Several crucial decisions likely will be made at this week’s NATO summit meeting. The most important of all involves Ukraine’s application to join the Alliance. Zealotry for Ukraine in some NATO capitals is so strong that that a path to membership for that country is being considered even in the midst of an ongoing war and unresolved territorial disputes. The most likely move would be to approve a Membership Action Plan (MAP) for Kyiv, which normally is the final substantive measure that an...

Sometimes one wishes Winston Churchill had left behind an evergreen quote in regard of Russian diplomacy as well, similar to his epic one on Russian politics, which still remains unbeatable — “Kremlin political intrigues are comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.”  Renegade Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s defiance of the regime in Russia has apparently turned into a bulldog fight....

A woman walks amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Sunday, April 3, 2022. By manhhai via Flickr.Let us consider the following paragraphs, which appear in the May 29 edition of The New Yorker: While Tynda and his team were fighting from the trench, long and powerful fusillades had issued from another Ukrainian position, on a hilltop behind them. I later went there with Tynda. In a blind overlooking the no man’s land stood an improbably antique contraption on...

How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)? Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself—rather than having some court or politician translate them for you—and you will be under no illusion about where to draw the line when it comes to speaking your mind, criticizing your government, defending what is yours, doing whatever you want on your own property, and...

As a long-standing free speech advocate, the last few years have been alarming and, frankly, depressing. The censorship efforts of the government are, unfortunately, not new. However, what is new is the support of the media and the Democratic Party in such censorship. That was on display on various channels after the recent opinion finding that the Biden Administration had violated First Amendment in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” However, no one...

The former US president Donald Trump’s remarks regarding the failed coup attempt in Russia by Yevgeniy Prigozhin stood out for their sheer subtlety amidst the crass new western narrative that the dramatic events on June 23-24 highlighted “cracks” within the Russian system.  No one cares to explain what these “cracks” are but the coinage conveys that Russia is heading for implosion. Per Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin may have been “somewhat weakened”, creating an opportunity for the US...

Radio Sputnik called me first thing this morning and asked me to comment on the recent speech in Oxfordshire, England by the Director of the CIA, William Burns. I quickly scanned the news item and assumed it was a joke. I did a quick check to verify that this was a hoax or another clever bit of satire by the Babylon Bee. Nope. Burns really is this fatuous. Maybe the real Bill Burns has been abducted by aliens (the outer space kind). CIA Director William Burns called Russia’s war on Ukraine a...

The new Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, shares much in common with the first movie in the series — Raiders of the Lost Ark. Among the common features is that the villain in the new movie, as in Raiders, is a German Nazi. How is that? While Raiders was set when the National Socialists ruled Germany, the new movie takes place roughly 30 years later. The twist is that in the new movie the German Nazi villain, a physicist, had moved to America toward the end of or after...

Suppose that after you visit your doctor for a physical examination, he informs you that you are suffering from the following ailments: 1) A stiff knee, which requires six months of physical therapy. 2) Being overweight, which requires a big change in diet. 3) Kidney problems, which require you to give up drinking. 4) A growing malignant tumor on your stomach that can be removed by surgery. The doctor recommends that you give priority to ailment 4, but you instead decide to give priority to...

Remember the book and movie, Is Paris Burning? "The title is taken from the question reportedly asked by Adolf Hitler following his order to destroy the city rather than let it be re-captured by the Allies. The story was adapted into a feature film by the same name in 1966." Looks like Hitler was 79 years too early. Yes, many parts of Paris now are blazing as well as buildings and cars in other cities, and there is no end in sight. Yet the West is treating this as sort of a ho-hum business and...

One of the greatest influences on both my personal philosophy and the strategy of how to promote it was Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Read founded FEE in 1946, just as WWII was ending and the US government was about to embark upon a cold war with the Soviet Union. Read must have foreseen the expansion of government that was coming – both at home and overseas – and he started FEE to spread the message of non-interventionism and freedom. You could say...

Humanity was never exposed to any evidence of a “super virus” or anything resembling a unique human modified viral agent. Yet we still have plenty of glaring evidence of panicked government officials attempting to perform a widespread mop up and smear operation. How do we square that circle? Communications and emails from the early days of the Covid Hysteria era reflect that US Government Health officials truly believed their clandestine gain of function virus modification experiments had...

When the last US troops left the Philippines in the early 1990s, the prevailing assumption was that an extremely close military relationship between Washington and Manila would be just another relic of the Cold War. The decision by the Philippines Senate not to renew the US leases on Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base was quite emphatic. A thick layer of ash from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo made Clark unusable in any case, and public opinion in the country tended to both installations...

James Rosen, White House correspondent for Newsmax TV, asked National Security Council spokesman John Kirby in a recent presser about the curious WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to his communist-tied Chinese buddy Henry Zhao that seems to implicate Joe Biden in his son’s scandalous business dealings — specifically, that Joe Biden has lied repeatedly by claiming zero knowledge of his son’s overseas’ dealings — and Kirby ran like a little girl from the podium.  This must be the approved...

On Monday night, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the nation for the second time with the intention to bring the curtain down on the coup attempt by Wagner “founder” Yevgeny Prigozhin on June 23-24. It was quintessentially a self-congratulatory speech — well-deserved, perhaps. The speech had four principal elements. First, Putin took note right at the outset the “restraint, cohesion and patriotism” that the Russian people had shown, their “civic solidarity and “high consolidation,”...

As Washington is mired in brinkmanship with Russia in Ukraine, the last thing the US should do is decouple with China. For years, the Pentagon has been eyeing a future war with Beijing, yet another unnecessary war which – in our lifetimes - could lead to this planet’s nuclear incineration. America’s new Cold War with China is a bi-partisan imperial project led by the Democrats. In 2011, former President Barack Obama began it in earnest, dubbing it the “pivot to Asia.” The “pivot” entails the...