The RPI Challenge

New data released Monday from the United Nations finds that US-backed forces in Afghanistan were responsible for killing more than twice as many children as did extremists during the first three months of 2020. The figures come from the latest quarterly report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). From January 1 - March 31, said UNAMA, there were 1,293 civilian casualties in Afghanistan, including 533 killed and 760 injured. The tally reflects a 29 percent decrease compared to...

By all accounts and from the very beginning it was clear to some that Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) was at the very most a little more dangerous than the seasonal flu – but was being deliberately hyped to stampede the public into an increasingly tangled web of bad policies. As early as last month, cooler-headed experts had warned that hyped death rates spread by politicians, the Western corporate media, other various panic-mongers, and even World Health Organization (WHO) officials would...

On April 27, at around five in the morning, Israel targeted residential areas of southern Damascus, killing three civilians, injuring four and causing significant material damage to homes. The attack was carried out by Israeli warplanes unlawfully hijacking Lebanese airspace to fire their missiles into Damascus suburbs. It is the fourth such attack in the past month, two having taken place in the same week. Israeli media used the typical “self-defence-mission” arguments to justify the...

Do quick shutdowns work to fight the spread of Covid-19? Joe Malchow, Yinon Weiss and I wanted to find out. We set out to quantify how many deaths were caused by delayed shutdown orders on a state-by-state basis. To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A...

Dr. Richard Hatchett. He was an advisor to President George W. Bush, for whom he imagined mandatory confinement of the civilian population and now heads CEPI, the global coordination group for vaccine investment created by the Davos Forum around the Gates Foundation. He was the first to equate the Covid-19 epidemic with a "war" (sic).In an earlier article [1], I demonstrated how frightening statistical predictions of the number of deaths that Covid-19 would cause were made by a charlatan,...

Will a bankrupt nation suffering from a massive six trillion dollar bailout hangover lose its appetite for interventionism overseas? Or is the global coronavirus just the kind of "Pearl Harbor event" the neocons have long pined for to again launch their global war plans? Watch today's Liberty Report:

Americans are uniquely privileged, to the point of simply imagining they can stay home for months and months without suffering severe economic hardship as a result. Our unique privilege is delusion, the mentality that America is rich and will remain rich without particular effort on our part. Abundance simply materializes around us, regardless of incentives, and the job of politicians is to rearrange this abundance more equitably. Polls such as this one showing widespread American support for...

According to the CDC’s long established mortality models, 687,000 Americans were supposed to die during the 12 weeks between February 1 and April 18. But only 666,000 actually complied. So the Grim Reaper was deprived of his seasonally adjusted mortality quota, even as 21,000 families were spared, at least temporarily, of the loss and grief which accompanies the passing of a loved one. Either way, how in the hell does that square with Lockdown Nation—an unprecedented government ordered...

In my first week in the House of Representatives in 1976, I cast one of the two votes against legislation appropriating funds for a swine flu vaccination program. A swine flu outbreak was then dominating headlines, so most in DC were frantic to “do something” about the virus.Unfortunately, the hastily developed and rushed-into-production swine flu vaccine was not only ineffective, it was dangerous. Approximately 50 people who received the vaccine subsequently contracted Guillain-Barré...

A rabid anti-China propaganda campaign has spread through the media since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The hysteria seems to be just as contagious as the virus, as Americans are bombarded with anti-China stories from the pages of The New York Times to segments on Fox News. Both Republicans and Democrats are arguing the other side is not tough enough on China as they gear up for the 2020 election. Since Donald Trump was elected president, the unfounded claim that Russia meddled in the...

Neoconservative publication The Atlantic has published an article authored by two university professors titled “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal”, subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the US was wrong.” The article is actually worth reading in full, not just because it’s outrage porn for anyone who values human communication that is unregulated by oligarchs and government agencies, but because it’s actually...

Bloomberg published a stunning piece on April 9th promoting the secession of California from the US, in an op-ed by Francis Wilkinson titled Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’, which resurrected John C. Calhoun in a neo-confederate argument favoring nullification. Bloomberg is part a strategy to prevent Trump from a second term by way of legal means (election), and has now brought to the fore the spectre of secession or nullification. This does not mean we should normally expect...

If CA Governor Newsom putting in place a "task force" to discuss how to end the lockdown in that state - when none was needed to implement it - isn't enough to convince you that this is all a load of horse manure, maybe these will help: 1. There is no empirical evidence for these lockdowns. Wilfred Reilly looked at the "data from the Worldometers Coronavirus Project, along with information about the population, population density, median income, median age and diversity of each US state, to...

To date, three county sheriffs in Washington State broke ranks and announced they will not enforce some of Governor Inslee’s executive orders relating to his several, and increasingly frequent lockdown orders–proclaimed under the auspices of state of emergency declarations to the COVID-19 situation. The dominant subject of dissent among these law enforcement officials centers around what are regarded as unconstitutional intrusions by the governor enacted against the citizens of their...

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore...