The RPI Challenge

The White House announced a $270 million weapons package Kiev on Friday. The latest transfer will send four additional High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS and drones to Ukraine.The additional four HIMARS brings the total number the US has committed to sending to Ukraine to 16. Commander of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley said the other 12 HIMARS have reached Ukraine and have not been destroyed by Russia. The US has provided Ukraine with rockets that can be fired 50 miles by the...

Below is my column in the Washington Times responding to the controversy over changes at the home of James Madison. While I have not been to Montpelier since the reported changes, I wanted to respond to the condemnation of Madison as “an enslaver.” He was indeed an enslaver but the truth is far more complex than presented by critics. Here is the column: If there is one concept that captured the brilliant vision of President James Madison for government, it was his statement in Federalist 51:...

Western governments have allocated well over $100 billion to prop up Ukraine in its war against Russia, with countless billions more flooding into the country at an increasing pace. Yet as each day passes, it’s becoming more and more clear that all of the money awarded and assigned to Ukraine continues to dissolve into a black hole of secrecy, corruption, deceit, and now, default. On Wednesday, Ukraine finance ministry asked foreign creditors to accept a delay in its debt repayments,...

Nothing is private. We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before. While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all. Nothing that was once private is protected. We have not even begun to register...

Language is a critical tool for communication among humans; we cry "watch out" when a speeding car hurtles toward a pedestrian. We also think of language as a cognitive tool for society at large, since all human learning is closely tied to how we learn and process language.et sometimes we forget language is also an important social and cultural institution. And like all institutions, it is subject to corruption, in the form of capture by elites with agendas quite contrary to those of average...

“Bidenflation” existed before he staggered into office on January 20, 2021. It was catalyzed when nearly every Republican supported the worst piece of legislation in American history on March 25, 2020, which set off a cascade of several other pieces of legislation underwriting, incentivizing, and consummating COVID lockdowns. The chief cheerleader of the bill at the time was none other than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the man whom Republicans are pining to see become floor leader...

The White House keeps insisting that it will not directly involve American soldiers in the war in Ukraine, but it keeps taking steps that will inevitably lead to a large-scale open combat role for the US against Russia. Among the most recent moves to increase the pressure on the Kremlin, Biden revealed at a NATO summit meeting in Madrid on June 29th that the US will establish a permanent headquarters in Poland for the Fifth Army Corps, maintain an additional rotational brigade of thousands of...

Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, known to history as Caligula, ruled as the Emperor of Rome from A.D. 37 to 41. For those who are unaware, Caligula, the great grandson of Rome’s first emperor, the brilliant Augustus Caesar, squandered the enormous wealth of the Roman State, declared himself to be a god, appointed his favorite racehorse to serve in the Roman Senate, and according to some sources, considered deifying the animal. After a little less than four years in office, Caligula was removed....

A recent video shows penguins at a Japanese aquarium rejecting the cheap fish the aquarium has substituted for the higher quality fish the penguins are used to receiving. The reason the aquarium switched fish is because rampant inflation has made it impossible for the aquarium to afford the higher quality fish. The penguins’ reaction illustrates the flaw in governments claiming that even if inflation makes it impossible for you (or penguins) to eat steak (or higher quality fish) your quality...

The December 2020 resignation of Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump, revealed predictable hypocrisy. Like so many other government officials around the world, she was caught violating her own stay-at-home order. Therefore she finally left her post following nine months of causing unfathomable amounts of damage to life, liberty, property, and the very idea of hope for the future. Even if Anthony Fauci had been the front man for the media, it was Birx who...

The State Department on Sunday implied that Ukrainian forces are allowed to use US-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) against Russian targets in Crimea, which Russia has controlled since 2014.When the US first announced it was sending HIMARS to Ukraine, Biden administration officials said they received “assurances” from Ukrainian officials that the rockets won’t be used to target Russian territory.When asked if the ban on Ukraine using the HIMARS to target Russian...

At the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland was invited to join the alliance. What does this mean for Finland? If Russian President Vladimir Putin breaches the 830-mile Finnish border, the United States will rise to Helsinki's defense and fight Russia on Finland's side. What does Finland's membership in NATO mean for America? If Putin makes a military move into Finland, the U.S. will go to war against the world's largest nation with an arsenal of between 4,500 and 6,000 battlefield and strategic...

What were the policy cliques, “the intelligence community” and the press that serves both going to do when the kind of war in Ukraine they talked incessantly about turned out to be imaginary, a Marvel Comics of a conflict with little grounding in reality? I have wondered about this since the Russian intervention began on Feb. 24. I knew the answer would be interesting when finally we had one. Now we have one. Taking the government-supervised New York Times as a guide, the result is a variant...

In the last of a series of landmark rulings issued at the end of its 2021–2022 term, the US Supreme Court held that federal executive branch agencies cannot take major regulatory initiatives without explicit congressional authorization. It was the right decision. The 6 to 3 majority determined in West Virginia et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency that the EPA’s “Clean Power Plan” (CPP), promulgated in 2015, overstepped its statutory authority by dictating that power plants must switch...

If you were holding out hope that the media and military analysts predicting the imminent collapse of Russia because of the failed invasion of Ukraine would get a grip on reality, think again. I take the New York Times as the leading indicator of the establishment mindset and the Times published a piece that reveals the delusion and confusion about the war in Ukraine that infects the Washington/New York Swamps. Put simply, the article–Ukraine’s Demands for More Weapons Clash With US...