Peter Van Buren

January 14, 2016

Since our providers and tech makers in Silicon Valley are already deep in bed with the NSA to help spy on us, it should be little surprise that the White House now wants them to climb on board another Bill of Rights busting train and help “disrupt” ISIS online by editing the Internet. This new […]

Eric Garris

January 13, 2016

Awesome interview on the Tom Woods Show of the Independent Institute’s Laurie Calhoun. Is Humanitarian Intervention a Good Idea? Listen to audio only here.

Peter Van Buren

January 12, 2016

I watched a documentary about North Korea which explained how the government there assigns a score to each citizen, based on how large a threat to the regime s/he is perceived to be. When I lived in Taiwan under a military government years ago, such a number was encoded into every national ID card. Those […]

Jessica Pavoni

January 11, 2016

Oxymoron: a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in “cruel kindness” or “to make haste slowly.” (Dictionary.com) The way we use words matters – a lot. When words begin to lose their meaning or get distorted, the things we say begin to mean something entirely different…perhaps even […]

Daniel McAdams

January 11, 2016

Why did the US fly a B-52 over South Korea yesterday? Was it a sign of superiority…or insecurity? North Korea tested some sort of nuclear device last week and the fly-over was part of a multi-pronged US response to the test. Today on the House Floor a bill strengthening sanctions against North Korea is likely […]

Peter Van Buren

January 11, 2016

The execution of Shi’ite cleric Nimr al-Nimr and 46 convicted al-Qaeda members by the Saudis triggered a still-unfolding crisis between the Kingdom and Iran. Protesters in Tehran set fire to the Saudi embassy, and the Iranian government threatened that the Saudis will face “divine” revenge. Riyadh responded by severing diplomatic relations and ordering Iran’s ambassador […]

Alli McCracken

January 10, 2016

President Obama should be given props for the progress made in thawing US-Cuban relations, but there’s a piece of unfinished business that he could – and should – still attend to: returning the US Naval Base in Guantanamo to the Cuban people. In doing so, he could also solve another dilemma that has plagued his […]

Daniel McAdams

January 7, 2016

Cries of glee must have emanated from the military-industrial complex and the Beltway think tanks as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made another of his periodic pleas for global attention. The nuclear detonation is looking less likely as powerful and thus significant than the North Korean government initially claimed, but that is not stopping […]

Daniel McAdams

January 6, 2016

When pondering the intellectual decline of political movements, it is hard not to call to mind the former flagship publication of the Buckleyite wing of conservatism called National Review. Where once learned men (and women) made their case from the heights of argumentation and erudition — a force to be reckoned with, like it or […]

Peter Van Buren

January 6, 2016

For those who still don’t get why the War of Terror continues to fail after 14+ years, here is another lesson. We all remember “Jihadi John,” who of course was never called that except in the western media. John (real name: Mohammed Emwazi) was a British citizen who became radicalized, joined ISIS and went on […]