A number of serious commentators – one being U.S. Professor Victor Hanson – are warning: “Brace yourself for what’s coming in 2024”. Hansen sees bad omens darkening the future. Is he exaggerating? Perhaps not. One cannot but notice how bad tempered Americans and Europeans generally have become. Calm, reasoned discussion of issues is gone; Yelling, emotivism and ‘othering’ is commonplace; something bad is coming. A gut feeling, Tucker Carlson says. “There are “angry people who...

To a nation of snowflakes, Christmas has become yet another trigger word. Indeed, the season for giving has turned into the season for getting…and for getting offended. Over the years, Christmas casualties in the campaign to create one large national safe space have ranged from the beloved animated classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (denounced for promoting bullying and homophobia) to the Oscar-winning tune “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (accused of being a date...

In their recent military campaigns, America and Israel have waged what to the inexpert, keen observer is largely old-fashioned, Third-Generation Warfare—a blitzkrieg, by any other name, against civilian populations. The ostensible use of “tanks, mechanized infantry, and close air support” to “collapse an enemy's defenses” are really unthinking, disproportionate shows of brute military force, reliant on massive amounts of materiel. Yet when military mavens predicted and depicted the next form...

Over the weekend Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained to the American people what’s really wrong with US foreign policy. Some might find his conclusions surprising. The US standing in the world is damaged not because we spent 20 years fighting an Afghan government that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. The problem has nothing to do with neocon lies about Iraq’s WMDs that led untold civilian deaths in another failed “democratization” mission. It’s not because over the past nearly...

The right to privacy -- to be left alone, to engage in personal behavior and communications immune from government regulation or surveillance, to be yourself -- is a fundamental human right that we all exercise every day. It is also a constitutional right since it is expressly protected by the Fourth Amendment and has been expressly recognized and upheld by state and federal courts consistently for the past 60 years. The Fourth Amendment requirement of a search warrant prior to surveillance is...

Last Thursday afternoon, news would spread throughout Ireland of a horrific knife attack on three young schoolchildren and their teacher outside a Gaelscoil (Irish-language school) in Dublin city centre. At the time of writing, the youngest of the victims, a five year old girl, remains gravely ill in hospital. With it soon emerging that the suspect was an immigrant who had previously been served a deportation order in 2003, tensions that had been building across the country over the past year...

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later as Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the Red Army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an abrupt end. The world had descended into a “77-Years War”. It had incepted with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations that germinated in the Great War, its...

Some libertarians dismiss concerns over social media companies’ suppression of news and opinions that contradict select agendas by pointing out that these platforms are private companies, not part of the government. There are two problems with this argument. First, there is nothing unlibertarian about criticizing private businesses or using peaceful and voluntary means, such as boycotts, to persuade businesses to change their practices. The second and most significant reason the “they are...

Update: A video transcript of Yasmin Porat’s testimony translated by David Sheen for Electronic Intifada follows this article. In a desperate bid for international sympathy, the Israeli government has sought to stir outrage over the killing of a 12-year-old girl during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7.  “This little girl’s body was burned so badly that it took forensic archeologists more than six weeks to identify her,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry...

The handwriting was on the wall. An Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled “I’m a Ukrainian, and I Refuse to Compete for Your Attention” summed things up nicely: a media junket the author’s friend had been organizing to Ukraine was canceled. The TV crew instead left for the Middle East. The United States controls how the war in the Ukraine proceeds and always has. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said it was the American side which scuttled any chance of...

On Monday, Thomas Massie was the lone Republican in Congress to vote NAY on Amendment 114 to H.R. 5894, the Appropriations bill for Labor, HHS, and Education Spending. The Amendment, introduced by New York RINO Mike Lawler, prohibits any federal funds from going to any university “that authorizes … any event that promotes antisemitism.” While Thomas Massie has been an adamant supporter of cutting education spending, going so far as to introduce legislation to abolish the Department...

The allegory is one in which a scorpion depends on the frog for its passage across a flooded river, by hitching a lift on the frog’s back. The frog distrusts the scorpion; but reluctantly agrees. During the crossing the scorpion fatally stings the frog swimming the river, under the scorpion. They both die. It is a tale from antiquity intended to illustrate the nature of tragedy. A Greek tragedy is one in which the crisis at the heart of any ‘tragedy’ does not arise by sheer mischance. The...

A massive US naval deployment in a wide arc of the so-called Greater Middle East is under way — stretching from Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean, into the Red Sea and  the Bab el Mandeb and into the Gulf of Aden and all the way into the Gulf of Oman. This deterrent display may transform as large scale offensive operations and aims to rework the geopolitical alignments and bring them back to the traditional grooves of intra-regional rivalries in the Gulf region.  Ship spotters...

New US House Speaker Mike Johnson struck a blow for liberty and justice last week when he finally authorized the release of all the tapes from the January 6, 2021 “insurrection.” We were told by no less than President Biden himself that this was the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” The FBI was unleashed by the Biden Administration to hunt down hundreds of participants in this “insurrection” and lock them up in the gulag where they awaited trial in torturous conditions –...

“Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.”  -- First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Here is a pop quiz: If the states ratified an amendment to the Constitution repealing the First Amendment, would we still enjoy the freedom of speech? That depends on which value prevails: Are our rights only what lawmakers have written down, or are they personal attributes immune from governmental reach? When James Madison was crafting the First Amendment, he insisted that the...