The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
The Ron Paul Peace and Prosperity Institute
Subscribe to the Institute View Us on YouTube Follow Us On Twitter Join Us on Facebook Join Us at Google Plus

Search Results

for:

Will the Midterms Change Anything?

Monday October 31, 2022

undefined

Many experts expect public anger over inflation to enable Republicans to regain a majority in the US House of Representatives and maybe the Senate in next week’s midterm elections. However, even if every close Senate race broke in Republicans’ favor, and the new Republican majority was determined to pass a pro-liberty agenda, there still would not be the votes to override President Biden’s vetoes, or Chuck Schumer’s filibusters. Pro-liberty legislation cutting spending, or protecting our First, Second, and Fifth Amendment rights, or shutting down the Department of Education, or auditing the Federal Reserve, would not become law.
read on...

'The Gates of Hell Opened': A Media Panic Ensues As Musk Takes Over Twitter and Fires Chief Censors

Saturday October 29, 2022

undefined

Thursday night I wrote a column on the challenges faced by Elon Musk in taking over Twitter and suggested steps to “hit the ground running.” One of those obvious steps discussed in earlier columns was to fire CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde, the primary figures responsible for creating one of the largest censorship systems in history. He did so within minutes of taking over and their removal constitutes as singular advances in the cause of free speech around the world.
read on...

Biden Surrenders First Use Nuke Policy to Pentagon Neocons

Friday October 28, 2022

undefined

It’s not unusual, in fact is typical, for presidents to ditch campaign promises. One such promise Joe Biden made on the campaign trail was a “no first use” of nuclear weapons.

That was then, this is now.

“The Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy rejected limits on using nuclear weapons long championed by arms control advocates and in the past by President Joe Biden,” Bloomberg reports:

"Citing burgeoning threats from China and Russia, the Defense Department said in the document released Thursday that “by the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.” In response, the US will “maintain a very high bar for nuclear employment” without ruling out using the weapons in retaliation to a non-nuclear strategic threat to the homeland, US forces abroad or allies. (Emphasis added.)"

According to the National Defense Strategy, delayed after Russia went into Ukraine, a policy of non-use of nukes, except in response to a nuclear attack, “would result in an unacceptable level of risk in light of the range of non-nuclear capabilities being developed and fielded by competitors that could inflict strategic-level damage.”
read on...

Energy: The Last Frontier of the Ukraine War

Friday October 28, 2022

undefined

The Ukraine war has intensified the old energy conflict between Russia and the US. The ultimate result of this struggle is uncertain but US main allies, i.e., Europe, are not expected to perform well.

Fossil fuels (coal, crude oil and natural gas) are the main sources of world energy providing 80 percent of the world’s consumption. In Europe, and despite long-dated political, social and media initiatives in favour of green energy, in 2021 fossil fuels sourced 70.6 percent of total energy consumption and renewables only 12.3 percent, the latter an unremarkable feet as green promotion started in the late 1970s. Historically Europe has relied on Russian fuels and as of May 2022 Russian oil imports represented 23.7 percent and 16.1 percent of OECD Europe’s oil demand and total imports, respectively, whereas in 2021 Russian gas equaled 71.7 percent of Europe’s total gas pipeline imports and 49 percent of total gas imports, respectively.

Reflecting a deep structural transformation in economic clout, the balance of power in the world energy markets has changed in the last decades to the West’s detriment. In 2021, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) energy production was 37.9 percent of the world’s total against 21.6 percent by the G7 and 4 percent by the European Union (EU), and the BRICS energy consumption was 40.1 percent of the world’s total against 25 percent by the G7 and 9.4 percent by the EU. Meanwhile, the energy weight of the US and Russia is backed by both having the world’s highest levels of fossil fuel reserves – each about 14 percent of world’s total in 2020 – and producing 15.9 percent and 11.8 percent of the world’s total energy, respectively.
read on...

Don Basilio, a Hero for our Times

Thursday October 27, 2022

undefined

‘Russian spy among the guest lecturers of a Budapest elite college? ’The question mark at the end of this headline above a recent article in an English-language Hungarian media outlet, Daily News Hungary, is an excellent example of the vigorous dishonesty practiced by journalists around the world, both in major national newspapers, including Dutch ones, as well as in minor media like this Hungarian one. Gideon van Meijeren caught a mendacious Dutch journalist red-handed this week but they are the same all over the world.

