The RPI Challenge

The mainstream media didn’t find it incongruous that the US walked back a claim that Russia placed bounties on US troops in Afghanistan on the same day it sanctioned Russia on the basis of another set of evidence-free accusations. The CIA now only has “low-to-moderate confidence” that Russia paid the Taliban to kill American servicemen in Afghanistan, it was reported on Thursday. On the same day, the Biden administration announced a new raft of sanctions against Russia as punishment for its...

That the United States likes to use expressions like “shock and awe” or “maximum pressure” would rather suggest that there is a psychopath working in the White House basement whose full-time job is to come up with pithy one-liners to somehow euphemize government bad behavior. The expressions hardly mean anything in and of themselves apart from “tough talk” but they do serve as an alternative to having to admit in plain language to the killing of millions of people since the Global War on...

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s go-to for all things coronavirus, said on Sunday on national news that even those who’ve been vaccinated should not gather indoors, or eat indoors, or remove their masks — or basically, in essence, do anything that involves being and breathing around others. This guy will have Americans walking on pins and needles, living in fear, forever — if we let him. His so-called supporting science is about as solid as tossing a coin. Heads, stay at home; tails, don’t...

Obsessive Covid cleaning is just the most recent and most palpable government regulation to serve no discernible health and safety policy goal. Many rules ostensibly made to “protect” you and yours really serve to protect incumbents from new entry by artificially increasing new entry costs. Others are paternalistic efforts designed to save you from yourself, including your natural cravings for wholesome natural foods. One particularly stunning example of the latter is the US Food and Drug...

The US decision to leave Afghanistan without any conditions represents a political victory for those in the US government who sought an end to the nearly two-decade conflict in that nation. President Joe Biden, in a departure from a policy embraced by four successive US presidential administrations which placed stringent conditions on determining the conditions under which the US might leave Afghanistan, has announced that he is ordering all US military forces out of Afghanistan by September...

1. Vaccine passports have existed in the U.S for decades. Some of my libertarian heroes have recently stated during podcasts that vaccine passports create a caste system and that this is one reason they should be opposed. The term “caste system” accurately and brilliantly describes one of the consequences of vaccine passports. However, in the same discussions, they have characterized vaccine passports as a “new” threat to liberty. In fact, vaccine passports and their resulting caste systems...

Rule by brute force. That’s about as good a description as you’ll find for the sorry state of our nation. SWAT teams crashing through doors. Militarized police shooting unarmed citizens. Traffic cops tasering old men and pregnant women for not complying fast enough with an order. Resource officers shackling children for acting like children. Homeowners finding their homes under siege by police out to confiscate lawfully-owned guns. Drivers having their cash seized under the pretext that they...

Last week, Indiana governor Eric Holcomb vetoed a bill that would limit gubernatorial authority in declaring emergencies. The bill would allow the General Assembly to call itself into an emergency session, with the idea that the legislature could then vote to end, or otherwise limit, a governor’s emergency powers. Although both the legislature and the governor’s office are controlled by Republicans, the legislature has apparently wearied of the governor’s repeated renewals of the state’s...

Conflict with Russia may be inevitable. Kiev’s strident threats to resolve the crisis in Eastern Ukraine with force of arms, combined with Washington’s refusal to acknowledge that Moscow actually has legitimate national security interests in Eastern Ukraine, makes it so. Equally troubling, the president sees no particular reason why he should explain to the American people why Washington’s readiness to support Kiev’s use of force against Russia makes strategic sense for America. In 1937, when...

First the Ukraine said it would use force to recover the renegade Donbass region as well as Crimea. It then moved heavy troops towards the contact lines. The ceasefire at the contact line was broken multiple times per day. Several Ukrainian soldiers died while attempting to remove a minefield in preparation of an attack. It became clear that a war in Ukraine's east was likely to soon braek out. A successful war would help Ukraine's president Zelensky with the ever increasing domestic crises. A...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has proposed that governments around the world require payment of at least a uniform “global minimum corporate tax.” A motivation for Yellen's push for a global minimum corporate tax is fear that the Biden administration’s proposed increase in the US corporate tax will cause some American corporations to flee the US for countries with lower corporate taxes.President Biden wants to increase corporate taxes to help pay for his so-called infrastructure plan. The...

As someone with a background in foreign policy and international affairs, I am often asked to discuss the ramifications of having Joe Biden as the so-called leader of the Free World. While it is easy to get carried away debating the merits of a heavily compromised man being the physical representation of the Free World, and how cringeworthy and depressing that is, I can’t help but get stuck on the possibility that the term itself is no longer viable. “What Free World?” The Free World is a term...

Investigative site Bellingcat is the toast of the popular press. In the past month alone, it has been described as “an intelligence agency for the people” (ABC Australia), a “transparent” and “innovative” (New Yorker) “independent news collective,” “transforming investigative journalism” (Big Think), and an unequivocal “force for good” (South China Morning Post). Indeed, outside of a few alternative news sites, it is very hard to hear a negative word against Bellingcat, such is the gushing...