Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“One under-discussed ticking time bomb is the way Israel keeps saying it’s going to resume incinerating Gaza if Hamas doesn’t disarm while Hamas keeps saying it won’t disarm. Netanyahu’s office is saying that Hamas will soon be given a 60-day deadline to give up its arms, after which the full-scale bombing of the enclave will resume if these demands aren’t met. A lot of people don’t understand that Hamas has never at any point agreed to give up its weapons. To give up its weapons would be to surrender, which is a very different thing from agreeing to a ceasefire. … Israel and its allies have no legitimate basis upon which to demand that Hamas surrender. All they can legitimately do is stop murdering and abusing the Palestinians.” (02/18/26)
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/02/18/the-ticking-time-bomb-looming-over-gaza-and-other-notes/
Source: Reuters
“U.S. import tariffs haven’t been enough to stop the United States losing another aluminium smelter, leaving the country with just five primary metal production plants. Century Aluminum suspended production at its Hawesville smelter in 2022 as energy prices spiked in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The company expected to resume operations within a year once power prices abated. But they didn’t, and Century has now sold the Kentucky site to digital infrastructure company TeraWulf. U.S. President Donald Trump hiked aluminium import tariffs to 50% last year with the stated goal of halting the decades-long slide in domestic primary metal capacity. The immediate impact has been limited to Century’s restart of 50,000 metric tons of annual capacity at its Mount Holly smelter in South Carolina. Tariffs helped, but an extension, opens new tab of the current power supply deal with local energy provider Santee Cooper was arguably more important.” (02/18/26)
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/power-trumps-tariffs-another-us-aluminium-smelter-shuts-2026-02-18/
Source: Cato Institute
“Ed Crane and the Ideas that Changed Washington — and the World.” (02/17/26)
https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-podcast/ed-crane-ideas-changed-washington-world
Source: Jacobin
by Jarrod Shanahan
“Some in the Trump administration may now regret calling Renée Good and Alex Pretti ‘domestic terrorists.’ The hasty application of this label by Kristi Noem, J. D. Vance, and other hard-liners generated justifiable outrage and helped mobilize opposition to Donald Trump’s terror campaign against immigrants. Meanwhile, however, a far less-publicized case threatens to provide an enduring legal framework by which virtually anybody involved in activism against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or Trump’s agenda more broadly, can be labeled a ‘domestic terrorist’ and treated accordingly.” (02/18/26)
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/prairieland-trump-domestic-terrorism-ice/
Source: The Daily Economy
by Tyler Turman
“CBO data show that government transfers now account for a historically large share of income among low-income households. Does today’s welfare system encourage mobility or entrench dependency?” (02/18/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/are-transfers-replacing-work-for-americas-poor/
Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Tim Worstall
“As we’ve been known to remark around here prices are information. We may not like the information being transmitted but that’s an incentive to change what is being done rather than to try and hide the price. On this basis the student loan system is working just perfectly …. We are seeing the price of trying to have 50% of the age cohort going to university. It’s a very high price too. One that — clearly — isn’t worth it as the whingeing is showing. But that’s what having that price, clear and obvious, does for us. Tells us that this isn’t working. … The price is too high therefore we need to change what we’re doing.” (02/18/26)
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-student-loan-system-is-working-just-perfectly
Source: New York Post
by Karol Markowicz
“In what is becoming a regular occurrence, someone trans-identifying is accused of committing a mass murder, this time during a high school hockey game, in suburban Rhode Island. Robert Dorgan, who preferred to be called Roberta, killed his ex-wife and one of his own children and shot three more people before turning a gun on himself. In 2020, Dorgan had told police that he was being kicked out of his home, by his father-in-law, after Dorgan had undergone ‘gender-reassignment surgery.’ His wife, Rhonda Dorgan, wrote ‘gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic + personality disorder traits’ as her grounds for divorce, but those words were crossed out and ‘irreconcilable differences which have caused the immediate breakdown of the marriage’ was written instead.” (02/17/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/02/17/opinion/the-rise-in-transgender-killers-proves-that-we-have-a-major-mental-health-crisis-unfolding/
Source: Freedom Works
“Steve Swedberg, Competitive Enterprise Institute ‘January Inflation Numbers.'” (02/18/26)
https://internetradiopros.com/freedomworks/?name=2026-02-19_zfw002162026.mp3
Source: Law & Liberty
by Andrew E Busch
“Minneapolis isn’t the first American city to grapple with high-profile shootings of civilians at the hands of panicked law enforcement.” (02/18/26)
https://lawliberty.org/calling-john-adams/
Source: spiked
by Frank Furedi
“US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference (MSC) last week was significant not for what he said, but for European leaders’ reaction to it. … Judging by European members’ response, they were clearly desperate to hear what sounded like a reassuring message from Washington. The audience broke into applause when Rubio stated that ‘we will always be a child of Europe’. At the end they even gave the secretary of state a standing ovation. For a few moments at least, they could enjoy the illusion that they were listening to a close family member.” (02/18/26)
https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/02/18/europe-is-still-clinging-to-americas-security-blanket/
