Like many other mainstream political commentators, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum is outraged and indignant over Donald Trump’s public praise and open embrace of foreign dictators who are allied or friendly with the US government. In an op-ed in the Post’s Sunday edition entitled “How Trump Makes Dictators Stronger,” Applebaum argues that Trump’s words and actions constitute a “paradigm shift” for the United States because they are now, she asserts, going to solidify pro-US...

You’re almost certainly interacting with Cloudflare right now. Feel OK?Cloudflare is a web services company that, among other things, protects sites against various malicious attacks and hacks. They don’t “host” data in most cases, but work as a kind of middleman between you and the server out there somewhere on the web that has the actual data. Cloudflare processes more web traffic than Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Instagram, and Wikipedia combined, because it handles data for most of those places...

President Trump is about to embark on his first foreign trip, where he will stop in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican, before attending a NATO meeting in Brussels and the G-7 summit in Sicily. The media and pundits have loudly wondered why hasn’t he gone on a foreign trip sooner. I wonder why go at all? What does the president hope to achieve with these meetings? This is a president who came into office with promises that we would finally start to mind our own business overseas. In...

Ann Coulter will not speak at Berkeley this week because the threat of mob violence lead campus authorities to claim they could not protect her. The same threats led New York University (NYU) to cancel Milo Yiannopoulos’ appearance in February. These are shameful actions by two universities, and they are unconstitutional as hell.Previous violence at Berkeley directed against Yiannopoulos, as well as the current threats, originated with a coalition of so-called antifa’s, anti-fascists, persons...

The North Korean “crisis” is a Washington orchestration. North Korea was last at war 1950-53. North Korea has not attacked or invaded anyone in 64 years. North Korea lacks the military strength to attack any country, such as South Korea and Japan, that is protected by the US. Moreover, China would not permit North Korea to start a war. So what is the demonization of North Korea by the presstitutes and Trump administration about?It is about the same thing that the demonization of Iran was...

Given that so many Americans continue to express gratitude to the troops for their forever service in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere, it would be worthwhile to revisit the immortal words of James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution: Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and...

Part of noninterventionism in foreign affairs is refraining from using threats, sanctions, foreign aid, or military attacks to make the governments of other countries change their actions in their own countries. The United States government has drifted so far from adherence to this standard that much media coverage expresses distress and amazement, due to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal domestic actions, that US President Donald Trump cordially spoke Saturday with Duterte in a...

There is a dangerous condition in Washington, DC where people in positions of influence and great power are, at this very moment, pushing this nation and the world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. We did not arrive at crisis overnight but be sure we are at a moment of peril. Unless an enlightened citizenry on campuses, in town halls, in community centers, in places of work, play and worship, is aroused and demands our government step back from the brink, we may find the life of our...

A senior Rand analyst, inadvertently, gave the game away in a recent article inculpating Syrian President Bashar al Assad over the alleged toxic massacre of civilians on April 4. The Rand Corporation, a longtime conduit for CIA propaganda, wrote: "The use of chemical weapons today provokes international condemnation… Those who order their deployment risk being charged with war crimes."The Western objective, as tacitly admitted above, is therefore to brand the Syrian leader and his government...

Congress ended the week by passing a continuing resolution keeping the government funded for one more week. This stopgap funding bill is designed to give Congress and the White House more time to negotiate a long-term spending bill. Passage of a long-term spending bill has been delayed over objections to Republican efforts to preserve Obamcare's key features but give states a limited ability to opt out of some Obamacare mandates.This type of brinkmanship has become standard operating procedure...

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984 Supposedly the National Security Administration is going to stop collecting certain internet communications that merely mention a foreign intelligence target.Privacy advocates are hailing it as a major victory for Americans whose communications have been caught in the NSA’s dragnet.If this is a victory,...

One of the problems of the interventionista – wanting to get involved in other people’s affairs “in order to help”, while genuinely wanting to do good, results in disrupting some of the peace-making mechanisms that are inherent in human’s affairs, a combination of collaboration and strategic hostility. As we saw in the prologue, the error continues because someone else is paying the price.I speculate that had IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots) and their friends not gotten involved, problems such...

Friday night’s failed missile launch by North Korea has exposed a kind of cognitive dissonance in the western mainstream media and also some alt-media sources.On the one hand, North Korea is an evil state whose nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems are capable of setting hell-fire upon East Asia and even parts of the western United States.At the same time, some of these same sources are promulgating an antithetical narrative that North Korea is little more than an ineffective...

Maybe the president believes he’s won a great victory over the wicked Syrians by lobbing cruise missiles at one of their underused air bases. Maybe Trump believes that he’s scared the evil Russians and the too big for their sampans Chinese into obedience.His 22,000 lb MOAB terror bomb on Afghanistan should keep those pesky Taliban quiet for a while even though the Pentagon claimed the intended target was a group – Khorosan – that may not actually exist.Those major malefactors, the crazy North...

What would have happened had there been no Iraq War in 2003 and Saddam Hussein had stayed in power? Where would we be today?It’s the 28th of April 2017. Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, now a member state of the newly reconstituted United Arab Republic (with Syria and Egypt), is celebrating his 80th birthday. There are big processions on a gloriously sunny and very hot day in Baghdad. Among visiting foreign heads of state was Zimbabwe’s 93-year-old President Robert Mugabe, who joked that if...