By Aubrey Bailey:

In the name of Allah, the Merciful to all, the Compassionate

Nowadays,every politician and military brass claims he warned Obama about the consequences of withdrawing all American troops from Iraq. In a strange turn of events, now even George W. Bush is admired for his great insights and ingenious, like he was a prophet who prophesized all the details of future. But is this really so?

On July 12, 2007, Bush took to the podium to answer critics of his order for a troop surge, and said at the time:

"It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda,"

"It would mean that we'd be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan."

To me it looks more like a plan to prediction. Bush and US Forces under his command sowed the seeds of chaos in Iraq, and they did not expect to reap anything else. Killing around 1.5 million Iraqis, destroying social texture, assassinating most of the prominent scholars and scientists and forcing the rest of them to escape from the country is more than enough to ensure trouble.

George Orwell did not live long enough to see how the Ministry of Truth of the United States rewrites history, so he could come up with better ideas in his "1984" novel. Now mainstream media tries to depict US forces as guardians of peace and security, who saved Iraq for years, and now they have to occupy not only Iraq, but also the whole Middle East again, just to keep the bad guys out.

As a matter of fact, these bad guys are created by western intelligent services, and they need a constant support to survive.

Thierry Meyssan in an article titled Who Makes Up the "Islamic Emirate"? explains this very well:

At the time, Senator John McCain came to Syria illegally to meet the chiefs of staff of the FSA. According to the photograph then distributed to attest to the meeting, the staff included a certain Abu Youssef, officially sought by the US State Department under the name Abu Du’a, in reality the current Caliph Ibrahim. Thus, the same man was - both and at the same time - a moderate leader in the FSA and an extremist leader in the "Islamic Emirate".

With this information, one can appreciate at its true value the document presented to the Security Council on July 14 by the Syrian Ambassador, Bashar Jaafari. This is a letter from the commander-in-chief of the FSA, Salim Idriss and dated January 17, 2014. It reads: "I hereby inform you that this ammunition sent by the chiefs of staff to leaders of the revolutionary military councils of the Eastern Region must be distributed in accordance with what was agreed upon: two-thirds to the warlords of the el-Nosra front, the remaining third to be distributed between the military and the revolutionary elements in the fight against the bands of IEIL (Islamic Emirate in Iraq and the Levant). We thank you for sending us the proof of delivery of all ammunition, specifying the quantities and qualities, duly signed by the leaders and warlords in person, so we can forward them to the Turkish and French partners. "In other words, two NATO powers (Turkey and France) have delivered ammunition for two thirds to the Al-Nosra Front (classified as a member of al-Qaeda by the Security Council) and one third to the FSA so that it can fight against the "Islamic Emirate", headed by one of its senior officers. In fact, the FSA has disappeared on the ground and the munitions were therefore intended for two-thirds to al-Qaeda and one third to the "Islamic Emirate".

With this dual role device, NATO will be able to continue to launch its hordes of jihadists against Syria while claiming to fight them.

In the name of Allah, the Merciful to all, the Compassionate

Today a story broke out on Aydinlik, a Turkish newspaper, that ISIL opened its first consulate in Ankara, to take care of Visa applications for people who want to travel to their territory. According to this newspaper, now you can send your application to their Gmail account.

We are living in pseudo-reality. Nothing is like what it should be. It feels like we are living in "Alice in the Wonderland" type of world. it was considered a common-sense before when something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's a duck. But that's not the case any more.

yesterday, September 24, the UN security Council unanimously passed the resolution 2178 which calls for the enhancement of international endeavors to fighting terrorism and foreign fighters. Presumably, that resolution ratified to justify bombing of ISIL positions by NATO members and their Arab allies. Moreover Turkey is a NATO member, and is offering its military bases for this campaign.

I have no idea how it could be possible in the real world to fight terrorism to destroy them, and at the same time having diplomatic relations with them, offering them medical facilities for their wounded soldiers, and being a hub for exporting their oil.

I am just wondering if people in western countries are that gullible to buy every lie they hear from their Main-stream media, or they are just complicit with it, as long as things work for them.

