“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap,” Napoleon reputedly said more than two centuries ago. Boundless ignorance is also not a handicap, as Congress demonstrated Monday night by approving a 5,593-page bill with no time to read it. The usual suspects are indignant at the sloppy procedures propelling $2.3 trillion in federal spending, including a last-minute $900 billion deal for COVID-19 relief. But reckless legislating has been standard procedure on Capitol Hill for almost three decades....

To justify Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called “Russia’s interference in our elections” in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama — that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy’s capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the US — and instead cast...

We’ve seen this movie before, and it ended with the largest power grab in world history. “It’s just a travel ban.” “It’s just two weeks to stop the spread.” “It’s just for non-essential workers.” “Just wear a mask. It will allow for society to reopen.” “It’s just a ‘pause’ on non-essential activities and businesses.” 2020, the year that will be defined by corona hysteria and unprecedented global power grabs, is coming to an end, and the simulation is apparently resetting. The conversation...

With apparently little else left to sanction in Syria, the United States is now going after Bashar al-Assad's wife and even extended family members which have long resided in London. A Tuesday statement from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated the US is imposing sanctions on Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad, blaming her in part for prolonging the war and blocking a peaceful political settlement through her charities and civil society organizations. Of course, in Washington-speak...

Most European governments instituted the shutdown of economies, restrictions on freedom of movement and other policies known as lockdown. This was allegedly in response to the spread of Sars-Cov-2, a dangerous respiratory virus that originated in Wuhan, China. Few countries rejected this approach; Sweden is the most well known of these. However, a more interesting case of dissent from the official narrative is Belarus and its leader Aleksandr Lukashenka. This article will outline Lukashenka’s...

As incoming nominees of a future Biden administration have stopped short in naming a culprit in the SolarWinds hack, the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has levelled blame on the usual suspect. Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by the media? It’s almost as though frantic journalists, unable to sell the ‘Trump Beats Biden with Kremlin Collusion’ narrative, have dreamt up this latest work of...

For months, we've been lectured to by the political elites that cases of coronavirus are spreading too quickly and that we must wear masks to stop the spread. The obvious fault with their act of desperation is that they can no longer mask the fact that most parts of the country have already been fully masked for months — long before the ubiquitous spread this fall. Researchers at RationalGround.com, a clearinghouse of COVID-19 data trends run by a grassroots group of data analysts, computer...

The Washington Post has published another article warning its readers that the Russians are “hacking our minds”, this one authored by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “Russia hasn’t just hacked our computer systems. It’s hacked our minds.” blares the ridiculous, propagandistic headline for an article about “the Russian model” of propaganda which “rests on the principle that people get convinced when they hear the same message many times from a variety of sources, no matter how biased.” Which is funny,...

A video of a confrontation between Ventura County, California health officials and restaurant owner Anton Van Happen has gone viral. The health officials were ordering Mr. Van Happen to close his business because he allegedly violated California’s ban on outdoor dining. Mr. Van Happen asked the health officials if the government will pay his employees and his rent while his business is indefinitely closed.Mr. Van Happen is hardly the only small business owner worried about how to pay bills...

There seem to be few normal doctors around anymore. Try to have an appointment with many doctors over the last few months and they will demand that you put a mask over your nose and mouth — supposedly to block coronavirus transmission. You’d think, given they are doctors, they would know that there are health risks from you doing so and that it is not established that you doing so provides any net protection against coronavirus. Yet, they demand away. This is abnormal behavior. Then, check out...

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) confirmed that the Pfizer covid vaccine is 95 percent effective, but what does that statement mean? The details of the Pfizer covid vaccine trial can be found here. As was the case in the previous announcement about the vaccine, this “efficacy” figure is misleading. The incidence of covid “cases” in the placebo group was 162 out of 18,325 subjects, or less than 1 percent. The incidence of “cases” in the vaccine group was 8 out of 18,198, or about...

The first rule of screenwriting, or in fact any fiction writing, is, “Conflict doesn’t create character, it reveals it.” People are who they are and we only find out what they are made of when tested to their limit. This is the essence of all good storytelling — create characters who rise to be role models for us as we navigate our way through a Universe hostile to our very existence. While I hesitate to ascribe such noble ideas as ‘character’ to any politician there are a few out there who...

A long-standing and vehement criticism of Joe Biden is that legislation he championed as a Senator in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly his crime bill of 1994, contributed to the mass incarceration of Americans generally and African-Americans specifically. Among the many on the left and libertarian right who have voiced this criticism (along with President Trump) is then-Senator Kamala Harris, who said during the 2020 Democratic primary race that Biden’s “crime bill -- that 1994 crime bill --...

Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services crashed, including Nest, Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube. The outage only lasted an hour, but it was a chilling reminder of how reliant the world has become on internet-connected technologies to do everything from unlocking doors and turning up the heat to accessing work files, sending emails and making phone calls. With each...

A perennial favorite tactic for officials running U.S. foreign policy has been to impose economic sanctions on countries whose governments defy Washington’s wishes. Sanctions enjoy a reputation among the policy elite of being the responsible "middle option" between relying solely on diplomacy or using military force when dealing with an adversary. Political leaders resist the former approach because they fear being portrayed as weakling appeasers. Conversely, launching military interventions...