If you use hand sanitizer when traveling, the Transportation Security Administration can badger you as if you were a terrorist suspect. TSA is one of the biggest hassles many Americans will encounter this holiday season. I learned that firsthand while flying home from Portland, Ore., on Thanksgiving morning. I arrived at the airport two hours before my flight. As usual, I opted out of going through TSA’s Whole Body Scanners. The agency’s prize possessions are incompetent at detecting terrorist...

On Tuesday evening, we took a look at how Iran’s Shiite proxy arms fighting ISIS in Iraq responded to Ash Carter’s contention that the US would soon send an “expeditionary targeting force” to assist Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the battle against Islamic State. From Kata'ib Hezbollah: "We will chase and fight any American force deployed in Iraq. Any such American force will become a primary target for our group. We fought them before and we are ready to resume fighting." From the Badr...

Blackadder: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other’s deterrent. That way there could never be a war. Baldrick: But, this is a sort of a war, isn’t it, sir? Blackadder: Yes, that’s right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan. Baldrick: What was that, sir? Blackadder: It was bollocks. —...

“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.” ― William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice Bottle up the champagne, pack away the noisemakers, and toss out the party hats. There is no cause for celebration. We have secured no major victories against tyranny. We have achieved no great feat in pushing back...

Following Russia's official retaliation to the Turkish downing of its jet a week ago, in which Putin issued an executive order limiting employment for Turkish workers, restricting Turkish organizations, and reducing the amount of bilateral trade with Ankara, perhaps a far more notable development took place earlier today when the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office issued a statement in which it recognized George Soros’s Open Society Institute and another affiliated organization as...

The interventionists will do anything to prevent Americans from seeing that their foreign policies are perpetuating terrorism and inspiring others to seek to harm us. The neocons know that when it is understood that blowback is real – that people seek to attack us not because we are good and free but because we bomb and occupy their countries – their stranglehold over foreign policy will begin to slip. That is why each time there is an event like the killings in Paris earlier this month, they...

Nigeria’s Boko Haram is now officially the deadliest terror group in the world. That they have reached this position is a direct consequence of UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Co’s war on Libya – and one that was perhaps not entirely unintended. According to a report just released by Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram were responsible for 6,644 deaths in 2014, compared to 6,073 attributed to ISIS, representing a quadrupling of their total killings in 2013. In the past week alone, bombings...

If we want to get to a world where terrorism isn’t such a regular tragedy, governments need to start recognizing the fact that the so-called “War on Terror” is a self-fulfilling prophecy destined to foment one thing and one thing only: more terrorism. The Big Picture: The problem arising in the wake of the recent mass-murder event in Paris and the subsequent French bombing of the Islamic State (also a mass-murder event) is that the two acts (and hundreds like them) serve as justification for...

Early last month, Green Berets battling to beat back a Taliban advance in Kunduz, Afghanistan, apparently decided that in order to rid an MSF hospital of some “insurgents” who were apparently hanging out inside, they needed to call in an AC-130 gunship. The aircraft made five passes on the way to engaging the building for an hour, eventually killing dozens as tends to happen when advanced air assault technology squares off against unarmed people lying on gurneys. Subsequent reports would...

We have been discussing the rapid erosion of free speech on our campuses. That trend started a long time ago in our high schools where officials have steadily attacked the exercise of free speech by teenagers. Few however have reached the level of censorship and content-based punishment as Revere High School in Massachusetts.Cheerleader Caley Godino has been banned from her team because she tweeted political comments that her teachers did not like about illegal immigration. The day after the...

“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.” —Daniel Webster Thanksgiving is not what it once was. Then again, America is not what she once was. Americans have become so enthralled by the “bread and circuses” of our age—tables groaning under the...

The panic in the western world, since the attack in Paris, where approx. 130 were killed is quite over the top. Walking home Friday evening, at the corner of Montgomery and Second St., in San Francisco, I witnessed train passengers rushing out of the underground train station. Police were rushing in. Someone had heard a "pop." It was nothing. The panic has spread to small towns: "Suspicious" briefcase in one-horse town creates major traffic jam & school shut-down https://t.co/jc0V5kWBAN...

The standard mainstream narrative of the war in Syria is that President Bashar al-Assad’s opponents only took up arms after his regime cracked down brutally on peaceful protesters in March 2011. The New York Times, for example, in a piece this week on ISIS reminds that “after a brutal crackdown by government forces, Syrian protest groups morphed into fighters”. The problem with this narrative is that it is false. Here’s what the Times is referring to: On March 25, 2011, it described how tens...