Source: Electronic Products

Shoving an unneeded messenger app down the throat of your entire user base is a guaranteed way to upset people and leave them feeling disillusioned, asking questions like “why do I suddenly need this?” While there’s no indication that Facebook harbors malicious intent, the company is collecting enormous amounts of data about the users of its applications, states iOS forensics specialist and security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski. This should come as no surprise considering that most mobile apps run some sort of analytics on user behavior, although Facebook’s apps ─ according to Zdziarski – have more spyware type code in it than in products specifically intended for surveillance.

In the name of Allah, the Merciful to all, the Compassionate

Kataeb Hezbollah, one of Iraqi Militia fighting ISIL reported on Saturday that for the second time U.S. bombed Militia who are fighting ISIL and Iraqi Army's positions in Al-owaysat north of Babel province. Kataeb claims that U.S. forces had enough intelligence about their positions and it was clear where ISIL positions were, but U.S. jets deliberately bombed them, instead of ISIL.

In the name of Allah, the Merciful to all, the Compassionate

Nowadays, you would hear the word Safavid used extensively in arguments, because Syrian insurgents, ISIL, Al-Qaeda, Wahhabis, and many others attribute whatever they do not like to Safavids. The Safavid dynasty collapsed in 1722 AD, and many other dynasties came to power and fell since that time.

The Safavid policy was to draw a line between their territory and other neighbors like the Ottoman, so they adopted Shi'ism as the official faith. After the Safavids, Nader Shah, the great conqueror who was expanding his territory, espoused the Sunni faith to face less challenges in conquered Sunni-majority lands, and banned certain Shi'a practices which were particularly offensive to Sunnis.

Source: RT

If the West bombs Islamic State militants in Syria without consulting Damascus, the anti-ISIS alliance may use the occasion to launch airstrikes against President Bashar Assad’s forces, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

“There are reasons to suspect that air strikes on Syrian territory may target not only areas controlled by Islamic State militants, but the government troops may also be attacked on the quiet to weaken the positions of Bashar Assad’s army,” Lavrov said Tuesday.

Global Research:

The end goal of the US and NATO is to divide (balkanize) and pacify (finlandize) the world’s biggest country, the Russian Federation, and to even establish a blanket of perpetual disorder (somalization) over its vast territory or, at a minimum, over a portion of Russia and the post-Soviet space, similarly to what is being done to the Middle East and North Africa.

The future Russia or the many future Russias, a plurality of weakened and divided states, that Washington and its NATO allies see is/are demographically in decline, de-industrialized, poor, without any defensive capabilities, and hinterlands that will exploited for their resources.

The Plans of the Empire of Chaos for Russia

Breaking the Soviet Union has not been enough for Washington and NATO. The ultimate goal of the US is to prevent any alternatives from emerging in Europe and Eurasia to Euro-Atlantic integration. This is why the destruction of Russia is one of its strategic objectives.

Washington’s goals were alive and at work during the fighting in Chechnya. They were also seen in the crisis that erupted with EuroMaidan in Ukraine. In fact, the first step of the divorce between Ukraine and Russia was a catalyst for the dissolution of the entire Soviet Union and any attempts at reorganizing it.

The Polish-American intellectual Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was US President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor and an architect behind the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, has actually advocated for the destruction of Russia through gradual disintegration and devolution. He has stipulated that «a more decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization». [1] In other words, if the US divides Russia up, Moscow would not be able to challenge Washington. In this context, he states the following: «A loosely confederated Russia—composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic—would find it easier to cultivate closer economic regulations with Europe, with the new states of Central Asia, and with [East Asia], which would thereby accelerate Russia’s own development». [2]

These views are not merely constrained to some academic’s ivory tower or to detached think-tanks. They have the backing of governments and have even cultivated adherents. One reflection of them is below.

