On the occasion of his 79th birthday, I thought it appropriate to share how Dr. Ron Paul has impacted my life in a very personal manner. Ron Paul (and more importantly, the philosophy of liberty that he champions) has inspired me to make life-altering decisions, the most consequential of which is to leave the military as a conscientious objector. Throw in homeschooling, sound money, economics, and non-aggression, and you’ve got a completely new outlook on life. It has not been an easy path,...

Today Ron Paul, the Founder and CEO of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, celebrates his birthday with a plea for assistance to his Institute. He is concerned about the strong neocon push to war with Russia and is determined to fight back. He is alarmed at the level of war propaganda that otherwise goes unchallenged. His Institute was founded to debunk the lies that lead us to war and has had great success in its short life, he notes. He asks for help to continue the mission of...

In recent years, President Obama, his European friends, and even some Middle Eastern allies, have supported “rebel groups” in Libya and Syria. Some received training, financial and military support to overthrow Muammar Gadhafi and battle Bashar al Assad. It’s a strategy that follows the old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and it has been the American and allied approach for decades in deciding whether to support opposition groups and movements. The problem is that it is...

We have been at war with Iraq for 24 years, starting with Operations Desert Shield and Storm in 1990. Shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that year, the propaganda machine began agitating for a US attack on Iraq. We all remember the appearance before Congress of a young Kuwaiti woman claiming that the Iraqis were ripping Kuwaiti babies from incubators. The woman turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and the story was false, but it was enough to turn US...

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, in a press conference notable for its brevity, identified the officer who shot Michael Brown as Darren Wilson, a six-year veteran of his department. Information distributed to the media included reports suggesting that Brown was a suspect in a strong-arm robbery of a package of cigars at a local convenience store. Still photographs, reportedly of the incident in the local QuikTrip, show a large young man resembling Brown involved in what appeared to be an...

“I thought I was losing my capacity to be shocked -- but events in Missouri over just the last couple of hours have crossed a frightening line, one that makes me pray that this assault on fundamental American values is just the aberration of one rudderless Heartland community, and not the first symptoms of nation gone mad with high-tech weaponry to keep its own citizens in line.”—Journalist Will Bunch The difference between what happened in Boston in the wake of the Boston Marathon explosion...

Let’s count the ways. It goes without saying that Obama is now busily bombing American military equipment. Some of that equipment is pretty high tech gear and especially lethal — not the kind that jihadists ordinarily train with in their desert lairs or mountain redoubts. But then again, ISIS got provisioned by none other than the Iraqi Army. The latter not only dropped its uniforms for civvies during the battle for Mosul, but also left behind armored Humvees, heavy artillery, night vision...

This is the way the multi-trillion dollar Global War on Terror (GWOT) ends: not with a bang, but with a bigger bang. The GWOT, since its conceptualization 13 years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, is the gift that keeps on giving. And no gift is bigger than a Transformer Al-Qaeda on steroids – bigger, brasher, and wealthier than anything Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had ever dreamt of; the IS (Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS) of Caliph Ibrahim, former Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. US...

Some ten years ago, as a financial strategist/fund manager in post-crisis Moscow, while laboring away over my strategy monthly “Truth and Beauty (and Russian Finance)” with its recurrent theme that Russia was embarking upon her New Asian Century (i.e. turning away from the West to build bridges to China), I was surprised to receive a polite rejoinder from one of my readers: the prominent Stanford academic Michael McFaul – even then seen as a rising star in Eastern European policy for the US...

Just as I predicted in my article “Why Not Simply Abolish the CIA?” critics of the CIA’s illegally hacking into the computers of U.S. senators who were investigating CIA torture are calling for reform, rather than abolition, of the CIA. Stuck in the mindset of the national-security state, they simply cannot raise their vision to a higher level—to one that restores a constitutionally limited government republic to our land. Here’s one example: an op-ed today entitled “The CIA vs. the Senate:...

I find it very disquieting that so few among the West European and American commentators on the Ukraine crisis, private or public, seem concerned that the United States has started this affair, and that it is not inconceivable that it may end in a war. Worse yet, Washington’s demonization of Vladimir Putin has been so successful in the American press and public, and its secrecy about the American role in Kiev, has left the public in the United States and in NATO Europe convinced that this has...

The US government's decision to apply more sanctions on Russia is a grave mistake and will only escalate an already tense situation, ultimately harming the US economy itself. While the effect of sanctions on the dollar may not be appreciated in the short term, in the long run these sanctions are just another step toward the dollar's eventual demise as the world's reserve currency. Not only is the US sanctioning Russian banks and companies, but it also is trying to strong-arm European banks...