The RPI Challenge

After the in-your-face Fourth of July “gift” that North Korea delivered to President Trump in the form of an intercontinental ballistic missile test, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see President Trump and the Pentagon retaliate by bombing North Korea. The reason goes not only to Trump’s erratic behavior, especially when teased or taunted, but also because a bombing attack would reflect the Cold War mentality that unfortunately still holds the Pentagon in its grip.I’ll bet that most...

A newly announced deal on a ceasefire in southwestern Syria may be an attempt by the United States to save the Syrian rebels from defeat, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Executive Director Daniel McAdams told Sputnik. 'On the Syria "ceasefire" agreement, we need to see the fine print. But I am skeptical that yet another US "ceasefire" proposal for Syria will result in the reduction of violence in that six year war,' McAdams said on Friday. 'It seems whenever the US side experiences...

Chicago police are keeping busy confiscating “illegal guns.” Last year through the summer, the confiscations were occurring at a rate of one every 59 minutes according to Chicago Police Department figures related by Mark Berman in an October 2016 Washington Post article. This summer, the Chicago police will have some assistance from the United States government in racking up impressive gun confiscation numbers. Following through on a plan that began its development during the Obama...

After six solid months of co-ordinated allegation from the mainstream media allied to the leadership of state security institutions, not one single scrap of solid evidence for Trump/Russia election hacking has emerged.I do not support Donald Trump. I do support truth. There is much about Trump that I dislike intensely. Neither do I support the neo-liberal political establishment in the USA. The latter’s control of the mainstream media, and cunning manipulation of identity politics, seeks to...

How did Donald Trump defy all the pollsters, the pundits, and the Twitterverse “experts” and take the White House? According to the Democrats, it was all a Russian plot – Kremlin-directed Twitter “bots” spread “misinformation” and “fake news,” Russian hackers stole the DNC’s emails, and this deprived Hillary Clinton of her rightful place as President of these United States. If we listen to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, it was all because their man Bernie failed to win the nomination...

The United States invaded Iraq in March, 2003. Over the ensuing fourteen years we’ve done nothing of significance that hasn’t proven counterproductive. None of this should have been a surprise. Prior to invading Iraq, Lieutenant General Bill Odom, the Director of the National Security Agency under President Reagan, made it clear in every forum that would carry his opinion that if America invaded Iraq it would be the greatest strategic blunder in the nation’s history. Those of us with any...

I actually forced myself to watch the documentary The White Helmets, which is available on Netflix. It is 40 minutes long, is of high quality cinematographically speaking, and tells a very convincing tale that was promoted as “the story of real-life heroes and impossible hope.” It is overall a very impressive piece of propaganda, so much so that it has won numerous awards including the Oscar for Best Documentary Short this year and the White Helmets themselves were nominated for the Nobel...

“The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we’re part of the medium. The scary thing is, we’ll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.”—Director Steven Spielberg, Minority Report We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by...

As Independence Day comes around again we should spend a few moments between barbecue and fireworks to think about the meaning of independence. The colonists who rebelled against the British Crown were, among other things, unhappy about taxation. Yet, as economist Gary North points out, the total burden of British imperial taxation was about one-to-two percent of national income.Some 241 years later, Washington claims more of our money as its own than King George could have ever imagined. What...

US Secretary of Defense James Mattis has said “civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,” referring to America’s war against Islamic State. How can America in clear conscience continue to kill civilians across the Middle East? It’s easy; ask Grandpa what he did in the Good War. Civilian deaths in WWII weren’t dressed up as collateral damage, they were policy. Following what some claim are looser rules of engagement in place under the Trump administration, US-led...

It’s obvious Mad Dog and the war-makers take us for complete idiots.On Wednesday Trump’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, otherwise fondly known as Mad Dog, said Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian government backed down on a chemical attack after a stern warning from the United States.“It appears that they took the warning seriously,” Mad Dog told reporters. “They didn’t do it.”It is common practice now for the government to make outrageous claims and not bother to offer a scintilla of evidence....

The New York Times has finally admitted that one of the favorite Russia-gate canards – that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred on the assessment of Russian hacking of Democratic emails – is false.On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for...

Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations. What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible. — Ludwig von MisesPeace is popular.That was Ron Paul’s message to our audience in Texas earlier this spring, and it has been his consistent message since first running for Congress in the 1970s. So why do seemingly endless wars remain such a stubborn feature of the American presidency, with the shameful complicity of...