US State-Owned Media Forecasts the Balkanization of Russia

Dmytro Sinchenko published an article on September 8, 2014 about dividing Russia. His article is titled «Waiting for World War III: How the World Will Change». [3] Sinchenko was involved in EuroMaidan and his organization, the Ukrainian Initiative «Statesmen Movement» (Всеукраїнської ініціативи «Рух державотворців»), advocates for an ethnic nationalism, the territorial expansion of Ukraine at the expense of most the bordering countries, reinvigorating the pro-US Georgia-Ukraine-Azerbaijan-Moldova (GUAM) Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, joining NATO, and launching an offensive to defeat Russia as part of its foreign policy goals. [4] As a note, the inclusion of the word democracy in GUAM should not fool anyone; GUAM, as the inclusion of the Republic of Azerbaijan proves, has nothing to do with democracy, but with counter-balancing Russia in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Sinchenko’s article starts by talking about the history of the «Axis of Evil» phrase that the US has used to vilify its enemies. It talks about how George W. Bush Jr. coined the phrase in 2002 by grouping Iraq, Iran, and North Korea together, how John Bolton expanded the Axis of Evil to include Cuba, Libya, and Syria, how Condoleezza Rice included Belarus, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar (Burma), and then finally he proposes that Russia be added to the list as the world’s main pariah state. He even argues that the Kremlin is involved in all the conflicts in the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East, North Africa, Ukraine, and Southeast Asia. He goes on to accuse Russia of planning to invade the Baltic States, the Caucasus, Moldova, Finland, Poland, and, even more ridiculously, two of its own close military and political allies, Belarus and Kazakhstan. As the article’s title implies, he even claims that Moscow is intentionally pushing for a third world war.

This fiction is not something that has been reported in the US-aligned corporate networks, but is something that has been published directly by US government-owned media. The forecast was published by the Ukrainian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which has been a US propaganda tool in Europe and the Middle East that has helped topple governments.

Chillingly, the article tries to sanitize the possibilities of a new world war. Disgustingly ignoring the use of nuclear weapons and the massive destruction that would erupt for Ukraine and the world, the article misleadingly paints a cozy image of a world that will be corrected by a major global war. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the author are essentially saying that «war is good for you» to the Ukrainian people and that some type of utopian paradise will emerge after a war with Russia.

The article also fits very nicely into the contours of Brzezinski’s forecast for Russia, Ukraine, and the Eurasian landmass. It forecasts the division of Russia whereas Ukraine is a part of an expanded European Union, which includes Georgia, Armenia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, Belarus, Israel, Lebanon, and Denmark’s North American dependency of Greenland, and also controls a confederation of states in the Caucasus and the Mediterranean Sea—the latter could be the Union for the Mediterranean, which would encompass Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and the Moroccan-occupied Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic or Western Sahara. Ukraine is presented as an integral component of the European Union. In this regard, Ukraine appears to be situated in a US-aligned Franco-German-Polish-Ukrainian corridor and Paris-Berlin-Warsaw-Kiev axis that Brzezinski advocated for creating in 1997, which Washington would use to challenge the Russian Federation and its allies in the CIS. [5]

Redrawing Eurasia: Washington’s Maps of a Divided Russia

With the division of the Russian Federation, Radio Free Europe’s/Radio Liberty’s article claims that any bipolar rivalry between Moscow and Washington would end after World War III. In a stark contradiction, it claims that only when Russia is destroyed will there be a genuine multipolar world, but also implies that the US will be the most dominant global power even though Washington and the European Union will be weakened from the anticipated major war with the Russians.

Accompanying the article are also two maps that outline the redrawn Eurasian space and the shape of the world after the destruction of Russia. Moreover, neither the author nor his two maps recognize the boundary change in the Crimean Peninsula and depict it as a part of Ukraine and not the Russian Federation. From west to east, the following changes are made to Russia’s geography:

• The Russian oblast of Kaliningrad will be annexed by Lithuania, Poland, or Germany. One way or another it will become a part of an enlarged European Union.

• East Karelia (Russian Karelia) and what is currently the federal subject of the Republic of Karelia inside Russia’s Northwestern Federal District, along with the Federal City of St. Petersburg, Leningrad Oblast, Novgorod Oblast, the northern two-thirds of Pskov Oblast, and Murmansk Oblast are split from Russia to form a Finnish-aligned country. This area could even be absorbed by Finland to create a Greater Finland. Although the oblast of Archangel (Arkhangelsk) is listed as a part of this partitioned area in the article, it is not included in the map (probably due to a mistake in the map).

