The RPI Challenge

It might be time to get off Gab, Voat, and other “white supremacist” social media sites. These are not bona fide racist websites—unlike, say, the Daily Stormer—although they do have an appreciable percentage of what the state now calls “white nationalists” freely posting and (in the United States, for now) exercising what remains of the First Amendment. Supposed white nationalism is a carefully crafted amalgamate. It is vague enough to include political movements and ideologies that have...

Since he became president, Donald Trump has killed thousands of people in Afghanistan and the Middle East in wars that are illegal under our form of government, given that he has never secured the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war to wage such wars. Operating through his military-intelligence forces, he has also assassinated countless people in different parts of the world, notwithstanding the fact that the Constitution expressly prohibits him and his cohorts from...

After months of rumors, John Bolton was finally fired from the White House but the post mortem on why it took so long to remove him continues, with the punditry and media trying to understand exactly what happened and why. Perhaps the most complete explanation for what occurred came from President Donald Trump himself shortly after the fact. He said, in some impromptu comments, that his national security advisor had “…made some very big mistakes when he talked about the Libyan model for Kim...

This is soooooo boring. For nearly a week, Washington has been consumed by reports that Donald Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden. The furor began on Wednesday, Sept. 18, when the Washington Post disclosed that Trump had said something to an unknown foreign leader that “was so alarming that a US intelligence official who had worked at the White House went to the inspector general of the intelligence community.” Two days...

“Anyone who cares for someone with a developmental disability, as well as for disabled people themselves [lives] every day in fear that their behavior will be misconstrued as suspicious, intoxicated or hostile by law enforcement.”—Steve Silberman, The New York Times Think twice before you call the cops to carry out a welfare check on a loved one. Especially if that person is autistic, hearing impaired, mentally ill, elderly, suffering from dementia, disabled or might have a condition that...

TEHRAN- Some in the mainstream western media are lamenting why US President Donald Trump is dragging its feet to march off to another open-ended military conflict in the Middle East, after days of reckless efforts to implicate Iran in the September 14 Yemeni attacks into Saudi oil installations. The MSM outlets are repeating that Iran was behind the attack, despite the fact Iranian complacency with the Yemeni strike has not yet been publicly demonstrated. They are following in the footsteps of...

The precision attack on the Saudi "jewel in the crown," crude-processing installation last week, is also a precision assault on Saudi credibility, on the believability of the US security "umbrella,' and a humiliation for Trump, and particularly to America’s image as a competent military and intelligence power. Gulf States will be pursing their lips as they consider now their own vulnerabilities and question their reliance on that US umbrella. Even the Pentagon might be questioning, "what then...

President Trump deserves credit for resisting the war cries from neocons like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after last week’s attack on two Saudi oil facilities. Pompeo was eager to blame Iran because he wants war with Iran and anything that can trigger such a war is fine with him. So he put the president in a difficult spot by declaring Iran the culprit: suddenly the president’s options in the media and in Washington were limited to “how to punish Iran.”A week has now...

Kamala Harris wants you to join her cult. But don’t worry: membership is voluntary — that is, unless a plurality of your fellow voters wants to join, in which case you’ll be automatically enrolled. You see, Harris’ cult is the “cult of the Presidency.” Coined by Gene Healy, the phrase describes the worship that so often accompanies what many Americans consider to be a grand, magisterial office from which all good things flow, and all evil seeks to corrupt. In their peculiar astronomy of this...

As Joe Biden plummets in the popularity, Democratic lawmakers and the MSM have gone into panic mode after a whistleblower report of political malfeasance during a July phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about the Biden family's dealings turned out to be fake news. Since the initial report, the Trump-Zelensky call has been downgraded to remove implications of a quid pro quo - and attention is now turning to what the Bidens actually did. “The real story...

A series of interviews of Democratic presidential candidates opposing President Trump in the 2020 election by the Council of Foreign Relations in New York reveal that the perceptions regarding US-Saudi ties have dramatically changed in the Washington beltway. Two issues during the past one-year period made all the difference — the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi and the war in Yemen where Saudi atrocities have come into focus. Trump’s argument to remain committed to the Saudi ally had boiled...

The Mideast has its own variety of crazy humor. The Saudis have been blasting and bombing wretched Yemen, one of this world’s poorest nations, since 2015. These US-supported attacks and a naval blockade of Yemen imposed by Saudi Arabia and its sidekick ally, the United Arab Emirates, have caused mass starvation. No one knows how many Yemenis have died or are currently starving. Estimates run from 250,000 to one million. The black humor? The Saudis just claimed they were victims of Iranian...

From the abstract of a (paywalled) piece about the never ending US war on Afghanistan: Slow failure: Understanding America’s quagmire in Afghanistan The United States government has no organised way of thinking about war termination other than seeking decisive military victory. This implicit assumption is inducing three major errors. First, the United States tends to select military-centric strategies that have low probabilities of success. Second, the United States is slow to modify losing or...