The question mark in the headline illustrates the dishonesty. It is nothing but an attempt to say something while denying that you are saying it. Right at the end of the piece, with breathtaking chutzpah, the journalist writes, ‘Of course, all the above written does not support he (Laughland) was ever a Russian spy.’ But of course that is the whole thrust of the text, otherwise the headline would have been ‘Innocent academic wrongly questioned by British police. ’You have to get to the end of the article to read this miserable disclaimer, whereas the intent of the text is to make the reader see the headline (while overlooking the question mark).

Ever since I started working at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in 2008, and long before the concept of ‘fake news’ became common (around 2016) I observed the industrial production of fake news at close quarters because it concerned me personally. Whether the journalists contacted me or not, it made no difference: they always wrote the same story - that IDC was a front organisation for the Kremlin. The accusation was always more interesting than the truth, even though the accusation was always identical. In the last 15 years, the so-called ‘news’ has not progressed one jot.
read on...

The Pentagon Brought on Both Nuclear Crises

Thursday October 27, 2022

undefined

I fully realize that when it comes to Ukraine, one is supposed to focus exclusively on Russia’s invasion and not on what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis, a crisis that has gotten us perilously close to a world-destroying nuclear war with Russia. Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s role in this crisis needs to be emphasized, over and over again, just as the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the Cuban Missile Crisis also needs to be emphasized, over and over again.
read on...

Dictatorship in Disguise: Authoritarian Monsters Wreak Havoc on Our Freedoms

Wednesday October 26, 2022

undefined

All is not as it seems.

There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live.

Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.

Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
read on...

Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word

Tuesday October 25, 2022

undefined

It’s been more than obvious since April 2020 that lockdowns were far too costly for individuals and society and could never earn a rational public-health defense. And the evidence was rolling in from one year later that the vaccine mandates were similarly indefensible.

Both tactics had in common the enormous use of state coercion that flew in the face of every principle of civilized government.

As we are constantly told, both people and government were panicked, and needlessly so. As it turns out, the infection fatality rate was not 2-3 percent, as the WHO had said early on, or 1 percent as Fauci told the Senate in March 2020, but rather 0.035 percent for anyone under the age of 60 (which is 94 percent of the population).

Covid has been highly transmissible and with it the resulting protection of natural immunity. The correct policy should have been to maintain all social and market functioning while the actual vulnerable population protected itself as it awaited widespread immunity. That’s how every generation for 100 years has handled infectious disease: as a medical and not political matter.
read on...

Playing at War in Ukraine

Tuesday October 25, 2022

undefined

As the astute author Hunter S. Thompson noted, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Weird is indisputably the condition in Great Britain, where Liz Truss, an arguably empty and talentless prime minister, is out—and was, it seemed for a moment, very nearly replaced by her vacuous predecessor, Boris Johnson.

Weirdness, however, is not foreign to American politics. An indicator of just how weird Washington is becoming is the apparent interest in General (ret.) David Petraeus’s recent suggestion that Washington and its allies may want to intervene in the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev.

According to Petraeus, the military action he advocates would not be a NATO intervention, but “a multinational force led by the US and not as a NATO force.” In other words, a US-led Multi-National Force on the Iraq model composed of conventional ground, air, and naval forces.

Petraeus does not explain why US military action is needed. But it’s not hard to guess. The intervention is designed to rescue Ukrainian forces from defeat and presumably compel Moscow to negotiate on Washington’s terms, whatever those terms might be.
read on...

Fake News, Fake Putin Nuclear Threat

Monday October 24, 2022

undefined

If one reads the news with an uncritical eye, he or she would more than likely believe Vladimir Putin intends to nuke Ukraine. Of course, Putin never said he would use nukes in Ukraine, only if his country faces an existential threat, undoubtedly the same policy followed the USG.

The lies and hysteria spread by the corporate war propaganda media have resulted in frightening millions of people in Europe and America. The fear campaign went so far as to insinuate there will be a nuclear attack staged against New York. The NYC Emergency Management Department played its part by releasing an entirely ludicrous PSA instructing New Yorkers what to do in response to a nuclear attack. Go inside, stay inside, and stay tuned, the video instructs.

Left unsaid is the fact that “sheltering in place” during a nuclear explosion is less than worthless. The PSA assumes a single nuke would be targeted at New York. More fear porn and stupidity. If its existence is threatened, Russia would use its Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, designed to replace it SS-18 Satan ICBM. The new missile can travel 6,000 miles and carry 16 independently targeted warheads. It has the capability to destroy and area the size of France.

Needless to say, those “sheltering in place,” from Manhattan to Queens and beyond, would die in place. It is conservatively estimated 4 million people would be killed with an additional 5 million injured. A couple of these nukes targeted at America’s east coast would kill more than 10 million people.
read on...

Subscribe

Authors

Tags