• The southern administrative districts of Sebezhsky, Pustoshkinsky, Nevelsky, and Usvyatsky in Pskov Oblast from the Northwestern Federal District and the westernmost administrative districts of Demidovsky, Desnogorsk, Dukhovshchinsky, Kardymovsky, Khislavichsky, Krasninsky, Monastyrshchinsky, Pochinkovsky, Roslavlsky, Rudnyansky, Shumyachsky, Smolensky, Velizhsky, Yartsevsky, and Yershichsky, as well as the cities of Smolensk and Roslavl, in Smolensk Oblast from the Central Federal District are joined to Belarus. The Smolensk Oblast’s Dorogobuzhsky, Kholm-Zhirkovsky, Safonovsky, Ugransky, and Yelninsky districts appear to be portioned further in the map as the new border between Belarus and the proposed amputated Russia.

• The North Caucasian Federal District of Russia, which is comprised of the Republic of Dagestan, the Republic of Ingushetia, the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, the Karachay-Cherkess Republic, the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania, Stavropol Krai, and Chechnya, is separated from Russia as a European Union-influenced Caucasian confederation

• The South Federal District of Russia, which is constituted by the Republic of Adygea, Astrakhan Oblast, Volgograd Oblast, Republic of Kalmykia, Krasnodar Krai, and Rostov Oblast, is completely annexed by Ukraine; this leads to a shared border between Ukraine and Kazakhstan and cuts Russia off from the energy-rich Caspian Sea and a direct southern frontier with Iran.

• Ukraine also annexes the oblasts of Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk, and Voronezh from Russia’s most heavily populated federal district and area, the Central Federal District.

• Siberia and the Russian Far East, specifically the Siberian Federal District and the Far Eastern Federal District, are torn off from Russia.

• The text states that all of the territory in Siberia and most of the territory in the Russian Far East, which are comprised of the Altai Republic, Altai Krai, Amur Oblast, the Republic of Buryatia, Chukotka, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Irkutsk Oblast, Kamchatka Krai, Kemerovo Oblast, Khabarovsk Krai, the Republic of Khakassia, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Magadan Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast, Omsk Oblast, Primorsky Krai, Sakha Republic, Tomsk Oblast, the Tuva Republic, and Zabaykalsky Krai either turn into several Chinese-dominated independent states or, alongside Mongolia, become new territories of the People’s Republic of China. The map categorically draws Siberia, most the Russian Far East, and Mongolia as Chinese territory. The exception to this is Sakhalin Oblast.

• Russia loses Sakhalin Island (called Saharin and Karafuto in Japanese) and the Kurile Islands, which constitute Sakhalin Oblast. These islands are annexed by Japan.

On his own webpage, Sinchenko posted his Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article days earlier, on September 2, 2014. The same maps, which are accredited to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, are also present. [6] There, however, is an additional picture on Sinchenko’s personal webpage that is worth noting; this is a picture of Russia being cheerfully carved out for consumption as a large meal by all the bordering countries. [7]

Mapping a New World Order: The World After World War III?

The second map is of a post-World War III globe that is divided into several supranational states. Japan is the only exception. The second map and its supranational states can be described as follows:

• As mentioned earlier, the European Union is expanded and has control over its peripheries in the Caucasus, Southwest Asia, and North Africa. This is the realization of NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue and Partnership for Peace at the political and military levels and the European Union’s Eastern Partnership and Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (the Union for the Mediterranean) at the political and economic levels.

• The United States forms a North American-based supranational entity that includes Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, the Guianas (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana), and the entire Caribbean.

• All the countries that are not swallowed by the US in South America will form their own supranational entity in a lesser South America, which will be dominated by Brazil.

• Some type of Southwest Asian bloc or supranational entity will be formed out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen.

• Some type of a supranational entity will be formed in the Indian sub-continent or South Asia out of India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma), and Thailand.

• There will be a supranational entity in Australasia and Oceania that will include the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, East Timor, Papa New Guinea, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific. This entity will include Australia and be dominated by Canberra.

