The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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She Wouldn't Wear A Mask...Galveston Police Broke Her Foot

Monday March 15, 2021

A 65 year old Galveston woman found herself tackled, handcuffed, arrested, and with a broken foot after she refused to leave a local Bank of America branch without her money. The bank demanded she put on a mask, she refused, so they called in the police. Property rights? Also today, first anniversary of the Covid lockdowns. Success or tragic failure? Watch today's Liberty Report...
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Advocates of Economic Sanctions Mirror the Morality of al Qaeda

Monday March 15, 2021

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Efforts to restore American and Iranian compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal—formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—are at an impasse.

President Biden has declared there will be no relaxing of smothering economic sanctions on Iran unless the country first returns to full compliance with the deal. Iran, which began exceeding nuclear enrichment thresholds in response to America’s total withdrawal from the deal under President Trump, wants the United States to begin easing sanctions first.

As that chess game continues, there’s something missing from op-ed pages, network news studios and the House and Senate chambers: a fundamental debate about the morality of economic sanctions.

If we reduce economic sanctions to a general characterization that encompasses both ends and means, we arrive at a truth that is as damning as it is incontrovertible:
Economic sanctions intentionally inflict suffering on civilian populations to force a change in their governments’ policies
If that has a familiar ring, perhaps it’s because “the intentional use of violence against civilians in order to obtain political aims” is one definition of terrorism.
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The One-Year Anniversary of Lockdowns

Monday March 15, 2021

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One year ago, between March 13 and 16, 2020, began what most of us would agree were the most difficult days of our lives. We thought our rights and liberties were more or less secure or could only be hobbled on the margin. We took certain things for granted, such as that our governments would not – and could not – order us to stay home, close most businesses and schools, shut down travel, padlock churches and concert halls, cancel events, much less lock down society in the name of virus control. 

All that changed with a federal document issued March 13, 2020, and declassified three months later. It was the lockdown guidelines. Over the following days, governors panicked. People panicked. Bureaucrats were unleashed. All the powers of the state at all levels of society were deployed not on the virus but on the people, which is all that governments can really control. The lockdowns were nearly universal, implemented around the world but for a few holdouts, one of which was in the US (South Dakota). 

A year later, most states are opening up while those still clinging to lockdowns can no longer control people. Regardless of warnings from the top that going back to normal life is too dangerous, most people have decided to be done with the whole dreadful episode.
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Is Biden Holding America Hostage Until ‘Independence’ Day?

Monday March 15, 2021

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Last week President Biden addressed the nation on the first anniversary of the coronavirus being declared a “pandemic.” It was a disturbing speech, warning us that the “hopeful spring” will only emerge “from a dark winter” if all Americans “stick with the rules.” Whose rules? His rules.
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One year into ‘15 days to flatten the curve’, why are we still tolerating authoritarian government clampdowns on our daily lives?

Saturday March 13, 2021

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In the 12 months since states first started ordering citizens to stay at home under the pretext of Covid, we’ve come a long way. Particularly in our understanding of how illiberal our politicians can be and how supine we are.

One year ago, at noon on Tuesday, March 17, France went into total lockdown for the first time. Until then, Covid-19 was something of which we were faintly aware – background noise in our daily lives that was mostly relegated to Wuhan, China. But we all had that one moment when we realized that it was about to hit home hard. 

In my case, that instant came two days before the lockdown, when the local outdoor pool posted a sign on the door drastically reducing the total user capacity to just 100, right before closing entirely the following day. On March 16, French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the nation to announce what he described as temporary measures, to be implemented for at least 15 days. Only essential trips outside the home would be allowed. Period. Case closed. All in the interests of protecting the French healthcare system, the long-suffering victim of perennial government cutbacks, from being forced onto life-support as it tends to be nearly every year during flu season.

The government’s drastic actions successfully convinced many citizens at the outset of the lockdown that the coronavirus must be on par with the plague. Macron opened the first few paragraphs of his national address with the phrase, “We are at war.” Yet even the government didn’t really know what it was dealing with at that point or how to handle it.
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The Sovietization of the American Press

Friday March 12, 2021

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I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.

These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed.
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Lockdowns Wrecked Democracy around the World

Friday March 12, 2021

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While the number of fatalities attributed to Covid-19 is carefully tracked by governments, few people have recognized how pandemic-spurred crackdowns have devastated democracy around the world. Emergency proclamations have entitled presidents and other government officials to seize vast new powers previously forbidden to them. Government bureaucrats became a new priesthood that could sanctify unlimited sacrifices merely by invoking dubious statistical extrapolations of future perils.
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What Next? Spear Control?

Friday March 12, 2021

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For people who still have fears about the threat of a violent takeover of the federal government, a ruling by Washington, D.C., federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth has gone a long way to relieve such fears. In a decision denying bail to one of the January 6 protestors, Jacob Anthony Chansley, who is often referred to as the “QAnon Shaman,” Lamberth no doubt succeeded in calming the fears of Washington lawmakers and members of the mainstream press who remain convinced that there was a serious danger posed by the January 6 “insurrectionists,” “revolutionaries,” “insurgents,” “rebels,” “terrorists,” “traitors,” “overthrowers,” and “rioters” who were supposedly attempting to violently take over the reins of the federal government.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this phenomenon is the weapon that Chansley chose to lead the charge to take over the Capitol. He used a spear, a weapon so dangerous that Lamberth cited it as one of the principal reasons that he was denying pretrial bail to Chansley.

A spear? Yes, a spear! What could be more dangerous than that? No, don’t say an AR-15 or a Glock 19. Those weapons run the risk of malfunctioning or misfiring. Moreover, unless a person is highly trained in the use of firearms, one runs the definite risk of missing the target when firing.

A spear is obviously a much more effective weapon to employ when trying to violently overthrow a government. A spear doesn’t lock up and misfire. And it’s virtually impossible to miss with a spear. Moreover, its history as a weapon goes back a lot further than the history of guns.
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Biden Promises Diplomacy, Delivers Militarism

Thursday March 11, 2021

From Syria to Iran to Afghanistan to Russia, President Biden's early promises to focus on diplomacy rather than the alleged brute force of the Trump Administration has not been followed up with action. In fact, US foreign policy is as militaristic as ever. Today on the Liberty Report...
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