahead.

In the missive, published on the party's official website, Gennady Zyuganov complained about the detentions of Communists following protests on September 20 and 25. He described the arrests as "groundless" and "unlawful."

Last month, the party organized two demonstrations against the results of September's parliamentary election, which, for the first time, was held over multiple days. In Moscow, the Communists believe they were robbed of rightfully won seats by rigged online voting and are campaigning to annul the results. Because of the tallied remote votes, the party failed to win a single seat in the capital's single-mandate districts, despite several candidates topping the poll in the regular physical ballot.


Following the protests, many Communist politicians, supporters and members were detained by the authorities. The demonstrations were officially unauthorized by the Moscow government, but the party claims that it was simply a meeting of MPs with their voters, which by law does not require any approval.

"It is obvious that those who ordered and carried out these and other illegal actions are guided not by legal provisions and the interests of public safety, but by a poorly understood political expediency," Zyuganov wrote.

According to the veteran politician, the new three-day electoral format, combined with online voting, is "a nuclear bomb which could sooner or later blow up the stability of society that patriotic forces have been building for years."