The RPI Challenge

Historians of the now seventeen-year old US war in Afghanistan will take note of this past week when the newly-appointed American general in charge of US and NATO operations in the country made a bombshell, historic admission. He conceded that the United States cannot win in Afghanistan. Speaking to NBC News last week, Gen. Austin Scott Miller made his first public statements after taking charge of American operations, and shocked with his frank assessment that that the Afghan war cannot be...

There was bound to be a major pushback. Widespread use of the internet has helped make all sorts of information much cheaper to create and easier to access. That has been a boon for people seeking to communicate and receive information that would not have been readily available in the days when radio, TV, and newspapers were the overwhelming means of mass distribution of information about current events. At the same time, the internet-facilitated alternative voices boom threatens the interests...

Given President Trump’s impulsive decision to suddenly send 5,200 armed US soldiers to the US-Mexico border to prevent a few thousand women and children and others from seeking refugee status in the United States, which foreign citizens are entitled to do under US law, a question naturally arises with respect to those troops: What were they doing before they were sent to the border? The answer is: Nothing, at least nothing productive. Oh sure, one can say that they were training to kill more...

The #MeToo movement is spurring millions of Americans to reconsider the meaning of consent in sexual relations. But there is another realm where far too much has been presumed because of often token gestures. Political consent is defined radically differently than the consent that people freely give in their daily lives. The Declaration of Independence enshrined the notion that government must possess “the consent of the governed.” Unfortunately, winning politicians often claim blank checks to...

Not for the first time the Turkish army has attacked US-backed forces in northeastern Syria on Sunday in yet another absurd contradiction of American policy in the region. It highlights the awkward fact that in northern Syria for over the past year one NATO country (Turkey) is at war with another NATO country's proxy force, namely the Pentagon armed and trained Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, of which the YPG is a core part).The new flair up of tensions comes as President Turkey's...

The angst over the Jamal Khashoggi murder in the Saudi Arabian Consulate General building in Istanbul is already somewhat fading as the media has moved on in search of fresh meat, recently focusing on the series of attempted mail bombings, and currently on the mass shooting in Pittsburgh. But the affaire Khashoggi is still important as it potentially brings with it possible political realignments in the Middle East as well as in Europe as countries feel emboldened to redefine their...

President Trump recently called the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes crazy. Leaving aside President Trump’s specific complaint, which is likely motivated by the belief that low rates will help him win reelection, he is right that “crazy” is a good way to describe the Federal Reserve. When not forced to use a government-created currency, individuals have historically chosen to use a precious metal such as gold or silver as money. The reasons include that precious metals are durable and...

Yet another shooting. Yet another smear of ugliness, hatred and violence. Yet another ratcheting up of the calls for the government to clamp down on the citizenry by imposing more costly security measures without any real benefit, more militarized police, more surveillance, more gun control measures, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do more stop-and-frisk searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate...

Politics attracts psychopaths like honey attracts bears. Questions of morality are irrelevant for today’s politicians, along with questions of principle, honor and integrity -- things frequently written about by the great thinkers of the 20th Century, particularly Huxley and Orwell who are more and more referenced particularly in social media these days and rightly so. On a point of detail, but one of importance and relevance to mention, is the response to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s...

Robert Bowers, the suspected shooter at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, is being used to denounce social media not on the corporate reservation.Bowers had an account on Gab, the free speech social media alternative to Twitter and Facebook, where he posted antisemitic content, and this is now being used to portray the site as a haven for antisemites.Gab posted the following on Twitter: If you are a terrorist the absolute worst place for you to be online is https://t.co/J3Rfto6fi3. We will work...

The history of criminal behavior and online threats by Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man charged with sending suspicious packages to prominent Democrats, somehow went ignored by both government and social media police. Sayoc, 56, was arrested on Friday, and stands accused of sending pipe bombs - 14, as of the last count - to former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, actor Robert De Niro, billionaire Democrat donors George Soros and Tom Steyer, and several Democrat lawmakers. Federal...

A White Helmets uniform found during a search of al Qaeda-lined rebel headquarters in Eastern Ghouta, Syria. Morad Saeed | SputnikThe October 16 issue of NY Review of Books has an article by Janine di Giovani titled “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets”. The article exemplifies how western media promotes the White Helmets uncritically and attacks those who challenge the myth. A Crude & Disingenuous Attack Giovani’s article attacks several journalists by name. She singles out...

Two recent stories about Russians have demonstrated how the news is selected and manipulated in the United States. The first is about Maria Butina, who apparently sought to overthrow American democracy, such as it is, by obtaining a life membership in the National Rifle Association. Maria, a graduate student at American University, is now in detention in a federal prison, having been charged with collusion and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. She has been in prison...