• Aside from North Africa, which will be controlled by the European Union, the rest of Africa will unify under the leadership of South Africa.

• An East Asian supranational entity will include most of the Russian Federation, Indo-China, China, the Korean Peninsula, Mongolia, and post-Soviet Central Asia. This entity will be dominated by the Chinese and dominated from Beijing.

Although Radio Free Europe’s article and two post-World War III maps can be dismissed as fanciful notions, some important questions have to be asked. Firstly, where did the author pick up these ideas? Were they transmitted through any workshops supported by the US and the European Union indirectly? Secondly, what informs the author’s visions of a post-World War III political landscape?

The author has essentially catered to Brzezinski’s outline of a divided Russia. The text and the maps have even included the areas of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Caucasus that the European Union views as a secondary periphery or layer to itself. These areas are even shaded with a lighter blue than the darker blue used to identify the European Union.

Even if Radio Free Europe is dismissed; no one should lose sight of the fact that Japan still lays claim to Sakhalin Oblast and the US, European Union, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia have been supporting separatist movements in both the Federal Southern District and the North Caucasian District of the Russian Federation.

Ukrainianism

The Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty article radiates with traces of Ukrainianism, which is worth briefly mentioning.

Nations are constructed, because they are all dynamic communities that, in one way or another, are constructed and kept together by the collective of individuals that make societies. In this regard they can be called imagined communities.

There are machinations at play to deconstruct and reconstruct nations and groups in the post-Soviet space and Middle East. This can be called the manipulation of tribalism in sociological and anthropological jargon or, in political jargon, the playing out of the Great Game. In this context, Ukrainianism has particularly been supportive of anti-government elements and anti-Russian nationalist feelings in Ukraine for more than one hundred years, firstly under the Austrians and Germans, later through the Poles and British, and now under the US and NATO .

This article was originally published on of two minds:

Before an empire collapses, it first erodes from within. The collapse may appear sudden, but the processes of internal rot hollowed out the resilience, resolve, purpose and vitality of the empire long before its final implosion. What are these processes of internal rot? Here are a few of the most pervasive and destructive forces of internal corrosion:

1. Each institution within the system loses sight of its original purpose of serving the populace and becomes self-serving. This erosion of common purpose serving the common good is so gradual that participants forget there was a time when the focus wasn't on gaming the system to avoid work and accountability but serving the common good.

2. The corrupt Status Quo corrupts every individual who works within the system.Once an institution loses its original purpose and becomes self-serving, everyone within either seeks to maximize their own personal share of the swag and minimize their accountability, or they are forced out as a potentially dangerous uncorrupted insider.

The justification is always the same: everybody else is getting away with it, why shouldn't I? Empires decline one corruptible individual at a time.

3. Self-serving institutions select sociopathic leaders whose skills are not competency or leadership but conning others into believing the institution is functioning optimally when in reality it is faltering/failing.

The late Roman Empire offers a fine example: entire Army legions in the hinterlands were listed as full-strength on the official rolls in Rome and payroll was issued accordingly, but the legions only existed on paper: corrupt officials pocketed the payroll for phantom legions.

Self-serving institutions reward con-artists in leadership roles because only con-artists can mask the internal rot with happy-story PR and get away with it.

4. The institutional memory rewards conserving the existing Status Quo and punishes innovation. Innovation necessarily entails risk, and those busy feathering their own nests (i.e. accepting money for phantom work, phantom legions, etc.) have no desire to place their share of the swag at risk just to improve sagging output and accountability.

So reforms and innovations that might salvage the institution are shelved or buried.

5. As the sunk costs of the subsystems increase, the institutional resistance to new technologies and processes increases accordingly. Those manufacturing steam locomotives in the early 20th century had an enormous amount of capital and institutional knowledge sunk in their factories. Tossing all of that out to invest in building diesel-electric locomotives that were much more efficient than the old-tech steam locomotives made little sense to those looking at sunk costs. As a result, the steam locomotive manufacturers clung to the old ways and went out of business. The sunk costs of empire are enormous, as is the internal resistance to change. 6. Institutional memory and knowledge support "doing more of what worked in the past" even when it is clearly failing. I refer to this institutional risk-avoidance and lack of imagination as doing more of what has failed spectacularly. Inept leadership keeps doing more of what once worked, even when it is clearly failing, in effect ignoring real-world feedback in favor of magical-thinking. The Federal Reserve is an excellent example.

