What happens when governments confuse worst-case scenarios with reality? They transform a health crisis into a social crisis and an economic tsunami, with consequences more severe than the virus could produce in the first place. As I write, hundreds of thousands of people across Europe and the world have already lost their jobs, in the leisure and entertainment sectors in particular. As sector after sector is impacted by global lockdowns, mass unemployment is not a possibility, it is definite....

Governments all over the world are using the alleged threat of a COVID-19 pandemic to shut down the world’s economy. Daniel Lacalle, an authority on energy economics, writes: “The decision to shut down air travel and close all nonessential businesses is now a reality in major global economies. The United States has banned all European flights as Italy enters a complete lockdown, Spain declares a state of emergency, and France closes all nonessential public places and businesses.” Further, he...

The administration of President Donald Trump may escape the most recent conflict with Iran without war, however, a dangerous escalation is just over the horizon. And as before, the key factors driving the belligerence are not outraged Iraqi militia leaders or their allies in Iran, but Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long sought to draw the US into a military confrontation with Iran.  Throughout the fall of 2019, Netanyahu ordered...

The COVID-19 “pandemic” is primarily designed to empower the ruling elite and further its authoritarian reach. The primary tool is the innate human fear of death and this fear has been greatly magnified by the corporate propaganda media. For those able to sidestep the trap of fear-mongering, it is obvious this disease is less of a threat to mortality than the seasonal flu and tuberculosis. COVID-19’s death rate thus far is minuscule by way of comparison, although the state and its media...

Social media behemoth Facebook has just acted to censor and suppress Ron Paul's latest weekly column, "The Coronavirus Hoax," based on a hatchet job "fact check" by the notoriously biased "Politifact" organization.At issue is Dr. Paul's statement that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci's claim that the coronavirus is "ten times more deadly" than the seasonal influenza virus is “without any scientific basis." Fauci made the claim recently in testimony...

Fear is contagious: Fear is more contagious than any virus could ever be, and the media has really fed the fear factor when it comes to the coronavirus. I am by no means playing down the deadly Covid-19 coronavirus. It is a killer. Depending on the reporting nation, it appears that on average 3.4 percent of every 100 who catch the coronavirus die. Those are not good odds. Adding to the problem, the Center for Disease Control allowed the virus to spread in the United States out of an act of...

Big news Monday night. Buried amid the panic over the corona virus. Robert Mueller's prosecutors got the green light to flush down the toilet one of their major cases alleging that Russia hacked the 2016  US Presidential election -- US District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich on Monday evening granted the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case against Concord Management and Consulting. This is more than a black eye. It is an indictment and rebuke of a corrupt group of prosecutors who worked for Special...

“Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it’s indistinguishable from the purest paranoia.”— Terrence Rafferty, New York Times What do zombies have to...

People are understandably upset about the coronavirus epidemic, but if we’re not careful, an even greater danger lies ahead. Sinister forces in American political life are using the crisis to incite war with China and to stir up bad feelings towards the Chinese people. The Chinese people are in fact heroic. They are our friends, not our enemies. But the forces of evil want you to think otherwise. Concerning the coronavirus, the key fact to remember is that we know very little about it. The...

How much longer can the troubled OPCW organisation continue to operate with any credibility after the doctoring of its investigations to suit a western narrative in Syria continues to be exposed and shows it is far from an independent chemical weapons watchdog? Readers may remember that previously, towards the end of 2019, leaked emails from two key OPCW investigators who were dispatched to Douma in Syria in 2018, revealed that their original remarks – which indicated that the Assad regime...

Governments love crises because when the people are fearful they are more willing to give up freedoms for promises that the government will take care of them. After 9/11, for example, Americans accepted the near-total destruction of their civil liberties in the PATRIOT Act’s hollow promises of security.It is ironic to see the same Democrats who tried to impeach President Trump last month for abuse of power demanding that the Administration grab more power and authority in the name of fighting...

Yesterday the US attacked five sites in Iraq and killed 3 Iraqi soldiers of the 19th Division, two policeman and a civilian. The strikes came after some 10+ rockets, fired by unknown people, had hit the joint base Camp Tali and had killed 2 US and one British soldiers. Today the US received the revenge for its strikes. The US Central Command had argued that the "defensive precision strike" against the five sites created deterrence i.e. they would prevent other attacks: We believe that this is...

The spread of the coronavirus has meant that much of the other news about developments around the world has disappeared from the normal news cycle. The situation in Syria, which involves not only the government in Damascus but also Turkey, Russia, Iran and a remaining American force in part of the country has been proving increasingly unstable. Russian President Vladimir Putin has met face-to-face with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to come up with a de-escalation plan that would avoid...

The airwaves and the internet are filled with warnings about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19). There is more panic in the air than virus itself. The panic is a non-stop viral news dump. But lost in the hysteria concerning the virus is the fundamental fact that humans rank choices every day, all the time. Government edicts to deal with the virus are simply various methods to trample over human individual choices. This is economics 101. Consider, it seems pretty clear that if someone under the...

Two more US soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Yes, that Iraq — the Iraq that never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so — the Iraq that the US government invaded and has occupied for umpteen years under the rubric of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” What did those two soldiers die for? They died for the same thing that 58,000 US soldiers died for in Vietnam — nothing. They certainly didn’t die for freedom. Just as the North Vietnamese were never threatening the freedom of the...

I have previously objected to how the Justice Department uses grand juries to punish certain individuals who refuse to cooperate with federal investigations. This concern was heightened during my representation of Dr. Sami Al-Arian who signed a plea bargain with the understanding that, after serving his time, he would be allowed to leave the country. Instead, he was forced before a grand jury and remained in jail for years as a matter of contempt. The Justice Department often prolongs the...