In the rush to sensationalize the Paris terrorist attacks and minimize all other news (for example, even more horrendous terrorist attacks in Nigeria), the American media has conveniently overlooked one major ill effect of the public hysteria it is helping to foment. In a mini-redux of what happened subsequent to the 9/11 attacks, the American public, by confusing what's on TV with reality, is demonstrating what experts call "probability neglect." This phenomenon entails people excessively...

The Charlie Hebdo terrorist assassinations struck France at a moment when it has an unpopular government and a weak President, when factories are closing and jobs are being lost, when French economic policy is determined by Germany via the European Union and its foreign policy is determined by the United States via NATO. Except for the therapeutic moment of togetherness on January 11, the country feels buffeted by winds of conflict it cannot resist. There is a certain terrible symmetry playing...

Now more than six months after the shoot-down of a Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine, the refusal of the Obama administration to make public what intelligence evidence it has about who was responsible has created fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root while reducing hopes for holding the guilty parties accountable. Given the US government’s surveillance capabilities – from satellite and aerial photographs to telephonic and electronic intercepts to human sources – American...

The Western public justly condemns the murders at Charlie Hebdo, but continues to behave as if Kiev's terror victims in Donetsk are “subhuman.” On January 7, masked terrorists massacred the staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in downtown Paris, killing ten. Two police officers (one of them a French Muslim, Ahmed Merabet) were also gunned down in the attack, while five more innocents lost their lives during a subsequent hostage standoff at a Parisian kosher store. Three male suspects...

Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the dollar has lost over 97 percent of its purchasing power, the US economy has been subjected to a series of painful Federal Reserve-created recessions and depressions, and government has grown to dangerous levels thanks to the Fed’s policy of monetizing the debt. Yet the Federal Reserve still operates under a congressionally-created shroud of secrecy. No wonder almost 75 percent of the American public supports legislation to audit the...

While headlines in Yahoo News and Raw Story blare, respectively, “U.S. attorney general bans asset seizure by local police” and “No more asset seizure: Eric Holder bans controversial ‘war on drugs’ tactic,” the truth is that United States Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday changed US Department of Justice policy in a manner that will result in at most a small rollback of asset seizures. It is true that there appears to be a rollback in the police state for a change. The catch is that the...

US involvement in Iraq War 3.0 was initially sold as a limited, humanitarian rescue operation to save members of a religious minority the administration claimed were threatened by ISIS's long march through northern Iraq. Who could object to rescuing a poor religious minority without sounding like a complete monster? As expected, many otherwise suspicious of the use of military force in the US embraced this mission as an example of how the US military can be used as a force for good. Principled...

Last week’s bloody events in Paris demonstrate yet again that a noninterventionist foreign policy, far from being a luxury, is an urgent necessity — literally a matter of life and death. A government that repeatedly wages wars of aggression — the most extreme form of extremism — endangers the society it ostensibly protects by gratuitously making enemies, some of whom will seek revenge against those who tolerate, finance, and symbolize that government and its policies. (On the specific...

The current American war in Iraq is a struggle in search of a goal. It began in August as a humanitarian intervention, morphed into a campaign to protect Americans in-country, became a plan to defend the Kurds, followed by a full-on crusade to defeat the new Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS, aka ISIL), and then... well, something in Syria to be determined at a later date. At the moment, Iraq War 3.0 simply drones on, part bombing campaign, part mission to train the collapsed army the U.S. military...

RPI Director Daniel McAdams was interviewed yesterday on the deteriorating situation in Ukraine. Following is the interview in its entirety: Making quick judgments over the situation in Ukraine, including the latest bus tragedy, suits Washington’s political goals as, unlike the EU, it is incapable of backing down, Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute, told RT. Twelve people were killed Tuesday in the shelling of a bus in east Ukraine. OSCE Ukraine mission representative...

Since Tuesday and continuing for the coming three weeks, an amazing trial is happening in U.S. District Court at 401 Courthouse Square in Alexandria, Va. The trial is open to the public, and among the upcoming witnesses is Condoleezza Rice, but -- unlike the Chelsea Manning trial -- most of the seats at this somewhat similar event are empty. The media is mostly MIA, and during lunch break the two tables at the cafe across the street are occupied, one by the defendant and his lawyers, the other...

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means If 2014 was the year of militarized police, armored tanks, and stop-and-frisk searches, 2015 may well be the year of technologized police, surveillance blimps and scan-and-frisk searches. Just as we witnessed neighborhood cops being transformed into soldier cops, we’re about to see them shapeshift once again, this time into robocops, complete with robotic exoskeletons,...

The Charlie Hebdo affair has many of the characteristics of a false flag operation. The attack on the cartoonists’ office was a disciplined professional attack of the kind associated with highly trained special forces; yet the suspects who were later corralled and killed seemed bumbling and unprofessional. It is like two different sets of people.Usually Muslim terrorists are prepared to die in the attack; yet the two professionals who hit Charlie Hebdo were determined to escape and succeeded,...