The RPI Challenge

At 5:58 pm on December 18, 2022, the Twitter account, @blackintheempir (“Black in the Empire”, belonging to an “Anti Establishment Vet w/ commentary from experience inside the war machine and life in the civilian world as a Black man”) posted the following tweet: If Russia's military is so pitiful, why hasn't NATO beat them yet? — Black in the Empire (@blackintheempir) December 19, 2022 A fair question, given the reality that the 10-month-old war raging in Ukraine has, from its very inception,...

We recently discussed schools joining the University of Chicago free speech alliance. Now, the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have adopted a resolution defending freedom of speech and expression, including speech deemed “offensive or injurious.” It is a triumph for free speech. However, while 98 faculty voted for the resolution, 52 professors voted against the free speech principles. The Free Expression Statement is a balanced affirmation of the essential role of free...

A year ago today (on Dec. 30, 2021) US President Joe Biden, in a telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, assured him that "Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.” Against that backdrop, bilateral talks in Geneva to start on January 9, 2022 seemed off to a promising start. The Kremlin clearly thought so. Then Biden changed his mind. The key issue of offensive missiles on Russia’s borders fell off the table. Glimmer of Hope on Dec. 30...

Blackrock is the world’s largest asset management and investment firm. It invests more than $10 trillion in client funds, a mountain of cash that casts a shadow over the GDP of many countries, including Germany, the fourth largest GDP in the world. It is fair to say it controls, or has outsized influence, on the Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks, including Goldman Sachs and Vanguard, the WEF meet and greet at Davos (and its control freak Great Reset), and all that follows, including President...

From the beginning of the Covid panic, it felt that something was very wrong. Never had a pandemic, much less a seasonal pathogenic wave, been treated as a quasi-military emergency requiring the upending of all freedoms and rights.  What made it more bizarre was how alone those of us who objected felt until very recently when Elon Musk finally bought the platform Twitter, fired all the embedded federal agents, and has started to release the files.  As Elon said, every conspiracy theory about...

In my humble opinion the surfacing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington last week was possibly the most disgusting example of the corruption of our country and its values since Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu arranged for a similar invitation to address a rapturous Congress back in 2015. Zelensky’s “surprise” visit had in fact been arranged over the course of several months and was a carefully choreographed performance intended to pay political dividends for both the...

Steel fencing and police barricades ringed the perimeter of the US Capitol Building hours ahead of the arrival of Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president appeared in Washington DC in the early afternoon on December 21, 2022, emerging from a US military jet clad in an olive drab sweatshirt and cargo pants, and charged with a singular mission: convince Congress and the Biden administration to send his government more than the whopping $45 billion in military and humanitarian aid it had...

Below is my column in the Hill on the need for a new “Church Committee” to investigate and reform the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after years of scandals involving alleged political bias. In response to criticism over its role in Twitter’s censorship system, the FBI lashed out against critics as “conspiracy theorists” spreading disinformation. However, it still refuses to supply new information on other companies, beyond Twitter, that it has paid to engage in censorship. Here is the...

Those hoping for a Christmastime government shutdown were once again disappointed when Congress passed a 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus appropriations bill that few, if any, Representatives and Senators read before voting on. The Republican leadership celebrated this bloated monstrosity because it spends $858 billion on warfare while “only” spending $772.5 billion on welfare.No one should think Republican insistence on more warfare than welfare spending means Democrats oppose the warfare...

The defining moment in US President Joe Biden’s press conference at the White House last Wednesday, during President Zelensky’s visit, was his virtual admission that he is constrained in the proxy war in Ukraine, as European allies don’t want a war with Russia.  To quote Biden, “Now, you say, ‘Why don’t we just give Ukraine everything there is to give?’ Well, for two reasons. One, there’s an entire Alliance that is critical to stay with Ukraine. And the idea that we would give Ukraine material...

Lindsey Graham, the neocon senator for South Carolina, wants to murder Vladimir Putin. Lindsey Graham says the only way the war in Ukraine will end is if Russia "breaks" and someone "takes Putin out" pic.twitter.com/M5do9Oj06q — Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) December 23, 2022 Many members of the political class are unapologetic psychopaths who are eager to resolve geopolitical issues with murder, torture, and rape. The “indispensable nation” believes it can murder anybody it wants after...

It is not clear what is more chilling: the menacing role played by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Twitter’s censorship program or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. This week saw another FBI “nothing-to-see-here” statement to the release of files detailing how it actively sought to suppress the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election, gave millions to Twitter, and targeted even satire or tiny posts that did not conform with its guidelines. The releases...

Even long after most people have left the coronavirus scare behind, you can count on the United States government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to keep the coronavirus fearmongering going. The latest example of this is the CDC’s Thursday report “Mortality in the United States, 2021” blaming coronavirus for much of the decrease in life expectancy for Americans registered for the years 2020 and 2021. Ignored in the report is the great contribution to this dire development...

The spectacle in the US Capitol Building Wednesday night was downright retch-worthy. And we are not actually referring to the detestable little warmongering clown who preened at the podium in a sweatshirt and cargo pants, offering endless lies and hideously false promises about why American taxpayers and consumers are being bled to death in a pointless and necessary war. No, we are referring to the pathetic gaggle of Representatives and Senators who applauded relentlessly and uproariously in...

When the Biden administration came into office it had promised to reenter into the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran. Under Trump the US had left the deal and had reissued sanctions against Iran. Tehran followed up by increasing its enrichment capabilities and by accumulating more enriched Uranium. It would have been easy for Biden to immediately eliminate the sanctions and to rejoin the deal. Iran would surely have followed up by returning to the enrichment levels the deal allows for. But Biden...

During a speech given on November 29, Polish Vice-Minister of National Defense (MON) Marcin Ociepa said: "The probability of a war in which we will be involved is very high. Too high for us to treat this scenario only hypothetically." The Polish MON is allegedly planning to call up 200,000 reservists in 2023 for a few weeks’ training, but observers in Warsaw suspect this action could easily lead to a national mobilization. Meanwhile, inside the Biden administration, there is growing concern...