7. These dynamics of eroding accountability, effectiveness and purpose lead to systemic diminishing returns. Each failing institution now needs more money to sustain its operations, as inefficiencies, corruption and incompetence reduce output while dramatically raising costs (phantom legions still get paid).

8. Incompetence is rewarded and competence punished. The classic example of this was "Good job, Brownie:" cronies and con-artists are elevated to leadership roles to reward loyalty and the ability to mask the rot with good PR. Serving the common good is set aside as sychophancy (obedient flattery) to incompetent leaders is rewarded and real competence is punished as a threat to the self-serving leadership.

9. As returns diminish and costs rise, systemic fragility increases. This can be illustrated as a rising wedge: as output declines and costs rise, the break-even point keeps edging higher, until even a modest reduction of input (revenue, energy, etc.) causes the system to break down:

A modern-day example is oil-exporting states that have bought the complicity of their citizenry with generous welfare benefits and subsidies. As their populations and welfare benefits keep rising, the revenues they need to keep the system going require an ever-higher price of oil. Should the price of oil decline, these regimes will be unable to fund their welfare. With the social contract broken, there is nothing left to stem the tide of revolt.

10. Economies of scale no longer generate returns. In the good old days, stretching out supply lines to reach lower-cost suppliers and digitizing management reaped huge gains in productivity. Now that the scale of enterprise is global, the gains from economies of scale have faltered and the high overhead costs of maintaining this vast managerial infrastructure have become a drain.

11. Redundancy is sacrificed to preserve a corrupt and failing core. Rather than demand sacrifices of the Roman Elites and the entertainment-addicted bread-and-circus masses to maintain the forces protecting the Imperial borders, late-Roman Empire leaders eliminated defense-in-depth (redundancy). This left the borders thinly defended. With no legions in reserve, an invasion could no longer be stopped without mobilizing the entire border defense, in effect leaving huge swaths of the border undefended to push back the invaders.

Phantom legions line the pockets of insiders and cronies while creating a useful illusion of stability and strength.

12. The feedback from those tasked with doing the real work of the Empire is ignored as Elites and vested interests dominate decision-making. As I noted yesterday in The Political Poison of Vested Interests, when this bottoms-up feedback is tossed out, ignored or marginalized, all decisions are necessarily unwise because they are no longer grounded in the consequences experienced by the 95% doing the real work. This lack of feedback from the bottom 95% is captured by the expression "Let them eat cake." (Though attributed to Marie Antoinette, there is no evidence that she actually said Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.)

The point is that decisions made with no feedback from the real-world of the bottom 95%, that is, decisions made solely in response to the demands of cronies, vested interests and various elites, are intrinsically unsound and doomed to fail catastrophically.

How does an Empire end up with phantom legions? The same way the U.S. ended up with ObamaCare/Affordable Care Act. The payroll is being paid but there is no real-world feedback, no accountability, no purpose other than private profit/gain and no common good being served.

That's how empires collapse: one corrupted, self-serving individual at a time, gaming one corrupted, self-serving institution or another; it no longer matters which one because they're all equally compromised. It's not just the border legions that are phantom; the entire stability and strength of the empire is phantom. The uncorruptible and competent are banished or punished, and the corrupt, self-serving and inept are lavished with treasure.

This is how empires collapse: one complicit participant at a time.

This Article was originally published on Maltanow. However, I do not believe in Carbon-14 dating, or any other dating method. Because there is absolutely no way to verify it, and the error margin is 100%, so to speak. By the way, it's another flaw in modern archaeology.

In June 1936 Max Hahn and his wife Emma were on a walk beside a waterfall near to London, Texas, when they noticed a rock with wood protruding from its core. They decided to take the oddity home and later cracked it open with a hammer and a chisel. What they found within shocked the archaeological and scientific community. Embedded in the rock was what appeared to be some type of ancient man made hammer.