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...

By washing its hands of responsibility to hear the Texas challenge to the 2020 presidential election, the nine Justices of the US Supreme Court may have sealed the country’s fate and made a kinetic civil war much more likely. On Friday, the highest court in the land decided that Texas “lacked standing” to challenge the conduct of elections in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin under Article 3 of the US Constitution. Yet the article in question explicitly states that the SCOTUS will...

Hunter Biden announced Wednesday he is under federal investigation for his financial dealings in foreign countries, including China. While the news sent shockwaves through Washington, D.C., it shouldn’t have been surprising. The announcement confirms many of the allegations of corruption that were leveled against Hunter Biden in the months leading up to the November elections – allegations the media steadfastly refused to cover. The nation’s largest social media companies went further: They...

Last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was caught violating his own warnings against multiple households dining together indoors. The Democratic governor was spotted at the French Laundry, an exclusive restaurant north of San Francisco, where he was celebrating the birthday of longtime friend Jason Kinney. The dinner controversy was more than just an opulent display of political double standards — it also highlighted the backroom efforts to maintain special treatment during the pandemic....